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Develop Yourself
To change careers and land your first job as a Software Engineer, you need more than just great software development skills - you need to develop yourself.
Welcome to the podcast that helps you develop your skills, your habits, your network and more, all in hopes of becoming a thriving Software Engineer.
Develop Yourself
#272 - The State of the 2025 Tech Job Market: Is AI Helping or Hurting Us?
The tech job market is sending seriously mixed signals in 2025. While social media overflows with doom and gloom about hiring freezes and impossible entry barriers, actual data tells a surprisingly different story.
Job openings are trending upward, with big tech companies like Meta, Google, and Apple actively expanding their engineering teams.
What's really happening is a massive shift in what companies need from their developers. "AI engineering" positions have exploded, increasing 5-6x since 2023 alone. But here's the critical insight most are missing: these roles don't primarily require deep machine learning expertise or data science backgrounds.
This represents a golden opportunity for software developers willing to expand their skills in the right direction.
Let's explore.
Here's the link to the original article: https://substack.com/inbox/post/172584839?utm_source=unread-posts-digest-email&inbox=true&utm_medium=email&triedRedirect=true
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Zubin's LinkedIn (ex-lawyer, former Googler, Brian-look-a-like)
Welcome to the Develop Yourself podcast, where we teach you everything you need to land your first job as a software developer by learning to develop yourself, your skills, your network and more. I'm Brian, your host. Let's be honest. The software job market is really really weird in 2025, and it's felt like that for a while, and I know there's a lot of doom and gloom news out there, some of it grounded in reality, some of it just based on opinions or what's going to be hot on Twitter or LinkedIn or whatever to get likes, clicks and views. There is an author, a really well-known developer, who I'm going to butcher his name, gergely Oroz. I'm just going to call him Geo. Anyway, gergely writes a lot about software engineering. He is an engineering manager, engineering leader, written a best-selling book on software engineering Very, very smart, respectable guy and he just recently published this article about the state of software engineering and the job market in 2025 that I think is worth a look.
Speaker 1:We're not going to go over the entire article, but there's some definite pieces of information and some trends here that I think you really need to pay attention to. Some of these things I've been saying for a while, so it's really nice to see some validation from somebody that's way higher up on the food chain than I am, but he basically starts off like this we're in a weird, weird state right now as far as jobs are concerned, not just in tech, but really everywhere. I mean inflation, tariffs, economic instability it doesn't feel like things are really stable in any industry right now, but especially in tech, and I think we've basically made AI the boogeyman. We've said AI is the reason why nobody can get hired, or AI is taking away junior developer jobs. It's honestly a ton of nonsense in my opinion, and I don't see any facts to back it up. But let's see what Gio says, what Gergely says about this. So he uses a site that I use as well called TrueUp, to look at vacancies in big tech jobs, and it shows actually that you know I don't know how to tell you this the number of jobs is up quite a lot, actually Incrementally steadily growing. We went from around 40,000 open jobs in 2024, trending towards 60,000 jobs in 2025. This doesn't make sense, right? Because all you hear online is nobody's getting hired, nobody's hiring junior developers. Two things can be true at the same time. Now he focuses mostly on big tech, and that is where most of the software engineering positions are opening at places you wouldn't really expect either Apple, ibm, amazon. We've had a few students at Parsity actually recently get interviews at Amazon, which is interesting. So big tech seems to be hiring again, which is really good news. This could be a bellwether for other tech companies out there and the smaller tech companies as well.
Speaker 1:Now here's where things get even weirder. I thought actually that mostly senior roles were the only ones being opened up. It turns out that there's just as many mid-level and entry-level roles. Now I'm a senior software engineer. I've been doing so for about 11 years now. I honestly have not really had a hard time in this market. I feel like I'm actually in higher demand than I've been. And if you're a senior software developer and you're not feeling like that, I would honestly tell you to do one thing which is up-level in AI and we're going to get to that at the end in a practical way to do it. I don't mean learning, machine learning or becoming a data scientist. I mean something very different. That Gio also agrees with me in here as well. So this is also really interesting because we see the mid-level and entry-level roles opened up quite a lot. Senior roles actually less than the mid-level and entry Senior plus roles, of course, are always gonna be pretty lower and director roles really, really low, because you don't need that many directors. This next trend should come as no surprise AI engineering and I say AI engineering in quotes because I don't think companies mean AI engineer when they say they want an AI engineer that is skyrocketed. The openings for AI engineers at top tech companies just blown out of proportion and went from around what 1,500 or so in like 2023 to now 6,000 plus in 2025. So we've had like basically a 6x or 5x increase in the number of roles for AI engineer.
Speaker 1:Here is where I think this should blow your mind as a software developer, and this is a big thing that I think too many people aren't understanding. They hear AI engineer and they think Python, data science, machine learning, all these things that would traditionally be under data science, but when you look at what they actually want, it's honestly not that difficult. This is actually really easy stuff to pick up, and this is the reason why we're going so deep into this at Parsity. This is actually really easy stuff to pick up and this is the reason why we're going so deep into this at Parsity, because I'm seeing this in my own job in the stuff that I'm now doing. What they really mean is they want people that can build on top of large language models like OpenAI, grok, anthropic Cloud, whatever. Mostly, it means how do you glue together these new APIs that return you non-deterministic responses and can be streamed to the front end or to the back end or whatever? What they really want are software engineers who know how to work with LLMs in a programmatic way. Right, if you're using an LLM behind the scenes in your code, you could possibly label yourself as an AI engineer.
Speaker 1:I would argue that you need to go a little bit deeper than that. It's not just learning how to use those APIs, though. I think that's honestly the biggest bang you're going to get for your buck. I think understanding how to integrate things like retrieval, augmented generation, vector databases, traditional things like web scraping to feed to large language models these are all really kind of old school traditional skills. The only thing really new is what we're doing with this data and some of the new databases that have come into play, like Quadrant, pinecone, vertex, ai on GCP all really the same Vector databases that you're using to feed data to your hungry large language model, and I've been kind of screaming this from the rooftops for a few months now because I've seen this at the last two startups I went to, which are AI startups in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Speaker 1:So I'm like this is going on, this is the trend, and I hear people that are still thinking React, node, express, typescript is enough to get hired, and I'm like you're fundamentally misunderstanding where we're heading as an industry. You have to know these things now. It's much more than just knowing how to use Cursor or how to use Cloud in your terminal. That's table stakes. So where are all these AI engineers getting hired? San Francisco. They're also the most for remote jobs. Seattle is third, and then you get down to a bunch of other cities, right, so San Francisco by far. I think this is why my brain is so warped and I'm so bullish on this, because I see it In San Francisco, there are 1,800 jobs open for this type of position. Remote, there's only 631. I'm in the epicenter of this and we know that the Bay Area is the bellwether. This is the place that sets the tech trends Everything from hiring to that stupid Google interview you're going to have to do for a no-name startup.
Speaker 1:It all started here. So, yes, I'm super, super confident that you should be learning things like RAG. You should be learning how to integrate open AI. You should be learning how to use vector databases. This is going to be your job in the future, my friend. That's why I've been like telling people please learn this stuff, and I can't wait to release the material that I'm going to be teaching on how to learn this stuff, because I had to learn basically on my own. So if you're in the Bay Area, you 100% need to be learning this kind of stuff. If you're a full stack TypeScript, javascript, React type of engineer, right. So who are the companies hiring for this kind of thing? No shock here, really big companies and also every other company in between. I mean, whatever happens here is going to happen everywhere. It's going to trickle down the ladder and we see TikTok at the top, apple, then Amazon. Which kind of trends with why Amazon may be looking to hire a lot more people right now?
Speaker 1:What are the most common technologies for AI engineering roles? Python, llm, pytorch. This is where things get a little cloudy for me, because at one end, we see that, well, what do we really want. We want people that use large language models in, like full stack apps or traditional software engineering. And then you see Python at the top of the list. Now that can be a little confusing too, because I think the AI engineering is getting conflated with traditional data engineering, machine learning engineering, data scientists so I don't know how to really read into this, because I know that we need data scientists.
Speaker 1:Obviously, people are trying to either fine tune models they're either trying to create their own models or build off of large language models. But the number two technology here is LLM. That is such a nebulous term large language model and I think we're developing a new class of software engineer, or maybe just a different role, like a different offshoot of full-stack software engineer. I actually don't like the term AI engineer, although I use it because it's the easiest one to grok, but LLM engineer or LLM software developer something along those lines makes a lot more sense to me. So I think seeing LLM as the number two technology mentioned really means that companies are looking for people that know how to integrate large language models off-the-shelf models like OpenAI and Anthropx Cloud. Right, because why would you need to build your own large language model? They won the game already. You're not going to build a large language model with a trillion parameters and run it on billions of dollars of infrastructure. Your startup is just not going to do that. They really just want people that know how to use these tools.
Speaker 1:So now we'll get into big tech hiring trends, and it looks like meta is at the top of the pack. After having big cuts in 2023, now they're hiring the most software engineers, which is really interesting. They have 19% more engineers compared to 2022. Google and Apple showing similar growth They've increased by 16% and Amazon and Microsoft showing the slowest growth 8%. But, like me, you're probably not in a really big company. I've never worked for a really large tech company. And then you have your lived experience, of course, where you're out there saying, well, why can't I get hired?
Speaker 1:And that's the hardest part for me to understand, because it's taking longer for people to find roles. Less people are leaving their roles and we see less entry-level jobs opening up. Now there's also been a massive increase in the number of AI engineering roles opening up, so I see this decrease as really a shift. And would they take entry-level people into these roles? I don't know. I do know that we need entry-level people in general, and this is even more paradoxical right here, hiring managers are saying that it now takes longer to fill positions, even though recruitment is actually up.
Speaker 1:I think at the heart of this problem is we have a fundamentally broken hiring system, and I hate saying that because people have been saying that literally for the last 10 years that I've been in tech. Hiring is broken. I'm like okay, so what? What are we going to do about it? No one's going to fix hiring. Linkedin tried to fix hiring and I could argue they've actually broken it so poorly. Linkedin is a social media platform pretending to be a job site. So if you're looking for a job, you're basically undiscoverable unless you have a certain number of connections and if you post in the right places, if you have the right second and third party connections, if you're a recruiter and you're looking for people, it's like finding a needle in a haystack. I can't tell you how long it takes to hire somebody that's a decent senior software engineer. So I really hate this stupid narrative from people that probably have never hired that are saying oh, you know, you're competing now with people from really big tech companies that are gonna come in and take your job or something like that, because they've been laid off. Big tech hiring is up, not down, despite whatever you've read in the news. These are just the numbers. These are numbers from these companies that show vacancies are up and they're hiring more. I don't know how to argue against those kinds of things, but I will say it takes a very long time to find good senior software engineering talent.
Speaker 1:Now I think that's because we have a pile of people on LinkedIn that can hit the easy apply to all sorts of jobs they want. You get filled with junk applications, some of which aren't even filled out, or people that have no business applying for it. You're filtering through all those. The people that may have wanted to click on it are now seeing there's a thousand people that have applied. Most of them are junk, they're not applying for it or they don't even know that you're hiring at all. If you're a hiring manager without a large voice on LinkedIn and you put I'm hiring in your post, it may get seen by five people, right? So you're essentially invisible to the candidates. And then the candidates who might not be posting either are invisible to you. And how's the recruiter going to find these people in a haystack, especially when it comes for remote roles. So we have this perfect storm right now really bad news, a very strange system of how to apply on a social media site, basically, and now we have people like me who have a very large voice really having a much easier time finding jobs, and people who do not do so having a very, very difficult time.
Speaker 1:Now, this is not to say it's all doom and gloom. I just think you need to understand the rules of the game. If you're going to be on LinkedIn and use that as your main platform for finding work, I do think you're going to need to use it differently. At Parsity, we've really dug into going through your actual connections reaching out to people, cold DMing people, having to put on your sales hat a lot more than you're probably comfortable with if you want a job. Now, that's not to say that that's just going to magically get you to the promised land. You can't suck at what you do.
Speaker 1:And, yes, I strongly believe you need some AI skills. That's one of the reasons why we're teaching it at Parsity in a non-generic, hokey type of way Real skills that companies actually want to hire for. So if you learned React, nextjs, mongodb, sql, typescript, python, whatever Flask, and you think that's just going to be enough to get in the door. It could be, but you're not gonna be able to stand out and this is one of those unique times right now where, if you know those skills and you add in a little bit of large language model and API integration and maybe something like RAG, you can really really stand out.
Speaker 1:I wish more people would take me up on this advice and do it, because I've done it. It's a ton of fun and I really do think it'll help you out in the future, especially going into 2026. If you're interested in learning more about that, check me out at Parcityio. Otherwise, I hope you found this useful and hopefully it gives you a little more context about what's going on, why things feel really weird and maybe what you can do to get ahead of the game or maybe where you should start looking and using your time to invest in upscaling. See you around. That'll do it for today's episode of the Develop Yourself podcast. If you're serious about switching careers and becoming a software developer and building complex software and want to work directly with me and my team, go to parsityio. And if you want more information, feel free to schedule a chat by just clicking the link in the show notes. See you next week.
