DE Interviews Are Brutal Now, And the Jobs Aren't Even There

I've been through more interview loops than I can count at this point. Some were great. Some were absurd theater. But the loops I'm hearing about now, from friends still actively searching, from people in my DMs, from threads on Blind and Reddit that read like therapy sessions; they're something else entirely. Six rounds. Eight rounds. Take-home projects that take a full weekend. Live SQL gauntlets followed by system design marathons followed by behavioral panels followed by a "culture chat" that's really just another behavioral panel wearing a different hat. And here's the part that makes it sting: there are fewer roles to fight over. The data engineering job market in 2025 and into 2026 has cooled. Not collapsed. Not dying. But cooled in a way that's obvious to anyone actively looking. Headcounts got tighter after the layoff waves. Backfills got deprioritized. Hiring managers who used to have three open reqs now have one, maybe, and it's "pending approval" for six months. Meanwhile,