Software engineering still pays well and still hires. Firing off 80 Easy Apply clicks before lunch is still a waste of a morning, though. You need a tighter search: job boards you trust, LinkedIn alerts built on real titles, company career pages, and a GitHub trail that looks like work, not a class assignment. Is the market "hot," or is it just loud? Both, and it depends on the title you type.
The hiring picture is mixed, not mythical
Start with the federal numbers. U.S. government outlook data, as summarized in an industry explainer citing BLS figures, still puts software developers among the faster-growing occupations, with a median wage near $133,080 and a large number of openings each year. The spread is wide. The bottom tenth earns under $79,850, while the top tenth clears $211,450. Remember what those figures pool together: every employer type, every region, every seniority band. They are not a FAANG offer letter.
Thing is, headcount at any single company doesn't move in a straight line. The Pragmatic Engineer has tracked firms that added engineers for two years, then slowed. Other employers posted cuts. A listing count can climb on Indeed while your inbox sits silent. That's the part people skip.
AI tooling changed what "junior" means on a posting. Plenty of JDs now expect you to catch almost-right generated code, not just ship CRUD. Applied AI, cloud, and DevOps language shows up more. Some vendor blogs claim a 15-25% pay bump for LLM or MLOps skills at the same level. Treat that as a rumor with a spreadsheet behind it, not a promise.
Enterprise and government roles often pay less than consumer tech. They can be steadier. Remote filters also hide a lot of hybrid jobs, so read the location line twice.
Search LinkedIn like a recruiter, then save the alert
Recruiters don't search "coding ninja." They type "Backend Engineer," "Senior Software Engineer," "Full Stack Developer." Copy those exact strings.
Build the search before you subscribe to anything. If the unfiltered results look like spam, the alert will just email you that same spam on a schedule. Filter location or remote, experience band, and date posted. Check that the first page holds jobs you'd actually open. Then turn the search into an alert.
Guides on LinkedIn job alerts push the same idea: two tight alerts beat a pile of vague ones, meaning your main title plus one adjacent title. Daily notifications help if you apply fast. Weekly is enough if you batch.
Company website applications still beat a one-click pile at some firms. Easy Apply works when the posting is specific and your profile matches. It's weak when a crowd has already tapped it.
Here's the setup:
- Pick the exact title you can defend in a screen.
- Add remote or a metro area, not a too-narrow neighborhood.
- Set past 24 hours or past week.
- Open five results. If four are junk, change keywords.
- Save the alert. Name it so you remember the filter.
- Repeat once for a neighboring title, like backend plus platform.
Don't stack a pile of noisy subscriptions. You'll mute them.
Recruiter InMail is a separate channel. Reply when they name a company, a product, and a stack. Skip the "exciting opportunity" notes with no employer attached and a mystery calendar link. Ask for the req and the location before you send a resume.
General boards vs engineering-focused boards
LinkedIn and Indeed still carry most of the volume.
Volume is not quality.
Specialized developer boards try to cut that noise. Arc's roundup of developer job sites is a vendor piece, so read it as a map of options, not a scorecard. Stack Overflow Jobs is gone, though you can still network on the site itself. Remote-only aggregators help if you won't relocate. Startup boards skew equity and vague titles. Big-company career pages skip the job-board tax, and they usually want you inside their own ATS.
| Where you look | Best for | Watch-outs |
|---|---|---|
| Alerts, recruiter inbound, title matching | Easy Apply piles, recycled JDs | |
| Indeed | Breadth, keyword volume | Duplicate posts, stale listings |
| Company careers | Direct ATS, clearer reqs | You have to know the company exists |
| Remote/dev boards | Fewer non-eng roles mixed in | Smaller inventory, vendor bias |
Turns out a lot of "remote" posts are U.S.-only or one-day-a-week office. Check the timezone. Check the employment type too, because contract vs W2 changes your taxes and which tools you bother setting up later.
Apply on the company site when both links exist. Your materials land in the system they actually search. Indeed and LinkedIn often reprint the same req a week apart. If the description is identical, skip the second application.
Set Indeed alerts with the same titles you used on LinkedIn. Keep the location filter honest. A nationwide "remote" search will bury you in contract spam. Add the stack only after the title search already looks clean. Java plus "software engineer" is useful. Java plus 12 buzzwords is not.
GitHub and resume proof hiring teams can check
A software resume without evidence is a claim. Hiring teams click.
Pin a handful of relevant repos, not your entire homework history. Three to six is plenty if they match the jobs. README files, tests, and a short note on what you built beat a private repo named final-final-v3. If a project is central to the role, put it in a bullet on the resume too, not only in a links row. Portfolio guidance aimed at technical resumes makes that same point: the portfolio has to make the resume believable.
What gets attention is boringly specific. You shipped something real. You can say how you used AI tools without pretending the model wrote the architecture. You have depth in one stack, not a logo cloud of 40 entries.
Keep the resume parseable. Standard headings, real dates, employer names a parser can find. List a skill from the JD only if you can talk about it. Job-description matching tools can flag missing keywords, but don't stuff them in. If you used Python and AWS, say where.
You can spend a whole weekend polishing a personal site that nobody opens while the GitHub commit graph and a single well-documented service would have answered the only question the screener had, which was "did this person actually build the thing they listed," and that question keeps coming back.
ATS boxes are picky
Most company career portals parse a plain .docx or a clean PDF fine. Fancy two-column templates are what break. Export something boring, then open the file and confirm your dates and titles still sit on one line.
A sane weekly cadence
Spray-and-pray feels productive. It isn't. Several job-search write-ups land in the same range: a handful of tailored applications beats a hundred generic ones. Five to fifteen serious applications in a day is already a lot if you rewrite bullets.
Run this loop for one week.
- Daily (15-20 min): Scan alerts. Save 3-7 postings. Ignore recruiter spam that doesn't name a product.
- Apply block (60-90 min): Tailor resume bullets to the stack in the posting. Submit on the company site when you can.
- Proof block (2-3 hours, twice a week): Push a README, a test, or a small feature to the pinned repos.
- Sunday: Kill alerts that sent junk. Add one tighter keyword. Refresh cached LinkedIn filters if results look stale.
To be honest, most people skip the kill step. Old alerts rot. They train you to ignore email, which is worse than the rot.
Track where you applied. Log the date, company, req ID, and which resume version you sent. When a recruiter pings three weeks later, you'll know.
Skip these applications
Generic "software engineer" posts with twenty languages and no product name are usually bait. Staffing mills recycle them.
No salary band on a tiny company is fine. A huge brand that hides everything: you can still apply, just don't rewrite your life story for it.
Roles that want 8 years in a framework that is 4 years old are broken JDs. Apply anyway if the rest fits. Those years are not a legal gate.
Government and enterprise listings move slower, and the ATS can be uglier. Compensation often sits below consumer tech, with better hours for some people. Know which trade you want before you optimize the board filters for "highest salary."
AI-generated postings that read like a syllabus waste time. If you can't tell what the team ships, you won't pass the hiring manager screen.
FAQ
Do I need LinkedIn if I only use Indeed? You can skip it. You'll just miss recruiter inbound and a lot of alerts. For U.S. software roles, LinkedIn is still where titles and people match.
Should I Easy Apply? Use it for a close match with a real company page behind it. Skip it when the applicant count is already huge and your profile is thin.
Will AI tools replace the need to apply? No. They draft bullets and code samples. You still pick boards, fix the resume, and show work a human can run.
Tonight, set two LinkedIn alerts with titles you can defend. Pin three repos that match them. Then send a few applications on company sites this week, not fifty Easy Apply clicks.