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Between AI and competing against the world with H-1B, it's really never been harder to get an entry or mid-level software engineering job. Which means our pipe
by declan_roberts 2mo ago
Between AI and competing against the world with H-1B, it's really never been harder to get an entry or mid-level software engineering job.
Which means our pipeline to senior engineer is completely broken.
- mikert89 2mo agoI think the field is basically over as a long term career unless you are truly exceptional. It will become very easy to build most software, and the upper end will be filled with the top people in the country/from abroad. Wages are certainly going down for most software roles
- esafak 2mo agoOnly if you run out of things to write. Is your back log ever empty?
- skinfaxi 2mo agoNo one said there won't be work to be done, just that fewer people will be doing it.
- esafak 2mo agoIf the work to be done is infinite, why would there necessarily be fewer people doing it?
- pjmlp 2mo agoBecause most companies aren't software driven, they sell physical products and software is a cost center. There is a budget and when it is gone, no contractors until next budget round.
- andriy_koval 2mo agoit could mean they are not completely out of automation opportunities, and will lose to more innovative players if won't invest into software. The end state of these companies is grid of cheap robots controlled by software.
- pjmlp 2mo agoExactly, because the amount of people on bench due to robots doesn't scale with the amount of customer opportunities. There are only so much customers to chose from and all of them have finite budgets. The exponential growth curve only exists in MBA books.
- andriy_koval 2mo agoIn case of productivity surplus, exponential demand can be easily created by government: e.g. they print N trillions dollars, and say we spend it on some (hopefully useful) mega project(s): fusion, carbon capture, give nice home to everyone, fully verifiable, glitch free, hyper optimized software, etc. It will immediately create lots of demand, supply chains, customers, etc. You can see current AI hype as example, and its government didn't step in and printed N trillions yet.
- pjmlp 2mo agoSure, and I have a bridge to sell, to the same government.
- mikert89 2mo agoofcourse not, but they can pay someone 80k a year to work on the backlog, whereas maybe they used to pay 175k. its not about work going down, its the skill set needed to complete the work is lower than ever, and they need less people than ever
- reactordev 2mo agothey won't even need that as agents talk to their own lanes in some Linear project management workflow that your sales team agents are connected. The entire system is going to end up agentic and even the CEO will be out of work unless they are founders and owners of the company. We'll all have our own business this way. Or it all collapses. Time will tell.
- mrbombastic 2mo agocolor me skeptical that the CEO or anyone non-technical is ever going to prompt their way out of a major incident when all the AI chickens come home to roost.
- mikert89 2mo agoi think this is farther off, much sooner is just the subjugation of technical workers to be low skill drivers of LLMs
- Manfrednotfunny 2mo agoIn a few years, it just might. If maintenance and security is fully automated and for small changes or a small feature you will only dump some spec document into your agent platform, for sure.
- mjr00 2mo ago> In a few years, it just might. If you're in a product company and your development backlog is empty, run. That company is about to go out of business.
- edukite 2mo agoJust another 6 months bro, only another funding bro, I promise, all devs will be replaced bro I have stupid question here. Why they sell tokens instead of AI generated full application and AI fixes to your code without you needing a single dev?
- Applejinx 2mo agoWait.
- edukite 2mo agoI'm 40yo. Do you know how long I'm waiting? Only taking for an account this newest hype I heard like 4x next year and the current progress is slowing significantly over last year. Even foundings are starting to back off
- pjmlp 2mo agoBecause selling shovels is more profitable than digging holes themselves.
- edukite 2mo agoReally? Where do you live because in my country the opposite is true
- Tangurena2 2mo agoMaintenance will be forever. Tax laws change annually, so the payroll app will never stop being updated.
- falcor84 2mo agoI don't accept that argument. As I see it, laws should be structured as data rather than code, using a clean non-Turing-Complete DSL for any embedded logic and calculations. Maybe there would still be occasional situations when new software features are needed, but it should be a rare occurrence rather than on every new change.
- ok123456 2mo agoPeople just need to add/subtract an input box and update the tax rates. They don't need an ontology of taxes and goods.
- mejutoco 2mo ago> laws should be You are comparing what it is with what should be.
- Terr_ 2mo ago> laws should be structured as data rather than code There was a submission a while back that might be relevant here: "Why Law Is Law-Shaped" (lawvm.org) [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47945861 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47945861
- mdemare 2mo agoI bet tax law is Turing-complete.
- falcor84 2mo agoI wouldn't be surprised if it is in some places, but nevertheless I wonder - is there a good reason for that? I don't think any lawmaker actually wants tax calculations to have the potential of not halting, right? ... right?
- nwatson 2mo agoI'm hopeful that software will be applied in new areas where it was too costly before, with AI help it will be possible. Software will be cheaper, even more prevalent, lower quality in since respects, but SW engineering will still be a viable career.
- stefan_ 2mo agoThere are really a ton of fields where people have done an absolutely terrible job of properly using the advantages of software, even pre AI. Like, even today there are people manually drawing footprints in PCB design software, manually determining what pins carry differential signals, manually forgetting to swap RX and TX lines.. except for the functions they absolutely had to have a computer do, they forgot to move out all the drudgery and footguns and continue operating in "PDF space". It's embarrassing for a profession that is supposedly made of engineers. PDF space is still more advanced than the people typing into "word processors" however. Making software to emulate letters was such a massive mistake for the trajectory of computing, it let people effortlessly "adopt computers" by making a digital facsimile of their terrible analog processes. Only with AI we now have the ability to digest all this unstructured mess.
- pjmlp 2mo agoYes, when the project budget runs out and contractor team has to leave.
- ryandvm 2mo agoMy backlog is less empty than ever - it just happens to be overflowing with whispy Claude-written tickets for functionality that somebody else's Claude suggested after summarizing some other Claude-infused Slack chat.
- johnnyanmac 2mo agoMy backlog is overflowing. My wallet, however, is depleting.
- weatherlite 2mo agoAll fields are basically over as a long term career besides perhaps prostitutes and even there I'm not entirely sure. But the questions of how soon and by how much matter a lot. Being early is the same as being wrong a clever guy once said.
- mikert89 2mo agono programming is verifiable, and the major LLM companies are focused on it. its the first domino to fall by probably 5+ years
- nanapipirara 2mo agoI think this is true. A lot of AI believers (me too fwiw) seem to forget it’s a lot harder to ‘close the loop’ on non-code projects. I think this is because they are usually coders.
- owebmaster 2mo agoThat's what all AI believers get it wrong about programming. Code doesn't create products, humans do.
- weatherlite 2mo agoIs it really that simple ? A programming function that has set inputs and determinstic outputs is rather verifyable. A ten million lines code base is not easily verifyable. Knowing whether an agent is improving when it's working on a huge codebase is not that easy - it could easily start hurting code quality without it being clear in any output.
- IsTom 2mo agoIf you believe that I've got a halting problem oracle to sell to you.
- palmotea 2mo ago> no programming is verifiable, and the major LLM companies are focused on it. its the first domino to fall by probably 5+ years Which is kinda proof they're populated by sociopaths with extremely little empathy. The people who are building that stuff are programmers, and if they had a tiny bit of functioning empathy they'd stop or slow down or at least be unenthusiastic. And we're not talking about very high level empathy here, but the very basic kind of thinking about the effects on someone very much like yourself.
- ryandrake 2mo ago> It will become very easy to build most software We keep hearing this, but where is the Photoshop killer written by a gas station attendant? Where is the PayPal alternative written by a retired nurse? Over and over we're told that software is now trivial to write, and Claude is evidently writing some billions of lines of code a day, but where are the results? Where is the vibe coded app toppling the legacy hand-coded monster product from 20 years ago?
- confidantlake 2mo agoSoftware wins because of the sales team and the network effects. You could already create a better twitter or facebook that no one would use long before llms.
- mikert89 2mo agothe future is already here, its just not evenly distributed
- pydry 2mo agoIn the "iceberg" of boring company systems I see working day to day I actually think delivery of production software has been slowed down. The cost of "writing" code went down a bit, while validation costs positively exploded. There are definitely more apps developed these days but I haven't seen anything much vibe coded which actually seems to have staying power. Everything is prototype quality.
- deaton 2mo agoNow you can make a prototype without understanding what's going on internally or why the prototype wasn't good enough!
- threatofrain 2mo agoWhy ask such extreme stuff? Why not ask about the solo entrepreneur who creates a convincing iOS app without a programming background? Advantage the problem on the side of ML and look for winning scenarios today.
- dzonga 2mo agonah the world needs more software - it's just the delivery mechanism that's different. we are entering the world of smaller service firms (1 - 3 people) - where technical chops will even get paid more. the age of cookie-cutter apps is over.
- DataDaoDe 2mo agoI agree. And I would remove the basically. I give it five years before essentially just a few very senior people are managing the whole cycle. Downward pressure on wages is just gonna keep ratcheting up.
- cardy31 2mo agoPeople started saying this several years ago and yet it hasn’t really come to pass.
- mikert89 2mo agoit certainly has, SWE wages have dropped and continue to do so
- johnnyanmac 2mo agoIt's not over (far from it), but we certainly have spent the last few years shedding SWE's off by the millions. Try finding a new job as a SWE today. Whether that is due to AI or other economic conditions is an exercise left to the reader.
- davidw 2mo agoPeople have been fretting about 'foreigners' taking their jobs for decades and it never really happened. This is all about LLM's. I mean, think about it; just a few short years ago there was a very strong market for software engineers, despite outsourcing and immigration being very much part of the landscape.
- mikert89 2mo agohave you been inside any big tech company? lots of orgs are > 80% foreign.
- davidw 2mo agoThat's not actually true; people have been complaining about this for decades, and it's never been the zero-sum game that they claim it is. I mean, I wrote this 12 years ago in response to similar discussions on this same site, and in the intervening years, we had a great market for software engineers: https://journal.dedasys.com/2014/12/29/people-places-and-jobs/ https://journal.dedasys.com/2014/12/29/people-places-and-job... What has changed is 1) the zero interest rate environment went away and 2) LLM's.
- mikert89 2mo agoive worked at multiple FAANG, almost always been the only american on a team of 10. theres some huge push by corporations to deny it to justify shipping in more foreign labor.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- johnnyanmac 2mo agoThis doesn't explain the whole story because 1) despite the accusations of "overtiring", none of these companies actually have decreased headcount over the last 5-6 years. They have all grown, though perhaps not in North America. 2) LLM's have not been shown to significantly replace current work as of 2026. The most optimistic projects is that it could do maybe 5% of current jobs. That doesn't match the current death in hiring and mass layoffs.
- iLoveOncall 2mo agoThere are 100K H1-Bs a year and 4 million grads a year in the US. Anyone who thinks H1-Bs are actually contributing to their inability to find a job is a moron.
- mikert89 2mo agohave you been inside a big tech company? there arent many american fresh grads working there, its mostly foreign
- iLoveOncall 2mo ago[flagged]
- weatherlite 2mo agoWhat's wrong with being mediocre?
- mikert89 2mo agoamazon is crammed full of indians, its one of the worst offenders. i spent 5 years at the company also nothing impressive about a senior SDE there, maybe 10 years ago it was impressive, best talent has either moved on or is L7+
- throw-the-towel 2mo agoCan't help but laugh that even Amazon has someone who defends its honour.
- dauertewigkeit 2mo agoFor some reason people never mention this, but aren't there also much more people graduating with CS degrees than ever before?
- WarmWash 2mo agoPretty much no other engineering field made sense to go into for about a decade. Even kids who did go EE, Mech E, or even Chem E ended up taking software jobs. The pay, benefits, and work/life balance of SWE just absolutely obliterates everything else. Or did at least
- whateveracct 2mo agoDegrees take 4 years. It's a very laggy indicator.
- AnimalMuppet 2mo agoPeople can switch majors. But despite me saying that, I think it's going to take longer than four years. It takes a while for people to realize that a dream is dead.
- nwatson 2mo agoSome companies hire junior devs to adopt AI-first practices to then drag their seniors in the same direction.
- 2mo ago
- bryzaguy 2mo agoWhat if the new entry level is what we consider senior today? Isn't it possible today to obtain entry/mid level skills with LLMs? I wonder if things will shift more in that direction.
- unified101 2mo agoAlready seeing it in many places.
- lnrd 2mo ago[flagged]
- logicchains 2mo agoIt's not a scapegoat, it's basic economics that wages are determined by supply and demand; increasing the supply decreases wages. It's also basic economics that this ultimately reduces costs to consumers, but that doesn't make it any less painful for the workers whose wages face downward pressure due to increased competition from labor force growth.
- lnrd 2mo agoNever heard the words "basic economics" used outside of strawman political arguments. To think that H-1B developers can meaningfully shift the supply to the point that is felt by other people it's very shortsighted. The job market has been very difficult for years with vastly more supply than demand and its due to plenty economic, financial and political reasons. Interest rates itself affect it way more than any H-1B developer could ever do it. If you were to actually sit down and look deeply into it and look at the data, I'm sure that H-1B would be a small percentage of the problem and you would get fired up about so many other things. But that's difficult and time consuming, if anything it's advanced economics and requires effort to decode what's happening. What it's very easy to do is getting angry at a group of people and to feel deep unfairness about it, then think that if that group of people were to leave, the problem would improve or be solved. That's exactly the kind of thought that seems to be so pervasive at all levels and yes, it is a scapegoat. Especially since that the only merit someone has over H-1B is to (by pure chance) having being born in a different place. I really feel that many people complaining against H-1B wouldn't even qualify for it if they were born somewhere else.
- gadflyinyoureye 2mo agoThere are approximately 250,000 to 300,000 H-1B workers in software development in the United States at any given year. No the general idea behind the program is that these hundreds of thousands of individuals are so highly skilled that there are no Americans able to fulfill the role. While I fully agree with you on all the topics about financing and interest rates, here’s my question: would there be as slow of a market for software development if those hundreds of thousands of individuals were not here? There was a court case that showed the H1B visas reduced salaries by about 30%. The court ruled that 30% is not a large enough number to say that it has a negative impact on the market. Others disagreed.
- docmars 2mo agoEven the senior, staff, and principal levels are a wild gamble where you're lucky to get any acknowledgment after applying, even with a strong profile.
- whazor 2mo agoI disagree with pipeline being broken. Now with agents, you can get really bad (vibe coded) code bases in a week. Before, to get this kind of experience, you had to work in a company for at least 2 or 3 years.