Marc Morcos graduated with the highest final-year grade in his program at the University of Toronto. Although he interned at Epson for longer than a year while in school, it took him more than six months and hundreds of job applications to finally secure a post-graduate role as a software engineer.

For Morcos and many others, the dream of securing work at one of the tech industry’s top companies in Silicon Valley has become more like a nightmare.

Nestled in the San Francisco Bay Area, Silicon Valley is home to some of the world’s premier tech companies.

Major players like Apple, Google, and Meta attract some of the industry’s top young talent, who hope to find a job with one of these industry leaders. But the job market has been less than welcoming for entry-level engineers in recent years, especially since the end of the COVID pandemic.

In its May 2025 “State of Tech Talent Report,” SignalFire found that new graduate hiring was down 50 percent from pre-pandemic levels. The San Francisco-based firm tracks tech trends like hiring.

“As demand for junior roles declines, even highly credentialed engineering grads are struggling to break into tech, especially at the Big Tech companies,” the report states.

And that couldn’t be more the case for Dillon Hammond, a software engineer at Google who recently graduated from the University of California–Davis.

Entry-Level Woes

Hammond earned a degree in computer science last year, but he told The Epoch Times that he had to apply to 300 jobs before finally being hired by the federal government as a computer science patent examiner.

“Yeah, it’s difficult. I think the average computer science major is honestly in a really rough position right now,” he said. “You really kind of have to do everything to have a chance.”

From there, Hammond took a six-month paid leave offer as part of a downsizing program by the Department of Government Efficiency, and spent the time preparing for what would become his current role at Google.

His struggle to secure a software engineering position is not unique.

Overall, the SignalFire report found that “the share of new graduates landing roles at the Magnificent Seven (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA and Tesla) has dropped by more than half since 2022.”

Despite moving to Silicon Valley, Morcos also faced a grueling job search once he was out of school.

He also applied to “some obscene amount” of jobs—about a few hundred—before eventually returning to work at Epson, he said.

It took him another eight months to finally land his current role as a software engineer at Google. He clarified that he was not speaking on behalf of the company.

Other graduates from Morcos’s class found themselves in a similar situation, he said—even struggling to land jobs where they had already interned.

“Basically, everybody in my grade, for the first at least half a year, couldn’t really find a job,” he told The Epoch Times. “So pretty much a huge portion of my program ended up doing a master’s.”

There is also a whole other layer to this struggle that’s hidden beneath the surface, and that’s fake job postings.

“A lot of the jobs online aren’t real listings,” Hammond said.

He was referring to something called ghost jobs, which MyPerfectResume defines as “job postings for positions that are non-existent or have already been filled.”

In the company’s 2024 survey of 753 recruiters across the United States, 81 percent reported that they post ghost jobs.

Most of the time, you can identify a ghost job in tech if there’s no first-stage exam, which applicants need to ace in order to secure a first-round interview, according to Hammond.

But Morcos found that even a first-round interview doesn’t guarantee that you’re applying for a real job.

“Personally, I’ve gone to an interview for a job that I knew didn’t exist, the interviewer didn’t exist, and we kind of just made it a practice interview,” he said.

The employee who met Morcos for the interview told him truthfully that the position was not real.

This practice might represent a growing trend in the job market.

In a May 2024 survey of 1,641 managers by Resume Builder, 40 percent reported that their company had posted a fake job listing in 2024. The survey report calls this type of posting a “highly unethical tactic” and states that the motivations include collecting resumes and keeping them on file for later, making it look like the company is growing, and making employees feel replaceable.

Overhiring During COVID

So how did the tech industry’s job market end up where it is today? The answer to that might trace all the way back to the shutdowns during COVID-19.

When COVID-19 led to widespread shutdowns, tech companies found themselves in a unique position.

To prevent economic disaster, President Donald Trump enacted more than $3 trillion in pandemic spending during his first term, and the Biden administration followed up with a $1.9 trillion boost in 2021.

This stimulus sparked a surge in consumer demand—especially in the tech industry—since everything from essential services to remote work was moving online.

In response, tech companies began hiring in droves. In the Bay Area alone, where Silicon Valley is located, the industry added 74,700 jobs from 2020 to 2022, according to an analysis from Industry Insider.

Incomes for these employees also ballooned. The average salary rose by 6.9 percent to $104,556 from 2020–2021 to 2022, the highest ever recorded by the job platform that was called Dice at the time.

All this was fueled even more by a tax provision called IRS Section 174.

For decades, IRS Section 174 allowed companies to deduct all of their research and development spending in the same year it was incurred. The law was originally meant to “level the playing field” for small businesses, according to The Tax Adviser, but tech companies benefited, too.

That’s because almost all of what they do involves working on new technology, according to Jason McBurney, director of engineering at AI-hiring platform JobMap.

“If you have no tax burden, and you’re a startup and everything you’re doing is research and development, then your overall tax burden is almost zero,” he told The Epoch Times.

But the law didn’t just benefit startups. McBurney said that even big tech developer salaries during the pandemic were deducted from tax bills, and “the government then is helping you fund your research.”

Tech companies took full advantage during the COVID hiring spree, but that all changed as a delayed change to the tax code took effect in 2022.

During the first Trump administration, lawmakers set up delayed tax hikes in order to offset costs from the massive Tax Cuts and Jobs Act passed in 2018.

One result of this was a fundamental change to Section 174—companies would now have to amortize the deductions from research and development over the span of five or 15 years, rather than all at once.

This change happened at the same time that the COVID stimulus was running out, leading to a massive fallout.

Mass Tech Layoffs

The tech industry has been seeing mass layoffs ever since the end of the pandemic, fueled by what McBurney called a “perfect-slash-imperfect storm” of drastic changes.

The industry was very highly employed during COVID, he said, with companies chasing engineers and inflating salaries.

But once the pandemic stimulus dried up and Section 174 changed, big tech companies were left with huge tax jumps and an oversupply of high-salary engineers, along with decreased consumer demand.

Tech executives were saying to themselves, “Wow, we need to cut back; these departments are more expensive than they’ve been in 20 years,” McBurney said.

So, in around 2023, Silicon Valley tech giants like Google, Meta, and Intel began laying off software engineers en masse.

In early 2023, Google announced layoffs of about 12,000 employees, or around 6 percent of its workforce at the time.

Similarly, Meta laid off 10,000 of its employees later that year, after having let go of 11,000, or 13 percent of its workforce, in 2022.

And the sweeping cuts are continuing to this day—Intel in July announced plans to cut 15 percent of its staff by the end of 2025.

The Bay Area alone saw 80,200 tech jobs cut in 2023 and 2024, and the wave is still going.

AI Emergence and the Current Outlook

Following the bursting of the COVID bubble, artificial intelligence quickly emerged as the next big trend in tech.

Along with it came predictions of huge long-term potential, but uncertain short-term effects.

Global consulting firm McKinsey & Company reported that AI could add up to $4.4 trillion to the economy in long-term productivity growth, yet only 1 percent of companies said their investments were “mature,” with AI fully integrated and ready to drive “substantial business outcomes.”

Right now, McBurney doesn’t see AI causing major disruption.

“I would say nothing’s going to change radically in the next five years,” he said.

Still, the tech industry has begun to feel its effects. Hammond pointed out that many lower-skilled or entry-level jobs have been eliminated, while engineers like himself are being encouraged to incorporate AI into their everyday workflows.

The general sentiment among software engineers, according to him and Morcos, is that the technology is insufficient to code on its own, and that it’s better used as more of an assistant for now.

In the meantime, students and entry-level job applicants are left doing everything they can—from internships and personal projects to months of coding and job hunting—to fight for a position.

“For computer science, if you just graduate with a degree and nothing else, you’re going to be working at McDonald’s,” Hammond said. “That’s just a reality; this isn’t an overstatement.”