I’m not trying to be unsympathetic in this comment so please do not read it that way, and I’m aware …

AI coding simply isnt there to start replacing people with 20 years of experience unless your experience is obsolete or irrelevant in today’s market. Perhaps in years 3-20 they relied solely on skills and knowledge they acquired in years 1 and 2. So even if the work still needs to be done, it can be done at 10x productivity using AI, requiring fewer people.

Overall I'd agree with your sentiment, but it depends on the market. I only know personally of one counter example to your message. In my career, I've reviewed, interviewed, and hired a few hundred people for somewhat known companies and startups. I also helped many friends find jobs in the past, before the market became what it is today, without any issues. So I like to think I understand what recruiters and hiring managers are looking for. End of last year, a friend with 12 years of relevant experience started looking for a job. I reviewed his CV (which he tweaked for some of the applications) and cover letters (he wrote one for each company). Everything was as good as it can be for the position he was applying for. Out of ~20 applications he got a total of 4 replies: 3 generic rejections and one screening that led him to being hired. He killed it during the interviews, but just gettin…

Last year I applied for a single job, out of a vague interest, and immediately had multiple calls from recruiters from different companies trying to talk to me. This year I'm actually looking, applied for multiple jobs, and had silence. Might be a Trump effect but it's not the same just now. Reminds me of 2008.

Your mileage may vary. I know a number of very experienced engineers that went through hundreds of application over more than a year before finally finding employment. Often there would be several rounds of interviews, sometimes 6!, with several leading to c-suite interviewers saying "you'll be receiving an offer", and then nothing. Ghosted. These are people with decades of experience, big corps, successful startups, extensive contact networks. The DOGE breed of 20 something darlings are in for a rude awakening down the road. I'm very very glad I'm at the tail end of my 40 year career. If I were looking at university enrollment in the present, I don't think I'd choose engineering. The tech industry is just not the employment growth opportunity that it was. I'd choose being an electrician before being an electrical engineer in the current conditions...

Could it be that your particular position required more ongoing learning, and that has kept you better prepared for a changing world? What fraction of positions require that ongoing learning, or at least to that degree? Also, consider many other jobs, are they doing their job, and the doing of their job itself provides the experience that makes you a more valuable worker? Or is the doing of the job basically a necessary distraction from the actual task of preparing yourself for a future job? What fraction of humanity actually takes on two jobs, the paying job and the preparing-for-the-next-job? Might doing the latter get you fired from the former? Most importantly, is doing that latter job getting more important over time, that is, are our jobs less secure? If so, is this what is an improving economy, rising, as it were, with GDP?

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…

Honestly, his power-wash business is likely his redemption. If I was running into the kind of wall he was trying to get a coding job [1], I think I, like him, would be looking at a career change. When I was in the Bay Area, living on a street of white-collar professionals, the one "blue collar" guy on the block had a house painting business. It's probably no surprise he began as a painter himself, working for someone else. He was smart enough to know how to bail and go into business for himself. That eventually lead to him hiring others. He's the boss now. When I retired and left the neighborhood, his day appeared to begin with going out to the various job sites that day and see that his crew were on task, knew the plan. He played golf most of the middle of the day. By the afternoon he went around the sites to see how his guys had done. In the evening with the garage door open, he would …

It feels like we're in a phase where hiring is slow for a lot of reasons: 1. Lot's of great talent on the market. It's a great time to be owning a company right now in terms of hiring. 2. The reality and perception of AI making it possible to do "more with less". I can imagine conversations playing out today, "we need to hire more developers" with the rebuttal, "ok, what about AI? Let's see how far it will go without hiring more people" 3. Even without AI, software teams can do more with less because there's simply much better tooling and less investment is required to get software off the ground. 4. Interest rates and money is simply more expensive than it was 3-5 years ago, so projects need to show greater return for less money. It does feel like the reality and perception of AI hasn't converged yet. There's a general sense of optimism that AI will solve a lot of huge problems, but we …

> I come from poverty. my father was a drug addict who is dead. my mother is disabled and i’m helping support her. my grandparents are dead. my friends are on the west coast, dealing with similar financial hardships and they are already living with their parents and on couches. I’m not above asking for help, but there is no one to ask. I wonder how much this factors in. We know from statistic this situation tends to lead to worse outcomes. Basically those connections you are talking about, are some form of nepotism and a kind of privilege. Should it be this way?