How to navigate a brutal job market
This job market is hard. And after living through a similar one before, here’s what I’d recommend.
“This job market is so hard.”
I hear it constantly right now, and I get it.
But I want to offer a slightly different read, because the framing matters.
It is hard. The last decade gave us a long tech boom, hiring ramping up and up, and then it froze. Now there’s a low hum of when’s the next layoff? running under everything. It feels brutal because the rules we’d gotten used to all changed at once: ICs are asked to do far more than before, managers are being moved back into IC roles, and no one can quite tell you what their job will look like a quarter or two from now — or what “success” even means in it.
But there has always been uncertainty. I’ve been watching it my whole life.
A short history of hard markets
In 1991, the summer after third grade, my dad walked through the door in the middle of the day carrying a small box. He’d been laid off. Money being tight wasn’t entirely foreign to me — it had been stretched thin a few years earlier while he was in grad school. As a toddler I’d wander around saying things like, “When my dad gets a job…” It worked out then. But it left a mark.
Fast forward to 2000 and the dot-com bubble. My dad lost his job again, and the stakes were higher this time. I sat beside him in the college bursar’s office explaining why we needed an extension on tuition, hoping the student loan we’d applied for would come through within the month. The irony wasn’t lost on me. He was the one who’d pushed me toward degrees in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, and Computer Science, and yet here we were. My 18-year-old brain couldn’t reconcile it. Why work this hard just to get laid off? He insisted it was still the right path, and that things would pick up.
They didn’t, not right away. I was graduating in 2004, which meant I had to make my own opportunities. Microsoft and IBM came to campus, but those spots felt pre-claimed. So the summer of my junior year I leveraged every connection I had to land an internship in a small town in Indiana, and spent my off-hours studying for the GREs. Hedging every bet. When I graduated the market was still sluggish. I landed a government job in Lanham, MD, but couldn’t picture myself coding in a windowless building, so I turned it down, interned at Qualcomm instead, and was told upfront I’d likely need a master’s to get a full-time offer. So I kept interviewing. By summer’s end I had two offers: one in RTP, NC, and one in Mountain View, CA. I took California. I knew that’s where I needed to be.
The people who graduated just one year after me benefited from the Google IPO that happened a quarter after I graduated, and they landed in a completely different world. One year made all the difference.
This is the “your career is a trampoline, not a ladder” reality Maria Giudice and I talked about ten years ago on Build. A decade later the episode still holds up — you can watch it here. The shape of a career changed a long time ago; the market just keeps reminding us.
How a layoff changed my mindset
Then in 2006, I was laid off. No real rhyme or reason. The year before I’d been given a promotion, so it stung in a particular way: I’d let myself believe the promotion was something I’d earned, something that made me safe.
It sounds silly, but in retrospect it was one of the most defining moments of my 22-year career. Two good things came out of it.
The first was a job placement service, and a tough-love woman in her 50s who told 24-year-old me a few things I still repeat:
- Tell everyone. Literally everyone. She joked that I should mention I was job-hunting to people all the way down to my hairdresser.
- Work out. I’m not kidding. “Do not sit at home eating a bag of potato chips watching daytime drama. Exercise every day, and as you meet people at the gym, tell them you’re looking.” She wanted those endorphins flowing any way we could get them.
- Reconnect with your whole network. This was before LinkedIn, so that meant coffee shops and showing up in person. I worked through my alumni network and asked each person I met for more introductions, and more, and more.
What that service quietly did was normalize being out of work. That’s the only layoff I’ve been through (knock on wood), but it taught me these things just happen, and that wallowing only slows you down.
I’ll admit, at 24, I spent some time sobbing. But after attending the career placement training, I told myself that every hour I spent feeling sorry for myself was an hour I could instead spend sharpening my interview skills or talking to someone who might hire me.
The second good thing: I’d been noodling on joining a startup — one of the reasons I’d moved to the Bay Area in the first place. The layoff was the kick in the pants I needed. The three-month severance helped, because I was up to my eyeballs in student loans, a car payment (on a modest Honda Civic I still proudly drive today), and Bay Area rent that was brutal even then. The startup was Mint.com. It worked out — yes, I got lucky — but I’d never have taken the leap without losing the golden handcuffs of a steady paycheck first.
What’s actually hard about today’s market
So when I look at today, it reminds me of 2004. You have to hustle, keep your skills sharp, and let people know what you’re looking for.
That’s harder than it sounds, because for the last 15 or so years things were easy. Hiring was smooth. During the pandemic there was an outright feeding frenzy: 20% bumps just for switching. What people are feeling now reads as brutal mostly because of how easy it had gotten.
That’s not the same as “nobody’s hiring.” Qualified people are still getting interest. It’s that now you have to do the work to land the role you want, and for anyone who hasn’t had to in years, that’s a real adjustment.
I’ve spoken to engineering and product directors who’ve been at one company for 12 or 15 years, and when I ask when they last interviewed, they wince: “Oh, I’m so rusty.” Of course they are. They built their position, they grew, they did everything right, and now they have to get back to basics. It’s mentally hard. (Also genuinely hard to take decades of experience and boil it down to a 30-second pitch.)
It’s also gotten genuinely murkier on the hiring side, and that’s the part that messes with your head. You can do everything right and still feel like you’re shouting into a void. A few patterns I’ve watched up close this past year:
Fewer inbound, and flakier inbound. There are simply fewer recruiters reaching out, and the ones who do often don’t have a clear picture of what they’re hiring for, which turns into a wild goose chase. I’ve had a couple of these in the last year: a recruiter who won’t get on a call, or who asks for some oddly specific resume reformatting, and you start to wonder whether you were talking to a bot the whole time.
Job descriptions, then a hiring freeze. A posting goes up, but it can take 6 to 12 months to actually fill. They load the pipeline, run a few interviews, and if they don’t find their unicorn before the quarterly budget closes, they pause until next quarter. The role looks open. It mostly isn’t.
The description isn’t the same as what they want. A job description lists requirements, but it rarely names the actual desire underneath. You can check 50%, 90%, even every single box and still not get the call. Why? Because there’s an unspoken script running in the hiring manager’s head: Will this person want more, or leave in 6 to 24 months? Will this person come for my job? And just as often, a quieter one: Is this person going to be a headache?
Someone who’s escalation-happy, or who struggles to ship consistently, reads as future pain — the kind that pushes a manager to either suck it up and do the work themselves or bring in a contractor they can keep on a tight leash. So they reach for what I call the safe bet. The safe bet isn’t a hero, and isn’t a consistent standout either — their resume has nothing that really jumps out. They know enough to get the job done most of the time, they won’t rock the boat, and they won’t ask for a raise.
You can’t out-compete a safe bet. The move isn’t to shrink yourself into looking like one — it’s to find a place that values what you bring.
So what can you actually control?
That’s the question I come back to in any disruption. Here’s where I’d put the energy. Start by writing down what you enjoy about your current role and what you’d change if you could. It’s just for you, but the answers tend to clarify a lot. Once you’ve done that, consider the following:
Revisit your resume before you need it.
Do it around the same time as those pernicious performance reviews. Write your accomplishments down, quantify them, and capture any testimonials from coworkers or cross-functional partners, because a year from now you’ll have forgotten most of them. Then reorganize so the roles you want to be noticed for are the ones that stand out. And please get someone to review it! Ideally someone who is in a similar role and has actually been reviewing resumes. If no one comes to mind, then reach out to your network, and ask for specific feedback on how it currently lands.
Tidy up your LinkedIn.
Tell a coherent story: where you started, where you are, where you’re headed. (If it currently reads like Justin Trudeau’s career arc, rethink it.) And remember a lot of people now use AI to surface exactly the expert who fits a req — so the clearer you are about what you can do, the more often you come up as the match.
Use AI sparingly.
Start by doing the work yourself, whether it’s your resume or LinkedIn profile. The first time I used AI for this, a few things showed up that I didn’t like. It downplayed, and in some cases eliminated, major accomplishments that were highly relevant — like writing two books. It also flattened my voice. Someone even asked if I had used AI because they know what I usually sound like. And finally, be wary of the hidden biases AI can exhibit, like the one Jennifer Horsburgh called out in this post — credit to Karen Catlin for sharing it with me.
Get your pitch to 60 seconds.
Make it so simple a kid could repeat it. My eight-year-old knew I was “responsible for the software that tested iPhones before they got made at the factory.” That’s the whole pitch — you elaborate as people ask for more.
Network anyway.
I know we’re all a little jaded on meeting new people right now, but every conversation is information. Someone griping about their 2% raise? That’s a team to avoid. Someone quietly killing it at consulting, or who just joined a place that’s hiring? Add it to the list. The longer you put this off, the longer you’re guessing about what’s out there, and the people you meet remember you, and circle back.
Know your non-negotiables.
I said this in 2019 and I’ll say it again: what matters to you now? Salary, bonus, time off, remote, or the projects and skills that will level you up? Decide before you’re in the negotiation, not during. Here’s the 8-minute video on how to set and stick to your non-negotiables.
Keep this one for later
Markets turn, and layoffs blindside people who did everything right. The one variable you fully control is whether you keep moving — so keep the resume current, make the calls, and let people know what you’re looking for. Not because you’re leaving tomorrow, but so you’re never starting from zero.
Don’t wait until you need it.
Not gonna lie — it’s a lot to take in. So take it one step at a time.
If you’re in the thick of it right now, tell me in the comments: what’s the one thing in your control you could put energy into this week? I read every one.
And if this was useful, follow me here — I write weekly on the climb from engineer to technical leader, and you can get these straight to your inbox by subscribing here.
