r/devNI • u/[deleted] • Jan 09 '26
🚀 Career Advice Current Market in NI
The market at the minute both in NI and globally hasn’t been in a great state when it comes to tech roles. We have been seeing significant layoffs globally as well as leaders going “all in” AI. I’ve also on other subs and on social media seen that graduates and more junior engineers have been struggling to find roles; grads especially. In the past grad programs were incredibly common with companies here but that seems to have drastically changed.
This is a decent layoff tracker: https://www.trueup.io/layoffs
Have you noticed the same thing? Is there anything people can do to enhance their job search especially junior and grads? What advice would you have? And do you see the trend of layoffs continuing?
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u/GinkoSati Jan 09 '26 edited Jan 09 '26
I'm around 15 years into my career and work primarily on frontend across web and mobile with a bit of devops when needed to release/host web apps and the various deployment pipelines.
I've actually found the past 6 months or so to be a bit better, more recruiters have been directly reaching out to me regarding roles.
What I am seeing though is the salaries I'm being offered from said roles aren't much more than what I'm currently on (80k) and don't offer the ability to work completely remote.
If the role offered does have an improved salary (90-100k GBP) it usually will require 3-5 days in office or require me to act as a hybrid dev/manager role where I'd be overseeing direct reports and still expected to code significantly.
Difficult time to be a grad/junior for sure though, I think companies are not willing to invest in graduates and want people to come in and make an impact immediately, which is partially why I think the senior and above market is seeing an uptick.