The 2023 State of Software Engineering For Junior Devs

On February 28th 2023 Hired.com released it’s annual report on the State of Software Engineering, reflecting data captured from 68,500 job candidates and 494,000 interview requests. I highly encourage any job seeker to check out the full report here to better understand the pros and cons of of the job market today.

I was privileged to have early access to their findings and was even asked to participate in their webinar on the topic. While the conversation was great, we couldn’t cover everything. So here are my thoughts, as they relate to junior developers and their job search.

1. The Tech Industry Unemployment Rate is 1.5%

During this same time period, the unemployment rate across the the United States was 3.4%, itself a historic low. What this suggests is that the demand for Software Engineers is still high and that the mass layoffs and hiring freezes in Big Tech, while difficult on an individual level, were mischaracterized in aggregate. This consistently low unemployment rate indicates that either:

• Most of the tech workers were quickly re-absorbed into the market, or
• Most of the layoffs were for non-technical roles