This market is brutal
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Are headhunters and 3rd party rectueirs on your side when it comes to salary negotiations? My understanding is that they take a cut of the pay OR the company pays them some about in order to get someone hired into a role. If that’s the case I’d assume they’re incentivized to get a higher offer unless it’s a flat rate at which point maybe they don’t care?
How many of you actually feel like you’re making a comfortable salary? A $160k salary in San Francisco in 2026 makes you feel like you’re barely scraping by now. After Uncle Sam takes his cut, and I fork over $3,800 a month for a decent apartment that doesn't have regular car break-ins outside, my savings rate is pathetic. Companies act like $160k is a king's ransom, but the local economy has completely swallowed the value of that number.
My company just slashed our On-Call Compensation structure by 50% because they claim our new automated monitoring tool reduces the manual burden. In reality, PagerDuty is hitting us just as hard at 2 AM. It feels like an incredibly underhanded way to cut total compensation without changing the official base salary numbers on our contracts. How do you collectively organize a pushback against a policy change?
The only question left is will it ever improve. Right now, I say no. They've offshored, outsourced, or automated everything until jobs in America will cease to exist. I saw an ad for $65k software developers in Latin America. How can we compete with that with 2 and 3 thousand dollar rents
My prediction is that AI will actually bring more engineering during jobs back to the US. There’s no need for cheaper labor abroad when you can have really elite engineers here with AI do much more.
Definitely one of the toughest job markets I’ve ever seen in a long time. I’m glad that I’m not graduating from college right now from what I’ve heard from friends with kids in college - they haven’t been able to find anything at all.
So true.