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.
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.
> 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 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.
4 months to land a contract that lasted 2 years, and due to laws it could no longer be extended.
5 months to land another contract that only lasted 6 months, this is my last week at this place.
I have been working in IT for near 20 years now, from dial-up to ADSL, from on-prem to cloud, from software to SaaS, from manual everything to GitHub and anything CI/CD related, from VM to Kubernetes, from DevOps to DevSecOps, etc. And more recently AI!!
I did applied for some IT jobs but I am seriously thinking about any other non-IT job, even tho homelab is my main hobby and enjoy it very much.
What makes me happy is that companies after companies are noticing that firing engineers to be replaced by AI is costing them half million for some companies within half year, so 1M a year spent with AI tokens.
I hear developers saying "I used AI, the code works but I do not understand it" all the time. It has already started, 2027 is the year companies more than never will start being breached due to AI slope.
I do use Perplexity AI as a replacement for Google since SEO is dead in 2026, it does provide me all the sources it used to spider, but all my code is written by me. That is different than copy/paste.
But honestly.......I am tired boss!!
After so many generation of technology jumps, I am tired man.
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.
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 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.
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.
It might also be foolish, but I'm mid-pivot to becoming an Actuary. They credential through a very transparent exam system, and interviews are relatively cursory, assuming you've passed the appropriate exams on the right timeline. I've got a math degree, and my software experience is all in the data engineering space, which seems to be in demand.
I got laid off from a large company last summer, and took some time off to travel. Now I've got a chill, low paid dev job in a resort town in New Zealand, but my sense is that dev work is not going to be the thing for me long term. This job will pay my bills while I pivot, but they're not going to sponsor me to extend my visa, so I'm on a bit of a timer. The market back in the US seems like an ongoing mess and I don't want to get back into it.
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.
I have been the lead of a very stressful project that was the highest priority for the company I work for and it was crucial to get this working as it was a hard deadline. I started using AI a lot, but I still read the code and sometimes it was so garbage. I had two developers with me, but they were both kind of new in the domain and one didn’t know the programming language. The project finished and the part my coworkers developed was fundamentally flawed, it worked for ~85% of the cases but not all and caused an incident.
Now I get to work with two of my other friends/colleagues and they are amazing. They don’t use AI at all and so neither do I and it is glorious. It is so nice to build things like this and honestly not meaningfully slower either. It took us some time to figure out all the details, edge cases and all. Writing tests first, I love it!
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.
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 am not sure op opinion about AI is helping him to get a job. I feel like there is no other way than adopt AI as any other technology we did in previous years.
The opinion that it was trained over the data we provided is not so good, specially when you think many of our jobs is to automate other people's jobs... well, using their expertise to do so.
I was unemployed for 2 months and the way I found was to go full AI and learn as much as I can about it. It turned out that most of the things you need to learn is soft skills. That combined with a reasonable tech network may help a little bit.
I’ve 12 years of official experience and it took me 8 months to find a job. I’ve been also writing about huge problems in the western Europe IT job market - hiring has almost plateaued here. So the trick was to search for a job in the eastern Europe, moving soon.
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.
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.
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”.
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 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.
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.
Frankly I’m sad to hear it. There are just too many programmers - simple.
30 years ago or so, I was a contractor working on back-to-back 3 to 12 month C++ projects. I would typically get a call one day from a recruiter followed by a phone call (or maybe a quick meet or coffee) with someone technical on the project, and arrive and be in the codebase the next. That day I would get 2 calls about my availability.
There was no sh*t-show of continuous deployment, code reviews (even for trusted internal projects), and scrum-like ceremonies. There was instead version control, periodic tested releases, a weekly update meeting, a Friday team lunch at the pub, and trust.
Too many programmers (sorry err Engineers) - too few jobs, and the enshitification of an industry.
Reading these reports makes me angry and relieved at the same time.
Angry because it feels like such a waste that good developers are getting sidelined due to LLMs in interviews. (And good developers would be likely be better LLM users in the long run.)
Relieved because I got into this industry when Z80 assembler knowledge (from ZX-81 days) gave me a head start back in the 80s, and I quit before I had to suffer interviewees using LLM. Knowing assembly made it much easier to deal with hardware and cranky C compilers back in the 80s.
Now I'm in a complete unrelated "lifestyle business" where I occasionally can use code to optimise my workflow.
If you 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.
I've found that the people working for big brand companies like Blizzard for an extended period of time tend to lose touch. It's very easy to find meaning and purpose when everyone you know loves the products the company you work at produces. They can bring their soul to work and remain satisfied. The reality is that work isn't purposeful by default and we're in a capitalist system where our income is based on exploiting labor and capital.
If you don't love AI, that's fine. Just don't harm yourself because of some hastily formed opinions by grifters. If you refuse to enter the workforce because of a refusal of AI, then you are harming yourself. If your colleagues and friends would rather you live in impoverished conditions than get an AI job, then reconsider whose opinions you value.
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.
Jobs and Software Is Fucked
(urflow.bearblog.dev)312 points by speckx 22 June 2026 | 284 comments
Comments
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"
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.
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.
4 months to land a contract that lasted 2 years, and due to laws it could no longer be extended.
5 months to land another contract that only lasted 6 months, this is my last week at this place.
I have been working in IT for near 20 years now, from dial-up to ADSL, from on-prem to cloud, from software to SaaS, from manual everything to GitHub and anything CI/CD related, from VM to Kubernetes, from DevOps to DevSecOps, etc. And more recently AI!!
I did applied for some IT jobs but I am seriously thinking about any other non-IT job, even tho homelab is my main hobby and enjoy it very much.
What makes me happy is that companies after companies are noticing that firing engineers to be replaced by AI is costing them half million for some companies within half year, so 1M a year spent with AI tokens.
I hear developers saying "I used AI, the code works but I do not understand it" all the time. It has already started, 2027 is the year companies more than never will start being breached due to AI slope.
I do use Perplexity AI as a replacement for Google since SEO is dead in 2026, it does provide me all the sources it used to spider, but all my code is written by me. That is different than copy/paste.
But honestly.......I am tired boss!!
After so many generation of technology jumps, I am tired man.
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
Let's see. My plan:
- Have my own company and start looking for customers. (Rust consulting)
- Keep looking for job opportunities, but don't succumb for shit jobs.
It might be that I'm too hopeful, but you can't know unless you try.
Anyway, I may join the "everything is shit" crowd in half a year if nothing pans out, but until then, I'm hopeful.
- political: there’s an enormous amount of uncertainty here. All businesses make plans and uncertainty puts them all on pause.
- economic: related to political, but we’re teetering on a very bad recession. Watch where national oil reserves go.
- AI: I throw this in with every new technology that comes out. There is always a period of chaos before normalization. We’re still in the chaos phase.
- Business Pain: Right now I don’t see any sector that’s in pain. Inflation has hurt consumers, but we’re still spending. When consumers lock it down, that pain comes back and job market shifts with it.
I have no solution other than figuring out a way to do your own thing. There’s no better time to be a founder.
I got laid off from a large company last summer, and took some time off to travel. Now I've got a chill, low paid dev job in a resort town in New Zealand, but my sense is that dev work is not going to be the thing for me long term. This job will pay my bills while I pivot, but they're not going to sponsor me to extend my visa, so I'm on a bit of a timer. The market back in the US seems like an ongoing mess and I don't want to get back into it.
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(?)
Now I get to work with two of my other friends/colleagues and they are amazing. They don’t use AI at all and so neither do I and it is glorious. It is so nice to build things like this and honestly not meaningfully slower either. It took us some time to figure out all the details, edge cases and all. Writing tests first, I love it!
The opinion that it was trained over the data we provided is not so good, specially when you think many of our jobs is to automate other people's jobs... well, using their expertise to do so.
I was unemployed for 2 months and the way I found was to go full AI and learn as much as I can about it. It turned out that most of the things you need to learn is soft skills. That combined with a reasonable tech network may help a little bit.
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.
You only need to know for one though...
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.
What a noncommittal sentence
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.
And then recruiter spam is COMPLETELY gone. I'm not really complaining, but it feels indicative of where things are at.
Don't blame the job market, take some responsibility over your atrophying skillset
The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48620142
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.
30 years ago or so, I was a contractor working on back-to-back 3 to 12 month C++ projects. I would typically get a call one day from a recruiter followed by a phone call (or maybe a quick meet or coffee) with someone technical on the project, and arrive and be in the codebase the next. That day I would get 2 calls about my availability.
There was no sh*t-show of continuous deployment, code reviews (even for trusted internal projects), and scrum-like ceremonies. There was instead version control, periodic tested releases, a weekly update meeting, a Friday team lunch at the pub, and trust.
Too many programmers (sorry err Engineers) - too few jobs, and the enshitification of an industry.
Angry because it feels like such a waste that good developers are getting sidelined due to LLMs in interviews. (And good developers would be likely be better LLM users in the long run.)
Relieved because I got into this industry when Z80 assembler knowledge (from ZX-81 days) gave me a head start back in the 80s, and I quit before I had to suffer interviewees using LLM. Knowing assembly made it much easier to deal with hardware and cranky C compilers back in the 80s.
Now I'm in a complete unrelated "lifestyle business" where I occasionally can use code to optimise my workflow.
The frontier model companies could all collapse tomorrow but the tech is not going anywhere.
If you don't love AI, that's fine. Just don't harm yourself because of some hastily formed opinions by grifters. If you refuse to enter the workforce because of a refusal of AI, then you are harming yourself. If your colleagues and friends would rather you live in impoverished conditions than get an AI job, then reconsider whose opinions you value.