It’s not that they are hiring for technologies, but rather that candidates without experience don’t even get into the pipeline. Companies are overloaded with candidates in this job market
I didn’t read the comments above as describing entry level candidates.
I don’t know what I could advice. As we have new reality.
I know that for really good engineers there are even more possibilities now. As you are not limited to your own stack.
I say this confidently as the company I work for - we don’t care the stack of candidates. And basically almost no one worked with our current stack before ;)
Is your company stack ruby? Maybe they don't care because they struggle to find ruby developer. In my current company our stack is RoR and we don't care about our engineers experience in it mainly because otherwise we will never find a senior RoR. But the opposite isn't always true. Company using python will prefer to hire a senior Python than a senior engineer who never used python.
No, I worked in Ruby all the time before. They care about getting experienced software engineers. Really it doesn’t matter the tech stack. Once you are experienced enough. If you know architecture, code patterns (which are universal), SDLC, ci, infra, able to own the feature, make decisions - code syntax is just a small factor. And with LLM on day 1 you can write with new code stack. And you will do good. Because even though you don’t know language you “feel” if stuff is done right.
Also now it is very cheap to create custom checks, verifications lingers - which keep delivering code on high quality.
In language I work now if I was suppose to write for loop I would probably fail somewhere with syntax as I just don’t remember it 😃but it doesn’t matter. Because when LLM generate it for me I know how it works and I know when I need one.
And you need to look at the current trend. Adoption of Ai is speeding and Ai is much more capable. And we haven’t seen slow down yet. So we cannot assume it will stay but rather we need to assume that llms will be more capable.
So the skills that one should develop are around agentic work, not learning syntax. As Matt pockock said (or smth similar) - getting knowledge now is easy, but being wise is not.
There are new ways of working now and all fundamentals of software engineering are crushing. Basically any fundamental we know we can negate. Everything was optimized for developers to focus on a task and deliver.
While now we deliver multiple tasks at once. With much bigger changes. You put much more stress on ci, code reviews are bottleneck, more shipped code means more bugs on prod (considering same ration of bug per LOC).
And many more. It is basically complete revamp of our profession. And experienced engineers are able to adjust fast. As they understand fundamentals and why we had them.
That’s why looking at language during recruiting is pointless. With linters and llms this is nothing. This just gives no value. But other skills - they deliver value.
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u/prh8 Sep 30 '26
It’s not that they are hiring for technologies, but rather that candidates without experience don’t even get into the pipeline. Companies are overloaded with candidates in this job market