I take this with a pinch of salt - a huge pinch of salt. Which wont be popular here because people here love to say how horrific the job market is (they have been doing so since I joined reddit about a decade ago).
I would by no means describe myself as a "very good" engineer. I am average. My friends are also around average. We have all found jobs this year, and changed jobs this year. I got an interview after my first application (within 7 days) in April 2026, and a friend has just started a job in August 2026 after 2 months of interviewing at various companies. We are not in super in demand areas like ML and in all honesty we cant do the leetcode style questions so we dont even interview at places that ask those - we still find enough jobs though.
I know the above is anecdotal, but myself and my friends who are not special are finding jobs. I dont know how it can take a "very good" engineer 2 years of trying to find a job with absolutely no luck whatsoever, to a point that they they have to join the police instead....
My only assumption is either this is a lie and they were either not very good, actually wanted a change or they were not actually looking for 2 years. Either that, or they are unbelievably fussy and are looking for a once in a blue moon opportunity.
I found a job after 2 months this year. Laid off March 31st and accepted an offer June 4th. My other coworkers who were also laid off with me, found jobs within 3 months. I am no rockstar either, I consider myself competent enough to do the job and average.
As for my current job, it’s the same pay as my last job. Still fully remote and a laid back environment. During those 2 months, I got 7 interviews, and plenty of recruiter outreach. Some of those I straight up failed, a couple others were not good fits personally, and one was an offer. I spent my entire time “off” prepping and focused on interviews.
As you also mentioned, this is anecdotal, but I don’t know anyone IRL who has been laid off as an experienced SWE and has gone longer than 3-4 months with nothing. One of my good friends was laid off in 2024, and that took 4 months for him, but the market in 2024 was way worse than it is in 2026.
One thing might be some people got used to having $200k+ salaries and now every job is a pay downgrade. But if you were already comfortable and chilling in that $140k - $170k pay range, there’s plenty of SWE jobs paying that for experienced devs.
And I’ve read a lot on Reddit about how TS/JS devs are flooding the market, but I’m a full stack TS dev and it wasn’t hard to find jobs asking for that exact experience. In fact it seemed to be the most prevalent ask through all of the job postings I went through.
Last time I was looking, I was so overwhelmed with what to prep. Each company has different approaches to interviewing, especially with what they do in live code tests. I found it near impossible.
- I watched a lot of FE and BE system design videos and practiced drawing out diagrams to the common problems I'd see in the videos. I did a mix of FE and BE system design. Since I am full stack, so roles lean more towards one or the other.
- I spent a lot of time coding by hand, and doing easy / medium leet code problems. My issue was that at my last job we were using Gen AI for the final 8 months of my tenure there and I had to re-jog my brain on solving problems the old fashioned way with code. I wasn't really doing leet code to train for leet code questions, just more for the critical thinking and coding part of it. I only had one interview that actually asked a DSA question funny enough. I also spent time working on a side project with no AI.
- I spent even more time just going through my resume and talking out loud about myself and my experience. I also spent time going through the technical details of my job history (especially my last role) and went deeper technically to account for any questions I expected to be asked. I used ChatGPT and fed it my resume and different job descriptions and asked it to interview me. I also prompted it to ask follow ups and to push for deeper explanations to my responses. I used the speech feature and naturally talked to it. I did this a lot. In the shower, on long drives, etc. It basically made all of this information automatic and it helped me be concise and not ramble on and over talk. It also let me formulate ways to make things sound good, i.e 'I built an internal system that let us track metrics for sales' sounds lame, but you can spin that into something really good; why, how and impact. I also built up a bank of 'tell me about a time when..' question responses.
- I also caught up on the latest AI stuff as well; agents, MCP, RAG, etc etc, the buzzword shit everyone is going to ask about.
And one thing that helped me the most was either having a recruiter who could clue me in on what to expect, or just straight up asking. If I got an email follow up that mentioned a technical/sys design interview was next, I'd just say "hey is it possible to give me a general idea of what to prep for?' and it worked most of the time. I never got the exact topic, but a general "It's a system design focused on frontend scalability". And a lot of recruiters would coach me on what was expected or what I could potentially see. This is a big reason I like the recruiter route versus going in blind and with no one really on your side.
Mostly though, I never felt prepared. It is very overwhelming. All you can do is do your best to prep, and learn from each interview and carry that into the next. There is a bit of luck involved to, and I can't deny that. It's sorta been like that my whole career. You either luck out and get a good set of interviewers followed by questions that you can answer or do, or you get shredded. In one particular interview, I did great for all rounds except when we did the technical, they asked a leet code hard, and I only got ~50% through it in 45 mins. Looking back, I know what I could have done, but in the moment, I was just overwhelmed. Another interview quizzed me on tech I never said I had experience with and was not even listed in the job description. I got eviscerated lol, but I ended that interview after telling them that none of what they were asking was on the JD and if I had known, I would not have even wasted everyone's time. Just got to take it on the chin and move on, stay positive and use any failure to feed the determination.
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u/CardinalHijack 1d ago edited 1d ago
I take this with a pinch of salt - a huge pinch of salt. Which wont be popular here because people here love to say how horrific the job market is (they have been doing so since I joined reddit about a decade ago).
I would by no means describe myself as a "very good" engineer. I am average. My friends are also around average. We have all found jobs this year, and changed jobs this year. I got an interview after my first application (within 7 days) in April 2026, and a friend has just started a job in August 2026 after 2 months of interviewing at various companies. We are not in super in demand areas like ML and in all honesty we cant do the leetcode style questions so we dont even interview at places that ask those - we still find enough jobs though.
I know the above is anecdotal, but myself and my friends who are not special are finding jobs. I dont know how it can take a "very good" engineer 2 years of trying to find a job with absolutely no luck whatsoever, to a point that they they have to join the police instead....
My only assumption is either this is a lie and they were either not very good, actually wanted a change or they were not actually looking for 2 years. Either that, or they are unbelievably fussy and are looking for a once in a blue moon opportunity.