How is the market right now for junior engineers?

Has it really improved? It seems like a barren hellscape that has continued to get worse, especially for juniors, to a degree that I think is difficult to actually comprehend if you are far removed from this level.

I've followed resume advice from this site, and the Tech Resume Inside and Out, and held my first full time software engineer position for 2.5 years now, and sent out 1000+ applications over the past nearly 2 years (it's small, disorganized, and I am stagnating there. There are no tests except ones I've written, the boss hand crafts json instead of serializing an object and named one of the most important methods in the code base "do_work").

I've had about a 1.8% application response rate, and one job offer that was an entry level salary and a pay cut and they refused to negotiate even a single dollar, so I refused it. In retrospect, I'd go back in time out of sheer desperation and accept it, as it seems like the job market has only continued to get worse. There are normally 100-300+ people per hour applying to job board positions that are not obvious scams, and the total seems to normally be 3000-5000+ applicants. This indeed job posting index for software engineers shows the number of postings is now lower than during the trough of the covid pandemic. I am not sure applying for an even higher volume of jobs somehow is the answer at this point.

A course here said reaching out to an employer directly basically doesn't work, except maybe for small companies if you get them at the right time.

I guess I should try to build some user getting side project or somehow become an open source master outside my full time job to attract more attention, but it seems like networking or knowing the right person must be basically the only way to actually get a job right now if you are junior / early career and don't have some kind of stand out background with a top university CS degree, internship at big tech, an industry-disrupting side project, etc.???

Sorry for the rant, it just feels extremely bleak early career job wise. Definitely wondering if it was not extremely foolish to switch careers to software engineering, and what my backup plan could be. $250bn a year is being spent on AI which seems likely to continue to reduce the headcount to make up for the cash spent and push people to do more with less, Microsoft laying off 6000 with 25bn quarterly profits, higher than wall street expected, etc.

Hopefully there's some cycle that will improve, but damn...

Wondering if anyone has had any luck networking cold or reaching out to small local employers, and how they achieved it? For a while I was trying the methods described in the 2 hour job search book, and got some informational interviews and a couple of referral offers, but it went nowhere. Gave that up after a month or two. Probably should give it another go.

Has it really improved? It seems like a barren hellscape that has continued to get worse, especially for juniors...

A big curveball was the recent US presidential election, specifically the tariffs (and the fear surrounding them) coming out of that.

As someone who runs Taro, I closely keep track of career outcomes of Taro members over time. There was a clear delta between 2023 (literally 0 laid-off juniors I know getting jobs) and the first 3 quarters of 2024 (several laid-off juniors in Taro getting jobs, even at top companies like ServiceNow).

But yeah, the market in 2025 is shaping up to the real bad unfortunately, especially for folks on the junior/early mid-level end of the spectrum 🥺

2% response rate is really good. I understand the frustration with sending out 100s of apps, but respectfully you should be aiming for 100 apps a week. 1000 over 2 years is quite frankly not a lot. It's very doable with like 30-40 mins of effort a day/15 apps a day using simplify to automate the repetitive parts. This should get you 2 interviews a week at your rate.

My biggest advice is you need to lock in with leetcode. The current market is one where you wont get many interviews, but the interviews you do get which you eventually will, you need to be on your A game. You cannot afford to start prepping for leetcode style interviews AFTER you get an interview. Also you're extremely likely to get leetcode in atleast 1 round