Ask HN: What is the job market like?

Ask HN: What is the job market like?18 points by gardnr 31 minutes ago | hide | past | favorite | 12 commentsWe've all heard about layoffs; what are people's actual lived experiences when it comes to the recent changes in the job market? help I don't have lived experience, but "Who is hiring" had only 2 or 3 posts from my country this whole year. Until about 2 years ago there were 5-8 posts in each threads.(I'm in a small central-European country, that is full of tech companies, both domestic and international) I don’t know how to make the statistics match my perceived reality.Both in this thread, and people I know in real life who are looking for jobs are struggling hard. Mass layoffs at many big companies is becoming more common.And yet, the numbers say we are in a hiring market with more job openings than ever, except for during the pandemic.My perceived reality and the numbers almost could not be further apart. Everyone I know is having a hard time in all sorts of industries. Either they are currently unemployed and have been job searching for sometimes over a year. Or they are still employed but any looking they've done has been fruitless. So different than a couple years ago. My anecdata has people from junior to director level telling a similar story. Staff eng level, ~15-20 years experience. 18-36 months in position at well known large company at beginning of the year, lots of the usual recruiter interest.Responded to one from another major company mid January. Short interview process. Started late March. Similar level, slightly higher scope, significant salary bump.Took the opportunity to send outbounds to a few other major companies while in process, with senior referrals: ~no responses at all from that stuff.Also, despite the employer change not being public, much less recruiter outreach the last 2 months. Check r/cscareerquestions ha usually blood bath for juniors eg. thousands of applications to try and land a job. r/experienceddevs too a little different vibe there but some insight on job marketBut hey if you don't use AI when doing an interview, might have a better leg up than those that do eg. pause for 5 seconds between responses, ear piece, looking at a screen, someone replacing you after hiring, etc... > pause for 5 seconds between responsesI'm sure I'm not the only one, but I've gotten so aggressive about monitoring for this. I do most interviews zoomed in on the candidate's eyes and I rubric on how they "thought" through the problem, not just the results.Thankfully the interview tools are catching on as well and now tracking this like browser focus, number of monitors, window size, and sending notifications when any of those change. We actually state in our job listings that we will have an onsite interview as part of the process (we pay for travel/hotel, of course!).Seems to weed these folks out. Reddit, is not and never was reality especially now with all the bots with private profiles. Either they are unemployed or a senior developer at FAANG. Will say there is a difference between "reality" and hackernews too, this is a startup elite type place, jobs posted here, different than those posted on LinkedIn.I'm just fortunate recruiters have found me for my jobs... there was one time I used Hired that was back in 2022 that worked for 1 job.The hiding of user posts on reddit is bs I hate that, although it is convenient if you want to just hide all your stuff without deleting your account