Hiring shifts, fewer new grads

Big Tech’s pipeline for entry-level software jobs has narrowed sharply, and recent graduates are competing for a smaller share of hiring than they did two years ago. (signalfire.com) SignalFire said in its May 20, 2025 talent report that new graduates accounted for 7% of hires at Big Tech companies, down from 25% in 2023 and more than 50% below pre-pandemic 2019 levels. The same report said startup hiring of new grads fell below 6% of hires. (signalfire.com) Ivan Turkovic, in an April 22, 2026 essay, used those numbers to argue that “the old junior role is dying” as routine coding work shifts toward artificial intelligence tools and companies ask engineers to do more specification, review, and direction. He also wrote that Big Tech new-grad hiring had dropped to 7% of all new hires from 25% in 2023. (ivanturkovic.com) The pressure is showing up outside company headcounts. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York said labor-market conditions for recent college graduates worsened at the end of 2025, with unemployment at about 5.7% in the fourth quarter and underemployment at 42.5%, the highest since 2020. (newyorkfed.org) Turkovic also pointed to a split inside hiring itself: some employers are cutting classic junior roles, while others are reopening narrowly defined entry paths tied to newer artificial-intelligence workflows. His April 22 post cited examples including Netflix, OpenAI, and Anthropic adding junior hiring in ways he described as exceptions to the broader contraction. (ivanturkovic.com) On the interview side, Steve Huynh, who describes himself on Substack as an ex-Amazon principal engineer and former Amazon Bar Raiser, has published a series of April 2026 posts on what evaluators screen for in hiring loops. His archive lists “What I Learned From Nearly 1,000 Interviews at Amazon” on April 3 and “The Book I Would Have Given Every Candidate I Interviewed At Amazon” on April 8. (alifeengineered.substack.com) (substack.com) Huynh’s framing matches a second shift in the market: fewer openings mean candidates can lose even when they code well if they miss the traits interviewers are scoring, including judgment, communication, and how they make decisions under ambiguity. That emphasis appears in the descriptions of his interview posts and in Turkovic’s argument that engineers are being valued less for raw code output and more for intent, review, and system-level judgment. (alifeengineered.substack.com) (ivanturkovic.com) SignalFire’s report did not attribute the drop to one cause alone. It cited smaller funding rounds, shrinking teams, fewer formal new-grad programs, and the rise of artificial intelligence as overlapping reasons companies are reducing entry-level hiring. (signalfire.com) The result is a hiring market with fewer apprenticeship-style roles and tighter filters for the ones that remain. For new graduates in April 2026, the bottleneck is no longer just getting a software interview; it is getting through a narrower system that now screens for both technical skill and AI-era judgment. (signalfire.com) (ivanturkovic.com) (alifeengineered.substack.com)