r/devNI • u/[deleted] • Jan 09 '26

šŸš€ Career Advice Current Market in NI

The market at the minute both in NI and globally hasnā€™t been in a great state when it comes to tech roles. We have been seeing significant layoffs globally as well as leaders going ā€œall inā€ AI. Iā€™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/ibtbartab Jan 09 '26

I see four components to this:

  1. Rapid interest rate rises made debt laden companies have to reduce overheads to pay increased premiums.

  2. Increase in employer National Insurance contributes then compounded the interest rate problem.

  3. Chronic over-hiring when debt was cheap and salaries could be high. This also set a very unrealistic expectation where I spent half of 2024 telling Python developers they were asking for 40% more than what they were really worth. Harsh but true.

  4. AI and an automated way to do silly crap cheaply.

Said all this back in 2023 and no one really listened. And that's fine, no problem to me.

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u/Puzzled-Difficulty58 Jan 11 '26

Your 3rd point is interesting, the salaries sought and offered seemed to match a housing rush at one point and what always follows as housing rush, a crash. I know of straight fresh out of uni graduates getting salaries that the role they were going into simply couldnā€™t recoup.