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In my experience, tech employment is incredibly bimodal right now. Top candidates are commanding higher salaries than ever, but an "average" developer is going

by mjr00 7mo ago

In my experience, tech employment is incredibly bimodal right now. Top candidates are commanding higher salaries than ever, but an "average" developer is going to have an extremely hard time finding a position. Contrary to what many say, I don't think it's simple as seniors are getting hired and juniors aren't. Juniors are still getting hired because they're still way cheaper and they're just as capable as using AI as anyone. The people getting pushed out are the intermediates and seniors who aren't high performers.

electronsoup 7mo ago
> and they're just as capable as using AI as anyone Wouldn't the assumption be the opposite, in that AI is magnifying the decision making of the engineer and so you get more payback by having the senior drive the AI?
- chillacy 7mo ago
  I've found this to be true so far, junior engineers with AI can be super productive but they can also cause a lot of damage (more outages than ever) and AI amplifies the sometimes poorly designed code they can generate. I suspect a lot of it best practices will be enforcing best practices via agents.md/claude.md to create a more constrained environment.
  - lumost 7mo ago
    I’ve observed radically different workflows amongst senior candidates vs junior candidates when using an ai. A senior candidate will often build an extremely detailed plan for the agent - similar to how you would do a design for/with a junior engineer. Then let the agent go full throttle to implement the plan and review the result. Juniors seem to split into the category of trust everything the ai says, or review every step of the implementation. It’s extremely hard to guide the ai while you are still learning the basics, opus4.6 is a very powerful model.
    - devin 7mo ago
      My observation has been that there are a lot of personal styles to engaging with the LLMs that work, and "hold the hand" vs "in-depth plan" vs "combination" doesn't really matter. There is some minimum level of engagement required for non-trivial tasks, and whether that engagement comes mid-development, at the early design phase, or after isn't really that big of a deal. Eg; "Just enough planning" is a fine way of approaching the problem if you're going to be in the loop once the implementation starts.
    - foldr 7mo ago
      I don't claim to have any special skill at AI, but as a 'senior' dev, my strategy is exactly the opposite. I try to be as lazy, dumb and concise as I can bring myself to be with my initial prompt, and then just add more detail for the bits that the AI didn't guess correctly the first time around. Quite often the AI guesses accurately and you save the time you'd have spent crafting the perfect prompt. Recently, my PM shared a nigh-on incompressible hand-scribbled diagram on Slack (which, in fairness, was more or less a joke). I uploaded it to Gemini with the prompt "WTF does this diagram mean?". Even without a shred of context, it figured out that it was some kind of product feature matrix and produced a perfect three paragraph summary. I've never really seen the value in the planning phase as you're free to just throw away whatever the AI produces and try again with a different prompt. That said, I don't pay for my tokens at work. Is planning perhaps useful as a way of reducing total token usage?
      - lumost 7mo ago
        It's more about the size of the task I try to do, it's quite possible to get opus4.6 to one shot a "good" 30k loc change with the right planing doc. I'm not confident I could get similar results handholding. I also tend to want to know the major decisions and details in such a change up front rather than discovering them post-hoc. This could simply be a matter of style however.
        foldr 7mo ago
        One-shotting 30k LOC is no use to me because none of my colleagues will review a PR that big. But more to the point, I wouldn't be able to review it either, and I think we're still at a point where you do want to look carefully at the output these tools generate.
- mjr00 7mo ago
  For a good senior, yes you get massive returns, which is why those good seniors are in incredibly high demand right now. For average to low-performing intermediates/seniors... there's not much difference in output between them and a good junior at this point. Claude really raised the skill floor for software development.
  - fhd2 7mo ago
    My thinking is a bit different here: Seniors, even mediocre ones, already learned a lot of hard lessons by doing things pre-LLMs, even pre-SO. Those skills are valuable and I don't know how to train them into juniors. I find it easier to get a reasonably smart senior to use AI in a good way, than to train a junior in what thinking to do, and what to outsource, learning basics about good design, robustness and risk analysis. The tools aren't the problem per se, it's more about how people use them. Bit of a slippery slope. That's just my anecdotal experience from not a whole lot of data though. I think the industry will figure it out once things calm down a bit. Right now, I usually make the bet to get one senior rather than two juniors. Quite different to my strategy from a few years ago.
  - deleted 7mo ago
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- alfalfasprout 7mo ago
  Yep. I've seen this personally. The ROI of a great engineer is bigger than ever.
- nfm 7mo ago
  100% this. AI is automating the code generation. Being able to clearly describe a problem and work with the AI to design a solution, prioritise what to put the AI to work on, set up good harnesses so the quality of the output is kept high, figure out what parallelises well and what’s going to set off agents that are stepping on each others toes… all of this needs experience and judgement and delegation and project organisation skills. AI is supercharging tech leads. Beginners might be able to skill up faster, but they’re not getting the same results.
phendrenad2 7mo ago
> Top candidates are commanding higher salaries than ever I haven't found that to be true. Unless by "top candidates" you mean people working at actual AI companies such as Alphabet/Meta/OpenAI/Anthropic. If you're an AI-user and not an AI scientist it's bad out there, even for senior+ developers who previously worked in "FAANG".
yesb 7mo ago
Relating it to performance is just silly. Most companies barely understand the performance of their employees much less candidates. The market has shrunk but not catastrophically so. Most people haven't been majorly affected but that doesn't mean they're automatically the most deserving or best performing. People with experience and/or credentials desired by companies in areas of growth (i.e. AI) are always in high demand
- johnnyanmac 7mo ago
  >Most people haven't been majorly affected Apparently it is over a third affected in my domain. Which is crazy. Pretty much everyone in my immediate band has been hit at some point. That that weren't were usually around 5-8 above me. So basically a different generational band altogether.
- jimbokun 7mo ago
  > People with experience and/or credentials desired by companies in areas of growth (i.e. AI) are always in high demand This is tautological.
  - lazyasciiart 7mo ago
    No it isn't, because in the context of the comment it should be read "people with experience and/or credentials desired [...] are always in high demand " regardless of their actual performance level.
serial_dev 7mo ago
I’m not sure it is just that, I don’t even see positions listed where I would like to work. For salary ranges, I see lower upper limits than my second best offer three n half years ago. Considering the high inflation, that’s crazy. I would not mind switching but 1. I don’t see interesting positions 2. they don’t pay well, and only 3. they might not even want me. It might also be just my niche, but finding a good position feels completely impossible for me. I am doing cross platform mobile development and I’m wondering how I could transition into backend development or I started even considering the decentralized finance…
- johnnyanmac 7mo ago
  Yeah, I don't know if I'd call myself competent (I'm late intermediate/early senior. So the worst of the curve here). But there's a difference between "interviews have gotten a lot harder now" and "I can't even get a response back". It's far, far more in the latter. My resume isn't bad on paper either. It's not FAANG coded, but it's decent experience.
- Aurornis 7mo ago
  > than my second best offer three n half years ago 3.5 years ago was peak ZIRP hiring craziness. It wasn't a normal reference point.
lowkey_ 7mo ago
Agreed on the bimodal, but I don't think this is junior vs. senior - I think it's just competence being rooted out. The majority of engineers, in my hiring experience, failed very simple tests pre-AI. In a world where anyone can code, they're no better than previously non-technical people. The CS degree is no longer protection. The gap between average and the best engineers now, though, is even higher. The best engineers can visualize the whole architecture in their head, and describe exactly what they want to an AI - their productivity is multiplied, and they rarely get slowed down. While this could be done by junior or senior, I think junior usually has the slight advantage in being more AI-native and knowing how to effectively prompt and work with AI, though not always.
- _alternator_ 7mo ago
  Largely agree, with a bit of clarification. Junior devs can indeed prompt better than some of the old timers, but the blast radius of their inexperienced decisions is much higher. High competence senior devs who embrace the new tools are gonna crush it relative to juniors.
  - weatherlite 7mo ago
    > Junior devs can indeed prompt better than some of the old timers I guess? I don't really see why that would be the case. Being a senior is also about understanding the requirements better and knowing how/what to test. I mean we're talking about prompting text into a textarea, something I think even an "old timer" can do pretty well.
    - llbbdd 7mo ago
      I've seen a few people I would consider senior engineers, good ones, who seem to have somewhat fallen for the marketing if you look at the prompts they're using. Closer to a magical "make it so" than "build the code to meet this spec, that I wrote with the context of my existing technical skills". I'm not sure why junior engineers would be any better at that though, unless it's just that they're approaching it with less bias and reaping beginners luck.
Eridrus 7mo ago
> they're just as capable as using AI as anyone They're just as capable of typing prompts into AI, but what they don't have is good judgement of what good work/code looks like, so what's the point of asking a junior engineer to do something vs asking the LLM directly?
- alienbaby 7mo ago
  The junior engineer will become a senior. An llm wont. For now, anyway.
- cucumber3732842 7mo ago
  Because a lot of stuff doesn't need to be good it needs to be done. Nobody is gonna lose money because some script that generates yaml for the build process every hour nested three loops instead of two. Intern, AI, junior dev, junior dev telling an intern how to use AI, doesn't matter. If it works for the week it'll work for the decade. If someone needs to pick it apart and fix something in a year it'll either take no time because they know enough to do it easily or it'll be a good low stakes learning exercise for a junior. Everyone wants to think their stuff is important but 99.9% of code is low stakes support code either in applications or in infrastructure around them.
  - Eridrus 7mo ago
    This isn't really an argument for hiring junior folks though.
deleted 7mo ago
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ex-aws-dude 7mo ago
I don’t think that’s true If intermediates were being pushed out they would just take junior roles to have something Companies really don’t like hiring Juniors in general
soperj 7mo ago
> just as capable as using AI as anyone This is probably the dumbest take I've heard of. They're the most likely to make mistakes with AI because they don't know the pitfalls of what they're doing.
crystal_revenge 7mo ago
I generally tend to interview every year to see what's out there in the world (sometimes I find something worth switching for, other times not). I'm not even looking very hard but have had 4 interviews in the last month. Personally I think it's a bit more nuanced than senior vs junior (though it is very hard for juniors right now). What I've seen a lot of hunger for is people with a track record of getting their hands dirty and getting things solved. I'm very much a "builder" type dev that has more fun going from 0-v1 than maintaining and expanding scalable, large systems. From the early start of the last tech boom through the post-pandemic hiring craze I increasingly saw demand for people who where in the latter category and fit nicely in a box. The ability to "do what you must to get this shipped" was less in demand. People cared much more about leetcode performance than an impressive portfolio. Now reminds me a lot of 2008 in terms of the job market and what companies are looking for. 2008-2012 a strong portfolio of projects was the signal most people looked for. Back then being an OSS dev was a big plus (I found it not infrequently to be a liability in the last decade, better to study leetcode than actually build something). Honestly, a lot of senior devs lose this ability over time. They get comfortable with the idea that as a very senior hire you don't have to do all that annoying stuff anymore. But the teams I see hiring are really focused on staying lean and getting engineers how are comfortable wearing multiple hats and working hard to get things shipped.
- sanufar 7mo ago
  In your experience, what’s the best way to increase signal? I feel as though a lot of devs struggle with the initial process of getting past screening, drawing attention to projects, etc.
  - Aurornis 7mo ago
    Not the parent commenter but I've performed a lot of resume reviews for people and also done a lot of hiring. Most resumes are not very good. Beyond the obvious problems like typos, there is a lot of bad advice on the internet that turns resumes into useless noise. Screen a lot of resumes and you'll get tired of seeing "Boosted revenue by 23% by decreasing deploy times by 64%." This communicates nothing useful and we all know that revenue going up 23% YoY was not attributable to this single programmer doing anything at all. Often I'll get candidates into interviews and they light up telling me about impressive things they did at a past job with enough detail to convince me they know the subject, but their resumes are garbage because they've followed too many influencers. So try to work on your resume first. Try different resumes. Rewrite it and see what makes interviewers take notice and what they ignore. The most common mistake is to write a resume once and then spam it to 100 jobs. I know it's not fun to change the resume or invest time into applying for a job that may not respond, but you know what else isn't fun? Applying to 100 jobs and not getting any responses because every hiring manager has 20 tailored resumes in their inbox ahead of yours. Having a simple but clear LinkedIn profile helps. Many scoff at this, but it works. You don't have to read LinkedIn's social media feed or do anything with the site. Just set it up and leave it for them to find. GitHub portfolios and other things have low relative value at most companies. There are some exceptions where someone will look at it and it might tip the balance in your favor, but it's a small optimization. You need to be perfect the resume first, get a LinkedIn that looks decent second, and only then think about the ancillary things.
no_wizard 7mo ago
High performer is so subjective too. You can be a great unblocker, team lead, and work well within cross cutting areas and with interdepartmental stake holders, have a history of strong technical performance. and yet its nebulous if that means you're a high performer or not to those hiring. It seems I'm seeing 'culture fit' as a common reason people aren't getting hired again. That was out of vogue for a good while.
- bayarearefugee 7mo ago
  In tech 'culture fit' is generally a dog whistle for ageism in my experience.
  - no_wizard 7mo ago
    I also think its being used to filter out people that aren't basically a mirror for the interviewers in many instances. I've noticed a huge tightening of the rope around that sort of thing. I can't tell you how many times I've passed all the tests, all the interview things, get to the final round with the team and the rejection email comes in despite having good conversations. By all accounts, I believe any person would say the interview went well. my peers are reporting the same things.
    - ptrrrrrrppr 7mo ago
      Other angle: often interview with candidate A goes well, but then you meet candidate B who is comparable but wants less money. From my experience that happens more often now, as there are more people who are desperate and willing to lower their salary expectations to a level that I wouldn't consider reasonable few years ago.
      - mjr00 7mo ago
        I have hired a lot of people and I have never seen a situation where candidate A and B are both within the target salary band but one was chosen because they were cheaper. You'd always choose the one that was better. I can only see a slightly lower expected salary being a factor at extremely early stage startups with very little funding.
seanmcdirmid 7mo ago
> Juniors are still getting hired because they're still way cheaper and they're just as capable as using AI as anyone. Seniors have much more advantage right now in using AI than Juniors. Seniors get to lean in on their experience in checking AI results. Juniors rely on the AI's experience instead, which isn't as useful.
doctorpangloss 7mo ago
> Contrary to what many say, I don't think it's simple as seniors are getting hired and juniors aren't. Juniors are still getting hired because they're still way cheaper and they're just as capable as using AI as anyone. Tell me about all the junior developers you've hired (it's none)
- Bombthecat 7mo ago
  We do consulting with several finance institutes, banking, insurance and government. None of them want to hire any juniors anymore. Where do you see juniors getting hired?
moralestapia 7mo ago
This has been my experience as well. Happy to be on the high-end ^^.
jjmarr 7mo ago
Juniors from non target schools are getting pushed out since the skill floor is too high. I graduated 9 months ago. In that time I've merged more PRs than anyone else, reduced mean time to merge by 20% on a project with 300 developers with an automated code review tool, and in the past week vibe coded an entire Kubernetes cluster that can remotely execute our builds (working on making it more reliable before putting it into prod). None of this matters. The companies/teams like OpenAI or Google Deepmind that are allegedly hiring these super juniors at huge salaries only do so from target schools like Waterloo or MIT. If you don't work at a top company your compensation package is the same as ever. I am not getting promoted faster, my bonus went from 9% to 14% and I got a few thousand in spot bonuses. From my perspective, this field is turning into finance or law, where the risk of a bad hire due to the heightened skill floor is so high that if you DIDN'T go to a target school you're not getting a top job no matter how good you are. Like how Yale goes to Big Law at $250k while non T14 gets $90k doing insurance defence and there's no movement between the categories. 20-30% of my classmates are still unemployed. We cannot get around this by interviewing well because anyone can cheat on interviews with AI, so they don't even give interviews or coding assessments to my school. We cannot get around this with better projects because anyone can release a vibe coded library. It appears the only thing that matters is pedigree of education because 4 years of in person exams from a top school aren't easy to fake.
- klooney 7mo ago
  I hate the credentialism. What a bummer of a place to end up.
- zabzonk 7mo ago
  Can I ask what you and others that posts things like this here -"What are you actually developing?" People are posting about pull requests, use of AIs, yada yada. But they never tell us what they are trying to produce. Surely this should be the first thing in the post: - I am developing an X - I use an LLM to write some of the code for it ... etc. - I have these ... testing problems - I have these problems with the VCS/build system ... Otherwise it is all generalised, well "stuff". And maybe, dare I say it, slop.
JeremyNT 7mo ago
> Juniors are still getting hired because they're still way cheaper and they're just as capable as using AI as anyone. While I could buy that hiring managers believe this, it's not actually true. The gulf between the quality of what a sr developer can do with these tools and what a jr can do is huge. They simply don't know what they don't know and effective prompting requires effective spec writing. A rando jr vibe coder can churn out code like there's no tomorrow, but that doesn't mean it's actually right.
- geodel 7mo ago
  While I agree with what you said. In personal experience I have noticed the software design / architecture is becoming irrelevant for lot of enterprises (including mine of course). So design nowadays is about API design Input/Output/Error handling. And architecture is about Cloud/Kubernetes/APM , deployment and monitoring etc. Code now does not need much design. Things like performance, isolation, extensibility etc as those are now higher level concerns not part of code itself. This is also where micro services pattern fits in well because individual unit is so small no design needed.
  - girvo 7mo ago
    > Code now does not need much design. I’ll bite: why? Genuine question, not a weird gotcha.
- Bombthecat 7mo ago
  Absolutely agree, when we got our last junior one and a half year ago. He started with using AI for... Everything. If you told him research this and that topic and ways to do X and y and if it's possible. He just used AI which missed half the steps and information. I'm not against research with AI. But using a search engine helps you go through a railway basically and helps you gather information step by step and you have time to notice it something is missing. With AI you don't have the mental pause to process the information.
sodafountan 7mo ago
Yes, this has been my experience. I'd consider myself average at best. I worked in the industry for almost 7 years before being laid off. I can't find anything at the moment and have resorted to moving back in with my parents. It's pretty depressing. I'd take just about anything at the moment. I understand desperation going into a job interview isn't ideal either. It feels like I'm in a hole.
waba99 7mo ago
I'm seeing a lot of specialization. For the past 11 years I've marketed myself as a frontend engineer. I got laid off last year and the job search was largely similar to my previous job search 4 years prior. I've been looking again this year and the landscape has changed drastically. Specialization is the name of the game, I have a good amount of experience working with Growth initiatives and I've been getting good responses from roles that are looking for either Growth or Design engineers, roles that were not as prevalent years ago.
game_the0ry 7mo ago
> In my experience, tech employment is incredibly bimodal right now. Top candidates are commanding higher salaries than ever, but an "average" developer is going to have an extremely hard time finding a position. This is the K-shaped economy playing out. Its a signal that the american middle class is hollowing out. Bad, very bad.
carabiner 7mo ago
Yep - the dual economy has moved into tech itself.
fny 7mo ago
As the kids say, AI makes everyone a 10x engineer. Who would you you want to 10x?
- andai 7mo ago
  But it's measuring quantity, not quality. https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html What we really need is the -10X engineer ;) Alas, his job would entirely consist of debloating the slop everyone else is pumping out "at inference speed". https://steipete.me/posts/2025/shipping-at-inference-speed https://steipete.me/posts/2025/shipping-at-inference-speed
kseniamorph 7mo ago
This matches what I've seen too. Though I'd add another dimension: soft skills. In my experience, job searching has always been easier for people who communicate well regardless of their technical level. And soft skills might be what's making some people more resilient to this market shift specifically
- girvo 7mo ago
  That has always been true (not that I’m saying you don’t know that, I’m using your comment as a jumping off point) in this industry. I am a good developer, but I’m a very good teacher and leader, and soft skills are why I’ve had the career I’ve had over the past two decades.
deleted 7mo ago
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rwyinuse 7mo ago
In my experience juniors are simply being replaced with intermediates and seniors who are willing to work for junior wages.
- antonymoose 7mo ago
  This seems closest to my experience. There is work out there but it’s of lower quality. I turn on LinkedIn “Looking for Work” a few times a year. The only recruiters I get now are those trying to run an agency, farm you out to their Blue Chip clients like BOA or Duke Energy for a low-ball salary on a 12 month contract while they dangle the hope of future hiring as a carrot. I live close enough to a small/mid city that I could get a proper job quickly enough… except I would be taking a 30-40k pay cut and transition from remote to having an 80-mile / 3-hour commute daily. Meanwhile at my day job we’re trying to hire a Senior Data Engineer to manage our data pipelines in AWS. Nothing too crazy, it’s remote, it’s advertised on LinkedIn, but we cannot find qualified candidates to save our life. All the while I open HN daily and see the complaints about job hunting and layoffs all over. Where are all the laid off applicants?
libraryofbabel 7mo ago
> In my experience, tech employment is incredibly bimodal right now. Top candidates are commanding higher salaries than ever, but an "average" developer is going to have an extremely hard time finding a position. That sounds good for many of us (and don’t we all like to think we’re top candidates here on HN…) but is there any data to back this up? Or it just anecdata (not to dismiss anecdata, still useful info).
ramijames 7mo ago
I'm not a Senior, but I'm not a Junior either. The market has no place for people like me. I've killed myself for almost two years and can't secure a position. It's incredibly disheartening. I have a family to feed. I need to be able to work.
- orangecoffee 7mo ago
  Sending you empathy. I think we have to get used to the lower pay expectation. This is the biggest negative, which does not make up for all of the AI's upsides.
  - ramijames 7mo ago
    I've dropped my pay requirement into the basement. 60-70% pay decrease and it isn't enough. At some point I'm going to wonder if I'm ever going to work again.
alienbaby 7mo ago
Juniors really aren't just as capable with AI as anyone. Knowing how to unambiguously describe correctly what you want isn't something a junior can do, nor is understanding if what the ai produces is good or bad.
simonw 7mo ago
That matches an observation made in that report from the recent Thoughtworks retreat: https://www.thoughtworks.com/content/dam/thoughtworks/documents/report/tw_future%20_of_software_development_retreat_%20key_takeaways.pdf https://www.thoughtworks.com/content/dam/thoughtworks/docume... > The retreat challenged the narrative that AI eliminates the need for junior developers. Juniors are more profitable than they have ever been. AI tools get them past the awkward initial net-negative phase faster. They serve as a call option on future productivity. And they are better at AI tools than senior engineers, having never developed the habits and assumptions that slow adoption. > The real concern is mid-level engineers who came up during the decade-long hiring boom and may not have developed the fundamentals needed to thrive in the new environment. This population represents the bulk of the industry by volume, and retraining them is genuinely difficult. The retreat discussed whether apprenticeship models, rotation programs and lifelong learning structures could address this gap, but acknowledged that no organization has solved it yet.
- not_ai 7mo ago
  Thanks for sharing this is the first I’ve seen this. I wish they had expanded on exactly what mid-level might be missing rather then just saying “fundamentals” and “practical intuition”
milchek 7mo ago
I wonder if that is just a correction of the rampant hiring that took place just before this employment “crash?” - if it is as you say that its intermediates and non high performers then does that make it a good thing as well. Truth is, when I was part of larger orgs/enterprise I definitely saw some folks who were dead weight, and I don’t mean to be harsh, a few of these knew they weren’t contributing and were being malicious in that sense. Similarly, I wonder how many high performers now are taking multiple jobs thanks to remote work and exposing the mid to low performers. Like some kind of developer hypergamy taking place.
jordemort 7mo ago
someone: (actual data) HN user: not in my experience!
agentultra 7mo ago
What is a high performer? Someone who jumps higher than expected when the boss demands it? Someone who works 996 in the office? Or someone who knows what they’re doing? I think this is bigger than any individual. It’s just a matter of time before you’re let go. There’s no loyalty from companies at all. Not when they’re seeing higher than expected profits and are still cutting huge percentages of staff every year. There’s no strategy or preference to it. I don’t think this has to do with how you or I perform on the job. Most people I’ve talked to lately who are still employed are watching out for their job to get cut.
butterisgood 7mo ago
> Juniors are still getting hired because they're still way cheaper and they're just as capable as using AI as anyone. That is pretty context sensitive. You're correct that there's no real deep AI use expertise broadly understood to exist at this point (unless you're Steve Yegge?), but if people think they can toss out the engineers with experience in the systems that have been around a while, with junior developers "guiding" changes — that's likely a good way for a business to fall on its sword.
gspetr 7mo ago
> "average" developer is going to have an extremely hard time finding a position. As was foretold in the Tyler Cowen's eponymous 2013 book "Average Is Over". In it he argued that the modern economy will undergo a permanent shift where "average" performance no longer guarantees a stable, middle-class life. He predicted that the economy will split into two distinct classes: a high-earning elite (roughly 10–15% of the population) who thrive by collaborating with technology, and a larger group (85–90%) facing stagnant wages and fewer opportunities. AI summary of the other key points of that book: The "Man + Machine" Advantage: Success will belong to those who can effectively use smart machines. Cowen uses Freestyle Chess (teams of humans and computers) as an analogy, noting that human intuition combined with machine processing power consistently outperforms either working alone. The Power of Conscientiousness: In a world of abundant information, the scarcest and most valuable traits will be self-motivation, discipline, and the ability to focus. Hyper-Meritocracy: Advanced data and machine intelligence make it easier for employers to measure an individual's exact economic value. This leads to extreme salary inequality as top performers are identified and rewarded more precisely. A New Social Contract: Cowen predicts a future where individuals must be more self-reliant. He suggests society will move toward lower-cost living models for the non-elite, featuring cheaper housing and "bread and circuses" in the form of low-cost digital entertainment and online education. EDIT: Notice how we're basically already here: Netflix is cheap, YT is free, Khan Academy and MIT OCW is free, Coursera/Udemy/etc. are cheap. Stagnant vs. Dynamic Sectors: The economic divide is worsened by "low accountability" sectors like education and healthcare, where productivity is hard to measure and costs continue to rise, unlike tech-driven sectors that see rapid gains.
- chongli 7mo ago
  Cowen uses Freestyle Chess (teams of humans and computers) as an analogy, noting that human intuition combined with machine processing power consistently outperforms either working alone. Unfortunately, this one hasn't aged well. Human+Computer is now consistently outperformed by Computer alone in the chess world. Also, the name Freestyle Chess is now used for Chess960, the chess variant where starting positions are randomized. It has nothing to do with computer chess now!
- Bombthecat 7mo ago
wswin 7mo ago
Any reasoning/data or at least an anecoded behind this claim? No?
MattGrommes 7mo ago
I'm also seeing companies looking at only hiring juniors from overseas because they're using the same generative tools as US-based juniors but cost even less.
rps93 7mo ago
I sold a house after being laid off in mid-January from a government IT contractor where I had worked for eight years. The sale and move took about five weeks. Before that role, I spent two years at another government contractor working on various govt. applications doing UX research, design, and front-end UI development. Overall, I’ve had a 17-year career in UX Research, Design and Development, starting at an ad agency in 2009. From 2016 to 2022, I worked hard in government projects and enjoyed collaborating with great, close-knit coworkers and receiving consistently positive client feedback. From 2022 to 2026, things changed as the company grew—my role narrowed to UX research and design while newer hires handled UI development. I often felt underutilized and raised it, but management assured me I was doing well. With little direction from my last manager, I focused on staying visible to the client by monitoring user chats, identifying UX issues, and proposing design solutions that the client appreciated and the development team implemented. Looking at where the tech industry is now—with thousands laid off from government IT and the broader tech sector flooding the job market, creating rising competition, constant pressure to work harder (Elon wants us to work as hard as Chinese workers do) and AI rapidly reshaping creative and development roles—I’m not very interested in that level of stress. I worked hard for many years and enjoyed it, but I value MY LIFE and MY HEALTH more than participating in the current “battle royale” environment in tech. Overall, now with AI I feel graphic & web design, as well as front design web development is a stupid career! It was a nice run, bought two houses from it, worked remotely, when things were slow worked from wherever in the lower 48 and now .... in April Im starting nursing school and Im not young (20 years left of work in me). Roll with the punches here yet the punches are gonna punch hundreds of thousands to millions in the face ... not sure how this any good for an economy and society but here we are! If you are like me sell your house and stash the money away to buy houses when the crash from AI happens!
- ChrisMarshallNY 7mo ago
  Good luck! I suspect that nursing is an excellent choice. I got pushed out, and slapped with the Dead Fish of SV Ageism. It was brutal, and I got pissed off. But in the long run, it's been the best thing that ever happened to me. I would have liked the extra ten years of salary and saving, but I'm not entirely sure that I would have survived it.
- 7mo ago
pasquinelli 7mo ago
> In my experience, tech employment is incredibly bimodal right now. Top candidates are commanding higher salaries than ever, but an "average" developer is going to have an extremely hard time finding a position. what an interesting way to say most programmers find it extremely difficult to get a job. you sound like you have some kind of insight, but is there anything notable about jobs drying up for people who aren't cheap enough or who aren't valuable enough? that's just how jobs dry up. anytime it's a bad job market for workers it'll be like that. it is a great way to frame the coming tech crash. it allows whoever remains to fancy themselves as top talent.
chii 7mo ago
> The people getting pushed out are the intermediates and seniors who aren't high performers. i argue that's a good outcome. Seniors who aren't high performers should not command high salaries. I think the anomaly that is the post-covid boom is warping salary expectations vs difficulty of job (and the competency required for it).
didibus 7mo ago
> The people getting pushed out are the intermediates and seniors who aren't high performers. It's almost impossossible to screen for "high performers" though. When interviewing, you just don't know who you are getting, short of like, they can solve your leetcode questions well, and they had good answers to pretty high-level "work experience" questions. So I don't think this can be true on the hiring side. Maybe on choosing who they let go when cutting down the workforce, they can look at general performance reviews and such, but I doubt it plays a role in hiring.
- saxenaabhi 7mo ago
  > It's almost impossossible to screen for "high performers" though That's not true? leetcode is crap, but usually you can learn a lot about a person from how they approach problems and on what kind of questions they ask.
otabdeveloper4 7mo ago
"Senior" is about time served, not about capability. Plenty of clueless seniors out there.
frigg 7mo ago
>they're just as capable as using AI as anyone. This is a very naive take. AI output still needs to be guided and iterated over, architecture decisions (even at the code level) still need experience to judge correctly.
stuaxo 7mo ago
Not everyone is as capable as using AI. I worked with someone that was trying to push code with all the tells that they didn't understand the code and that it had been through multiple LLM iterations, it burned a lot of the productivity in a project.
data_maan 7mo ago
> The people getting pushed out are the intermediates and seniors who aren't high performers. Also the people that can't market themselves. There are very average programmers that have a large following on X that seem to do very well.
cweld510 7mo ago
I agree with this — there is at least some bifurcation by skillset and capabilities. Lots of engineers are overfitted to working on consumer web apps or SaaS products, but those are no longer an area of focus. You need to be adaptable enough to work on other kinds of systems too. Doing so either requires that you’re really good commercially (can lead development of a product over time, drive revenue, etc) or very good technically at a wide breadth of technologies and problems. What makes this more extreme is that we’re in a paradigm shift, technically. Systems of the future look different than what’s been built before. Building agentic stuff is very different than web apps. The infrastructure side is also different. Moreover, both are uncertain so there’s no plug-and-play set of skills that would fit into any company in the way you could probably get hired reliably in the 2010s if you can operate Kubernetes, design a database schema, write Node.js APIs, etc.

by mjr00 7mo ago

electronsoup 7mo ago

> and they're just as capable as using AI as anyone Wouldn't the assumption be the opposite, in that AI is magnifying the decision making of the engineer and so you get more payback by having the senior drive the AI?

chillacy 7mo ago
I've found this to be true so far, junior engineers with AI can be super productive but they can also cause a lot of damage (more outages than ever) and AI amplifies the sometimes poorly designed code they can generate. I suspect a lot of it best practices will be enforcing best practices via agents.md/claude.md to create a more constrained environment.
- lumost 7mo ago
  I’ve observed radically different workflows amongst senior candidates vs junior candidates when using an ai. A senior candidate will often build an extremely detailed plan for the agent - similar to how you would do a design for/with a junior engineer. Then let the agent go full throttle to implement the plan and review the result. Juniors seem to split into the category of trust everything the ai says, or review every step of the implementation. It’s extremely hard to guide the ai while you are still learning the basics, opus4.6 is a very powerful model.
  - devin 7mo ago
    My observation has been that there are a lot of personal styles to engaging with the LLMs that work, and "hold the hand" vs "in-depth plan" vs "combination" doesn't really matter. There is some minimum level of engagement required for non-trivial tasks, and whether that engagement comes mid-development, at the early design phase, or after isn't really that big of a deal. Eg; "Just enough planning" is a fine way of approaching the problem if you're going to be in the loop once the implementation starts.
  - foldr 7mo ago
    I don't claim to have any special skill at AI, but as a 'senior' dev, my strategy is exactly the opposite. I try to be as lazy, dumb and concise as I can bring myself to be with my initial prompt, and then just add more detail for the bits that the AI didn't guess correctly the first time around. Quite often the AI guesses accurately and you save the time you'd have spent crafting the perfect prompt. Recently, my PM shared a nigh-on incompressible hand-scribbled diagram on Slack (which, in fairness, was more or less a joke). I uploaded it to Gemini with the prompt "WTF does this diagram mean?". Even without a shred of context, it figured out that it was some kind of product feature matrix and produced a perfect three paragraph summary. I've never really seen the value in the planning phase as you're free to just throw away whatever the AI produces and try again with a different prompt. That said, I don't pay for my tokens at work. Is planning perhaps useful as a way of reducing total token usage?
    - lumost 7mo ago
      It's more about the size of the task I try to do, it's quite possible to get opus4.6 to one shot a "good" 30k loc change with the right planing doc. I'm not confident I could get similar results handholding. I also tend to want to know the major decisions and details in such a change up front rather than discovering them post-hoc. This could simply be a matter of style however.
      - foldr 7mo ago
        One-shotting 30k LOC is no use to me because none of my colleagues will review a PR that big. But more to the point, I wouldn't be able to review it either, and I think we're still at a point where you do want to look carefully at the output these tools generate.
mjr00 7mo ago
For a good senior, yes you get massive returns, which is why those good seniors are in incredibly high demand right now. For average to low-performing intermediates/seniors... there's not much difference in output between them and a good junior at this point. Claude really raised the skill floor for software development.
- fhd2 7mo ago
  My thinking is a bit different here: Seniors, even mediocre ones, already learned a lot of hard lessons by doing things pre-LLMs, even pre-SO. Those skills are valuable and I don't know how to train them into juniors. I find it easier to get a reasonably smart senior to use AI in a good way, than to train a junior in what thinking to do, and what to outsource, learning basics about good design, robustness and risk analysis. The tools aren't the problem per se, it's more about how people use them. Bit of a slippery slope. That's just my anecdotal experience from not a whole lot of data though. I think the industry will figure it out once things calm down a bit. Right now, I usually make the bet to get one senior rather than two juniors. Quite different to my strategy from a few years ago.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
alfalfasprout 7mo ago
Yep. I've seen this personally. The ROI of a great engineer is bigger than ever.
nfm 7mo ago
100% this. AI is automating the code generation. Being able to clearly describe a problem and work with the AI to design a solution, prioritise what to put the AI to work on, set up good harnesses so the quality of the output is kept high, figure out what parallelises well and what’s going to set off agents that are stepping on each others toes… all of this needs experience and judgement and delegation and project organisation skills. AI is supercharging tech leads. Beginners might be able to skill up faster, but they’re not getting the same results.

phendrenad2 7mo ago

> Top candidates are commanding higher salaries than ever I haven't found that to be true. Unless by "top candidates" you mean people working at actual AI companies such as Alphabet/Meta/OpenAI/Anthropic. If you're an AI-user and not an AI scientist it's bad out there, even for senior+ developers who previously worked in "FAANG".

yesb 7mo ago

Relating it to performance is just silly. Most companies barely understand the performance of their employees much less candidates. The market has shrunk but not catastrophically so. Most people haven't been majorly affected but that doesn't mean they're automatically the most deserving or best performing. People with experience and/or credentials desired by companies in areas of growth (i.e. AI) are always in high demand

johnnyanmac 7mo ago
>Most people haven't been majorly affected Apparently it is over a third affected in my domain. Which is crazy. Pretty much everyone in my immediate band has been hit at some point. That that weren't were usually around 5-8 above me. So basically a different generational band altogether.
jimbokun 7mo ago
> People with experience and/or credentials desired by companies in areas of growth (i.e. AI) are always in high demand This is tautological.
- lazyasciiart 7mo ago
  No it isn't, because in the context of the comment it should be read "people with experience and/or credentials desired [...] are always in high demand " regardless of their actual performance level.

serial_dev 7mo ago

I’m not sure it is just that, I don’t even see positions listed where I would like to work. For salary ranges, I see lower upper limits than my second best offer three n half years ago. Considering the high inflation, that’s crazy. I would not mind switching but 1. I don’t see interesting positions 2. they don’t pay well, and only 3. they might not even want me. It might also be just my niche, but finding a good position feels completely impossible for me. I am doing cross platform mobile development and I’m wondering how I could transition into backend development or I started even considering the decentralized finance…

johnnyanmac 7mo ago
Yeah, I don't know if I'd call myself competent (I'm late intermediate/early senior. So the worst of the curve here). But there's a difference between "interviews have gotten a lot harder now" and "I can't even get a response back". It's far, far more in the latter. My resume isn't bad on paper either. It's not FAANG coded, but it's decent experience.
Aurornis 7mo ago
> than my second best offer three n half years ago 3.5 years ago was peak ZIRP hiring craziness. It wasn't a normal reference point.

lowkey_ 7mo ago

Agreed on the bimodal, but I don't think this is junior vs. senior - I think it's just competence being rooted out. The majority of engineers, in my hiring experience, failed very simple tests pre-AI. In a world where anyone can code, they're no better than previously non-technical people. The CS degree is no longer protection. The gap between average and the best engineers now, though, is even higher. The best engineers can visualize the whole architecture in their head, and describe exactly what they want to an AI - their productivity is multiplied, and they rarely get slowed down. While this could be done by junior or senior, I think junior usually has the slight advantage in being more AI-native and knowing how to effectively prompt and work with AI, though not always.

_alternator_ 7mo ago
Largely agree, with a bit of clarification. Junior devs can indeed prompt better than some of the old timers, but the blast radius of their inexperienced decisions is much higher. High competence senior devs who embrace the new tools are gonna crush it relative to juniors.
- weatherlite 7mo ago
  > Junior devs can indeed prompt better than some of the old timers I guess? I don't really see why that would be the case. Being a senior is also about understanding the requirements better and knowing how/what to test. I mean we're talking about prompting text into a textarea, something I think even an "old timer" can do pretty well.
  - llbbdd 7mo ago
    I've seen a few people I would consider senior engineers, good ones, who seem to have somewhat fallen for the marketing if you look at the prompts they're using. Closer to a magical "make it so" than "build the code to meet this spec, that I wrote with the context of my existing technical skills". I'm not sure why junior engineers would be any better at that though, unless it's just that they're approaching it with less bias and reaping beginners luck.

Eridrus 7mo ago

> they're just as capable as using AI as anyone They're just as capable of typing prompts into AI, but what they don't have is good judgement of what good work/code looks like, so what's the point of asking a junior engineer to do something vs asking the LLM directly?

alienbaby 7mo ago
The junior engineer will become a senior. An llm wont. For now, anyway.
cucumber3732842 7mo ago
Because a lot of stuff doesn't need to be good it needs to be done. Nobody is gonna lose money because some script that generates yaml for the build process every hour nested three loops instead of two. Intern, AI, junior dev, junior dev telling an intern how to use AI, doesn't matter. If it works for the week it'll work for the decade. If someone needs to pick it apart and fix something in a year it'll either take no time because they know enough to do it easily or it'll be a good low stakes learning exercise for a junior. Everyone wants to think their stuff is important but 99.9% of code is low stakes support code either in applications or in infrastructure around them.
- Eridrus 7mo ago
  This isn't really an argument for hiring junior folks though.

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

ex-aws-dude 7mo ago

I don’t think that’s true If intermediates were being pushed out they would just take junior roles to have something Companies really don’t like hiring Juniors in general

soperj 7mo ago

> just as capable as using AI as anyone This is probably the dumbest take I've heard of. They're the most likely to make mistakes with AI because they don't know the pitfalls of what they're doing.

crystal_revenge 7mo ago

I generally tend to interview every year to see what's out there in the world (sometimes I find something worth switching for, other times not). I'm not even looking very hard but have had 4 interviews in the last month. Personally I think it's a bit more nuanced than senior vs junior (though it is very hard for juniors right now). What I've seen a lot of hunger for is people with a track record of getting their hands dirty and getting things solved. I'm very much a "builder" type dev that has more fun going from 0-v1 than maintaining and expanding scalable, large systems. From the early start of the last tech boom through the post-pandemic hiring craze I increasingly saw demand for people who where in the latter category and fit nicely in a box. The ability to "do what you must to get this shipped" was less in demand. People cared much more about leetcode performance than an impressive portfolio. Now reminds me a lot of 2008 in terms of the job market and what companies are looking for. 2008-2012 a strong portfolio of projects was the signal most people looked for. Back then being an OSS dev was a big plus (I found it not infrequently to be a liability in the last decade, better to study leetcode than actually build something). Honestly, a lot of senior devs lose this ability over time. They get comfortable with the idea that as a very senior hire you don't have to do all that annoying stuff anymore. But the teams I see hiring are really focused on staying lean and getting engineers how are comfortable wearing multiple hats and working hard to get things shipped.

sanufar 7mo ago
In your experience, what’s the best way to increase signal? I feel as though a lot of devs struggle with the initial process of getting past screening, drawing attention to projects, etc.
- Aurornis 7mo ago
  Not the parent commenter but I've performed a lot of resume reviews for people and also done a lot of hiring. Most resumes are not very good. Beyond the obvious problems like typos, there is a lot of bad advice on the internet that turns resumes into useless noise. Screen a lot of resumes and you'll get tired of seeing "Boosted revenue by 23% by decreasing deploy times by 64%." This communicates nothing useful and we all know that revenue going up 23% YoY was not attributable to this single programmer doing anything at all. Often I'll get candidates into interviews and they light up telling me about impressive things they did at a past job with enough detail to convince me they know the subject, but their resumes are garbage because they've followed too many influencers. So try to work on your resume first. Try different resumes. Rewrite it and see what makes interviewers take notice and what they ignore. The most common mistake is to write a resume once and then spam it to 100 jobs. I know it's not fun to change the resume or invest time into applying for a job that may not respond, but you know what else isn't fun? Applying to 100 jobs and not getting any responses because every hiring manager has 20 tailored resumes in their inbox ahead of yours. Having a simple but clear LinkedIn profile helps. Many scoff at this, but it works. You don't have to read LinkedIn's social media feed or do anything with the site. Just set it up and leave it for them to find. GitHub portfolios and other things have low relative value at most companies. There are some exceptions where someone will look at it and it might tip the balance in your favor, but it's a small optimization. You need to be perfect the resume first, get a LinkedIn that looks decent second, and only then think about the ancillary things.

no_wizard 7mo ago

High performer is so subjective too. You can be a great unblocker, team lead, and work well within cross cutting areas and with interdepartmental stake holders, have a history of strong technical performance. and yet its nebulous if that means you're a high performer or not to those hiring. It seems I'm seeing 'culture fit' as a common reason people aren't getting hired again. That was out of vogue for a good while.

bayarearefugee 7mo ago
In tech 'culture fit' is generally a dog whistle for ageism in my experience.
- no_wizard 7mo ago
  I also think its being used to filter out people that aren't basically a mirror for the interviewers in many instances. I've noticed a huge tightening of the rope around that sort of thing. I can't tell you how many times I've passed all the tests, all the interview things, get to the final round with the team and the rejection email comes in despite having good conversations. By all accounts, I believe any person would say the interview went well. my peers are reporting the same things.
  - ptrrrrrrppr 7mo ago
    Other angle: often interview with candidate A goes well, but then you meet candidate B who is comparable but wants less money. From my experience that happens more often now, as there are more people who are desperate and willing to lower their salary expectations to a level that I wouldn't consider reasonable few years ago.
    - mjr00 7mo ago
      I have hired a lot of people and I have never seen a situation where candidate A and B are both within the target salary band but one was chosen because they were cheaper. You'd always choose the one that was better. I can only see a slightly lower expected salary being a factor at extremely early stage startups with very little funding.

seanmcdirmid 7mo ago

> Juniors are still getting hired because they're still way cheaper and they're just as capable as using AI as anyone. Seniors have much more advantage right now in using AI than Juniors. Seniors get to lean in on their experience in checking AI results. Juniors rely on the AI's experience instead, which isn't as useful.

doctorpangloss 7mo ago

> Contrary to what many say, I don't think it's simple as seniors are getting hired and juniors aren't. Juniors are still getting hired because they're still way cheaper and they're just as capable as using AI as anyone. Tell me about all the junior developers you've hired (it's none)

Bombthecat 7mo ago
We do consulting with several finance institutes, banking, insurance and government. None of them want to hire any juniors anymore. Where do you see juniors getting hired?

moralestapia 7mo ago

This has been my experience as well. Happy to be on the high-end ^^.

jjmarr 7mo ago

Juniors from non target schools are getting pushed out since the skill floor is too high. I graduated 9 months ago. In that time I've merged more PRs than anyone else, reduced mean time to merge by 20% on a project with 300 developers with an automated code review tool, and in the past week vibe coded an entire Kubernetes cluster that can remotely execute our builds (working on making it more reliable before putting it into prod). None of this matters. The companies/teams like OpenAI or Google Deepmind that are allegedly hiring these super juniors at huge salaries only do so from target schools like Waterloo or MIT. If you don't work at a top company your compensation package is the same as ever. I am not getting promoted faster, my bonus went from 9% to 14% and I got a few thousand in spot bonuses. From my perspective, this field is turning into finance or law, where the risk of a bad hire due to the heightened skill floor is so high that if you DIDN'T go to a target school you're not getting a top job no matter how good you are. Like how Yale goes to Big Law at $250k while non T14 gets $90k doing insurance defence and there's no movement between the categories. 20-30% of my classmates are still unemployed. We cannot get around this by interviewing well because anyone can cheat on interviews with AI, so they don't even give interviews or coding assessments to my school. We cannot get around this with better projects because anyone can release a vibe coded library. It appears the only thing that matters is pedigree of education because 4 years of in person exams from a top school aren't easy to fake.

klooney 7mo ago
I hate the credentialism. What a bummer of a place to end up.
zabzonk 7mo ago
Can I ask what you and others that posts things like this here -"What are you actually developing?" People are posting about pull requests, use of AIs, yada yada. But they never tell us what they are trying to produce. Surely this should be the first thing in the post: - I am developing an X - I use an LLM to write some of the code for it ... etc. - I have these ... testing problems - I have these problems with the VCS/build system ... Otherwise it is all generalised, well "stuff". And maybe, dare I say it, slop.

JeremyNT 7mo ago

> Juniors are still getting hired because they're still way cheaper and they're just as capable as using AI as anyone. While I could buy that hiring managers believe this, it's not actually true. The gulf between the quality of what a sr developer can do with these tools and what a jr can do is huge. They simply don't know what they don't know and effective prompting requires effective spec writing. A rando jr vibe coder can churn out code like there's no tomorrow, but that doesn't mean it's actually right.

geodel 7mo ago
While I agree with what you said. In personal experience I have noticed the software design / architecture is becoming irrelevant for lot of enterprises (including mine of course). So design nowadays is about API design Input/Output/Error handling. And architecture is about Cloud/Kubernetes/APM , deployment and monitoring etc. Code now does not need much design. Things like performance, isolation, extensibility etc as those are now higher level concerns not part of code itself. This is also where micro services pattern fits in well because individual unit is so small no design needed.
- girvo 7mo ago
  > Code now does not need much design. I’ll bite: why? Genuine question, not a weird gotcha.
Bombthecat 7mo ago
Absolutely agree, when we got our last junior one and a half year ago. He started with using AI for... Everything. If you told him research this and that topic and ways to do X and y and if it's possible. He just used AI which missed half the steps and information. I'm not against research with AI. But using a search engine helps you go through a railway basically and helps you gather information step by step and you have time to notice it something is missing. With AI you don't have the mental pause to process the information.

sodafountan 7mo ago

Yes, this has been my experience. I'd consider myself average at best. I worked in the industry for almost 7 years before being laid off. I can't find anything at the moment and have resorted to moving back in with my parents. It's pretty depressing. I'd take just about anything at the moment. I understand desperation going into a job interview isn't ideal either. It feels like I'm in a hole.

waba99 7mo ago

I'm seeing a lot of specialization. For the past 11 years I've marketed myself as a frontend engineer. I got laid off last year and the job search was largely similar to my previous job search 4 years prior. I've been looking again this year and the landscape has changed drastically. Specialization is the name of the game, I have a good amount of experience working with Growth initiatives and I've been getting good responses from roles that are looking for either Growth or Design engineers, roles that were not as prevalent years ago.

game_the0ry 7mo ago

> In my experience, tech employment is incredibly bimodal right now. Top candidates are commanding higher salaries than ever, but an "average" developer is going to have an extremely hard time finding a position. This is the K-shaped economy playing out. Its a signal that the american middle class is hollowing out. Bad, very bad.

carabiner 7mo ago

Yep - the dual economy has moved into tech itself.

fny 7mo ago

As the kids say, AI makes everyone a 10x engineer. Who would you you want to 10x?

andai 7mo ago
But it's measuring quantity, not quality. https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html What we really need is the -10X engineer ;) Alas, his job would entirely consist of debloating the slop everyone else is pumping out "at inference speed". https://steipete.me/posts/2025/shipping-at-inference-speed https://steipete.me/posts/2025/shipping-at-inference-speed

kseniamorph 7mo ago

This matches what I've seen too. Though I'd add another dimension: soft skills. In my experience, job searching has always been easier for people who communicate well regardless of their technical level. And soft skills might be what's making some people more resilient to this market shift specifically

girvo 7mo ago
That has always been true (not that I’m saying you don’t know that, I’m using your comment as a jumping off point) in this industry. I am a good developer, but I’m a very good teacher and leader, and soft skills are why I’ve had the career I’ve had over the past two decades.

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

rwyinuse 7mo ago

In my experience juniors are simply being replaced with intermediates and seniors who are willing to work for junior wages.

antonymoose 7mo ago
This seems closest to my experience. There is work out there but it’s of lower quality. I turn on LinkedIn “Looking for Work” a few times a year. The only recruiters I get now are those trying to run an agency, farm you out to their Blue Chip clients like BOA or Duke Energy for a low-ball salary on a 12 month contract while they dangle the hope of future hiring as a carrot. I live close enough to a small/mid city that I could get a proper job quickly enough… except I would be taking a 30-40k pay cut and transition from remote to having an 80-mile / 3-hour commute daily. Meanwhile at my day job we’re trying to hire a Senior Data Engineer to manage our data pipelines in AWS. Nothing too crazy, it’s remote, it’s advertised on LinkedIn, but we cannot find qualified candidates to save our life. All the while I open HN daily and see the complaints about job hunting and layoffs all over. Where are all the laid off applicants?

libraryofbabel 7mo ago

> In my experience, tech employment is incredibly bimodal right now. Top candidates are commanding higher salaries than ever, but an "average" developer is going to have an extremely hard time finding a position. That sounds good for many of us (and don’t we all like to think we’re top candidates here on HN…) but is there any data to back this up? Or it just anecdata (not to dismiss anecdata, still useful info).

ramijames 7mo ago

I'm not a Senior, but I'm not a Junior either. The market has no place for people like me. I've killed myself for almost two years and can't secure a position. It's incredibly disheartening. I have a family to feed. I need to be able to work.

orangecoffee 7mo ago
Sending you empathy. I think we have to get used to the lower pay expectation. This is the biggest negative, which does not make up for all of the AI's upsides.
- ramijames 7mo ago
  I've dropped my pay requirement into the basement. 60-70% pay decrease and it isn't enough. At some point I'm going to wonder if I'm ever going to work again.

alienbaby 7mo ago

Juniors really aren't just as capable with AI as anyone. Knowing how to unambiguously describe correctly what you want isn't something a junior can do, nor is understanding if what the ai produces is good or bad.

simonw 7mo ago

That matches an observation made in that report from the recent Thoughtworks retreat: https://www.thoughtworks.com/content/dam/thoughtworks/documents/report/tw_future%20_of_software_development_retreat_%20key_takeaways.pdf https://www.thoughtworks.com/content/dam/thoughtworks/docume... > The retreat challenged the narrative that AI eliminates the need for junior developers. Juniors are more profitable than they have ever been. AI tools get them past the awkward initial net-negative phase faster. They serve as a call option on future productivity. And they are better at AI tools than senior engineers, having never developed the habits and assumptions that slow adoption. > The real concern is mid-level engineers who came up during the decade-long hiring boom and may not have developed the fundamentals needed to thrive in the new environment. This population represents the bulk of the industry by volume, and retraining them is genuinely difficult. The retreat discussed whether apprenticeship models, rotation programs and lifelong learning structures could address this gap, but acknowledged that no organization has solved it yet.

not_ai 7mo ago
Thanks for sharing this is the first I’ve seen this. I wish they had expanded on exactly what mid-level might be missing rather then just saying “fundamentals” and “practical intuition”

milchek 7mo ago

I wonder if that is just a correction of the rampant hiring that took place just before this employment “crash?” - if it is as you say that its intermediates and non high performers then does that make it a good thing as well. Truth is, when I was part of larger orgs/enterprise I definitely saw some folks who were dead weight, and I don’t mean to be harsh, a few of these knew they weren’t contributing and were being malicious in that sense. Similarly, I wonder how many high performers now are taking multiple jobs thanks to remote work and exposing the mid to low performers. Like some kind of developer hypergamy taking place.

jordemort 7mo ago

someone: (actual data) HN user: not in my experience!

agentultra 7mo ago

What is a high performer? Someone who jumps higher than expected when the boss demands it? Someone who works 996 in the office? Or someone who knows what they’re doing? I think this is bigger than any individual. It’s just a matter of time before you’re let go. There’s no loyalty from companies at all. Not when they’re seeing higher than expected profits and are still cutting huge percentages of staff every year. There’s no strategy or preference to it. I don’t think this has to do with how you or I perform on the job. Most people I’ve talked to lately who are still employed are watching out for their job to get cut.

butterisgood 7mo ago

> Juniors are still getting hired because they're still way cheaper and they're just as capable as using AI as anyone. That is pretty context sensitive. You're correct that there's no real deep AI use expertise broadly understood to exist at this point (unless you're Steve Yegge?), but if people think they can toss out the engineers with experience in the systems that have been around a while, with junior developers "guiding" changes — that's likely a good way for a business to fall on its sword.

gspetr 7mo ago

> "average" developer is going to have an extremely hard time finding a position. As was foretold in the Tyler Cowen's eponymous 2013 book "Average Is Over". In it he argued that the modern economy will undergo a permanent shift where "average" performance no longer guarantees a stable, middle-class life. He predicted that the economy will split into two distinct classes: a high-earning elite (roughly 10–15% of the population) who thrive by collaborating with technology, and a larger group (85–90%) facing stagnant wages and fewer opportunities. AI summary of the other key points of that book: The "Man + Machine" Advantage: Success will belong to those who can effectively use smart machines. Cowen uses Freestyle Chess (teams of humans and computers) as an analogy, noting that human intuition combined with machine processing power consistently outperforms either working alone. The Power of Conscientiousness: In a world of abundant information, the scarcest and most valuable traits will be self-motivation, discipline, and the ability to focus. Hyper-Meritocracy: Advanced data and machine intelligence make it easier for employers to measure an individual's exact economic value. This leads to extreme salary inequality as top performers are identified and rewarded more precisely. A New Social Contract: Cowen predicts a future where individuals must be more self-reliant. He suggests society will move toward lower-cost living models for the non-elite, featuring cheaper housing and "bread and circuses" in the form of low-cost digital entertainment and online education. EDIT: Notice how we're basically already here: Netflix is cheap, YT is free, Khan Academy and MIT OCW is free, Coursera/Udemy/etc. are cheap. Stagnant vs. Dynamic Sectors: The economic divide is worsened by "low accountability" sectors like education and healthcare, where productivity is hard to measure and costs continue to rise, unlike tech-driven sectors that see rapid gains.

chongli 7mo ago
Cowen uses Freestyle Chess (teams of humans and computers) as an analogy, noting that human intuition combined with machine processing power consistently outperforms either working alone. Unfortunately, this one hasn't aged well. Human+Computer is now consistently outperformed by Computer alone in the chess world. Also, the name Freestyle Chess is now used for Chess960, the chess variant where starting positions are randomized. It has nothing to do with computer chess now!
Bombthecat 7mo ago

wswin 7mo ago

Any reasoning/data or at least an anecoded behind this claim? No?

MattGrommes 7mo ago

I'm also seeing companies looking at only hiring juniors from overseas because they're using the same generative tools as US-based juniors but cost even less.

rps93 7mo ago

I sold a house after being laid off in mid-January from a government IT contractor where I had worked for eight years. The sale and move took about five weeks. Before that role, I spent two years at another government contractor working on various govt. applications doing UX research, design, and front-end UI development. Overall, I’ve had a 17-year career in UX Research, Design and Development, starting at an ad agency in 2009. From 2016 to 2022, I worked hard in government projects and enjoyed collaborating with great, close-knit coworkers and receiving consistently positive client feedback. From 2022 to 2026, things changed as the company grew—my role narrowed to UX research and design while newer hires handled UI development. I often felt underutilized and raised it, but management assured me I was doing well. With little direction from my last manager, I focused on staying visible to the client by monitoring user chats, identifying UX issues, and proposing design solutions that the client appreciated and the development team implemented. Looking at where the tech industry is now—with thousands laid off from government IT and the broader tech sector flooding the job market, creating rising competition, constant pressure to work harder (Elon wants us to work as hard as Chinese workers do) and AI rapidly reshaping creative and development roles—I’m not very interested in that level of stress. I worked hard for many years and enjoyed it, but I value MY LIFE and MY HEALTH more than participating in the current “battle royale” environment in tech. Overall, now with AI I feel graphic & web design, as well as front design web development is a stupid career! It was a nice run, bought two houses from it, worked remotely, when things were slow worked from wherever in the lower 48 and now .... in April Im starting nursing school and Im not young (20 years left of work in me). Roll with the punches here yet the punches are gonna punch hundreds of thousands to millions in the face ... not sure how this any good for an economy and society but here we are! If you are like me sell your house and stash the money away to buy houses when the crash from AI happens!

ChrisMarshallNY 7mo ago
Good luck! I suspect that nursing is an excellent choice. I got pushed out, and slapped with the Dead Fish of SV Ageism. It was brutal, and I got pissed off. But in the long run, it's been the best thing that ever happened to me. I would have liked the extra ten years of salary and saving, but I'm not entirely sure that I would have survived it.
7mo ago

pasquinelli 7mo ago

> In my experience, tech employment is incredibly bimodal right now. Top candidates are commanding higher salaries than ever, but an "average" developer is going to have an extremely hard time finding a position. what an interesting way to say most programmers find it extremely difficult to get a job. you sound like you have some kind of insight, but is there anything notable about jobs drying up for people who aren't cheap enough or who aren't valuable enough? that's just how jobs dry up. anytime it's a bad job market for workers it'll be like that. it is a great way to frame the coming tech crash. it allows whoever remains to fancy themselves as top talent.

chii 7mo ago

> The people getting pushed out are the intermediates and seniors who aren't high performers. i argue that's a good outcome. Seniors who aren't high performers should not command high salaries. I think the anomaly that is the post-covid boom is warping salary expectations vs difficulty of job (and the competency required for it).

didibus 7mo ago

> The people getting pushed out are the intermediates and seniors who aren't high performers. It's almost impossossible to screen for "high performers" though. When interviewing, you just don't know who you are getting, short of like, they can solve your leetcode questions well, and they had good answers to pretty high-level "work experience" questions. So I don't think this can be true on the hiring side. Maybe on choosing who they let go when cutting down the workforce, they can look at general performance reviews and such, but I doubt it plays a role in hiring.

saxenaabhi 7mo ago
> It's almost impossossible to screen for "high performers" though That's not true? leetcode is crap, but usually you can learn a lot about a person from how they approach problems and on what kind of questions they ask.

otabdeveloper4 7mo ago

"Senior" is about time served, not about capability. Plenty of clueless seniors out there.

frigg 7mo ago

>they're just as capable as using AI as anyone. This is a very naive take. AI output still needs to be guided and iterated over, architecture decisions (even at the code level) still need experience to judge correctly.

stuaxo 7mo ago

Not everyone is as capable as using AI. I worked with someone that was trying to push code with all the tells that they didn't understand the code and that it had been through multiple LLM iterations, it burned a lot of the productivity in a project.

data_maan 7mo ago

> The people getting pushed out are the intermediates and seniors who aren't high performers. Also the people that can't market themselves. There are very average programmers that have a large following on X that seem to do very well.

cweld510 7mo ago

I agree with this — there is at least some bifurcation by skillset and capabilities. Lots of engineers are overfitted to working on consumer web apps or SaaS products, but those are no longer an area of focus. You need to be adaptable enough to work on other kinds of systems too. Doing so either requires that you’re really good commercially (can lead development of a product over time, drive revenue, etc) or very good technically at a wide breadth of technologies and problems. What makes this more extreme is that we’re in a paradigm shift, technically. Systems of the future look different than what’s been built before. Building agentic stuff is very different than web apps. The infrastructure side is also different. Moreover, both are uncertain so there’s no plug-and-play set of skills that would fit into any company in the way you could probably get hired reliably in the 2010s if you can operate Kubernetes, design a database schema, write Node.js APIs, etc.