Then with increased interest rates. Which are still active and weirdly should've caused more hardship than ~3 months lower stocks.

And now ai, but this depends on demand for software too, which I don't how big it is, like can demand scale too with ai?

Like when you lower electricity cost people just use more electricity.

I'm happy my junior years passed before all this and I don't envy those who are just coming into this field.

And it's not just tech - all over my extended social circle there are people in various fields who were laid off. It's a crawling, largely invisible in the usual indicators, crisis.

[1] https://hnjobs.mathieularose.com

Well, yeah. High supply of workers meets low demand of jobs.

Really, what do you expect from a "profession" that has been trying to lower the entry level to a point where anyone with access to an AI is a programmer?

I remember when folks had to have a degree to enter the "profession" of software developer. Nowadays all you need to be a "programmer" is access to AI. And correspondingly the quality of the output has fallen to such a level that it no longer possible to distinguish between human generated or machine generated code.

The bad quality is hidden away with euphemisms such as "release early, release often" or "move fast and break things". The constant requirement to update because updates were broken is just another symptom of an industry gone badly wrong.

Worse still, the solution coming out the tech hubs isn't to slow down and reflect about these issues in IT, rather it's to throw even more technology at it. Technology that then also fails. Technology that is designed to cause vendor-lockin and dependence on a few controlling companies (OpenAI & Anthropic being the latest in a long line ... AWS for servers and Google for spreadsheets and email).

Hm ... now what do we do? More of the same probably.