Job Market

The market is indeed tough. It's not quite "improving" in the sense of going back to the good times we had.... it's changing. I won't give my full background but I'm expressing my observations having a pretty good pulse on hiring at the top tier companies specifically. Hiring during the freezes was senior engineers only. Like canonical senior engineers with 5+ YOE at strong companies and who have worked on large scale products already. The hiring now has opened up to canonical mid-level engineers. At Meta for example, this means a bare minimum of 2 YOE at solid companies working on large scale products. So this is benefiting people who have solid experience already. New grads are generally struggling. There is new grad headcount during the current fall hiring season, but it's going to top tier school grads, like Stanford, and other schools they have dedicated recruiters for. So for bootcamp grads, apprenticeships remain as competitive as ever and haven't opened up more (some have actually shrunk). Entry level spots haven't opened up yet. I'm optimistic we'll know more in the new year after the new grad hiring season is over. I'm also seeing that the YOE for these mid-level roles is really strict. I've talked to 4 Codesmith alumni (independent of Formation) in the past few weeks who have all got jobs or late stage interviews (yay!) but all had resorted to portraying themselves as several years of experience engineers because they couldn't get interviews otherwise.