10 ms·

Jobs and Software Is Fucked

• Trasmatta 5mo ago
  It really is awful right now. I'm lucky enough to still have a job, but floated my resume around earlier this year. I have a pretty good resume and and 15 YOE, and got turned down EVERYWHERE. I used to at least get interviews at like 50% of places I applied to. And then recruiter spam is COMPLETELY gone. I'm not really complaining, but it feels indicative of where things are at.
  • AznHisoka 5mo ago
    You're right on the latter point. I always wondered if Linkedin increased their spam filter or make it 10x more expensive to DM candidates, but I guess it's simply because there is simply a lack of demand right now
  • craftkiller 5mo ago
    > And then recruiter spam is COMPLETELY gone. Oddly enough, in the past year recruiter spam has ticked up significantly for me. It was completely gone for a while, but it's back in full force.
• qwe----3 5mo ago
  > when I need to recall off the top of my head the proper way to instantiate a list or heap in X language You only need to know for one though...
  • FrustratedMonky 5mo ago
    It was an example. 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.
    • Daishiman 5mo ago
      > I guess even an off hand example, now must be completely 100% technically correct , or you aren't worth a job? It's a litmus test, and not a terribly challenging one. It's solved by spending a week doing simple coding challenges.
    • colonCapitalDee 5mo ago
      Just use python for all practical programming problems. Lists, sets, and dicts are all you need for most leetcode problems; dynamic typing is convenient; there's good ergonomics for http and other random utility tasks; and pretty much every company is cool with python in an interview. You'll probably only see language trivia questions for languages you claim a specialty in (there's a huge market for C++ specialists, for instance).
    • greygoo222 5mo ago
      Leetcode/hackerrank problems aren't that high variance, dedicate a weekend studying and you should be good.
• carabiner 5mo ago
  This is peripheral about bearblog, but it's so grating to see the "D M, Y" date format with the comma. The correct format is "D M Y." It's like someone deciding to write June, 6, 2026 for some reason.
  • deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
• aurareturn 5mo ago
  [flagged]
  • gf263 5mo ago
    The roles im being reached out for (senior) are only getting higher and higher compensation.
  • mothballed 5mo ago
    It's at least satisfying these company owners are feeling the squeeze of the end of ZIRP. Soon they'll realize that not only are there "hundreds of employees" vying for jobs but also hundreds of companies vying for customers, and the approach of picking the meekest mice to fill the slot means their application for a customer ends up in the shit-pile against one of the other 200 companies applying for a customer with employees with some balls.
    • aurareturn 5mo ago
      I don't disagree with you. I've been saying for years here that we might see an increase in software engineering demand. There will be many more companies employing software engineers but companies won't need hundreds/thousands of engineers anymore. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46630762 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46630762
  • supertroop 5mo ago
    That’s right! Buckle down and lick boot like a proper young republican!
    • nielsbot 5mo ago
      I appreciate this sentiment and I think it's sad to sacrifice rights for money... but you know, sometimes you need money. If unions were stronger and the government was more populist, etc., (speaking of the US), maybe this choice could have been headed off better... but it's too late for that this cycle.
• tern 5mo ago
  Curious about the perspective from anyone who has a skill set / reputation where finding jobs is easy right now. 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(?)
  • giwook 5mo ago
    Anecdotally I've seen the latter to be true and have had third-party recruiters echo that familiarity with AI use in coding has become a pivotal part of job interviews with startups. 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).
  • ryandrake 5mo ago
    I feel like any advice you get from someone would be as useful as "how to be a good coin flipper" advice from the 1 person in 1024 who flipped heads 10 times in a row. In other words it would be purely survivorship bias.
  • programjames 5mo ago
    My perspective is it is impossible to cut through the three layers of bullshit between you and anyone who knows what they are talking about. The only way to do this is with brand-name qualifications, like "MIT graduate", not things that are actually impressive. This is also why you see senior developers saying, "the offers I'm getting are bigger and bigger," meanwhile skilled younger developers need to become a marketing professional just to get an interview. 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).
  • fl4regun 5mo ago
    I work in an industry tangentially involved with the ML build-out (think companies like Broadcom, Marvell, etc.). We can't find enough people, if you have like 3+ years of experience with PCIe, Ethernet, DDR, you're a shoe in. Verification, Validation, Design, Customer Applications, Firmware, you name it, we need it. The pay is good too, especially for people who got in a year ago or more, stock base compensation has taken off like a rocket. 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.
• VirusNewbie 5mo ago
  I agree that the online hackerrank quizes where it isn't even a video call is dumb because so many people cheat and if you don't, you're at a disadvantage. 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.
  • quietbritishjim 5mo ago
    I'd suggest not adding recruiters as LinkedIn connections in the first place. I mean, LinkedIn is hardly sacred, but why are you adding people you don't know as a connection? 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.
    • VirusNewbie 5mo ago
      I'm talking about recruiters that you talked to throughout an interview loop, not randos.
    • strobe 5mo ago
      I heard that recruiters also use amount of connections to filter out candidates, and they probably view it as if you don't have 500-1000 connection probably you just don't fit basic requirements of the the role even with 10+ yoe. Even is so stupid but looks like in last few years lot of strange metrics like that used more and more.
• darth_avocado 5mo ago
  The job market to be honest has been very fucked. To me a lot of this sounds like people experiencing how terrible tech hiring has become for the first time after being in a stable job for a long time. Almost everything the Author said, was something I’ve experienced when I was laid off in the 2022-2023 wave of layoffs. At the time I was told “it was a skill issue”.
• themgt 5mo ago
  It's not like the job market was that much better before AI infested every single corner of the market, but it supercharged all of the worst aspects of everything. 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 as a software engineer, as someone that truly gives a shit about security and code. 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.
  • bananamogul 5mo ago
    That quote from Heat (1995) is so deployable in so many different contexts.
    • AIorNot 5mo ago
      the irony is that McCauley (DeNiro) doesn't actually follow his macho adage as the movie shows in the end..same goes for real developers.
      • goatherders 5mo ago
        Thats the point of the movie: the organized and disciplined leader didnt follow his own advice while the hot-head reckless gambling degenerate did.
        • dbt00 5mo ago
          Chris also goes back, Charlene saves him.
        • jimt1234 5mo ago
          That scene is gold. Neil pauses for a little longer than 30 seconds before he decides to abandon Eady, meaning he followed the intent of his rule (walk away), just not the timing (30 seconds flat). If he made the same decision in less than 30 seconds, he probably would've gotten away. 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/0062653377/ https://www.amazon.com/Heat-2-Novel-Michael-Mann/dp/00626533...
• lifestyleguru 5mo ago
  Hopefully you had been saving and investing folks. The sun has set, the power is off, the signal is lost. See you on the other side!
• firefoxd 5mo ago
  A month ago, I fell back into reading patio11's "don't call yourself a programmer" and I found it fitting. The core of the message wasn't about the title we assign to ourselves but the "other career advice". 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 https://idiallo.com/blog/you-are-an-ai-enabled-engineer-now
  • xtracto 5mo ago
    >Engineers in particular are usually very highly paid Cost Centers, which sets MBA’s optimization antennae to twitching. This is what brings us wonderful ideas like outsourcing, which is “Let’s replace really expensive Cost Centers who do some magic which we kinda need but don’t really care about with less expensive Cost Centers in a lower wage country”. (Quick sidenote: You can absolutely ignore outsourcing as a career threat if you read the rest of this guide.) Nobody ever outsources Profit Centers. Attempting to do so would be the setup for MBA humor. It’s like suggesting replacing your source control system with a bunch of copies maintained on floppy disks. Really good stuff haha. EDIT: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-programmer/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pr...
  • ItsYan 5mo ago
    I feel like this advice is not very useful because when you call yourself a software engineer or programmer, you are doing it in order to sell a service. 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.
• FloorEgg 5mo ago
  During the pandemic money printing things got very weird. It created a lot of leverage and bullshit companies and bullshit dev work which led to artificial demand for software developers. 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.
  • commandlinefan 5mo ago
    Nobody likes to hear it, but this is the only explanation that makes sense. We had an unprecedented economic shock, and we're dealing with an unprecedented economic fallout. The only question is how much longer it will last.
    • an0malous 5mo ago
      The timeline also matches up exactly, the Fed started raising rates in Q1-Q3 2022 and you can see the largest spike of layoffs happened Q1-Q3 2022: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/interest-rate https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/interest-rate https://layoffs.fyi/ https://layoffs.fyi/ ChatGPT wasn’t released until the end of 2022, and it wasn’t until the next spring where it really started to take off. Spring 2023 is when ChatGPT started to gain traction as a direct to consumer app and it wasn’t until later in the year when startups started building on top of it.
• semiquaver 5mo ago
  > 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 Conflating things in this inflammatory way is a big mistake. Using a technology employers want you to use is not betraying your friends. Not everything has to be a culture war front.
  • iwontberude 5mo ago
    I think you might not get the context this is coming from, it’s about a game developer laid off from Blizzard not wanting to partake in the technology that will justify layoffs of their friends. Pretty straight forward to me.
    • echelon 5mo ago
      You will not have a job in software in the future if you refuse to use AI. I fully stand behind that prediction. edit: despite the downvotes, I'll double down: most of today's software jobs will disappear. Your job, if it is in software, will disappear. It might transform into something new, if you're lucky. Or it might just go away entirely.
      • bayarearefugee 5mo ago
        For the vast majority of people who currently have a job in software... you will not have a job in software in the future whether you use AI or not. The tide is coming for almost all of us.
        • Bombthecat 5mo ago
          Yap, the signs are here. Software and code is turning into a commodity
        • mynameisbilly 5mo ago
• ChrisArchitect 5mo ago
  Related: The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48620142 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48620142
• celltalk 5mo ago
  Two weeks ago, I got 100/100 of a test from a big company for a first screening without using AI. I was pretty confident that I would pass the first round, even hinted few of my friends, but ended up being rejected with an automated mail… The job market is insane at this point and I am not sure what the recruiters are actually looking for. If the candidate uses AI they’re eliminated, if not they’re eliminated. I guess this is one of these times we read on history books: great unemployement.
  • ryandrake 5mo ago
    Getting through an interview process during a bull market has always had a small random component. I think we all have to understand and accept that in bear hiring markets, almost the entire component is random. Having a perfect skill quiz or hackerrank score and getting rejected should not cause you to try to figure out what you did wrong.
  • lenerdenator 5mo ago
    > The job market is insane at this point and I am not sure what the recruiters are actually looking for. 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.
    • 8b16380d 5mo ago
      I was just involved in the hiring process for a new rec on a team adjacent to mine, and the HR/screening process was a complete mystery as to candidate filtering for outside applicants. So many AI tools making arbitrary judgments from resume content to psychological profiles of candidates, led us to 0 organic people “qualified” enough to interview for an SRE/Devops role. All we hire now is referrals as they are the only ones to get pass automated screening
• robmn 5mo ago
  Adapt dude. You can.
  • FrustratedMonky 5mo ago
    Everyone says Adapt. Like, go be a farmer, Adapt? Reinvent yourself as a performance artist? Because, learn Java in 21 days, is kind of gone.
• scotty79 5mo ago
  Freelance? Find someone who needs or wants a thing done, but doesn't know how to do it, then do it for them. Take half of the money upfront.
  • em-bee 5mo ago
    most of those who might hire someone because they don't know how to do it are now using AI instead. so that market is shrinking too.
    • lylejantzi3rd 5mo ago
      That market is growing because of AI. Everybody I've seen use AI gets to a certain point where it breaks and they don't know how to fix it. They have a choice to make, then: ditch it and pay for real software that works, or pay somebody to fix it. Hopefully, they've used that AI generated software to create enough cash flow to afford somebody to fix it.
      • em-bee 5mo ago
        everyone talking about this topic (me included) assumes that this is the case. i have yet to find anyone who is actually hiring people to fix problems the AI created. so far the solution to AI problems seems to be more AI.
  • Exoristos 5mo ago
    I'm transitioning to freelance (independent consultant, full stack and Cloud), and I find I'm working alongside AI in business manager's hands. It's an uncanny mode of competition.
• elzbardico 5mo ago
  The first place to look for jobs should be in your network, people that worked with you, teachers, ex-managers. 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.
• theturtle 5mo ago
  [dead]
• ChicagoDave 5mo ago
  There are a number of reasons I’d site for the current job market tightness: - 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.
  • Exoristos 5mo ago
    * cite > There is always a period of chaos before normalization. In this case, it's the normalization period that has people terrified.
    • ChicagoDave 5mo ago
      Understandable. Look at the possible directions: - GenAI becomes a foundational requirement for tech and non tech sectors. If you’ve refused to engage, you’ve self-selected out of any of those sectors. - GenAI usage shifts down to just the tech sector, but in an integrated fashion where current engineering practices are still desired. Everyone survives, but pay scales are adjusted down by a not-insignificant amount. - GenAI bubbles badly, OpenAI and Anthropic merge with Google/Microsoft/Oracle/IBM/???. Tokens become extremely expensive and no one is leaning into agentic integration. Everyone thrives.
      • XorNot 5mo ago
        The problem with scenario one is it's still cope: "if you didn't develop the skills to use GenAI then you'll be left behind". But that's not the promise of GenAI models. The skill floor is constantly lowering and your advanced workflow is rendered obsolete monthly.
• taffydavid 5mo ago
  > This is probably the worst job market I've seen in a while. What a noncommittal sentence
  • medion 5mo ago
    I noted this too - considering he's only been a developer for a decade, this is a weird comment to make - the last decade has been a breeze.
• micromacrofoot 5mo ago
  If you truly give a shit you have to change and help make the mess less mess. It sucks, it might be worse than it was, but you can't continue giving a shit by not participating. The horse has left the barn on this one. The frontier model companies could all collapse tomorrow but the tech is not going anywhere.
• thelonelyborg 5mo ago
  it is quite dystopic
• GolDDranks 5mo ago
  I am currently quitting a company of 10 years of employment. And I keep hearing how everything's shit. Btw. I'm located in Tokyo where it isn't as bad, apparently, but... 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.
  • NetOpWibby 5mo ago
    Best of luck!
    • GolDDranks 5mo ago
      Thank you!
  • bayareateg 5mo ago
    Don't leave unless you have something lined up lol
    • dolebirchwood 5mo ago
      That might be a truism that's generally applicable, but some people have enough of a safety net to last them several years while building a business. We don't know OP's circumstances.
    • GolDDranks 5mo ago
      I'm am not willing to wager my mental health for staying if I feel the current work environment would be detrimental for that.
  • radiator 5mo ago
    why not start looking for customers before quitting?
    • 5mo ago
• swedishuser 5mo ago
  OP's opinion about AI coding is pretty obvious in this blog post. Maybe some of that sips out during interviews which certainly will spook the employer.
  • gafferongames 5mo ago
    In the game industry this is actually a positive thing. If you think that AI can write code better than you can, I'm not going to disagree with you, but maybe you should try getting better or more specialized at what you do, because I can ask the AI simple questions about my field and it's completely wrong 3-4 prompts in. Using this technology to build anything remotely serious, OR EVEN GAMES, is wildly stupid.
    • luaKmua 5mo ago
      I'm not used to seeing informed takes on the games industry on Hacker news, but then I looked up to see your name. Love your stuff, your website was mind opening when I was in college.
      • gafferongames 5mo ago
        Thank you sir
    • cleaning 5mo ago
      Hate to be that guy but you're likely holding the tool wrong. Being an expert does not guarantee you're one of those people who can easily get good results from an (frontier) LLM.
      • gafferongames 5mo ago
        And how many games have you shipped?
        • cleaning 4mo ago
          [dead]
• Ralo 5mo ago
  After 5+ years of actively trying to get into the field (pre AI), I left. 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"
  • poly2it 5mo ago
    Did you go into tech because you love software or for the money?
    • Ralo 5mo ago
      I love software, but knew I would quickly learn to hate it. I'm not going to be working on my passion projects. I'd be working on horribly boring software used by some corporation. I really wanted to go into tech because I've been told the trades were the boogie man my entire life.
  • benterris 5mo ago
    Did you have qualifications / an interest in this field before switching? What drawn you to this occupation in the first place? Just being curious
    • Ralo 5mo ago
      I'm a car guy, and a computer guy. 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.
• RA_Fisher 5mo ago
  Companies should encourage AI use in interviews to avoid this issue.
• pianopatrick 5mo ago
  I wasn't there but this seems like the same feelings people would have had in the Rust Belt when the first factories started closing and getting a job started getting harder.
  • deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
• FrustratedMonky 5mo ago
  I really hope this thread is wrong. 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.
  • operatingthetan 5mo ago
    The companies seem to truly believe they will just have a handful of devs at that point manning large pools of AI agents. I doubt it though!
• bayareateg 5mo ago
  The blog lacks crucial info. What type of projects have you worked on? What work are you applying for? Personally, "small contractor" and Blizzard does not translate well to the typical "enterprise web dev" role.
• YuechenLi 5mo ago
  The industry will realize that while getting LLMs to write code is easy, getting LLMs to write good, production ready code is a skill all on its own, which simply must be done by a human and is not automatable to an LLM in any sense effectively. That will be the differentiating factor software engineering in the future, I think. 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.
  • yallpendantools 5mo ago
    I've spoken about my troubles getting as much mileage out of LLMs as before while being vague about my industry and, well, this hits the nail in the head. > because the tooling used in the gaming industry is as unfriendly to LLM coding as it gets: Heavily visual scripting based At the start of the LLM craze, we (as a team) put ChatGPT to test with Godot. It wasn't very successful in that, IIRC, GDScript 2 was just released and ChatGPT's training corpus was so obviously based on GDScript 1. We could make ChatGPT outline steps of how to accomplish things in Godot, sort of like getting a customized tutorial. When code isn't involved, ChatGPT was okay and Gemini seemed to fare better. Based on vibes, I think Gemini had a marginally better handle on GDScript 2 for some reason. I've been trying it lately with Claude still with mixed results. I had to install a few skills/extensions for it (can't tell you which as I basically just blindly followed what our AI advocate recommended). Sometimes it works but when it doesn't it's harder to put a finger on why. Overall I prefer the DX of generating customized tutorials with ChatGPT. > extremely reflection heavy Big time. And IME we don't even have to deal with textbook reflection here. Game entities are so convoluted (remember the Fallout 3 Train NPC, the stories of how Skyrim works, etc.) that it is really pushing inheritance and OO to contortions it shouldn't be doing. Dirty confession: in our game we have this GIANT switch-statement dealing with game objects. It happens in a handful of places, for different game object types. LLMs (Copilot and Codex) could generate the monkey code of adding a switch case and even writing the body but sooner than later, when the new objects have to interact with others, LLMs just can't reason around it. Not to mention the hundred edge cases you have to consider! And before some smart-ass comments: in my almost-decade of dealing with this code base there have been a handful of attempts to "refactor" these switch-statements, always a newcomer's enthusiastic effort. I'm proud to say, I've managed to slay one of the giants, the only successful effort to my knowledge, and this only happened last year. But I did so by basically delegating to another of the giants; they turned out to be twins and we could do without one. The dirty way is the clean way because the alternative contains Lovecraftian geometries. Claude has been great for finding edge-case bugs but that's only once the code has been written properly. Generally if QA reports a bug on a pre-release feature, it's at most 50/50 if Claude can debug it. But if it's a player report/live incident, I'd say Claude's chances goes up to around 80%. All that said, > if you are in the game industry, you probably have nothing to worry about in terms of LLM coding replacing you Hah-hah. Look, I agree with you but please get in touch with upper management. As an engineer I'm confident on the value I bring to the table but I'm not sure management "gets" that. Like, no matter how I tell them what features I shipped, what infra I built, etc., it doesn't come across to them that LLMs would not have been able to automate that output!
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• regnull 5mo ago
  If you don't have a full time job for a year, why don't you start a software business on your own? It's hard to succeed, but, successful or now, you will have something to show people and something that you are passionate to talk about. It will give you a new way to connect to people, and quite likely will help you to get hired. And who knows, maybe you will succeed.
  • thoughtpeddler 5mo ago
    100% this. Interviewing isn't something that can compound. Striking out from company after company doesn't leave behind a trail of real work and real lessons. Starting a business is tough but it really does teach skills that are hard to find any other way (about sales, recruiting, management, etc). After a certain point, it's wiser to give up on getting hired, and just hire yourself and build something.
  • anon-3988 5mo ago
    Creating a business something that sounds soooo far fetched. It is such a tail event for me that I never even considered. How do you even begin? You just start calling people if they want your product?
    • gloosx 5mo ago
      Business is pretty simple actually: you begin by finding the market, then you proceed with getting a thing to sell on the market, then you sell you thing at the market. Think about it in simple terms: to start a business of selling vegetables – acquire vegetables, find a marketplace nearby, sit there and sell your vegetables. All businesses really are just increasingly sophisticated versions of this; source something of value, reach the customer, make money.
• 5701652400 5mo ago
  agree with that.
• annzabelle 5mo ago
  It might also be foolish, but I'm mid-pivot to becoming an Actuary. They credential through a very transparent exam system, and interviews are relatively cursory, assuming you've passed the appropriate exams on the right timeline. I've got a math degree, and my software experience is all in the data engineering space, which seems to be in demand. I got laid off from a large company last summer, and took some time off to travel. Now I've got a chill, low paid dev job in a resort town in New Zealand, but my sense is that dev work is not going to be the thing for me long term. This job will pay my bills while I pivot, but they're not going to sponsor me to extend my visa, so I'm on a bit of a timer. The market back in the US seems like an ongoing mess and I don't want to get back into it.
  • aryehof 5mo ago
    Nice, I don’t think your foolish. Now you just need to ignore the jokes that say that Actuaries make Accountants look exciting! A couple of decades ago I was leading a project migrating one of the main applications widely used by actuaries. Those were the days - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48641095 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48641095
• periodjet 5mo ago
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• testertester00 5mo ago
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• kittikitti 5mo ago
  I've found that the people working for big brand companies like Blizzard for an extended period of time tend to lose touch. It's very easy to find meaning and purpose when everyone you know loves the products the company you work at produces. They can bring their soul to work and remain satisfied. The reality is that work isn't purposeful by default and we're in a capitalist system where our income is based on exploiting labor and capital. If you don't love AI, that's fine. Just don't harm yourself because of some hastily formed opinions by grifters. If you refuse to enter the workforce because of a refusal of AI, then you are harming yourself. If your colleagues and friends would rather you live in impoverished conditions than get an AI job, then reconsider whose opinions you value.
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• Jackie1402 5mo ago
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• SanjayMehta 5mo ago
  Reading these reports makes me angry and relieved at the same time. Angry because it feels like such a waste that good developers are getting sidelined due to LLMs in interviews. (And good developers would be likely be better LLM users in the long run.) Relieved because I got into this industry when Z80 assembler knowledge (from ZX-81 days) gave me a head start back in the 80s, and I quit before I had to suffer interviewees using LLM. Knowing assembly made it much easier to deal with hardware and cranky C compilers back in the 80s. Now I'm in a complete unrelated "lifestyle business" where I occasionally can use code to optimise my workflow.
• h4kunamata 5mo ago
  DevOps isn't different!! 4 months to land a contract that lasted 2 years, and due to laws it could no longer be extended. 5 months to land another contract that only lasted 6 months, this is my last week at this place. I have been working in IT for near 20 years now, from dial-up to ADSL, from on-prem to cloud, from software to SaaS, from manual everything to GitHub and anything CI/CD related, from VM to Kubernetes, from DevOps to DevSecOps, etc. And more recently AI!! I did applied for some IT jobs but I am seriously thinking about any other non-IT job, even tho homelab is my main hobby and enjoy it very much. What makes me happy is that companies after companies are noticing that firing engineers to be replaced by AI is costing them half million for some companies within half year, so 1M a year spent with AI tokens. I hear developers saying "I used AI, the code works but I do not understand it" all the time. It has already started, 2027 is the year companies more than never will start being breached due to AI slope. I do use Perplexity AI as a replacement for Google since SEO is dead in 2026, it does provide me all the sources it used to spider, but all my code is written by me. That is different than copy/paste. But honestly.......I am tired boss!! After so many generation of technology jumps, I am tired man.
  • MattDamonSpace 5mo ago
    What law prevents the two-year contract from going further?
    • h4kunamata 5mo ago
      In Australia, by law a contract can only extend up to 2y and then you have to become full time. Some companies follow that rule, others do not so you can work 10y under a contract for some companies.
  • gib444 5mo ago
    > 5 months to land another contract that only lasted 6 months My god this is insanity
    • h4kunamata 4mo ago
      >My god this is insanity At some point in your life, I am still in my middle 30s, things are just another Tuesday in the office. If I could give a piece of advice especially for the younger generation, if you earn $1000k, do not spend $2000k Always have an emergency saving to help you stay afloat, there is nothing worse than being unemployed and having financial stress. It should be at least a month worth of your living, preferable 3-half year. If you spend $5k a month with bills, shopping and etc, you should have at least $15k in a saving account with another bank. The way how things are going, soon a year worth of saving is gonna be mandatory haha I do, to an extent, expect things to be easier than June 2025 when AI was still pure hype, but like I said, I will give it a try another month or so whilte trying to shift away from IT. But until AI doesn't take another deep( datacenters contructions delayed or being cancelled altogether already, companies noticing the enshitification, stock market bubble that is already poping, companies hiring engineers back because AI hype cooled down), things will get a lot worse before getting any better.
• scuderiaseb 5mo ago
  I have been the lead of a very stressful project that was the highest priority for the company I work for and it was crucial to get this working as it was a hard deadline. I started using AI a lot, but I still read the code and sometimes it was so garbage. I had two developers with me, but they were both kind of new in the domain and one didn’t know the programming language. The project finished and the part my coworkers developed was fundamentally flawed, it worked for ~85% of the cases but not all and caused an incident. Now I get to work with two of my other friends/colleagues and they are amazing. They don’t use AI at all and so neither do I and it is glorious. It is so nice to build things like this and honestly not meaningfully slower either. It took us some time to figure out all the details, edge cases and all. Writing tests first, I love it!
• ukprogrammer 5mo ago
  Without AI your 10 years of experience is of lower utility than an AI wielding junior with 2 years of experience Don't blame the job market, take some responsibility over your atrophying skillset
• aryehof 5mo ago
  Frankly I’m sad to hear it. There are just too many programmers - simple. 30 years ago or so, I was a contractor working on back-to-back 3 to 12 month C++ projects. I would typically get a call one day from a recruiter followed by a phone call (or maybe a quick meet or coffee) with someone technical on the project, and arrive and be in the codebase the next. That day I would get 2 calls about my availability. There was no sh*t-show of continuous deployment, code reviews (even for trusted internal projects), and scrum-like ceremonies. There was instead version control, periodic tested releases, a weekly update meeting, a Friday team lunch at the pub, and trust. Too many programmers (sorry err Engineers) - too few jobs, and the enshitification of an industry.
• KernelPryanic 5mo ago
  I’ve 12 years of official experience and it took me 8 months to find a job. I’ve been also writing about huge problems in the western Europe IT job market - hiring has almost plateaued here. So the trick was to search for a job in the eastern Europe, moving soon.
• lucastamoios 5mo ago
  I am not sure op opinion about AI is helping him to get a job. I feel like there is no other way than adopt AI as any other technology we did in previous years. The opinion that it was trained over the data we provided is not so good, specially when you think many of our jobs is to automate other people's jobs... well, using their expertise to do so. I was unemployed for 2 months and the way I found was to go full AI and learn as much as I can about it. It turned out that most of the things you need to learn is soft skills. That combined with a reasonable tech network may help a little bit.
• sinoue 4mo ago
  Speckx, Every downturn frees up talent that leads to the next generation of startups. If your finances can handle risk working for a startup or bootstrapping your own go for it. If you need a job now be sure to circle your connections to get better leverage on the inside track for closing those job interviews. Often times they already have a lead candidate the job was specifically written for. See if you have friends and old bosses that would do the same. I hope when you land where you are going you'll write an update.