Senior developer: 100 applicants per job, zero interviews

The senior developer who closed his business and can’t find work

A 35-year-old former developer hasn’t passed a single technical interview since March. He paid social security as an employee at several companies, left the profession because of anxiety and depression, set up online businesses for five years, closed them almost a year ago and is now living off savings while sending out résumés to a market he describes as a graveyard. As another participant points out, he is not an isolated case: it is happening to half of all 35-year-old senior developers.

The story has three mutually reinforcing layers. The first is salaried employment: few openings, poorly paid, and requiring fluent English plus a thousand simultaneous responsibilities. The second is unskilled work: as soon as “senior developer” appears on the CV, the candidate is rejected as overqualified. The third is entrepreneurship: web traffic collapsed, and the business collapsed with it. When all three fail at once, the problem stops being personal and starts to look structural.

Why aren’t they hiring senior developers anymore?

The most widespread explanation isn’t that the sector is dead, but that it has been compressed. As one participant sums it up, AI doesn’t eliminate the job: it makes one person cover the work of three. In that view, companies no longer look for hands that write code; they look for people who can review what the machine generates, understand the business and do it all in English. The result is that a job posted in the morning racks up more than a hundred interested applicants within minutes.

Even those who defend the profession share the technical diagnosis. One current holds that today’s tools already absorb a project’s context and run on rails: the team barely opens the development environment and simply passes tickets along. If that is true, skilled work becomes supervision, and anyone with judgment can supervise. If even a talentless profile can program at a basic level with the new tools, the calculation many repeat is inevitable: there are too many developers.

But that data point doesn’t tell the whole story. At the same time, one participant reports that his company has three open vacancies and only two technical interviews in three months, and that it accepted a candidate who didn’t meet the level of the role. And some claim they’re still fine, getting assignments worth over 3,000 euros without being any kind of genius. Both things are true and don’t quite fit together. The market hasn’t died; it has narrowed and become hyper-selective toward those coming from outside.

Overqualified: the CV you need to rewrite

There is one piece of advice that comes up insistently: it’s worth having a different résumé for each type of job. For a warehouse or checkout job, there’s no point detailing fifteen years of development; whoever reads the CV thinks the candidate will leave as soon as they can and moves on to the next one. On a general job board, according to one participant, every unskilled opening gets two hundred or more applicants, many with no training and others hiding it. Applying for a job has become as brutal a filter as the tech one.

Being overqualified has stopped being an advantage. It’s a label that triggers automatic rejection.

Oposiciones (Spanish civil service exams): from lifeline to massive funnel

The most repeated way out is oposiciones. The argument is backed by a participant preparing for a place: in Galicia, posts are opening up because of staff retirements and the population pyramid suggests more will open in the coming years. A quiet systems administrator job at a town hall, with around 1,600 euros net, is the horizon another participant describes for burnt-out technical profiles.

The problem is that if everyone takes the same route, the route collapses. An oposición that nobody used to prepare for becomes a mass lifeline. And the warning almost nobody calculates appears: a post in a town where rent eats up your salary is a trap, and some people already resign after passing. The recurring metaphor is getting into one of the last lifeboats on the Titanic. It may be the right boat. It may also be that the ship wasn’t the one they thought.

Leaving Spain: the maths that works out and the maths that doesn’t

Emigration appears as plan B and plan C. Switzerland is the most-mentioned destination: it’s said that English and basic German are enough to enter the IT sector, and people speculate about gross salaries of 60,000 to 90,000 francs in roles such as professional driver. Australia is ruled out because of age, by that same criterion. The United States, because of the difficulty of regularizing your status without wealth. Ireland, despite being the tax domicile for half the sector, offers no real employment for engineers according to one participant, and even Japan no longer compensates.

Another less romantic route: retraining into industry and defense, where one participant expects fresh money to come in. The profile would be less web and more systems, with C and C++ and third-party libraries. It isn’t segarro. It may be the only thing growing.

With the domestic market narrowing, oposiciones oversubscribed and the exit door ever narrower, the foreseeable outcome is that retraining into industry and defense will gain weight over the coming months. But it’s worth not treating it as settled: the same sector that today says there are too many developers could tomorrow hire someone who knows how to direct the machine. The unknown isn’t whether people will be needed, but how many and with what CV.