Software engineer lost his $150K-a-year job to AI—he’s been rejected from 800 jobs and forced to DoorDash and live in a trailer to make ends meet
Software engineer lost his $150K-a-year job to AI—he’s been rejected from 800 jobs and forced to DoorDash and live in a trailer to make ends meet
I have a strong feeling, that someone who characterises himself as a "metaverse and web developer" that is interested in "super intelligence" might have other reasons why people do not consider him.
Don't get me wrong,he might be a totally nice fella and IT outside a narrow field of healthcare IT is not my field. But this guys makes all my spidey HR/management senses tingle hard.
Jup, something is missing in this story.
So the author of the blog post that the article is based off of actually interacted with some comments over on Hacker News and there were some pretty interesting revelations - such as his resume having Vibecoding as the first skill listed on it and living/looking for jobs on the East Coast with a website sounding like he's on the West Coast among other things.
I guess the media saw his blog post as a quick means of driving clicks through a clickbait headline. That's not to say that the market isn't hot trash at the moment, but I personally doubt Engineers are being replaced by AI.
Honestly have to agree. I was skeptical on your take until I read his blog post. I see zero reflection on it. Instead I see blame and anger, and yes frustration.
Look, the market is trash, but there are jobs for those willing to learn. He mentions php. Php hasn't been relevant for new jobs for a while. The only time I mention my php knowledge is it it's in reference to an older project I did. He mentions he's kept up on AI by "reading HN and articles" and then saying he has 5 projects he has essentially vibe coded it sounds like. That's not keeping up with AI from a software engineering standpoint. That's just using AI tools and reading articles. Keeping up with AI from an engineering standpoint to me is using their apis, running models, training your own models. Go under the surface, show curiosity.
We work in a field where a fundamental requirement is to keep learning. It's very easy to get comfortable in a role and not learn anything new, but you'll get stuck there. If you have unemployment learn every library you can. Learn Rust, Go, random languages. Choose the packages you don't know very well to build your app. Deploy your app yourself, learn CI/CD and infrastructure. Don't stand still.
I'm a dotnet engineer now. Right now that means I'm 40% dotnet, python, nosql, kubernetes, and React. 5 years ago I was Angular. 10 years ago I was php and webforms. You can't just say "I learned to code, I'm done!". In this field it's never done.
Edit, I also want to call out two other red flags from him. He's unemployed but the thought of in office was a red line for him? I prefer WFH of course, but if it's door dashing or an office, it's a no brainer. Then also if you have that many connections on LinkedIn and no one will vouch for you, that's a moment of introspection. I won't say all or even a majority I would expect to help out for me, but I have a decent network. You have to keep that up
Shitty media's greatest trick is cherry-picking and anecdotal "evidence".
Yeah, not surprised. An experienced software engineer in the US won't have to do unskilled labour unless there's something else massive going on with them.
I also have a job in that neighborhood and I could not be replaced by AI. I'm sympathetic to him in the sense that this is a shitty time to be looking for work for a number of reasons, but it seems in the realm of possibility that this guy is a shitty developer who made bank of the fact that for a while companies were desperate for anyone to increase IT headcount, and now finds himself unable to compete with the shitty output of AI.
I've 100% worked with developers worse than AI, but not many and if it were up to me they would be retrained into some other career where they can make more of a contribution.
You want to blame it on AI CTS scanning? Yep. Totally believable. AI generated technical questions? Sure.
But because AI is coding circles around you? Bruh....
I think it's less likely this has anything to do with skill, and more likely this is a company looking for an excuse to cut a highly paid position.
I think this post is a cope.
You might be 100% right. But that wouldn't change the fact that you're focusing on the individual in a story about trends, and I think you're doing so because doing so is a way to avoid engaging with the larger point of the article.
Tech work isn't safe. No work is really safe these days. It doesn't even matter if AI can do your job well. It is just a facet of a project to devalue labor and disempower laborers. And that project is going really well! No matter how good you are at your job, none of us can "merit" our way out of that project.
I'm great at my job, and my job is very AI proof. But that doesn't protect me from the fact that my company is looking for ways to gigify the work and hire contract workers from among highly paid laid off scientists and engineers to take over little easy parts of my job. They'll concentrate the hard parts, of my job and yours, and reorganize it until it's as modular as possible, and raise our workloads without increasing our pay until they can make it hard enough to say we're not doing it fast enough.
No chatbot will replace me in the next 10 years. But my company doesn't need them to in order to limit my bargaining power! They're fostering an ecosystem of abundant cheap, fungible atomized workers so they will never have to bid for your labor or worry about you being irreplaceable.
All of us need to get wise to the con. We need universal incomes, universal services, universal healthcare, universal housing. We need a guaranteed safety net that is high enough that everyone has the ability to turn down bad jobs. Even the people you think suck at their jobs.
You cannot escape this by dismissing any laid off worker as too slow to keep up. Because this is a team event. And the bosses are on the other team.
I respect what you're saying, and while I agree with you—as you say yourself, he's not being replaced by AI like that article states. And that was as far as I was trying to go. It's not even impossible that he's a good developer who got fired by an idiot who bought into AI hype, but that's not my first guess, you know?
That's all I was saying. I largely agree with your points. I don't think we are really in opposition here, you're just coming at it from a different perspective than I contemplated in that comment.
Cheers.
Headline aside, if you're on $150k p.a. you should have an ample emergency fund and frankly aim to live below your means while earning that kind of money in such a volatile employment field.
What people should do has historically been at odds with their actual actions.
True that. Captain hindsight to the rescue.
$150k is not necessarily a lot of money in a lot of cities. The article just mentions New York, but typically that would not be enough to buy in most areas even close to NYC
Then don't live there.
I'm sorry, but I can't sympathize with normal people with normal salaries that choose to live in the most expensive cities in the world, and then discover that they can't afford shit, especially when they find themselves out of a job.
Move out, find towns that are affordable, go work for employers that embrace remote work, get a normal salary, and enjoy a low cost-of-living.
It is 2025. The job market is global and remote work is now. If you're relying on salary to be magically tied to where you live, then you obviously don't know how capitalism works.
Earlier this year, the CEO of Anthropic Dario Amodei predicted that more software jobs will soon go by the wayside. By September, he said AI will be writing 90% of the code; moreover, “in 12 months, we may be in a world where AI is writing essentially all of the code,” he tells the Council on Foreign Relations.
Sure, Jan
This is drawing lines between the job market and AI that probably aren't there. We're just in the beginning of an economic downturn.
An engineered one to finally end the middle class by grabbing assets at fire-sale prices so everyone has to rent, while simultaneously being able to further raise rents on account of all the new demand.
More than that, "software engineer" has been drifting towards "software technician" for a while now. If you don't have any additional physics, math or engineering specialty on top of software skills, things are pretty crowded. Anyone can learn to write decent software. It's really never been a traditional academic topic for the most part, and AI is definitely making that worse.
Let me guess - Silicon Valley-like company? Focused on new fads, long or short, eager to adopt any new trend for themselves?
Yes
The only part "AI" plays in this is giving employers the sensation that they can replace workers. Which companies that are building on trends, especially silicon valley ones, are much more likely to fall for. And I'm very sure that the "800" applications were sent to very similar companies.
In my last job search, I sent out more than a thousand applications across multiple industries, got one interview, didn't get the job. It's very plausible.
The whole article aside, looking for jobs really sucks. It's painful. Honestly, I'm probably just weak, but job searching sends me into a spiral of depression that lasts weeks.
universal experience
You're not weak. It's genuinely a dehumanizing, exhausting experience that seems to get worse year after year. I'm barely in my 30s, I've been laid off twice and had to relocate once. Each search was worse than the last.
Thanks for the kind words. I guess it's just very difficult to fit into whatever mold these companies are looking for. It feels like they want a unicorn or a robot. And if you don't somehow match their very specific buzzwords, your resume doesn't get looked at.
It makes me feel like I'm not enough. I'm quite uncertain as to how I'll make enough of a living going forward in the future, but I guess I shouldn't worry about it too much. Stuff usually works out right? Haha
I have avoided working for the FAANG companies my entire career and I’m happier for it.
This sounds shockingly familiar. The job market is a scam these days, and I've been homeless for a year and a half. AI hype is just going to make it worse.
So do you have to basically ai spam applications if you want a job now? Cause it seems like companies are using ai to filter out 99% of applications so there's no use into putting manual effort to adjust resumes and write cover letters if a human isn't going to read it.
they were doing that before AI, just used some other software to screen people out.
Reminds me of: https://youtu.be/4R4uTrA1vQ8
hahaha well, howd ya not see that coming
Zero chance this company replaced him with an AI that actually does anything useful.
It's kind of by definition. They're working on the metaverse.
That fact alone makes me question his judgement and therefore critical thinking skills.
i dont know of a single person, technical or non-technical that thought the metaverse would ever account for anything whatsoever. it was always a non-starter. a dead end. it is ridiculous just on premise, let alone any serious valuation.