Uncategorized – Software and Other Shenanigans

I really wanted to call this “The AI trap,” but I try not to ascribe to malice what I could explain with ignorance, apathy, and/or stupidity, and given that I generally don’t ascribe the level of foresight and deliberation needed to execute a “trap” to the types of people running large public companies, “trap” isn’t the right word. But even so, this push to start using AI to do as much as humanly possible has already generated content about the plight of junior devs. What I’m worried about is senior developers (yes, I am technically considered a “senior” dev, so there is some self-interest here) are about to walk themselves into a nasty setup they’re never going to recover from.

If you hear anyone say anything about the jobs market these days, odds are the word “broken” comes to mind. Hundreds of resumes sent out, and in the best case scenario people have been getting tens of calls in response. Not job offers, not in-person interviews, just the company in question calling back to start the potential interview process. Given the auto-rejections coming far too quickly for a human to have made a decision on the resume, the silence about whether or not the company is moving forward with candidates, and ghost jobs, it’s easy to see why people think there’s a fundamental problem with the process. From the employer side, given the fact the software industry has a bloodbath lately, there’s far more applicants than openings, and by all (public-facing at least) indications, every posting is getting flooded with applications. All of this is leading to a situation where people in software are going unemployed for months, even years, after losing their jobs. All of this certainly sounds like a system that fundamentally isn’t working, but I’ve come to a more disturbing hypothesis – the job market isn’t broken, it’s been optimized.

Software and Other Shenanigans

The AI pitfall

I don’t think the problem is that the job market is broken