Yea, we're basically not hiring anyone that isn't a senior developer already. That's going to be a huge problem eventually but not my problem to deal with.
My best advice for folks that want to get into software now is be willing to do it cheap for awhile and then jump once you've developed some skills. If you were getting into this industry for the money you're properly fucked and I hope you didn't load up on debt. If you're passionate about building stuff there's still room but the path forward is a lot murkier.
The reality is most firms are running out of projects to take that make economic sense.
Note: ECONOMIC SENSE. This has nothing to do with refactoring for the sake of refactoring. Its all to do with earnings growth with respect to the cost of capital.
Me and most of my friends from school started in low paying consultant jobs, in fact most from my class dont do software at all only 5 of us had jobs after education ended, this is like 12 years ago, it was also hard back then to get a job, maybe people forgot or something.
I have been out of the tech startup labor market for many years. But when I was doing hiring in a startup around 2017, we had to put specific, conscious effort into accepting inexperienced candidates. The default mode for hiring is finding like-minded individuals whose experience overlaps with the existing team.
Using AI as a scapegoat for hiring freezes or layoffs is just more FUD. Like all propaganda campaigns, the purpose of fatigue is to induce an amnesia effect.
This has been my experience as well. I tried my hand at switching jobs in 2018 and it was a tough market. It feels like people don't have any concept of transferable skills, and just want a clone of someone who just left and can pick right up from where the other person left off, with no on-boarding period. Nothing seems to have really changed in the intervening 8 years.
I can make more money doing HVAC but I'm tired of being on hot roofs.
> the path forward is a lot murkier.
If you're just here for the money go somewhere else. If you're here because you love computer science then ignore these people and do the work. If you can't find a company get a dayjob and do it for yourself.
> If you're passionate about building stuff there's still room but the path forward is a lot murkier.
Definitely feel the murkiness. I've been programming as a hobby for over ten years and only recently started wanting to do it professionally. I'm actually wondering if there's a path for me.
What people don’t get that traditional software jobs are gone.
There is no need for developers, testers, PMs, TPMs, devops, leads anymore. Communication burden and structure imposed by these roles is too high when you have AI. It doesn’t make sense to tell somebody to do something and for them to type it into the AI. You can type it into the AI yourself without wasting the time.
There is new job - software creator. Think of it as a single person replacing a team. This job requires different mix of skills, and different level of autonomy. Hiring needs to be adapted to this really, and people need to adapt. Some will shine in this new world, and those who still narrowly think of themselves as specialists in the specific old role are going to be jobless.
same applies for seniors as well. ther isn't much distinction of senior vs junior human dev (as in cost and efficiency) compared to AI-dev (cost and efficiency). more so, at current imrpovement rate. in couple more years you would not need seniors anymore either.
As long as architectural decisions have long-term costs and you need human taste and judgement to speculate on what business needs will come about in the next few years you'll still need human engineers.
What exactly was your company doing such that the concurrent development of features and infrastructure by 30 people is now done by 2? Each engineer is monitoring 15 Claude swarms?
This seems pretty unlikely. If it turns out to be true then you don't need a junior or senior dev you can just get a random person from the street and they could do the job.
tbh, it was always kind of difficult to get a job as a Junior engineer, I had to work for free for almost a year to get the job then slowly grind my way up for higher salary
