I generally tend to interview every year to see what's out there in the world (sometimes I find something worth switching for, other times not). I'm not even looking very hard but have had 4 interviews in the last month.

Personally I think it's a bit more nuanced than senior vs junior (though it is very hard for juniors right now). What I've seen a lot of hunger for is people with a track record of getting their hands dirty and getting things solved. I'm very much a "builder" type dev that has more fun going from 0-v1 than maintaining and expanding scalable, large systems.

From the early start of the last tech boom through the post-pandemic hiring craze I increasingly saw demand for people who where in the latter category and fit nicely in a box. The ability to "do what you must to get this shipped" was less in demand. People cared much more about leetcode performance than an impressive portfolio.

Now reminds me a lot of 2008 in terms of the job market and what companies are looking for. 2008-2012 a strong portfolio of projects was the signal most people looked for. Back then being an OSS dev was a big plus (I found it not infrequently to be a liability in the last decade, better to study leetcode than actually build something).

Honestly, a lot of senior devs lose this ability over time. They get comfortable with the idea that as a very senior hire you don't have to do all that annoying stuff anymore. But the teams I see hiring are really focused on staying lean and getting engineers how are comfortable wearing multiple hats and working hard to get things shipped.

> In my experience, tech employment is incredibly bimodal right now. Top candidates are commanding higher salaries than ever, but an "average" developer is going to have an extremely hard time finding a position.

what an interesting way to say most programmers find it extremely difficult to get a job. you sound like you have some kind of insight, but is there anything notable about jobs drying up for people who aren't cheap enough or who aren't valuable enough? that's just how jobs dry up. anytime it's a bad job market for workers it'll be like that.

it is a great way to frame the coming tech crash. it allows whoever remains to fancy themselves as top talent.

Agreed on the bimodal, but I don't think this is junior vs. senior - I think it's just competence being rooted out.

The majority of engineers, in my hiring experience, failed very simple tests pre-AI. In a world where anyone can code, they're no better than previously non-technical people. The CS degree is no longer protection.

The gap between average and the best engineers now, though, is even higher. The best engineers can visualize the whole architecture in their head, and describe exactly what they want to an AI - their productivity is multiplied, and they rarely get slowed down.

While this could be done by junior or senior, I think junior usually has the slight advantage in being more AI-native and knowing how to effectively prompt and work with AI, though not always.

Juniors from non target schools are getting pushed out since the skill floor is too high.

I graduated 9 months ago. In that time I've merged more PRs than anyone else, reduced mean time to merge by 20% on a project with 300 developers with an automated code review tool, and in the past week vibe coded an entire Kubernetes cluster that can remotely execute our builds (working on making it more reliable before putting it into prod).

None of this matters.

The companies/teams like OpenAI or Google Deepmind that are allegedly hiring these super juniors at huge salaries only do so from target schools like Waterloo or MIT. If you don't work at a top company your compensation package is the same as ever. I am not getting promoted faster, my bonus went from 9% to 14% and I got a few thousand in spot bonuses.

From my perspective, this field is turning into finance or law, where the risk of a bad hire due to the heightened skill floor is so high that if you DIDN'T go to a target school you're not getting a top job no matter how good you are. Like how Yale goes to Big Law at $250k while non T14 gets $90k doing insurance defence and there's no movement between the categories. 20-30% of my classmates are still unemployed.

We cannot get around this by interviewing well because anyone can cheat on interviews with AI, so they don't even give interviews or coding assessments to my school. We cannot get around this with better projects because anyone can release a vibe coded library.

It appears the only thing that matters is pedigree of education because 4 years of in person exams from a top school aren't easy to fake.

That matches an observation made in that report from the recent Thoughtworks retreat: https://www.thoughtworks.com/content/dam/thoughtworks/docume...

> The retreat challenged the narrative that AI eliminates the need for junior developers. Juniors are more profitable than they have ever been. AI tools get them past the awkward initial net-negative phase faster. They serve as a call option on future productivity. And they are better at AI tools than senior engineers, having never developed the habits and assumptions that slow adoption.

> The real concern is mid-level engineers who came up during the decade-long hiring boom and may not have developed the fundamentals needed to thrive in the new environment. This population represents the bulk of the industry by volume, and retraining them is genuinely difficult. The retreat discussed whether apprenticeship models, rotation programs and lifelong learning structures could address this gap, but acknowledged that no organization has solved it yet.

What is a high performer?

Someone who jumps higher than expected when the boss demands it?

Someone who works 996 in the office?

Or someone who knows what they’re doing?

I think this is bigger than any individual. It’s just a matter of time before you’re let go. There’s no loyalty from companies at all. Not when they’re seeing higher than expected profits and are still cutting huge percentages of staff every year. There’s no strategy or preference to it. I don’t think this has to do with how you or I perform on the job.

Most people I’ve talked to lately who are still employed are watching out for their job to get cut.

I’m not sure it is just that, I don’t even see positions listed where I would like to work. For salary ranges, I see lower upper limits than my second best offer three n half years ago. Considering the high inflation, that’s crazy.

I would not mind switching but 1. I don’t see interesting positions 2. they don’t pay well, and only 3. they might not even want me.

It might also be just my niche, but finding a good position feels completely impossible for me.

I am doing cross platform mobile development and I’m wondering how I could transition into backend development or I started even considering the decentralized finance…

> they're just as capable as using AI as anyone

They're just as capable of typing prompts into AI, but what they don't have is good judgement of what good work/code looks like, so what's the point of asking a junior engineer to do something vs asking the LLM directly?

> In my experience, tech employment is incredibly bimodal right now. Top candidates are commanding higher salaries than ever, but an "average" developer is going to have an extremely hard time finding a position.

This is the K-shaped economy playing out. Its a signal that the american middle class is hollowing out. Bad, very bad.

> and they're just as capable as using AI as anyone

Wouldn't the assumption be the opposite, in that AI is magnifying the decision making of the engineer and so you get more payback by having the senior drive the AI?

> Juniors are still getting hired because they're still way cheaper and they're just as capable as using AI as anyone.

While I could buy that hiring managers believe this, it's not actually true.

The gulf between the quality of what a sr developer can do with these tools and what a jr can do is huge. They simply don't know what they don't know and effective prompting requires effective spec writing.

A rando jr vibe coder can churn out code like there's no tomorrow, but that doesn't mean it's actually right.

> Juniors are still getting hired because they're still way cheaper and they're just as capable as using AI as anyone.

Seniors have much more advantage right now in using AI than Juniors. Seniors get to lean in on their experience in checking AI results. Juniors rely on the AI's experience instead, which isn't as useful.

I sold a house after being laid off in mid-January from a government IT contractor where I had worked for eight years. The sale and move took about five weeks.

Before that role, I spent two years at another government contractor working on various govt. applications doing UX research, design, and front-end UI development. Overall, I’ve had a 17-year career in UX Research, Design and Development, starting at an ad agency in 2009.

From 2016 to 2022, I worked hard in government projects and enjoyed collaborating with great, close-knit coworkers and receiving consistently positive client feedback. From 2022 to 2026, things changed as the company grew—my role narrowed to UX research and design while newer hires handled UI development. I often felt underutilized and raised it, but management assured me I was doing well. With little direction from my last manager, I focused on staying visible to the client by monitoring user chats, identifying UX issues, and proposing design solutions that the client appreciated and the development team implemented.

Looking at where the tech industry is now—with thousands laid off from government IT and the broader tech sector flooding the job market, creating rising competition, constant pressure to work harder (Elon wants us to work as hard as Chinese workers do) and AI rapidly reshaping creative and development roles—I’m not very interested in that level of stress. I worked hard for many years and enjoyed it, but I value MY LIFE and MY HEALTH more than participating in the current “battle royale” environment in tech.

Overall, now with AI I feel graphic & web design, as well as front design web development is a stupid career! It was a nice run, bought two houses from it, worked remotely, when things were slow worked from wherever in the lower 48 and now .... in April Im starting nursing school and Im not young (20 years left of work in me). Roll with the punches here yet the punches are gonna punch hundreds of thousands to millions in the face ... not sure how this any good for an economy and society but here we are! If you are like me sell your house and stash the money away to buy houses when the crash from AI happens!

Juniors really aren't just as capable with AI as anyone. Knowing how to unambiguously describe correctly what you want isn't something a junior can do, nor is understanding if what the ai produces is good or bad.

This matches what I've seen too. Though I'd add another dimension: soft skills. In my experience, job searching has always been easier for people who communicate well regardless of their technical level. And soft skills might be what's making some people more resilient to this market shift specifically

I'm not a Senior, but I'm not a Junior either. The market has no place for people like me. I've killed myself for almost two years and can't secure a position. It's incredibly disheartening. I have a family to feed. I need to be able to work.

I wonder if that is just a correction of the rampant hiring that took place just before this employment “crash?” - if it is as you say that its intermediates and non high performers then does that make it a good thing as well.

Truth is, when I was part of larger orgs/enterprise I definitely saw some folks who were dead weight, and I don’t mean to be harsh, a few of these knew they weren’t contributing and were being malicious in that sense.

Similarly, I wonder how many high performers now are taking multiple jobs thanks to remote work and exposing the mid to low performers. Like some kind of developer hypergamy taking place.

I'm also seeing companies looking at only hiring juniors from overseas because they're using the same generative tools as US-based juniors but cost even less.

I'm seeing a lot of specialization. For the past 11 years I've marketed myself as a frontend engineer. I got laid off last year and the job search was largely similar to my previous job search 4 years prior.

I've been looking again this year and the landscape has changed drastically. Specialization is the name of the game, I have a good amount of experience working with Growth initiatives and I've been getting good responses from roles that are looking for either Growth or Design engineers, roles that were not as prevalent years ago.

> In my experience, tech employment is incredibly bimodal right now. Top candidates are commanding higher salaries than ever, but an "average" developer is going to have an extremely hard time finding a position.

That sounds good for many of us (and don’t we all like to think we’re top candidates here on HN…) but is there any data to back this up? Or it just anecdata (not to dismiss anecdata, still useful info).

> Juniors are still getting hired because they're still way cheaper and they're just as capable as using AI as anyone.

That is pretty context sensitive. You're correct that there's no real deep AI use expertise broadly understood to exist at this point (unless you're Steve Yegge?), but if people think they can toss out the engineers with experience in the systems that have been around a while, with junior developers "guiding" changes — that's likely a good way for a business to fall on its sword.

In my experience juniors are simply being replaced with intermediates and seniors who are willing to work for junior wages.

Relating it to performance is just silly. Most companies barely understand the performance of their employees much less candidates. The market has shrunk but not catastrophically so. Most people haven't been majorly affected but that doesn't mean they're automatically the most deserving or best performing.

People with experience and/or credentials desired by companies in areas of growth (i.e. AI) are always in high demand

I don’t think that’s true

If intermediates were being pushed out they would just take junior roles to have something

Companies really don’t like hiring Juniors in general

> "average" developer is going to have an extremely hard time finding a position.

As was foretold in the Tyler Cowen's eponymous 2013 book "Average Is Over".

In it he argued that the modern economy will undergo a permanent shift where "average" performance no longer guarantees a stable, middle-class life.

He predicted that the economy will split into two distinct classes: a high-earning elite (roughly 10–15% of the population) who thrive by collaborating with technology, and a larger group (85–90%) facing stagnant wages and fewer opportunities.

AI summary of the other key points of that book:

The "Man + Machine" Advantage: Success will belong to those who can effectively use smart machines. Cowen uses Freestyle Chess (teams of humans and computers) as an analogy, noting that human intuition combined with machine processing power consistently outperforms either working alone.

The Power of Conscientiousness: In a world of abundant information, the scarcest and most valuable traits will be self-motivation, discipline, and the ability to focus. Hyper-Meritocracy: Advanced data and machine intelligence make it easier for employers to measure an individual's exact economic value. This leads to extreme salary inequality as top performers are identified and rewarded more precisely.

A New Social Contract: Cowen predicts a future where individuals must be more self-reliant. He suggests society will move toward lower-cost living models for the non-elite, featuring cheaper housing and "bread and circuses" in the form of low-cost digital entertainment and online education.

EDIT: Notice how we're basically already here: Netflix is cheap, YT is free, Khan Academy and MIT OCW is free, Coursera/Udemy/etc. are cheap.

Stagnant vs. Dynamic Sectors: The economic divide is worsened by "low accountability" sectors like education and healthcare, where productivity is hard to measure and costs continue to rise, unlike tech-driven sectors that see rapid gains.

As the kids say, AI makes everyone a 10x engineer. Who would you you want to 10x?

Any reasoning/data or at least an anecoded behind this claim? No?

High performer is so subjective too.

You can be a great unblocker, team lead, and work well within cross cutting areas and with interdepartmental stake holders, have a history of strong technical performance.

and yet its nebulous if that means you're a high performer or not to those hiring. It seems I'm seeing 'culture fit' as a common reason people aren't getting hired again. That was out of vogue for a good while.

> Top candidates are commanding higher salaries than ever

I haven't found that to be true. Unless by "top candidates" you mean people working at actual AI companies such as Alphabet/Meta/OpenAI/Anthropic. If you're an AI-user and not an AI scientist it's bad out there, even for senior+ developers who previously worked in "FAANG".

someone: (actual data)

HN user: not in my experience!

Yes, this has been my experience. I'd consider myself average at best. I worked in the industry for almost 7 years before being laid off. I can't find anything at the moment and have resorted to moving back in with my parents.

It's pretty depressing. I'd take just about anything at the moment. I understand desperation going into a job interview isn't ideal either.

It feels like I'm in a hole.

Yep - the dual economy has moved into tech itself.

This has been my experience as well.

Happy to be on the high-end ^^.

> Contrary to what many say, I don't think it's simple as seniors are getting hired and juniors aren't. Juniors are still getting hired because they're still way cheaper and they're just as capable as using AI as anyone.

Tell me about all the junior developers you've hired (it's none)

> just as capable as using AI as anyone

This is probably the dumbest take I've heard of. They're the most likely to make mistakes with AI because they don't know the pitfalls of what they're doing.