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Comment by stephenpontes | Hacker News Reader

Agree. I feel like most of the people sounding the alarm have been in the software-focused job hunting market for 6+ months.

Those who downplay it are either business owners themselves or have been employed for 2+ years.

I think a lot of software engineers who _haven't_ looked for jobs in the past few years don't quite realize what the current market feels like.

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Alternatively: this is an America problem. I'm outside of America and I've been fielding more interviews than ever in the past 3 months. YMMV but the leading indicator of slowed down hiring can come from so many things. Including companies just waiting to see how much LLMs affect SWE positions.

Alternatively, it's a loud minority.

As an American I found a new job last year (Staff SW), and it was falling off a log easy, for a 26% pay bump.

It's from AI either directly or indirectly, either the top SWE's using AI are replacing 10 mid/juniors or your job is outsourced to someone doing it at half your Salary with a AI subscription. Only the top/lucky/connected SWE's will survive a year or two, if you have used any SOTA agent recently or looked at the job market you would have seen this coming and had a plan B/C in place, i.e. Enough capital to generate passive income to replace your salary, or another career that is AI safe for next 5-10 years. Alternatively stick your head in the sand.

I guess I just don’t see that happening right now. I’m at a big public startup and our hiring hasn’t changed much and we still have a ton of work and Claude code with SOTA models can shortcut some tasks but I’m still having a hard time saying it’s giving us much of a multiplier. Even with plenty of .MDs describing what we want. It can ad-lib some of the stuff but it’s not AGI yet. In 5-10 years I have no idea

In Europe it doesn’t seem too bad right now (for the 15+ yr cohort?). I interviewed at a handful of places and got an offer or two and my current team and company is hiring about the same as the last few years

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