180 engineer interviews — what I’m hearing

I’m two-thirds through the year and I’ve already had 180 first-round interviews with engineers. That’s roughly four a week, every week, for eight months. Most are 30-minute video calls. A few have stretched into hours. They’ve ranged from junior backend engineers in Berlin to staff ML researchers in Kraków to founding engineers at Amsterdam scaleups nobody’s heard of yet.

I want to write down what I’m hearing. Not because I have a thesis — mostly because my pattern-matching is getting strong enough that the trends feel worth naming.

1. Most of them are brilliant.

This is the boring observation but it’s the most important one. The technical bar in EU engineering is genuinely very high right now. The people I’m talking to have built distributed systems at scale, shipped ML models that handle real traffic, debugged production fires at 3am with their hands shaking. They are good at what they do.

I say this because the dominant narrative in tech — especially since 2023 — has been one of candidate desperation. Layoffs. AI eating jobs. Saturated market. Junior engineers can’t get hired anywhere. The vibes are bleak.

What I see in the actual conversations is different. The market is harder than it was in 2021. But the talent is excellent. If you’re an engineer reading this and feeling like you must not be good enough, the data from my 180 calls says otherwise. You’re competing in a field of strong people. That’s not the same as being weak.

2. Many of them are exhausted.

This is the harder one. Maybe sixty percent of the engineers I talk to are interviewing not because they’re excited about a new opportunity, but because they’re done. Done with their current company. Done with the layoffs and reorgs and pivots. Done with the silent erosion of trust between them and their manager.

The clearest signal: when I ask “what would your perfect role look like?”, a tired engineer can’t answer. They know what they don’t want. They can’t articulate what they do.

The hardest job-hunters to place are the ones running away from something. The easiest are the ones running toward something. The middle group — running away while pretending to run toward — ends up in the same kind of role they just left.

If you’re an engineer who’s been at the same place for three or four years and the work has gotten quieter and the org chart keeps changing — please, before you start interviewing, write down what you actually want from your next role. Not just compensation. Not just title. What do you want to spend your days doing. The clearer you are about that, the better the offers you’ll get.

3. Companies aren’t investing in their existing engineers.

The single most common phrase in my notes from the past six months: “I haven’t had a real 1:1 with my manager in months.“

It’s not specific to one company. I hear it from engineers at very different employers — FAANG-adjacent, mid-size SaaS, late-stage startups. The pattern is identical. Skip-level meetings cancelled. Performance review process delayed. Career development conversations replaced with “we’ll talk about this in Q3.”

Companies are running their engineering orgs in pure execution mode. Heads down, ship the roadmap. There’s no time or budget or attention for the slower investments — mentorship, growth conversations, real coaching. So the engineers who would have grown in place are leaving for other companies that will at least pretend to care about their development for the first six months.

It’s a slow-motion talent leak. And the companies losing people aren’t even noticing the pattern, because they’re attributing each individual departure to that person’s specific reasons.

4. AI is changing the conversations, but not how you’d think.

I expected AI to dominate every conversation this year. It hasn’t. Maybe a third of the engineers I talk to are working seriously with LLMs. The rest are aware, mildly engaged, but not betting their careers on it.

The interesting part: AI keeps coming up in indirect ways. Engineers report using AI tools daily for their own work and feeling weird about it. Some are afraid it’ll devalue their craft. Some are afraid their company will use it as a layoff justification. Some are quietly thrilled because it’s let them ship things they never could have before.

None of these reactions are unanimous within a single team. The same office contains people who think Cursor is a productivity miracle and people who think it’s accelerating the death of software engineering. They’re not even arguing about it — they just don’t talk about it. It’s the new political topic, the thing nobody mentions at lunch.

5. The best conversations aren’t about tech stacks.

Out of 180 calls, maybe 20 stand out in my memory. Of those, almost none are memorable for the technical content. They’re memorable because the engineer was clear-eyed about what they wanted and clear-eyed about what they were good at.

An ML engineer who said: “I don’t want to manage. I’ve been told three times that I have to grow into management to keep advancing. I’d rather take a small pay cut and stay an IC than do that.” That’s a person who knows themselves. They got hired in two weeks.

A backend engineer who said: “I realize I’m not good at greenfield work. I get paralyzed by the blank page. I’m great at coming into a half-broken system and making it boringly reliable.” That’s someone with calibrated self-awareness. Three offers within a month.

These aren’t the most technically impressive engineers I’ve talked to. They might not even be in the top 30%. But they win their searches because they make it easy for everyone — including me, including the hiring manager — to picture exactly where they belong.

What I take from all this

If I had to compress 180 conversations into one piece of advice for engineers right now, it would be: get clear about what you want before you start interviewing.

Not what your CV looks like. Not what your LinkedIn says. Not what your peers think you should aim for. What do you actually want to spend your time doing? What kind of company, team, problem, manager, schedule, location?

The engineers who answer those questions clearly find roles that fit them. The engineers who can’t — the talented, exhausted middle — tend to land in the next version of where they already are.

You don’t need to know the answer perfectly. You just need to be working on it actively. The clarity is the work.