Jobs and Software Is Fucked

https://urflow.bearblog.dev/jobs-and-software-is-fucked/

by speckx • 1 month ago

326 252 1 month ago

urflow.bearblog.dev

Trasmatta• 1 month ago

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.

AznHisoka• 1 month ago

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

craftkiller• 1 month ago

And then recruiter spam is COMPLETELY gone.

Oddly enough, in the past year recruiter spam has ticked up significantly for me. It was completely gone for a while, but it's back in full force.

qwe----3• 1 month ago

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...

FrustratedMonky4• 1 month ago

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.

Daishiman• 1 month ago

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.

colonCapitalDee2• 1 month ago

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).

greygoo2222• 30 days ago

Leetcode/hackerrank problems aren't that high variance, dedicate a weekend studying and you should be good.

carabiner• 1 month ago

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

tern• 1 month ago

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(?)

giwook• 1 month ago

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).

ryandrake2• 1 month ago

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.

programjames• 1 month ago

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).

fl4regun3• 1 month ago

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.

ponector2• 1 month ago

If you cannot find enough people in current market then pay is not that good as you think.

mixmastamyk• 1 month ago

Hi, looking for your contact info or you can find mine from the beginning of the month hiring post. Cheers.

mchaver• 30 days ago

If you guys are hiring, I am interested. My email and personal website are in my profile. Thanks!

iLoveOncall2• 1 month ago

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.

Exoristos3• 1 month ago

What, in your evaluation, are the top two or three attributes of an attractive resume?

colonCapitalDee2• 1 month ago

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.

rglynn• 1 month ago

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.

lylejantzi3rd2• 1 month ago

How much does it pay, relatively? The last time I looked into jobs in the UK and in Europe, I could make more money flipping burgers in the US.

vanuatu• 1 month ago

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

sublinear2• 1 month ago

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.

IshKebab3• 1 month ago

Silicon design/verification. In really high demand at the moment, I guess because of the death of Moore's Law - now it is much more worthwhile making custom chips.

h4kunamata7• 30 days ago

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

There is no such thing as easy right now!!

Engineers with years of experience are being dismissed from interviews, and they are solid candidates. I speak with recruiters since I am looking for job atm and it is a horror movie atm.

Companies literally have no idea what they want, they lost the touch with reality. There was a twitter post from a developer who released a tool being used left and right, then a role AD asking for more years of experience for that tool than the tool exists.

You need a miracle right now to find a job, also, you need to know the recruiter who knows the hiring manager to get you in.

Nothing is easy anymore, and won't be anytime soon although the AI bubble started to pop and companies are waking up to the huge mistake they made.

greygoo2222• 30 days ago

I'm a new grad. It took me about three weeks to get two offers, both from cold applications. I applied to ~100 jobs in total and got first round interviews from 10% of the ones I cold applied to, much higher when I had an in.

I then, uh, turned both offers down because I thought the roles weren't interesting enough and didn't pay enough to make up for not being interesting (170k base). Now I am back in the process and, knock on wood, I am in the middle of final rounds with several companies and expect to have a much better offer by next week.

I have a background in ML and agentic systems, which did come up, but my resume isn't outstanding. No big tech or frontier lab internships, no published papers, no unicorn startup. I wouldn't say finding jobs has been easy, but it hasn't been remotely as difficult as this thread implies, and I believe the statistics back me up here. I suspect this is a "people who aren't struggling don't complain about it online" phenomenon.

Regardless, I wish everyone here best of luck in finding a job.

VirusNewbie2• 1 month ago

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.

quietbritishjim• 1 month ago

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.

VirusNewbie2• 1 month ago

I'm talking about recruiters that you talked to throughout an interview loop, not randos.

strobe• 1 month ago

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.

darth_avocado• 1 month ago

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

themgt• 1 month ago

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.

bananamogul• 1 month ago

That quote from Heat (1995) is so deployable in so many different contexts.

AIorNot• 1 month ago

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.

lenerdenator3• 1 month ago

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.

joquarky• 29 days ago

Also the more insecure ones will feel threatened that you want their role.

redshiftza• 28 days ago

Learned this surprisingly late in life and it almost broke me . Still it sucks because as checked out as I am , I want to care about what I spend half my waking life doing.

atleastoptimal3• 1 month ago

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.

teaearlgraycold• 1 month ago

Both the people that claim they won't use LLMs and the people that claim they don't even need to look at the code anymore are deluding themselves.

archagon2• 1 month ago

AI is good enough now that you can't claim that you aren't using it because you're upholding some higher standard of quality. It is simply a matter of it offending your sensibilities.

AI is also great at the mechanics of writing. Should people stop writing? Obviously not.

Is there value to coding other than compiling without errors and producing a plausible program as output? Obviously yes.

LLMs can’t think and the decisions they make are stochastic. Ignoring this basic fact means you’re probably not cut out for engineering to begin with — much like content creators churning out LLM blogspam are not cut out for writing. It’s a dead version of the discipline.

Perhaps some form of the world will pass us by. I’m not sure I want to be part of that world.

zetsurin• 1 month ago

Now, if you're on me and you gotta move when I move, how do you expect to keep a...a tech stack?

blitzar• 1 month ago

What are you a monk?

jambalaya82• 1 month ago

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 wages for the majority of them will go further and further down until they become roughly equivalent to the average minimum wage, if they are not outsourced entirely. Many people will attempt to transition to a non-tech field if the number of available jobs and the wages are not commensurate (especially considering the cost of education). The most desirable of those jobs will also have an upper limit of positions available, and that is of course not paying attention to how many of those will be offloaded onto automation and/or AI. Little things wind up mattering (like the lowering crime rate in California towns suddenly putting auto and window glass repairers out of business) and people who leave tech for other jobs will be fighting for the same dwindling work, with people who are often less difficult to find or work with. Rent won't really go down, and the price of other things will likely continue to rise or stagnate (like many tech salaries; a small percentage of salaries went way up, and the majority went down or are stagnant also). Not saying AI will push everyone out of every field, but it feels like people are thinking in too little of a macro sense.

As AI 'knowledge' is populated by more and more countries with different languages and priorities, English- and some other language speakers will be squeezed out. Probably moreso if and when brain-machine interfaces become de rigeur. Countries with populations of a billion and large families will simply cancel out some people in places like America because social networks will merely favour different people. If my name sounds like yours ethnically, I am possibly far more likely to favour you in a queue. Especially if I am from the same country. This works against people all the time now in the opposite direction. Yes, AI models do use data like this, just as people do.

It is not just tech, of course, and that is the kicker. Tech writing, sure, but also movie and fiction writing, fields dealing large data models, accounting and pharmaceutical research will be largely automated and researched with AI models. Will we need forensic accounting once a model exists?

To the commenters who wrote about how, yes, sure, there will need to be people overseeing things, how do you propose to police that when the lower level AIs skills are so far beyond even the current most senior intermediate or advanced/senior people, and they ramp up so fast, but lack any error correcting? Maybe the AI won't want you involved. Maybe you cannot tell if it chose a good solution or not.

Many... well, no, most good (not even talking godly) tech people only get good by experience, hard work, repetition and the ability to see patterns in their debugging, crashes, program execution, the way their data farms 'feel' (how else do I put this? if you know it feels not right, and sure enough something breaks), and lord knows, even human-computer interaction.

At some point, looking for work is something AIs will discourage us from doing, if they don't already, just for feeling like maybe we won't choose the same solution (would we know?).

Not paranoia. Mere logic. We are attempting to create models but we lack the solutions ourselves. Are we not, like, pricing ourselves out of our own careers (and planet?)?

It is more than hubris.

derangedHorse• 30 days ago

but wages for the majority of them will go further and further down until they become roughly equivalent to the average minimum wage, if they are not outsourced entirely.

In your framework, can't this be said for all jobs in the long tail of technological development? This is also assuming we get to a point where there is no need for a human to coordinate models and prioritize tasks, otherwise the job will become that.

Many people will attempt to transition to a non-tech field if the number of available jobs and the wages are not commensurate

In this world where AI is good enough that most tech jobs aren't present due to outsourcing, why wouldn't the progress extend to other 'non-tech' jobs? I assume you use 'non-tech' to refer to jobs with physical labor but the field of robotics is always getting better. With the cost of writing software for them going down to 0, we should expect jobs in this domain to be scarce as well.

Rent won't really go down, and the price of other things will likely continue to rise or stagnate

There's only so high a landlord can make rent without losing tenants and stacking losses due to mortgages or property taxes. Otherwise they're just paying the government for capital that could be used more efficiently elsewhere.

As AI 'knowledge' is populated by more and more countries with different languages and priorities, English- and some other language speakers will be squeezed out

English is the most popular language in the world even being used as common languages. by countries that don't have it as their native language. I don't think there's any basis for this.

At some point, looking for work is something AIs will discourage us from doing, if they don't already

I don't believe this accurately captures where AI is today. It is not good enough to be left to its own devices in most fields.

Are we not, like, pricing ourselves out of our own careers (and planet?)

Planet? If AI is being built to prioritize helping humanity, what reason is there to believe that a superintelligence would push us out? Unless you're assuming we'd mess up alignment so bad that they'd form other priorities where eliminating/removing humans is the best way to go about it.

Like the flawed paperclip AI thought experiment that assumes an AI with an unreasonably narrow goal can understand enough of the world's structure to combat humans on every front. Having such a narrow failure case makes it surprisingly hard to realize given we have a hard time aligning trained models to narrow things we want it to steer towards. For better or worse our training methods, and emergent behavior that arises from it, makes having such an inconsistently unaligned view of the world unlikely in my opinion.

lifestyleguru• 1 month ago

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

firefoxd• 1 month ago

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

xtracto• 1 month ago

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...

ItsYan• 1 month ago

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.

FloorEgg• 1 month ago

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.

commandlinefan• 1 month ago

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.

an0malous• 1 month ago

The timeline also matches up exactly, the Fed started raising rates in Q1-Q3 2022 and you can see the largest spike of layoffs happened Q1-Q3 2022:

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/interest-rate

https://layoffs.fyi/

ChatGPT wasn’t released until the end of 2022, and it wasn’t until the next spring where it really started to take off. Spring 2023 is when ChatGPT started to gain traction as a direct to consumer app and it wasn’t until later in the year when startups started building on top of it.

semiquaver• 1 month ago

  > 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.

iwontberude4• 1 month ago

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.

echelon4• 1 month ago

You will not have a job in software in the future if you refuse to use AI.

I fully stand behind that prediction.

edit: despite the downvotes, I'll double down: most of today's software jobs will disappear. Your job, if it is in software, will disappear. It might transform into something new, if you're lucky. Or it might just go away entirely.

Bombthecat2• 1 month ago

Yeah, but nothing he can do

VonGuard• 1 month ago

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.

moralestapia3• 1 month ago

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.

drdaeman7• 1 month ago

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.

AlexandrB2• 1 month ago

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.

nekusar• 1 month ago

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.

deterministic• 30 days ago

A friend of mine is an artist working in the games industry. So far nobody has been fired. They all simply started using AI to be more productive.

They care more about doing their job well than some artistic ideal that only works in practice if you don't have to care about things like food and shelter.

nyc_data_geek1• 1 month ago

This particular technology has been trained by explicitly ripping off a lot of peoples' friends, though.

braden-lk• 1 month ago

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.

alephnerd• 1 month ago

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...

---

Edit: can't reply

Why should that be a relevant concern? It's not like any of us will be working in game dev if AI wins.

Becuase AI is not taking all jobs. Yes a lot of redundant work will go away, but there is still a real need for human intervention, monkeypatching, and ingenuity.

The North American gaming industry only exists because the entire ecosystem from AdTech to Engines to Marketplaces exists to develop, finance, and distribute IP.

If you stay frozen in the past, you eventually get outcompeted and the ecosystem will leave. And unlike the automotive industry, game devs aren't a core voting bloc.

This is what happened to the entire animation industry and is what is happening to the film and television industry. Gaming will be the next IP driven industry to leave if everyone remains frozen and opposed to innovation.

Maybe (sic) Chines sell tools for artists pitching them as useful rather then "haha this will make you obsolete you looser look at slop I made" middle finger pitch?

The obsolence and cost saving message is true though and used all over Asia - even in China [0][1].

Either you innovate and compete, or you will get trounced. THIS is the cultural mindset back in Asia.

Americans best learn how to compete again.

[0] https://www.zaobao.com.sg/news/china/story20260622-9245522

[1] https://m.tech.china.com/articles/20260615/202606151894081.h...

FrustratedMonky4• 1 month ago

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.

fragmede2• 1 month ago

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.

falcor84• 1 month ago

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.

soiltype• 1 month ago

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.

rektomatic• 1 month ago

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

casey2• 1 month ago

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.

coldtea5• 1 month ago

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.

h4kunamata7• 30 days ago

As a gamer, if a game has mention of AI in any way or form, that equals to slope.

And it is always the case, bugs, broken arts, you name it, so no, I disagree with you and agree with OP.

By using AI for gaming development, you are taking away job from real people to replace it with AI slope.

ChrisArchitect• 1 month ago

The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48620142

celltalk• 1 month ago

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.

ryandrake2• 1 month ago

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.

lenerdenator3• 1 month ago

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.

8b16380d• 1 month ago

I was just involved in the hiring process for a new rec on a team adjacent to mine, and the HR/screening process was a complete mystery as to candidate filtering for outside applicants. So many AI tools making arbitrary judgments from resume content to psychological profiles of candidates, led us to 0 organic people “qualified” enough to interview for an SRE/Devops role. All we hire now is referrals as they are the only ones to get pass automated screening

ponector2• 1 month ago

Nowadays more than half of job postings are fake. It's either process to show activity or they already have one to hire but need to follow established process.

nickvec• 1 month ago

You can do everything right in an interview and still get denied. It is truly a crapshoot in today's job market.

robmn• 1 month ago

Adapt dude. You can.

FrustratedMonky4• 1 month ago

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.

scotty79• 1 month ago

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.

em-bee2• 1 month ago

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.

lylejantzi3rd2• 1 month ago

That market is growing because of AI. Everybody I've seen use AI gets to a certain point where it breaks and they don't know how to fix it. They have a choice to make, then: ditch it and pay for real software that works, or pay somebody to fix it. Hopefully, they've used that AI generated software to create enough cash flow to afford somebody to fix it.

Exoristos3• 1 month ago

I'm transitioning to freelance (independent consultant, full stack and Cloud), and I find I'm working alongside AI in business manager's hands. It's an uncanny mode of competition.

elzbardico• 1 month ago

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.

ChicagoDave3• 1 month ago

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.

Exoristos3• 1 month ago

* cite

There is always a period of chaos before normalization.

In this case, it's the normalization period that has people terrified.

ChicagoDave3• 1 month ago

Understandable. Look at the possible directions:

- GenAI becomes a foundational requirement for tech and non tech sectors. If you’ve refused to engage, you’ve self-selected out of any of those sectors.

- GenAI usage shifts down to just the tech sector, but in an integrated fashion where current engineering practices are still desired. Everyone survives, but pay scales are adjusted down by a not-insignificant amount.

- GenAI bubbles badly, OpenAI and Anthropic merge with Google/Microsoft/Oracle/IBM/???. Tokens become extremely expensive and no one is leaning into agentic integration. Everyone thrives.

taffydavid• 1 month ago

This is probably the worst job market I've seen in a while.

What a noncommittal sentence

medion• 1 month ago

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.

micromacrofoot• 1 month ago

If you truly give a shit you have to change and help make the mess less mess. It sucks, it might be worse than it was, but you can't continue giving a shit by not participating. The horse has left the barn on this one.

The frontier model companies could all collapse tomorrow but the tech is not going anywhere.

thelonelyborg• 1 month ago

it is quite dystopic

GolDDranks4• 1 month ago

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.

NetOpWibby• 1 month ago

Best of luck!

GolDDranks4• 1 month ago

Thank you!

bayareateg2• 1 month ago

Don't leave unless you have something lined up lol

dolebirchwood• 1 month ago

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.

GolDDranks4• 30 days ago

I'm am not willing to wager my mental health for staying if I feel the current work environment would be detrimental for that.

radiator• 1 month ago

why not start looking for customers before quitting?

t-writescode• 1 month ago

I suspect the reason is highly personal to their particular situation, but also most likely justified.

GolDDranks4• 30 days ago

It's very hard when you are overworked to a near-burnout state. I needed to quit to save myself.

swedishuser2• 1 month ago

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.

gafferongames8• 1 month ago

In the game industry this is actually a positive thing. If you think that AI can write code better than you can, I'm not going to disagree with you, but maybe you should try getting better or more specialized at what you do, because I can ask the AI simple questions about my field and it's completely wrong 3-4 prompts in.

Using this technology to build anything remotely serious, OR EVEN GAMES, is wildly stupid.

luaKmua• 1 month ago

I'm not used to seeing informed takes on the games industry on Hacker news, but then I looked up to see your name. Love your stuff, your website was mind opening when I was in college.

cleaning• 1 month ago

Hate to be that guy but you're likely holding the tool wrong. Being an expert does not guarantee you're one of those people who can easily get good results from an (frontier) LLM.

swedishuser2• 30 days ago

I can ask the AI simple questions about my field and it's completely wrong 3-4 prompts in.

I'm guessing that field is gaming? It would be interesting to know what those simple questions are and what's wrong the answers if you don't mind sharing.

Ralo14• 1 month ago

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"

poly2it• 1 month ago

Did you go into tech because you love software or for the money?

Ralo14• 1 month ago

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.

benterris• 1 month ago

Did you have qualifications / an interest in this field before switching? What drawn you to this occupation in the first place? Just being curious

Ralo14• 1 month ago

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.

shivapb80• 1 month ago

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

Ralo14• 1 month ago

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.

pixelatedindex2• 1 month ago

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?

Ralo14• 1 month ago

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.

rcbdev• 30 days ago

Adore it! Why did you not become an auto mechanic, then?

RankingMember• 28 days ago

FWIW, there's a huge difference in job quality between diesel and a regular auto mechanic (at least if you're in the states): Unless you work somewhere rare and amazing, auto mechanics typically work within the flat-rate system. In case you're not familiar, this is a joke of a wage system wherein you're not actually paid for the time a job takes, but the time a book says it should take in a perfect world. Rusty fasteners, broken equipment, bad/wrong parts- all the real-world complications that come up during jobs will conspire to make you take longer than book time and, especially for new people, can leave you making less than you'd make in fast food.

coldpie• 1 month ago

I'm looking to leave working in tech. The local public transit bus agency is always hiring mechanics. Going to a technical school for a diesel mechanic training and working there is high up on my list of things to explore. Thanks for the positive reinforcement.

Ralo14• 1 month ago

That's how the majority get into it. My first year course, half the students were all from the public transit and knew each other.

jonathanlydall• 1 month ago

Reading this and some of your other comments in this thread, I think it’s awesome you’ve landed up doing what you really enjoy and are well compensated for it.

It makes me wonder if I would be happier doing something else, but (because of my personality) I’m very doubtful.

Since you see yourself as also being a computer guy I’m assuming that lack skill or intuition was not why you left the industry, so don’t read the rest of my comment as talking about you.

But I’ve definitely seen plenty of people in the software development industry where they may get by “okay” at their job, but things don’t tend to “click” as easily (in terms of intuitive understanding) for them the same way they do for me.

So I feel lucky and deeply happy to be at a company I enjoy working at and doing what has always been my passion.

It’s not that the computer industry is completely terrible (although plenty of parts of it certainly are), it’s just that for some people it’s not their true passion (which is fine).

the_real_cher• 30 days ago

I think its the smart people who things click well for that have the most problems because theyre not worried about things clicking, so their whole focus is on how B.S. the actual industry is.

dogwalker5000• 1 month ago

Until AI comes for your mechanics job too,

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

I feel we are getting the worse of “both worlds”.

Fiction has sold AI in the form of Data from Star Trek. A robot with perfect recall of information over a wide range of topics and flawless reasoning.

Today’s AI is nothing like Data with its hallucinations but are taking jobs anyway because it’s “good enough” for many corporations.

P.S. Haven’t been keeping up to date but let’s say I have a story where I retcon a previously an established fact midway through the story with no explanation. If I feed it into AI as part of its training data, will it “challenge” this contradiction? Or will it just blindly accept it? What if the story is part of a prompt, will it “challenge” it in anyway?

I mean even a young child will point out that “that wasn’t what you said earlier”.

pydry• 1 month ago

Until AI comes for your mechanics job too,

AI didn't "come" for software either. This is just a rerun of the 2000s outsourcing boom with a different kind of dirt cheap slop code.

That one ended with execs patting themselves on the back for hiring "only the best" software engineers- almost as if slop actually was a problem.

Ralo14• 1 month ago

I'm not concerned. If the trades get replaced, then its just over for everyone.

Then literally nothing is safe.

Besides, unless we build physical robots to trace airlines and replace them, I'm safe.

linzhangrun• 1 month ago

That kind of work needs robots in the loop. There is very little training data, most of it is private or opaque, and a lot of the know-how was never written down. It should hold out at least 20 years longer than programming, where basically the whole job happens inside the computer, and where the best references, examples, and source code are public to a degree unimaginable in most other industries.

h4kunamata7• 29 days ago

Until AI comes for your mechanics job too,

Yes and no!!

New cars are computers on wheel, you need a computer to release the break pad in some cars which is insane.

Now, when it comes to being a mechanic per se, there is no robot able to perform most of the jobs done by a human. Good mechanics are full booked.

tacon• 1 month ago

You might be able to be a diesel mechanic and clean up in tech. This video is almost a year old, about applying Claude Code to boring businesses, a mobile diesel mechanic service in this case study: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWNFna6fgS8

Ralo14• 1 month ago

I try everyday to apply my tech background to my mechanics. I use it for things like torque specs and brain storming issues but nothing much else.

Utilizing it for business purposes is certainly an option too. Possibly in the far future, having the highest quality website with good SEO would help me stomp out competition.

ValentineC• 1 month ago

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.

The first sentence is what I'd think too.

Have you considered if the fully ticketed salary includes risk of serious injury if something bad happens (like, knock on wood, lifts failing)?

The far higher risk of injury and death is one thing that keeps people away from physical jobs.

Ralo14• 1 month ago

Absolutely.

It's not perfect. I risk crushing my hands everyday. Or falling. Or causing 10s of thousands of dollars in damage because I didnt tighten a bolt. Arthritis is likely.

But it's still incredibly rare, and mainly in your control. All my coworkers are major injury free.

hintymad• 1 month ago

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).

This. People tend to underestimate the joy that steady progress brings. A quick peak usually just leads to a long, depressing decline. Many people would rather take a career that grows a few percent every year for four decades over one that spikes and crashes any day. It’s better to be a slow grower who stays valuable than a flash-in-the-pan who burns out by 35[1].

[1] Honestly, I think there is a reason for this decline that has nothing to do with AI: the IT industry has just matured. Aside from the classic GoF patterns and Enterprise patterns and their variations, what new popular and deep design patterns have we actually adopted lately? Or look at all those must-know data structures and algorithms that are all over the web. How many of those were invented in the last ten years? Even in open source, where are the new platform-level projects invented in the last 5 years that every major company is pouring resources into? There are not many.

In other words, we are just eating our own tail at this point. It is just CRUD to death. When things get this stagnant, tech departments inevitably turn into cost centers. Even without AI, we were already heading toward a dead end. AI just happens to be the tool that makes it easy to automate everything because, at the end of the day, most of our work is just rearranging the same old code patterns anyway.

sublinear2• 30 days ago

Many people would rather take a career that grows a few percent every year for four decades

That's exactly what the corporate IT world has always been once you leave SV.

Paying about 10M/yr for a team of 50 people makes perfect sense. It doesn't really make a dent in payroll to keep daily operations going while their people get paid competitively to work from home in an affordable suburb.

In this world, AI is not a threat. It just auto-transcribes meeting notes and sucks at code review. There's very little to delegate to AI because everyone is maintaining services that have to stay in prod for years if not decades. You wouldn't replace them in the same way you wouldn't replace your lawyers and accountants.

AngryData• 1 month ago

Wrenching is a better than the average trade, but you will accumulate damage in your hands and shoulders from it. The vibration of impact guns do considerable damage to your hands over a decade or two of work along with the tight squeezing of tools. Thick padded hand grips might be a good idea even if impact guns don't feel like it hurts right now. Heavy wrenching can do a number on shoulders too but shoulder sockets can be replaced, although it is supposedly not a pleasant experience.

Ralo14• 1 month ago

Absolutely. It's not perfect but safety is in your control, and all up to you.

I accept the trade off, as the alternative is going back to linkedin and begging for a job all day.

This is why I try to hoard all my money. I don't want to do this when I'm 50. I've always thought about doing this for 10-15 years and then building a semi and doing some owner operator long haul trucking. I could easily fix anything on the truck and save major money.

Gud• 30 days ago

Avoid impact guns at all costs.

I install heavy machinery for a living and I forbid them on site.

Use regular spanners, ensure adequate cross tightening and final tightening with torque.

SanjayMehta2• 1 month ago

I did door to door sales for a while and let me tell you there's nothing more degrading than getting the door slammed in your face at best and being chased off by dogs at worst.

Would have taken grunt labour any day over the latter.

But it gave me a thick skin in the long run and made me a much better (nastier?) negotiator when I had to run business groups.

Happy to be out of it now. Kind of rose at the right time and left before LLMs showed up.

itbeho• 29 days ago

I'm in a similar process. I've enjoyed working in tech but it feels for me that it has run its course. We recently started making EDC bags and minimalist laptop backpacks. https://ancientedc.com And while it probably won't generate tech money, it's really nice sitting down at the sewing machine and cranking out a physical product that people really enjoy using.

RA_Fisher• 1 month ago

Companies should encourage AI use in interviews to avoid this issue.

pianopatrick• 1 month ago

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.

FrustratedMonky4• 1 month ago

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.

operatingthetan• 1 month ago

The companies seem to truly believe they will just have a handful of devs at that point manning large pools of AI agents. I doubt it though!

bayareateg2• 1 month ago

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.

YuechenLi2• 1 month ago

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.

yallpendantools• 1 month ago

I've spoken about my troubles getting as much mileage out of LLMs as before while being vague about my industry and, well, this hits the nail in the head.

because the tooling used in the gaming industry is as unfriendly to LLM coding as it gets: Heavily visual scripting based

At the start of the LLM craze, we (as a team) put ChatGPT to test with Godot. It wasn't very successful in that, IIRC, GDScript 2 was just released and ChatGPT's training corpus was so obviously based on GDScript 1.

We could make ChatGPT outline steps of how to accomplish things in Godot, sort of like getting a customized tutorial. When code isn't involved, ChatGPT was okay and Gemini seemed to fare better. Based on vibes, I think Gemini had a marginally better handle on GDScript 2 for some reason.

I've been trying it lately with Claude still with mixed results. I had to install a few skills/extensions for it (can't tell you which as I basically just blindly followed what our AI advocate recommended). Sometimes it works but when it doesn't it's harder to put a finger on why. Overall I prefer the DX of generating customized tutorials with ChatGPT.

extremely reflection heavy

Big time. And IME we don't even have to deal with textbook reflection here. Game entities are so convoluted (remember the Fallout 3 Train NPC, the stories of how Skyrim works, etc.) that it is really pushing inheritance and OO to contortions it shouldn't be doing.

Dirty confession: in our game we have this GIANT switch-statement dealing with game objects. It happens in a handful of places, for different game object types. LLMs (Copilot and Codex) could generate the monkey code of adding a switch case and even writing the body but sooner than later, when the new objects have to interact with others, LLMs just can't reason around it. Not to mention the hundred edge cases you have to consider!

And before some smart-ass comments: in my almost-decade of dealing with this code base there have been a handful of attempts to "refactor" these switch-statements, always a newcomer's enthusiastic effort. I'm proud to say, I've managed to slay one of the giants, the only successful effort to my knowledge, and this only happened last year. But I did so by basically delegating to another of the giants; they turned out to be twins and we could do without one. The dirty way is the clean way because the alternative contains Lovecraftian geometries.

Claude has been great for finding edge-case bugs but that's only once the code has been written properly. Generally if QA reports a bug on a pre-release feature, it's at most 50/50 if Claude can debug it. But if it's a player report/live incident, I'd say Claude's chances goes up to around 80%.

All that said,

if you are in the game industry, you probably have nothing to worry about in terms of LLM coding replacing you

Hah-hah. Look, I agree with you but please get in touch with upper management. As an engineer I'm confident on the value I bring to the table but I'm not sure management "gets" that. Like, no matter how I tell them what features I shipped, what infra I built, etc., it doesn't come across to them that LLMs would not have been able to automate that output!

YuechenLi2• 30 days ago

I'm proud to say, I've managed to slay one of the giants, the only successful effort to my knowledge, and this only happened last year. But I did so by basically delegating to another of the giants; they turned out to be twins and we could do without one. The dirty way is the clean way because the alternative contains Lovecraftian geometries.

If you are interested, I've built an open source project specifically to solve this issue in game AI and it resolves the switch/if-else ladders pretty cleanly. It's C#, so it should work for .NET version of Godot as well, and I have a couple of sample MonoGame project on there to demonstrate that it works: HSFM + utility AI. Works not just for games, but weirdly for LLM orchestration too.

https://github.com/yuechen-li-dev/Dominatus

Try it out, I don't want people to think I'm here just to self-promote, but I think this could be the thing that helps you slay the switch statement giants once and for all. If it helps you for your work, hey, powers to you.

unknownfuture• 1 month ago

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.

I don't agree.

Here's the thing about poorly written code: it can work for a surprisingly long time.

And by the time it stops working, the people who built it or the leaders who drove it or the execs who insisted on it have probably moved on.

So no. I would in fact argue that, by and large, as long as the software appears to work, most business don't care about code quality, and slinging high quality, AI written code slower than another guy who spitting out garbage will lose in this new normal.

Anamon2• 27 days ago

I agree that this is the main differentiator. Software jobs will be fine in those industries where quality, security, robustness, and liability matter.

It changes the job where software needs to be good; it replaces the job anywhere where it was already possible before to get away with turning in broken rubbish. And I guess that's not a negligible part of the industry.

h4kunamata7• 1 month ago

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.

Not many people understand that, including some reply to your comment.

AI loves to do enshitification, it adds code that is not required at all, broken logic, sure it might work but it might not be best practice.

People forget that AI as it exists atm isn't Artifical Inteligence but machine learning, it is as good as the model it was trained on. If the model is good, that agentic will be good, if the model is bad, the agentic will be so so.

Companies are making that same mistake.

I wrote a skill for Claude to talk with a MCP server using API, it uses far less token, ~700 instead of ~2k tokens to perform the same task so cheaper and a lot faster too, seconds instead of minutes.

Which again, goes back to what I said, an agentic AI is only as good as the model it was trained on, vibe coding without adding vulnerabilities is a whole another level.

regnull• 1 month ago

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.

thoughtpeddler• 1 month ago

100% this. Interviewing isn't something that can compound. Striking out from company after company doesn't leave behind a trail of real work and real lessons. Starting a business is tough but it really does teach skills that are hard to find any other way (about sales, recruiting, management, etc). After a certain point, it's wiser to give up on getting hired, and just hire yourself and build something.

anon-3988• 30 days ago

Creating a business something that sounds soooo far fetched. It is such a tail event for me that I never even considered. How do you even begin? You just start calling people if they want your product?

gloosx• 30 days ago

Business is pretty simple actually: you begin by finding the market, then you proceed with getting a thing to sell on the market, then you sell you thing at the market. Think about it in simple terms: to start a business of selling vegetables – acquire vegetables, find a marketplace nearby, sit there and sell your vegetables. All businesses really are just increasingly sophisticated versions of this; source something of value, reach the customer, make money.

5701652400• 1 month ago

agree with that.

annzabelle• 1 month ago

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.

aryehof2• 30 days ago

Nice, I don’t think your foolish. Now you just need to ignore the jokes that say that Actuaries make Accountants look exciting!

A couple of decades ago I was leading a project migrating one of the main applications widely used by actuaries.

Those were the days - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48641095

periodjet• 1 month ago

Can we please stop highlighting and indulging these neurotic cybersocialists?

kittikitti• 1 month ago

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.

SanjayMehta2• 1 month ago

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.

h4kunamata7• 1 month ago

DevOps isn't different!!

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.

MattDamonSpace• 1 month ago

What law prevents the two-year contract from going further?

h4kunamata7• 1 month ago

In Australia, by law a contract can only extend up to 2y and then you have to become full time.

Some companies follow that rule, others do not so you can work 10y under a contract for some companies.

gib444• 30 days ago

5 months to land another contract that only lasted 6 months

My god this is insanity

h4kunamata7• 29 days ago

My god this is insanity

At some point in your life, I am still in my middle 30s, things are just another Tuesday in the office.

If I could give a piece of advice especially for the younger generation, if you earn $1000k, do not spend $2000k

Always have an emergency saving to help you stay afloat, there is nothing worse than being unemployed and having financial stress. It should be at least a month worth of your living, preferable 3-half year.

If you spend $5k a month with bills, shopping and etc, you should have at least $15k in a saving account with another bank.

The way how things are going, soon a year worth of saving is gonna be mandatory haha

I do, to an extent, expect things to be easier than June 2025 when AI was still pure hype, but like I said, I will give it a try another month or so whilte trying to shift away from IT.

But until AI doesn't take another deep( datacenters contructions delayed or being cancelled altogether already, companies noticing the enshitification, stock market bubble that is already poping, companies hiring engineers back because AI hype cooled down), things will get a lot worse before getting any better.

scuderiaseb• 30 days ago

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!

ukprogrammer• 30 days ago

Without AI your 10 years of experience is of lower utility than an AI wielding junior with 2 years of experience

Don't blame the job market, take some responsibility over your atrophying skillset

aryehof2• 30 days ago

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.

KernelPryanic• 30 days ago

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.

lucastamoios• 30 days ago

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.

sinoue• 28 days ago

Speckx, Every downturn frees up talent that leads to the next generation of startups. If your finances can handle risk working for a startup or bootstrapping your own go for it. If you need a job now be sure to circle your connections to get better leverage on the inside track for closing those job interviews. Often times they already have a lead candidate the job was specifically written for. See if you have friends and old bosses that would do the same. I hope when you land where you are going you'll write an update.

Jobs and Software Is Fucked

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