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.
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.
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.
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. This is especially true of MNC with a strong presence in APAC.
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.
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.
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 can "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 needs 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, remote work is beneficial: it forces a company to develop a level of rigor that helps it interface better with reality.
Every alleged "collaboration" efficiency the in-person model produces comes at the cost of enlarging a pile of accumulating social-technology debt incurred by substituting vibing, room-reading, and charisma for writing, debate, and accountability.
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.
It is, unfortunately, a numbers game (unless you have connections)
In 2024 I applied to ~100 jobs and was rejected or ghosted by the vast majority. It's not a reflection of your ability. Finding a job is strangely difficult even if you are more than capable.
> 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.
If the author had this developed this level of certainty in the face of profound gaps of information, they might as well just apply to jobs disguised as a post-singularity AI escaping their sandbox exclusively to remotely co-work with you in particular!
With programming becoming boring and AI looming, my almost finished electricians' education from high school does come to mind from time to time.
A friend of mine ended up actually becoming an electrician, and its clear there's a shortage of able-minded people in that industry. In Norway electrician is one of those "never amounted to anything so this is the last resort" jobs, even if it shouldn't be. Simply by being able to follow instructions you beat most of the competition. The pay isn't half bad (around average national pay) and there are plenty jobs that require you to use your brain and vary wildly in what you do from day to day. Sounds like a lot of fun.
I think this is a bad plan B, but maybe just because I don't think a good plan B exists.
Do you know what everyone has told me about the end of software? Get into the skilled trades. Become an electrician, welder, plumber etc...
For a couple of years, if you're experienced you'll probably do well. But 5 years from now every displaced SWE and white collar worker will have their apprenticeship.
Do you need to work as an apprentice for 2 years before you get that electrician license in your country? In many states of US, it ranges from 1 year to four years.
In many European countries you don't need a license for being an electrician, you may need to register somewhere although that won't be very hard. But you do need to follow the national rules and guidelines while working, which is why an education or applying to a large firm where they'll teach you on the job is not a bad idea.
Highly experienced people in tech centers like SF, NYC, Boston are struggling so I can't imagine anyone would be looking to hire in a small city in Australia.
Add to that time-zone issues and a very small local market.
I wish you the best but in the nicest way possible, insisting on fully remote work in a random city in Australia will likely narrow your options and make you less attractive to potential employers.
You will find something, I really hope so, but it will just take a lot longer.
Getting a 24 out of 36 response rate on your applications is an S tier level response rate. I mean, the news is bad (rejection), but that is pretty incredible.
I can't make up my mind if that means he is so good that actual human beings look at his profile, or some sort of ATS filtering system just hard rejects him with prejudice.
I'm at 33 rejections 7 ghosts in my currents job search, is getting a rejection abnormal? I haven't really ever done a high volume search like I am currently doing so I have no context.
It's not the rejections that are abnormal, but the total response rate. 66% is a very good response rate. My very long job search has a 21% response rate.
It looks to me like a really unfortunate intersection between his personal brand - a deep expert on technical details - and the part of the job that at least, perception-wise, people think is completely solved by AI now. Nobody thinks they need a deep expert in Ruby, or JavaScript or any language now. If anything, people may believe over-expert people will be less accepting of AI developed code. It is slightly better for people at the product or architecture level because there's at least some presumption the models need direction on those fronts. It hurts because it isn't the slightest bit rational or fair, but everything is perception now.
You can do what all our applicants did - just have AI answer all of our interview questions for you, and collect a couple paycheques until we finally fire you. Rinse and repeat.
I mean ... don't do that. But we have been BOMBARDED with this, literally 100% of our pipeline was fake until we rejigged it a bunch. I wonder how much of peoples challenges are just that the scammers are making the job hunting environment a market for lemons?
I also make music and would also love to know what alternatives the author is exploring (as a Rubyist I'm very familiar with Ryan).
I've been unemployed for 8 months but I'm pretty ok with money, am single with no children, so I can keep up unemployment for at least another couple of years. I'd rather not, of course, but it's been very fun hanging out with my dog and recording music. I got my 4-tracks serviced and have gone back to those which has been very fun and rewarding... for one it's made it so I can cut out screen-time while recording! Has other benefits too.
But ya... uh, I dunno, stream-of-conscious there since your comment resonated, I don't have much of substance to offer.
The reality is that there is a huge fracture at the middle of the market.
On the one side companies want people to go to an office and struggle to find good people. On the other side good people want to work remote and struggle to find good companies.
My email and LinkedIn are as full as ever with recruiters trying to hire me for positions I’m not really excited about. At my workplace (FAANG) we get tons of applications but very few of them are any good.
When I apply to remote roles I can’t get an offer because I am competing with hundreds of other applicants and companies can pick someone with the exact expertise they’re looking for.
> 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.
You've applied to only 36 jobs? Where I'm from the norm is to apply to at least 150-200 jobs and you hear back from about 10% of them. Out of which you probably clear 50%. Spray and pray.
I am pretty torn on remote work and I say that as someone that benefits pretty greatly from it. Between remoteness and the rise of AI, I feel like there is basically no social interaction anymore, and I would be curious to see what an in person environment with AI looks like. It may be awful, but I am just curious. I know it won’t be a popular opinion.
Yeah, pairing in Zoom or Gather just doesn't make a lot of sense when one person is just typing things in Claude Code. Also the other person can't review code at that pace. So pairing is basically dead with AI (assisted) coding.
I agree, I have not paired in a while, but I am actually curious if there is a place for 2 or more people to collaborate on prompts and prototyping in real time. It’s not necessarily for code quality but just making sure the output is starting in a good place. Not all the time, but every once in a while, could make for some interesting learning.
> It never made sense anyway for two people to do the work of one
Disagree, pairing has helped me in the past to reach answers more quickly and at the same time means that more than one person is familiar with a codebase (which is a helps reduce bus factor)
> 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.
Pure remote roles are very hard to get if you don’t already have an in with the team. Letting someone you know and trust work remotely is very different than just hiring someone cold remotely.
Yes there will be the “but we’re a fully remote company and it works great” posts but for the time being cold applying remote puts one at a significant disadvantage in the market and that’s just the reality. About the only thing worse you could put on a CV currently is that you need visa sponsorship.
I target students. (My books are for sale, but PDF downloads are free, no ads.) There's still a need there since AI, as powerful as it is, isn't as good as humans at explaining things.
And if they take that away eventually, I'll still write because that's the best way to learn something.
But yes, what of AOCP? Sad that people aren't giving a shit about it any longer.
I like to think that the most hirable engineers will be the ones who learned to code. Partly because they know how to read code, but mostly because they used that experience to become superior problem-solvers.
I'm really sorry to hear that you're going through this. Any company would be lucky to have you on their team.
My strong suggestion to you: pivot to hardware. I still use Ruby but most of my development efforts are ESP32-P4 and RP2350-based these days.
Learning CAD and mastering various additive and subtractive fabrication techniques, getting PCBs made to make ideas real... it's been a roller coaster but LLMs are remarkably good as engineering mentors these days.
And yes, as several others have already said, this might be the time to learn woodworking and/or video production skills.
You'll find that you still need your programming brain, instincts and intuitions. You just deploy them in a different way in support of creating a device instead of an experience [or yet another CRUD form].
I understand why you think that this is a valid point in this context, but 95% of what's hard about creating a thing you can hold in your hands does not happen in KiCAD.
> I’ve now applied for over 3 dozen jobs and I’ve heard back from 24 of them with a rejection
> I cannot continue to put myself through this process of rejection
Need to pump those numbers up, those are rookie numbers. Just kidding, but coming from India, that seems a really small number. We probably have a lot more competition, though, so maybe my views are skewed. I'm also surprised that they haven't even mentioned their network... someone with that amount of experience must be knowing people who can help out.
I applied for more jobs, have heard radio silence more than rejections (forget acceptances), and am still somehow in tech, whatever it means these days.
I keep seeing people pining for the old days. Those days are gone. And even if they came back, it's unlikely that life will be as good, because the entire world economy is in a different state than it was before. The only thing one can do is adapt.
I quit a full-time job a few years ago, took a long break which my accelerated savings helped me easily afford, and now I'm having a ball freelancing despite being a veritable cave-dweller, because everyone wants to AI, but doesn't have the setup to make the AI effective.
3 dozen is a huge number from my (American) point of view. When I graduated from college I should have needed to apply to zero jobs, but yknow, covid. I ended up applying to 3 I think. Then, 4 years ago I applied to one job and got it. Last year I applied to 5 jobs, and got the one I wanted. I have a somewhat unusual niche which helps. I'd be hard pressed to find 3 dozen jobs that even make sense for me to apply to.
The average rate for job application to interview is roughly 2%...so while there have been some boom times and professions where this is different, I think OP is going to have a rough time giving up this early. I know it sucks...but applying for jobs sucks.
Even before that, the vast majority of companies first need to have their automation and data processes in order. You cannot just get some LLM API keys and expect medium/long-running businesses to be able to fully leverage them. People want to hop on to the AI bandwagon, but are realizing that their software processes need to be good enough first. For me, this means a mixture of regular best-practices software dev, and adding some AI on top of that.
> And how do you get freelance clients?
Word of mouth, regular applications, cold calling. There's nothing new here.
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.
Remote with that timezone difference seems tricky to find something. Maybe consider starting something on your own? Pro: You can be remote, and dont need to apply, also uncapped upside. Con: It's hard.
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 don't want this new thing. our work was fulfilling because reading and writing helped us learn and grow and become better. asking an LLM to "figure it out" followed by "ok, do it" (or, if you're company is actually funding you, creating loops that do that) robs you of the joy you used to feel.
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.
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.
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 on 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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's a bit odd, isn't it? To see people who literally work in the field of automating almost everybody else out of their jobs, complaining that our field isn't run like the East Coast Dockworkers unions. It's absolutely true that doctors have rigged medicine! It's one of the biggest social problems in the United States. You'd think the wakeup call would be: don't do that.
> To see people who literally work in the field of automating almost everybody else out of their jobs
Over-generalization. Lots of us have had nothing to do with automating people out of their jobs, unless you want to go really far back, like "in 1921 people used to do this with a slide rule and you put them out of a job over a hundred years later, somehow".
> ...doctors have rigged medicine! It's one of the biggest social problems in the United States.
Another over-generalization. I know lots of people, some of whom are doctors. You know what no one says about the doctors? "Hey, there's a member of a cartel who's artificially keeping prices high. How disgusting!". They all say "Oh cool, he/she's a doctor!" It's only for terminally online people that this is some huge social problem.
> complaining that our field isn't run like the East Coast Dockworkers unions
Exaggeration. You don't need to be run like the East Coast dockworkers unions to mandate certain professional standards and certifications so some Pointy Haired Boss who read a blog post on the Internet (nowadays, who got a sycophantic answer from his LLM) can't just make up rules about the software you ship. Now I'm fairly sure you haven't worked at companies like this; count yourself lucky.
This is a rationalization. Whether or not you work on products that literally automate jobs away (and a surprisingly broad set of apps does that --- that's what "productivity", in the economic sense, means), your compensation is supported by the demand those sectors of the industry creates.
I agree that people admire doctors and don't give much thought to the problems their industry has created (in the United States).
> 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.
> 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".
The Indians and the eastern Europeans are going to be the ones babysitting agents. There is no way in hell the companies are going to continue to pay US salaries for any of this within a few years.
I think that argument made way more sense back when people were manually programming. Considering how small a delta staff cost will be compared to token cost, it makes way more sense in the new world to hire more expensive staff who better understand the nuance of your requests imo
I don’t know what you’re referring to, but we end up paying less than $1500 on average in token cost for each developer per month while paying them upwards of 15,000 a month. The human cost is much much higher than what you pay for in tokens and tokens will be dirt cheap in a few years once all the data centers are online.
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.
"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?
Every single one of these cases is someone who is too old applying to be an IC. That’s the elephant in the room no one is ever going to acknowledge but everyone knows.
If you're saying that's how it is in practice, because of shitty managerial practices and management lacking value for wisdom and skill of talented workers, sure. If you're saying that's how it should be because if you're an IC at 40 you're not good enough at what you do... no.
Ryan needs Nik Suresh. Nik's in Melbourne, runs Hermit Technology, his team works mostly remotely, and he shares Ryan's talent for spotting bullshit. He's also moving into recruiting! Nik wrote this: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-glo...
Many people are using AI auto apply tools these days. In comparison, applying to 36 jobs is nothing. I'd encourage him to apply to many more roles. Even though it's not ideal, that's the state of job applications today. We're working on improving the hiring process at levels.fyi. If you're a recruiter / hiring manager get in touch (email in profile)
I’m sorry, I don’t get it… I view the LLMs as just another JS framework or similar. Learn to use it effectively. It’s very simple. I don’t understand why folks are so hesitant to understand. It’s a force multiplier and can be fun.
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.
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.
I'm sure the author is going through a very hard time, and I want to say up front that it sucks and I hope he lands on his feet.
Looking at his linkedin I see one programming job he had for more than a few months, and a lot that are about 8 months give or take. At one job he started as a programmer after a year and was moved to be a trainer, which he did for 2 more years. That's such a bad sign.
The most likely explanation, to me, of this resume is that there's something more to this story. He gets hired, they give him a few months and then pull the plug. This pattern is there 5 or 6 times, and then one programming job longer than 2 years, which is remote.
I don't know him and I can't say for sure, but this pattern of employment does not fill me with confidence.
Then there are macro issues. He has spent almost his entire career doing Ruby on Rails, which is nearly dead. Jobs for Rails are at 2007 levels as a % of overall tech jobs, and going down year over year for a decade. The tech job market is also saturated with applicants in general.
Finally, and overwhelmingly most importantly, he is only looking for fully remote jobs in Australia.
Overall I would say if he is only willing to consider remote work in Australia, applying to 36 jobs and not getting any is not that surprising. Things are rough out there and he is excluding 99.99% of the job market.
If I were giving him advice, it would be to go get whatever job he can and keep applying to programming jobs if that is where he wants to continue his career. He hasn't been looking very long and his experience in the market he is limiting himself to does not really reflect on him or his abilities. I would give him further advice to clean up his resume, remove several of the short-time jobs that nobody cares about because they are so long ago (but do care about because of the pattern of short term jobs), and combine that job that is split into programmer/trainer stints into one long job with both responsibilities summarized (I programmed and trained people). Finally spend your free time learning a technology that is growing and has relevance, like Rust or Go, and keep applying.
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.
Bro thought that being a good employee would give him high social position. Rookie mistake. This is the exact reason why IDGAF about my job, do the bare minimum, and spend rest of the time just doing whatever, while trying to speedrun financial independence.
For someone with 20 years experience who has written a bunch of books, I think that's a lot. I'd expect someone in this position to not really apply/interview in the normal sense anymore and to be able to hop around via their network.
The 1000s of applications folks are doing on the SWE subreddits are mostly juniors (or over titled seniors) with not much experience.
Maybe this guy is in that latter category, but it seems unlikely. I think this is just an issue of remote jobs being scarce.
the higher, better, more up you go, the fewer jobs there are. that's why big league people at normal (not fang) ask for parachutes. there's not that many XYZ companies in XYZ area that need a CFO, CTO, Head of ABC. Anyone can get an entry level job, but the higher you move, the harder it is.
Also - do people who write ruby books make companies more money?
I wrote 90% of the code that processed multiple billions of dollars worth of payments just last year. By myself to start with, then with the robot once the patterns were established and I could be sure it wouldn’t break anything.
The company charged for each of these payments, netting them something around 0.5-1% per payment. You do the math.
As far as I'm concerned, that supports the authors point rather than making him a troll. It's not normal for someone who can demonstrate competence in a technical field to need to send out thousands of applications. It's not normal for someone who has published books in the field to have a majority of their applications rejected.
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.
A computer used to be a person, not a machine. And their job was to perform long and tedious calculations by hand. Until they were replaced by machines.
Programmers face the same fate. Coding as a job is dead. Nobody is gonna pay you a super high salary so you can sit at home comfortably, with your headphones on, and just code in your favorite typed language.
I dunno - the abstraction level is going up, that's all. You still have to know all the techy bits, if you don't you're going to have a hard time and get eclipsed by someone that does.
At least that's how it is today. But last year it was barely even worth using. Next year? Really hard to say, but it feels like it's plateauing to me. Depends on the day you ask though.
Will we be entirely replaced? Maybe. Or it'll get close enough to the "no code" wet dream of a few years back, and you'll have enough low cost LLM kiddies that the whole notion of the highly paid software engineer is just a dead end.
And then what? ... I kind of hate whatever this career is now anyway, I wouldn't mind doing something else, but I'm addicted to that sweet sweet cheese!
^this, i know the market is bad but the author seems like *whining* a lot. i've viewed his CV and the books but they are not as impressive as he described. i'm a software engineer and seeing that software engineering as a professional career have been changed forever
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.
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.
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.
The emptied office and shops and restaurants can be turned into data centers!
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 think a lot will fail to hold up when 8 out of 10 people are replaced with ai.
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.
The bosses desperately want you to use AI for Dev work but they want to watch you doing it in person for some reason
I’ve noticed a strong correlation between struggling to find a job and only looking remote.
It’s a 2020 anomaly that’s gone. You need a relationship developed from in-person work to get it.
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. This is especially true of MNC with a strong presence in APAC.
And whether true or not you’re also signaling negative worker traits.
All low engagement employees want to work remote. But not all remote workers are low engagement. How do you properly position yourself?
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.
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.
What did you end up doing? Doing something with a bunch of like minded folks is the dream (as long as you can pay the bills!)
> 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.
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?
> wouldn't real-time collaboration on code matter even less than it did before?
being a software engineer means more than just coding.
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.
Collaboration can happen on a zoom call. We don't need to be in shoddy tuna can meeting rooms.
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 can "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 needs 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, remote work is beneficial: it forces a company to develop a level of rigor that helps it interface better with reality.
Every alleged "collaboration" efficiency the in-person model produces comes at the cost of enlarging a pile of accumulating social-technology debt incurred by substituting vibing, room-reading, and charisma for writing, debate, and accountability.
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?
I've never had to apply to more than two or three jobs to get an offer. Thankfully I haven't had to do that since before the pandemic.
If those are you priors, 36 rejected applications is going to hurt.
> 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.
I think that also, pre-pandemic job postings were more likely to be real. Now they are LLM slop and so are most of the applications.
Oh right, ya. This is something my brain often refuses to process.
I suppose not if it's causing the author mental anguish as described in the post. I agree it's far too early to throw in the towel.
It is, unfortunately, a numbers game (unless you have connections)
In 2024 I applied to ~100 jobs and was rejected or ghosted by the vast majority. It's not a reflection of your ability. Finding a job is strangely difficult even if you are more than capable.
My writeup of finding a job ~2 years ago: https://sjer.red/blog/2024/job-hunt/
> 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.
You are just making shit up for upvotes.
I think \ real sentiment \ gitgud .
If the author had this developed this level of certainty in the face of profound gaps of information, they might as well just apply to jobs disguised as a post-singularity AI escaping their sandbox exclusively to remotely co-work with you in particular!
With programming becoming boring and AI looming, my almost finished electricians' education from high school does come to mind from time to time.
A friend of mine ended up actually becoming an electrician, and its clear there's a shortage of able-minded people in that industry. In Norway electrician is one of those "never amounted to anything so this is the last resort" jobs, even if it shouldn't be. Simply by being able to follow instructions you beat most of the competition. The pay isn't half bad (around average national pay) and there are plenty jobs that require you to use your brain and vary wildly in what you do from day to day. Sounds like a lot of fun.
It's not a bad plan B.
I think this is a bad plan B, but maybe just because I don't think a good plan B exists.
Do you know what everyone has told me about the end of software? Get into the skilled trades. Become an electrician, welder, plumber etc...
For a couple of years, if you're experienced you'll probably do well. But 5 years from now every displaced SWE and white collar worker will have their apprenticeship.
Do you need to work as an apprentice for 2 years before you get that electrician license in your country? In many states of US, it ranges from 1 year to four years.
In many European countries you don't need a license for being an electrician, you may need to register somewhere although that won't be very hard. But you do need to follow the national rules and guidelines while working, which is why an education or applying to a large firm where they'll teach you on the job is not a bad idea.
I think 1 year apprentice or 2 years of school.
I’m wondering if electrician is a good option given the author requires 100% remote.
He's in a medium sized town (35,000 people) with no real IT jobs, hence the remote requirement.
However there will no doubt plenty of electrician jobs
Highly experienced people in tech centers like SF, NYC, Boston are struggling so I can't imagine anyone would be looking to hire in a small city in Australia.
Add to that time-zone issues and a very small local market.
I wish you the best but in the nicest way possible, insisting on fully remote work in a random city in Australia will likely narrow your options and make you less attractive to potential employers.
You will find something, I really hope so, but it will just take a lot longer.
Are you from the USA? Just curious.
Remote work doesn't mean internationally remote and Australia has a job market too. I think you made some unfair assumptions.
I would love to see better breakdowns of where things are hard. YOE/level, remote/hybrid, specialty, region, etc
Most of the people I’ve worked with over the years seem to be doing fine.
Getting a 24 out of 36 response rate on your applications is an S tier level response rate. I mean, the news is bad (rejection), but that is pretty incredible.
I can't make up my mind if that means he is so good that actual human beings look at his profile, or some sort of ATS filtering system just hard rejects him with prejudice.
I'm at 33 rejections 7 ghosts in my currents job search, is getting a rejection abnormal? I haven't really ever done a high volume search like I am currently doing so I have no context.
It's not the rejections that are abnormal, but the total response rate. 66% is a very good response rate. My very long job search has a 21% response rate.
It looks to me like a really unfortunate intersection between his personal brand - a deep expert on technical details - and the part of the job that at least, perception-wise, people think is completely solved by AI now. Nobody thinks they need a deep expert in Ruby, or JavaScript or any language now. If anything, people may believe over-expert people will be less accepting of AI developed code. It is slightly better for people at the product or architecture level because there's at least some presumption the models need direction on those fronts. It hurts because it isn't the slightest bit rational or fair, but everything is perception now.
I apply to a minimum of 3 jobs a day, and this time I’ve gotten to 1 final stage interview.
It didn’t work out, another job I decided to not proceed with because it’s DoD related.
Had a recruiter cancel the call because she had a personal emergency. Just ghosted me after that , no explanation.
Friday I had a promising call, but I’d have to move again.
I’m not sure what alternative the author proposes to working in tech.
I make music , but I can’t imagine sending a demo to Universal working out.
I dont know your situation, but applying to 3 jobs a day on avg is not that much. When I was trying to find a job my avg was closer to 30
You can do what all our applicants did - just have AI answer all of our interview questions for you, and collect a couple paycheques until we finally fire you. Rinse and repeat.
I mean ... don't do that. But we have been BOMBARDED with this, literally 100% of our pipeline was fake until we rejigged it a bunch. I wonder how much of peoples challenges are just that the scammers are making the job hunting environment a market for lemons?
I also make music and would also love to know what alternatives the author is exploring (as a Rubyist I'm very familiar with Ryan).
I've been unemployed for 8 months but I'm pretty ok with money, am single with no children, so I can keep up unemployment for at least another couple of years. I'd rather not, of course, but it's been very fun hanging out with my dog and recording music. I got my 4-tracks serviced and have gone back to those which has been very fun and rewarding... for one it's made it so I can cut out screen-time while recording! Has other benefits too.
But ya... uh, I dunno, stream-of-conscious there since your comment resonated, I don't have much of substance to offer.
The reality is that there is a huge fracture at the middle of the market. On the one side companies want people to go to an office and struggle to find good people. On the other side good people want to work remote and struggle to find good companies.
My email and LinkedIn are as full as ever with recruiters trying to hire me for positions I’m not really excited about. At my workplace (FAANG) we get tons of applications but very few of them are any good. When I apply to remote roles I can’t get an offer because I am competing with hundreds of other applicants and companies can pick someone with the exact expertise they’re looking for.
> 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.
You've applied to only 36 jobs? Where I'm from the norm is to apply to at least 150-200 jobs and you hear back from about 10% of them. Out of which you probably clear 50%. Spray and pray.
Yeah I know someone working in data science who applied to around 500 places for their most recent search
That sucks for where you're from I guess?
I am pretty torn on remote work and I say that as someone that benefits pretty greatly from it. Between remoteness and the rise of AI, I feel like there is basically no social interaction anymore, and I would be curious to see what an in person environment with AI looks like. It may be awful, but I am just curious. I know it won’t be a popular opinion.
Yeah, pairing in Zoom or Gather just doesn't make a lot of sense when one person is just typing things in Claude Code. Also the other person can't review code at that pace. So pairing is basically dead with AI (assisted) coding.
I agree, I have not paired in a while, but I am actually curious if there is a place for 2 or more people to collaborate on prompts and prototyping in real time. It’s not necessarily for code quality but just making sure the output is starting in a good place. Not all the time, but every once in a while, could make for some interesting learning.
Yeah pairing is dead. It never made sense anyway for two people to do the work of one. We're not flying airplanes.
The LLM is the pair now, and soon it will just be running solo.
> It never made sense anyway for two people to do the work of one
Disagree, pairing has helped me in the past to reach answers more quickly and at the same time means that more than one person is familiar with a codebase (which is a helps reduce bus factor)
> 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.
Pure remote roles are very hard to get if you don’t already have an in with the team. Letting someone you know and trust work remotely is very different than just hiring someone cold remotely.
Yes there will be the “but we’re a fully remote company and it works great” posts but for the time being cold applying remote puts one at a significant disadvantage in the market and that’s just the reality. About the only thing worse you could put on a CV currently is that you need visa sponsorship.
>> written books about programming
I was walking by a huge selection of programming books in the library and it stuck me.
What happens to the thousands of tech books written on the art of programming now? It is a sad situation for them as well
I target students. (My books are for sale, but PDF downloads are free, no ads.) There's still a need there since AI, as powerful as it is, isn't as good as humans at explaining things.
And if they take that away eventually, I'll still write because that's the best way to learn something.
But yes, what of AOCP? Sad that people aren't giving a shit about it any longer.
I like to think that the most hirable engineers will be the ones who learned to code. Partly because they know how to read code, but mostly because they used that experience to become superior problem-solvers.
They're used for AI training and discarded afterwards
I'm really sorry to hear that you're going through this. Any company would be lucky to have you on their team.
My strong suggestion to you: pivot to hardware. I still use Ruby but most of my development efforts are ESP32-P4 and RP2350-based these days.
Learning CAD and mastering various additive and subtractive fabrication techniques, getting PCBs made to make ideas real... it's been a roller coaster but LLMs are remarkably good as engineering mentors these days.
And yes, as several others have already said, this might be the time to learn woodworking and/or video production skills.
You'll find that you still need your programming brain, instincts and intuitions. You just deploy them in a different way in support of creating a device instead of an experience [or yet another CRUD form].
AI is coming there soon. May be faster than one can learn it.
I understand why you think that this is a valid point in this context, but 95% of what's hard about creating a thing you can hold in your hands does not happen in KiCAD.
It might be 98%.
If my teaching gig falls through, I'm going to go back to coding with AI but for either the public sector or a non-profit doing work for good.
AI coding isn't remotely as fun or rewarding as hand coding for me, but I'm willing to forgo that for a good cause. But not otherwise.
I'd hope that if I weren't coding for work I'd have the energy to code after work on fun things.
> I’m going to chat to some people to figure out what’s next.
One idea would be for the author to ask questions here that they think the answers of will be good input into their reasoning process.
> I’ve now applied for over 3 dozen jobs and I’ve heard back from 24 of them with a rejection
> I cannot continue to put myself through this process of rejection
Need to pump those numbers up, those are rookie numbers. Just kidding, but coming from India, that seems a really small number. We probably have a lot more competition, though, so maybe my views are skewed. I'm also surprised that they haven't even mentioned their network... someone with that amount of experience must be knowing people who can help out.
I applied for more jobs, have heard radio silence more than rejections (forget acceptances), and am still somehow in tech, whatever it means these days.
I keep seeing people pining for the old days. Those days are gone. And even if they came back, it's unlikely that life will be as good, because the entire world economy is in a different state than it was before. The only thing one can do is adapt.
I quit a full-time job a few years ago, took a long break which my accelerated savings helped me easily afford, and now I'm having a ball freelancing despite being a veritable cave-dweller, because everyone wants to AI, but doesn't have the setup to make the AI effective.
One needs to be flexible and stop reminiscing.
3 dozen is a huge number from my (American) point of view. When I graduated from college I should have needed to apply to zero jobs, but yknow, covid. I ended up applying to 3 I think. Then, 4 years ago I applied to one job and got it. Last year I applied to 5 jobs, and got the one I wanted. I have a somewhat unusual niche which helps. I'd be hard pressed to find 3 dozen jobs that even make sense for me to apply to.
The average rate for job application to interview is roughly 2%...so while there have been some boom times and professions where this is different, I think OP is going to have a rough time giving up this early. I know it sucks...but applying for jobs sucks.
> now I'm having a ball freelancing despite being a veritable cave-dweller.
Can you tell more about what is your freelance work about?
Implementing AI solutions for companies?
And how do you get freelance clients?
> Implementing AI solutions for companies?
Even before that, the vast majority of companies first need to have their automation and data processes in order. You cannot just get some LLM API keys and expect medium/long-running businesses to be able to fully leverage them. People want to hop on to the AI bandwagon, but are realizing that their software processes need to be good enough first. For me, this means a mixture of regular best-practices software dev, and adding some AI on top of that.
> And how do you get freelance clients?
Word of mouth, regular applications, cold calling. There's nothing new here.
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.
Remote with that timezone difference seems tricky to find something. Maybe consider starting something on your own? Pro: You can be remote, and dont need to apply, also uncapped upside. Con: It's hard.
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 don't want this new thing. our work was fulfilling because reading and writing helped us learn and grow and become better. asking an LLM to "figure it out" followed by "ok, do it" (or, if you're company is actually funding you, creating loops that do that) robs you of the joy you used to feel.
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.
> we will realize that our passion and pride in our work was not really valued by employers
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...
20 years is a long career. If you no longer want to adapt then time to call it quits. Hope you saved and invested.
Are there other industries with comparable or even living wages that support full time remote and are easy to transition into?
I’m all ears, so please let me know
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.
It's time for you to buy a leather tool belt.
Warrnambool is nice. Tower Hill is beautiful. I wouldn't want to leave there, either.
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 on 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"
Is WFH allowance still dwindling among employers? I'm not in the market so unsure
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's a bit odd, isn't it? To see people who literally work in the field of automating almost everybody else out of their jobs, complaining that our field isn't run like the East Coast Dockworkers unions. It's absolutely true that doctors have rigged medicine! It's one of the biggest social problems in the United States. You'd think the wakeup call would be: don't do that.
> To see people who literally work in the field of automating almost everybody else out of their jobs
Over-generalization. Lots of us have had nothing to do with automating people out of their jobs, unless you want to go really far back, like "in 1921 people used to do this with a slide rule and you put them out of a job over a hundred years later, somehow".
> ...doctors have rigged medicine! It's one of the biggest social problems in the United States.
Another over-generalization. I know lots of people, some of whom are doctors. You know what no one says about the doctors? "Hey, there's a member of a cartel who's artificially keeping prices high. How disgusting!". They all say "Oh cool, he/she's a doctor!" It's only for terminally online people that this is some huge social problem.
> complaining that our field isn't run like the East Coast Dockworkers unions
Exaggeration. You don't need to be run like the East Coast dockworkers unions to mandate certain professional standards and certifications so some Pointy Haired Boss who read a blog post on the Internet (nowadays, who got a sycophantic answer from his LLM) can't just make up rules about the software you ship. Now I'm fairly sure you haven't worked at companies like this; count yourself lucky.
This is a rationalization. Whether or not you work on products that literally automate jobs away (and a surprisingly broad set of apps does that --- that's what "productivity", in the economic sense, means), your compensation is supported by the demand those sectors of the industry creates.
I agree that people admire doctors and don't give much thought to the problems their industry has created (in the United States).
> 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?
[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/
> 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.
This is like, really bad for society though?
> we built this technology, we enthusiastically embraced it and one-upped each other by showing how much we can vibecode
Who's "we"? I'm a software engineer and I sure didn't
> 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".
Have Cory Doctorow's explanations of what's happening registered at all on HN? Centaur and reverse centaur etc?
We? I'm not queasy at all
The Indians and the eastern Europeans are going to be the ones babysitting agents. There is no way in hell the companies are going to continue to pay US salaries for any of this within a few years.
I think that argument made way more sense back when people were manually programming. Considering how small a delta staff cost will be compared to token cost, it makes way more sense in the new world to hire more expensive staff who better understand the nuance of your requests imo
Tokens will only get cheaper over time.
I don’t know what you’re referring to, but we end up paying less than $1500 on average in token cost for each developer per month while paying them upwards of 15,000 a month. The human cost is much much higher than what you pay for in tokens and tokens will be dirt cheap in a few years once all the data centers are online.
Might be the opposite. Something like a technical product manager who understands users and the business.
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.
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.
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.
In tech industry which is very much global, you’d only unionize yourself out of a job
I'm also going to jump in here and say I had nothing to do with this either.
"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?
No, it's made up
Every single one of these cases is someone who is too old applying to be an IC. That’s the elephant in the room no one is ever going to acknowledge but everyone knows.
What’s too old?
40
Why?
If you're saying that's how it is in practice, because of shitty managerial practices and management lacking value for wisdom and skill of talented workers, sure. If you're saying that's how it should be because if you're an IC at 40 you're not good enough at what you do... no.
I don't mean to be inconsiderate but isn't it normal to have a strong network to lean on after spending two decades in the same sector?
Ryan needs Nik Suresh. Nik's in Melbourne, runs Hermit Technology, his team works mostly remotely, and he shares Ryan's talent for spotting bullshit. He's also moving into recruiting! Nik wrote this: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-glo...
Many people are using AI auto apply tools these days. In comparison, applying to 36 jobs is nothing. I'd encourage him to apply to many more roles. Even though it's not ideal, that's the state of job applications today. We're working on improving the hiring process at levels.fyi. If you're a recruiter / hiring manager get in touch (email in profile)
Last time I look I applied to over 50 - and that was in a better market.
I’m sorry, I don’t get it… I view the LLMs as just another JS framework or similar. Learn to use it effectively. It’s very simple. I don’t understand why folks are so hesitant to understand. It’s a force multiplier and can be fun.
It also can multiply things that are not fun. It's not a universal win.
36 applications is nothing. Come on
Warrnambool is a long way from Melbourne.
It is a buyers market for developers.
This alone is likely the biggest factor - they have people local who can do the job and that’s their preference.
You might not like it but that’s the way it is.
In this case it’s not likely about AI it’s about location.
[flagged]
> Bye Felicia. Dude seems completely inflexible, both in terms of using AI and relocating. The days of prima donna devs are over.
Yikes - personal attacks are not ok here, regardless of how you perceive someone else or feel about them.
No more of this, please.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
It wasn’t meant to be personal. I don’t know this person. I was commenting in general. I’ll edit it.
I definitely believe that you didn't intend to be personal. It's just very easy to slip into without intending.
That’s a bit harsh but it does sound like they aren’t willing any compromise which is a bit unreasonable in the current market
Also 36 jobs isn’t that much
Thanks, that’s what my point was. It wasn’t really meant to be personal. I’ve updated it.
I think this is a bit fatalist.
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.
yes the elixr market isnt exactly hot
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.
> He's not imagining his accomplishments
I didn't suggest that.
I don't need your permission to say words.
Alright enjoy the phantom arguments
Recessions naturally apply market forces to balance supply and demand.
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.
I'm sure the author is going through a very hard time, and I want to say up front that it sucks and I hope he lands on his feet.
Looking at his linkedin I see one programming job he had for more than a few months, and a lot that are about 8 months give or take. At one job he started as a programmer after a year and was moved to be a trainer, which he did for 2 more years. That's such a bad sign.
The most likely explanation, to me, of this resume is that there's something more to this story. He gets hired, they give him a few months and then pull the plug. This pattern is there 5 or 6 times, and then one programming job longer than 2 years, which is remote.
I don't know him and I can't say for sure, but this pattern of employment does not fill me with confidence.
Then there are macro issues. He has spent almost his entire career doing Ruby on Rails, which is nearly dead. Jobs for Rails are at 2007 levels as a % of overall tech jobs, and going down year over year for a decade. The tech job market is also saturated with applicants in general.
Finally, and overwhelmingly most importantly, he is only looking for fully remote jobs in Australia.
Overall I would say if he is only willing to consider remote work in Australia, applying to 36 jobs and not getting any is not that surprising. Things are rough out there and he is excluding 99.99% of the job market.
If I were giving him advice, it would be to go get whatever job he can and keep applying to programming jobs if that is where he wants to continue his career. He hasn't been looking very long and his experience in the market he is limiting himself to does not really reflect on him or his abilities. I would give him further advice to clean up his resume, remove several of the short-time jobs that nobody cares about because they are so long ago (but do care about because of the pattern of short term jobs), and combine that job that is split into programmer/trainer stints into one long job with both responsibilities summarized (I programmed and trained people). Finally spend your free time learning a technology that is growing and has relevance, like Rust or Go, and keep applying.
Is this satire? Ragebait to draw attention to your looking for work page (https://ryanbigg.com/work)? It's really well written!
pretty smart if true
It's the worst possible time to leave a job right now.. anyone else agree?
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.
Shocked that this was downvoted.
Nah, it's the best time (if you can). This is the time to spin up your own company/product and steal maximum marketshare from enshititech.
Bro thought that being a good employee would give him high social position. Rookie mistake. This is the exact reason why IDGAF about my job, do the bare minimum, and spend rest of the time just doing whatever, while trying to speedrun financial independence.
> I’ve now applied for over 3 dozen jobs and I’ve heard back from 24 of them with a rejection
Sorry is this a troll? Go check out the SWE subreddits, people are sending out 1000s of applications before they get something.
For someone with 20 years experience who has written a bunch of books, I think that's a lot. I'd expect someone in this position to not really apply/interview in the normal sense anymore and to be able to hop around via their network.
The 1000s of applications folks are doing on the SWE subreddits are mostly juniors (or over titled seniors) with not much experience.
Maybe this guy is in that latter category, but it seems unlikely. I think this is just an issue of remote jobs being scarce.
the higher, better, more up you go, the fewer jobs there are. that's why big league people at normal (not fang) ask for parachutes. there's not that many XYZ companies in XYZ area that need a CFO, CTO, Head of ABC. Anyone can get an entry level job, but the higher you move, the harder it is.
Also - do people who write ruby books make companies more money?
I wrote 90% of the code that processed multiple billions of dollars worth of payments just last year. By myself to start with, then with the robot once the patterns were established and I could be sure it wouldn’t break anything.
The company charged for each of these payments, netting them something around 0.5-1% per payment. You do the math.
As far as I'm concerned, that supports the authors point rather than making him a troll. It's not normal for someone who can demonstrate competence in a technical field to need to send out thousands of applications. It's not normal for someone who has published books in the field to have a majority of their applications rejected.
Hey dang, what about this one?
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.
A computer used to be a person, not a machine. And their job was to perform long and tedious calculations by hand. Until they were replaced by machines.
Programmers face the same fate. Coding as a job is dead. Nobody is gonna pay you a super high salary so you can sit at home comfortably, with your headphones on, and just code in your favorite typed language.
I dunno - the abstraction level is going up, that's all. You still have to know all the techy bits, if you don't you're going to have a hard time and get eclipsed by someone that does.
At least that's how it is today. But last year it was barely even worth using. Next year? Really hard to say, but it feels like it's plateauing to me. Depends on the day you ask though.
Will we be entirely replaced? Maybe. Or it'll get close enough to the "no code" wet dream of a few years back, and you'll have enough low cost LLM kiddies that the whole notion of the highly paid software engineer is just a dead end.
And then what? ... I kind of hate whatever this career is now anyway, I wouldn't mind doing something else, but I'm addicted to that sweet sweet cheese!
As someone else put it:
Rigorous thinking required:
Rigorous thinking optional: And if thinking is not required, then the work won't pay.Time to flood the market with electricians and plumbers!
^this, i know the market is bad but the author seems like *whining* a lot. i've viewed his CV and the books but they are not as impressive as he described. i'm a software engineer and seeing that software engineering as a professional career have been changed forever