You’re not weak. It’s genuinely a dehumanizing, exhausting experience that seems to get worse year after year. I’m barely in my 30s, I’ve been laid off twice and had to relocate once. Each search was worse than the last.

universal experience

Yeah, not surprised. An experienced software engineer in the US won’t have to do unskilled labour unless there’s something else massive going on with them.

Shitty media’s greatest trick is cherry-picking and anecdotal “evidence”.

Honestly have to agree. I was skeptical on your take until I read his blog post. I see zero reflection on it. Instead I see blame and anger, and yes frustration.

Look, the market is trash, but there are jobs for those willing to learn. He mentions php. Php hasn’t been relevant for new jobs for a while. The only time I mention my php knowledge is it it’s in reference to an older project I did. He mentions he’s kept up on AI by “reading HN and articles” and then saying he has 5 projects he has essentially vibe coded it sounds like. That’s not keeping up with AI from a software engineering standpoint. That’s just using AI tools and reading articles. Keeping up with AI from an engineering standpoint to me is using their apis, running models, training your own models. Go under the surface, show curiosity.

We work in a field where a fundamental requirement is to keep learning. It’s very easy to get comfortable in a role and not learn anything new, but you’ll get stuck there. If you have unemployment learn every library you can. Learn Rust, Go, random languages. Choose the packages you don’t know very well to build your app. Deploy your app yourself, learn CI/CD and infrastructure. Don’t stand still.

I’m a dotnet engineer now. Right now that means I’m 40% dotnet, python, nosql, kubernetes, and React. 5 years ago I was Angular. 10 years ago I was php and webforms. You can’t just say “I learned to code, I’m done!”. In this field it’s never done.

Edit, I also want to call out two other red flags from him. He’s unemployed but the thought of in office was a red line for him? I prefer WFH of course, but if it’s door dashing or an office, it’s a no brainer. Then also if you have that many connections on LinkedIn and no one will vouch for you, that’s a moment of introspection. I won’t say all or even a majority I would expect to help out for me, but I have a decent network. You have to keep that up

Jup, something is missing in this story.

The entire industry collapsed, but he worked on https://framevr.io/ which was exactly the type of software that people flocked to during COVID. After people were able to go home again, many of these companies tried to pivot to the metaverse in hopes of jot throwing out their product entirely, unsuccessfully it seems.

Conceptually, it’s not terrible. The product isn’t as much of scam as you might think it is based on the metaverse tag.

Zero chance this company replaced him with an AI that actually does anything useful.

That fact alone makes me question his judgement and therefore critical thinking skills.

I think this post is a cope.

You might be 100% right. But that wouldn’t change the fact that you’re focusing on the individual in a story about trends, and I think you’re doing so because doing so is a way to avoid engaging with the larger point of the article.

Tech work isn’t safe. No work is really safe these days. It doesn’t even matter if AI can do your job well. It is just a facet of a project to devalue labor and disempower laborers. And that project is going really well! No matter how good you are at your job, none of us can “merit” our way out of that project.

I’m great at my job, and my job is very AI proof. But that doesn’t protect me from the fact that my company is looking for ways to gigify the work and hire contract workers from among highly paid laid off scientists and engineers to take over little easy parts of my job. They’ll concentrate the hard parts, of my job and yours, and reorganize it until it’s as modular as possible, and raise our workloads without increasing our pay until they can make it hard enough to say we’re not doing it fast enough.

No chatbot will replace me in the next 10 years. But my company doesn’t need them to in order to limit my bargaining power! They’re fostering an ecosystem of abundant cheap, fungible atomized workers so they will never have to bid for your labor or worry about you being irreplaceable.

All of us need to get wise to the con. We need universal incomes, universal services, universal healthcare, universal housing. We need a guaranteed safety net that is high enough that everyone has the ability to turn down bad jobs. Even the people you think suck at their jobs.

You cannot escape this by dismissing any laid off worker as too slow to keep up. Because this is a team event. And the bosses are on the other team.

I think it’s less likely this has anything to do with skill, and more likely this is a company looking for an excuse to cut a highly paid position.

What people should do has historically been at odds with their actual actions.

$150k is not necessarily a lot of money in a lot of cities. The article just mentions New York, but typically that would not be enough to buy in most areas even close to NYC

An engineered one to finally end the middle class by grabbing assets at fire-sale prices so everyone has to rent, while simultaneously being able to further raise rents on account of all the new demand.

More than that, “software engineer” has been drifting towards “software technician” for a while now. If you don’t have any additional physics, math or engineering specialty on top of software skills, things are pretty crowded. Anyone can learn to write decent software. It’s really never been a traditional academic topic for the most part, and AI is definitely making that worse.

In my last job search, I sent out more than a thousand applications across multiple industries, got one interview, didn’t get the job. It’s very plausible.

they were doing that before AI, just used some other software to screen people out.