The great displacement is already well underway?

I thought this piece really spoke to the landscape of software engineering in the present/future. Unfortunately discussions on this site are subject to a truly baffling mix of confirmation biases and messianic complexes.

Wishing you well and best of luck with your search.

Any thread about hiring (here, reddit cscareerquestions, blind, whatever) is full of cunts waiting to put people down because they absolutely love telling people they aren't good enough for minor reasons despite proven records of competency.

They know that hiring is just as volatile as the rest of us. If any of their project requirements or job duties changed as much as hiring has, they'd think the company/PM were incompetent.

Hey Shawn

Tough times. You’re doing everything right (except perhaps reading too many of the comments which is probably not great for your mental health) - your break will come. The night is darkest before the dawn and all that.

Peace & love.

I thought most of these comments have actionable if not tough to hear advice.

Perhaps offering an opportunity for more humility and introspection. Instead you’re here doubling down on the victim mindset.

Wishing you the best.

ignore those addicted to negativity. for most people, their life is just reducing awareness to fit into their adlib structured arguments to assuage their insecurities. “Im so smart, i can ignore possibilities and unknowns and frame a thought construct that boosts my sense of ego and importance!”

> the population of substackistan is much less FUCKING CYNICAL AND NEGATIVE than you guys,

I took some time to offer some resume review tips here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43978225

This is a really difficult topic to address because it appears you're interesting in venting and commiseration, but it's mixed with pleas for job placement and opportunities. If you want some honest advice:

- Your resume still needs a lot of work. See my other comment with more details. After reading your Substack I see why you're keyword stuffing words like "Vibecoding" as your #1 skill, but I don't think you realize how much this is hurting you.

- I've read your resume and I clicked the link to go to your website. I still don't really understand what you specialize in or what kind of job you're trying to get. In a market like this one, you need to have a resume that tells a story of why you're a great fit for the job, not someone who has a couple years of experience 10 different times at 10 different things. There's a lot of vague claims about "award-winning state-of-the-art web experiences" but then you have everything from AI and Vibecoding to VR apps to teaching classes on your resume. Broad experience can be good, but I think you need to start writing different resumes tailored to different jobs because I can't make heads or tails of your career goals from the way it's all presented.

- I'd separate the Substack from your resume, personal website, and job search as much as possible. To be blunt, the tone is alarmingly cynical in ways that any hiring manager would want to keep away from their team. Phrases like "Generally, it’s the fresh-faced bay area 25 year old with a Steve Jobs complex" ooze a sort of anger with the world that people just do not want to bring into their company. Blaming everything on AI and "the great displacement" falls very flat for anyone who has just read your resume and seen "Vibecoding" as your top skill while trying to figure out what, exactly, you did at your past jobs.

- Consider sprucing up your portfolio a bit. It's a little jarring to read a resume about "award winning state of the art web experiences" and then encounter some centered yellow text on a black background in a quirky font that slowly fades into view. I would also recommend that you include screenshots of your specific work on each site and a short description of what you did for each. Random links and screenshots aren't helpful. Hiring managers aren't going to watch YouTube videos at this point of scanning your resume, either. Try to view your website like a hiring manager who wants to know what they're getting into. Seeing "21 years of experience" and then having the first large link on your website being a link to University of Oregon because that's where you got your degree doesn't make sense.

- To be more blunt: There are some major red flags that you need to clean up. Your portfolio links to the live nike.com/running website, but your resume says you last worked on a Nike website over a decade ago. This is the kind of thing I expect to see from fake applicants, not a real person. I would go so far as to suggest leaving your portfolio off of your resume until it can be cleaned up and modernized with specific information about your work. Use a template if you have to, but the site clashes with your headline claim of being an award winning web developer.

- Finally: Try to create a cohesive narrative in your resume and application process. If you're applying for full-stack web-dev jobs, your resume should show a career trajectory of starting with small websites and working up to more and more complex projects. Right now the top job entry lists "tens of thousands of MRR" as an achievement but a decade ago you were working on Nike.com. You need to find a way to tell the opposite story, that you've been working your way up. Unfortunately the substack article makes this even worse with talk of being a Doordasher now. It's okay to vent on Substack, but don't cross the streams with your application process.

Not to be rude, but unless your portfolio site is nothing short of spectacular you shouldn't include one. In all likelihood, its doing you more harm than good.

Keep your head up. These are interesting times. Things will get back to normal at some point.

Well, for what it's worth, I recognize a lot of what you're going through.

I barely thought I was going to make it through this time, but finally somehow managed to at least land another SW job; we'll see how far that goes.

HN is to large extents a bunch of spoiled, transhumanist AI fanatics, don't let them get to you.

Initiated a connect on LN, but wasn't allowed to send a note since I'm not a premium member.

It feels like we're in a phase where hiring is slow for a lot of reasons:

1. Lot's of great talent on the market. It's a great time to be owning a company right now in terms of hiring.

2. The reality and perception of AI making it possible to do "more with less". I can imagine conversations playing out today, "we need to hire more developers" with the rebuttal, "ok, what about AI? Let's see how far it will go without hiring more people"

3. Even without AI, software teams can do more with less because there's simply much better tooling and less investment is required to get software off the ground.

4. Interest rates and money is simply more expensive than it was 3-5 years ago, so projects need to show greater return for less money.

It does feel like the reality and perception of AI hasn't converged yet. There's a general sense of optimism that AI will solve a lot of huge problems, but we don't really know until it plays out. If you believe history rhymes, humans will figure out what AI does well and doesn't do so well. Once that's worked out, the gap between perception and reality will close and labor markets will tighten up around the new norm.

I am 61, and have been working for almost 40 years. I don't really have a lot of personal connections, because I am on the autistic spectrum. Yes, I have many former co-workers linked on LinkedIn, but to most of those people, I'm just an old acquaintance, not someone they are going to phone up with a hot new job opportunity.

The exception is one college friend who did help me get multiple jobs at startups, but he retired several years ago.

Establishing and maintaining relationships is hard, and many of us are simply not good at it.

Now I did make sure to stay in touch with a couple ex-managers who I knew would be good references. One of them even helped me get an interview. But even when I had a connection on the inside of a company, all that really does is move me to the head of the line, past the HR screen. I still have to interview, something I still suck at despite decades of practice.

Pure speculation, but I wonder if it's not so much AI as tech companies realizing they actually can do more with less. And, again, I have no evidence to back this up other than "feels," but I swear when Elon bought Twitter and cut so much of the workforce that's when sentiment seemed to shift materially. I wonder if that wasn't a bit of an "aha" moment for mega tech and tech in general. It's like all the major companies said maybe we don't need as many people as we have. Of course people are going to debate whether the changes at Twitter had a monumentally-negative impact (they may very well have in terms of revenue, but I'm not so sure in terms of absolute or even relative profit).

Of course, as a sibling comment, I think, said it could be the end of ZIRP. But maybe the truth is it's end of ZIRP, seeing a "peer" shed employees en masse and not fail outright, and AI.

Twitter deal in 2022. Headcount by year for a few (not suggesting this data supports my theory; just sharing to reality check)...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/META/meta-platform... https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/numb... https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/number-... https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/num...

Edit: grammar

>> 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 had the same impression. Anyone reading this who is younger: at some point in your life your employment will probably mostly depend on the connections you make to your successful peers, the companies you start, or the products/ technologies you are associated with. When you are starting, strangers will hire you off of your resume. At some point this effectively stops and if people aren't familiar with you or your work they will not consider you. This has been true long before LLMs existed.

Overall I'd agree with your sentiment, but it depends on the market.

I only know personally of one counter example to your message. In my career, I've reviewed, interviewed, and hired a few hundred people for somewhat known companies and startups. I also helped many friends find jobs in the past, before the market became what it is today, without any issues. So I like to think I understand what recruiters and hiring managers are looking for.

End of last year, a friend with 12 years of relevant experience started looking for a job. I reviewed his CV (which he tweaked for some of the applications) and cover letters (he wrote one for each company). Everything was as good as it can be for the position he was applying for.

Out of ~20 applications he got a total of 4 replies: 3 generic rejections and one screening that led him to being hired. He killed it during the interviews, but just getting his foot in the door was so hard. Maybe in some parts of the world we're back to 2015-2020 levels of recruiter "harassment", but in others it's super dry, even for senior positions.

It's hard to say for sure without knowing his whole situation, but I will agree with you that when I hear someone say they've submitted 750 applications, my first thought is that they're taking a machine gun approach, applying to a lot of jobs in a short time. I was always taught that you tailor your resume to the position you're applying for, and apply only after doing a lot of research on the company to know whether you are suitable for their position. I'm older than the author of this post, and applied for my most recent job at about his age—though it was a few years ago, before AI was really a consideration. In my entire life, I've probably applied to ~25 positions, made it to the final round 8 times, and been hired 6 times.

Knock on wood that he's wrong about the cause of his current frustration, because that means it's fixable.

> I come from poverty. my father was a drug addict who is dead. my mother is disabled and i’m helping support her. my grandparents are dead. my friends are on the west coast, dealing with similar financial hardships and they are already living with their parents and on couches. I’m not above asking for help, but there is no one to ask.

I wonder how much this factors in. We know from statistic this situation tends to lead to worse outcomes.

Basically those connections you are talking about, are some form of nepotism and a kind of privilege. Should it be this way?

I suspect it's not AI.

> dismissing me when they find out my dinosaur age of 42

I gave up, after encountering this (at 55). It's been a thing for quite some time (more than the 2.5 years he mentions).

What's annoying, is that the very people doing the dismissing, are ones that will soon be in those shoes.

I believe ol' Bill Shakey called it "Hoist by your own petard."

> 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.

I have to emphasize this a lot to mid-career developers that I've mentored. In the past decade it was really easy to find a comfy job and coast, or to job-hop every year to get incrementally higher salary.

Juniors are mostly a blank slate. Once someone has 10-20 years you should be able to see a trajectory in their career and skills. I've seen so many resumes from people who either did junior-level work for a decade, or who job hopped so excessively that they have 1 year of experience 10 times, almost resetting at every new company.

It's hard to communicate this to juniors who are getting advice from Reddit and peers to job hop everywhere and do dumb things like burn bridges on their way out (via being overemployed by not quitting the old job until they're fired, or by quitting with 0 days notice, or just telling them off as you leave). A lot of people are having a sudden realization about the importance of leaving a good impression and building healthy relationships in your network now that organic job offers are hard to find.

> 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's okay that you aren't that interested in engineering.

Lots of unfounded assumptions and snobbery in this.

> That cool-down really started in ~2021-2022 and really hasn't picked back up. When the market cools down, the unremarkable old-timers are sadly the first ones to be shown the door.

It makes me wonder if we're in a the early stages of some kind of economic depression or recession.

> 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.

Yes, this is something that is poorly understood. (And something that I fear, given that I'm middle-aged.) It's easier to take a risk on someone who charges less, than to take a risk on someone who charges more. Often budgets just won't allow for an expensive software engineer, especially when an overseas engineer is cheaper.

It's not even that you necessarily have a ceiling, some people work for twenty years and are lucky with success, some are unlucky. You can be 45 and not have reached your ceiling. But the perception is there and you have to think about ways to re-invent yourself. It's really hard when you have family obligations and can't take a lot of risks.

I have a friend in a similar situation to the poster and tbh I don't have great advice.

just for reference about my amassed 'wealth', the combined cost of my mortgages is less than a studio apartment's rent in the bay area. i left the west coast for precisely this reason

> 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

Unpack this for me: what constitutes significant contributions to peers or the field?

Yep.

Some context from the blog post: > I turned to service apps this winter: doordash, instacart, uber eats. Their signup systems were incompatible with my full, legal, one-letter last name, and it took about 50 hours on the phone with doordash support in Malaysia and the background check provider in India to eventually get cleared to drive them. I was not able to get through on the other apps.

For sure the impact is not just limited to service apps.

I will probably begin doing this but i will say-- in the past it was not a hurdle at all, and i got many interviews and a few jobs with this name. I have had about 10 interviews in the last year, going to 4th rounds, and nobody suggested it was a problem. my ratio of landing interviews per applications i put in parallels what I am hearing/reading from all other developers on the job market now. I don't strongly suspect my one-letter last name is a huge culprit here, but after a year on the job search and willing to try anything, i may begin applying with a pseudonym

Long ago I knew a person named Gregg. He constantly had to correct peoples' spelling of his name.

Why would parents burden their kid like this?

Change name to an Indian one, problem solved!

This is completely insane. Anyone filtering out qualified applicants based on their names is messing up.

thanks. this is the fifth iteration of my resume in this last year's search. im clearly trying to push for ai-coding, as i think i was often overlooked for being too 'trad'. in reality im all-in on ai.

I'm sure if he wasn't also a caretaker, losing control of his ability to schedule around being a caretaker wouldn't be "rock bottom".

His life would be much "easier" if he didn't have to be his mother's caretaker. But this is America, so he has to, so he's fucked.

Yup. The trust issues around overemployment or straight up fraudulent candidates have made remote work rare and have lead to companies offering a premium for hybrid or fully in person roles. I don't think WFH only is line you can afford to draw anymore if you're on the ropes and leveraged.

I stumbled upon this line as well.

And then I realized that he started with just getting home after driving 6 hours of uber to make $200, which didn't really square with on-site work being rock bottom.

On site work is exhilarating at the right place

Opinion: the end of ZIRP has a much greater influence on the job market than AI. No more free money means an entirely different incentive structure. There's a fair bit of "oops we overbuilt in the past assuming we'd have free money to hire more engineers". The interest rate thus mediates how and what we build (Conway's Law strikes again!).

Generative AI is a novelty that makes us crazy productive at certain tasks. But it doesn't yet seem to fundamentally change what we build or why. We just do it faster and sloppier with AI. It's a tactical tool to help you win, whereas interest rates define the rules of the game.

Not just end of ZIRP, not just Agentic AI / Vibe Coding being effective [1], but also:

"Software development is now considered a Section 174 R&D expenditure. This means it must be capitalized and amortized over 5 years (15 years for foreign software development)."

If any one of these were the case you'd have tens of thousands of previously gainfully employed swes out of work. But ALL of them became the case and pretty much in the last 3 years.

[1] - Let's just say I'm a believer

my parent corp let go many, maybe 20% of each of their various dev teams in early 2024, right after everyones productivity was starting to go 3-10x. instead of keeping everyone and dreaming way way bigger, it was more like 'get the same amount of stuff done with way less people.' now i have more experience and skills than ever before, but the ratio of applications to even getting a response much less an interview is lower than ever in the past. anecdotally, in my job searches in 2018 and 2020, roles that would say they had ~20 applicants within the first day of posting, now have like 1000+

i applied at a web dev role at SU, in-office, making less than what i made in like 2009, with skills that are frankly below me. custom written cover letter. job been posted for months. they just hit me with the 'no thanks'

> but there is a big defense industry here (Saab, SRC, Lockheed, AFRL)

i hope things don't get so bad that my options are destitution or the defense industry, but i'm used to eating ramen.

Are you in Firefox? I just had the same loop of click allow all cookies over and over again until only necessary made it disappear!

Well it does the same for "accept all"

You'll become a servant for the people who have some wealth, and they'll feel thrilled to be able to order you around.

TBH I much prefer your linked post to the OP for its positive tone and outlook. Thanks for sharing.