u/No_Arm3650

My background: 8+ years of SDE experience at small or mid-size companies. Interviewd at 10+ companies, made it to onsite at 5, and struck out on all of them. the market now feels really brutal.

the job market right now is a compeletely diffrent world from before.

This is my 3rd time job hunting
First time was right after graduating, pre-COVID. Onsite at 3 companies, faild 2, got 1 offer.
Second time was during the money-printing era. Onsite at 3 companies faild 2, got 1 offer and jump ship. Back then I only had 3+ y of experience, but Linkedin recruiters were coming at me nonstop, Amazon alone would reach out 2-3 times a week. That's completely gone now
This time made it onsite at 5 companies, zero offers

Linkedin is still somewaht useful. I got premium, and I get 5+ recruiter messages a day.But most of them don't sponsor. Maybe 1-2 sponsoring companies reach out per week. My interview pipeline breakdown ~10% cold applications, ~40% referrals from friends, ~50% from Linkedin Inmail

The quality of Inmail has clearly dropped. Full-time SDE position have noticeably dried up

Interview formats vary company to company, but it's mostly still the old classic trio coding +system design +BQ. Haven't run into any AI-coding specific interviews yet

Of the coding questions i've gotten about 80% have gone fine, mostly medium level, pretty standard stuff. Strongly recommand grinding through problems by category until you're solid on all of them A few companies threw curveballs though, and for those you just have to roll with it.

Interviews feel noticeably harder than before. personnally,I think my system design skills are actually better than they were a few years ago, but i've gotten feedback at several companies that I failed the system design round.

The big difference from my previous job switches
Back then, a lot of companies, like google meta, had multiple openings. you'd interview first, then get matched with a hiring manager afterward. Now, very few companies have multiple openings. Backfill roles almost always already have a "better candidate" lined up, It's an uphill battle on top of an uphill battle.

I've been seeing Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) roles pop up more often in AI companies recently, and it feels like this might become a bigger trend.

What is an FDE?

An FDE is basically an engineer who deploys and adapts a company's tech/AI products into real customer environments and makes sure they actually work in production.

Simply put, it's a role that combines software engineering (development skills) with solution-oriented, client-facing communication skills.

Difference from SWE interviews

FDE interviews tend to be more open-ended / product + systems oriented, e.g.:

- A hospital wants an internal AI search system — how would you approach it?

- A logistics company wants to reduce delays using AI — where do you start?

- Your agent is underperforming due to messy data — how do you debug it?

Pros

- a good fit for engineers who don't want to grind LeetCode, only build features, or fully move into PM/sales.

- You get exposure to real customer problems, production challenges, and enterprise AI use cases with direct business impact.

- If you're into AI products, enterprise AI, agents, or startups, it's valuable experience seeing how demos turn into paid real-world deployments (and all the gaps in between).

Downsides

The role can also be pretty demanding:

lots of customer meetings

cross-team coordination

constant prioritization pressure

firefighting production issues

possible travel

And you're often stuck between customers ↔ product ↔ engineering

One important nuance

Companies define “FDE” very differently:

- Some roles are basically pre-sales / solutions engineering

- Others are deeply technical and contribute to core product development

So the job title alone isn't enough. What really matters:

Do you write production code?

Do you influence product direction?

Can you move between FDE and SWE tracks?

Those seem much more important for long-term career value than title or even compensation.

As more AI companies move into enterprise adoption, do you think FDE will become a mainstream career path, or just a temporary role that emerged during the AI boom?

Saw a post on X today talking about some study of 21k+ US companies, basically saying firms that went all in on AI actually grew their workforce, even entry-level hiring went up. Kinda blew my mind tbh bc for like the past 2 yrs the whole narrative's been "AI is coming for your job."

But also... layoffs are still happening?? maybe not the huge one-time mass layoffs like before, more like smaller rounds that just keep trickling in. and ngl the job market rn just feels way tougher than it used to, like something's off even if the big numbers say otherwise.

Personally based on vibes/how things feel rn, I still lean towards AI having a net negative effect, but genuinely open to hearing other takes bc this study kinda threw me off lol.

Hey everyone,

I’m building a small site to help people land jobs in tech.

I’ve got a bunch of NGs on it now, but I’m kind of stuck on the mentor side.

Just wondering where do people usually find engineers who are open to doing paid 1:1 mentoring?

Or are there any engineers here who would be open to doing something like this?

Thanks