Spain's software job market offers no hope for 35-year-old developers

The graveyard of development: no offers, no interviews at 35

A senior programmer with five years of running his own business behind him has not set foot in a single technical interview since March. Just phone calls. Just silence afterwards. At 35, with his savings in free fall and the option of moving back in with his parents on the table, his diagnosis is blunt: software development in Spain has become a graveyard. And he is not the only one who thinks so.

The story has three layers, and all three hurt. The first is the tech market, where job postings demand responsibility over a thousand fronts at once, fluent English and, within a minute of being published, already attract more than a hundred interested applicants. The second is unskilled work: warehouse loader, cashier, whatever comes up. There the problem is reversed —you are overqualified— and you get rejected before the first phone call because they assume you will leave. The third is a business that never takes off while AI eats up website traffic and the ship sinks with the savings on board.

AI as excuse and as cause

The arrival of artificial intelligence appears in the conversation as a double-edged sword. For some, it explains the collapse in web traffic that killed their own business. For others, it is the perfect excuse companies use to justify not hiring: they want one person doing the work of three, all in English, with the tool of the moment as their only teammate. Some describe the scene without anesthesia: colleagues who no longer even open their development environment, who simply pass the client's ticket to the model and give a cursory glance to what it returns. If that is the job, anyone will do.

The counterpoint comes from within the industry: programming was never the ceiling. The ceiling is understanding distributed systems, information flows, edge cases, transactions, real-time bottlenecks. Years of study and practice that a project manager with a finger-painting degree will not make up for from scratch. The discussion, therefore, is not whether AI replaces the programmer, but which programmer it replaces and how many entry-level positions are left to train the next generation.

Civil service exams as the only way out, with their own traps

The most repeated answer in the conversation is one word: take the civil service exam. Become a public servant. The only economic security that, according to this camp, can be counted on today. Some say it with a harshness that borders on a outburst —better to fail at 25 than at 45— while others put it more nuanced: if you live in a big city, take the exam; if not, the assignment may leave you in a place where rent eats your salary. It is no small detail. Some positions go unfilled because the successful candidate turns the job down upon seeing where they would be posted.

The public system itself offers a striking thermometer. In the State IT specialist exam (Spain's competitive civil service examination), the cut-off score went from a 3 out of 10 —the legal minimum— to 4.8 out of 10, still below the 6.3 required in the general administrative exam. The reading is twofold: the position is starting to be more sought after and, at the same time, remains less competitive than an administrative post. The full data, with the comparison between bodies and years, paints a picture of the public labor market that does not appear in official statistics.

Reinventing yourself: from an industrial degree to a manual trade

Outside the civil service, the proposals multiply. Learn a trade —bricklaying, plumbing, carpentry, electrical work— and go self-employed. Take a higher vocational course in the industrial branch, such as mechatronics or automation and robotics, where industry does demand people and the IT background works in your favor. Build a platform connecting producers, carriers and local points of sale without intermediaries. Become a building manager, taking advantage of the fact that AI lets you set up shop without employees. Even sheep herding, with classes on public holidays and long weekends, and city dwellers arriving in summer for therapy.

The underlying problem is that none of these routes solves the urgency. They all take time, and time is exactly what is running out when savings are counting down. The strain has been going on for two years, and moving back in with your parents at 35 —after a decade of independence— comes up as a last resort, not as a plan.

Ageism and the mirage of experience

On age there are versions for every taste. Some argue that companies are starting to prefer older, experienced profiles over freshly trained ones without experience. Others point out that the problem is not age but the salary that comes with experience: when the market is full of candidates willing to earn less, the senior becomes a luxury nobody wants to pay for. And a third points to the macro calendar: if the recession arrives and tech companies fall, IT layoffs will be epic, because with AI a screen scraper is enough to replicate a form.

The result is a storm combining several fronts at once: artificial intelligence, offshoring via remote work, an excess of programmers trained in recent years and ageism. None of these factors, on its own, explains what is happening. Together, they do.

Is it worth leaving Spain?

The question that closes the opening argument gets skeptical answers. Without fluent English, emigrating is harder than it seems. Winters elsewhere are harsher. And the global tech market is no better: AI knows no borders. The alternative some defend is to stay and use the very tool that threatens the job to start a business again, with the advantage of knowing the terrain.

The cautious prediction: the sector's adjustment is not over. If the recession confirms the scenario, pressure on salaries and entry-level positions will intensify before stabilizing. Nobody knows how long the winter will last, nor how many of those job hunting today will still be hunting when it lets up.