The tech job market didn't crash evenly, and that changes how you search

The “tech hiring is dead” headline hides a segmentation story. SignalFire found engineering roles are down about 11 percent since 2019 while overall tech hiring fell about 25 percent. Knowing which side of that gap your role sits on changes how you run your search.

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The headline everyone repeats

If you’ve been job searching in tech for the past year, you’ve heard the same sentence from a dozen directions. Tech hiring is dead. The market is frozen. Nobody’s hiring. It shows up in Reddit threads, in the group chat, in the well-meaning advice from someone who left the market three years ago.

The problem with that sentence isn’t that it’s wrong. Hiring did drop, and it dropped hard. The problem is that it’s an average, and averages hide the part you actually need. “The market is down 25 percent” tells you almost nothing about the market you’re personally trying to enter. It’s like being told the average temperature of a house with the oven on and the freezer open.

The number that breaks the headline

SignalFire, a venture firm that tracks hiring across thousands of companies through its recruiting dataset, put a real shape on this in its State of Talent report. The topline drop in tech hiring since 2019 is roughly 25 percent. But engineering roles specifically are down only about 11 percent over the same period.

Sit with that gap for a second. If core engineering is down 11 and the whole category is down 25, then something else in tech got cut far more than 25 percent to pull the average down that far. The pain is real, but it is not spread evenly across every desk in the building. Some functions absorbed most of the contraction. Others barely moved.

That is the difference between a market that’s dead and a market that’s uneven. And “uneven” is a word you can actually act on.

Where the drop actually landed

The contraction sorts along a few clear lines.

The first is function. Roles that build and ship the product held up better than roles that support the org around it. Engineering, and to a degree product and core infrastructure, stayed closer to their old levels because they’re the last thing a company stops paying for. The functions that expand fastest in good times, recruiting chief among them, are the ones that contract fastest when hiring slows. A company that stops hiring doesn’t need as many recruiters, so recruiting teams got cut early and deep.

The second is seniority. This is the one that hurts the most to read if you’re early in your career. The door that narrowed most is the entry-level one. When budgets tighten, companies keep the people who can operate without hand-holding and pull back on the roles that need a year of ramp before they contribute. SignalFire’s data on new-grad hiring at large tech companies shows it falling much faster than hiring overall. The senior engineer with a track record is in a very different market than the new graduate with the same degree from the same school two years apart.

The third line is how close a role sits to work that software can now do without a person. This is where the AI displacement story is real, but narrower than the headlines make it. The roles under the most pressure are the ones built around tasks a model can now handle at acceptable quality: first-draft content, routine data cleanup, tier-one support, the more mechanical slices of junior coding. The roles getting more valuable are the ones that direct, review, and own the outcome. Someone still has to decide what to build, check whether the output is right, and answer for it when it ships. That work didn’t get automated. If anything, it got more concentrated in fewer people.

So the honest version of the headline is this: tech hiring is down, entry-level and support-adjacent roles are down a lot, and core building roles held up better than the panic suggests. Whether “the market is dead” is true for you depends entirely on which of those buckets you’re standing in.

The market got more legible, too

There’s a second shift running alongside the contraction, and it works in your favor. Job postings are telling you more up front than they used to.

The Indeed Hiring Lab has tracked how many US job postings list pay. In 2020, it was roughly one in five. By 2024, more than half of postings included a salary range. That change tracks the spread of state pay-transparency laws, and it means you can now filter a lot of the market by compensation before you ever write a cover letter.

Combine the two shifts and the search that works looks different from the one everyone defaults to. The market is tighter, but it’s also more readable. You can see which roles pay what, and the data tells you which segments are actually hiring. That rewards aim over volume. Firing off 200 near-identical applications made a rough kind of sense when postings were opaque and plentiful. It makes much less sense when you can read the segment you’re in and target it.

What this changes about your search

If you’re in one of the resilient segments, the “market is dead” narrative is quietly working against you. It’s talking you into applying to fewer roles and expecting worse, when the roles you’re qualified for are still there. They’re just quieter than they were in 2021, and they’re buried under a lot of doom. The move is to keep your standards high, apply to the specific companies still hiring your function, and not let the aggregate mood set your expectations. The funnel math on “just apply to more” was never the answer, and it’s even less so now.

If you’re in one of the squeezed segments, volume is the wrong lever, because more applications into a shrinking pool doesn’t fix a pool problem. Two things move the needle instead. One is repositioning toward the adjacent resilient segment: the new grad who frames themselves around what they can already own rather than what they need trained on, the support specialist who moves toward the part of the role that reviews and directs rather than the part a model now handles. The other is precision targeting: finding the specific companies and teams still hiring your exact function, which exist even in a down segment, and going deep on those instead of wide on everything. It also helps to know what actually happens to an application after you submit it, because in a tight market the six-second resume scan is even less forgiving.

Either way, the takeaway is the same. Figure out which side of the gap your role sits on before you decide how to search, because the right strategy for a resilient segment is the wrong strategy for a squeezed one.

That’s the search JobHawk is built for. Instead of a fire hose of every listing, it surfaces a focused set of matches each day filtered to your role and criteria, so you can put real effort into the applications that fit the segment you’re actually in. Fewer, better applications beat a scattered 200, and in an uneven market that’s not a preference. It’s the math.

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