Remix.run Logo
declan_roberts 2 hours ago

Between AI and competing against the world with H-1B, it's really never been harder to get an entry or mid-level software engineering job.

Which means our pipeline to senior engineer is completely broken.

mikert89 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think the field is basically over as a long term career unless you are truly exceptional. It will become very easy to build most software, and the upper end will be filled with the top people in the country/from abroad.

Wages are certainly going down for most software roles

ryandrake an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> It will become very easy to build most software

We keep hearing this, but where is the Photoshop killer written by a gas station attendant? Where is the PayPal alternative written by a retired nurse?

Over and over we're told that software is now trivial to write, and Claude is evidently writing some billions of lines of code a day, but where are the results? Where is the vibe coded app toppling the legacy hand-coded monster product from 20 years ago?

threatofrain an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Why ask such extreme stuff? Why not ask about the solo entrepreneur who creates a convincing iOS app without a programming background? Advantage the problem on the side of ML and look for winning scenarios today.

mrbombastic 12 minutes ago | parent [-]

because this comment is responding to: "I think the field is basically over as a long term career unless you are truly exceptional. It will become very easy to build most software"

photoshop, paypal, and many more companies etc. have software of vast complexity that cannot be reproduced or maintained today solely with llms, ipso facto you still need software developers or some similar role to build and maintain the complexity of _yesterday_

some guy shipping an iOS app to zero users doesn't change that. although i think it is good we can have more bespoke software.

mikert89 2 minutes ago | parent [-]

You aren’t getting it. They can pay their engineers half what they used to, you don’t need the same level of skill to build photoshop. Yes, you need a bunch of engineers, but they will be driving coding agents, not writing code by hand. They can be hired and fired for cheap

deaton 17 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

See this is the big issue I've been seeing. The only vibe coded product I can think of off the top of my head that's succeeding at all is Bun, and maybe I'm behind the times but it feels like Bun's success is mostly being pushed by Anthropic; I've yet to see much other than Claude Code use it.

mikert89 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

the future is already here, its just not evenly distributed

pydry an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In the "iceberg" of boring company systems I see working day to day I actually think delivery of production software has been slowed down. The cost of "writing" code went down a bit, while validation costs positively exploded.

There are definitely more apps developed these days but I haven't seen anything much vibe coded which actually seems to have staying power. Everything is prototype quality.

deaton 16 minutes ago | parent [-]

Now you can make a prototype without understanding what's going on internally or why the prototype wasn't good enough!

ex-aws-dude 37 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Every time I see people say this I think: show me the money?

If its so good why aren't you rich?

SoftTalker 2 minutes ago | parent [-]

Why would anyone get rich doing something easy?

weatherlite 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

All fields are basically over as a long term career besides perhaps prostitutes and even there I'm not entirely sure. But the questions of how soon and by how much matter a lot. Being early is the same as being wrong a clever guy once said.

mikert89 2 hours ago | parent [-]

no programming is verifiable, and the major LLM companies are focused on it. its the first domino to fall by probably 5+ years

weatherlite an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Is it really that simple ? A programming function that has set inputs and determinstic outputs is rather verifyable. A ten million lines code base is not easily verifyable. Knowing whether an agent is improving when it's working on a huge codebase is not that easy - it could easily start hurting code quality without it being clear in any output.

IsTom an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If you believe that I've got a halting problem oracle to sell to you.

nanapipirara 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think this is true.

A lot of AI believers (me too fwiw) seem to forget it’s a lot harder to ‘close the loop’ on non-code projects. I think this is because they are usually coders.

owebmaster an hour ago | parent [-]

That's what all AI believers get it wrong about programming. Code doesn't create products, humans do.

palmotea 35 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

> no programming is verifiable, and the major LLM companies are focused on it. its the first domino to fall by probably 5+ years

Which is kinda proof they're populated by sociopaths with extremely little empathy. The people who are building that stuff are programmers, and if they had a bit of functioning empathy they'd stop or slow down or at least be unenthusiastic.

And we're not talking about very high level empathy here, but the very basic kind of thinking about the effects on someone like yourself.

esafak 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Only if you run out of things to write. Is your back log ever empty?

ryandvm an hour ago | parent | next [-]

My backlog is less empty than ever - it just happens to be overflowing with whispy Claude-written tickets for functionality that somebody else's Claude suggested after summarizing some other Claude-infused Slack chat.

mikert89 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

ofcourse not, but they can pay someone 80k a year to work on the backlog, whereas maybe they used to pay 175k. its not about work going down, its the skill set needed to complete the work is lower than ever, and they need less people than ever

reactordev 2 hours ago | parent [-]

they won't even need that as agents talk to their own lanes in some Linear project management workflow that your sales team agents are connected. The entire system is going to end up agentic and even the CEO will be out of work unless they are founders and owners of the company. We'll all have our own business this way. Or it all collapses. Time will tell.

mikert89 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

i think this is farther off, much sooner is just the subjugation of technical workers to be low skill drivers of LLMs

mrbombastic 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

color me skeptical that the CEO or anyone non-technical is ever going to prompt their way out of a major incident when all the AI chickens come home to roost.

Tangurena2 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Maintenance will be forever. Tax laws change annually, so the payroll app will never stop being updated.

falcor84 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't accept that argument. As I see it, laws should be structured as data rather than code, using a clean non-Turing-Complete DSL for any embedded logic and calculations. Maybe there would still be occasional situations when new software features are needed, but it should be a rare occurrence rather than on every new change.

ok123456 an hour ago | parent [-]

People just need to add/subtract an input box and update the tax rates. They don't need an ontology of taxes and goods.

nwatson 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm hopeful that software will be applied in new areas where it was too costly before, with AI help it will be possible. Software will be cheaper, even more prevalent, lower quality in since respects, but SW engineering will still be a viable career.

skinfaxi 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

No one said there won't be work to be done, just that fewer people will be doing it.

esafak 2 hours ago | parent [-]

If the work to be done is infinite, why would there necessarily be fewer people doing it?

pjmlp an hour ago | parent [-]

Because most companies aren't software driven, they sell physical products and software is a cost center.

There is a budget and when it is gone, no contractors until next budget round.

Manfrednotfunny 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In a few years, it just might.

If maintenance and security is fully automated and for small changes or a small feature you will only dump some spec document into your agent platform, for sure.

mjr00 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> In a few years, it just might.

If you're in a product company and your development backlog is empty, run. That company is about to go out of business.

edukite 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Just another 6 months bro, only another funding bro, I promise, all devs will be replaced bro

I have stupid question here. Why they sell tokens instead of AI generated full application and AI fixes to your code without you needing a single dev?

pjmlp an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Because selling shovels is more profitable than digging holes themselves.

Applejinx an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Wait.

pjmlp an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes, when the project budget runs out and contractor team has to leave.

dauertewigkeit 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

For some reason people never mention this, but aren't there also much more people graduating with CS degrees than ever before?

WarmWash 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Pretty much no other engineering field made sense to go into for about a decade. Even kids who did go EE, Mech E, or even Chem E ended up taking software jobs. The pay, benefits, and work/life balance of SWE just absolutely obliterates everything else. Or did at least

doctorwho42 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

And how do you think people go from fresh graduates to senior devs?

whateveracct 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Degrees take 4 years. It's a very laggy indicator.

francisofascii 28 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Right. CS Enrollments dropped 8% this year. High schoolers got the message.

AnimalMuppet 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

People can switch majors.

But despite me saying that, I think it's going to take longer than four years. It takes a while for people to realize that a dream is dead.

nwatson an hour ago | parent [-]

Some companies hire junior devs to adopt AI-first practices to then drag their seniors in the same direction.

pydry an hour ago | parent | next [-]

This is a reliable recipe for turning your systems into an absolute clusterfuck.

whateveracct 43 minutes ago | parent [-]

should be a fun decade :)

AnimalMuppet an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Juniors to push the accelerator, seniors to pump the brakes. It could work.

bryzaguy 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What if the new entry level is what we consider senior today? Isn't it possible today to obtain entry/mid level skills with LLMs? I wonder if things will shift more in that direction.

davidw 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

People have been fretting about 'foreigners' taking their jobs for decades and it never really happened. This is all about LLM's.

I mean, think about it; just a few short years ago there was a very strong market for software engineers, despite outsourcing and immigration being very much part of the landscape.

mikert89 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

have you been inside any big tech company? lots of orgs are > 80% foreign.

a34729t an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah my new VP is from a certain country in the eastern hemisphere, and the interviews I've conducted for US-based candidates oddly enough have been 100% of engineers from that same country (say 30 or so in the last 2 years).

davidw 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That's not actually true; people have been complaining about this for decades, and it's never been the zero-sum game that they claim it is.

I mean, I wrote this 12 years ago in response to similar discussions on this same site, and in the intervening years, we had a great market for software engineers: https://journal.dedasys.com/2014/12/29/people-places-and-job...

What has changed is 1) the zero interest rate environment went away and 2) LLM's.

mikert89 2 hours ago | parent [-]

ive worked at multiple FAANG, almost always been the only american on a team of 10. theres some huge push by corporations to deny it to justify shipping in more foreign labor.

chaps 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Orrrrrr... it could be a complex combination of outsourcing, an over-reliance on degrees, LLMs, a lack of "apprenticeship" mentoring, etc etc etc.

I was very fortunate to get a job in a NOC a little bit after high school where I learned things one'd expect to learn in an entry level job. The team I worked on was all about mentorship, learning, and building people to the next level.

Haven't seen that attitude elsewhere in my entire career except in the non-profit world where I reside these days. It blows me away that people are surprised that these industries have failed to build entry level positions.

mattkrause 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I'd also throw in hiring practice. Whatever we're doing (across the board) to find candidates seems....less ideal.

davidw an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> outsourcing, an over-reliance on degrees, LLMs, a lack of "apprenticeship" mentoring,

Which of those things changed (along with higher interest rates) in the past few years though? All the other variables did not change. They were present 5 years ago and present 10 years ago too. To me that's indicative that those factors are not the cause of a soft market for software engineers in 2026.

nsxwolf 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

My job was just taken by Cognizant, which is technically American, so I guess you're technically right!

iLoveOncall 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There are 100K H1-Bs a year and 4 million grads a year in the US. Anyone who thinks H1-Bs are actually contributing to their inability to find a job is a moron.

weatherlite 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

But those H1Bs all come for a very narrow set of work - mostly software development or other adjacent roles. So your 4 million figure that counts all graduates in all fields doesn't make sense when we talk about tech.

There are around 100k U.S CS graduates . You're telling me 100k H1-Bs don't make any impact on them?

iLoveOncall 2 hours ago | parent [-]

You're counting only CS bachelors, in reality there's 400K graduates a year in software engineering fields.

There's also only 60,000 H1-Bs a year for private companies.

Lastly the majority of H1-Bs doesn't go to software engineering jobs, it's around 30-50%.

There's also basically no US company hiring juniors via H1-Bs, so yeah, I'm saying it doesn't make any meaningful impact.

30K H1-Bs versus 400K grads...

weatherlite an hour ago | parent [-]

The way you handled those numbers makes me think you have leadership potential, perhaps even U.S presidency material

KetoManx64 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

-85,000 NEW visas granted each year, not including renewals - The mass majority of those are going into the tech/software - there are only around ~100k CS graduates each year - H1B workers will take much lower salaries and benefits than their US citizen counterparts.

mikert89 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

have you been inside a big tech company? there arent many american fresh grads working there, its mostly foreign

iLoveOncall 2 hours ago | parent [-]

[flagged]

fl4regun 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

IME many big companies are filled with mediocre morons, or at least people who just don't care enough to do better than mediocre. Still not the fault of brown people either way.

shimman 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Why are you bringing racism into the equation?

It's not an unreasonable thing for people of a country to think that the government should do more to protect their livelihoods over a corporation's balance sheet.

fl4regun an hour ago | parent [-]

perhaps if you read the comment chain you would realize I'm not the one who introduced this into the conversation. Sorry that you disagree with my position.

shimman an hour ago | parent [-]

wow I did not read this thread fully, my bad.

throw-the-towel 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Can't help but laugh that even Amazon has someone who defends its honour.

mikert89 2 hours ago | parent [-]

hahaha i was laughing too, of all companies for someone to defend

ryandrake an hour ago | parent [-]

Every $1B+ company out there has at least one person on HN eager to passionately praise and defend it online. I've never understood it. People get devoted to a company like it's their religion.

WarmWash 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>The reason you're not getting a job at Amazon isn't because of brown people,

The correct framing is "The reason you're not getting a job at Amazon isn't because of people willing to work for less money,"

2 hours ago | parent | next [-]
[deleted]
iLoveOncall 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The compensation bands and the actual compensation are exactly the same regardless of immigration status.

snovymgodym an hour ago | parent [-]

Bands yes, packets no.

Big tech companies aren't like a Government job with rigorous pay grades based on role and seniority. You can have people even within the same role and level at big tech with multiple $100k pay discrepancies.

If someone's continued ability to stay in the country where they currently live is contingent on employment then they will accept worse conditions and pay.

That's the entire reason why tech companies use H1B, it's not as though there's a dearth of Java developers or DevOps people who are US citizens.

mikert89 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

amazon is crammed full of indians, its one of the worst offenders. i spent 5 years at the company

also nothing impressive about a senior SDE there, maybe 10 years ago it was impressive, best talent has either moved on or is L7+

weatherlite 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What's wrong with being mediocre?

insane_dreamer 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Spend some time processing tech job applications and you’ll realize you’re wrong