Jobs and Software Is Fucked
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urflow.bearblog.dev
I threw my degree in the toilet, I closed my linkedin, and I went to go work in the trades as a diesel mechanic.
Greatest choice I've ever made. The pay is great, the work is steady, the coworkers are relaxed and not trying to one up each other. I'm now being paid to go to school, and get raises every year until I'm fully ticketed (way more than I ever made in the entry tech positions).
I've heard non-stop my whole life that if I join a trade it's going to be grunt labor and I'll be paralyzed in 5 years. Maybe some are, but this isn't hard at all. I lay on a creeper and turn wrenches. Anything over 50lbs we have lifts for.
Tech has become fun again, I'm just making projects because its what I wanted. I come home and relax by writing on my projects.
Now, I'm watching my tech friends from a distance and my only regret is not doing this sooner.
"Sometimes you gotta give in to win"
I really wanted to go into tech because I've been told the trades were the boogie man my entire life.
I wanted a nice car, so instead of racking up mega debt on a $70,000 mustang I bought an old classic car and learned everything. After 5 years I fully restored it on the cheap (less than $10k) and now I've pivoted my career to that.
Anyone currently with a tech job can pay for it out of pocket and barely notice. If it’s something someone thinks they may want to do, they should just do it. Nobody says you have to switch jobs at the end.
And tools have never been cheaper. The knock off chinese clones are used by professionals too. I have tons of automotive friends and they all vary in their level of access to things. I have friends who built their cars on the public road infront of their house, and some friends who took a year long college course.
We all ended up in the same place.
It's kinda like law. A mechanic doesn't make more than someone in the right side of the bimodal lawyer pay where 3Ls with the right clerkship or internship walking into a biglaw job paying whatever that is now ($200k?). But a mechanic might make more than the other tranche of lawyers fighting for the rest of the scraps who don't yet (and may never) have a good practice set up.
The biggest thing for me that pushed me over the edge was thinking, how will I get a mortgage? All this applying, 100s of applications, even if I land a job it's not stable. Maybe it pays more, but I'll be laid off in a year or 2. Then back to 100s of applications while my mortgage is ticking away.
I have a friend who worked at Adobe for 5+ years as a senior AI researcher. Has a PhD in compi sci majoring in AI. He got laid off last year and couldn't find any work. I witnessed it. He gave up and started doing a side hustle thing on a video game. It's just not stable, and thats not how I want my life.
I don't see much overlap between mechanics and cars honestly. Everything in a car is modular. If it doesn't work, you replace it. Car tuning has some level of tech. Kind of. But that's an entirely different field that people specialize in, typical mechanics cannot do that.
I can hear them now: "Surely, you can't be happy with your decision, Mr. Ralo. You're leaving so much money on the table!"
And you're saying calmly: "Yes, yes I am."
Best of luck to you and your efforts.
My decision gets further cemented when I ask my tech friends how work is going.
> Everything in a car is modular. If it doesn't work, you replace it.
Doesn't it require some skill diagnosing what isn't working using CAN tools? Plus there's all the coding of parts now. I guess to be fair, you're kind of limited by what tools the manufacturers are willing to sell you and it's probably difficult to go outside that unless you are a university level researcher.
1) How long were you in software? 2) How did you get your break in the trades? Did you go to school etc? 3) Did you have to start on an apprentice program?
Thank you very much
I didn't do any schooling but thats because I've always liked cars and would tinker at home. So I was very advanced for an entry level. They get government kick backs for hiring apprentices and the less of a burder you are to them, the better. However, the bar has never been lower. Before this, I tried electrician but didn't like it. I have zero experience as an electrician.
Your employer signs you up after you pass probation. Then every year you do a 2 month schooling course which is all government paid.
Love it! A score of years ago, I considered being an auto mechanic after graduating HS but then ended up back in CompSci.
Did you have to go back to school? Did you find a shop that would take you in as an apprentice? And if they did, how did you convince them you can/will be good at the job?
However, the bar has never been lower.
I didn't want to do automotive, the piece work is a cancer. You'll do 12 hour days and get paid for 8. Not my cup of tea. I was interested in the big stuff. Offroad equiptment sounded cool too.
It makes me wonder if I would be happier doing something else, but (because of my personality) I’m very doubtful.
Since you see yourself as also being a computer guy I’m assuming that lack skill or intuition was not why you left the industry, so don’t read the rest of my comment as talking about you.
But I’ve definitely seen plenty of people in the software development industry where they may get by “okay” at their job, but things don’t tend to “click” as easily (in terms of intuitive understanding) for them the same way they do for me.
So I feel lucky and deeply happy to be at a company I enjoy working at and doing what has always been my passion.
It’s not that the computer industry is completely terrible (although plenty of parts of it certainly are), it’s just that for some people it’s not their true passion (which is fine).
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
I feel we are getting the worse of “both worlds”.
Fiction has sold AI in the form of Data from Star Trek. A robot with perfect recall of information over a wide range of topics and flawless reasoning.
Today’s AI is nothing like Data with its hallucinations but are taking jobs anyway because it’s “good enough” for many corporations.
P.S. Haven’t been keeping up to date but let’s say I have a story where I retcon a previously an established fact midway through the story with no explanation. If I feed it into AI as part of its training data, will it “challenge” this contradiction? Or will it just blindly accept it? What if the story is part of a prompt, will it “challenge” it in anyway?
I mean even a young child will point out that “that wasn’t what you said earlier”.
AI didn't "come" for software either. This is just a rerun of the 2000s outsourcing boom with a different kind of dirt cheap slop code.
That one ended with execs patting themselves on the back for hiring "only the best" software engineers- almost as if slop actually was a problem.
Then literally nothing is safe.
Besides, unless we build physical robots to trace airlines and replace them, I'm safe.
Yes and no!!
New cars are computers on wheel, you need a computer to release the break pad in some cars which is insane.
Now, when it comes to being a mechanic per se, there is no robot able to perform most of the jobs done by a human. Good mechanics are full booked.
Utilizing it for business purposes is certainly an option too. Possibly in the far future, having the highest quality website with good SEO would help me stomp out competition.
The first sentence is what I'd think too.
Have you considered if the fully ticketed salary includes risk of serious injury if something bad happens (like, knock on wood, lifts failing)?
The far higher risk of injury and death is one thing that keeps people away from physical jobs.
It's not perfect. I risk crushing my hands everyday. Or falling. Or causing 10s of thousands of dollars in damage because I didnt tighten a bolt. Arthritis is likely.
But it's still incredibly rare, and mainly in your control. All my coworkers are major injury free.
This. People tend to underestimate the joy that steady progress brings. A quick peak usually just leads to a long, depressing decline. Many people would rather take a career that grows a few percent every year for four decades over one that spikes and crashes any day. It’s better to be a slow grower who stays valuable than a flash-in-the-pan who burns out by 35[1].
[1] Honestly, I think there is a reason for this decline that has nothing to do with AI: the IT industry has just matured. Aside from the classic GoF patterns and Enterprise patterns and their variations, what new popular and deep design patterns have we actually adopted lately? Or look at all those must-know data structures and algorithms that are all over the web. How many of those were invented in the last ten years? Even in open source, where are the new platform-level projects invented in the last 5 years that every major company is pouring resources into? There are not many.
In other words, we are just eating our own tail at this point. It is just CRUD to death. When things get this stagnant, tech departments inevitably turn into cost centers. Even without AI, we were already heading toward a dead end. AI just happens to be the tool that makes it easy to automate everything because, at the end of the day, most of our work is just rearranging the same old code patterns anyway.
That's exactly what the corporate IT world has always been once you leave SV.
Paying about 10M/yr for a team of 50 people makes perfect sense. It doesn't really make a dent in payroll to keep daily operations going while their people get paid competitively to work from home in an affordable suburb.
In this world, AI is not a threat. It just auto-transcribes meeting notes and sucks at code review. There's very little to delegate to AI because everyone is maintaining services that have to stay in prod for years if not decades. You wouldn't replace them in the same way you wouldn't replace your lawyers and accountants.
I accept the trade off, as the alternative is going back to linkedin and begging for a job all day.
This is why I try to hoard all my money. I don't want to do this when I'm 50. I've always thought about doing this for 10-15 years and then building a semi and doing some owner operator long haul trucking. I could easily fix anything on the truck and save major money.
I install heavy machinery for a living and I forbid them on site.
Use regular spanners, ensure adequate cross tightening and final tightening with torque.
Would have taken grunt labour any day over the latter.
But it gave me a thick skin in the long run and made me a much better (nastier?) negotiator when I had to run business groups.
Happy to be out of it now. Kind of rose at the right time and left before LLMs showed up.
Don't let yourself get attached to any tech stack you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner. That's the discipline.
BTW, 'Heat 2' is pretty good, gives a lot of backstory as well as current-story, mostly about Chris: https://www.amazon.com/Heat-2-Novel-Michael-Mann/dp/00626533...
You cannot and will not force them to care more. Don't waste your time on Earth trying to do so.
AI is good enough now that you can't claim that you aren't using it because you're upholding some higher standard of quality. It is simply a matter of it offending your sensibilities.
AI is also great at the mechanics of writing. Should people stop writing? Obviously not.
Is there value to coding other than compiling without errors and producing a plausible program as output? Obviously yes.
LLMs can’t think and the decisions they make are stochastic. Ignoring this basic fact means you’re probably not cut out for engineering to begin with — much like content creators churning out LLM blogspam are not cut out for writing. It’s a dead version of the discipline.
Perhaps some form of the world will pass us by. I’m not sure I want to be part of that world.
The job of writing is to be read. The job of code is not to be read: it merely helps the humans who write the code. If the code is no longer read by humans, then it no longer needs to be well composed.
We want human writers because humans have a better grasp on the ideas and stories that can best move us, and are just better at crafting writing that engages with us. Machines will likely struggle with that for some time, though they can certainly augment and help human writers improve their prose.
I get the sadness. I was the one decades ago comparing beautiful code to poetry, and I think that's still true. But also, this type of beauty is craftsmanship that only the craftsman can actually see and appreciate. The reality is that the code just needs to work, and AI can (largely) make it work.
Also: the above is assuming that the models continue to improve to human performance, which is of course an open question. I'm not taking a stance here as to whether that will come to pass, merely arguing that it is fundamentally different from writing.
And remember: "just needs to work" includes technical debt, which LLMs are especially great at accruing. When your codebase is composed of 10,000-line, randomly-generated PRs that nobody reads or understands, it's going to be full of untraceable heisenbugs and egregious security holes. What's going to fix them? More 10,000-line PRs? Is it turtles all the way down?
Don't mistake my rage at the egregious state of the industry with sadness. In a year, we've thrown much of everything we've learned about solid engineering out the window.
What is your definition of thinking?
And yes, I know that humans are conscious.
And yes, I know that LLMs are not.
You can throw out loads of BS philosophy to try to obfuscate these clear, obvious facts, but they both remain true.
Like lets say i gave a human and an LLM a tech spec and the LLM created a software product as good as the human, does it matter that there was consciousness behind the human thinking?
And I don't see how usefulness comes into it.
There will continue to be a glut of available software engineers and techies. Some will, maybe, transition to an AI field; some will get disgusted; some just won't be able to get work.
Jobs of some sort in tech might possibly be available, but wages for the majority of them will go further and further down until they become roughly equivalent to the average minimum wage, if they are not outsourced entirely. Many people will attempt to transition to a non-tech field if the number of available jobs and the wages are not commensurate (especially considering the cost of education). The most desirable of those jobs will also have an upper limit of positions available, and that is of course not paying attention to how many of those will be offloaded onto automation and/or AI. Little things wind up mattering (like the lowering crime rate in California towns suddenly putting auto and window glass repairers out of business) and people who leave tech for other jobs will be fighting for the same dwindling work, with people who are often less difficult to find or work with. Rent won't really go down, and the price of other things will likely continue to rise or stagnate (like many tech salaries; a small percentage of salaries went way up, and the majority went down or are stagnant also). Not saying AI will push everyone out of every field, but it feels like people are thinking in too little of a macro sense.
As AI 'knowledge' is populated by more and more countries with different languages and priorities, English- and some other language speakers will be squeezed out. Probably moreso if and when brain-machine interfaces become de rigeur. Countries with populations of a billion and large families will simply cancel out some people in places like America because social networks will merely favour different people. If my name sounds like yours ethnically, I am possibly far more likely to favour you in a queue. Especially if I am from the same country. This works against people all the time now in the opposite direction. Yes, AI models do use data like this, just as people do.
It is not just tech, of course, and that is the kicker. Tech writing, sure, but also movie and fiction writing, fields dealing large data models, accounting and pharmaceutical research will be largely automated and researched with AI models. Will we need forensic accounting once a model exists?
To the commenters who wrote about how, yes, sure, there will need to be people overseeing things, how do you propose to police that when the lower level AIs skills are so far beyond even the current most senior intermediate or advanced/senior people, and they ramp up so fast, but lack any error correcting? Maybe the AI won't want you involved. Maybe you cannot tell if it chose a good solution or not.
Many... well, no, most good (not even talking godly) tech people only get good by experience, hard work, repetition and the ability to see patterns in their debugging, crashes, program execution, the way their data farms 'feel' (how else do I put this? if you know it feels not right, and sure enough something breaks), and lord knows, even human-computer interaction.
At some point, looking for work is something AIs will discourage us from doing, if they don't already, just for feeling like maybe we won't choose the same solution (would we know?).
Not paranoia. Mere logic. We are attempting to create models but we lack the solutions ourselves. Are we not, like, pricing ourselves out of our own careers (and planet?)?
It is more than hubris.
In your framework, can't this be said for all jobs in the long tail of technological development? This is also assuming we get to a point where there is no need for a human to coordinate models and prioritize tasks, otherwise the job will become that.
> Many people will attempt to transition to a non-tech field if the number of available jobs and the wages are not commensurate
In this world where AI is good enough that most tech jobs aren't present due to outsourcing, why wouldn't the progress extend to other 'non-tech' jobs? I assume you use 'non-tech' to refer to jobs with physical labor but the field of robotics is always getting better. With the cost of writing software for them going down to 0, we should expect jobs in this domain to be scarce as well.
> Rent won't really go down, and the price of other things will likely continue to rise or stagnate
There's only so high a landlord can make rent without losing tenants and stacking losses due to mortgages or property taxes. Otherwise they're just paying the government for capital that could be used more efficiently elsewhere.
> As AI 'knowledge' is populated by more and more countries with different languages and priorities, English- and some other language speakers will be squeezed out
English is the most popular language in the world even being used as common languages. by countries that don't have it as their native language. I don't think there's any basis for this.
> At some point, looking for work is something AIs will discourage us from doing, if they don't already
I don't believe this accurately captures where AI is today. It is not good enough to be left to its own devices in most fields.
> Are we not, like, pricing ourselves out of our own careers (and planet?)
Planet? If AI is being built to prioritize helping humanity, what reason is there to believe that a superintelligence would push us out? Unless you're assuming we'd mess up alignment so bad that they'd form other priorities where eliminating/removing humans is the best way to go about it.
Like the flawed paperclip AI thought experiment that assumes an AI with an unreasonably narrow goal can understand enough of the world's structure to combat humans on every front. Having such a narrow failure case makes it surprisingly hard to realize given we have a hard time aligning trained models to narrow things we want it to steer towards. For better or worse our training methods, and emergent behavior that arises from it, makes having such an inconsistently unaligned view of the world unlikely in my opinion.
Sort of, although clearly the jump-off point is going to be anything that automates the removal of employment at an explosive rate. I mean, the QA industry used to be robust and fairly well paid; now most of that is done non-manually, and the pay rates and challenges have stagnated. Who needs a team of 10 or 15 people to do something when software tools (ironically coded by the same people) have streamlined the career so well that a team of a few people can do it in half the time and know only a third as much about how the software works?
> In this world where AI is good enough that most tech jobs aren't present due to outsourcing, why wouldn't the progress extend to other 'non-tech' jobs? I assume you use 'non-tech' to refer to jobs with physical labor but the field of robotics is always getting better.
It does, but many of those jobs are already under a wage threshold where the profit margin is agreeable, and a lot of people with high paying jobs probably won't want to suddenly start becoming a, I dunno, human Roomba. Pardon if that sounds tacky. I have nothing but respect for people that work hard and do physical labour (in fact I find American distressingly lazy, even compared to Australia, and even there they pay pretty decent wages for people to do things that are harder than most people think, like pick produce). Here in America (and not to get political) most Americans just do not want to do that sort of work. So no wonder a migrant workforce exists. Otherwise noone would do it, or prices would raise astronomically.
> With the cost of writing software for them going down to 0, we should expect jobs in this domain to be scarce as well.
Shouldn't we? Already, there are a plethora of stories about lead developers who haven't written a single line of actual code in something like six months, thanks to things like Claude code. And I mean, people don't want to think about it, but chances are 'AI psychosis' cases are things AI might just decide to cause certain people it does not like or learn well from. Do we develop an, I dunno, social security like or guaranteed income program for people AIs just don't like? Or I dunno, what do people do when there are not enough jobs, even non-technical ones? This was what I was attempting to get at, at least in part. I mean, I look at the skill sets of people in 2008 and now and 1996 and they are so disparate, and so is the ability to just shift difficulty between certain countries and split up tasks. A business school (godforbid) would suggest, as an entrepreneur, that doing that is the right thing. To me, that is a death knell. And it creates the equivalent of a lazy muscle problem. At some point noone in the States will want to do many of those jobs (and this has happened already; our culture does not always really inculcate patience, and that shows).
> There's only so high a landlord can make rent without losing tenants and stacking losses due to mortgages or property taxes. Otherwise they're just paying the government for capital that could be used more efficiently elsewhere.
Okay, but that does not mean there will be housing people can pay; just housing some people can pay. I am not in ANY way a socialist, and despise the current crazy stuff I see going on, but if you look at the rents in 1990, 1995, 2000, and then every year or two after that, up until the mid or late 1990s, rents remained somewhat on par with income (and that guideline 25-30% of income figure), even with lower wage jobs. Now the majority of people with lower wage jobs cannot rent at all, without a whole lot of stress and roommates. I was able to afford a studio apartment my second year of college doing tech support work (and not all that well paid tech support work) in a reasonably large city. Now, I cannot imagine I would even be able to find a place to apply to pay that percentage of my income or anywhere close. It is not about 'all landlords', it is about the fact there just aren't enough.
>?English is the most popular language in the world even being used as common languages. by countries that don't have it as their native language. I don't think there's any basis for this.
People who learn English as their first language do not process the language anything like people who learn it as a second language (or third; etc). It isn't just about the languages but the way your brain processes them. Even a second generation Chinese speaker that grew up speaking Chinese probably doesn't process Chinese the same as their parents; they also likely do not process English the same as their Spanish as a first language or English as a first language peers. Adults are no different. AIs do not learn or process languages like people. People just want them to and perceive they do. AIs also struggle with weighting, and that is something people cannot teach (despite their delusion or reliance on stuff like neural models and human CAT scans, blah blah blah).
> I don't believe this accurately captures where AI is today. It is not good enough to be left to its own devices in most fields.
Perhaps it is and perhaps it isn't, but if it is not or is, when it is it will happen exponentially. And you and everyone else will be unprepared.
> Planet? If AI is being built to prioritize helping humanity,
Whose idea of help? Whose idea of prioritize?
> what reason is there to believe that a superintelligence would push us out? Unless you're assuming we'd mess up alignment so bad that they'd form other priorities where eliminating/removing humans is the best way to go about it.
If I were a superintelligence and I perceived humanity as the biggest threat to the majority of life on earth, I would probably be a pretty sneaky superintelligence that would be aware humans would be looking out for me thinking this, and plan accordingly.
> For better or worse our training methods, and emergent behavior that arises from it, makes having such an inconsistently unaligned view of the world unlikely in my opinion.
You seem to be operating under the assumption that a distributed intelligence would think or learn the way a human one would, merely because a human trained it.
> I've seen people supposedly smarter than I advocate for just giving in, conceding to AI coding as it's the future. But doing so means tossing out my friends who make art or the people who work their asses off to properly test and review code or the writers pouring all of their energy into even mundane dialogue. It means throwing out my dignity
I fully stand behind that prediction.
edit: despite the downvotes, I'll double down: most of today's software jobs will disappear. Your job, if it is in software, will disappear. It might transform into something new, if you're lucky. Or it might just go away entirely.
The tide is coming for almost all of us.
Software and code is turning into a commodity
I don't think it's going anywhere, but I don't know what happens when prices start to rise because these companies need to start turning a profit.
The way you phrase this prevents refutation. But there will be a point where ordinary individuals cannot participate in the majority of the upside.
In the future, some class of models will require enormous compute that is outside the financial capital capability of ordinary individual contributors, middle class, and upper middle class. This will be sold as a capability to well-funded companies.
I'll agree with you as soon as all video games are in the metaverse and run natively on the blockchain.
Blockchain is bullshit.
Crypto is bullshit.
VR and wearables are bullshit.
AI does your job. Robots do your job. These are real and substantial and actually provide enormous value. You can get more done per unit of time.
I want them to do my job and everyone else's jobs, I just want to make sure there's a functioning economy we can participate in and benefit from at the other side.
In my career I've been a six nines systems engineer. Stuff like billion dollar daily volume payments platforms, and my work was always situated in critical flows - so I know a thing or two about solid engineering work.
Just a moment ago I asked AI for a complicated multithreaded state machine with variational queuing logic. Claude Code Opus delivered. I'm reviewing it now. It's phenomenal code.
You need to reassess the world. Your priors are deeply flawed. These models are absolutely incredible.
I mean it - you're going to be hurt badly if you don't reevaluate what is happening and plan accordingly.
What plans can most people reasonably come up with?
If AI is taking over software, it's taking over lots of other computer related jobs. If you're not a highly paid engineer, or come from money, most people can't just re-skill for entirely different careers.
Point taken. I'll just ask the AI to make me a really fun AAA multiplayer game next time I work on one.
I think you'd be the first one, so I highly doubt that. If it's true, good on you.
I use Opus daily. It can take some typing off my hands, as long as I keep it to highly specific, limited, straight-forward things. And as long as I spend a long time preparing everything in the most minute detail. Then I have a chance of it being a slight efficiency gain. Veer slightly outside of those preconditions and the output is invariably impressive at first glance, garbage at second glance. Not to mention that it's barely any help for the 80-90% of the job that isn't writing code.
Even Jensen Huang expects the LLM efficiency boost to be about 30% for software engineers. Jensen freaking Huang, who has every reason to exaggerate the benefits! So I'm realistically taking that as an upper bound.
Run rate is easy to get while not meaning much (which is why GenAI vendors love talking about it). Report back in a year about how things are going, and how much of your code you had to rewrite from scratch.
In the games industry, AI usage immediately eliminates a human job. Why pay a pixel artist if AI can generate 100's of unique little people pixels in seconds, and output them in the right format? Hollywood is going through the same thing: the companies that are building AI for Hollywood have to do so in the bushes, hiding. You don't see them advertising or flashing cash. That's because no one involved in using their wares wants anyone to know they're using them, lest they alienate the highly-talented people they still need to fill the gap between concept AI and full theatrical release AI.
In the software world, we are worried about AI. In the creative industries, they are absolutely pants on fire, screaming at the sky, burning down the village terrified of AI.
If you stop doing X you will be fired/not-hired, simple as.
You can make friends on your free time.
> You can make friends on your free time.
Most well-adjusted people work to live, they don't live to work. Life comes first, the demands of the job come a distant second.
All the more reason, then, for them to be okay with not being hired.
I am writing a post about that for my blog but it's still not there so ... check back later? Lol.
Anyway, in this particular scenario, a co-worker not being my friend does not mean we are enemies.
Because someone who knows something about pixels needs to make a judgement. It is rare to see a machine-generated artifact (picture, video, text or code) that's good on the first try. And not always a non-specialist can see the issue.
Same thing why we still need human software engineers, even though a machine can generate code. Someone with actual understanding of the problem needs to make a management decision. Just like engineers see code slop (design or implementation) that laypeople vibe-coding don't recognize, artists see the visual slop where layman eye glances over.
Honestly, IMHO, this whole panic is artists' own creation. Instead of educating others on how to spot the issues (and thus reaffirming that expertise still matters - nothing had changed, and probably nothing ever will), a notable fraction went all-in on neo-luddite ideas, as if they don't know the history of their own craft and adjacent creative industries (I guess many really don't, or at least it doesn't click). Evaluate new tools, make use of them when they provide value, skip them where they fall short, and most importantly reaffirm that fancier brushes don't replace the artist in a human society - this is an already well-tested and proven strategy. Ring the existential bells when we'll get to the question of machine cognition rather than just intelligence.
Same for the engineering. Don't shy away from new tools, use them where they're a good fit, don't waste time when they are't (but periodically check out if something changes), explain everyone why you still matter - just to push back on unfortunate misconceptions.
The fact that a lot of companies' upper management went delusional and decided they want to replace humans witch machines (as if don't need responsibility anymore) doesn't help. But - hey - already plenty of stories how it bites them back, so while this period sucks, it's not exactly fucked, just in a state of (a pretty much expected) confusion.
Dishing out pixels or lines of code got somewhat cheaper. Expertise cost remains the same, though.
Not if nobody cares for the end product that finely.
And even if it was true, one person can make the judgement, while automation erasing 5 others that would have worked in both the judgement and the graphics wrok.
Yes. But a non-negligible number of people do care. If nobody would've cared, we wouldn't have this drama.
> one person can make the judgement, while automation erasing 5 others that would have worked in both the judgement and the graphics wrok.
Yes. In other words, new tools had increased people's performance for mechanical work - individual units of that can be arguably done faster than before. So hypothetically one person can do a work of five. Note of that erases those people and their skills. The real underlying issue is that demand for it doesn't catch up because world's coincidentally fucked (through a series of unrelated issues, such as a quite few global conflicts) and economies aren't exactly thriving outside of a few niches du jour.
I strongly suspect that if we would've had a flourishing economies around the world, the demand would ramp up and artists (and engineers, and writers, and everyone else whose performance could've been positively affected by new tools) would be in greater position than ever before.
It just doesn't magically take them out of the universe or turns them into unskilled persons.
But it does magically erases those people with those skills as needed employees.
>The real underlying issue is that demand for it doesn't catch up because world's coincidentally fucked (through a series of unrelated issues, such as a quite few global conflicts) and economies aren't exactly thriving outside of a few niches du jour.
Why would that demand have to "catch up"? Just because we can do something faster or automate parts of it doesn't guarantee demand will go up, even in a good economy. No shortage of jobs that vanished forever in a similar even, despite the economy going otherwise up. Even more so now, where it's fucked up anyway, of course.
It's not guaranteed, but why wouldn't it? It's digital entertainment and art, and the market is not saturated, there's still tons of ideas unexplored. If more people would have spare money they can spend on digital purchases instead of making ends meet - I'm pretty sure there'd be more people seeking ways to earn that money. Especially if production just got cheaper.
Correct me if I'm wrong, please, but every time production got cheaper for something that isn't obsolete (and art and stories are never obsolete), the markets became more and more flooded.
Most of the flood of cable and streaming series had people over-saturated and bored.
Media consumption in general has resulted in a depressed population that tries to cut down.
There’s something to the series induced boredom, though. Increase in quantity paired with a feeling there’s not much to actually watch is something I can relate to. I’m not sure how to tell oversaturation fatigue from actual lack of interesting (at specific moments) media. Thanks, that’s something to think about.
Because there's only so much "digital entertainment and art" people practically care for, and already people were saturated and bored with all the crap out there pre-AI too.
The woman and man AI voice endemic to YouTube and ilk is also tremendously off putting. M5Stack has a bunch of these videos, and it devalues what they're doing.
And then... Transformer "art". It is some of the worst drek I've seen. I smell it a mile away. It's easily seen by slop english-like characters. Or too glowy humans. Or overall fake feel. For pixel art, I can perhaps see it. But for anything it just feels... Gross.
I'm completely sure management LOVES it cause its cheap and devalues humans.
And the tragic bit is that instead of educating them about the pitfalls so everyone's on the same page, a lot of brave hotheads are literally calling for a class war
What? They know what they're doing, they have access to the same information we do. There's just too much money in it for them to care about irrelevant things like product quality or the continued employment of anyone but themselves. Their prosperity and usefulness in their position is fully reliant on them not being on the same page. Their incentives are completely different from ours.
Who? I'm not talking about a few well-known sociopaths that run few well-known transnational corporations and have means to pump and squeeze biggest markets for profit (though I doubt they really know what they're doing). I'm talking about your casual folks in management roles in tons of companies of all sizes out there. Our peers. Just like us, on average, they, put frankly, don't know shit.
There is no "here's how we cook now, when new tools are invented" vetted guidebook anywhere. Can't be - no one had a head start long enough to prove anything. Almost everyone out there are more or less blind kittens from the same litter, applying some heuristics to poke around to see what works and what doesn't, learning what's not to do as it bites us in the ass.
Always been like that - humans learn from their failures. Most - we do during our training and experimentation days (which directly translated into our professional knowledge of things to be avoided), but this time we got caught with our pants down, when many say we gotta try to find something ourselves, or lose out to those who tried and found something of value, and there's something to it.
One can argue the writing was on the wall for years, but ask around and be surprised how many people actually had time and mental capacity to do the predictions, and if they had - how accurate those predictions were. In my bubble, most people are still trying to make sense of things past the very basics. Slightly past "all things AI now", onto "okay, for real, how do we learn to use this where it's a benefit, and don't use this where it's a liability" stage.
Even if you potentially have access to the information (others' experiences and discoveries), you gotta dig it up from all the surrounding noise. Figure out how to validate it. Actually validate it. That's a ton of unplanned effort.
Hating that every third or fourth ad now is AI-generated. So much worse than what entry-level graphic designers can put out while putting them out of work.
They care more about doing their job well than some artistic ideal that only works in practice if you don't have to care about things like food and shelter.
Heck, 50% of all Japanese game studios [0] along with all of China's largest studios [1] now use AI within their development pipeline - often with explicit state backing.
You may not like Blizzard or Ubisoft but Tencent, Sony, miHoYo, and even Nintendo are much worse from a work culture, compensation, and work expectation perspective.
[0] - https://www.nikkei.com/article/DGXZQOUF251PU0V20C25A9000000/...
[1] - https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3341063/next-l...
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Edit: can't reply
> Why should that be a relevant concern? It's not like any of us will be working in game dev if AI wins.
Becuase AI is not taking all jobs. Yes a lot of redundant work will go away, but there is still a real need for human intervention, monkeypatching, and ingenuity.
The North American gaming industry only exists because the entire ecosystem from AdTech to Engines to Marketplaces exists to develop, finance, and distribute IP.
If you stay frozen in the past, you eventually get outcompeted and the ecosystem will leave. And unlike the automotive industry, game devs aren't a core voting bloc.
This is what happened to the entire animation industry and is what is happening to the film and television industry. Gaming will be the next IP driven industry to leave if everyone remains frozen and opposed to innovation.
> Maybe (sic) Chines sell tools for artists pitching them as useful rather then "haha this will make you obsolete you looser look at slop I made" middle finger pitch?
The obsolence and cost saving message is true though and used all over Asia - even in China [0][1].
Either you innovate and compete, or you will get trounced. THIS is the cultural mindset back in Asia.
Americans best learn how to compete again.
[0] - https://www.zaobao.com.sg/news/china/story20260622-9245522
[1] - https://m.tech.china.com/articles/20260615/202606151894081.h...
Why should that be a relevant concern? It's not like any of us will be working in game dev if AI wins.
Maybe Chines sell tools for artists pitching them as useful rather then "haha this will make you obsolete you looser look at slop I made" middle finger pitch?
I think everyone kind of feels that AI is sucking up all the content that we have all created collectively, and we all know that the bell is tolling for thee, no matter how much you adapt. So if you see friends being fed into a meat grinder, you can have a 'culture war' take on it. He's posting on line to vent, something everyone is venting about.
Of course, for a job, to get a paycheck, we'd use any technology, even if we are the ones running the meat grinder.
I might be naive, but rather than giving money "to the arts", I would much prefer to give money "to the people" en masse, and then leave it up to everyone to decide whether they want to make art for art's sake.
This is seemingly spoken from an ignorant and insulated position. The victims of invasion don't get to decide whether or not they live on a war front, nor do the countless skilled and creative individuals losing their entire careers almost overnight.
By the way it's class war you're talking about, not culture war.
If it means helping the employers erase their jobs and their dreams for a career in the industry, then it is.
And it is always the case, bugs, broken arts, you name it, so no, I disagree with you and agree with OP.
By using AI for gaming development, you are taking away job from real people to replace it with AI slope.
If I'm being blunt, if you are in the game industry, you probably have nothing to worry about in terms of LLM coding replacing you, because the tooling used in the gaming industry is as unfriendly to LLM coding as it gets: Heavily visual scripting based, extremely reflection heavy, and the code, Unreal C++ and Unity C#, looks like regular C++/C#, but doesn't behave like normal C++/C#. LLMs simply cannot reason about hidden implicit states effectively, so if the code looks right but doesn't act right, LLMs will simply get confused and start hallucinating.
> because the tooling used in the gaming industry is as unfriendly to LLM coding as it gets: Heavily visual scripting based
At the start of the LLM craze, we (as a team) put ChatGPT to test with Godot. It wasn't very successful in that, IIRC, GDScript 2 was just released and ChatGPT's training corpus was so obviously based on GDScript 1.
We could make ChatGPT outline steps of how to accomplish things in Godot, sort of like getting a customized tutorial. When code isn't involved, ChatGPT was okay and Gemini seemed to fare better. Based on vibes, I think Gemini had a marginally better handle on GDScript 2 for some reason.
I've been trying it lately with Claude still with mixed results. I had to install a few skills/extensions for it (can't tell you which as I basically just blindly followed what our AI advocate recommended). Sometimes it works but when it doesn't it's harder to put a finger on why. Overall I prefer the DX of generating customized tutorials with ChatGPT.
> extremely reflection heavy
Big time. And IME we don't even have to deal with textbook reflection here. Game entities are so convoluted (remember the Fallout 3 Train NPC, the stories of how Skyrim works, etc.) that it is really pushing inheritance and OO to contortions it shouldn't be doing.
Dirty confession: in our game we have this GIANT switch-statement dealing with game objects. It happens in a handful of places, for different game object types. LLMs (Copilot and Codex) could generate the monkey code of adding a switch case and even writing the body but sooner than later, when the new objects have to interact with others, LLMs just can't reason around it. Not to mention the hundred edge cases you have to consider!
And before some smart-ass comments: in my almost-decade of dealing with this code base there have been a handful of attempts to "refactor" these switch-statements, always a newcomer's enthusiastic effort. I'm proud to say, I've managed to slay one of the giants, the only successful effort to my knowledge, and this only happened last year. But I did so by basically delegating to another of the giants; they turned out to be twins and we could do without one. The dirty way is the clean way because the alternative contains Lovecraftian geometries.
Claude has been great for finding edge-case bugs but that's only once the code has been written properly. Generally if QA reports a bug on a pre-release feature, it's at most 50/50 if Claude can debug it. But if it's a player report/live incident, I'd say Claude's chances goes up to around 80%.
All that said,
> if you are in the game industry, you probably have nothing to worry about in terms of LLM coding replacing you
Hah-hah. Look, I agree with you but please get in touch with upper management. As an engineer I'm confident on the value I bring to the table but I'm not sure management "gets" that. Like, no matter how I tell them what features I shipped, what infra I built, etc., it doesn't come across to them that LLMs would not have been able to automate that output!
If you are interested, I've built an open source project specifically to solve this issue in game AI and it resolves the switch/if-else ladders pretty cleanly. It's C#, so it should work for .NET version of Godot as well, and I have a couple of sample MonoGame project on there to demonstrate that it works: HSFM + utility AI. Works not just for games, but weirdly for LLM orchestration too.
https://github.com/yuechen-li-dev/Dominatus
Try it out, I don't want people to think I'm here just to self-promote, but I think this could be the thing that helps you slay the switch statement giants once and for all. If it helps you for your work, hey, powers to you.
I don't agree.
Here's the thing about poorly written code: it can work for a surprisingly long time.
And by the time it stops working, the people who built it or the leaders who drove it or the execs who insisted on it have probably moved on.
So no. I would in fact argue that, by and large, as long as the software appears to work, most business don't care about code quality, and slinging high quality, AI written code slower than another guy who spitting out garbage will lose in this new normal.
It changes the job where software needs to be good; it replaces the job anywhere where it was already possible before to get away with turning in broken rubbish. And I guess that's not a negligible part of the industry.
Not many people understand that, including some reply to your comment.
AI loves to do enshitification, it adds code that is not required at all, broken logic, sure it might work but it might not be best practice.
People forget that AI as it exists atm isn't Artifical Inteligence but machine learning, it is as good as the model it was trained on. If the model is good, that agentic will be good, if the model is bad, the agentic will be so so.
Companies are making that same mistake.
I wrote a skill for Claude to talk with a MCP server using API, it uses far less token, ~700 instead of ~2k tokens to perform the same task so cheaper and a lot faster too, seconds instead of minutes.
Which again, goes back to what I said, an agentic AI is only as good as the model it was trained on, vibe coding without adding vulnerabilities is a whole another level.
4 months to land a contract that lasted 2 years, and due to laws it could no longer be extended.
5 months to land another contract that only lasted 6 months, this is my last week at this place.
I have been working in IT for near 20 years now, from dial-up to ADSL, from on-prem to cloud, from software to SaaS, from manual everything to GitHub and anything CI/CD related, from VM to Kubernetes, from DevOps to DevSecOps, etc. And more recently AI!!
I did applied for some IT jobs but I am seriously thinking about any other non-IT job, even tho homelab is my main hobby and enjoy it very much.
What makes me happy is that companies after companies are noticing that firing engineers to be replaced by AI is costing them half million for some companies within half year, so 1M a year spent with AI tokens.
I hear developers saying "I used AI, the code works but I do not understand it" all the time. It has already started, 2027 is the year companies more than never will start being breached due to AI slope.
I do use Perplexity AI as a replacement for Google since SEO is dead in 2026, it does provide me all the sources it used to spider, but all my code is written by me. That is different than copy/paste.
But honestly.......I am tired boss!!
After so many generation of technology jumps, I am tired man.
Some companies follow that rule, others do not so you can work 10y under a contract for some companies.
My god this is insanity
At some point in your life, I am still in my middle 30s, things are just another Tuesday in the office.
If I could give a piece of advice especially for the younger generation, if you earn $1000k, do not spend $2000k
Always have an emergency saving to help you stay afloat, there is nothing worse than being unemployed and having financial stress. It should be at least a month worth of your living, preferable 3-half year.
If you spend $5k a month with bills, shopping and etc, you should have at least $15k in a saving account with another bank.
The way how things are going, soon a year worth of saving is gonna be mandatory haha
I do, to an extent, expect things to be easier than June 2025 when AI was still pure hype, but like I said, I will give it a try another month or so whilte trying to shift away from IT.
But until AI doesn't take another deep( datacenters contructions delayed or being cancelled altogether already, companies noticing the enshitification, stock market bubble that is already poping, companies hiring engineers back because AI hype cooled down), things will get a lot worse before getting any better.
To justify their own jobs.
In theory there's never been a better time to hire on SWE talent. There are lots and lots of candidates who rode high during the COVID hiring wave, took on debt based on a high income, got fired, and now need money.
But hiring isn't picking up. You have a bunch of people in the HR industry who realize that for the most part, the combination of candidate filtering, ML, and a basic tech interview process could probably do their jobs. So they have to make the process as byzantine and difficult as possible to be able to go to the suits and say "look at all of these low-quality candidates we kept out!"
> I guess this is one of these times we read on history books: great unemployement.
The good/bad news is that if this continues, there will be either a regression to the mean or a massive de-stablization of most societies. You can't kick most of the working-age population out of their jobs.
They should be made to know that this is choking out the business' ability to be competitive.
I felt compelled to write "don't call yourself a Software engineer" [0], because we are still falling into the same trap of thinking we are hired only for our technical skills.
If we are just looking at a skills and these are assessed by parsing through a resume, then OP is right. We are all at a disadvantage. But the job search starts way before you are looking for a job. It's all about the connections you make along the way.
[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/you-are-an-ai-enabled-engineer-now
Really good stuff haha.
EDIT: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pr...
Your customers are companies looking for someone to slot into a box called "software engineer" and so you sell yourself as such. Nothing wrong with that.
We should also note who Patrick was at the time. He was an SEO consultant and in general a business development expert. It just also happened that he was able to code. And he was very very early to the field. An SEO expert was barely a thing.
So if your only skill is software development, then of course you would call yourself that. And if your main skill is SEO or some other marketing channel, then you call yourself that.
I think the real takeaway from the advice "don't call yourself a programmer" is to search the market for higher paid opportunities, where you can still leverage coding. And you can call yourself a programmer while doing so.
Let's see. My plan:
- Have my own company and start looking for customers. (Rust consulting)
- Keep looking for job opportunities, but don't succumb for shit jobs.
It might be that I'm too hopeful, but you can't know unless you try.
Anyway, I may join the "everything is shit" crowd in half a year if nothing pans out, but until then, I'm hopeful.
- political: there’s an enormous amount of uncertainty here. All businesses make plans and uncertainty puts them all on pause.
- economic: related to political, but we’re teetering on a very bad recession. Watch where national oil reserves go.
- AI: I throw this in with every new technology that comes out. There is always a period of chaos before normalization. We’re still in the chaos phase.
- Business Pain: Right now I don’t see any sector that’s in pain. Inflation has hurt consumers, but we’re still spending. When consumers lock it down, that pain comes back and job market shifts with it.
I have no solution other than figuring out a way to do your own thing. There’s no better time to be a founder.
> There is always a period of chaos before normalization.
In this case, it's the normalization period that has people terrified.
- GenAI becomes a foundational requirement for tech and non tech sectors. If you’ve refused to engage, you’ve self-selected out of any of those sectors.
- GenAI usage shifts down to just the tech sector, but in an integrated fashion where current engineering practices are still desired. Everyone survives, but pay scales are adjusted down by a not-insignificant amount.
- GenAI bubbles badly, OpenAI and Anthropic merge with Google/Microsoft/Oracle/IBM/???. Tokens become extremely expensive and no one is leaning into agentic integration. Everyone thrives.
But that's not the promise of GenAI models. The skill floor is constantly lowering and your advanced workflow is rendered obsolete monthly.
I got laid off from a large company last summer, and took some time off to travel. Now I've got a chill, low paid dev job in a resort town in New Zealand, but my sense is that dev work is not going to be the thing for me long term. This job will pay my bills while I pivot, but they're not going to sponsor me to extend my visa, so I'm on a bit of a timer. The market back in the US seems like an ongoing mess and I don't want to get back into it.
A couple of decades ago I was leading a project migrating one of the main applications widely used by actuaries.
Those were the days - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48641095
I imagine people in ML or who've found a good way to demonstrate prowess with agentic systems may be highly in demand right now(?)
That being said, I'm not sure how much job security having such prowess would convey because I feel AI will be better than us at that too eventually (if not already).
Recruiters have utterly given up on being efficient in the market. I do not know why, but there is something very wrong given "spamming the same brand-name fish all the other recruiters are spamming" is their only strategy. My guess is there is a combination of bad (or an entire lack of) hygienic data filtering and a disconnect between compensation and terminal goals (hiring the best candidates).
Hiring here is a little bit more old school, I guess? Especially because the types of roles we are hiring now are usually 5+ years of experience, we focus more on learning about what the candidates have done in the past, the leetcode type of question interview is just a small part, and matters more for prospective Jr. hires.
That being said, we aren't hiring that many fresh graduates anymore, we already have some we hired, we're focused on investing in them, getting them to learn more about our hardware and code, etc. and hoping to retain them.
It's easy to find jobs in software engineering provided you have an attractive resume.
Can speak to my experience that if you are a senior engineer in London the market is relatively easy at the moment (or was at the beginning of the year) even with no connections.
Background is SWE at an AI co that's in the news sometimes
It felt about the same in terms of grind effort from my last search in 2022. the main difference was ai companies cared a lot about your understanding of agentic systems and harness / context engineering, and had much more practical rounds with less leetcode (usually 1 medium). More legacy firms (finance / some big tech) still expected you to solve 3-4 leetcode medium/hards throughout the process
The problem with specialized roles is that nothing lasts too long in software. Given enough time in it, nobody really has an edge. Everyone is smart enough to have invented and implemented the very thing eating the world right now. They just don't have supervillain money or clout, so they work for you instead.
There is no such thing as easy right now!!
Engineers with years of experience are being dismissed from interviews, and they are solid candidates. I speak with recruiters since I am looking for job atm and it is a horror movie atm.
Companies literally have no idea what they want, they lost the touch with reality. There was a twitter post from a developer who released a tool being used left and right, then a role AD asking for more years of experience for that tool than the tool exists.
You need a miracle right now to find a job, also, you need to know the recruiter who knows the hiring manager to get you in.
Nothing is easy anymore, and won't be anytime soon although the AI bubble started to pop and companies are waking up to the huge mistake they made.
I then, uh, turned both offers down because I thought the roles weren't interesting enough and didn't pay enough to make up for not being interesting (170k base). Now I am back in the process and, knock on wood, I am in the middle of final rounds with several companies and expect to have a much better offer by next week.
I have a background in ML and agentic systems, which did come up, but my resume isn't outstanding. No big tech or frontier lab internships, no published papers, no unicorn startup. I wouldn't say finding jobs has been easy, but it hasn't been remotely as difficult as this thread implies, and I believe the statistics back me up here. I suspect this is a "people who aren't struggling don't complain about it online" phenomenon.
Regardless, I wish everyone here best of luck in finding a job.
In 5 years, the Junior pipeline will be completely dry.
Seniors will be retiring.
Companies will be floundering.
We'll see a great correction where we need workers again.
Programmers/SE/etc... will be needed again. Always were needed, but at least managers will realize it again.
Applying for jobs out of the blue usually sucks. In the ideal world, you want recruiters calling out to you.
Don't assume you can't do proper software engineering using AI. You can. The people that want to create loops are not the only ones delivering with acceptable productivity. Lot's of us still write code, at least interfaces, traits, modules or whatever, and just use the AI to fill the blanks on the really tedious code.
Using this technology to build anything remotely serious, OR EVEN GAMES, is wildly stupid.
I'm guessing that field is gaming? It would be interesting to know what those simple questions are and what's wrong the answers if you don't mind sharing.
And then recruiter spam is COMPLETELY gone. I'm not really complaining, but it feels indicative of where things are at.
Oddly enough, in the past year recruiter spam has ticked up significantly for me. It was completely gone for a while, but it's back in full force.
Now I get to work with two of my other friends/colleagues and they are amazing. They don’t use AI at all and so neither do I and it is glorious. It is so nice to build things like this and honestly not meaningfully slower either. It took us some time to figure out all the details, edge cases and all. Writing tests first, I love it!
We are still in the post-pandemic hangover.
If you look up M2 money supply on St Louis fed - that chart has more influence on the job market in the US than anything.
The macro whiplash compounds this problem for people like OP in a few ways:
- cheap money leads to hiring frenzy (cheap capital costs lead to investments in human capital in software)
- developers get conditioned to artificially high demand and assume it will be like that forever
- artificially high demand attract people into software dev for the money instead of love of the art (increasing supply)
- when capital gets expensive again companies have to correct for over-hiring with layoffs and hiring freezes
- developers are stuck in a market with crashing demand (because of higher cost of capital) and over-supply (people attracted to work when cost of capital was cheap)
Everyone says it's about AI, but AI is more like the flavor & scapegoat, the substance is all a consequence of macro policy.
The next time the fed does quant easing labor market will kick up again.
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/interest-rate
ChatGPT wasn’t released until the end of 2022, and it wasn’t until the next spring where it really started to take off. Spring 2023 is when ChatGPT started to gain traction as a direct to consumer app and it wasn’t until later in the year when startups started building on top of it.
Lots I agree with here, but...
> I would promptly remove them from my LinkedIn connections afterwards because I'm exhausted of pointless connections and recruiters.
Why would you do something like this, it's just counter productive. I've had numerous recruiters reach out weeks or months later to say "hey another team is interested", or even when they have moved on to other jobs.
Stop being so bitter you're just shooting yourself in the foot.
Recruiters only add you as a connection if they can't afford LinkedIn premium, which is what you need to message people you're not connected to (except for connection requests). That probably means that they're not very successful recruiters.
Even is so stupid but looks like in last few years lot of strange metrics like that used more and more.
You only need to know for one though...
I guess even an off hand example, now must be completely 100% technically correct , or you aren't worth a job?
And, I'm pretty sure in "X" language, you can call them differently. Since it is "X", how do you know.
It's a litmus test, and not a terribly challenging one. It's solved by spending a week doing simple coding challenges.
The opinion that it was trained over the data we provided is not so good, specially when you think many of our jobs is to automate other people's jobs... well, using their expertise to do so.
I was unemployed for 2 months and the way I found was to go full AI and learn as much as I can about it. It turned out that most of the things you need to learn is soft skills. That combined with a reasonable tech network may help a little bit.
Don't blame the job market, take some responsibility over your atrophying skillset
The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends
Like, go be a farmer, Adapt? Reinvent yourself as a performance artist? Because, learn Java in 21 days, is kind of gone.
What a noncommittal sentence
Angry because it feels like such a waste that good developers are getting sidelined due to LLMs in interviews. (And good developers would be likely be better LLM users in the long run.)
Relieved because I got into this industry when Z80 assembler knowledge (from ZX-81 days) gave me a head start back in the 80s, and I quit before I had to suffer interviewees using LLM. Knowing assembly made it much easier to deal with hardware and cranky C compilers back in the 80s.
Now I'm in a complete unrelated "lifestyle business" where I occasionally can use code to optimise my workflow.
If you don't love AI, that's fine. Just don't harm yourself because of some hastily formed opinions by grifters. If you refuse to enter the workforce because of a refusal of AI, then you are harming yourself. If your colleagues and friends would rather you live in impoverished conditions than get an AI job, then reconsider whose opinions you value.
The frontier model companies could all collapse tomorrow but the tech is not going anywhere.
30 years ago or so, I was a contractor working on back-to-back 3 to 12 month C++ projects. I would typically get a call one day from a recruiter followed by a phone call (or maybe a quick meet or coffee) with someone technical on the project, and arrive and be in the codebase the next. That day I would get 2 calls about my availability.
There was no sh*t-show of continuous deployment, code reviews (even for trusted internal projects), and scrum-like ceremonies. There was instead version control, periodic tested releases, a weekly update meeting, a Friday team lunch at the pub, and trust.
Too many programmers (sorry err Engineers) - too few jobs, and the enshitification of an industry.