ProgrammerHumor
thatWasTheTime
Literally offers were overflowing that time
Discussion
Looks like I'm going to need to invent a time machine, as a prerequisite of finding a job.
They won't accept experience with technologies not yet created
I mean, they already ask for 5 years of experience in technologies that have been around for less than a year.
That's what we call 5x developer
Just get 5 jobs for 5x experience
Soham, is that you?
Executives and board members be having 500x experience without anyone knowing 😭
5 times the work, 5 times the experience
Will it be open source? I might need it too
Sure, I’ll give you the code, just bring your own Black Hole and sort your own transport 👍
Jokes on you cause I was looking back then, and I am basically still in the same boat lmao
And a house.
That's one of my company's take home assignments for candidates
Reminding me of 08. 08 fucking sucked.
'03 has entered the chat
The year 2000 dotcom bubble burst was a punch right in the nuts. Thankfully I was just a year out of college at the time so my expectations and experience were already low
I was a student during the dotcom bubble and I actually declined a job offer for a full time position because I "wanted to focus on the studies first". Then the bubble burst and it was incredibly hard to find just a trainee position.
Something something, when the iron is hot..
I graduated in 1998 as an engineer with a masters degree in electronics. We were headhunted. As in: large companies were literally begging us to apply, calling us at our parents place, sending letters, anything to get us to sign before graduation so we could start immediately after. I remember being called by telecoms startups who talked about good contracts and an on-premise masseuse to give neck and shoulder massages.
Good times. I went to work for a small startup where I did my educational internship.
Yes, for a few years it was crazy, In 1999 my friend got a job as a software developer just because of the fact that he was accepted in a CS program at a uni. He hadn't even started his studies yet.
In the cs majors sub, some students would ask whether they should accept full time 100k+ offers (and pause/drop their studies) and most people say it's better to finish the degree cause " jobs will always be available."
I was in college around the same time as well. Took me awhile to find an entry level job for 7 bucks an hour.
Same. I graduated in 2000, and 2001-2003 I was delivering pizzas and hoping I could find another dev job. I got lucky and did, but by the time that happened I was starting to explore either a Masters/Doctorate in CS or moving towards non-tech academia. I was out of options by then.
Luckily I got the job, and I've been in the industry ever since.
Seems worse this time.
The 2001–2003 tech downturn was the worst because it was driven by pure overvaluation and speculation with no real revenue backing most companies, leading to a nearly 80% NASDAQ crash and a total collapse of trust in the tech sector. Entire businesses disappeared, hiring froze for years, and recovery was painfully slow.
Compared to today, the current downturn feels smaller because the fundamentals are stronger. Companies like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are still highly profitable, and sectors like AI are actively growing, even as overall hiring stays cautious.
Everybody is still laying off more tech workers than they're hiring, and it seems to at least be fueled in part off of fear of being the company that invested too much in workers, when they think most of their work will be done by AI agents soon.
Yea there was a lot of speculation AI would replace devs, but it's quickly becoming apparent it's not meanwhile more and more research is starting to come in showing that it's not helping productivity or quality.
That’s terrifying
Ah yes, the year I graduated college 😬😬
God it was dumb... like 20k pay increase just for the same work from home job...
I went from 50k to 100k with only a bachelors and 2 years of professional exp (and 2 years of IT helpdesk exp where I had SQL access and wrote minor workflow scripts) in 2022. Unfortunately, the 100k job let me and a ton of other people go 6 months later after house prices started to become uncertain (it was a realty company that hired me) then it took me 4 months to land another role where I've made 80-85k for the last 3 years. I've been passively applying to other dev roles (like one application every other week) looking to reclaim 6 figures but I haven't had much luck. Not even an interview, though I'm being a bit more selective compared to when I landed my current role (which again took 4 moths).
It's rough out there.
Well with the advent of AI coding one of two things is gonna happen from here
a) Companies realize AI coding can only handle the most basic of shit and no UI. Their work productivity completely tanks within six months and they are forced to rehire most of their devs back to fix everything.
b) AI coding significantly improves quickly and the job market gets even worse for people, particularly new grads looking to get into a crowded field
Most signs point to A. But you can't say B isn't possible or hell even ultimately inevitable but just a lot further off than these slimy AI companies are trying to pitch.
I graduated in 2020. I started applying to jobs in March, before I graduated, and got my first job in May of that year before the hiring frenzy started, when companies were being cautious about the economy. It was a laughable 40,000 a year but I took it because it was fully remote (found on weworkremotely.com)--which I wasn't going to compromise on--and I wasn't too proud not to take a job when the alternative was unemployment. Six months later I leveraged that employment experience into something better and today I make 150,000. Not Silicon Valley money, but I would kill myself before working for FAANG.
I wonder how 2023 grads will do 5 year later in 2028 — and whether they’ll be as well off or not. My wishes go out to them
2020 COVID grads rise up brother.
Still firmly of the belief the ai hype is going to die down and companies will suddenly be upping their SE hires again. Ai can write some fine code but as long as the business can't clearly communicate their desires, and that's never changed, you'll need folks like us.
bruh that's just a scapegoat
interest rates are up, stock buybacks are more desirable than employees
Both can be true.
I work at one of the huge tech companies that's thumping their chest on AI, and I haven't seen AI replace a single SWE. It's capable of reducing customer service and community moderator type jobs, but not software engineers yet. SWE are losing their jobs to budget cuts and India, not AI.
This
And eventually those jobs going to India will come back due to quality being poor, it’s cyclical.
I don’t have too much concern that AI will eventually take over. There was that research paper stating we’ve hit the limit for AI that came out awhile back.
A lot of the hype is driven by companies that have a vested interested in the hype.
I am in this job for more than 25 years. Offshoring, Nearshoring and now AI. In the end it always came back. I can see where AI benefits a developer in some places, making him more effective but for a REAL big project? Good luck with your technical debts...
Efging “landlord” model. McKinsey is pumping that shit all over Fortune700
Less scapegoat and more just speaking on a different topic.
There's any number of fucked up things around the AI craze
Yeah it’s not where it needs to be to replace engineers. Belts are tight, outsourcing and H1B’s are in.
H1-Bs are rejected in the first screening round if sponsorship is required.
Sure but these companies are still applying for H1B’s. MS laid off 15k workers these past two months. Meanwhile they applied for 10k H1B’s these first two quarters. They got 10k application approvals. I’d say that’s a big BIG fucking problem
It is. You're thinking of it as one engineer cant be completely replaced by AI with no supervision. The real reason it will replace engineers is productivity. One engineer can do 3x work now. That means 2 less headcount...
All the tariff uncertainty isn't helping either.
^ this is the real truth.
You can fully deduct your ai expenses but not your human devs salary.
What do you think about the theory that these companies overhired tech workers and are using AI as a scapegoat to hide their mistake?
I think this is pretty plausible - not that they overestimated their needs, but that they overestimated their growth potential
I guess it's possible, but seems unlikely they all overestimated their needs that badly.
In my experience with Gemini, it does one of two things:
- It generates something very close to what I asked, but it needs to be fixed still
- It misses by 20 miles.
Gemini 2.5 pro is quite amazing I have to say. Probably the best coding model at the moment.
As soon as interest rates drop this will happen. Even if AI hype does not die down and this idea that it can do 50% of the work of a SWE sticks, why would you hire 50% fewer SWEs and develop at the same pace when you can hire more SWEs for the same price you were hiring them and get 50% more productivity out of them?
Cutting SWE jobs because SWEs supposedly have a tool that makes them more productive only really makes sense if you don't care about time-to-market.
Exactly, the can’t even communicate requirements clearly to a BA or an engineer let alone an AI. Not to mention all the missed requirements and separation of concerns needed to create a safe application
Yeah that's sort of a big problem with the "make whatever you want" machine. Product owners have an extremely foggy idea of what they want.
It shows how inexperienced this subreddit is that they think the hard part of software engineering is writing discrete bits of code
I’m sorry to tell you that the hype isn’t going away. The tools currently available can absolutely let good engineers half their delivery time. And can allow a senior to do the work of 4-5 juniors.
That being says, we still need juniors to replace seniors in the future. And it’s going to hurt.
Please show me the AI tools that can do this. I currently have a junior engineer porting our fairly basic blob storage logic that uses S3 to also support Azure (and soon GCP). Would love to have AI write it immediately.
Is it going to understand our permissions model in S3 and make sure that same behavior is implemented in Azure? Will it know how to distribute credentials using these different models? How is it going to tie into monitoring? Will it be able to create a new data model so that we can reference Azure containers and files instead of S3 buckets?
AI tools cannot do this unsupervised.
But AI tools are pretty good at answering prompts of people who know which questions to ask. I was a senior software dev. Now I am a senior admin. I automate a ton of stuff. I understand software architecture and the Windows ecosystem at a low level.
I do use copilot and I ask it to give me code to do X, in situation Y. And it will give me code that is close but not entirely appropriate, which I can then read and tell it to this way or that. And then I use that without having to program everything by hand. I still need to program the higher level design and set up things properly, but copilot helps me fill in a lot of details in a short amount of time.
It's true that AI tools are still basic and will probably be for a long time. But they are passed the point where they could still go away. It's very useful for people who know which questions to ask and who have enough knowledge to evaluate the answer.
Additionally, copilot is also great at retrieving information from vast libraries such as the MSDN database
Please show me the AI tools that can do this
Literally just pasting stuff into Claude is enough to get maybe a 10% productivity boost.
Is it going to understand our permissions model in S3 and make sure that same behavior is implemented in Azure?
If you give it the spec for it, then yes, it will try. And it will probably get it halfway right. And then you have to fix all the fuckups. In the end, you've probably still saved some time.
Will it be able to create a new data model so that we can reference Azure containers and files instead of S3 buckets?
Yes.
I think you just got to try it. Give it two weeks. Don't vibe code, read all the code it generates and scrutinize it. Or just use AI to tab-auto complete 1-3 lines at a time - that in itself is probably a 5% boost right there.
There's some thing AI is amazing at, and some things it's really bad at. Don't see it as a revolutionary thing, just see it as any tool.
Installing tmux doesn't turn you into a 10x developer, but it might improve your productivity by 5% - that's the way you should see AI. After a few weeks with Claude or similar models you're probably going to see a 10-20% boost in productivity.
Please show me the AI tools that can do this. I currently have a junior engineer porting our fairly basic blob storage logic that uses S3 to also support Azure (and soon GCP). Would love to have AI write it immediately.
I am not a fan of AI, but Claude can absolutely do this instantly right now.
Is it going to understand our permissions model in S3 and make sure that same behavior is implemented in Azure? Will it know how to distribute credentials using these different models? How is it going to tie into monitoring? Will it be able to create a new data model so that we can reference Azure containers and files instead of S3 buckets?
Probably not.. but neither is a junior engineer.
I think the hype will. Not ai as a tool. Right now maybe some managers are thinking along the less headcount line and maybe even just a full ai team with one SE supervising, but eventually they'll settle into the realization that it's better to have the same team size with them all using ai tools to increase the number of features they can deliver and still keep quality high, or automate more mundane tasks. IDEs didn't reduce headcount, nor stackoverflow, and in the long term I doubt AI will either.
Okay but I don't want to do the work of 4-5 people, that sucks ass.
Agreed. I was just in a meeting with Gihub where they showcased us their new AI Agents. It was extremely impressive. You could assign the AI a Jira item and it would submit an MR for the changes. You might have to clean up a bit but it was insanely good for small cleanup tasks and whatnot that would free up like 3-5 hours
That just means they'll invest in product guys, better business folks, etc
Love being a 2023 graduate....
I was a 2024 grad and had to settle for a non IT office job. Have U managed to land something in IT yet?
nope, currently still unemployed -_-
Make sure you got some projects to showcase.
Something like 80% of junior applicants we get (web dev/machine learning) have nothing on their github/similar profile other than school work. You instantly go near the top of the list just for having a single clearly non-schoolwork repo with a few dozen commits (that is yours and not just a fork with nothing big added).
In IT? If you can talk for 20 minutes about your self-hosted setup, you're probably in the top 2% (junior) candidates.
This.
Applying for a sys admin role? Get a repo with some demonstration scripts for automating some basic stuff. (Ansible/tf would be ace but you're early on)
Applying for front end - play around and make the game of life from scratch - show off something novel that comes to mind.
Software Dev? Make something - literally anything from scratch. Show it in your git.
That would put you a practical shoe in compared to our candidates....
Oh - and it depends on the interview, but unless your Bs is top quality - just say I don't know, id guess xxx but I'd be willing to learn how that should be done. (Not just dunno)
I'm a web Dev and I made a couple full project websites that I felt were unique in concept and decently showed off my capabilities. Maybe they weren't good enough idk but I really tried man... I refined my resume over like a dozen different versions. I applied for hundreds of places and got nothing back. Idk I'm not gonna bs and pretend I'm an excellent dev. But I think I put in enough work to show I can do the job. The market is just so fucked atm it just feels impossible for a lot of people. I didn't get this degree to fucking fight for my job 😭
Wait you serious? Projects are still all you need to be a top candidate?
We all really got conned into studying IT huh 😭
Only bites I’ve gotten were through referrals. I’m working on that social engineering now
Same
To be completely honest, I'm gradually coming to the conclusion that IT has become the next law. So many people want to be lawyers that there are vastly more law graduates each year than jobs, because law is a "prestigious" job. To the point where some law schools are actually getting sued by students for misrepresenting their placement numbers.
Over the last 20 years, it's been hammered into society's head that tech jobs are the place to be, all while the tech industry is trying trying to do more with less constantly in the name of automation and efficiency. Inevitably, this means that there will come a time where IT graduates vastly outstrip open positions in a given year.
I'm truly sorry you're having problems. If I can help I'm willing to, though I don't know what I could do beyond looking at a resume and making suggestions for what I'd look for. I hope you find something soon!
Was going to ask why one would graduate before getting a job, you know keep the student discounts running, be able to take additional courses and have your thesis funding and instructors knowledge as a leverage to get directly into R&D jobs. Then I remembered that likelihood based on reddit demographics is that you did not have student allowance from your country and did have tuition from your school.
2025 here, and from a separate field… I managed to get one job quickly, but now we need to move for my partner’s career so I’ll have to roll the dice again
Unsolicited advice as someone who has been a software engineer for 15 years and does hundreds of engineer reviews yearly.
Build something to show off and talk about. Dont build yet another damn ToDo manager, that’s not interesting. Show something original. It’s incredibly hard to find a job nowadays, but start with a smaller company and work your way up to bigger companies. Don’t shoot for FAANG and a $100k+ salary right out of the gate. Take what you can get and get hands on experience.
It’s discouraging, I know, but you’ll get a job! Could always start your own company or freelance on something like Gun.io or Fiverr
Does making a polished indie game and releasing it on steam count?
Yes. Basically anything you'd actually use, or other people use. Something with a purpose, and something you care about.
I've done this but lets just say it's legal-adjacent. What do? Yolo?
Depends on how legal-adjacent, and the culture. Interviews are generally assumed the candidate is doing a step up in terms of professionalism (e.g. dressing up slightly), so I'd probably be very careful what you're showing.
If by legal adjacent you mean something like "organizing movies that you definitely legally purchased", I think you're fine so long as you don't put too much emphasis on it. Generally programmers are pretty pro freedom of information, so even those that disagree with piracy will generally still appreciate software that involves it.
If by legal adjacent you're talking something more controversial, I'd probably avoid it unless the job is controversial in the same sort of way
LMAO, I was here like, "this psycho made software tools for court clerks in his spare time??"
Lol I feel like I'd recommend that person to hire just because I'd need to understand what life choices led to such a thing.
Dear god. Anything that interacts with lawyers is a no for me. Not because I dislike lawyers, but they are the most technophobic group I've ever encountered, and they're picky.
Maybe it would be worth your time to make a legal version of that project that you could easily put on a resume.
Yes, it especially counts if you release it. Things you can talk about in interviews:
- Trade-offs you made in selecting certain tech for your stack
- How you designed the architecture (and why you designed it that way, again what trade-offs you made here)
- Things that were much more difficult than anticipated to overcome (and how you overcame them)
- How you tested your game (hopefully with a mix of automated and manual)
- How you used user-feedback pre / post release to improve the game
- If you worked with others you could talk about how you resolved disagreements, and how you coordinated who worked on what
Lots of stuff like that, essentially the interviewer is trying to answer a few questions in their head: "How well does this candidate work with others on a team? Does this candidate make rational decisions for themselves based on limitations or do they just use what's popular? Does this candidate know when to ask for help or will they just plow ahead for days and waste time? Does this candidate try to follow best practices or do they rely on quick and dirty solutions for everything?" that kinda stuff, your goal is to answer "yes" in their head to as many of them as possible through your discussion of the project
Thanks that is actually very useful
Something to be mindful of though, don’t give the impression that your dream is being a game dev and you’re settling for something else - companies want people who want to be there.
And the interesting part? Once you start building something you like? You are bound to face all of those, its like the rite of passage of sorts, you code is gonna break, your tests are gonna be inadequate, your architecture will need to be changed because something that you want to add doesn’t fit well, or is inefficient and you just learnt a new and better way of doing things, or maybe its just me who fucks up while designing shit.
Yeah, for sure. Show something interesting that you can tell an interesting story about
Yes! I hired a guy who did exactly this, definitely helped him stand out. PeaceMaintainer left a great comment, pretty much nailed what the guy covered in his interview.
No, everyone’s done that already /s
That makes you top 2% of junior candidates, easily.
Make sure to talk about it - in the personal letter and in the interviews. Don't be shy!
Unfortunately I have 9 years of on the job experience but i long lost the motivation to program outside of work so i don’t have any personal projects to show off and cant really show off my work for other companies. Thankfully not currently in the market but i fear ever having to return empty handed
I think that advice is more for people early in their career.
You should be able to talk in elaborate detail about your work at other companies though.
When you have a decade of experience, nobody asks for your personal projects. They want to know how much experience you have with the current cloud environments, ssdlc, systems design, .... Talk about projects you did at work
Oh something original ok ill get right on that
Make a blog, write demos on using Azure Semantic Kernel, make a simple media player. Do something that shows you actually applying knowledge not following the same tutorial thousands of other people have done.
Just telling you what will help you get noticed if you get past the AI screening
Blogs and media players aren’t really original though, those have all been done before.
Doesn’t have to be 100% originally, just something that they’re not going to see dozens of examples of
It's more original than "Todo Manager" which is basically like a "Hello World" at this point.
I'm personally really into self-hosting so i've built pretty much my whole eco-system "by hand". I have a shitton to talk about. I just never get to talk ;)
I’m gonna be the negative Nancy to say that this is terrible advice. This sounds like exactly the type of advice someone who doesn’t have to deal with the job market as a new grad would give
I mean your right, go for it make very complex projects. They are good for you
But honestly keep ur expectations low. Hope for the best and prepare for the worst. Right now you can do everything right, but every checklist and things can still fail. Not cause ur project was not big enough or you didn’t study hard enough, maybe, but more often then not these are trying times
You have a fair point, this is definitely not a magic bullet “Do this and you’ll get a job”, this is just part of it.
For me, the biggest factor was getting involved with tech user groups, conferences, and doing a lot of OSINT on companies I wanted to work for and networking with people who were there. Buying someone lunch or a coffee and asking them about what it’s like and expressing your interest there is a big benefit.
Thirdly, don’t just cold call asking for a referral. I get a lot of this on LinkedIn as their first interaction with me.
No, this is a good advice. I'd say much better than just sending out hundreds of CVs where you have only uni and some courses.
This is how I found my first IT job when I was looking for a transition from software user to software developer (.NET). And I'm not a new grad, I don't even have a CS degree.
I knew some common issues I was having as a software user, and it was interesting for me to try to fix them. Made a plug-in, published it on GitHub, wrote about it on LinkedIn. The code was horrible, but it worked, and it was enough to get me an offer for a junior position in a good team.
Then, after some time, I rewrote the plug-in with new knowledge, added some new features, made it more reliable. I still get occasional mails and messages with gratitude for the plug-in from different countries.
Yeah this is some good advice right here. Whenever I dealt with recruiters with at least a little bit of tech know how, they always wanted to talk about my passion projects and I feel like thats whats won them over in a lot of cases. These projects are a sign of so many valuable skills
I made tons of projects out of personal interest and got zero interest so far. Non of them are "tutorials" if you know what I mean.
400 applications and not much to show for it I'm afraid. Maybe these things matter for seniors as extra fluff, i dono, but so far, as a guy with no experience, it really haven't gotten me any interviews. Which is odd cus most people say that's what gets you the most attention.
Not that this is overly impressive but I wrote a baby web scraper that emailed me when new motorcycle safety courses were posted at a subset of local host spots. These things always seemed to fill up within hours of being posted so I kept missing them. When I was interviewing I mentioned this and one of the guys hiring was big into riding and was "Yesssss, my man." I got the job.
And to tack on unsolicited advice to the interviewing side of things as someone who’s interviewed roughly hundreds of candidates
Don’t ask them silly brain teaser questions or how to invert a binary tree. Your work doesn’t do that and you know it. Ask them something relevant, preferably how to solve a problem your team recently had but rephrased in a different way. A candidate who knows how to cleverly code is rarely a good fit despite what FAANG might say
Exactly, for the technical part I have started using a Blazor app a few of us built with bugs in it and we created GitHub issues for those bugs. We have the interviewee start debugging, making fixes, and PR’s
I’m still drowning in offers, then again I pass the stupid hr filter anyways by the simple merit of having done this long enough
tell me your secrets. i've been at large and small companies for 20 years and just SUCK at this part.
A nicely written LinkedIn profile goes a long way.
Something that expresses “I solve your problems with software so you don’t have to deal with it”
Good advice, honestly. But in my experience this is not even needed.
My LinkedIn page is pretty empty, the only thing on there is my work experience and education. I dont even have a profile picture. And I get recruiter offers weekly. And I'm not even looking for a job.
It's probably a difference in where you're located (I'm from the Netherlands)
I got my first job in 2022 and all everyone was talking about between 2020 and 2022 was how impossible it was to get a job. Its been that way since Covid.
People been saying this since the dawn of time
Everything goes around. Bad times lead to people avoiding the industry, that leads to a lack of software engineers, and that leads to good times. Then all the companies get too big and fat trying to hoard engineers, and they gotta cut down again. Circle of life.
Based
I got laid off yesterday. Got hired in 2022 at almost double my previous job.
Too real
was/is so cool graduating in 2023 :'''''')
Is this some kind of american joke I am too european to understand?
I'm always a bit confused by these statements. They have to be USA or other region-specific bc in Germany we're struggling to find (good) software engineers
Yeah IT hiring slowed down a little bit in Europe last year but it's nowhere close to the absolute slaughter that Americans seem to be going through.
yeah i need context. Will this crisis somehow get to us some day ?
Just become a data engineer
I would but MySQL hates me so I can’t
So use someone else’s
To be blunt you should know how to write SQL
A data engineer is just three devops engineers and a few lines of SQL in a trenchcoat.
That was what I thought too, but apparently not. Most data engineers just want to work within already established systems, and they have no clue how to set up the infra.
But you may need to find another job in >~10 years (but that's still a lot of time)
By the time the hype gets down
I think you're thinking of data scientist
Thats the dream. Worked as a DBA on my first internship. Something about SQL and DB design speaks to me.
It was such a different job market back then. This is why unions are important
I'd say I'm one of the more skilled developers in my department, but because of union seniority, I've been bumped out of my job by someone more senior to me who lost theirs. So ironically, if it wasn't for the union I'd probably still have a job.
that sounds like a shitty union policy
Lol… and as someone who graduated in 2018 you could change this meme to the 2021-22 being squidward with the 18’s having fun below.
Then you could change it to 2018 as squidward with 2014 below.
Always look at the bright side. We’re still drowning
I put out 100+ apps between those years. Maybe it was the 1yr of experience but I think it's just being in the right place with the right skills at the right time.
This should change a little bit with software dev becoming eligible as an r&D expense again.
The trick is to work on boring software. I work on ERP software and get pretty steady 1-3 offers a week even not looking.
With how much experience?
Wait, till all the vibecoded bs starts to fail / work so poorly everything gets fucked / needs maintenance…
I still get hit up by recruiters 2-3 times a month
I'll say it over and over again, it really depends on how much effort you put in, and where you are looking for jobs.
I live in Aalborg, Denmark and I'm a junior/fresh out of uni and I got an offer for full time within two weeks of graduation, while my current job as a student developer was also offered to me fairly quickly though a career fair at uni.
The key for me is that I have been spending a lot of free time on writing code during my studies as well, so I have knowledge about technologies that are used in the industry you wouldn't normally get to play with at uni. A good example is that my upcoming job was very interested in my broad (mostly only surface level though) understanding of parts of their system from the kernel to the frontend
That's going to return. GitHub CEO already said smart companies don't fire their devs. Workload will just shift. Junior devs can do more elaborate work now with AI.
Companies who fire their devs risk being taken over by their competitors who did not fire their devs. Small companies are now able to compete with larger counterparts.
Nooooo, it wasn’t only 2021-2022, the time of drowning in offers was much much longer
Honestly, it still feels unreal when I think about how HRs are practically begging candidates for interviews, and people online are talking about choosing between multiple job offers every day lol
The best thing to do is to diversify your skillset. Don't just know how to program but also know how to create/deploy containers, know how to query + visualize data, know how to reverse engineer code, know how to architect workflows, know how to use Excel, and know how to bring it all together to develop solutions.
AI can maybe replace any one of those individual skills but not all of them together. You might still have a hard time getting hired but at least you'll know it's because the recruiters are stupid and not because you're replaceable.
The catch is those offers didn't pay jack shit.
hopefully it'll come back when companies relize that ai is not that good at coding
Been out of work since December 4th, 2024… 25 years experience as a full stack.
After a decade at a FAANG I job hopped in 2023 for a 6 figure increase with a downlevel (less responsibility) and full remote. The new company has been a wild ride that I'm probably jumping out of in the next 6 months, but I'm still here, full remote and making more, while FAANG has all RTO'd.
I feel like this meme is exaggerated. Maybe it’s just my imagination, but the volume of recruiting email spam hasn’t seemed to change - just most of them have AI somewhere in the subject
So strong, was their desire to automate tasks, they awoken something from dark depths that would come to automate them all.
They are the reason the job market is bad now. Too many non-SWE folks flexing their day in a life doing nothing on YouTube resulting in c-suite calling for RTO and layoffs. There’s a reason JomaTech is back at Meta and other influencers at the time all disappeared.
The hubris that came along with it too.
Rip yall
Must be bad now if 2022 was the good ole days
I wish for the AI bubble to fucking die with utmost prejudice
My favourite thing is that as a junior i need to have 3 years of experience....
Like brother, from where...
It will come back. Everyone who tried the LLMs to generate more than few lines of code know that it's stupid AF.
That's what I think as well. It's basically a bubble.
I got an offer at that time. It was a shitty offer but it was something.......... I never even gave an interview.
I still had a recruiter request to call me last week when my LinkedIn very clearly shows that I'm already employed.
The cycle continues
I'm still drowning in offers
As member of both..so true
Literally had a $58k a year entry level programming job for half of 2021. With no experience and knowing basically nothing. Haven't had a programming job since then.
I got out of the industry when they decided we needed to start going back to work. I was senior! I was supposed to be the wizard that fixed everything for the dev team plebs, but was never actually seen. But they wanted me to return to office, which was a 3 hour drive one way from where I live. So I quit. I’m starting watchmaking school in August.
Do you think...there could be some correlation?
Fr I feel this. I graduated in 2019 and was pretty much employed within weeks.
Did it without AI and now I know people just 5 years younger struggling
Guess this will be me until the next renaissance
As someone that works in AI and senior+, I'm still drowning in offers.
It was the best of times, it was the worst [best] of times.
Heavily depends on where in the world you are. Okay, we're not drowning in offers here anymore like we used to, but it's not like we have to make the lowest offer to get hired or anything. Job market's still pretty alright - just stabilised it seems.
I'm in Europe btw, just in case anyone was assuming America for some reason.
Juniors and trainees searching food in the trash
can we get covid 2.0 without the disease?
Am I literally the only software developer that still gets drowned in job offers?
Switched companies a year ago and I literally wrote 2 applications and got offers from both after the interview.
I worked in Appraisal Management during a very busy time and an appraiser told me, “When its hot, its hot, and when its not we roll quarters for groceries” and that always stuck with me.
What does "roll quarters" mean?
Think of it like counting pennies
I thought it meant it's not
You’re rolling quarters so you can pay with a roll of (whatever the roll adds up to, I forget) because it’s easier than throwing a bunch of quarters out of your pocket down and the cashier doesn’t need to count.
And you’re having to do it in the first place because you’re down to scraps in the bank so you’re collecting all your spare coins.
I’m sure it still exists, just haven’t had to do it in years. But if you deposited or withdrew a large amount of coins at a bank, the coins would need to be rolled into these paper wrappers. Each one had like 40-50 coins of the same denomination
Coin Rolls go to even counts to make counting the rolls themselves easier. So quarter rolls are always 40 coins because that equals $10. 50 coins would be $12.50 which is not a nice even amount.
Grabbing the change from the cash register, grab a paper roll (like the stacks of change go into), stacking the quarters inside the paper, and rolling it up like a joint or sushi. Then you have a neat little stack you give to the bank for cash.
You ever had to crack one of those stacks? They can also be rolled by hand like that lmao
Common for cash businesses and small shops so you don't have loose change and have to count it. They can just weigh it
Collecting your change together into measured rolls you can use at the shop instead of dumping a big bag of loose change on the counter and counting it out one by one.
A new way to say "feast or famine"