alt Hacker NewsI watched a video of some (unemployed) programmer lamenting over the current job situation market. He had been coding for a good while, but had recently been laid off. The vid was mainly concerning the searching and interview process, but it also did highlight something I find somewhat true and important:
Right now we're in a gold rush. Companies, that be established ones or startups, are in a frenzy to transform or launch AI-first products.
You are not rewarded for building extremely robust and fast systems - the goal right now is to essentially build ETL and data piping systems as fast as humanly (or inhumanly) possible, and being able to add as many features as possible. The quality of the software is of less importance.
And, yes, senior engineers with other priorities are being overshadowed - even left in the dust - if they don't use tools to enhance their speed. As the article states, there are novice coders, even non-coders that are pushing out features like you wouldn't believe it. As long as these yield the right output, and don't crash the systems, that's a gold star.
Of course there are still many companies whose products do not fall under that, and very much rely on robust engineering - but at least in the startup space there's overwhelmingly many whose product is to gather data (external, internal), add agents, and do some action for the client.
You need extremely competent, and critically thinking technical leaders on the top to tackle this problem. But we're also in the age where people with somewhat limited technical experience are becoming CTOs or highly-ranked technical workers in an org, for no other reason than that they know how to use modern AI systems, and likely have a recent history of being extremely productive.
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If anything, the current era looks like how 1995-2015 was for me.
Back then I was not in the “nitpicker’s radar” yet. I was working in small teams and shipping like crazy, sometimes fixing small bugs literally in seconds.
Things worked, were stable, made money, teams were fun and code and product had quality.
The post-Thoughtworks, post-Uncle-Bob world of 2015-2025 was absolute hell for a maker. It was 100% about performative quality. Everything was verbose and had to be by the book, even when it didn't make sense from an engineering or product point of view.
Different opinions were simply not accepted.
It was the age of bloat, of thousands of dependencies, of nitpicks, of infinite meetings, of quality in paper but not in practice, of doing overtime, of being on a fucking pager, of having CI/CD that took 10 hours to merge, and all the stress it comes with.
I would be totally ok if all those “professional” engineers from that generation were to be replaced with hackers, both old and new.
You have described exactly the situation of almost all of my clients. And in some way it is good to see our business model validated as we help steer organisations at this level, also technically. I would only add that the quality of software has improved significantly. From my perspective, the bar for quality at most organisations like this is low, extremely low.
Companies that don't fall under that rubric are established and have actual money on the line if their software shits the bed. Software that handles actual logistics and transactions can't be treated to lots of LLM updates without some serious problems arising. Startups and B2B ones especially have always been cheap, cut corners, screwed up and apologized later, and most importantly just created hype and fluff to get investment that's rarely spent on building solid foundations. There's not much crap AI is writing for them now, as code or marketing material, that wasn't already just as junky when it was written by humans. That's been the mutually agreed upon game that startups and VC have played since the 90s. LLMs just distill the douchery and the flawed logic, and it's pleasant to watch their artifacts go down in flames.
i feel like i saw the same thing! was is this (AsianDadEnergy channel)?
I've simply not seen this at all. As someone with 10 YOE who was in the job market from November to early April going for senior software engineer roles, quality and architecture seemed to be the thing every org cared about. The bar not only to secure and interview, but to get hired was unbelievably high.
Some of the interviews I were getting were at AI startups and all of them were either doing architectural questions or multiple rounds of architectural, behavioural and leetcode problems.
Only one of the orgs was hiring junior engineers and the director of technology mentioned to me he didn't want to as they were "incapable", but it was a quota given to him by the board.
I also got told by multiple recruitment agents that I wasn't experienced enough, and some hiring managers were demanding 15 YOE for a senior role.