I'm not interested in the products we're supposed to build, and I don't like the way we're building them. Code quality has suddenly became irrelevant, and you have to keep up with everybody who ship twice as much code as before.
At the same time, there's more pressure on SWEs to deliver as layoffs are looming. I think leadership really believes they'll be able to save a lot by ultimately getting rid of all of us.
I'm not sure what to do at that stage but I'm pretty miserable. It's crazy that this occurred so fast.
The competitive nature of this regard was always there, it just took a pause during Covid hiring.
FAANG in mid 2010s used to be fairly competitive.5-10% of the people that got the in-person interview got the offer. The stories you heard about work load and stress and PIPs weren't so much about how the expectation was, it was more along the lines of the bottom line of developers who never developed the skill set to be effective at work just couldn't keep up with the people that did.
Companies still grew, so people were still building stuff, and if you knew any of the "top" developers, you saw they weren't stressing. Partially, they enjoyed the work they did and weren't working for the FAANG paycheck only like the majority of people. But mostly its because when it came to doing the work, the biggest advantage that they had is they had the ability to independently figure shit out. This is where "knowing how to code = knowing how to google" and "copy pasting stackoverflow" memes came from. Whereas people that didn't were always slow because they a) were only doing what they have been taught without any interest of actually learning things, and b) they relied on others a lot for guidance.
Then came the covid hiring craze when interest rates were low and companies invested a shit ton of money into products. People needed to get hired. Standards slipped. Lots of people with very low skill got hired that should never have been.
Now, the competitive edge is back on, except this time, its about how to use LLMs. Contrary to popular belief, LLMs take skill to use, not everyone can vibe code services into production. Prompt engineering is very real. To get LLMs output good quality code you have to guide them quite a bit. If you don't have a set of personal prompts you use to get LLMs to do stuff, you are behind.
Thats the nature of the game where new grads can make 100k out of college. That money isn't free. Learn to play the game or don't play at all.
I also use LLMs for writing; it's good, but again, you need to carefully read everything and rewrite passages that are completely made up. So I'm not really sure how this can replace people, to the point that Amazon is firing 30,000 people. I have a hard time squaring it that it's because of AI.
It sucks SO much rn, but it seems the majority option is to grin and bear it for the time being and pray to whatever gods you believe in that we get back to something sane sooner than later
- Have a candid 1:1: say you’re misaligned with the process, but propose owning guardrails leadership cares about—reliability, security, test coverage, CI policies, prompt/eval hygiene. Suggest measuring outcomes beyond velocity: defect escape rate, change failure rate, MTTR, SLOs, incident cost. - Differentiate where agents are weak: ambiguous requirements, system design, debugging gnarly prod issues, performance tuning, threat modeling, compliance. Volunteer for those areas. - Use AI defensively: generate tests, fuzzers, benchmarks, docs, migrations; prune agent output; write prompts/evals to reduce rework and incidents. - Protect yourself: keep a brag doc with quantified impact, network for internal transfers, and quietly explore roles that still value rigor (fintech, healthcare, infra, aerospace, devtools). - Set a 60–90 day window. If nothing changes, execute an exit plan rather than burn out.
It’s okay to be disillusioned. Your edge now is owning quality, risk, and outcomes—things the org can’t ignore even when throughput is cheap.
I decided to just disable codepilot and keep my skills sharp i know we will be called back to clean up the mess. Reminiscent of offshoring in the 2000s
I'm also really bored and hate that my job is writing specs and stupid prompts.
If AI is going to replace a programmers role, it will 100% replace any LLM expert / LLM prompter role.
If today:
Come up with some requirements -> programmer -> app
Why would the future be:
Come up with some requirements -> LLM expert -> app
Instead of:
Come up with some requirements -> app
I understand your thoughts, we have to keep pushing through this and saner heads will prevail.
the LLM will parse tweets and emails and whatever else and can write it in a perfect, localized vernacular for whichever demographic you want to sell to.
and it can do it in real-time, 24/7
at this point you're mostly a bot-herder or social-media-tool admin; the tools are doing the thinking.
the cursor-bots needed wranglin' after'n they got into the source code for node.js.
yep, the linter's on the fritz now, too. i think ol' Jedadiah musta convinced it to act like jar-jar binks. well that jokester just cost us one. too bad we' can't fire'em. he's the only one knows how to turn the servers on.
i'm gonna go sit on the porch and watch tiktoks for the rest of the night. you be a good boy and tell the OpenRoomba to do its chores.
For writing as an expression of meaningful thinking, and more so, as a tool for arriving at coherent understanding and thinking (the one that’d eventually produce the writing)… not so much.
AI slop is slop.
vibe code is going to crash those apps and I want to be away from them when it happens.
your job security is probably at risk already, so sharpen up that resume killer -- the market is rough right now.
You’ll probably find something to hate about that new job, too.