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.
That scene is gold. Neil pauses for a little longer than 30 seconds before he decides to abandon Eady, meaning he followed the intent of his rule (walk away), just not the timing (30 seconds flat). If he made the same decision in less than 30 seconds, he probably would've gotten away.
Yes, sadly the most principled will have to contend with the world passing them by when it turns out those principles are dead weight to capital momentum. You could have made the same point during the dawn of the industrial revolution: that purchasing any product of a machine would be betraying your friends who have spent years honing their craft, but either way, people will still opt for the machine because it's 10x cheaper and faster.
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.
Also, never, ever give more of a shit about things than the people leading the effort. Doesn't matter if that's a for-profit enterprise, a FLOSS project, or just a way to pass the time.
You cannot and will not force them to care more. Don't waste your time on Earth trying to do so.
This may seem all well and good, but let's consider some basic logical mileposts and outcomes:
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 the wage 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). 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).
As AI 'knowledge' is populated more and more countries with different languages and priorities, English-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 jobs in places like America.
It is not just tech, of course, and that is the kicker. Tech writing; fiction writing; even fields like large data models and accounting and pharmaceutical research will be largely automated and researched with AI models.
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. Talk about hubris.
After 5+ years of actively trying to get into the field (pre AI), I left.
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.
> I closed my linkedin, and I went to go work in the trades as a diesel mechanic.
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?
I had lots of personal experience under my belt. I built a hot rod out my garage on the cheap (because I was broke and wanted a nice car). I used that on my resume and they were extremely excited on that. The company I work for is famous for their fleet of "show" semis. It's super super cool and I think the mix of my passion for cars mixed well with their eye for details on their fleet.
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.
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.
A long-ago colleague got a junk classic car and took night classes at the local community college to learn how to fix/restore everything. He finished the degree and quit the tech job.
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.
that is so inspiring to hear. would you mind answering a couple of questions:
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?
My entire life I've done tech. I remember in middle school all my teachers knew me as the kid who wrote code. I did my degree, and did an internship but nothing ever really stuck (still not sure what happened with that) and my full time job became begging for work.
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.
I love software, but knew I would quickly learn to hate it. I'm not going to be working on my passion projects. I'd be working on horribly boring software used by some corporation.
I really wanted to go into tech because I've been told the trades were the boogie man my entire life.
> 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.
The author is coming from the games industry. As an arts based industry, AI is EXTREMELY divisive. The author really will lose friends over even so much as touching AI in certain ways, because the artists that built the games industry were already badly abused, and now, they're being squeezed out entirely. For business developers, AI is somewhat less existentially terrifying, as it can be seen to be really empowering to an experienced user.
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.
> Why pay a pixel artist if AI can generate 100's of unique little people pixels in seconds
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.
Everyone in the games industry is badly abused. Mostly because so many want to go into it. And yet game publishers continue to struggle with profitability because budgets have ballooned. I honestly think there's just not enough room in the market for the number of game studios we have today, at least not unless management improves and gets costs under control.
What gets me is that LLM writing has an inhuman voice. Of course we know the tells. Not only this, but that. You're exactly right! —
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.
Spend some time learning about the concept of the excluded middle[1]. It is something that will be useful on your life going forward, it might even save you a lot of trouble.
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.
Just to +1 the sentiment here; AI in the gaming industry is absolutely a culture war front. Especially in the indie space, you will lose advertising deals with many sponsors & influencers, for example, if you appear to endorse AI. Probably won't be that way forever, but it's a hotbed right now.
Meanwhile, Asian studios are much more open to experimenting with AI workflows, and will eventually build the next generation of Niantics and AppLovins if this neo-ludditism continues.
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.
> 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.
I dunno, maybe OpenAI and Anthromorphic should learn from Chinese companies how to not act in ridiculously off-putting ways?
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?
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.
Propertly testing and reviewing code is a must with AI, it's actually more important. I don't know why the author feels like it's assumed that this goes out the window with AI
Not sure the technology is the issue here. He isn't debating using Java v C#, and one is a betrayal of all that is holy, so he refuses to use it.
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 think you might not get the context this is coming from, it’s about a game developer laid off from Blizzard not wanting to partake in the technology that will justify layoffs of their friends. Pretty straight forward to me.
I guess I'm just confused by this sentiment. Are you making these conclusions while considering the fact that AI is still heavily subsidized? The economics of AI isn't quite the same as other software/tech.
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.
I'm happy using GLM 5.2 at API pricing. There will never be a point where essentially unlimited usage (i.e. what I, as a normal developer, can use at peak effort) of extremely good models will become financially unattainable.
Corporations are the organizational equivalent of AI, they one thing well asmass money, their output aside from that is total shit. Not only are you betraying your friends/community/loved ones but such a setup is necessary to prevent the total collapse of society.
yeah, the question is what would you do with $100 million? I mean I don't have $100 million but I'd give it to the arts after I've taken care of myself well and science. Am I gonna make $100 million playing with AI? I don't even know if I can take care of myself, shit, but the government ain't gonna do that. What are the new jobs after the Saaspocalypse? Well all the money went to those companies and what do those companies want or what do those newly minted millionaires want? Hopefully something I have but shit yo. So they're gonna go back to where they came from and be millionaires but how much is Dave Chappelle changed the city that he moved to? Is there a Dave Chappelle center for comedy? some of them want ASI so I look forward to studies on human intelligence. Maybe they'll pay human subjects to model supply two digit numbers while in an MRI machine hopefully enough of those studies to pay my mortgage.
> I mean I don't have $100 million but I'd give it to the arts
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.
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.
I feel like this advice is not very useful because when you call yourself a software engineer or programmer, you are doing it in order to sell a service.
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.
>Engineers in particular are usually very highly paid Cost Centers, which sets MBA’s optimization antennae to twitching. This is what brings us wonderful ideas like outsourcing, which is “Let’s replace really expensive Cost Centers who do some magic which we kinda need but don’t really care about with less expensive Cost Centers in a lower wage country”. (Quick sidenote: You can absolutely ignore outsourcing as a career threat if you read the rest of this guide.) Nobody ever outsources Profit Centers. Attempting to do so would be the setup for MBA humor. It’s like suggesting replacing your source control system with a bunch of copies maintained on floppy disks.
If you don't have a full time job for a year, why don't you start a software business on your own? It's hard to succeed, but, successful or now, you will have something to show people and something that you are passionate to talk about. It will give you a new way to connect to people, and quite likely will help you to get hired. And who knows, maybe you will succeed.
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.
I am currently quitting a company of 10 years of employment. And I keep hearing how everything's shit. Btw. I'm located in Tokyo where it isn't as bad, apparently, but...
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.
That might be a truism that's generally applicable, but some people have enough of a safety net to last them several years while building a business. We don't know OP's circumstances.
The industry will realize that while getting LLMs to write code is easy, getting LLMs to write good, production ready code is a skill all on its own, which simply must be done by a human and is not automatable to an LLM in any sense effectively. That will be the differentiating factor software engineering in the future, I think.
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.
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.
Getting through an interview process during a bull market has always had a small random component. I think we all have to understand and accept that in bear hiring markets, almost the entire component is random. Having a perfect skill quiz or hackerrank score and getting rejected should not cause you to try to figure out what you did wrong.
> The job market is insane at this point and I am not sure what the recruiters are actually looking for.
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.
I work in an industry tangentially involved with the ML build-out (think companies like Broadcom, Marvell, etc.). We can't find enough people, if you have like 3+ years of experience with PCIe, Ethernet, DDR, you're a shoe in. Verification, Validation, Design, Customer Applications, Firmware, you name it, we need it. The pay is good too, especially for people who got in a year ago or more, stock base compensation has taken off like a rocket.
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.
I joined a new company 6 months ago. I interviewed at 16 companies and got 5 offers from a mix of ai cos / big tech / trading firms
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
I feel like any advice you get from someone would be as useful as "how to be a good coin flipper" advice from the 1 person in 1024 who flipped heads 10 times in a row. In other words it would be purely survivorship bias.
Anecdotally I've seen the latter to be true and have had third-party recruiters echo that familiarity with AI use in coding has become a pivotal part of job interviews with startups.
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).
I'm starting a new job in a few weeks, and can confirm (for startups at least) experience with coding agents is something companies are looking for. Multiple companies I interviewed with had a AI assisted interview session to go along with a more typical closed book programming session. I was asked about my use of coding agents in behavioral interviews. I'm not an ML guy, just a generalist SWE with 4 YOE. I only got one offer in my search, but it only took ~a month and I feel pretty good about being able to get more offers with more searching. It helps that I'm young, no dependents, and willing to relocate.
My perspective is it is impossible to cut through the three layers of bullshit between you and anyone who knows what they are talking about. The only way to do this is with brand-name qualifications, like "MIT graduate", not things that are actually impressive. This is also why you see senior developers saying, "the offers I'm getting are bigger and bigger," meanwhile skilled younger developers need to become a marketing professional just to get an interview.
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).
What do you mean by easy? Do you mean FAANG or equivalent salary? What level of seniority?
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.
Easy hires are the same now as in the past. They have held several specialized roles before without letting it narrow their career path, and they have at least a decade of experience.
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.
OP's opinion about AI coding is pretty obvious in this blog post. Maybe some of that sips out during interviews which certainly will spook the employer.
Just use python for all practical programming problems. Lists, sets, and dicts are all you need for most leetcode problems; dynamic typing is convenient; there's good ergonomics for http and other random utility tasks; and pretty much every company is cool with python in an interview. You'll probably only see language trivia questions for languages you claim a specialty in (there's a huge market for C++ specialists, for instance).
I wasn't there but this seems like the same feelings people would have had in the Rust Belt when the first factories started closing and getting a job started getting harder.
I know people who were and I think it was worse. It was semi-apocalyptic, entire cities just wiped out. A lot of people just had to get the fuck out, even if they were professionals instead of factory workers. Many of these folks who left came back later.
The blog lacks crucial info. What type of projects have you worked on? What work are you applying for? Personally, "small contractor" and Blizzard does not translate well to the typical "enterprise web dev" role.
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.
Nobody likes to hear it, but this is the only explanation that makes sense. We had an unprecedented economic shock, and we're dealing with an unprecedented economic fallout. The only question is how much longer it will last.
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.
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.
I'd suggest not adding recruiters as LinkedIn connections in the first place. I mean, LinkedIn is hardly sacred, but why are you adding people you don't know as a connection?
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.
I heard that recruiters also use amount of connections to filter out candidates, and they probably view it as if you don't have 500-1000 connection probably you just don't fit basic requirements of the the role even with 10+ yoe.
Even is so stupid but looks like in last few years lot of strange metrics like that used more and more.
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”.
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.
You're right on the latter point. I always wondered if Linkedin increased their spam filter or make it 10x more expensive to DM candidates, but I guess it's simply because there is simply a lack of demand right now
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.
> 2. FAANGMANGAMEME never hired that many truly exceptional people in the first place and you've fallen for corporate propaganda.
in my experience, FAANGMANGAMEME hires good people but they get placed on a weird career trajectory.
they learn how to work experience in enormous well funded company that has spent a fortune building fancy in-house tools for their dev experience, spend their time thinking about scaling problems that no other company will likely ever face, and all covered in ten layers of bureaucracy and "process".
if you hire a faang employee into your startup or normal mid-sized business, there needs to be a bit of a detox period where they have to learn what software dev is like for the rest of us mere mortals.
Stuff does actually happen, out there in the real world. It's OK - even preferable - for people to engage with the world instead of ignoring it.
> Maybe the virtue signaling is still strong here and I'll get flagged
Having beliefs, a sense of morality, and a personality are actually not virtue signaling. Having a solid and informed perspective on the world is an important part of being a complete human being. It makes for better employees, too.
If I'm a shitty friend, I might give the same advice as what you just said. Just go find a company that is pro-{whatever you're supporting at the moment}.
If I think the problem is my friend, I might tell them what I wrote.
Having a solid and informed perspective on the world is an important part of being a complete human being.
I agree with this and I'd try to inform my long-term unemployed friend of what employers actually look for in the real world.
Having beliefs
I don't come across as someone who doesn't have beliefs, right? I have very strong beliefs in general. I also don't think my post says to throw out all your beliefs and values and free thoughts.
> Just go find a company that is pro-{whatever you're supporting at the moment}.
You give yourself away when you say things like this. Your phrasing here comes across as if you think that people who support social change are fickle and unprincipled, just following whatever is popular.
> I don't come across as someone who doesn't have beliefs, right? I have very strong beliefs in general.
Oh you do come across as having beliefs. Not ones that you seem willing to state or actually stand behind, though.
Your phrasing here comes across as if you think that people who support social change are fickle and unprincipled, just following whatever is popular.
No, this is not what I'm saying. I'm saying you need to do everything possible to present yourself as someone who is 100% dedicated to the company and not cause headaches and troubles. Anyone who is unemployed for a year should not be openly talking about controversial things on the internet or interviews or putting that stuff on a resume/blog.
> If I'm the owner of a business and I have hundreds of applicants for every job, I'm picking the one who looks least likely to cause trouble outside of work, assuming everything else is equivalent.
Interesting. If _I_ was the owner of a business, I would try to find the people, who have ideals, dedication, like understanding what they deliver, being thorough in their work, like to learn, etc.. Well rounded persons. Individuals, whom you can give a task and they will search and find a solution. I find the hyperallergic reaction to people who stand for something, anything actually, to be very superficial and short-sighted. Businesses which do that are bound to become mediocre, due to hiring mediocre yes sayers.
But then I am not a business owner, for a reason. I probably couldn't deal with all the crap one has to wade through to be a business owner.
As a small business owner, I look for people who can walk the line. Who understand that there's a bottom line, but also that we are not machine men with machine hearts.
I respect the candidates who stand for something and can pragmatically navigate the social space of work at the same time. I find that people who just want to shut up and lick boot don't end up being very creative problem solvers. It's easy to say for me as a small biz; different atmosphere in larger corps, but I can't subscribe to the reality presented by the cynical grandparent post here. I think we can be better than this.
You are an independent entity that will be selling your services to a company. If you want to maximize your potential customer base (employers), minimize your interest in anything that isn't relevant to the company making money. You want to maximize traits that make money, and minimize traits that lose money.
That doesn't mean throwing your values out the window, but does mean separating your personal life from your work life, and understanding that your opportunity window shrinks with each "non-negotiable" you require.
How does this have anything to do with a sluggish job market? Do you think people are struggling to find jobs because they are too political? One can be a servile dog, and still struggle to land a role, it's not particularly correlated.
No one really goes into an interview speaking about politics, or propaganda, or unionizing. So there isn't much signal in telling people to not do that, most already bend over backwards to look like an ideal candidate.
Telling people to have a good attitude is easy to say, hard to do when you've been applying for 6+ months with no response and bills to pay.
Unfortunately, the advice that's most likely to help is something everyone already knows. Networking, practice, and luck play a huge role in a environment like this. And cut expenses as much as possible, just in case you need a cash cushion.
No one really goes into an interview speaking about politics, or propaganda, or unionizing.
They don't but humans are extremely good at picking up unspoken language. Not only that, employers and hiring managers will look you up, read your blogs, read your social media posts, and call your ex employers.
I’m a senior lead at a big (not tech) company and have had multiple people change jobs in the past few months for much better offers. I’ve had two places try to hire me in the past six months. Things were down for a bit with the rise of AI (I’d imagine a “wait and see” approach) but I’m personally seeing a lot of people trying to recruit now.
Call me ghoulish if you want. If I'm running out of money, out of work for a year, I'm giving you my best attitude. You won't find a more dedicated employee to your business than me. That's the attitude I'm taking to any interview.
If the market ever turns favorable for me, then I'll advocate for all those things you deem not ghoulish.
> Call me ghoulish if you want. If I'm running out of money, out of work for a year, I'm giving you my best attitude. You won't find a more dedicated employee to your business than me. That's the attitude I'm taking to any interview.
And again, what does that have to do with pronouns?
> If the market ever turns favorable for me, then I'll advocate for all those things you deem not ghoulish.
If you only stand for things when you think you have the advantage, then you stand for nothing at all.
Search frictions are real lots of bad candidates clog up the market and your assessment process/ other things might not be getting who you need in the door.
> The most important one is your attitude. If this is an employer's market, you need to present as someone who isn't going to cause any trouble. No him/her. No entitled attitude. No I hate everything attitude. No I'm always the victim attitude. You need to present yourself as someone who isn't likely to sue your boss, or advocate to form a union, or walk out on your company for supporting Israel or Palestine or Ukraine or Russia or China or whatever propaganda is on TV at the moment
As you said, this isn't about OP who didn't mention any of these.
But honestly, I don't think most companies read applicants' resumes and interviews deeply enough to even derive "attitude" from them. There is such an overabundance of supply that they have to use coarse, blunt filters to narrow the incoming list down to something manageable. Getting noticed and not rejected by the layers of AI filtering is likely almost a pure numbers/luck game at this point. When you have hundreds of applicants at the top of the funnel per job opening, who has time to figure out whether one particular applicant has an undesirable attitude?
It's important to point out that this advice can exist alongside the fact that it is OK (necessary to civilization, even) to criticize anything hellish in one's society (e.g. the very article this comment is responding to). The advice in this comment is not a counterpoint to the article.
We can do the miserable things that are necessary to secure our lives while also fighting to stop the people who are forcing us to do those miserable things.
Also, when you say, "No him/her", I honestly can not tell what you are saying. I'm not being sly - I really can't tell if you're saying:
1. People should pretend to not be trans (scary, but a very common form of hatred).
2. Don't mention your pronouns even if you're not trans (which, ok, so maybe you roll your eyes when people do that, I don't even think that's insane - but what on earth does that have to do with having a bad "attitude"?).
Sound advice, honestly, especially the "no I'm always the victim attitude" piece.
The more politically-charged parts of your comment apply to both sides - it's fine if you have political opinions, but nobody wants them shoved down their throats, or brought up at work. If you come across as someone who is going to put politics over work, or cause conflict, then people aren't going to want to hire you and deal with that.
But it is a sad state of affairs if you have to self-suppress you're freedoms to work. That is how freedom dies isn't it? Everyone fearful to speak or lose a job.
"Just shut up and code, have to get those gas chambers up and running themselves, so we can stick the rest of you lot into them."
The data shows that listed job openings are increasing, but the rate of hiring is decreasing. This appears to be a unique occurrence and appears to substantiate the observations in the post.
It's at least satisfying these company owners are feeling the squeeze of the end of ZIRP. Soon they'll realize that not only are there "hundreds of employees" vying for jobs but also hundreds of companies vying for customers, and the approach of picking the meekest mice to fill the slot means their application for a customer ends up in the shit-pile against one of the other 200 companies applying for a customer with employees with some balls.
I don't disagree with you. I've been saying for years here that we might see an increase in software engineering demand. There will be many more companies employing software engineers but companies won't need hundreds/thousands of engineers anymore.
Self expression at the workplace where you bring your home self to the office hadn’t been much of a thing if you were not your own boss till you had the likes of Sun, Netscape, etc where people were allowed liberties like bringing their pets to the office, pajamas to work etc., as a way to endear the employee to the boss. Once the mid teens hit and every company was letting the inmates run the asylum, it was no longer something that set a company apart. However now companies have the upper hand and are showing it by controlling your self at work. It’s a way to communicate who has the upper hand whether it makes sense or not. One has to know one’s context and act accordingly if you want to work within that system. If you become your own boss or become someone else’s boss you get to set the rules again.
You aren't ready to get that job until you've truly accepted your role as a genderless machine that turns salary into personal validation for the hiring manager.
I appreciate this sentiment and I think it's sad to sacrifice rights for money... but you know, sometimes you need money.
If unions were stronger and the government was more populist, etc., (speaking of the US), maybe this choice could have been headed off better... but it's too late for that this cycle.
They are saying a very different, obvious thing if you don't want to be cynical. And I say this as someone with some very strong opinions about many things.
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.
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.
That quote from Heat (1995) is so deployable in so many different contexts.
the irony is that McCauley (DeNiro) doesn't actually follow his macho adage as the movie shows in the end..same goes for real developers.
Thats the point of the movie: the organized and disciplined leader didnt follow his own advice while the hot-head reckless gambling degenerate did.
Chris also goes back, Charlene saves him.
That scene is gold. Neil pauses for a little longer than 30 seconds before he decides to abandon Eady, meaning he followed the intent of his rule (walk away), just not the timing (30 seconds flat). If he made the same decision in less than 30 seconds, he probably would've gotten away.
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...
Yes, sadly the most principled will have to contend with the world passing them by when it turns out those principles are dead weight to capital momentum. You could have made the same point during the dawn of the industrial revolution: that purchasing any product of a machine would be betraying your friends who have spent years honing their craft, but either way, people will still opt for the machine because it's 10x cheaper and faster.
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.
>Now, if you're on me and you gotta move when I move, how do you expect to keep a...a tech stack?
Also, never, ever give more of a shit about things than the people leading the effort. Doesn't matter if that's a for-profit enterprise, a FLOSS project, or just a way to pass the time.
You cannot and will not force them to care more. Don't waste your time on Earth trying to do so.
This may seem all well and good, but let's consider some basic logical mileposts and outcomes:
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 the wage 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). 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).
As AI 'knowledge' is populated more and more countries with different languages and priorities, English-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 jobs in places like America.
It is not just tech, of course, and that is the kicker. Tech writing; fiction writing; even fields like large data models and accounting and pharmaceutical research will be largely automated and researched with AI models.
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. Talk about hubris.
After 5+ years of actively trying to get into the field (pre AI), I left.
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 closed my linkedin, and I went to go work in the trades as a diesel mechanic.
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?
I had lots of personal experience under my belt. I built a hot rod out my garage on the cheap (because I was broke and wanted a nice car). I used that on my resume and they were extremely excited on that. The company I work for is famous for their fleet of "show" semis. It's super super cool and I think the mix of my passion for cars mixed well with their eye for details on their fleet.
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.
Did you have qualifications / an interest in this field before switching? What drawn you to this occupation in the first place? Just being curious
I'm a car guy, and a computer guy.
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.
A long-ago colleague got a junk classic car and took night classes at the local community college to learn how to fix/restore everything. He finished the degree and quit the tech job.
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.
100%
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.
that is so inspiring to hear. would you mind answering a couple of questions:
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
My entire life I've done tech. I remember in middle school all my teachers knew me as the kid who wrote code. I did my degree, and did an internship but nothing ever really stuck (still not sure what happened with that) and my full time job became begging for work.
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.
Did you go into tech because you love software or for the money?
I love software, but knew I would quickly learn to hate it. I'm not going to be working on my passion projects. I'd be working on horribly boring software used by some corporation.
I really wanted to go into tech because I've been told the trades were the boogie man my entire life.
The author is coming from the games industry. As an arts based industry, AI is EXTREMELY divisive. The author really will lose friends over even so much as touching AI in certain ways, because the artists that built the games industry were already badly abused, and now, they're being squeezed out entirely. For business developers, AI is somewhat less existentially terrifying, as it can be seen to be really empowering to an experienced user.
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.
> Why pay a pixel artist if AI can generate 100's of unique little people pixels in seconds
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.
Everyone in the games industry is badly abused. Mostly because so many want to go into it. And yet game publishers continue to struggle with profitability because budgets have ballooned. I honestly think there's just not enough room in the market for the number of game studios we have today, at least not unless management improves and gets costs under control.
What gets me is that LLM writing has an inhuman voice. Of course we know the tells. Not only this, but that. You're exactly right! —
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.
Arts or no arts companies hire you to do X, not to make friends.
If you stop doing X you will be fired/not-hired, simple as.
You can make friends on your free time.
> Arts or no arts companies hire you to do X, not to make friends. If you stop doing X you will be fired/not-hired, simple as.
> 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.
Great!
All the more reason, then, for them to be okay with not being hired.
Go tell HR that you don't give a shit about your coworkers ;)
Spend some time learning about the concept of the excluded middle[1]. It is something that will be useful on your life going forward, it might even save you a lot of trouble.
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.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_excluded_middle
Why would this bother HR? They don't give a shit about the coworkers either.
>Using a technology employers want you to use is not betraying your friends.
If it means helping the employers erase their jobs and their dreams for a career in the industry, then it is.
Just to +1 the sentiment here; AI in the gaming industry is absolutely a culture war front. Especially in the indie space, you will lose advertising deals with many sponsors & influencers, for example, if you appear to endorse AI. Probably won't be that way forever, but it's a hotbed right now.
Meanwhile, Asian studios are much more open to experimenting with AI workflows, and will eventually build the next generation of Niantics and AppLovins if this neo-ludditism continues.
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.
I dunno, maybe OpenAI and Anthromorphic should learn from Chinese companies how to not act in ridiculously off-putting ways?
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?
"will eventually build the next generation of Niantics and AppLovins"
Why should that be a relevant concern? It's not like any of us will be working in game dev if AI wins.
> Not everything has to be a culture war front.
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.
This particular technology has been trained by explicitly ripping off a lot of peoples' friends, though.
Propertly testing and reviewing code is a must with AI, it's actually more important. I don't know why the author feels like it's assumed that this goes out the window with AI
Not sure the technology is the issue here. He isn't debating using Java v C#, and one is a betrayal of all that is holy, so he refuses to use it.
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 think you might not get the context this is coming from, it’s about a game developer laid off from Blizzard not wanting to partake in the technology that will justify layoffs of their friends. Pretty straight forward to me.
Yeah, but nothing he can do
You will not have a job in software in the future if you refuse to use AI.
I fully stand behind that prediction.
For the vast majority of people who currently have a job in software... you will not have a job in software in the future whether you use AI or not.
The tide is coming for almost all of us.
I guess I'm just confused by this sentiment. Are you making these conclusions while considering the fact that AI is still heavily subsidized? The economics of AI isn't quite the same as other software/tech.
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.
I'm happy using GLM 5.2 at API pricing. There will never be a point where essentially unlimited usage (i.e. what I, as a normal developer, can use at peak effort) of extremely good models will become financially unattainable.
Yap, the signs are here.
Software and code is turning into a commodity
What year, and how much money are you willing to bet?
Corporations are the organizational equivalent of AI, they one thing well asmass money, their output aside from that is total shit. Not only are you betraying your friends/community/loved ones but such a setup is necessary to prevent the total collapse of society.
yeah, the question is what would you do with $100 million? I mean I don't have $100 million but I'd give it to the arts after I've taken care of myself well and science. Am I gonna make $100 million playing with AI? I don't even know if I can take care of myself, shit, but the government ain't gonna do that. What are the new jobs after the Saaspocalypse? Well all the money went to those companies and what do those companies want or what do those newly minted millionaires want? Hopefully something I have but shit yo. So they're gonna go back to where they came from and be millionaires but how much is Dave Chappelle changed the city that he moved to? Is there a Dave Chappelle center for comedy? some of them want ASI so I look forward to studies on human intelligence. Maybe they'll pay human subjects to model supply two digit numbers while in an MRI machine hopefully enough of those studies to pay my mortgage.
> I mean I don't have $100 million but I'd give it to the arts
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.
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
I feel like this advice is not very useful because when you call yourself a software engineer or programmer, you are doing it in order to sell a service.
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.
>Engineers in particular are usually very highly paid Cost Centers, which sets MBA’s optimization antennae to twitching. This is what brings us wonderful ideas like outsourcing, which is “Let’s replace really expensive Cost Centers who do some magic which we kinda need but don’t really care about with less expensive Cost Centers in a lower wage country”. (Quick sidenote: You can absolutely ignore outsourcing as a career threat if you read the rest of this guide.) Nobody ever outsources Profit Centers. Attempting to do so would be the setup for MBA humor. It’s like suggesting replacing your source control system with a bunch of copies maintained on floppy disks.
Really good stuff haha.
EDIT: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pr...
If you don't have a full time job for a year, why don't you start a software business on your own? It's hard to succeed, but, successful or now, you will have something to show people and something that you are passionate to talk about. It will give you a new way to connect to people, and quite likely will help you to get hired. And who knows, maybe you will succeed.
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.
* cite
> There is always a period of chaos before normalization.
In this case, it's the normalization period that has people terrified.
I am currently quitting a company of 10 years of employment. And I keep hearing how everything's shit. Btw. I'm located in Tokyo where it isn't as bad, apparently, but...
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.
why not start looking for customers before quitting?
Best of luck!
Thank you!
Don't leave unless you have something lined up lol
That might be a truism that's generally applicable, but some people have enough of a safety net to last them several years while building a business. We don't know OP's circumstances.
The industry will realize that while getting LLMs to write code is easy, getting LLMs to write good, production ready code is a skill all on its own, which simply must be done by a human and is not automatable to an LLM in any sense effectively. That will be the differentiating factor software engineering in the future, I think.
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.
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.
Getting through an interview process during a bull market has always had a small random component. I think we all have to understand and accept that in bear hiring markets, almost the entire component is random. Having a perfect skill quiz or hackerrank score and getting rejected should not cause you to try to figure out what you did wrong.
> The job market is insane at this point and I am not sure what the recruiters are actually looking for.
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.
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(?)
I work in an industry tangentially involved with the ML build-out (think companies like Broadcom, Marvell, etc.). We can't find enough people, if you have like 3+ years of experience with PCIe, Ethernet, DDR, you're a shoe in. Verification, Validation, Design, Customer Applications, Firmware, you name it, we need it. The pay is good too, especially for people who got in a year ago or more, stock base compensation has taken off like a rocket.
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.
I joined a new company 6 months ago. I interviewed at 16 companies and got 5 offers from a mix of ai cos / big tech / trading firms
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
I feel like any advice you get from someone would be as useful as "how to be a good coin flipper" advice from the 1 person in 1024 who flipped heads 10 times in a row. In other words it would be purely survivorship bias.
Anecdotally I've seen the latter to be true and have had third-party recruiters echo that familiarity with AI use in coding has become a pivotal part of job interviews with startups.
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).
I'm starting a new job in a few weeks, and can confirm (for startups at least) experience with coding agents is something companies are looking for. Multiple companies I interviewed with had a AI assisted interview session to go along with a more typical closed book programming session. I was asked about my use of coding agents in behavioral interviews. I'm not an ML guy, just a generalist SWE with 4 YOE. I only got one offer in my search, but it only took ~a month and I feel pretty good about being able to get more offers with more searching. It helps that I'm young, no dependents, and willing to relocate.
My perspective is it is impossible to cut through the three layers of bullshit between you and anyone who knows what they are talking about. The only way to do this is with brand-name qualifications, like "MIT graduate", not things that are actually impressive. This is also why you see senior developers saying, "the offers I'm getting are bigger and bigger," meanwhile skilled younger developers need to become a marketing professional just to get an interview.
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).
What do you mean by easy? Do you mean FAANG or equivalent salary? What level of seniority?
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.
Easy hires are the same now as in the past. They have held several specialized roles before without letting it narrow their career path, and they have at least a decade of experience.
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.
> Curious about the perspective from anyone who has a skill set / reputation where finding jobs is easy right now.
It's easy to find jobs in software engineering provided you have an attractive resume.
What, in your evaluation, are the top two or three attributes of an attractive resume?
OP's opinion about AI coding is pretty obvious in this blog post. Maybe some of that sips out during interviews which certainly will spook the employer.
> This is probably the worst job market I've seen in a while.
What a noncommittal sentence
I noted this too - considering he's only been a developer for a decade, this is a weird comment to make - the last decade has been a breeze.
agree with that.
> 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...
It was an example.
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.
Just use python for all practical programming problems. Lists, sets, and dicts are all you need for most leetcode problems; dynamic typing is convenient; there's good ergonomics for http and other random utility tasks; and pretty much every company is cool with python in an interview. You'll probably only see language trivia questions for languages you claim a specialty in (there's a huge market for C++ specialists, for instance).
> I guess even an off hand example, now must be completely 100% technically correct , or you aren't worth a job?
It's a litmus test, and not a terribly challenging one. It's solved by spending a week doing simple coding challenges.
I wasn't there but this seems like the same feelings people would have had in the Rust Belt when the first factories started closing and getting a job started getting harder.
I know people who were and I think it was worse. It was semi-apocalyptic, entire cities just wiped out. A lot of people just had to get the fuck out, even if they were professionals instead of factory workers. Many of these folks who left came back later.
The blog lacks crucial info. What type of projects have you worked on? What work are you applying for? Personally, "small contractor" and Blizzard does not translate well to the typical "enterprise web dev" role.
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.
Nobody likes to hear it, but this is the only explanation that makes sense. We had an unprecedented economic shock, and we're dealing with an unprecedented economic fallout. The only question is how much longer it will last.
Adapt dude. You can.
Everyone says Adapt.
Like, go be a farmer, Adapt? Reinvent yourself as a performance artist? Because, learn Java in 21 days, is kind of gone.
Companies should encourage AI use in interviews to avoid this issue.
I really hope this thread is wrong.
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.
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.
it is quite dystopic
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.
I'd suggest not adding recruiters as LinkedIn connections in the first place. I mean, LinkedIn is hardly sacred, but why are you adding people you don't know as a connection?
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.
I heard that recruiters also use amount of connections to filter out candidates, and they probably view it as if you don't have 500-1000 connection probably you just don't fit basic requirements of the the role even with 10+ yoe.
Even is so stupid but looks like in last few years lot of strange metrics like that used more and more.
I'm talking about recruiters that you talked to throughout an interview loop, not randos.
Related:
The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48620142
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”.
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.
most of those who might hire someone because they don't know how to do it are now using AI instead. so that market is shrinking too.
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!
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.
You're right on the latter point. I always wondered if Linkedin increased their spam filter or make it 10x more expensive to DM candidates, but I guess it's simply because there is simply a lack of demand right now
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.
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> Wherever these tens of thousands of qualified ex-Meta, ex-Microsoft engineers willing to work less are, I'm not seeing them.
Two possible reasons:
1. People who are truly in-demand still have an easy time of finding jobs without going through the tedious process you set up.
2. FAANGMANGAMEME never hired that many truly exceptional people in the first place and you've fallen for corporate propaganda.
> 2. FAANGMANGAMEME never hired that many truly exceptional people in the first place and you've fallen for corporate propaganda.
in my experience, FAANGMANGAMEME hires good people but they get placed on a weird career trajectory.
they learn how to work experience in enormous well funded company that has spent a fortune building fancy in-house tools for their dev experience, spend their time thinking about scaling problems that no other company will likely ever face, and all covered in ten layers of bureaucracy and "process".
if you hire a faang employee into your startup or normal mid-sized business, there needs to be a bit of a detox period where they have to learn what software dev is like for the rest of us mere mortals.
> whatever propaganda is on TV at the moment
Stuff does actually happen, out there in the real world. It's OK - even preferable - for people to engage with the world instead of ignoring it.
> Maybe the virtue signaling is still strong here and I'll get flagged
Having beliefs, a sense of morality, and a personality are actually not virtue signaling. Having a solid and informed perspective on the world is an important part of being a complete human being. It makes for better employees, too.
If I'm a shitty friend, I might give the same advice as what you just said. Just go find a company that is pro-{whatever you're supporting at the moment}.
If I think the problem is my friend, I might tell them what I wrote.
I agree with this and I'd try to inform my long-term unemployed friend of what employers actually look for in the real world. I don't come across as someone who doesn't have beliefs, right? I have very strong beliefs in general. I also don't think my post says to throw out all your beliefs and values and free thoughts.> Just go find a company that is pro-{whatever you're supporting at the moment}.
You give yourself away when you say things like this. Your phrasing here comes across as if you think that people who support social change are fickle and unprincipled, just following whatever is popular.
> I don't come across as someone who doesn't have beliefs, right? I have very strong beliefs in general.
Oh you do come across as having beliefs. Not ones that you seem willing to state or actually stand behind, though.
> If I'm the owner of a business and I have hundreds of applicants for every job, I'm picking the one who looks least likely to cause trouble outside of work, assuming everything else is equivalent.
Interesting. If _I_ was the owner of a business, I would try to find the people, who have ideals, dedication, like understanding what they deliver, being thorough in their work, like to learn, etc.. Well rounded persons. Individuals, whom you can give a task and they will search and find a solution. I find the hyperallergic reaction to people who stand for something, anything actually, to be very superficial and short-sighted. Businesses which do that are bound to become mediocre, due to hiring mediocre yes sayers.
But then I am not a business owner, for a reason. I probably couldn't deal with all the crap one has to wade through to be a business owner.
As a small business owner, I look for people who can walk the line. Who understand that there's a bottom line, but also that we are not machine men with machine hearts.
I respect the candidates who stand for something and can pragmatically navigate the social space of work at the same time. I find that people who just want to shut up and lick boot don't end up being very creative problem solvers. It's easy to say for me as a small biz; different atmosphere in larger corps, but I can't subscribe to the reality presented by the cynical grandparent post here. I think we can be better than this.
I think a better way to frame this is
You are an independent entity that will be selling your services to a company. If you want to maximize your potential customer base (employers), minimize your interest in anything that isn't relevant to the company making money. You want to maximize traits that make money, and minimize traits that lose money.
That doesn't mean throwing your values out the window, but does mean separating your personal life from your work life, and understanding that your opportunity window shrinks with each "non-negotiable" you require.
well, i guess its not very surprising to see a hiring manager advocate for soulless employees while visiting the VC tech forum.
the anti-trans stuff is a nice touch too.
The roles im being reached out for (senior) are only getting higher and higher compensation.
How does this have anything to do with a sluggish job market? Do you think people are struggling to find jobs because they are too political? One can be a servile dog, and still struggle to land a role, it's not particularly correlated.
It's advice for people who are unemployed and are competing with others for work.
No one really goes into an interview speaking about politics, or propaganda, or unionizing. So there isn't much signal in telling people to not do that, most already bend over backwards to look like an ideal candidate.
Telling people to have a good attitude is easy to say, hard to do when you've been applying for 6+ months with no response and bills to pay.
Unfortunately, the advice that's most likely to help is something everyone already knows. Networking, practice, and luck play a huge role in a environment like this. And cut expenses as much as possible, just in case you need a cash cushion.
I’m a senior lead at a big (not tech) company and have had multiple people change jobs in the past few months for much better offers. I’ve had two places try to hire me in the past six months. Things were down for a bit with the rise of AI (I’d imagine a “wait and see” approach) but I’m personally seeing a lot of people trying to recruit now.
> No him/her
No trans employees? What does that mean? No advocating for yourself at all? No unions?
You are ghoulish
Actually, if you interpret his requirement literally, it would suggest that he only accepts trans employees: no him/her, just they/them.
Call me ghoulish if you want. If I'm running out of money, out of work for a year, I'm giving you my best attitude. You won't find a more dedicated employee to your business than me. That's the attitude I'm taking to any interview.
If the market ever turns favorable for me, then I'll advocate for all those things you deem not ghoulish.
> Call me ghoulish if you want. If I'm running out of money, out of work for a year, I'm giving you my best attitude. You won't find a more dedicated employee to your business than me. That's the attitude I'm taking to any interview.
And again, what does that have to do with pronouns?
> If the market ever turns favorable for me, then I'll advocate for all those things you deem not ghoulish.
If you only stand for things when you think you have the advantage, then you stand for nothing at all.
Exactly. Business first.
Search frictions are real lots of bad candidates clog up the market and your assessment process/ other things might not be getting who you need in the door.
> The most important one is your attitude. If this is an employer's market, you need to present as someone who isn't going to cause any trouble. No him/her. No entitled attitude. No I hate everything attitude. No I'm always the victim attitude. You need to present yourself as someone who isn't likely to sue your boss, or advocate to form a union, or walk out on your company for supporting Israel or Palestine or Ukraine or Russia or China or whatever propaganda is on TV at the moment
As you said, this isn't about OP who didn't mention any of these.
But honestly, I don't think most companies read applicants' resumes and interviews deeply enough to even derive "attitude" from them. There is such an overabundance of supply that they have to use coarse, blunt filters to narrow the incoming list down to something manageable. Getting noticed and not rejected by the layers of AI filtering is likely almost a pure numbers/luck game at this point. When you have hundreds of applicants at the top of the funnel per job opening, who has time to figure out whether one particular applicant has an undesirable attitude?
It's important to point out that this advice can exist alongside the fact that it is OK (necessary to civilization, even) to criticize anything hellish in one's society (e.g. the very article this comment is responding to). The advice in this comment is not a counterpoint to the article.
We can do the miserable things that are necessary to secure our lives while also fighting to stop the people who are forcing us to do those miserable things.
Also, when you say, "No him/her", I honestly can not tell what you are saying. I'm not being sly - I really can't tell if you're saying:
1. People should pretend to not be trans (scary, but a very common form of hatred).
2. Don't mention your pronouns even if you're not trans (which, ok, so maybe you roll your eyes when people do that, I don't even think that's insane - but what on earth does that have to do with having a bad "attitude"?).
3. A 3rd thing I can't think of?
And none of that avocado toast, am I right??
Sound advice, honestly, especially the "no I'm always the victim attitude" piece.
The more politically-charged parts of your comment apply to both sides - it's fine if you have political opinions, but nobody wants them shoved down their throats, or brought up at work. If you come across as someone who is going to put politics over work, or cause conflict, then people aren't going to want to hire you and deal with that.
Forming unions is not the same as walking out based on some media propaganda.
While forming unions is a protected right in the US, it is incredibly stupid to signal that you will try to form a union during a job interview.
You aren't wrong.
But it is a sad state of affairs if you have to self-suppress you're freedoms to work. That is how freedom dies isn't it? Everyone fearful to speak or lose a job.
"Just shut up and code, have to get those gas chambers up and running themselves, so we can stick the rest of you lot into them."
You don’t have to at all. They are actually wrong, you can express yourself, share your pronouns, and find a job
The data shows that listed job openings are increasing, but the rate of hiring is decreasing. This appears to be a unique occurrence and appears to substantiate the observations in the post.
It's at least satisfying these company owners are feeling the squeeze of the end of ZIRP. Soon they'll realize that not only are there "hundreds of employees" vying for jobs but also hundreds of companies vying for customers, and the approach of picking the meekest mice to fill the slot means their application for a customer ends up in the shit-pile against one of the other 200 companies applying for a customer with employees with some balls.
I don't disagree with you. I've been saying for years here that we might see an increase in software engineering demand. There will be many more companies employing software engineers but companies won't need hundreds/thousands of engineers anymore.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46630762
Self expression at the workplace where you bring your home self to the office hadn’t been much of a thing if you were not your own boss till you had the likes of Sun, Netscape, etc where people were allowed liberties like bringing their pets to the office, pajamas to work etc., as a way to endear the employee to the boss. Once the mid teens hit and every company was letting the inmates run the asylum, it was no longer something that set a company apart. However now companies have the upper hand and are showing it by controlling your self at work. It’s a way to communicate who has the upper hand whether it makes sense or not. One has to know one’s context and act accordingly if you want to work within that system. If you become your own boss or become someone else’s boss you get to set the rules again.
> No him/her.
Uh. What?
You aren't ready to get that job until you've truly accepted your role as a genderless machine that turns salary into personal validation for the hiring manager.
As in don't put your pronouns on your CV. Rightly or wrongly this is associated with having a tendency to mix politics with work.
I think he means don't be trans. Fits with the rest of the rant.
they/their
That’s right! Buckle down and lick boot like a proper young republican!
I appreciate this sentiment and I think it's sad to sacrifice rights for money... but you know, sometimes you need money.
If unions were stronger and the government was more populist, etc., (speaking of the US), maybe this choice could have been headed off better... but it's too late for that this cycle.
Finally, someone talking sense! Personally I first evaluate all of my potential employees by how clean they can lick my boots.
They are saying a very different, obvious thing if you don't want to be cynical. And I say this as someone with some very strong opinions about many things.
Incredibly out of touch and has absolutely nothing to do with the current job market. But par-for-the-course for a "hiring manager" so not surprised.
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.