The great displacement is already well underway?

I’m not trying to be unsympathetic in this comment so please do not read it that way, and I’m aware having spent most of my career in cloud infrastructure that I am usually in high demand regardless of market forces - but this just does not make sense to me. If I ever got to the point where i was even in high dozens of applications without any hits, I’d take a serious look at my approach. Trying the same thing hundreds of times without any movement feels insane to me. I believe accounts like this, because why make it up? as other commenters have noted there may be other factors at play.

I just wholly disagree with the conclusion that this is a common situation brought by AI. AI coding simply isnt there to start replacing people with 20 years of experience unless your experience is obsolete or irrelevant in today’s market.

I’m about 10 years into my career and I constantly have to learn new technology to stay relevant. I’d be really curious what this person has spent the majority of their career working on, because something tells me it’d provide insight to whatever is going on here.

again not trying to be dismissive, but even with my fairly unimpressive resume I can get at least 1st round calls fairly easily, and my colleagues that write actual software all report similar. companies definitely are being more picky, but if your issue is that you’re not even being contacted, I’d seriously question your approach. They kind of get at the problem a little by stating they “wont use a ton of AI buzzwords.” Like, ok? But you can also be smart about knowing how these screeners work and play the game a little. Or you can do doordash. personally I’d prefer the former to the latter.

Also find it odd that 20 years of experience hasnt led to a bunch of connections that would assist in a job search - my meager network has been where I’ve found most of my work so far.

Pure speculation, but I wonder if it's not so much AI as tech companies realizing they actually can do more with less. And, again, I have no evidence to back this up other than "feels," but I swear when Elon bought Twitter and cut so much of the workforce that's when sentiment seemed to shift materially. I wonder if that wasn't a bit of an "aha" moment for mega tech and tech in general. It's like all the major companies said maybe we don't need as many people as we have. Of course people are going to debate whether the changes at Twitter had a monumentally-negative impact (they may very well have in terms of revenue, but I'm not so sure in terms of absolute or even relative profit).

Of course, as a sibling comment, I think, said it could be the end of ZIRP. But maybe the truth is it's end of ZIRP, seeing a "peer" shed employees en masse and not fail outright, and AI.

Twitter deal in 2022. Headcount by year for a few (not suggesting this data supports my theory; just sharing to reality check)...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/META/meta-platform... https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/numb... https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/number-... https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/num...

Edit: grammar

I'm sure some CEOs followed the Twitter lead, but I also think the entire industry was already shifting with regards to headcount. A lot of companies were hiring excessively going into that period and middle management bloat was a well-known phenomenon.

The overstaffing problem was painfully obvious at many of the companies I spoke too as a consultant during that time. They'd have bizarre situations where they'd have dozens of product managers, project managers, program managers, UX designers, and every other title but barely a handful of engineers. It was just a big gridlock of managers holding meetings all day.

One friend resigned from Twitter prior to anything Elon related, specifically citing the fact that it paid well but it was impossible to get anything done. Not all of Twitter was like this, but he was outside of engineering where he was one of scores of people with his same title all competing to work on tiny features for the site or app.

The pendulum seems to be swinging to the other direction, where companies are trying to do too much with too few people. I still see a lot of growing (or shrinking) pains where companies are cutting in the wrong places, like laying off engineers to the point of having more people with {product,project,program}-manager titles combined than engineers. I hope we settle out somewhere more reasonable soon.