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The software engineering market didn't collapse. It split — and most candidates are still preparing for the market that existed three years ago.
Openings exist, but they've concentrated. AI-adjacent and infrastructure roles are competitive to fill while generalist roles sit far below their pre-2022 baseline. The entry rung has thinned as AI absorbs the well-bounded work that used to train junior engineers, which pushes recent grads and career changers into a crowded middle already occupied by laid-off mid-level engineers. Time-to-hire has stretched. Fully remote postings are rare.
The bigger change is one almost nobody is preparing for: the interview itself got rebuilt. After a wave of real-time AI assistance in remote coding screens, companies responded in two directions. Some dragged interviews back on-site. Others redesigned the assessment — adding rounds where you're handed an AI assistant and evaluated on whether you can prompt it, catch its mistakes, and defend the result. Follow-up questions became the filter. Narrating your reasoning out loud went from nice-to-have to the thing you're actually scored on.
If your prep strategy is "grind 500 LeetCode problems," you are optimizing for a screen that increasingly isn't the deciding round.
Join software engineer and mentor Phong Lam for a working session on what's actually required to land a software engineering role right now. He'll cover:
- Where the market genuinely split, and which side of it your background currently sits on
- Why interview loops changed in 2026 — on-site returns, AI-assisted rounds, and follow-up questions as the real filter
- How to prepare by pattern, not volume: recognizing question families instead of memorizing solutions
- The new prep skill nobody practices — debugging and defending code you didn't write
- How to talk about using AI in your work without sounding like you've outsourced your judgment
- How mid-level and senior engineers coming off a layoff avoid reading as "generalist" on paper
- Where the openings actually are, including the non-obvious companies quietly hiring software talent
- What career changers and recent grads can do to clear a bar that moved after they enrolled
Come with your questions, your loop stories, and the roles you're targeting.
ABOUT PHONG LAM
Phong Lam is a senior software engineer at Circle, with past stops at DoorDash, Walmart, and IBM. Alongside his career he mentors junior and senior engineers on algorithmic problem solving, web frameworks, and navigating interviews. Connect with him on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/phongtlam/.
