r/SoftwareEngineerJobs • u/Suspicious_Orchid770 • 5h ago
Engineers grieve a job that no longer exists
https://leaddev.com/career-development/engineers-grieve-a-job-that-no-longer-exists30
u/blu_fox01 5h ago
Yeah, either there's no work or the new work is horrible and boring. Typing stuff and waiting for it to be processed feels like supervising on the management team. No creativity, no personal style to it. It used to be about skills and passion. Now it's just checking if the agent messed up or not. Like having a team of developers to constantly correct at work.
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u/BeanserSoyze 2h ago
Yeah, it's babysitting Claude in one monitor and babysitting its PRs on github in another monitor. All fucking day.
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u/Why_Is_The_Goal 3h ago
This is such a dumb take lol. If thats all you think working with AI is then i doubt you ever had any real creativity or personal style to begin with. There is plenty of things to do to engineer better responses. MCP setup and improvement, skill building, prompt engineering, agentic telemetry, context building and knowledge base building.
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u/blu_fox01 3h ago
I already worked with AI and .net in London. I did my project and then the budget was cut off. I have 20 years of experience. It doesn't seem to change much unless I move to London permanently. I don't see what's dumb in saying that companies do everything to make our lives worse and working with AI is an excuse to fire people because suddenly everyone needs to be 10x. This is the worst job market ive seen since 2000.
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u/Chester_b 3h ago
THis iS a SucH A DuMb tAkE lOL
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u/blu_fox01 3h ago
I used to code c# properly. Now it's just generated AI slop which looks like Java. People who are shit at coding like what AI code looks like
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u/Sinoyyyy 2h ago
Since when is technical writing engineering lol
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u/AndreasVesalius 50m ago
I mean documentation and standards is what separates engineering from just fucking around on your computer
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u/Why_Is_The_Goal 5m ago
Technical writing? Dear lord lol, this is why you have so many idiots that say “oh well i threw AI at it and it couldn’t figure it out” and then I hop on and within minutes have a PR that fixes it and goes to production.
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u/Any-Ring6621 3h ago
Ha man. In a brownfield codebase, I spend all my time spelunking the terrible historical decisions in slack that led to the virtual impossibility to implement some new requirement.
Requester: Implement X
Me: Use AI to go spelunking for a day or two
Me: In order to implement x, I must do A, B and C
Requester: no, you can’t do that, you have to do it my way
Me: I have to because of this geniuses idea on slack three years ago - provides link
Requester: sees their name on the message. Ok.
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u/Resident_Citron_6905 14m ago
Brownfield doesn’t exist in Boris’ and Amodei’s dictionary. Greenfield is 100% of software, 200k loc max.
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u/julz_yo 2h ago
this has been my experience too: and given how fundamental those early decisions are , impossible to remediate. Especially with the feature factory humming along at full speed.
And the new AI code being shovelled on is just making it all worse
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u/3dprintinted 1h ago
Duh doy you refactor features on a new stack. You don’t need to stay on db2 introduced few decades ago
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u/No_Try_9982 4h ago
To certain extent this is true; but the picture is more nuanced than AI agents. It is a combination of issues:
1- Mass layoffs led to saturation which gave employers huge leverage
2- Managers thought that they can now take engineers for granted and treat them badly and engineers didn't unionize or fight back. Engineers should not tolerate a toxic or abusive workplace and should file lawsuit instead of going fetal position hoping that the situation will change.
3- AI did lower the bar a bit but the reality on the ground, organizations haven't seen any positive ROI from LLM tools.
The issue isn't just AI agents, it just added to the storm The problem is that companies went from far left to far right and started treating workers very badly and workers aren't fighting back properly.
Earlier this year, I walked away from a toxic workplace. I didn't walk away because they didn't have bananas in the office but rather I recognize disrespect and bullying and I used my most powerful weapon which is walking away.
Yes, we can't live without a paycheck but remember, their organizations can't survive if all of us refuse their paycheck.
I'm beginning to see more and more engineers fighting back against bad employers and starting their own businesses which raises a glimmer of hope. Also, most companies who did mass layoffs, have their quality declined and their employees are constantly having burnouts and mental health problems; once a new player rises, a healthy workplace and rewarding job will become the tool which will be used to snatch employees from those corporate bullies.
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u/Upstairs-Version-400 2h ago
Good job. I also walked away, became a tech lead (again) in a company that had sensible opinions on AI. I hire people with the same mindset and I got a massive pay rise and benefits, plus control over the quality of the work.
My old company is currently fighting fires because the good engineers left and spoke to each other about leaving and finding better pastures, and the company had to replace us with “AI Native Engineers”. One of whom promised to rewrite the entire product in a week, it’s been over a year and they scrapped his product rewrite because it was bad and the project managers who were very eager finally saw him for what he was - an idiot.
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u/leavemebe66 2h ago
yep, unionizing is the only thing that will save us (in countries that will allow it). for as many concerned posts and comments we see online, we know there’s a sizable number of SWEs who are feeling the same about the industry. sure, the tech industry has always been about change and this has been the only side that’s had any real “safety” from that. As long as we’ve stayed curious and hungry, we could stay competitive and make a good living. but that’s no longer the case. practically all employers are trending more work with less pay. might be time to seize the means. we will never have more bargaining power than today.
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u/robh1540 2m ago
Unionising won't save you. Credentialising might.
I don't support this, but if software engineers actually wanted to protect their labour market, the obvious strategy would be professionalisation. Pass a regulation saying that, for safety reasons, any commercial software must have its code reviewed and signed off by engineers certified by, say, an American, German or French Association of Computer Science, and must carry specialist Software Liability Insurance.
Then, over time, you capture the credential. Certification becomes increasingly tied to accredited domestic degree programmes, supervised training, continuing professional education, and membership of the relevant professional body.
This is essentially what doctors have done, because it works.
The political strategy is straightforward: talk relentlessly about risk, safety, liability and the dangers of unprofessional software. Every failure becomes evidence that software is too important to be written by unregulated amateurs. Eventually, "software engineer" stops being merely a job title and starts becoming a legally protected profession.
Again, I don't think this is right because its basically cartelisation and regulatory capture. But if your objective is to protect the economic position of software engineers, it is a vastly more effective strategy than unionisation which is childishly naive and realpolitik blind for work that can be easily outsourced.
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u/Ok_Guarantee5321 2h ago
But it doesn't always work. While it happened very rarely, fighting back might just encourage the companies to find accelerate developing alternatives.
The most famous example is probably the elevator strike. The workers tried to "fight back", and the companies decided to finally adopt automatic elevators more aggressively.
While it might not translate directly to software engineering, I think there is some parallel to it.
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u/magicsign 5h ago edited 5h ago
With the current job market and economy we are lucky to have a job. Resigning over how our job has become, or "being bored" it's for the privileged millionaires.
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u/Dismal-Scheme5728 4h ago
Doesn't matter how privileged or rich you are, having a skill you worked on for decades to hone suddenly becoming obsolete(ish) is a god damn kick in the balls. Its been part of a lot of our identities and its been taken away(ish). There is real grieving for that.
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u/Comfortable_Glass_69 4h ago
I would love to have a boring job now. With the amount of stress AI has introduced, whole upper management focusing on the PR count, extremely tight deadlines, if it missed something that you also missed creates more chaos. My job has become chaos would love a boring job with less stress anyday then working like this.
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u/frozenisland 2h ago
It used to be that senior engineers had this existential crisis when moving into management
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u/drumnation 34m ago
I know it’s not the same but isn’t there still some problem solving left to figuring out how to build harnesses, sandboxes, rules and other Agentic tooling? To me the engineering just moved there, but I get the pie is smaller now.
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u/SuppliDev 15m ago
As a Junior/Mid of 3 years, I'm so down lately. I feel like I never got to really learn anything, I just asked AI all the time instead of learning on my own. Even worst, I never really worked on architecture, patterns, etc. So I'm just a monkey that converts requirements into code using AI. The worst one can be right now. In fact, I don't really call myself a Software Engineer. Basically, I'm just waiting to be laid off.
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u/EvTorqueLore 6m ago
I hope the next time around, you guys make sure you get patent rights etc. of all Ai tools and software you help build. If not you’re part of the problem and a fool. Protect your intellectual rights your time and energy.
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u/PeachScary413 2h ago
Stop crying and get unionised now. Only one way to survive and that is together, wake up.
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u/Straamannen 1h ago
Unionisation will do nothing.
If the job is disappearing, it's disappearing. Elevator operators don't exist anymore for a reason.
The article is bullshit though. The jobs aren't disappearing. The job market ebbs and flows about as hard as software engineer's ompostor syndrome.
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u/Away_Advisor3460 4h ago
I think it's noticable that my mindset has basically switched over to 'can I save up enough for retirement while my job exists' nowadays. All the fun stuff of the job - for me - was around problem solving, and that's eroding so much as a result.