The Strange Reality of AI and SWE Hiring in 2025

Understanding the job market beyond 'the market is bad' is

Welcome to the first of many career-focused articles within ML for SWEs! This week, I’ll be going over the strange reality of the current job market and tips I have for you. I’ll be going over the following topics in the near-future:

• The five primary roles that are being hired for in AI and how they differ

• The must-have skills top companies are looking for

• The top experience companies are looking for

• An overview of where job opportunities lie and the breakdown of compensation

Thank you for supporting ML for SWEs! If you aren't a paid subscriber and you want to get the career-building resources, you can subscribe for just $3/mo for a limited time. If you'd like to support ML for SWEs but $3/mo is unreachable for you shoot me a message.

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First, a quick update to ML for SWEs: I’ve decided to make the career-focused articles and resources paid. This means no technical resources will ever be paywalled and everyone will get access to articles that help you understand machine learning.

By paywalling the career resources, paid subscribers can have a more immediate return on investment and get more niche resources to further their career. I’ll still be doing paid-only AMA/chats (wanting to do this weekly) and paid subscribers will get access to my resources including Discord feeds and any other one-off resources I come up with (thinking about sharing my resume guide soon 🤔).

I understand this is different from what I’ve said before so if this makes ML for SWEs not worth paying for, shoot me a DM. Thank you for reading this. Now let’s get on to the actual article!

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The job market is is a weird place right now. Anyone who tells you the job market sucks is right, but it's worth taking a deeper look into things.

Right now, it seems hiring is at a post-COVID but pre-COVID boom hiring level. This means the jobs posted each day are equivalent to what was posted before COVID hiring caused the market to take off but after COVID itself caused a dip. At first, this doesn't seem terrible but the distribution of jobs is highly skewed in two ways: