The great displacement is already well underway?

I am the author of this piece, and i didn&#x27;t share it to HN, I don&#x27;t hang out here. I just gotta say wow, tough crowd. i wrote this piece from an emotionally low point after another fruitless day of applying to jobs. I didn&#x27;t have a particular agenda in mind. I was voicing what i&#x27;ve been through and some of what I was experiencing with no expectations.<p>you&#x27;ll notice in the comments section that the population of substackistan is much less FUCKING CYNICAL AND NEGATIVE than you guys, with many commenters saying they are in the same position. I heard from writers, designers, engineers, going through similar times.<p>my portfolio site is <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;shawnfromportland.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;shawnfromportland.com</a>, you can find my resume there. if you have leads that you think I might match with you can definitely send them my way, I will even put a false last name on an updated resume for you guys.<p>for those who are wondering, I legally changed my name to K long ago because my dad&#x27;s last name starts with K, but I didn&#x27;t like identifying with his family name everywhere i went because he was not in my life and didnt contribute to shaping me. I thought hard about what other name I could choose but nothing resonated with me. I had already been using Shawn K for years before legally changing it and it was the only thing that felt right.

I’m not trying to be unsympathetic in this comment so please do not read it that way, and I’m aware having spent most of my career in cloud infrastructure that I am usually in high demand regardless of market forces - but this just does not make sense to me. If I ever got to the point where i was even in high dozens of applications without any hits, I’d take a serious look at my approach. Trying the same thing hundreds of times without any movement feels insane to me. I believe accounts like this, because why make it up? as other commenters have noted there may be other factors at play.<p>I just wholly disagree with the conclusion that this is a common situation brought by AI. AI coding simply isnt there to start replacing people with 20 years of experience unless your experience is obsolete or irrelevant in today’s market.<p>I’m about 10 years into my career and I constantly have to learn new technology to stay relevant. I’d be really curious what this person has spent the majority of their career working on, because something tells me it’d provide insight to whatever is going on here.<p>again not trying to be dismissive, but even with my fairly unimpressive resume I can get at least 1st round calls fairly easily, and my colleagues that write actual software all report similar. companies definitely are being more picky, but if your issue is that you’re not even being contacted, I’d seriously question your approach. They kind of get at the problem a little by stating they “wont use a ton of AI buzzwords.” Like, ok? But you can also be smart about knowing how these screeners work and play the game a little. Or you can do doordash. personally I’d prefer the former to the latter.<p>Also find it odd that 20 years of experience hasnt led to a bunch of connections that would assist in a job search - my meager network has been where I’ve found most of my work so far.

I have heard from doctors and lawyers that there comes a time in your career when people are no longer interested in people who are older and unremarkable. In many ways it is worse to be a mediocre senior engineer at 45 than a naive junior at 20. You are expensive and you have shown that you have a ceiling.<p>It sucks that this perception attaches to people at this point in their career. Many become managers at this point because that&#x27;s an easy way to have broader impact and show career growth when you don&#x27;t _really_ care about engineering.<p>If you have spent 20 years as a software engineer amassing wealth (3 houses) and not making significant contributions to your peers or the field, everyone knows where your priorities are. It&#x27;s okay that you aren&#x27;t that interested in engineering. It does mean that it&#x27;s harder to get a job than someone who really is, especially in tight markets. You&#x27;re also not going to find employment below your level because they know you&#x27;re going to jump ship when the market shifts. It does mean lowering your standards on certain things, like the &quot;100% remote&quot; requirement.<p>For the last 20 years, there has been tremendous demand for software engineers that has allowed people to coast. That demand is cooling down for a variety of reasons, AI being one of them (but IMO not anywhere near the most significant). That cool-down really started in ~2021-2022 and really hasn&#x27;t picked back up. When the market cools down, the unremarkable old-timers are sadly the first ones to be shown the door.

Tough reading this sort of thing. :(<p>I don’t quite see the link to AI though?<p>The CV bot hellhole yes, but not how it replaced him? Is he saying nobody is hiring php devs anymore because of cursor &amp; co? Presumably with 20 years experience he isn’t coding simple stuff so that doesn’t seem super likely<p>&gt; something has shifted in society in the last 2.5 years.<p>End of ZIRP. For a lot of companies, especially in the early stage world the math stopped mathing without free money<p>Regardless overall the message does seem directionally correct - society is going to need a solution pretty soon for people struggling to compete, AI or otherwise

I think your name is unduly handicapping you. Since it is only a single letter people reading your resume think you are being coy and trashing it.<p>On you resume, change your name to &quot;Shawn Kay.&quot; Wait until you&#x27;re doing HR paperwork to use your legal name.

Full remote PHP Single letter name<p>I assure you the problem here is not “AI” The problem is that the world has changed and some of your prior assumptions are no longer valid (full remote is very challenging right now, property is the path to generational wealth with notable exceptions which you are experiencing, weird names are cool and hip among cool and hip people but that might not be who you find yourself among). You’ve painted yourself into a corner, change some self-imposed boundaries and the corner goes away.<p>I can’t help but wonder if there’s a word for doing something repeatedly and being baffled at a negative response when the problem is so blindingly obvious to an outsider.<p>Maybe the word is just stuck. Many of the self-imposed problems seem intractable, but are not.<p>Maybe a step back is in order. What has been tried is obviously not working. There are ~10 items in play and solving for all ~10 is impossible. Stack rank the items desired and start checking them off?<p>I suppose I’d start by getting a job come hell or high water. go by a reasonable sounding name (reserve legal name for paperwork) 50% of initial screening is rejecting the name (your hell with onboarding proved that nobody’s name parsing gets it without help, in job interviews you get dropped silently). There is zero overlap between hip companies who appreciate a cool name and php.<p>Focus resume detail on current languages and frameworks (see above re php)<p>Start applying for in-person in palatable places. Land and negotiate enough remote to stay sane.<p>Sell cabin (need cash, and it’s not cashflow positive) You didn’t mention where your mom is living but you have equity somewhere. Cash it out to move forward with the free capital.<p>Finish remodel or sell (needs cash to be cash flow positive)<p>You haven’t been displaced you’ve experienced a change of the state of the world and you’ve failed to adapt…<p>I’m going to leave the next line as an exercise for the reader. A hint though: adaptation is necessary for survival.

I took a look at your resume to see if I would have relevant work for you but doesn&#x27;t seem like it.<p>Maybe having vibecoding listed as a skill on your resume is a problem?<p>Alarm bells also go off when I see &quot;Github (advanced)&quot;<p>While you are powerless to change it I would also be concerned reviewing this resume as with the sole exception of your consultancy your longest tenure anywhere is just two years.

This was a good, albeit sobering, read.<p>Advice to other commenters here on HN. Before clicking &#x27;add comment&#x27;, ask yourself:<p>- If I post from a non-empathetic stance, to what extent is my lack of empathy a strategy to avoid experiencing discomfort?<p>- If I post from a contradicting or fact-checking stance, to what extent is my skepticism motivated by a desire to feel safer in the world?<p>- If I post from a relativising or contextualizing stance, to what extent is my reframing driven by the fear that it could happen to me?<p>You don&#x27;t have to ask yourself any of these things; but they are hard-won tools I&#x27;ve gained through a lot of work on myself, and they have been of benefit to me. May they be of benefit to you as well.

This is an interesting perspective. I&#x27;ve sort of intentionally pushed towards working where AI isn&#x27;t so useful (physical workflows that are heavily dependent on inputs from humans—scientists in particular) but my experience nonetheless has been discovering how useless AI is in so many ways I envisioned it replacing people by now. It&#x27;s extremely useful in very narrow bands of application, and outside of that, it&#x27;s often more of a distraction than an advantage.<p>I have a hard time believing it&#x27;s making people that much more productive. It certainly helps me here and there with very specific low-level implementations, but the really important, higher-level work I do? The way I decide which low-level work to do in the first place? Not really, no. I have to interface with very non-technical people who need bespoke solutions to their problems. I need to tie implementations for them together with existing systems that are not standardized, not well-known, and often poorly documented. I need to consider how the life cycle of these solutions can integrate with that of others, how it fits into the workflow and capacity of myself and people I work with, etc.<p>AI can&#x27;t do any of that properly right now, and I don&#x27;t expect that it will any time soon. If I tried to get it to work, I&#x27;d likely spend as much time fighting Claude as I&#x27;d save. I don&#x27;t know... What are people doing that they can actually be replaced? Or that companies could decide they actually need fewer people?<p>My suspicion is that with money being more expensive to borrow, teams are staying lean because we were absurdly inefficient as an industry for the better part of a decade. That&#x27;s not an AI thing, but a staying closer to actual means thing.

&gt; I even hit rock bottom: opening myself up to the thought of on-site dev work<p>This to me is likely the issue. I suspect if he was willing to move and work on-site, he&#x27;d have been back in the saddle quite quickly. My forced career moves also all involved a nationwide job search, and corresponding move.<p>Still, I believe the struggle, and worry that we&#x27;ll all be there in the next few years.

I live in syracuse, I found a job this year after being laid off in 2 months. It was a stressful time. Instead or 5-6 hours a week hed be better off studying C,C++ and Java and applying to places locally. Syracuse does not have a ton of web work, but there is a big defense industry here (Saab, SRC, Lockheed, AFRL) so there are things. Cornell, SU, UofR, I imagine are hiring fewer software engineers now though with the potus changes.

I don&#x27;t want to argue the validity of AI taking jobs, but I really miss the tech job market in mid 00s to early 10s so much.<p>It was genuinely such an exciting time back then. People were still optimistic about the web and new platform like mobile. There was so much to build, yet relativity few people working in tech. And those of us who were weird enough to work in tech loved it. It felt like almost every week there was some new startup asking around for tech talent and they&#x27;d take almost anyone they could get. And when you joined you built cool things that had never been built before.<p>Today tech feel so stale. People who work in tech are not techies, but just see it as a career. There&#x27;s so few novel things to build that SWE has basically become a profession of plumbing already built libraries and SaaS tools together. Even startups feel so much more mature from the get go. Back then startups were often bootstrapped projects by a dude in his bedroom. Today before a single line of code is written startups already have CEOs, CTOs, CFOs and several million dollars of investment.<p>Perhaps this guy should have kept up with trends, but 20 years ago the dude would have had a job at a company where he was respected greatly for being the dude who could throw together an e-commerce store in a few days or something. He probably would have been building genuinely new stuff with a team of other people who loved tech.

I feel terrible for this guy, but he really has stacked the deck against himself by moving to a rural area and refusing (or being unable) to work &quot;on-site&quot;. He is up against every new grad and every laid off FAANG programmer clinging to the notion that they should be able to work remotely. To be clear, I&#x27;m a huge proponent of remote work but I recognize that many power dynamics have shifted in the last few years.<p>I could offer a number of critiques about things but instead, I&#x27;ll encourage him to go back and un-delete his AI vlog content as even if he feels the ground has moved, I would likely find his interest in this topic as a positive thing. I would also recommend he move his tech vlogs to someplace where the topic was the focus rather than blending it into other important parts of his life.

Okay, I&#x27;ve read the whole article. His dad was a drug addict who is now dead. It sucks to have a bad parent. And his mother is disabled and can&#x27;t really help him. I see now where all the disgruntlement and negativity comes from. And why it is so hard for him to live a life. It&#x27;s always is hard when one (or in an even worse case both) of your parents are bad. Not only such parents do not pass over their knowledge of life and wealth to their children, they actually take from them. This really sucks, I&#x27;m sorry. The man is living this life on a higher difficulty. I feel for him.

I feel for all who feel obsolete and unneeded. The only solution I found for myself was to switch from implementing other people’s ideas to implementing mine. It’s a luxury some cannot afford, but I honestly think it’ll be necessary for many to think long and hard about an idea they can monetize. I wrote about it here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cleverthinkingsoftware.com&#x2F;programmers-will-be-replaced-by-people-with-ideas&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cleverthinkingsoftware.com&#x2F;programmers-will-be-r...</a>

I looked at your resume and here are my thoughts as a hiring manager for what it’s worth.<p>Get rid of the generative AI, VR, LLM augmented stuff from the top of the resume.<p>Make your typescript experience more prominent. Talk more about your experience with popular stacks and technologies in general.<p>Come up with a last name, the resume doesn’t have to be your legal name.

PHP is his only language, right? He&#x27;s in the same situation as Perl-only developers a couple of decades ago.

It&#x27;s brutal out there. I&#x27;m currently 36 years years old. I got laid off in March last year from an outsourcing shop because no work was coming, mostly working with PHP, with some Javascript and python sprinkled in there. I thank the Lord for not having a wife and children, because it would have been so painful watching them suffer because of me, and I thank my parents for helping me float through the tough times.<p>I got a small leyline around September with a part-time job doing Wordpress stuff for a former client. No days off, zero security, just barely surviving month after the other. Fortunately, things are turning around for me! I&#x27;m starting a new full-time job next month. It&#x27;s pretty well paid too, hybrid role, so I will be able to rebuild my savings, contribute to my pension fund, keep up with my balooning mortgage, etc.<p>The Lord is indeed merciful! I really hope I can make it work, because I get maybe an interview every few months or so.<p>I think the most brutal part that no one talks about is just how many scams are out there that target unemployed people. I tried doing freelancing for a while, but I never got paid even once. Contracts don&#x27;t even matter because I don&#x27;t have the muscle to enforce them. I almost fell for a bunch of scam job interviews&#x2F;offers as well. I think I broke into tears after an interview that seemingly went well, then I got forwarded some forms to fill, one of them asking for my credit card information for payment.<p>It&#x27;s beyond my powers to help him, but I hope things turn around for the OP as well.

I am cutting my experience in the CV to show only last 10 years. In my mind there is some unreasonable expectation that in 20 years you should be able to show research papers or patents, have a network of friends who will refer you, then show leadership skills, i.e. manage people (successfully), and to be a genius who can solve leetcode hards in 20 mins. I do have a substantial number of OSS work but that rarely was of interest to anyone.

OP, you’re setting yourself up to fail.<p>Stop being so different and try to match what companies are looking for.<p>Remote only.<p>Single letter surname.<p>This constraint, that constraint, you’re getting the answer you are telling the market to give you.<p>Yes there are now significant barriers you face: x months not in a relevant role, laid off, 20 years in the industry without a management role.<p>If you’re pitching yourself against people who have 3-5 years experience, will work 50-60 hour weeks coz early in career and lifestyle unencumbered, it’s not going to go your way.<p>That means you have to go the extra mile to fit what is wanted.<p>And yes, that likely means significant drop in salary &#x2F; attractiveness of role &#x2F; commute etc.<p>Maybe there just isn’t the work where you are and you will need to move, maybe your mother too.<p>Talk to people in the industry you know and trust about this, not HN.<p>I’ve been in similar situations, currently in a very tech role at 62, but that’s not usual.<p>Wish you the best

I think a lot of folks are missing the forest for the trees, here. OP is (presumably) a competent professional who has fallen on hard times despite record growth of the private enterprise and their immense profits. Their story is not unique, and Microsoft is adding another seven thousand bodies to the pile alone this week.<p>The fundamental problem is, as the OP gets at towards the end, what happens when a society built upon the trade of time and labor for income to provide for one’s needs, meets innovations that threaten to wholesale eliminate vast swaths of labor, permanently. A society that demands labor for survival, against corporations that demand growth at all costs, inevitably creates a zero-sum conflict between the working class and the Capitalist classes.<p>Workers, desperate to survive in a society hostile to the under or unemployed (and increasingly hostile to the presently employed), will continue to resort to more desperate means over time and as their numbers grow. This is an inevitability bore out through history time and time again, OP is just joining the chorus of voices warning that we are rapidly approaching such an inflection point if we continue soldiering onward “as-is”.

&gt; I own three houses<p>&gt; I could just about manage covering all the expenses<p>You put literally all your income into non-liquid assets, taking on significant debt to do so. As you said, you had &lt;5% of your income leftover at the end of the years. This is a lot of why you&#x27;re in such a bind now. Even just held as cash, that money would be available to help you through this difficult time. Investing in an index fund would also have been fine, and would again be available to you now.<p>Landlording is a tough game. Don&#x27;t you think?

It&#x27;s not AI&#x27;s fault that this website can&#x27;t save cookie preferences.<p>I believe other factors are also involved, such as having the necessary skills for software development.

Hey nice - the substack cookie dialog went into an infinite loop when i clicked &#x27;only necessary&#x27; cookies.

I think it&#x27;s interesting to ask ourselves if there are still jobs for everyone that pay well, and where people can get the training to do.<p>Like the article mentions, the cornerstone of US based society is that everyone needs to do something that provides value to others. Yet we constantly seek to scale and automate, to lower our dependence on others.<p>There must come a day where, you don&#x27;t need others, but they need you. Then what?

It&#x27;s no wonder that applications don&#x27;t work. I can confirm this, but I just quit wasting time on them, went via contacts network.<p>What surprised me is that the OP had no reaction for personal messages.

&gt; When i make it past all of them and land an interview, I face a series of final bosses: Generally, it’s the fresh-faced bay area 25 year old with a Steve Jobs complex dismissing me when they find out my dinosaur age of 42, or the moment they hear the words “php” uttered when they learn I was developing advanced php web apps when they were in diapers.<p>I&#x27;m about your age. I&#x27;d wonder how much of this is perception vs reality, tbh; while there _is_ ageism in the industry, people tend to overstress it a bit. Are you, in these situations, possibly reacting to something that&#x27;s all in your head? Being interviewed by younger people is, at our age, fairly inevitable and shouldn&#x27;t be seen as a problem; for that matter, your manager may well be younger than you too, and that&#x27;s fine!<p>There _is_ some ageism out there, no question, but you&#x27;ll do yourself no favours if you see it everywhere.<p>&gt; Before AI was on the scene 3 years ago, I was already beginning a transition from individual contributor to engineering manager. I tried to greet my layoff at first with great positivity and enthusiasm for the opportunity it provided to step up to EM role.<p>Bit late now, but this _probably_ wasn&#x27;t a great idea; it&#x27;s very difficult for someone with no experience as an EM to be hired as an EM (and for good reason, honestly; an EM is a high-risk hire and a bad EM can destroy a whole team). If you do want to go this route, it&#x27;s probably better to do it by going from IC to EM within the same job.

We need a solution to stuff like this. Unfortunately, right now we seem to be cutting everything in sight to help the rich, so... I don&#x27;t see that help or hope on the horizon.<p>Stuff of nightmares.

&gt; I even hit rock bottom: opening myself up to the thought of on-site dev work, which is an absolute red line for me.<p>Yeah; no more chillin&#x27; out in your camper upstate in the middle of nowhere.<p>Bummer!<p>(Writing from on-site office chair here.)

I&#x27;m not sure this is really AI driven. I think it&#x27;s more interest rate and age driven. I&#x27;m probably going to lose my job in a couple months and I&#x27;m afraid I&#x27;ll be in a similar position of endless posting. I&#x27;ll probably end up working at Walmart or something for about $20&#x2F;hr.

We&#x27;ve somehow built extremely fragile systems. Technological, yes, but not only technological. Also social, economical, and structural. Somehow, our systems can no longer absorb even slight shocks.<p>Then, when the job market contracts by what would otherwise be 5 or 10 percent, all hell breaks loose, and there&#x27;s an enormous chain reaction.

I don’t think this is because of AI. Rather, it seems a continuation of a shift which has already been occurring for my entire career, which is that the tech industry continually sheds people whose skills are entirely practical and are tied to a specific era or regime of technology. For instance, at one point, there were webmasters, but now those jobs don’t exist anymore. Sysadmins have gone through a similar struggle with the advent of the cloud. Once there were sysadmin jobs, and now there are no more. Today it is happening to a certain kind of full-stack engineers specializing in technology of the last 15 years. In the future it will probably happen to YAML engineers who specialize in Kubernetes and GitHub Actions.<p>Consistently the most durable roles seem to be those which require theoretical understanding of the fundamentals —- UI&#x2F;UX, systems, algorithms, etc. It’s unfortunate that not everyone gets a chance to learn these things.

Hey, I am heading your way, as it seems now. Not because of AI, but because of me, and I think you are in this position because of you, even if it looks like its AI. So I wanted to suggest something to you, and maybe it could help, and then maybe it would help me eventually too, if I was to reflect on you. Have you tried smiling recently? Try it. When you talk to people, write on the keyboard or talk over the phone - try smiling for a bit. Not the obligatory smile, but one that shows the better part of you. Your CV is probably perfect but does it smile? You need to re-learn how to smile, because out there is a team that probably wants you but also wants no angry newcomers. It&#x27;s tough for you right now but presenting it the way you&#x27;ve done gives off just the very wrong vibe, as if you&#x27;d be a burden.

Tangential, for people looking for engineering&#x2F;technical roles, I created this terminal app to help scrape and automatically filter jobs to match your resume using AI: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;nicobrenner&#x2F;commandjobs?tab=readme-ov-file">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;nicobrenner&#x2F;commandjobs?tab=readme-ov-fil...</a><p>I recently updated it with application tracking as well, so you can keep everything in the same place<p>Any feedback and issues on GitHub are welcome

Somehow it&#x27;s ironic that this post is about AI replacing jobs and yet when I click the &quot;accept all&quot; option for cookies, the page reloads and shows the banner again :)<p>Where are the all knowing AI bots who are going to fix this?

My thoughts go to this guy; many are always one bad-move away from falling through the cracks, and I know first-hand how hard everything becomes with aging relatives who are not financially independent.<p>I don&#x27;t think AI is impacting much of it currently (but I may be wrong), but I believe it&#x27;s a matter of time before it does and then things are going to get worse.<p>While I don&#x27;t usually advocate for such things, I feel that in the coming years many of us will be better off moving to places with small-village dynamics. It doesn&#x27;t need to be an actual small village. It can even be the sort of workplace where people know each other and implicitly treat their colleagues with kindness and dignity; such places still exist.

It&#x27;s not the AI, the dude wants $150k for a simple engineering job in this economy.

It’s got a lot more to do with interest rates than AI.

Have made an alt to comment in case my dev reads this<p>----<p>Wanted to chime in as someone very minorly on the hiring side. Run a business, used a remote contract developer for a decade. They were reasonably productive, but with a communications lag due to timezones and back and forth communication. Their rate also rose in the past couple of years.<p>We have completely eliminated their role and I took over the dev work using ai. I learned some programming a decade ago which helps oversee the ai.<p>In doing so I was able to see their code wasn&#x27;t up to spec. Outdated php with deprecated functions, some very inefficient functions which added multiple seconds to pageload. Refactored everything and our site is up to date and substantially faster.<p>I doubt this is a common case, most clients likely aren&#x27;t personally replacing their developers. But at the low end of codework it&#x27;s certainly possible to replace a dev with ai. Compared to our developer ai provided:<p>* instant feedback * Technically up to date code * More efficient methods when prompted how to approach a problem<p>Crucially our developer didn&#x27;t want to use ai and preferred handcrafting code. Also didn&#x27;t use it if they found something I wrote unclear, which could add 12-24 hours to a communications cycle.<p>I presume they&#x27;re still doing work for their other clients. But from my perspective the opportunity cost of using them rose tremendously when they refused to try new tools.<p>Thinking through code architecture has tremendous value. Physically crafting the actually expression of those thoughts in lines of boilerplate code has definitely declined in utility. Don&#x27;t know how many programming jobs this describes but ai is definitely nibbling at the lower end of the market.

All I wanted to say is, this is not because of AI. Or at least, I have not seen data that shows that. The loss of jobs is happening in all sectors, all over the world. Some say its because of higher interest rates, not sure though ?

The travails described in this post could just as well be my own, except that my career disintegration began in 2017 or so, soon after I turned 50. I&#x27;ve pursued every job search strategy this author lists, and encountered the same lack of progress. I&#x27;ve just submitted an application to work at the local grocery store for $17&#x2F;hour.<p>We can blame ageism, offshoring, AI, what have you. The basic problem is that the technology industry has never prioritized hiring or retaining experienced people as developers. Our roles are persistently misunderstood by management, and &quot;AI could do that!&quot; is just the latest misapprehension.<p>Meanwhile, be kind to your DoorDashers and store clerks.

It’s really important to build and maintain your network, especially as you get older. It’s nearly mandatory to know someone to get your foot in the door today. Especially today where we have a saturated market and dim prospects for future demand picking up like it was in the 2012-2022 era. Seriously, go through your contacts and just say hi every now and then. A career has to be groomed and managed today.<p>Try sending your CV directly to recruiters. If you find a job you’re a great fit try and find a recruiter on LinkedIn for the company and send them a note. Easier when company isn’t huge.<p>This works on hiring managers too. Be aggressive in how you send your CV out - direct to the stand holders. Show initiative.<p>Likewise if you see a job check your network to see if anyone works there. Send them a note. Even if you’re not that close they will recommend you in holes of getting the recruiting bonus.

Articles like this terrify me, and recently they are plenty. I have had a lifelong interest and participant in development, doing freelance at times, always utilizing it in my career when approved, and contributing to opensource. I finished out my BS:CS while working full-time and although my general-IT career has been pretty successful, I have always planned on trying to pivot into a proper development team full-time from the public sector.<p>Now that the structure of my organization, benefits, and even my job existing is on thin-ice (again, public sector), I have been dropping my name in the hat to open positions. My numbers are much better OP’s (landing at least a 1st round with ~10% of apps), but the closer I get to potential offers with some [great] companies, I can’t seem but to get even more worried about the stability or if this is the right choice for me and my family. My physiological and safety needs are met (i.e. Maslows), for now, but I have a longing for the rest of the hierarchy.<p>Is the industry forecast as bad as these outlooks paint it?

Everyone nitpicking OP&#x27;s personal choices, is this because the job market is not in fact being gutted by AI?

How does your experience jive with the massive shortage of SWEs we have in the US. We&#x27;ve been inviting an additional ~150k foreign workers each year because there are no Americans applying for the long list of tech positions.

Have you tried working with recruiters? I don’t have recommendations for how to find them, but they find me on LinkedIn and it has lead to my last 2 job opportunities and most of my interviews.

I don&#x27;t know what the situation is in the United States but down here in Australia trained members of the military are very well paid with excellent conditions and they are recruiting cyber and technical roles.

It feels like you&#x27;re describing my own experience. I&#x27;ve worked in the tech industry for years, putting in so much effort, and suddenly, everything I worked for seems to have lost its value. The changes brought by AI have been so fast, it&#x27;s like a complete upheaval. What seemed like a stable career path has suddenly become fragile. The hardest part isn’t losing the job, but feeling like I’ve been left behind by a system that’s rapidly changing.

This has to be a location based problem, or maybe the types of companies they are applying to? I can easily get another job doing something in software in the greater Milwaukee area. I typically look at companies that are not software companies, but who still need some software work in their IT dept to make their company work and keep them relevant.

I hope that as people talk about onshoring manufacturing jobs, they also look at onshoring technology jobs as well.<p>I doubt it is AI that has taken your job - it could just as easily by cheap labour, either via H1B or working from their home nation.

errr your gonna have to change your name to shawn kay … that’s it, right therr

btw i can barely scroll your website through my android firefox phone. it&#x27;s got these weird animations that&#x27;s making everything very slow.

This discussion saved my growth path from being sabotaged by cynicism.

&gt; I even hit rock bottom: opening myself up to the thought of on-site dev work, which is an absolute red line for me.<p>With respect, that is a red flag for me and would indicate a bit of an &quot;attitude problem&quot; if I was interviewing or reviewing applications and this was mentioned. If going to the office - something absolutely normal and expected of any desk worker - is a &quot;red line&quot; for you and you let potential employers know that, then frankly I am not surprised people are not biting. Yes we all had a good ride over COVID but the trend (whether people like it or not) is for the bosses to want everyone back in the office.<p>I would respectfully suggest you suck it up, don&#x27;t make a deal of it in your resume&#x2F;CV or interview, and accept that you&#x27;ll be badging through the turn-style 5 days a week along with everyone else and don&#x27;t expect special treatment.<p>Good luck.

Reading this site is not a fun experience with astigmatism. my gawd! Will try to continue reading now

This is the true definition of &quot;AGI&quot;.

I don&#x27;t think the author&#x27;s troubles have anything to do with AI, other than making it harder to get an interview. He seems to get a few of those. I think the real problem he has is... well, the meaning of life, i.e. 42.<p>He&#x27;s a 42 year old dude. Looking for a job in software? You gotta be joking. He says he can&#x27;t clear the 25-year old Steve-Jobs complex SV bro mini-boss. Well, duh.<p>That&#x27;s the industry. It sucks you up and it spits you out. It vampires the best years of your life and then you&#x27;re on your own.<p>Sorry that the author had to find out, but I think I&#x27;ve seen that coming from the day I was first employed as a junior engineer. I just averaged up the ages of my colleagues and it was blindingly obvious how things turn out in the long run.<p>Nor &quot;AI&quot; as in &quot;Artificial Intelligence&quot;, but &quot;AI&quot; as in &quot;Ageist Industry&quot;.<p>P.S. Look on the bright side: at least you&#x27;re not a 42 year old woman looking for software jobs. Hah.

I feel like &quot;AI is replacing tech workers&quot; is a far more negative opinion and unjustifiable opinion than tech companies &quot;overhired&quot; and governments pushed supply of tech related jobs too much (particularly CS degrees)<p>I&#x27;d like to see even a shred of evidence that your previous field of expertise was automated away. IF I was cynical and negative I would say spending 2 to 5 hours a day consuming AI media has caused brainrot and skill degradation which is preventing you from being hired.<p>My father is in his 70s and still makes enough money driving to people&#x27;s houses and companies to fix miscellaneous network and computer most of which probably could be solved by Google for the last 30 years, let alone ChatGPT. Sure the company work is more involved then I&#x27;m letting on and he handles procurement (ordering stuff from amazon), setup, referal etc. His degree? EE.<p>You clearly aren&#x27;t interested in SE so why pigeon hole yourself to it? Talk to some people and your neighbors about your houses. Open a LAN cafe or something be creative. If AI really is replacing skilled labor then it should be a piece of cake LOL

If the people who used to hire you would sell your work to clients for $2000 per day, then instead start freelancing your own work and selling it for $1000 per day.<p>It saddens me that tech people have become so intrinsically beholden to a lifetime association with some rich paying Company.

It&#x27;s so fucking heartbreaking, relatable and scary. I&#x27;m an immigrant, but before you readers start unsheathing your pitchforks, let me tell y&#x27;all - I&#x27;ve lived in the States for almost two decades, paying taxes and being a law abiding resident and later citizen — perhaps, contributing to the well-being of this nation more than I got back in return. Also, I&#x27;ve been here legally from day one.<p>I don&#x27;t have a portfolio of projects (all of the interesting work I&#x27;ve done is for private companies), I have not written any books or even noteworthy articles, I have never presented any talks at conferences.<p>Last year I lost my job, then I joined a startup where only after three months (most of which were in holiday season) the company decided to decommission the only project they&#x27;d hired me for and once again I had to start looking for something new.<p>I just couldn&#x27;t figure out the bureaucracy of unemployment bullcrap. When we were in California, that shit was relatively simple, despite it all happening during COVID. Yep, my company tried to get those PPP loans and for that they had to lay off the entire team, and of course, ostracizing the most expensive workers of the San Francisco team made more sense — remote workers in other states kept their jobs. For California unemployment, I just had to update my status every two weeks (or every week, I don&#x27;t remember anymore). In Texas, the bureaucracy felt debilitating. I just never figured out how to get that meager money. Between having stress, depression and dealing with interviews that was too much.<p>It took me seven months to find a job. I&#x27;ve been working since I was fourteen. I traveled and worked in different countries, for various industries, etc. Never in my life had I stayed without a job for that long. My typical job search back in 2015-2018 would take me no more than three days. This time was very different. I eventually found a new gig, but I had to settle for much less money than I made before. I am getting paid less today than when I was a junior developer - 10-12 years ago. Despite all my experience, knowledge and skills.<p>I don&#x27;t know what happens next, and I have no prospects for retirement — I don&#x27;t have enough savings to retire. I just want to keep doing what I love to do. I do love to code, solve problems and build solutions. I love to follow the data and build pipelines and visualize it and analyze it — slice it, dice it, group it, etc., and I&#x27;m good at that. I&#x27;m just hoping there will be something for me to do after all. Yet I don&#x27;t think I ever again will get compensated adequately for the work I do. And it&#x27;s not just the stark reality of capitalism, it&#x27;s not because money no longer is what it used to be. The world has changed, and whenever that happens some social tiers do usually suffer.<p>Let&#x27;s try to remain kinder to one another in this rapidly changing world, as all indications suggest it will only become more challenging.

Not the greatest word choice, those words have a lot of racist history.

Recent and related:<p><i>The Great Displacement Is Already Well Underway</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43944911">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43944911</a> - May 2025 (5 comments)

7 more years and I moving to another country.

what exactly are we transitioning to, economy wise? If it&#x27;s techno-feudalism, what do the peasant&#x27;s actually do when they&#x27;re not needed?