After a career in the private sector I decided to switch to the public sector for the second half of my career. After years of searching I found a great opportunity in the Federal space, political headwinds be damned I had to accept. I started in December of 2024.

That meant that I was caught up with the mass firings of probationary federal employees, the Valentine’s Day Massacre.

So back on the job market! Not just that, in the unenviable position of needing a job, any job. I started applying everywhere and to everything.

Eventually I was able to land a couple offers after a couple months of searching. I’ve read a lot of things about the state of the job market, what follows are my first-hand impressions. I’m breaking this up into two blogs, one for standard interviewing, and another that focuses on AI as I encountered it.

If you’re on the market, hopefully this will be valuable.

Remote Jobs Aren’t Going Away!

All the Return to Office mandates, all the bold pronouncements about the end of remote work from CEOs was bunk. It seems like we’re never going back to the prepandemic 5 days onsite work week.

I got the impression that remote work will remain attractive to startups going forward. What would a fledgling company rather spend $200k a year on? An office or another dev? And indeed, a number of the smaller shops I interviewed for had no fixed office.

Now Remote positions are the most cherished in the industry, and the competition for them is fierce. I landed my share of interviews, got to the late stage with four or so, but ultimately the offers came from hybrid positions. I don’t live in the largest or richest metro area, but I’m fortunate that there are enough local companies that I’ve been able to carry on my career here without having to move to a different state.

Return to Office, Except for Interviews

Every interview, every interaction I had with recruiters and interviewers occurred online or over the phone. I never set foot inside of a physical building at any part of the process.

Even interviewing for local companies, where the understanding was I’d need to report on site up to 4 days a week, all my interviews occurred online. In fact in this particular case, despite that strict mandate, everyone who interviewed me did so from their homes, and the manager lived in a different state! In only a couple instances did any of my interviewers appear to be in an office.

I did a lot of remote interviewing during the period of pandemic lockdowns, and unfortunately many of the remote interviewers were visibly distracted, muting their mics to address their children while I was in the middle of answering questions. It was pretty unprofessional, but as the applicant there wasn’t anything I could do.

In 2025 I didn’t have that problem. All my interviewers this go-round were focused on me and the interview. Even if they ultimately declined to make an offer, it was still good to experience some professionalism as a candidate.

The State of LinkedIn

My job search typically begins and ends with LinkedIn. Toggling on the “Open To Work” eventually gets me the interview that gets me my next job. Still I didn’t just wait for recruiters and applied to everything I could as well..

I had heard horror stories that all the job postings on LinkedIn were fake. After a couple months, direct applying led to a few interviews, and a lot of rejection letters. By my count, half of my applications were met with total silence, although rejection letters could take months to go out. I still get one or two every now and then despite not applying anywhere for months.

Ultimately recruiters got me the most interviews and eventually a position, and almost all of those recruiters reached out via LinkedIn. This makes sense. If a company is working with recruiters they’re much more likely to be actively hiring. My only reservation is that with everything being remote its hard to trust any interaction.

There are plenty of stories of people getting accepted to fraudulent jobs. Going through a seemingly normal interview process just to find out they’d given their personal details to thieves.

For the first few weeks I had the “Open to Work” toggle on, I was contacted in the middle of the night by a procession of “recruiters” with sloppily cut-and-pasted job descriptions. I looked back at my message history and all those have since disappeared.

So in 2025 LinkedIn has more noise than ever. Applying to job postings aren’t a total waste of time but the real value is connecting with recruiters, just be discerning. There are a lot of scammers swimming in these waters.

Outside of LinkedIn

I also dipped my toes in ZipRecruiter and Glassdoor in my job search. The results there were worse than LinkedIn. My applications on ZipRecruiter got one rejection letter, no interviews.

However, I did find some success outside of LinkedIn.

I am on a local tech Slack channel. There’s fewer jobs posted there, and only found three relevant ones during my search, but one of which led to multiple interviews at a local company. A much better hit ratio than LinkedIn.

My state’s unemployment system is paired with a job search board. Despite its confusing search tools it highlighted a lot of good jobs at major firms that I didn’t see posted anywhere else. At least one application led to a lengthy interview process which I made the final stage.

If you’re in the market don’t disparage those tools!

Many companies also allow you to subscribe to find out about new job postings. It’s always a good idea to get these notifications, especially when you’re not actively looking.

Coding Challenges: The More things change the more they stay the same

Underneath all the changes, browser extensions to lockdown the experience, coding challenges are similar to what they’ve always been.

In 2025 companies are still asking candidates to reverse strings, or build simple web apps. Then there are follow up questions. “What if you couldn’t use an array?” “How would you solve this using only math?”

Thankfully no one asked me to do any Binary Search Tree algorithms this go-round. I was so afraid that I had written down a cheat sheet just for those questions.

In most of the larger companies I interviewed with coding assessments were done live. Only a handful asked for coding assessments remotely. The tools for these varied. I never used the same platform twice. The one I’m most familiar with, HackerRank, didn’t even come up at all.

The challenges themselves were no different than the past, and a fact of life. I’m willing to spend up to two hours on them and no company this go-round presented anything that would have taken longer.

A note about demographics

I should make a note about me. Demographics matter, and some part of my job search must be seen as unique to me and my circumstances.

I’m located in the Mid Atlantic region. It’s not the biggest tech hub in the United States, but there’s been enough local companies hiring at any time that I’ve been able to stay employed without needing to move.

I am not a junior developer. I’m going on 20 years in the industry. At this point I’m a Full Stack JavaScript/Typescript/React/Node/Express developer and interviewing for those roles.

Up until this point I’ve done better with startups.

Of the two offers I got, both were publicly traded, large companies. Startups and smaller companies showed little interest in me this go-round although I did make it to the “final round” (per recruiters) with a few.

I have heard anecdotally that large companies are not doing much direct hiring in this market, favoring instead long term contracts or contracts to hire. Those couple offers were of that variety. Some developers wouldn’t consider anything other than a direct hire, but my advice is to reconsider.

For the first time I wasn’t just older than the interviewers but the founders too. Sometimes the age difference was more than 15 years. That’s an interesting dynamic. Did it cost me any of the jobs? I don’t know. Two good offers 30~60 days isn’t the best I’ve done, but it isn’t the worst either.

It’s probably evident from what I’ve written above, I see interviewing as a numbers game. Interview with enough companies and eventually the stars will align. I have more faith in numbers than any other metric. There are plenty of times I’ve successfully completed a coding challenge and didn’t get the job, just like there were instances where I felt I struggled during a coding challenge and got an offer. The trick is to keep at it until you manage to find a company that will give you a thumbs up. In 2025 the market isn’t the best but I managed to get in front of enough companies to eventually find a match.

I don’t begrudge anyone who has to search in this market—I’m certainly in no rush to test my luck again—if that’s you I wish you the best.