I was recently considering an engineering job offer at Grafana. At the end I was turned off by the amount of their AI-related mindless propaganda and demands they have put right in the job offer. (Which is by the way quite rare; it is rather untypical to state in the position description how a developer should use AI tools; even though everyone can imagine how it looks like).
Looks like they could have invested more energy in the processes and security rather than catching up "innovation" craze that much
Jobs are trully ridiculous in today's market. Not only you have to be "AI-native" with more years of experience with GenAI code, than the time it started getting popular, but you also get jobs that require you to know Claude Code in'n out, as if no other agent coding exists.
on my data engineering masters the course leader told us about a job advert he’d seen one time. the job needed hadoop experience, like 7 years worth.
hadoop had only existed for 5 years at the time, at most.
he figured that someone in HR got the draft for the job advert and just added in the 7 years as a guess based on another role they were hiring for.
edit — number of years required with specific technology is just a hand wavy estimate of how important it is for the role. never treat the numbers as gospel. that was the lesson he was teaching us.
This can play in your favor if you are experienced enough.
See, it is bullshit, but it is also easy enough. Claude Code is not inscrutable, this is much easier than learning, say, a new programming language. You can meaningfully learn enough to pass an interview in a couple of weeks. It's basically the same amount of information you need to learn to hype AI in HN comment section.
So yeah, I think AI is a deadend technology, far from being as useful as everyone invested on it claims. But I have been using it liberally just so I am on top of this shit, since it is the current hype cycle.
The companies are now so often looking for "AI engineers" or "engineers with AI experience" which is crazy given how current generation of AI tools are in very early stages and spending a lot of time mastering them might be time well wasted if many of them actually believe in any further advances, much less AGI. If what AI overlords promise is to materialize, then all these primitive tools like agents, MCPs, plugins (or "marketplaces" which is crazy that LLMs couldn't help them come up with a better name) and whatnot should be just an insignificant blip in the history of AI evolution.
Companies that care about the 3-15 months of agentic engineering experience you could possibly have (15 months if you count by the launch of Claude Code, 3 months if you count by when that term was coined) don't think about AGI. They think about immediate productivity gains and not working against company culture from the very beginning of their employment.
I remember one job interview where the team lead interviewing me and I had completely different takes on static vs. dynamic typing. It was an awkward moment when we realized we'd never agree, and attempting to cooperate would be very burdensome. Don't hire someone who thinks what you're doing is stupid. AI really divides the waters, better be up front.
There's not, sorry. I can only advice you look outside the "tech sector" (FAANG and the smaller wannabes).
As implied, my employer's product is not software, but rather hardware. This hardware does of course run firmware and software and needs to interface with other systems. It's entirely B2B. All this combined makes work relatively relaxed.
The behavior of companies when "adapting to AI" is like a famous phrase about communism - they heroically struggle overcoming problems created purely by themselves.
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