2026 NEW GRAD SWE RECRUITING IS COOKED

so this might be the worst software engineering new grad recruiting cycle in recent history and I've ever seen in recent history and I'm talking about the 2026 new grad recruiting cycle and the reason I say this is because I've spent the last couple of years posting about internships and new grad job postings and I've actually been doing this outside of TikTok since about 2018 and I have never seen so few software engineering new grad jobs open up by now mid October mid October mid October is usually peak recruiting season this is when every single company will open their new grad job postings and the reason they want to do it right now is because front to back finishing a new grad software engineering recruit like an interview cycle interview to offer is usually about four weeks long and you know what happens four weeks from now Thanksgiving Day and every single software engineer that has a family or has people they care about is going to take a week off around Thanksgiving they'll take PTO that's when interviews shut down that's when offers get sent out and then everybody goes on a break and December is kind of a lull and what we're seeing right now is no if you look at my TikTok comment section if you look at the swipe ups on my Insta if you look at my Instagram reels comments everybody is asking me everybody is asking me where are the new grad jobs I've been posting plenty of internship postings like we have hundreds at this point but there aren't any new grad jobs there's maybe a couple dozen at most and the truth is I'm not hiding the new grad job postings from you guys they just aren't opening up in mass the way that they used to and I think this a lot of tech companies are just choosing to hire a bunch of interns now and they're converting their interns to full-time they're keeping the good ones and letting them go flounder in the current new grad job market not their problem rig and don't even get me started on how bad it is for international students because even after the clarification that the administration made that they were really just targeting the Tatas like Indian consultancy like sweatshops that are really just um specifically only bringing cheap labor in from India it doesn't matter so many of these companies now feel like they um are experiencing too much thrash and uncertainty around visa sponsorship which makes recruiting as a new grad international student software engineer even more difficult because companies just are like we don't we don't wanna know maybe the policy is gonna change we don't wanna recruit you guys anyway so it is not an understatement when people say new grad tech recruiting is cooked there are objectively about 500,000 of you guys in computer science and at any given point there may be 350,000 new grad jobs available and what happens to the third that aren't going to get jobs I genuinely do not know now on the more optimistic side of things intern recruiting is still doing very well my follower base especially on Instagram where people turn on like my Instagram story notifications so they can see job links the second I post them like recruiting event links the second I post those those people are doing really well and I get a ton of success story DMs every single new grad completely different story but I'm curious is this like what the job market has felt like for you to just let me know in the comments