Jobs and Software Is Fucked

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).

> I closed my linkedin, and I went to go work in the trades as a diesel mechanic.

Love it! A score of years ago, I considered being an auto mechanic after graduating HS but then ended up back in CompSci.

Did you have to go back to school? Did you find a shop that would take you in as an apprentice? And if they did, how did you convince them you can/will be good at the job?

> I'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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Also, never, ever give more of a shit about things than the people leading the effort. Doesn't matter if that's a for-profit enterprise, a FLOSS project, or just a way to pass the time.

You cannot and will not force them to care more. Don't waste your time on Earth trying to do so.

This may seem all well and good, but let's consider some basic logical mileposts and outcomes:

There will continue to be a glut of available software engineers and techies. Some will, maybe, transition to an AI field; some will get disgusted; some just won't be able to get work.

Jobs of some sort in tech might possibly be available, but 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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

>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.

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

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.

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.

> 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.

>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.

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!

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

> 5 months to land another contract that only lasted 6 months

My god this is insanity

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.

Getting through an interview process during a bull market has always had a small random component. I think we all have to understand and accept that in bear hiring markets, almost the entire component is random. Having a perfect skill quiz or hackerrank score and getting rejected should not cause you to try to figure out what you did wrong.

> The job market is insane at this point and I am not sure what the recruiters are actually looking for.

To justify their own jobs.

In theory there's never been a better time to hire on SWE talent. There are lots and lots of candidates who rode high during the COVID hiring wave, took on debt based on a high income, got fired, and now need money.

But hiring isn't picking up. You have a bunch of people in the HR industry who realize that for the most part, the combination of candidate filtering, ML, and a basic tech interview process could probably do their jobs. So they have to make the process as byzantine and difficult as possible to be able to go to the suits and say "look at all of these low-quality candidates we kept out!"

> I guess this is one of these times we read on history books: great unemployement.

The good/bad news is that if this continues, there will be either a regression to the mean or a massive de-stablization of most societies. You can't kick most of the working-age population out of their jobs.

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

Best of luck!

why not start looking for customers before quitting?

Don't leave unless you have something lined up lol

I feel like this advice is not very useful because when you call yourself a software engineer or programmer, you are doing it in order to sell a service.

Your customers are companies looking for someone to slot into a box called "software engineer" and so you sell yourself as such. Nothing wrong with that.

We should also note who Patrick was at the time. He was an SEO consultant and in general a business development expert. It just also happened that he was able to code. And he was very very early to the field. An SEO expert was barely a thing.

So if your only skill is software development, then of course you would call yourself that. And if your main skill is SEO or some other marketing channel, then you call yourself that.

I think the real takeaway from the advice "don't call yourself a programmer" is to search the market for higher paid opportunities, where you can still leverage coding. And you can call yourself a programmer while doing so.

>Engineers in particular are usually very highly paid Cost Centers, which sets MBA’s optimization antennae to twitching. This is what brings us wonderful ideas like outsourcing, which is “Let’s replace really expensive Cost Centers who do some magic which we kinda need but don’t really care about with less expensive Cost Centers in a lower wage country”. (Quick sidenote: You can absolutely ignore outsourcing as a career threat if you read the rest of this guide.) Nobody ever outsources Profit Centers. Attempting to do so would be the setup for MBA humor. It’s like suggesting replacing your source control system with a bunch of copies maintained on floppy disks.

Really good stuff haha.

EDIT: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pr...

* cite

> There is always a period of chaos before normalization.

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

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

I work in an industry tangentially involved with the ML build-out (think companies like Broadcom, Marvell, etc.). We can't find enough people, if you have like 3+ years of experience with PCIe, Ethernet, DDR, you're a shoe in. Verification, Validation, Design, Customer Applications, Firmware, you name it, we need it. The pay is good too, especially for people who got in a year ago or more, stock base compensation has taken off like a rocket.

Hiring here is a little bit more old school, I guess? Especially because the types of roles we are hiring now are usually 5+ years of experience, we focus more on learning about what the candidates have done in the past, the leetcode type of question interview is just a small part, and matters more for prospective Jr. hires.

That being said, we aren't hiring that many fresh graduates anymore, we already have some we hired, we're focused on investing in them, getting them to learn more about our hardware and code, etc. and hoping to retain them.

I 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.

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

Anecdotally I've seen the latter to be true and have had third-party recruiters echo that familiarity with AI use in coding has become a pivotal part of job interviews with startups.

That being said, I'm not sure how much job security having such prowess would convey because I feel AI will be better than us at that too eventually (if not already).

I'm starting a new job in a few weeks, and can confirm (for startups at least) experience with coding agents is something companies are looking for. Multiple companies I interviewed with had a AI assisted interview session to go along with a more typical closed book programming session. I was asked about my use of coding agents in behavioral interviews. I'm not an ML guy, just a generalist SWE with 4 YOE. I only got one offer in my search, but it only took ~a month and I feel pretty good about being able to get more offers with more searching. It helps that I'm young, no dependents, and willing to relocate.

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.

>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.

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).

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.

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?