You only need to know for one though...
I guess even an off hand example, now must be completely 100% technically correct , or you aren't worth a job?
And, I'm pretty sure in "X" language, you can call them differently. Since it is "X", how do you know.
It's a litmus test, and not a terribly challenging one. It's solved by spending a week doing simple coding challenges.
I imagine people in ML or who've found a good way to demonstrate prowess with agentic systems may be highly in demand right now(?)
That being said, I'm not sure how much job security having such prowess would convey because I feel AI will be better than us at that too eventually (if not already).
Recruiters have utterly given up on being efficient in the market. I do not know why, but there is something very wrong given "spamming the same brand-name fish all the other recruiters are spamming" is their only strategy. My guess is there is a combination of bad (or an entire lack of) hygienic data filtering and a disconnect between compensation and terminal goals (hiring the best candidates).
Lots I agree with here, but...
> I would promptly remove them from my LinkedIn connections afterwards because I'm exhausted of pointless connections and recruiters.
Why would you do something like this, it's just counter productive. I've had numerous recruiters reach out weeks or months later to say "hey another team is interested", or even when they have moved on to other jobs.
Stop being so bitter you're just shooting yourself in the foot.
Recruiters only add you as a connection if they can't afford LinkedIn premium, which is what you need to message people you're not connected to (except for connection requests). That probably means that they're not very successful recruiters.
Even is so stupid but looks like in last few years lot of strange metrics like that used more and more.
Don't let yourself get attached to any tech stack you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner. That's the discipline.
I felt compelled to write "don't call yourself a Software engineer" [0], because we are still falling into the same trap of thinking we are hired only for our technical skills.
If we are just looking at a skills and these are assessed by parsing through a resume, then OP is right. We are all at a disadvantage. But the job search starts way before you are looking for a job. It's all about the connections you make along the way.
[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/you-are-an-ai-enabled-engineer-now
Really good stuff haha.
EDIT: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pr...
Your customers are companies looking for someone to slot into a box called "software engineer" and so you sell yourself as such. Nothing wrong with that.
We should also note who Patrick was at the time. He was an SEO consultant and in general a business development expert. It just also happened that he was able to code. And he was very very early to the field. An SEO expert was barely a thing.
So if your only skill is software development, then of course you would call yourself that. And if your main skill is SEO or some other marketing channel, then you call yourself that.
I think the real takeaway from the advice "don't call yourself a programmer" is to search the market for higher paid opportunities, where you can still leverage coding. And you can call yourself a programmer while doing so.
We are still in the post-pandemic hangover.
If you look up M2 money supply on St Louis fed - that chart has more influence on the job market in the US than anything.
The macro whiplash compounds this problem for people like OP in a few ways:
- cheap money leads to hiring frenzy (cheap capital costs lead to investments in human capital in software)
- developers get conditioned to artificially high demand and assume it will be like that forever
- artificially high demand attract people into software dev for the money instead of love of the art (increasing supply)
- when capital gets expensive again companies have to correct for over-hiring with layoffs and hiring freezes
- developers are stuck in a market with crashing demand (because of higher cost of capital) and over-supply (people attracted to work when cost of capital was cheap)
Everyone says it's about AI, but AI is more like the flavor & scapegoat, the substance is all a consequence of macro policy.
The next time the fed does quant easing labor market will kick up again.
> I've seen people supposedly smarter than I advocate for just giving in, conceding to AI coding as it's the future. But doing so means tossing out my friends who make art or the people who work their asses off to properly test and review code or the writers pouring all of their energy into even mundane dialogue. It means throwing out my dignity
I fully stand behind that prediction.
The tide is coming for almost all of us.
Software and code is turning into a commodity
The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends
To justify their own jobs.
In theory there's never been a better time to hire on SWE talent. There are lots and lots of candidates who rode high during the COVID hiring wave, took on debt based on a high income, got fired, and now need money.
But hiring isn't picking up. You have a bunch of people in the HR industry who realize that for the most part, the combination of candidate filtering, ML, and a basic tech interview process could probably do their jobs. So they have to make the process as byzantine and difficult as possible to be able to go to the suits and say "look at all of these low-quality candidates we kept out!"
> I guess this is one of these times we read on history books: great unemployement.
The good/bad news is that if this continues, there will be either a regression to the mean or a massive de-stablization of most societies. You can't kick most of the working-age population out of their jobs.
Like, go be a farmer, Adapt? Reinvent yourself as a performance artist? Because, learn Java in 21 days, is kind of gone.
Applying for jobs out of the blue usually sucks. In the ideal world, you want recruiters calling out to you.
Don't assume you can't do proper software engineering using AI. You can. The people that want to create loops are not the only ones delivering with acceptable productivity. Lot's of us still write code, at least interfaces, traits, modules or whatever, and just use the AI to fill the blanks on the really tedious code.
- political: there’s an enormous amount of uncertainty here. All businesses make plans and uncertainty puts them all on pause.
- economic: related to political, but we’re teetering on a very bad recession. Watch where national oil reserves go.
- AI: I throw this in with every new technology that comes out. There is always a period of chaos before normalization. We’re still in the chaos phase.
- Business Pain: Right now I don’t see any sector that’s in pain. Inflation has hurt consumers, but we’re still spending. When consumers lock it down, that pain comes back and job market shifts with it.
I have no solution other than figuring out a way to do your own thing. There’s no better time to be a founder.
> There is always a period of chaos before normalization.
In this case, it's the normalization period that has people terrified.
What a noncommittal sentence
The frontier model companies could all collapse tomorrow but the tech is not going anywhere.
Let's see. My plan:
- Have my own company and start looking for customers. (Rust consulting)
- Keep looking for job opportunities, but don't succumb for shit jobs.
It might be that I'm too hopeful, but you can't know unless you try.
Anyway, I may join the "everything is shit" crowd in half a year if nothing pans out, but until then, I'm hopeful.
I threw my degree in the toilet, I closed my linkedin, and I went to go work in the trades as a diesel mechanic.
Greatest choice I've ever made. The pay is great, the work is steady, the coworkers are relaxed and not trying to one up each other. I'm now being paid to go to school, and get raises every year until I'm fully ticketed (way more than I ever made in the entry tech positions).
I've heard non-stop my whole life that if I join a trade it's going to be grunt labor and I'll be paralyzed in 5 years. Maybe some are, but this isn't hard at all. I lay on a creeper and turn wrenches. Anything over 50lbs we have lifts for.
Tech has become fun again, I'm just making projects because its what I wanted. I come home and relax by writing on my projects.
Now, I'm watching my tech friends from a distance and my only regret is not doing this sooner.
"Sometimes you gotta give in to win"
I really wanted to go into tech because I've been told the trades were the boogie man my entire life.
In 5 years, the Junior pipeline will be completely dry.
Seniors will be retiring.
Companies will be floundering.
We'll see a great correction where we need workers again.
Programmers/SE/etc... will be needed again. Always were needed, but at least managers will realize it again.
If I'm being blunt, if you are in the game industry, you probably have nothing to worry about in terms of LLM coding replacing you, because the tooling used in the gaming industry is as unfriendly to LLM coding as it gets: Heavily visual scripting based, extremely reflection heavy, and the code, Unreal C++ and Unity C#, looks like regular C++/C#, but doesn't behave like normal C++/C#. LLMs simply cannot reason about hidden implicit states effectively, so if the code looks right but doesn't act right, LLMs will simply get confused and start hallucinating.
They are building an office to house 18,000 workers.
They clearly don’t think AI is going to be advancing at the rate the money men are hyping.
Hiring here is a little bit more old school, I guess? Especially because the types of roles we are hiring now are usually 5+ years of experience, we focus more on learning about what the candidates have done in the past, the leetcode type of question interview is just a small part, and matters more for prospective Jr. hires.
That being said, we aren't hiring that many fresh graduates anymore, we already have some we hired, we're focused on investing in them, getting them to learn more about our hardware and code, etc. and hoping to retain them.
It's easy to find jobs in software engineering provided you have an attractive resume.
Can speak to my experience that if you are a senior engineer in London the market is relatively easy at the moment (or was at the beginning of the year) even with no connections.
Background is SWE at an AI co that's in the news sometimes
It felt about the same in terms of grind effort from my last search in 2022. the main difference was ai companies cared a lot about your understanding of agentic systems and harness / context engineering, and had much more practical rounds with less leetcode (usually 1 medium). More legacy firms (finance / some big tech) still expected you to solve 3-4 leetcode medium/hards throughout the process
The problem with specialized roles is that nothing lasts too long in software. Given enough time in it, nobody really has an edge. Everyone is smart enough to have invented and implemented the very thing eating the world right now. They just don't have supervillain money or clout, so they work for you instead.
BTW, 'Heat 2' is pretty good, gives a lot of backstory as well as current-story, mostly about Chris: https://www.amazon.com/Heat-2-Novel-Michael-Mann/dp/00626533...
You cannot and will not force them to care more. Don't waste your time on Earth trying to do so.
AI is good enough now that you can't claim that you aren't using it because you're upholding some higher standard of quality. It is simply a matter of it offending your sensibilities.
I don't think it's going anywhere, but I don't know what happens when prices start to rise because these companies need to start turning a profit.
In the games industry, AI usage immediately eliminates a human job. Why pay a pixel artist if AI can generate 100's of unique little people pixels in seconds, and output them in the right format? Hollywood is going through the same thing: the companies that are building AI for Hollywood have to do so in the bushes, hiding. You don't see them advertising or flashing cash. That's because no one involved in using their wares wants anyone to know they're using them, lest they alienate the highly-talented people they still need to fill the gap between concept AI and full theatrical release AI.
In the software world, we are worried about AI. In the creative industries, they are absolutely pants on fire, screaming at the sky, burning down the village terrified of AI.
If you stop doing X you will be fired/not-hired, simple as.
You can make friends on your free time.
> You can make friends on your free time.
Most well-adjusted people work to live, they don't live to work. Life comes first, the demands of the job come a distant second.
All the more reason, then, for them to be okay with not being hired.
I am actually writing a post about that on my blog but it's still not there so ... check back later? Lol.
Anyway, in this particular scenario, a co-worker not being my friend does not automatically makes him my enemy.
Because someone who knows something about pixels needs to make a judgement. It is rare to see a machine-generated artifact (picture, video, text or code) that's good on the first try. And not always a non-specialist can see the issue.
Same thing why we still need human software engineers, even though a machine can generate code. Someone with actual understanding of the problem needs to make a management decision. Just like engineers see code slop (design or implementation) that laypeople vibe-coding don't recognize, artists see the visual slop where layman eye glances over.
Honestly, IMHO, this whole panic is artists' own creation. Instead of educating others on how to spot the issues (and thus reaffirming that expertise still matters - nothing had changed, and probably nothing ever will), a notable fraction went all-in on neo-luddite ideas, as if they don't know the history of their own craft and adjacent creative industries (I guess many really don't, or at least it doesn't click). Evaluate new tools, make use of them when they provide value, skip them where they fall short, and most importantly reaffirm that fancier brushes don't replace the artist in a human society - this is an already well-tested and proven strategy. Ring the existential bells when we'll get to the question of machine cognition rather than just intelligence.
Same for the engineering. Don't shy away from new tools, use them where they're a good fit, don't waste time when they are't (but periodically check out if something changes), explain everyone why you still matter - just to push back on unfortunate misconceptions.
The fact that a lot of companies' upper management went delusional and decided they want to replace humans witch machines (as if don't need responsibility anymore) doesn't help. But - hey - already plenty of stories how it bites them back, so while this period sucks, it's not exactly fucked, just in a state of (a pretty much expected) confusion.
Dishing out pixels or lines of code got somewhat cheaper. Expertise cost remains the same, though.
The woman and man AI voice endemic to YouTube and ilk is also tremendously off putting. M5Stack has a bunch of these videos, and it devalues what they're doing.
And then... Transformer "art". It is some of the worst drek I've seen. I smell it a mile away. It's easily seen by slop english-like characters. Or too glowy humans. Or overall fake feel. For pixel art, I can perhaps see it. But for anything it just feels... Gross.
I'm completely sure management LOVES it cause its cheap and devalues humans.
Heck, 50% of all Japanese game studios [0] along with all of China's largest studios [1] now use AI within their development pipeline - often with explicit state backing.
You may not like Blizzard or Ubisoft but Tencent, Sony, mihoYo, and even Nintendo are much worse from a work culture, compensation, and work expectation perspective.
[0] - https://www.nikkei.com/article/DGXZQOUF251PU0V20C25A9000000/...
[1] - https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3341063/next-l...
---
Edit: can't reply
> Why should that be a relevant concern? It's not like any of us will be working in game dev if AI wins.
Becuase AI is not taking all jobs. Yes a lot of redundant work will go away, but there is still a real need for human intervention, monkeypatching, and ingenuity.
The North American gaming industry only exists because the entire ecosystem from AdTech to Engines to Marketplaces exists to develop, finance, and distribute IP.
If you stay frozen in the past, you eventually get outcompeted and the ecosystem will leave. And unlike the automotive industry, game devs aren't a core voting bloc.
This is what happened to the entire animation industry and is what is happening to the film and television industry. Gaming will be the next IP driven industry to leave if everyone remains frozen and opposed to innovation.
Why should that be a relevant concern? It's not like any of us will be working in game dev if AI wins.
I think everyone kind of feels that AI is sucking up all the content that we have all created collectively, and we all know that the bell is tolling for thee, no matter how much you adapt. So if you see friends being fed into a meat grinder, you can have a 'culture war' take on it. He's posting on line to vent, something everyone is venting about.
Of course, for a job, to get a paycheck, we'd use any technology, even if we are the ones running the meat grinder.
I might be naive, but rather than giving money "to the arts", I would much prefer to give money "to the people" en masse, and then leave it up to everyone to decide whether they want to make art for art's sake.
This is seemingly spoken from an ignorant and insulated position. The victims of invasion don't get to decide whether or not they live on a war front, nor do the countless skilled and creative individuals losing their entire careers almost overnight.
By the way it's class war you're talking about, not culture war.
I wanted a nice car, so instead of racking up mega debt on a $70,000 mustang I bought an old classic car and learned everything. After 5 years I fully restored it on the cheap (less than $10k) and now I've pivoted my career to that.
Anyone currently with a tech job can pay for it out of pocket and barely notice. If it’s something someone thinks they may want to do, they should just do it. Nobody says you have to switch jobs at the end.
And tools have never been cheaper. The knock off chinese clones are used by professionals too. I have tons of automotive friends and they all vary in their level of access to things. I have friends who built their cars on the public road infront of their house, and some friends who took a year long college course.
We all ended up in the same place.
1) How long were you in software? 2) How did you get your break in the trades? Did you go to school etc? 3) Did you have to start on an apprentice program?
Thank you very much
I didn't do any schooling but thats because I've always liked cars and would tinker at home. So I was very advanced for an entry level. They get government kick backs for hiring apprentices and the less of a burder you are to them, the better. However, the bar has never been lower. Before this, I tried electrician but didn't like it. I have zero experience as an electrician.
Your employer signs you up after you pass probation. Then every year you do a 2 month schooling course which is all government paid.
Love it! A score of years ago, I considered being an auto mechanic after graduating HS but then ended up back in CompSci.
Did you have to go back to school? Did you find a shop that would take you in as an apprentice? And if they did, how did you convince them you can/will be good at the job?
However, the bar has never been lower.
I didn't want to do automotive, the piece work is a cancer. You'll do 12 hour days and get paid for 8. Not my cup of tea. I was interested in the big stuff. Offroad equiptment sounded cool too.
Trasmatta•1h ago
And then recruiter spam is COMPLETELY gone. I'm not really complaining, but it feels indicative of where things are at.
AznHisoka•55m ago