On the Precarious Nature of Coding Jobs in 2025
In the past few months, I decided it was time to try my wings on the job market again. Ideally, I’ve been looking for a hybrid role somewhere around Marquês de Pombal, a spot in Cascais, or just an office in Lisbon where I don’t lose two hours every day commuting (or more—Portugal’s public transport system had over 110 strike days in 2023 alone. It’s a coin toss whether your train shows up on time, or at all).
Things started promising. I got fairly deep into one application process—third stage in, solid rapport, good vibes—then, radio silence. Ghosted for weeks. Eventually, I found out they went with someone else. And look, it doesn’t intimidate me. These things happen. But it was the first time I truly felt like I had a gig in the bag, only to have it snatched away at the last minute. Apparently, I’m not alone. Others have told me the exact same story, down to the eerie vanishing act right after the final interview.
Then came another opportunity, or what I thought was one. A company that basically acts like a Craigslist for dev jobs—they broker out developers to other companies and skim your pay off the top. But you don’t even get the benefits or stability of a traditional agency in return.
Their candidate onboarding? A stale HTML form with dry questions. Forty minutes of form-filling later—silence. Then, eventually: “You haven’t sent in a video.”
A video?
No interview? I’m supposed to record myself for a WordPress Developer gig?
I talked myself into it—don’t be too prude, I thought. Maybe it’s good to see how things are changing, and maybe, just maybe, it’ll lead to something useful.
Then came some pop-up from something called Hireflix. An HR rep from the company read off an A4 sheet for four minutes, then some stuff popped up asking me to start my mic and camera.
It didn’t work.
Okay—stock Chrome on a Linux laptop. Fine. Could be a driver issue. Let’s try my partner’s IdeaPad with Windows 11 and stock Chrome.
Still didn’t work.
So I caved and used my phone.
Ten minutes, they said. But they didn’t mention the format.
You get a question. You get 1 minute to read it. Then around 3 minutes to respond. Four times. You have no way to gauge what they’re actually looking for. No feedback, no interaction, just you, your webcam, and a timer.
I’ve worked with WordPress for over a decade. I don’t walk around with a neat collection of “top 3 hardest projects” loaded in RAM. And even then, what do you put across in 3 minutes or less?
You remember tight deadlines, rough clients, crashes, and how you fixed them—but do I have a story that slots perfectly into this rigid format? No. Not even when you’ve done this stuff for ten years straight. I gave it a shot, though, what else could I do?
Weeks later, I get a no. Not surprised. I probably came off as too blunt, too visibly uncomfortable with being commodified like this.
If this is the future of international tech hiring, it’s bleak.
But there’s been light. Some far better offers have started to come in lately, and I believe I’ll land something soon.
Still, 2025 feels different from 2024 in one significant way.
The AI slop is everywhere.
LinkedIn, Indeed, X Jobs—you name it. Job ads are full of broken links that lead to https://You.you or https://Store.you. Applications half-generated and never reviewed. I saw one that said:
(Add the JS frameworks your company uses here)
…in a published ad. You’re asking for someone with an MIT degree and 18 years of experience in Erlang’s illegitimate cousin Gleam, but you can’t be bothered to clean up your bullet list?
And while the tech world worries about junior devs who “can’t really code,” I think we need to apply that same critical eye to the people hiring us, too. I keep hearing horror stories of project briefs and onboarding documents that are clearly AI-generated—full of perfect grammar but completely incoherent logic—that somehow got past team leads and board members alike.
On the funny-but-also-a-bit-tragic side of things: JIRA is now offering certifications to help get more users into their ecosystem. Their own onboarding prep points you to Trello. Yes, Trello. You can’t make this stuff up.
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I don’t mean to sound sardonic. I’ve worked in recruitment. I know how hard it is. I know most recruiters are doing their best. But something is fundamentally broken right now, and we need to talk about it—not in LinkedIn hustle culture platitudes, but in honest terms, with real stories from the ground.
I’m sharing mine. Would love to hear yours.
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