So many cycles of irrational exuberance followed by contraction, followed by...
If you're passionate about this work and having trouble getting paid for it, remember:
You don't need anyone's permission to start solving problems.
The last time I looked, we weren't running low on problems that need to be solved.
Every contraction I've seen hurts some really good folks, but mostly weeds out the poseurs and wannabe's, the parasites and bureaucrats, while those of us who make, just get back to the business of making.
So, as a soon to be new grad with tens of thousands in debt, limited real-world experience (~1yr), zero sales skills, no health insurance and no savings/safety net, what am I supposed to do? How do I even start in "the business of making" suffocating in debt and getting evicted within a few months? I'd love to go solo. Due to some health problems, early morning shifts (9-5, 8-4) are almost totally unfeasible for me, so even in a good job market my options in traditional work are more limited. But I just don't have the money to bootstrap a business, much less learn sales skills and everything else while my student loan repayment grace period runs out.
Because my experience is exclusively limited to software dev, I'm also getting rejected from positions in retail, and if I try to "dumb down" my resume, I'll have nothing but a blank page.
Seriously, any advice would be appreciated. I feel stuck.
Entry level retail jobs typically don’t need a lot of stuff on your resume. I remember when I was applying for my first job my dad would tell me to note things like having a reliable car. It’s mostly about if you’re actually going to show up, and if you don’t steal from them, that’s a bonus.
But don’t give up on software just because of some bad articles. Trends are trends, you only need to get one job. A lot of companies like to bring in college grads as a way to save money as they push out more seasoned people, while also bringing in new ideas and more modern approaches (for better or worse).
Also, think beyond “tech” companies. Nearly every business out there could benefit from a developer, and most don’t have anything at all.
Specifically, that all (most of) the companies doing layoffs (or RTO like Amazon, designed to force their high-agency folks to quit) hired like gangbusters during the pandemic is sick as shit.
This is being spun as a great anti-worker effort, but these companies have been mindlessly attached to cycles of hiring-at-all-costs regardless of reason. There's some upside to that, yes, for the workers, but the tale of grimdark no-tech despair we are hearing right now are so so out of line versus reality. It's to all the fatcat's advantage to spin this as dark days for workers, but this massive massive reflexive over hiring was an unprecedented boom, which does not necessarily imply a a bust, especially when these companies so carelessly are willing to shed their known great talent to mobilize against workers.
what problems that are solvable with software are out there? Most problems society faces today is too much entertainment, too much technology, not enough peace quiet and solitude, low quality subscription slop.
Most problems in society today require less tech, less software, and better quality hardware.
Make better software that solves problems. It doesn’t have to be new, just cheaper, faster, or a better UX. Offer your services to a local small business that is running on Excel spreadsheets and duct tape. Provide paid support for an open source project that you help maintain and develop. There are tons of opportunities outside Silicon Valley.
Genuinely, how much would this even pay? If you’re someone who was/is at faang and you’ve got a $2m mortgage - you’re gonna just bootstrap a $500k+/yr salary from the get go?
This sentiment feels like something that maybe works in parts of Europe or BFE where a house is still $80k.
Boot camp coders are an artifact of the low interest rate environment. Until we see low interest rates again, it's unlikely that there will be a significant market for people with superficial experience in Software Engineering.
Zirp drove demand of low quality code. LLMs drive supply. Bootcampers are being squeezed on both sides, and remote work adds foreign competition on all levels of competency.
Zirp also drove supply of capital. Inflated cloud and now gpu farm business. In the absence of gpu farms churning out code, it drove demand for bootcampers. If normal interest rates deflate supply of capital, it will also deflate supply of automatically produced low quality code, so it should be possible that normal interest rates actually accelerate a reverse to mean as in structural demand for low quality code supplied by bootcampers primarily.
Inflated pay for low quality code was an artifact of zirp. Supply and demand should settle at a place where bootcampers are not getting rich anymore which sounds more normal.
I was successful using llms to greatly help me on writing tests, on the front-end for simple components (they cant understand simple FSM we use on our page), or on the back-end to write what I would call 'gadgets' functions (I know, sec people, it's not what gadget really are, sorry), but as soon as you have a bit of complexity or domain-specific knowledge, they fall on their face. In the end, I might be 10-20% more effective now that I know in which cases llms are helpful, but clearly they won't replace anybody soon, as long as your product is complex enough.
If anything, AI investor FOMO is probably having a fairly positive effect on hiring, but nonetheless it's a good scapegoat if you want to wage a war on tech worker compensation and keep it on the down low.
If anything, once people wrap their head around AI they will realize the enormous amount of development required to leverage it. This is a whole new opportunity. I'm just worried about the non-technical people (the business) being able to understand and capitalize on it. So much change, yet again.
Was that his solution for getting a job or do you think he was marketing himself? Did it work? Is he featured in a WSJ article? Do you think that helped get his name out more than clicking Easy Apply on LinkedIn?
Also anecdotal, but I’m in the advertising industry and all our clients are blowing up our phones right now trying to book more projects. I think it was the rate cut.
Personally I'm much more worried about AI than a one time decline in demand. Pieces of what's necessary to create a competent software engineering agent are starting to fall into place.
Tech jobs are drying up but like the article says - if you’ve got some serious qualifications in AI - you can get paid 2-4x the amount of other engineers. 7 figure comp is not uncommon for people in AI. It’s also the one type of tech worker that they cannot seem to get enough of.
It’s no surprise that the grifters in my professional network all shifted to AI stuff 2-3 years ago. The people who wanted to deliver genuine and good work have all (foolishly?) stayed the same - the folks who chase fame and money all shifted to AI.
I’ve been on “sabbatical” for 2.5 years. I saw the downturn and decided to not work. I figured we’d be back to normal by now but considering FB just rescinded my offer - we’re far from it.
I’m late to this thread, but my money is against the grifters. There is much to be said of technicians who k ow their craft and have solid experience and wisdom. I don’t think those of us who are in our 40s or 50s have anything to worry about. Time will tell, though.
Clickbait. Yes, there is a shift but it has little to nothing to do with AI. While there are entire companies getting hyped about generative networks and LLM's(read "managers thinking they will get a fleet of devs for little to no money"), those are the exception and will go extinct sooner or later - I can name a few off the top of my head.
There was a huge boom around Covid, sure, when infrastructure was clearly not ready to cope with the demand so as many people had to be dragged into the equation. There were also companies aggressively hiring tech people partially because of the demand but also to establish a monopoly. And the rise of one-online-course developer programs was the cherry on top. That was bound to collapse and Musk's campaign over at Twitter gave everyone the confidence that there's no need for anyone but a few managers and prompt "engineers". And we are reaching the "find out" part for all players involved.
If you are a tech worker with skills, then you have absolutely nothing to worry about: AI can only write trivial code which normally would be thrown at an intern - stuff like "write a function that takes in a hashmap containing key-value mappings and a second hashmap to swap out the said keys", which you will likely still need to tweak to make it safe. But for any serious or critical code, if you are relying on a LLM to do the logic for you, you are basically walking around blindfolded, holding a loaded gun pointed at your head. Sadly I know a lot of people who actively do that exact thing.
The other part is that the market is over-saturated with products that no one needs. How many more social medias do you need? None. How many more trading platforms? None. How many more messenger apps? None? Dating apps? None. Yet new, "revolutionary" ones pop out daily. Guess how many of them fail? Their marketing campaign was "blockchain" 5 years ago. Now it's "ai". My coffee machine needs neither of those, who are you trying to sell this to?
When it comes to the tech sector, people should understand that this is not a bottomless pit and it all boils down to a finite amount of people that will use your product(consciously or not). And by implications you need a finite amount of tech workers. The jobs have not dried up, it's partially normalization after the Covid hype and to a lesser degree managers thinking AI will do their tech work - the same people who have become Musk cult members. I used to work for one and guess what - the company he founded in 2017 with very noble intentions and received a really good funding is collapsing cause they are unable to roll out a product. Those are bound to fail either way.
As for courses - there are talented people who have only done a bunch of those, but they are the extreme exception and realistically most of the people who enrolled in those were simply there because they thought that's a cheap ticket to a 6-figure salary.
This I agree with, but one thing I think should be added.
If you are over 50 years old (maybe 40), your job is probably in danger. Read up on Age Discrimination if in the US. IBM is in the process if having a stealth firing, most people being let go are over 50:
If we presume that's true, other than socking away an emergency fund, and diversifying out of the stock market, what else are we to do? Something that large bursting is going to affect the rest of the economy, so there's no place to hide. The Cassandra effect, if you will.
I can't say about the US. That's not so much of an issue here on the other end of the pond, if anything people are increasingly distancing themselves from the 20-30 age group. I've had my experience with them and a large chunk of them are insufferable. A notable example - one had a complete meltdown when he was told that go is not a low level language(and being the one that said it, I was his biggest enemy) :D
It pains me to say this, but I agree with you on the subject of AI. I think people are wildly misusing it and creating yet another bubble. It is good at digesting and sifting through data but it's terrible at providing good solutions and people are using it for the latter. I've been actively using it for months at work specifically for sifting through large, completely unstructured documents and pull out the relevant data from them and it has done wonders. So much so that the management has invested in some beefy GPUs for the occasion. And by beefy I do mean BEEFY, coming from someone who owns 2 * 24GB VRAM nvidias for personal usage. I also feel like the day when new models become a rare and unexpected occurrences is not far.
If you worked for a venture backed startup between 2018 and 2021, you saw the massive growth. Engineering teams doubling every 6 months. New teams spinning up left and right. Excess amounts of junior/boot camp developers. DEI/Employee experience/People Ops teams standing around doing nothing. I for one welcome the steady more tactical approach to hiring.
Decades of experience does not equal an old COBOL programmer. Personally I'm pretty up to date, with latest backend and some frontend frameworks and languages, rails, next, rust, clojure, etc, and even quite a bit of self-studied Torch, LLM tuning, plenty of mentoring, team-leadership and so on, and extensive system-design in enterprise, investment banks, etc.
I do have the disadvantage of living in a 'developing nation' while being a westerner (therefore expecting more than a rice-bowl salary).
But you can think it through step by step.
No-one is hiring, therefore no-one is getting hired, regardless of skills or experience. Meanwhile, it takes time to clear the decks and for sentiment to improve.
So you are right about the vagaries and dis-function of "the market".
Management typically doesn't have the engineering chops or in-the-trenches experience to properly discern "low value" engineers from "high value" engineers.
I doubt being able to solve real problems for other people by using technology is a skill that will go obsolete any time soon.
Unfortunately at the moment we have several trends in the industry that interfere with matching up people who have real problems and people who can figure out how to solve them.
Years of cheap money have flooded the industry with low-skilled workers, completely broken recruitment, destroyed any kind of trust between employers and employees, and created astronomical expectations of compensation in some parts of the industry that were never competitive outside their own bubble.
Then there are the hype cycles. Right now the big one is AI. As usual there are plenty of people in management positions who don't really understand the issues at all but have delusional expectations of game changing results that will let them dramatically downsize their teams without losing effectiveness. Obviously sooner or later they'll learn or they'll fail but in the meantime it's another barrier to good people finding good problems to solve and getting real work done.
If you're good and you're looking for interesting work then I suggest considering smaller employers. The era of the Big Tech free lunch is over and it's probably not coming back any time soon. Meanwhile there are people all over the place still trying to solve important problems who will value experienced colleagues who can get things done.
I definitely saw the overhiring with junior devs, but I also saw those junior guys take over a couple of shops just by sheer numbers.
They were more willing and able to deliver shit fast (which management obviously loved) at the expense of making terrible architecture choices that really crippled productivity in the medium/long run.
So, from management's perspective, you have like... a bunch of younger cheaper people getting more done. What's not to love?
If you're passionate about this work and having trouble getting paid for it, remember:
You don't need anyone's permission to start solving problems.
The last time I looked, we weren't running low on problems that need to be solved.
Every contraction I've seen hurts some really good folks, but mostly weeds out the poseurs and wannabe's, the parasites and bureaucrats, while those of us who make, just get back to the business of making.