July wasn’t a particularly pleasant month for me.
I was affected by the restructuring of the company I was working for, which meant going back into a job market I would politely describe as insane.
Over the past two months, I’ve interviewed mostly for frontend, SWE and full-stack engineering roles, and I’ve noticed quite a few things that feel very different from the last time I was interviewing, around two years ago.
I should preface this by saying that I’m not the best interviewee. My job is to be an engineer, not a professional interviewee or leetcode solver. I’m an introvert, and the job market increasingly requires a lot of soft skills: having a “brand”, marketing yourself, selling your experience, being charismatic, thinking on-the-fly ideas and presenting yourself as the perfect candidate.
None of that necessarily reflects how good you are at your actual job, and when the interview itself is stressful, that gap becomes even bigger.
1. The expectation is to be the perfect fit
In older interviews I had, there seemed to be more room for learning or better said “potential”. You didn’t have to possess all the skills but to be eager to learn. Now, I’m seeing much more of: “You don’t have exactly the experience we’re looking for? Rejected.”
If you don’t match a large part of the job description already, there doesn’t seem to be much appetite to invest in someone who could grow into the role.
Maybe this is simply the market correcting itself after years of aggressive hiring, but I do wonder whether we’re losing some of the willingness to hire for potential.
2. Interviewing well seems to matter more than engineering well
To me this is one of the biggest frustrations on the job market right now. Interviews are artificial environments. You are asked to produce your best answer, code, idea, product, under pressure, with very little time to think.
And yet we seem comfortable treating performance in that environment as a proxy for engineering ability.
In one interview, I received feedback that I had frozen because interviewing is stressful for me, and that saying “I don’t know” when nothing immediately came to mind wasn’t a good signal.
But isn’t being able to say “I don’t know” actually an important engineering skill?
I would much rather work with someone who says:
“I don’t know yet. Let me investigate.”
than someone who confidently makes something up because they think that’s what the interview expects.
3. Companies want you to be everything and salaries don’t necessarily reflect it
The scope of some of the roles I’ve seen has become… ambitious. Frontend. Backend. Product. Design. Talking to customers. Making technical decisions. Owning the roadmap. Using AI. Moving independently.
Basically: be the engineer, product manager, designer and mini-CEO of your area. Don’t get me wrong that’s not necessarily a bad thing, I actually like having ownership.B
ut when a company expects one person to cover what used to be several different roles, I think it’s fair to ask whether compensation and expectations have kept up with that change. Instead i see the salaries and budgets have..decreased?
Especially in expensive cities like Amsterdam.
You can live somewhere cheaper, that’s true, but then you often trade money for commuting time, which is another cost.
4. Some job advertisements don’t feel real
Many of the job descriptions are not real (or better said don’t feel real). Or if they are real, I’ve seen them sitting open for months.
I’ve seen job descriptions asking for extremely specific combinations of experience. And I’ve seen companies seemingly looking for a unicorn while complaining that they can’t find people.
Maybe they really can’t find talent? Or there is so much talent in the market that they don’t know what to do? Or do they ask for the impossible? Or are some of these roles not really intended to be filled in the first place?
Because right now, we somehow have a situation where companies say they can’t hire, while qualified people say they can’t get hired.
5. Job applications have become unnecessarily enormous
We’ve all joked about uploading your CV and then being asked to manually enter every single thing that’s already in your CV. Tbh, that’s not even a big problem anymore.
Most roles have open-ended questions. With the dreaded “What excites you about this role?” being on the top of the list, which “paying my rent and bills” is not necessirily an answer to.
And then, my personal favourite (approaching the word pet-peeve):
Record a 2-4 minute video answering X question.
Have you ever spoken to an engineer before? Some of us are already fighting for our lives in a live coding interview. Now you want a casting audition too? I didn’t know i was getting hired to be an actor.
6. Job descriptions are generally bad
An other trend i see is an abundance of startups got their first founding engineers, followed by job descriptions that are obviously AI-generated. Five paragraphs of corporate language that nobody understands following 37 technologies in must-haves. You should of course move fast, own end-to-end, thrive in ambiguity, be 20x engineer and 45x productive.
My brain has already left the building.
And then companies complain about receiving hundreds of generic, AI-generated applications. But if you put little thought into the job description, why should candidates put significantly more thought into their application?
You get as much effort as you put into it.
These are simply observations from my own experience over the last two months, and I’m genuinely curious whether other engineers are seeing the same thing.
Maybe it’s the AI transition/psychosis. Maybe it’s a correction after the hiring frenzy of the 2020 mass hiring. Or maybe I’m just particularly unlucky with interviews. 😅
What have you noticed in the 2026 tech job market that feels different from a few years ago?