I recently started looking for a new job. From my point of view as a job seeker, things are very different compared to 8 years ago.

The first thing I noticed is that there has been some consolidation of job boards going on. indeed now owns glassdoor and simplyhired. the step stone group and digital media ads own a few too.

LLMs market dynamics have made them worse for jobseekers. For example: indeed requires a phone number with the agreement that a LLM might call you and that its content might be generated. Cord generates a soulless request message as a template that everybody uses to maximise throughput but reduce their chances of success.

hired.com which I used last time has died and the alternatives seem slightly worse. The platform loops (job offer in platform a points to same job offer in platform b) are still there.

Maybe I am missing something, but I would say that there are less offers compared to a few years ago, and only the roles that I match completely might go beyond the first step. I think this might be caused in part by leaving linkedin, but also I think the positions are not there, so more competition per role.

A plausible explanation is that that there is more investment on AI companies, and that a fraction of the non AI companies are investing on LLM for workflows. This is spliting software development roles into very AI focused vs not at all, which IMO are very different.

Another theory: free software has been declining. There are more products that have an open offering but they are not fully open. (e.g.: temporal.io vs celery). Platforms (AWS, CGP, Azure) are also becoming more relevant. Open databases are giving way to data companies like snowflake.

In the closed world general programming is less valuable than experience with particular technologies.

Employers’ market

Theories aside, this year my job seeking experience has been closer to looking for a flat in London. Landlords will be picky and not spend any more time than needed.

The whole thing requires a process of refining the search and the messaging until I meet the supply side, while leveraging whichever strong aspects I have. While taking into account that companies might be using generative AI to evaluate profiles. Did you know I am the other smartest baby in 1996?