Jobs and Software Is Fucked

Trasmatta

It really is awful right now. I'm lucky enough to still have a job, but floated my resume around earlier this year. I have a pretty good resume and and 15 YOE, and got turned down EVERYWHERE. I used to at least get interviews at like 50% of places I applied to. And then recruiter spam is COMPLETELY gone. I'm not really complaining, but it feels indicative of where things are at.

qwe----3

> when I need to recall off the top of my head the proper way to instantiate a list or heap in X language You only need to know for one though...

carabiner

This is peripheral about bearblog, but it's so grating to see the "D M, Y" date format with the comma. The correct format is "D M Y." It's like someone deciding to write June, 6, 2026 for some reason.

tern

Curious about the perspective from anyone who has a skill set / reputation where finding jobs is easy right now. 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(?)

VirusNewbie

I agree that the online hackerrank quizes where it isn't even a video call is dumb because so many people cheat and if you don't, you're at a disadvantage. 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.

darth_avocado

The job market to be honest has been very fucked. To me a lot of this sounds like people experiencing how terrible tech hiring has become for the first time after being in a stable job for a long time. Almost everything the Author said, was something I’ve experienced when I was laid off in the 2022-2023 wave of layoffs. At the time I was told “it was a skill issue”.

themgt

It's not like the job market was that much better before AI infested every single corner of the market, but it supercharged all of the worst aspects of everything. 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 as a software engineer, as someone that truly gives a shit about security and code. 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.

lifestyleguru

Hopefully you had been saving and investing folks. The sun has set, the power is off, the signal is lost. See you on the other side!

firefoxd

A month ago, I fell back into reading patio11's "don't call yourself a programmer" and I found it fitting. The core of the message wasn't about the title we assign to ourselves but the "other career advice". 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

FloorEgg

During the pandemic money printing things got very weird. It created a lot of leverage and bullshit companies and bullshit dev work which led to artificial demand for software developers. 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.

semiquaver

> 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 Conflating things in this inflammatory way is a big mistake. Using a technology employers want you to use is not betraying your friends. Not everything has to be a culture war front.

ChrisArchitect

Related: The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48620142

celltalk

Two weeks ago, I got 100/100 of a test from a big company for a first screening without using AI. I was pretty confident that I would pass the first round, even hinted few of my friends, but ended up being rejected with an automated mail… The job market is insane at this point and I am not sure what the recruiters are actually looking for. If the candidate uses AI they’re eliminated, if not they’re eliminated. I guess this is one of these times we read on history books: great unemployement.

robmn

Adapt dude. You can.

scotty79

Freelance? Find someone who needs or wants a thing done, but doesn't know how to do it, then do it for them. Take half of the money upfront.

elzbardico

The first place to look for jobs should be in your network, people that worked with you, teachers, ex-managers. 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.

ChicagoDave

There are a number of reasons I’d site for the current job market tightness: - 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.

taffydavid

> This is probably the worst job market I've seen in a while. What a noncommittal sentence

micromacrofoot

If you truly give a shit you have to change and help make the mess less mess. It sucks, it might be worse than it was, but you can't continue giving a shit by not participating. The horse has left the barn on this one. The frontier model companies could all collapse tomorrow but the tech is not going anywhere.

thelonelyborg

it is quite dystopic