I understand the stated feelings of indignation and resentment toward a process that was broken well before the current market conditions, but given the current conditions, isn't applying to 36 jobs and deciding to back out a bit hasty?
> Thankfully I haven't had to do that since before the pandemic.
That's why you haven't experienced this. Pre-pandemic it was the same for me as in I only ever did one or two interviews then got an offer. I changed jobs twice post-pandemic and it took many 10s of interviews before I found something. I'm not sure pandemic is the cause here (not saying you were saying this either), it's really after Elon bought Twitter, fired a bunch of people, and a whole bunch of other companies followed suit.
Writing is the time-honored and original work-from-anywhere profession. Hemingway famously worked from his fascinating, weird house in Key West. I suppose the creative professions in general qualify nowadays.
But historically, these WFH vocations were solitary affairs. The great literary authors didn't exactly have the ability to VC to a daily standup and wouldn't have needed to do it anyway.
What seems odd to me is a fresh wave of companies deciding, out of the blue, that remote collaboration doesn't work. That's a strange conclusion to draw given that it's worked fine for years now and we have the technology to make it better than ever.
I was just having a discussion with my friend about AI art.
Personally, I find it soulless. Same with AI writing. And it's because I know there's no person behind it. I need to know that there was someone real trying to convey something in the art.
But that's me. Some people don't care how it was made.
I wonder what percentage of the population falls into each camp.
If you plan to stay in tech.. but it's a great time to make alternative plans if you aren't committed to adapting to the changes the industry is going through. The day-to-day of tech work could be unrecognizable in 5-10 years
I want to quit, and if the world were like it was 8 years ago with my current finances, I would have already taken the sabbatical I dream about.
As it stands, I'm raking in money and saving a fair amount of it, hesitant to make any big purchases or commitments that don't involve a barndominium and a farm, with quarters for close friends in a commune.
I got hired as a consultant at a netsec company a few years ago whose stock is doing really well, and I get paid well for my region. Basically being experienced in my field of network security and being a good communicator, and generally likeable.
I'm not FIRE by any means. I could quit and live happily for a few years. But I'm have vanishing faith that I could get back into the field without a 50% paycut vs how things were five years ago.
I think more seriously now about buying a modest house, or buying land with water access and decent soil.
I just happened to see this (I’m the other moderator here). We don’t get alerted to username mentions.
It’s not really cool to post callouts like this, especially when it’s immediately after you’ve had a moderation reply. it can seem like you’re avoiding taking responsibility and are trying to deflect attention away from your own breach onto others.
The flag link is there and can be used on any comment you see that’s a breach of the guidelines.
I don't know this person, so maybe there's a greater embarrassment to him getting rejected based on his previous experience, but this is kind of a puzzling read.
He applied for 36 jobs and he cannot take the rejection? Isn't that an extremely modest amount of applications to already be claiming mental anguish? This seems like a lot of doomerism for not that much effort wasted.
Ryan is a big deal in the Ruby community. He's not imagining his accomplishments and not long ago it's reasonable to say there would have been several companies fighting for the opportunity to have him on their team.
"Applied to 36 and been rejected by 24" as in interviewed with 24 (which would be incredibly good) or been passed on by 24 which is frankly totally normal?
What we're getting now is small potatoes compared to the job market apocalypse of 2007-2009, and before that, of 2000-2003. What's different is that back then, I think you could blame the downturn on external factors outside our control and still have plenty of faith in the future of software engineering.
Now, we only have ourselves to blame: we built this technology, we enthusiastically embraced it and one-upped each other by showing how much we can vibecode. And now, we're queasy about what comes next.
In my view, probably nothing pretty. I suspect we might wake up in a society that looks much like how it used to: cancer still not cured, poverty and hunger not solved, but now with tech jobs that pay less and suck more because you're just thoughtlessly babysitting agents and are a lot more replaceable in that role.
> Now, we only have ourselves to blame: we built this technology, we enthusiastically embraced it and one-upped each other by showing how much we can vibecode.
Speak for yourself. I have never done any of this and I don't want to be associated with the people who do.
You are aware that you're posting it on HN? Over the past three years, the majority of stories and comments here were strongly pro-AI, and the community was instrumental to selling this narrative to management and to the general public. Even leaked emails from frontier labs showed that they were concerned how HN would react to certain news and tried to optimize for that.
Maybe you weren't a part of it, but I don't think any of us gets to disclaim "association".
In other professions, workers protect their own. Doctors are the best example of this. They have regulatory agencies that ensure the supply of doctors is always kept artificially low hence why there always appears to be a shortage of doctor while at the same time med school has a very high barrier to entry, it's all by design.
Software devs are the polar opposite of this.
- We have the most gruelling interview process.
- We normalize working over time with no pay (oncall).
- We openly invite people from all walks of life to join this career. To suggest any sort of minimum standards is viewed as gatekeeping. Learn to code even became a meme at one point.
- We are supposed to sound like our work is our life and even outside of working hours we're busy with side projects.
I don't know of any other career in which the workers are so brutal to each other.
I hope the current AI revolution is a wake up call.
> To suggest any sort of minimum standards is viewed as gatekeeping.
There actually was a dedicated Software Engineering PE exam (similar to other engineering fields) but it was phased out due to low turnout some years back - though the PE Electrical and Computer is still offered [3].
> Learn to code even became a meme at one point.
Yup! Remember the companies that promised they were going to retrain former blue-collar Appalachia coal miners and turn them into programmers?
> Doctors are the best example of this. They have regulatory agencies that ensure the supply of doctors is always kept artificially low hence why there always appears to be a shortage of doctor while at the same time med school has a very high barrier to entry, it's all by design.
Take a look at what you pay for health insurance and then get back to me.
According to test scores, our best and brightest don't go to med school and haven't for about 50 years. So I'm not sure the argument about restricting the number of med school slots to preserve quality really holds any water. Also, a lot of the job of being a doctor isn't all that mentally taxing. There are a lot of specific procedures to follow and having really good coordination is a big plus. Technique is required a lot more often than brilliant insight. Bedside manor doesn't hurt either. None of these things are limited by test scores. So no, it probably doesn't benefit society but it definitely benefits those that are already practicing.
I will never understand how so many intelligent people in the software industry, programmers, my colleagues, were/are so short sighted, and... perhaps selfish.
Every time I have brought up unions for the past 25 years, you get this prevalent attitude that "we" programmers have it great. Do not rock the boat.
I do not mean to pick on any one individual, but look at this comment thread from just 1 year ago.
"Yeah, look at union successes like dockworkers holding economy hostage via a legalized monopoly, while having more striking non-working members long useless due to automation than actual workers! I sure aspire to work in an industry like that." -- some hackernews user
What?
"There is not a single problem competent developers have that unions would solve" -- some hackernews user
What?
Well. Now we will all suffer. I am bitter. I will suffer because of years of shortsightedness and stubbornness and some kind of "we are ubermensch" and above all the little people who need silly little crutches like unions.
Unions, like other monopolies, are good for their members and bad for everyone else. Whether unionizing is unselfish or not is debatable, but it makes the world worse.
Unions make the world worse? What nonsense is this?
Labor unions gave us the 8 hour workday, overtime pay, child labor bans, workplace safety standards, and union shops generally earn 10-15% more than their non-union counterparts.
> The industry at the moment wants people who know how to use AI to further the business goals but here’s the thing nobody wants to admit: not one person knows how to use AI to actually do that. I use it to write a lot of my code and then I critically review that code before it reaches production.
Unfortunately I think the real sentiment here is "here's the thing I don't want to admit: I don't know how to use AI to actually do that." It's not at all clear to me that nobody knows how to utilize AI practically. It's more clear that you have to be working in an environment that values developing this capability enough to pay a lot for tokens and let employees be free to explore, within reason. Or, you have to be willing to spend a lot of free time and cash doing that yourself.
I agree with what you've written. At the same time, the article author looks like he's the kind of person that gets into the nitty gritty of the tech details given the books he's written, https://ryanbigg.com/books.
So the thing that I think is inherently super shitty is that it's likely that many of the frontier models were trained on his books. So his expertise at code and architecture details is exactly the kind of tasks that AI has gotten good at because it's been trained on work like his.
I will never get how folks can't understand the critical differences that scale implies, i.e. the differences between putting stuff out there for people to learn vs. having this info be sucked up and then be made instantly available across the entire world, where the only organization that makes any money is the one that does the sucking.
I've met a guy who went from software into being a sherpa. Taking people up the mountain for hikes. Kinda fascinating.
But this post is not representative of the state of the market. The market for tech talent is still very hard/scarce. Finding good people is very difficult. You can validate that by seeing the trend of software salaries. It's not coming down.
One day a deer friend, and brilliant engineer, called me. He asked if he could come see me at my office in San Francisco. Surprised at what this could be I simply said yes. He arrived, we chatted. He showed me his plane ticket. He quit his job that day, and that evening he was flying abroad to become a monk. Haven't talked with him in a decade. Hope he is doing well!
Reading this, I wonder if the problem is AI or the remote market. From what I've heard, here in Sydney the market is pretty hot, at least for experienced folks. My experience matches that. That said I know that remote jobs are uncommon.
> I know I can work remotely effectively because I did it for the last 6 years.
6 years means that Ryan started right around COVID. Looking back I don't think COVID was the remote renaissance that it appeared at the time, I think it was a temporary blip. That sucks, I'd much rather it was permanent, and some things have changed for the long run, but unfortunately I think this is likely a much bigger factor. Remote jobs have always been few and far between, and super competitive.
It does feel like there's been a big over-correction towards on-site --- or at least the places that want remote haven't felt the need to hire much. What's driving it? I don't get it: now that we have AI for everything, wouldn't real-time collaboration on code matter even less than it did before?
Yeah, and the rise of AI and the huge volumes of code it can create means there is more of a need to collaborate with other areas of the business on what to actually build.
I suspect it's more that few people, even at "AI" companies, understand how AI works or how to apply it. In an environment of such uncertainty, a certain class of person feels safer physically sharing a room with his colleagues: this person "read the room" and exhibit "taste" by aligning his opinions with some emerging consensus, picking up on tiny social cues to keep himself on track.
In a remote environment, by contrast, these social signals aren't as strong. Our room-taster is forced into object-level arguments. He might be revealed as ignorant. By the same token, if a company is remote, it need some established workflow to make progress. Workflow means words written down somewhere. Writing means accountability. Safer to just vibe.
In case it's not clear, I think remote work is beneficial: it forces a company to have a level of rigor it would ordinarily be able to avoid for a long time.
Remote is absolutely making things harder. From what I've seen in Melbourne, most jobs on paper require you to come to the office 2 or so days a week. Even if in reality people still work fully remote, in the interview process if you want 100% never come to the office written in to the contract they will probably pass you up for someone else.
Lot of people moved out to the regional areas during covid and plentiful remote jobs but those jobs have mostly been reeled back to the CBDs again.
In practice if they are saying 2 days a week do they really care or track that? I know people who are not formally remote but are in the office only a couple of days a month.
And looking forward, LLMs don't need an office. The tactic of demanding RTO to maintain real estate values isn't going to hold up when 8 out of 10 people are replaced by AI.
When 8 out of 10 people are replaced by AI, the offices being burned to the ground in the violent revolt is going to be a much bigger concern than the offices not being full.
I live in Portland and we've recently committed to moving back to Bay Area because of this exact reason. The remote market that made it possible for me to live here is dying. There are also not many, if any, businesses in Portland that I'd work for that pay market rate.
There was an article like a year ago about how AI was making software engineers unemployable, with a single engineer as their case study. Except the guy lived in rural NY state and only wanted to work remote.
If you're only willing to work 100% remotely then you are competing with everyone in the world. Melbourne, where OP lives, has quite a few developing markets within a few hours of timezone offset.
I also think there is a noticeable drop in the quality of the interviews on the employers side. My friends still in the bay tell me there is a noticeable drop in the quality of the people they work with in the office. Look at the languages they are asking for, they are the languages that are cheap to develop for. But software isn't manufacturing, its more like some sort of publishing. And just making something for cheap is the best way to go out of business in publishing. I suspect that will be happening in the future. I know quite a few devs like the author who instead just started their own software business. Some are doing well, others not so much. I suspect this is the future of tech and it won't be in SV.
Honestly, one of the largest expenses most companies carry that’s optional is occupancy. The next big downturn I suspect the RTO mandates based cultural vibes will look a lot less attractive when the director of finance looking for a promotion proposes to the board eliminating offices. They will point to the productivity gains during remote work, the overhead of facilities, how many people they can not lay off by eliminating overhead. All of this is very easy to wave a hand at mumbling about serendipitous moment when profits are rising, hard to ignore when losses are mounting.
To Ryan, I don’t think your frustration with the tech industry at the moment is lone. I don’t know of any one super happy right now, and I know too many people under / unemployed for long stretches. Even when you land something it’s just a miserable slog of political wrangling to erect enough body shields to protect yourself during layoffs. It’s not what it used to be.
Myself I bailed and started something with friends. We took no outside money and have a slow but growing client base that seems to value what we offer. It’s the first time in a long time I can actually do something worth while. I’ve considered teaching, or even finding a job at the library. I’m lucky enough to have been well employed for a long time now so it’s more about health insurance (thanks US health care work slave system!). But for the moment I’m enjoying building things and solving problems which is what I enjoyed anyways.
> The next big downturn I suspect the RTO mandates based cultural vibes will look a lot less attractive when the director of finance looking for a promotion proposes to the board eliminating offices. They will point to the productivity gains during remote work, the overhead of facilities, how many people they can not lay off by eliminating overhead.
Things could change in the future, but currently and historically commercial office leases tend to have really long terms that aren't very easy to get out of, which has a limiting effect on this sort of thing as a cost-cutting measure.
It’s true, typically 5-10 years. However that means in any year 20-10% are negotiating extensions. Recessions on average are 22 months long. That’s 40-20% turn over potential, and once a trend starts it’s hard to reverse when it comes to cost cutting.
In fact many large companies were already trying to downsize their footprint and adopting hotel seating and we work foot prints, encouraging work from home increasingly. The BYOD move saved a small amount compared to what was being discussed - BYOO - bring your own office. The pandemic led to a reflexive reversal in that trend due to irrational reasons, despite having already approved a decreased footprint pipeline.
I don’t think the hand wavy stuff will carry water post the next downturn. In 5 year planning many companies do for occupancy plans I can’t imagine “serendipitous water cooler moments” is going to be high on the cost cutting agenda.
But the remote jobs are the canary in the coal mine.
Return to office (or tacking on an in person requirement to a posting) is just one sign that the market has shifted in favor of capital and away from labor. That's driven by AI reducing the value of developers.
This is an experienced person that any company should be happy to hire. If this person can't easily land something, remote or otherwise, then their frustration is valid.
The job market has definitely picked up for us tech sales weirdos. Remote is okay, but travel obligations _feel_ like they're picking back up. I know that pre-sales FDEs are definitely on the road a lot.
> I’ve now applied for over 3 dozen jobs and I’ve heard back from 24 of them with a rejection.
I wouldn’t encourage anyone who wants to do something else to stay, this just read as strange to leave to me. If he wants to find a job in tech surely he could reach to many of the people he’s worked with in the past or connected with at various events before throwing in the towel.
> The industry at the moment wants people who know how to use AI to further the business goals but here’s the thing nobody wants to admit: not one person knows how to use AI to actually do that.
Of course there are people that know how to do that. If you work an office job and don't know how to do that, you'd better learn to do it fast or start learning to weld or something.
While I agree the job market is tough right now, for context OP is living in Australia in what looks like a regional town, so set expectations accordingly.
seasoned software engineers are experimenting with using AI to ship actually maintainable software with varying degrees of success (i am doing it, my peers are doing it. it actually can work. it requires immense budget and organizational support for experimentation)
patterns and best practices will emerge. old stuff will be rediscovered. some hard earned wisdom and knowledge will become obsolete while other hard earned wisdom and knowledge will be more valuable than ever.
some good "traditional" software engineers make terrible "AI-engineers" (or whatever the term will be) and will either grow and learn, try to fake it as long as they can, or leave.
lots of us will leave the industry because we're tired. we dont want this new thing. we will realize that our passion and pride in our work was not really valued by employers. the value was us shipping shit that generates revenue for them.
the interview treadmill is fucking soul crushing.
we will leave and take 75% pay cuts. but our mindspace will belong to us again. we will struggle, but we will be happier.
All 24 of those jobs the author was rejected from likely went to 24 other people who just got hired. I doubt they'd be saying the tech market is cooked. It's more competitive than ever, but that's not the same as cooked.
Looking over the author's achievements, they are great but it's not clear for instance how those kind of things would help at our company, and I'm sure other companies would think the same. We don't care about Ruby or even Javascript... AI has made experience with programming languages more as a footnote rather than a core feature of a resume.
I hope the author will rebrand themselves for the AI era rather than just leave the tech industry entirely. Times are changing, we need good people.
at my last job I joined in 2022 and was one of the last to get an allowance to pay for most of a nice desk. the policy stopped soon after. meanwhile my current role I began this year has no policy whatsoever.
I have well over 1,000 applications I tracked over the years I've worked in the industry. (Started keeping track in 2014) I've interviewed at hundreds of places. I don't think I've ever interviewed at less than 50 places before getting a reasonable job offer. I have to study leetcode and system design religiously (I've solved over a thousand over the years) before I even apply for one job.
You're telling me you applied for 40 jobs and gave up? Maybe this industry isn't for you then. Have fun in retirement.
Software development is indeed “cooked”, other tech industries are soon to follow, unfortunately, developers or engineers shot themselves in their foot and failed to guard their profession the same way how healthcare and legal ones did (other white collars jobs). They were too obsessed with automating (and then later AI) their jobs that the decision makers had an aha moment and realized that they don’t even need them anymore. Honestly, I am not so sure why, is it short sighted vision and just focus in the process? Is it too passionate about their work? Or just sheer stupidity? No idea, but years ago I was in a family gathering and a 19yo relative just started her receptionist job, she was excited about it and after knowing what she actually does, I suggested that most of her job can be done through a google form where customers fill it before they call, to make it easier on her, and I remember her saying: yes, but then they will fire me!!
it's an arm race, everyone know exactly what that would lead to, including people in the frontier labs; but the mindset is "if it's not you then other will do, so better you're the first comer to the party so you can still get the best part of the cake"
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 44.3 ms ] threadOne idea would be for the author to ask questions here that they think the answers of will be good input into their reasoning process.
If those are you priors, 36 rejected applications is going to hurt.
That's why you haven't experienced this. Pre-pandemic it was the same for me as in I only ever did one or two interviews then got an offer. I changed jobs twice post-pandemic and it took many 10s of interviews before I found something. I'm not sure pandemic is the cause here (not saying you were saying this either), it's really after Elon bought Twitter, fired a bunch of people, and a whole bunch of other companies followed suit.
I’m all ears, so please let me know
But historically, these WFH vocations were solitary affairs. The great literary authors didn't exactly have the ability to VC to a daily standup and wouldn't have needed to do it anyway.
What seems odd to me is a fresh wave of companies deciding, out of the blue, that remote collaboration doesn't work. That's a strange conclusion to draw given that it's worked fine for years now and we have the technology to make it better than ever.
Personally, I find it soulless. Same with AI writing. And it's because I know there's no person behind it. I need to know that there was someone real trying to convey something in the art.
But that's me. Some people don't care how it was made.
I wonder what percentage of the population falls into each camp.
As it stands, I'm raking in money and saving a fair amount of it, hesitant to make any big purchases or commitments that don't involve a barndominium and a farm, with quarters for close friends in a commune.
I'm not FIRE by any means. I could quit and live happily for a few years. But I'm have vanishing faith that I could get back into the field without a 50% paycut vs how things were five years ago.
I think more seriously now about buying a modest house, or buying land with water access and decent soil.
Sorry is this a troll? Go check out the SWE subreddits, people are sending out 1000s of applications before they get something.
It’s not really cool to post callouts like this, especially when it’s immediately after you’ve had a moderation reply. it can seem like you’re avoiding taking responsibility and are trying to deflect attention away from your own breach onto others.
The flag link is there and can be used on any comment you see that’s a breach of the guidelines.
He applied for 36 jobs and he cannot take the rejection? Isn't that an extremely modest amount of applications to already be claiming mental anguish? This seems like a lot of doomerism for not that much effort wasted.
I didn't suggest that.
Workers near the end of their career retire. Those who have options in other fields switch. People in it for the money go to the next money maker.
This individual is telling us they really don’t need a job very badly and is part of supply coming back in balance.
Now, we only have ourselves to blame: we built this technology, we enthusiastically embraced it and one-upped each other by showing how much we can vibecode. And now, we're queasy about what comes next.
In my view, probably nothing pretty. I suspect we might wake up in a society that looks much like how it used to: cancer still not cured, poverty and hunger not solved, but now with tech jobs that pay less and suck more because you're just thoughtlessly babysitting agents and are a lot more replaceable in that role.
Speak for yourself. I have never done any of this and I don't want to be associated with the people who do.
Maybe you weren't a part of it, but I don't think any of us gets to disclaim "association".
Software devs are the polar opposite of this.
- We have the most gruelling interview process.
- We normalize working over time with no pay (oncall).
- We openly invite people from all walks of life to join this career. To suggest any sort of minimum standards is viewed as gatekeeping. Learn to code even became a meme at one point.
- We are supposed to sound like our work is our life and even outside of working hours we're busy with side projects.
I don't know of any other career in which the workers are so brutal to each other.
I hope the current AI revolution is a wake up call.
There actually was a dedicated Software Engineering PE exam (similar to other engineering fields) but it was phased out due to low turnout some years back - though the PE Electrical and Computer is still offered [3].
> Learn to code even became a meme at one point.
Yup! Remember the companies that promised they were going to retrain former blue-collar Appalachia coal miners and turn them into programmers?
[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/12/us/mined-minds-west-virgi...
[2] - http://archive.today/nsEHE
[3] - https://ncees.org/exams/pe-exam/electrical-and-computer/
This is like, really bad for society though?
According to test scores, our best and brightest don't go to med school and haven't for about 50 years. So I'm not sure the argument about restricting the number of med school slots to preserve quality really holds any water. Also, a lot of the job of being a doctor isn't all that mentally taxing. There are a lot of specific procedures to follow and having really good coordination is a big plus. Technique is required a lot more often than brilliant insight. Bedside manor doesn't hurt either. None of these things are limited by test scores. So no, it probably doesn't benefit society but it definitely benefits those that are already practicing.
Every time I have brought up unions for the past 25 years, you get this prevalent attitude that "we" programmers have it great. Do not rock the boat.
I do not mean to pick on any one individual, but look at this comment thread from just 1 year ago.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44485959
"Yeah, look at union successes like dockworkers holding economy hostage via a legalized monopoly, while having more striking non-working members long useless due to automation than actual workers! I sure aspire to work in an industry like that." -- some hackernews user
What?
"There is not a single problem competent developers have that unions would solve" -- some hackernews user
What?
Well. Now we will all suffer. I am bitter. I will suffer because of years of shortsightedness and stubbornness and some kind of "we are ubermensch" and above all the little people who need silly little crutches like unions.
Labor unions gave us the 8 hour workday, overtime pay, child labor bans, workplace safety standards, and union shops generally earn 10-15% more than their non-union counterparts.
ie Blizzard's CWA - it's scary to think about for many workers, so most people didn't bother to look up the details.
Unfortunately I think the real sentiment here is "here's the thing I don't want to admit: I don't know how to use AI to actually do that." It's not at all clear to me that nobody knows how to utilize AI practically. It's more clear that you have to be working in an environment that values developing this capability enough to pay a lot for tokens and let employees be free to explore, within reason. Or, you have to be willing to spend a lot of free time and cash doing that yourself.
So the thing that I think is inherently super shitty is that it's likely that many of the frontier models were trained on his books. So his expertise at code and architecture details is exactly the kind of tasks that AI has gotten good at because it's been trained on work like his.
I will never get how folks can't understand the critical differences that scale implies, i.e. the differences between putting stuff out there for people to learn vs. having this info be sucked up and then be made instantly available across the entire world, where the only organization that makes any money is the one that does the sucking.
But this post is not representative of the state of the market. The market for tech talent is still very hard/scarce. Finding good people is very difficult. You can validate that by seeing the trend of software salaries. It's not coming down.
> I know I can work remotely effectively because I did it for the last 6 years.
6 years means that Ryan started right around COVID. Looking back I don't think COVID was the remote renaissance that it appeared at the time, I think it was a temporary blip. That sucks, I'd much rather it was permanent, and some things have changed for the long run, but unfortunately I think this is likely a much bigger factor. Remote jobs have always been few and far between, and super competitive.
being a software engineer means more than just coding.
In a remote environment, by contrast, these social signals aren't as strong. Our room-taster is forced into object-level arguments. He might be revealed as ignorant. By the same token, if a company is remote, it need some established workflow to make progress. Workflow means words written down somewhere. Writing means accountability. Safer to just vibe.
In case it's not clear, I think remote work is beneficial: it forces a company to have a level of rigor it would ordinarily be able to avoid for a long time.
Lot of people moved out to the regional areas during covid and plentiful remote jobs but those jobs have mostly been reeled back to the CBDs again.
And looking forward, LLMs don't need an office. The tactic of demanding RTO to maintain real estate values isn't going to hold up when 8 out of 10 people are replaced by AI.
It’s a 2020 anomaly that’s gone. You need a relationship developed from in person working years to get it.
All low engagement employees want to work remote. But not all remote workers are low engagement. How do you properly position yourself?
To Ryan, I don’t think your frustration with the tech industry at the moment is lone. I don’t know of any one super happy right now, and I know too many people under / unemployed for long stretches. Even when you land something it’s just a miserable slog of political wrangling to erect enough body shields to protect yourself during layoffs. It’s not what it used to be.
Myself I bailed and started something with friends. We took no outside money and have a slow but growing client base that seems to value what we offer. It’s the first time in a long time I can actually do something worth while. I’ve considered teaching, or even finding a job at the library. I’m lucky enough to have been well employed for a long time now so it’s more about health insurance (thanks US health care work slave system!). But for the moment I’m enjoying building things and solving problems which is what I enjoyed anyways.
Things could change in the future, but currently and historically commercial office leases tend to have really long terms that aren't very easy to get out of, which has a limiting effect on this sort of thing as a cost-cutting measure.
In fact many large companies were already trying to downsize their footprint and adopting hotel seating and we work foot prints, encouraging work from home increasingly. The BYOD move saved a small amount compared to what was being discussed - BYOO - bring your own office. The pandemic led to a reflexive reversal in that trend due to irrational reasons, despite having already approved a decreased footprint pipeline.
I don’t think the hand wavy stuff will carry water post the next downturn. In 5 year planning many companies do for occupancy plans I can’t imagine “serendipitous water cooler moments” is going to be high on the cost cutting agenda.
Return to office (or tacking on an in person requirement to a posting) is just one sign that the market has shifted in favor of capital and away from labor. That's driven by AI reducing the value of developers.
This is an experienced person that any company should be happy to hire. If this person can't easily land something, remote or otherwise, then their frustration is valid.
I wouldn’t encourage anyone who wants to do something else to stay, this just read as strange to leave to me. If he wants to find a job in tech surely he could reach to many of the people he’s worked with in the past or connected with at various events before throwing in the towel.
Of course there are people that know how to do that. If you work an office job and don't know how to do that, you'd better learn to do it fast or start learning to weld or something.
patterns and best practices will emerge. old stuff will be rediscovered. some hard earned wisdom and knowledge will become obsolete while other hard earned wisdom and knowledge will be more valuable than ever.
some good "traditional" software engineers make terrible "AI-engineers" (or whatever the term will be) and will either grow and learn, try to fake it as long as they can, or leave.
lots of us will leave the industry because we're tired. we dont want this new thing. we will realize that our passion and pride in our work was not really valued by employers. the value was us shipping shit that generates revenue for them.
the interview treadmill is fucking soul crushing.
we will leave and take 75% pay cuts. but our mindspace will belong to us again. we will struggle, but we will be happier.
Most of those employers are not valued by anybody... The big secret is they (mgmt) are the most replaceable here...
Of course they will say, well they have the money, and I suppose that is true, for now...
All 24 of those jobs the author was rejected from likely went to 24 other people who just got hired. I doubt they'd be saying the tech market is cooked. It's more competitive than ever, but that's not the same as cooked.
Looking over the author's achievements, they are great but it's not clear for instance how those kind of things would help at our company, and I'm sure other companies would think the same. We don't care about Ruby or even Javascript... AI has made experience with programming languages more as a footnote rather than a core feature of a resume.
I hope the author will rebrand themselves for the AI era rather than just leave the tech industry entirely. Times are changing, we need good people.
You're telling me you applied for 40 jobs and gave up? Maybe this industry isn't for you then. Have fun in retirement.