Tech jobs market 2025, part 3: job seekers’ stories
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
-
Signalling (economics)
1 min read
The article discusses how candidates with 'pedigree' from high-profile schools and workplaces get 20-50x more recruiter outreach. This directly relates to signalling theory in economics - how credentials and affiliations serve as signals of quality in markets with information asymmetry, explaining why hiring managers rely heavily on brand-name employers and universities as proxies for candidate quality.
-
Adverse selection
13 min read
The article describes how inbound applications have become 'noisy' with many underqualified candidates, prompting companies to add barriers and screening. This is a classic adverse selection problem - when job seekers flood applications, the pool becomes dominated by less qualified candidates, forcing employers to implement costly screening mechanisms to identify quality.
-
Monopsony
14 min read
The article discusses how Big Tech companies and major employers in specific metros (especially SF Bay Area) dominate hiring, with remote workers facing lower compensation. Monopsony - where few buyers (employers) have market power over many sellers (workers) - helps explain wage dynamics and why geographic concentration of tech employers affects pay and bargaining power for engineers.
“What is the state of the tech jobs market in 2025?” is the question this article tackles in the third and final part of our mini-series on that major subject. We hear from job platforms, and from tech professionals searching for their next opportunity. This article features Wellfound (a jobs platform with around 6M software engineering profiles), and data from Revealera, an alternative data platform. There are also more than 30 software engineers and engineering leaders who discussed their job hunting experience with me. Today, we cover:
Job platform data. Falling demand for remote work, more “barriers” put up by companies, slightly higher demand for backend engineers than before, and more.
Junior engineer recruitment rebounds? More scaleups and publicly traded tech companies are doubling down on hiring new grads and early-career engineers.
Picky employers. More hiring managers hold out for the “perfect candidate,” more rejections come with no feedback, and some think the candidate quality is down, overall. Referrals seem like the only way to consistently get interviews.
Software engineer archetypes in and out of demand. AI engineers, those with Big Tech experience, and infra+SRE engineers are in demand. Times are reportedly tougher for candidates who took career breaks, are self-taught, or are native mobile engineers.
State of engineering leadership hiring. It’s very tough everywhere, especially for experienced engineering managers not yet at Director level. One executive recruiter says many leadership candidates have poor AI skills and unrealistic pay expectations.
Remote market. It’s harder to land a job and compensation is lower, but the bar is higher for remote positions.
Regional observations. Outside of cities, the market is tougher: in Germany, Wayfair’s exit could drag down pay. Are Swiss companies looking to hire in cheaper EU countries?
Previous articles in this series covered:
Tech job stats
AI Engineering trends
Big Tech hiring stats
Growing importance of location
Tenure rising fast at Big Tech
Where are Big Tech engineers moving to and from?
Engineering leadership recruitment
Remote jobs
Part 2: what hiring managers see
Flood of applications
Few hires via inbound
‘Top’ candidates are hard to find
Remote jobs: more competition for less comp?
Fake applicants + AI: a growing problem
Higher demand for founding engineers and product engineers
Early-stage startups have their own hiring problems
As usual, I have no affiliation with vendors mentioned in this article, and have not been paid to ...
This excerpt is provided for preview purposes. Full article content is available on the original publication.