Leaving Tech(ryanbigg.com) |
Leaving Tech(ryanbigg.com) |
patterns and best practices will emerge. old stuff will be rediscovered. some hard earned wisdom and knowledge will become obsolete while other hard earned wisdom and knowledge will be more valuable than ever.
some good "traditional" software engineers make terrible "AI-engineers" (or whatever the term will be) and will either grow and learn, try to fake it as long as they can, or leave.
lots of us will leave the industry because we're tired. we don't want this new thing. our work was fulfilling because reading and writing helped us learn and grow and become better. asking an LLM to "figure it out" followed by "ok, do it" (or, if you're company is actually funding you, creating loops that do that) robs you of the joy you used to feel.
we will realize that our passion and pride in our work was not really valued by employers. the value was us shipping shit that generates revenue for them.
the interview treadmill is fucking soul crushing.
we will leave and take 75% pay cuts. but our mindspace will belong to us again. we will struggle, but we will be happier.
Most of those employers are not valued by anybody... The big secret is they (mgmt) are the most replaceable here...
Of course they will say, well they have the money, and I suppose that is true, for now...
You're telling me you applied for 40 jobs and gave up? Maybe this industry isn't for you then. Have fun in retirement.
Now, we only have ourselves to blame: we built this technology, we enthusiastically embraced it and one-upped each other by showing how much we can vibecode. And now, we're queasy about what comes next.
In my view, probably nothing pretty. I suspect we might wake up in a society that looks much like how it used to: cancer still not cured, poverty and hunger not solved, but now with tech jobs that pay less and suck more because you're just thoughtlessly babysitting agents and are a lot more replaceable in that role.
It is a buyers market for developers.
This alone is likely the biggest factor - they have people local who can do the job and that’s their preference.
You might not like it but that’s the way it is.
In this case it’s not likely about AI it’s about location.
Yikes - personal attacks are not ok here, regardless of how you perceive someone else or feel about them.
No more of this, please.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Also 36 jobs isn’t that much
All 24 of those jobs the author was rejected from likely went to 24 other people who just got hired. I doubt they'd be saying the tech market is cooked. It's more competitive than ever, but that's not the same as cooked.
Looking over the author's achievements, they are great but it's not clear for instance how those kind of things would help at our company, and I'm sure other companies would think the same. We don't care about Ruby or even Javascript... AI has made experience with programming languages more as a footnote rather than a core feature of a resume.
I hope the author will rebrand themselves for the AI era rather than just leave the tech industry entirely. Times are changing, we need good people.
He applied for 36 jobs and he cannot take the rejection? Isn't that an extremely modest amount of applications to already be claiming mental anguish? This seems like a lot of doomerism for not that much effort wasted.
I didn't suggest that.
Workers near the end of their career retire. Those who have options in other fields switch. People in it for the money go to the next money maker.
This individual is telling us they really don’t need a job very badly.
Looking at his linkedin I see one programming job he had for more than a few months, and a lot that are about 8 months give or take. At one job he started as a programmer after a year and was moved to be a trainer, which he did for 2 more years. That's such a bad sign.
The most likely explanation, to me, of this resume is that there's something more to this story. He gets hired, they give him a few months and then pull the plug. This pattern is there 5 or 6 times, and then one programming job longer than 2 years, which is remote.
I don't know him and I can't say for sure, but this pattern of employment does not fill me with confidence.
Then there are macro issues. He has spent almost his entire career doing Ruby on Rails, which is nearly dead. Jobs for Rails are at 2007 levels as a % of overall tech jobs, and going down year over year for a decade. The tech job market is also saturated with applicants in general.
Finally, and overwhelmingly most importantly, he is only looking for fully remote jobs in Australia.
Overall I would say if he is only willing to consider remote work in Australia, applying to 36 jobs and not getting any is not that surprising. Things are rough out there and he is excluding 99.99% of the job market.
If I were giving him advice, it would be to go get whatever job he can and keep applying to programming jobs if that is where he wants to continue his career. He hasn't been looking very long and his experience in the market he is limiting himself to does really reflect on him or his abilities. I would give him further advice to clean up his resume, remove several of the short-time jobs that nobody cares about because they are so long ago (but do care about because of the pattern of short term jobs), and combine that job that is split into programmer/trainer stints into one long job with both responsibilities summarized (I programmed and trained people). Finally spend your free time learning a technology that is growing and has relevance, like Rust or Go, and keep applying.
Sorry is this a troll? Go check out the SWE subreddits, people are sending out 1000s of applications before they get something.
The 1000s of applications folks are doing on the SWE subreddits are mostly juniors (or over titled seniors) with not much experience.
Maybe this guy is in that latter category, but it seems unlikely. I think this is just an issue of remote jobs being scarce.
Also - do people who write ruby books make companies more money?
Software devs are the polar opposite of this.
- We have the most gruelling interview process.
- We normalize working over time with no pay (oncall).
- We openly invite people from all walks of life to join this career. To suggest any sort of minimum standards is viewed as gatekeeping. Learn to code even became a meme at one point.
- We are supposed to sound like our work is our life and even outside of working hours we're busy with side projects.
I don't know of any other career in which the workers are so brutal to each other.
I hope the current AI revolution is a wake up call.
There actually was a dedicated Software Engineering PE exam (similar to other engineering fields) but it was phased out due to low turnout some years back - though the PE Electrical and Computer is still offered [3].
> Learn to code even became a meme at one point.
Yup! Remember the companies that promised they were going to retrain former blue-collar Appalachia coal miners and turn them into programmers?
[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/12/us/mined-minds-west-virgi...
[2] - http://archive.today/nsEHE
[3] - https://ncees.org/exams/pe-exam/electrical-and-computer/
This is like, really bad for society though?
Every time I have brought up unions for the past 25 years, you get this prevalent attitude that "we" programmers have it great. Do not rock the boat.
I do not mean to pick on any one individual, but look at this comment thread from just 1 year ago.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44485959
"Yeah, look at union successes like dockworkers holding economy hostage via a legalized monopoly, while having more striking non-working members long useless due to automation than actual workers! I sure aspire to work in an industry like that." -- some hackernews user
What?
"There is not a single problem competent developers have that unions would solve" -- some hackernews user
What?
Well. Now we will all suffer. I am bitter. I will suffer because of years of shortsightedness and stubbornness and some kind of "we are ubermensch" and above all the little people who need silly little crutches like unions.
Who's "we"? I'm a software engineer and I sure didn't
Speak for yourself. I have never done any of this and I don't want to be associated with the people who do.
Maybe you weren't a part of it, but I don't think any of us gets to disclaim "association".
The company charged for each of these payments, netting them something around 0.5-1% per payment. You do the math.
Over-generalization. Lots of us have had nothing to do with automating people out of their jobs, unless you want to go really far back, like "in 1921 people used to do this with a slide rule and you put them out of a job over a hundred years later, somehow".
> ...doctors have rigged medicine! It's one of the biggest social problems in the United States.
Another over-generalization. I know lots of people, some of whom are doctors. You know what no one says about the doctors? "Hey, there's a member of a cartel who's artificially keeping prices high. How disgusting!". They all say "Oh cool, he/she's a doctor!" It's only for terminally online people that this is some huge social problem.
> complaining that our field isn't run like the East Coast Dockworkers unions
Exaggeration. You don't need to be run like the East Coast dockworkers unions to mandate certain professional standards and certifications so some Pointy Haired Boss who read a blog post on the Internet (nowadays, who got a sycophantic answer from his LLM) can't just make up rules about the software you ship. Now I'm fairly sure you haven't worked at companies like this; count yourself lucky.
I agree that people admire doctors and don't give much thought to the problems their industry has created (in the United States).
Labor unions gave us the 8 hour workday, overtime pay, child labor bans, workplace safety standards, and union shops generally earn 10-15% more than their non-union counterparts.
> I know I can work remotely effectively because I did it for the last 6 years.
6 years means that Ryan started right around COVID. Looking back I don't think COVID was the remote renaissance that it appeared at the time, I think it was a temporary blip. That sucks, I'd much rather it was permanent, and some things have changed for the long run, but unfortunately I think this is likely a much bigger factor. Remote jobs have always been few and far between, and super competitive.
Lot of people moved out to the regional areas during covid and plentiful remote jobs but those jobs have mostly been reeled back to the CBDs again.
And looking forward, LLMs don't need an office. The tactic of demanding RTO to maintain real estate values isn't going to hold up when 8 out of 10 people are replaced by AI.
It’s a 2020 anomaly that’s gone. You need a relationship developed from in-person work to get it.
To Ryan, I don’t think your frustration with the tech industry at the moment is lone. I don’t know of any one super happy right now, and I know too many people under / unemployed for long stretches. Even when you land something it’s just a miserable slog of political wrangling to erect enough body shields to protect yourself during layoffs. It’s not what it used to be.
Myself I bailed and started something with friends. We took no outside money and have a slow but growing client base that seems to value what we offer. It’s the first time in a long time I can actually do something worth while. I’ve considered teaching, or even finding a job at the library. I’m lucky enough to have been well employed for a long time now so it’s more about health insurance (thanks US health care work slave system!). But for the moment I’m enjoying building things and solving problems which is what I enjoyed anyways.
Things could change in the future, but currently and historically commercial office leases tend to have really long terms that aren't very easy to get out of, which has a limiting effect on this sort of thing as a cost-cutting measure.
being a software engineer means more than just coding.
If those are you priors, 36 rejected applications is going to hurt.
That's why you haven't experienced this. Pre-pandemic it was the same for me as in I only ever did one or two interviews then got an offer. I changed jobs twice post-pandemic and it took many 10s of interviews before I found something. I'm not sure pandemic is the cause here (not saying you were saying this either), it's really after Elon bought Twitter, fired a bunch of people, and a whole bunch of other companies followed suit.
Add to that time-zone issues and a very small local market.
I wish you the best but in the nicest way possible, insisting on fully remote work in a random city in Australia will likely narrow your options and make you less attractive to potential employers.
You will find something, I really hope so, but it will just take a lot longer.
Remote work doesn't mean internationally remote and Australia has a job market too. I think you made some unfair assumptions.
Most of the people I’ve worked with over the years seem to be doing fine.
A friend of mine ended up actually becoming an electrician, and its clear there's a shortage of able-minded people in that industry. In Norway electrician is one of those "never amounted to anything so this is the last resort" jobs, even if it shouldn't be. Simply by being able to follow instructions you beat most of the competition. The pay isn't half bad (around average national pay) and there are plenty jobs that require you to use your brain and vary wildly in what you do from day to day. Sounds like a lot of fun.
It's not a bad plan B.
I can't make up my mind if that means he is so good that actual human beings look at his profile, or some sort of ATS filtering system just hard rejects him with prejudice.
It didn’t work out, another job I decided to not proceed with because it’s DoD related.
Had a recruiter cancel the call because she had a personal emergency. Just ghosted me after that , no explanation.
Friday I had a promising call, but I’d have to move again.
I’m not sure what alternative the author proposes to working in tech.
I make music , but I can’t imagine sending a demo to Universal working out.
I mean ... don't do that. But we have been BOMBARDED with this, literally 100% of our pipeline was fake until we rejigged it a bunch. I wonder how much of peoples challenges are just that the scammers are making the job hunting environment a market for lemons?
I've been unemployed for 8 months but I'm pretty ok with money, am single with no children, so I can keep up unemployment for at least another couple of years. I'd rather not, of course, but it's been very fun hanging out with my dog and recording music. I got my 4-tracks serviced and have gone back to those which has been very fun and rewarding... for one it's made it so I can cut out screen-time while recording! Has other benefits too.
But ya... uh, I dunno, stream-of-conscious there since your comment resonated, I don't have much of substance to offer.
Of course there are people that know how to do that. If you work an office job and don't know how to do that, you'd better learn to do it fast or start learning to weld or something.
AI coding isn't remotely as fun or rewarding as hand coding for me, but I'm willing to forgo that for a good cause. But not otherwise.
I'd hope that if I weren't coding for work I'd have the energy to code after work on fun things.
Unfortunately I think the real sentiment here is "here's the thing I don't want to admit: I don't know how to use AI to actually do that." It's not at all clear to me that nobody knows how to utilize AI practically. It's more clear that you have to be working in an environment that values developing this capability enough to pay a lot for tokens and let employees be free to explore, within reason. Or, you have to be willing to spend a lot of free time and cash doing that yourself.
So the thing that I think is inherently super shitty is that it's likely that many of the frontier models were trained on his books. So his expertise at code and architecture details is exactly the kind of tasks that AI has gotten good at because it's been trained on work like his.
If the author had this developed this level of certainty in the face of profound gaps of information, they might as well just apply to jobs disguised as a post-singularity AI escaping their sandbox exclusively to remotely co-work with you in particular!
The LLM is the pair now, and soon it will just be running solo.
I was walking by a huge selection of programming books in the library and it stuck me.
What happens to the thousands of tech books written on the art of programming now? It is a sad situation for them as well
And if they take that away eventually, I'll still write because that's the best way to learn something.
But yes, what of AOCP? Sad that people aren't giving a shit about it any longer.
I like to think that the most hirable engineers will be the ones who learned to code. Partly because they know how to read code, but mostly because they used that experience to become superior problem-solvers.
I wouldn’t encourage anyone who wants to do something else to stay, this just read as strange to leave to me. If he wants to find a job in tech surely he could reach to many of the people he’s worked with in the past or connected with at various events before throwing in the towel.
My strong suggestion to you: pivot to hardware. I still use Ruby but most of my development efforts are ESP32-P4 and RP2350-based these days.
Learning CAD and mastering various additive and subtractive fabrication techniques, getting PCBs made to make ideas real... it's been a roller coaster but LLMs are remarkably good as engineering mentors these days.
And yes, as several others have already said, this might be the time to learn woodworking and/or video production skills.
You'll find that you still need your programming brain, instincts and intuitions. You just deploy them in a different way in support of creating a device instead of an experience [or yet another CRUD form].
Yes there will be the “but we’re a fully remote company and it works great” posts but for the time being cold applying remote puts one at a significant disadvantage in the market and that’s just the reality. About the only thing worse you could put on a CV currently is that you need visa sponsorship.
Programmers face the same fate. Coding as a job is dead. Nobody is gonna pay you a super high salary so you can sit at home comfortably, with your headphones on, and just code in your favorite typed language.
At least that's how it is today. But last year it was barely even worth using. Next year? Really hard to say, but it feels like it's plateauing to me. Depends on the day you ask though.
Will we be entirely replaced? Maybe. Or it'll get close enough to the "no code" wet dream of a few years back, and you'll have enough low cost LLM kiddies that the whole notion of the highly paid software engineer is just a dead end.
And then what? ... I kind of hate whatever this career is now anyway, I wouldn't mind doing something else, but I'm addicted to that sweet sweet cheese!
Rigorous thinking required:
Machine code
Assembly
C
Python
English
Time to flood the market with electricians and plumbers!
One idea would be for the author to ask questions here that they think the answers of will be good input into their reasoning process.
But this post is not representative of the state of the market. The market for tech talent is still very hard/scarce. Finding good people is very difficult. You can validate that by seeing the trend of software salaries. It's not coming down.
> I cannot continue to put myself through this process of rejection
Need to pump those numbers up, those are rookie numbers. Just kidding, but coming from India, that seems a really small number. We probably have a lot more competition, though, so maybe my views are skewed. I'm also surprised that they haven't even mentioned their network... someone with that amount of experience must be knowing people who can help out.
I applied for more jobs, have heard radio silence more than rejections (forget acceptances), and am still somehow in tech, whatever it means these days.
I keep seeing people pining for the old days. Those days are gone. And even if they came back, it's unlikely that life will be as good, because the entire world economy is in a different state than it was before. The only thing one can do is adapt.
I quit a full-time job a few years ago, took a long break which my accelerated savings helped me easily afford, and now I'm having a ball freelancing despite being a veritable cave-dweller, because everyone wants to AI, but doesn't have the setup to make the AI effective.
One needs to be flexible and stop reminiscing.
I’m all ears, so please let me know
But historically, these WFH vocations were solitary affairs. The great literary authors didn't exactly have the ability to VC to a daily standup and wouldn't have needed to do it anyway.
What seems odd to me is a fresh wave of companies deciding, out of the blue, that remote collaboration doesn't work. That's a strange conclusion to draw given that it's worked fine for years now and we have the technology to make it better than ever.
Personally, I find it soulless. Same with AI writing. And it's because I know there's no person behind it. I need to know that there was someone real trying to convey something in the art.
But that's me. Some people don't care how it was made.
I wonder what percentage of the population falls into each camp.
Can you tell more about what is your freelance work about?
Implementing AI solutions for companies?
And how do you get freelance clients?
Even before that, the vast majority of companies first need to have their automation and data processes in order. You cannot just get some LLM API keys and expect medium/long-running businesses to be able to fully leverage them. People want to hop on to the AI bandwagon, but are realizing that their software processes need to be good enough first. For me, this means a mixture of regular best-practices software dev, and adding some AI on top of that.
> And how do you get freelance clients?
Word of mouth, regular applications, cold calling. There's nothing new here.
All low engagement employees want to work remote. But not all remote workers are low engagement. How do you properly position yourself?
Disagree, pairing has helped me in the past to reach answers more quickly and at the same time means that more than one person is familiar with a codebase (which is a helps reduce bus factor)
In fact many large companies were already trying to downsize their footprint and adopting hotel seating and we work foot prints, encouraging work from home increasingly. The BYOD move saved a small amount compared to what was being discussed - BYOO - bring your own office. The pandemic led to a reflexive reversal in that trend due to irrational reasons, despite having already approved a decreased footprint pipeline.
I don’t think the hand wavy stuff will carry water post the next downturn. In 5 year planning many companies do for occupancy plans I can’t imagine “serendipitous water cooler moments” is going to be high on the cost cutting agenda.