Tech jobs market normalizing as July unemployment dips

Let's not count our chickens before they've hatched.

I'd hardly call it normalizing. The acceleration of layoffs has decreased, nearing a zero-crossing, but we've still got 100,000s of unemployed engineers floating around in the market.

I’m having trouble reconciling this with several threads over the last few days lamenting how hard it is to get interviews right now. Different position levels? Different sectors within tech? Not sure what’s going on.

We published the Levels.fyi 2023 mid-year compensation report earlier: https://www.levels.fyi/blog/2023-mid-year-report.html

While volume of hiring may have been lower overall so far this year, median compensation has generally remained steady or increased in the first half of 2023 relative to the last half of 2022 for most roles. In particular, the median for software engineer compensation stayed the same, while roles such as software engineering management saw a 5% increase in overall pay.

Augmented reality was quite in-demand so far in 2023. AI engineers have also seen elevated compensation compared to their engineer counterparts, which we analyze on our post here: https://www.levels.fyi/blog/ai-engineer-compensation.html