Tough reading this sort of thing. :(
I don’t quite see the link to AI though?
The CV bot hellhole yes, but not how it replaced him? Is he saying nobody is hiring php devs anymore because of cursor & co? Presumably with 20 years experience he isn’t coding simple stuff so that doesn’t seem super likely
> something has shifted in society in the last 2.5 years.
End of ZIRP. For a lot of companies, especially in the early stage world the math stopped mathing without free money
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
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.
> 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.
We're building some stuff that actively uses it—not (just) using it to write code, but integrating it into business processes.
This is both:
1) A far, far more valuable use of it than as a replacement for e.g. macros in your editor, assuming it worked as one might hope it would.
2) In practice so incredibly brittle, tightly-coupled, expensive, and slow to develop (not to mention some of the most boring work I've ever done in my 25 year career) relative to other options that the business could have embraced at any time in the last 15 years (but didn't because it took the hype of "AI" to gain activation energy for the project) all with no evident path toward any of that meaningfully improving, that I'm looking for an exit to another project that's ideally non-AI-related for when this one turns into a nightmare before eventually imploding and staining everyone involved's reputation, if not getting them fired. I reckon the nightmare phase is about six months out, for this one, and the implosion 12-18 out.
I expect similar stories are playing out all over the place.
The end of ZIRP coincided with some reorganizing of the tax code that wasn't favorable to developers, as well. Both hit after a year or two of windfall profits and massive hiring due to covid.
AI is a very convenient way to tell that story as being about an ascendant new technology, rather than a post covid decline for the tech sector.
The increased interest in using generative AI to replace high-paid workers may well have been caused by the end of ZIRP.
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 don’t quite see the link to AI though?
Then open your eyes. It was exactly 2022 exactly as the article states.