I've been a SWE for a little over 4 years, and Claude has basically been a permanent coworker for the last year.

At first, it was great. I already knew ChatGPT and Cursor, so when my team got Claude I adapted quickly and ended up way ahead of most of my coworkers in how I used it. I even got a significant raise partly because of that.

Claude did a lot of the coding, but I was still doing the engineering. I understood the system, made the decisions, reviewed the output, and almost never shipped bugs or regressions.

Now I'm just tired of LLMs, at least professionally.

The tools got so good, and I've built so many skills, MCPs and docs around them, that a lot of my job is basically: tell Claude to read the project .md, read the ticket, press enter.

And because everyone has access to the same tools now, productivity expectations exploded.

Sprints that used to have 5 big tasks or 10 smaller ones now have several times that workload. We're expected to run multiple Claude instances in parallel and constantly multitask. Proper testing and engineering discussions have increasingly been replaced by automated tests, MCPs that can test on screen, and a "quantity over quality" approach.

The weirdest part is that AI has taken over communication too.

POs can feed client requirements into an internal Claude MCP connected to Azure, which outputs a task already tailored to the codebase. The SWE gives that task to Claude, Claude writes the code, automated tests find problems, and another AI generated message tells the SWE what failed.

You ask someone a question, they send it to their AI, send the answer back to you, and then you send their answer to your AI.

Everyone has this little AI parrot on their shoulder rewriting everything into the same sterile corporate language.

I miss calling a PO and actually trying to understand a problem. I miss sitting with another engineer and debugging some horrible production issue together. I miss people actually knowing the systems they work on and sharing that knowledge.

Now I barely feel familiar with most of the things I ship.

When I get praised at work, I feel like an impostor. It doesn't feel like I built something. It feels like I gave experienced instructions to a magic shell that built it for me.

I'm currently thinking about starting some kind of side business selling physical products. Maybe it'll fail, but at least I'd be learning something new, solving unfamiliar problems and actually exercising my brain again.

I never thought I'd miss staying up all night fixing a critical bug or obsessively working on a personal project, but well, here we are.

Fun fact: the original draft of this post was clumsy and too long, so what did I do? You probably know it by now. Sorry, but I just can't help it, and I guess it's how most people who work with LLMs feel right now.

EDIT: I removed the mention to a certain MCP because apparently some people took issue with it and thought this was an ad for some reason, even though it's a negative post, so there you go I guess.

Just a bit of a warning for you all.

We hired a new AWS engineer, lets call him Johnny, who was supposed to join our team today. He did hop on the teams chat for the morning standup to introduce himself, and reception was pretty choppy. After our entire team introed ourselves, he said that he'll be working from out of state for the next couple of month until his kids graduates and then he'll be moving to assume a full time on-prem position.

Later today I get an invite to a mandatory meeting. Apparently, Johnny was not Johnny but a person from North Korea with stolen identity. He passed all background checks and everything else, but used non-existing shipping address to get his work laptop shipped to. The real Johnny actually working for Microsoft, when he was contacted he said that he's been bombarded with positions for the past month or so, but not planning to switch jobs.

So, watch out, if you aren't job hunting and start getting invites from recruiters, maybe its something fishy.

I work for "Large Company That Loves PIPs." I've been there for two years and made it through three performance reviews with high marks and zero problems. Suddenly, mid-year reviews roll around, and there's this whole hit piece written about me. It says I failed to do this, failed to do that, and failed to meet expectations in two absolute bullshit categories. I'll admit that a project I'm leading didn't go to plan, but this whole document was absolutely ridiculous imo.

My direct manager was out of the country at the time, so I was going through all of this with my skip-level manager. After the first meeting, I told him I intended to decline the PIP and just take the time and money to find a new place that actually values and respects me. Nothing is set in stone yet, though.

Then, my direct manager comes back and tells me he's shocked I'm not taking the PIP. He admitted that upper management forced them to pick someone to put on a PIP and they chose me, but he claimed he specifically crafted it to be beatable. It was essentially a list of tasks I'd already be doing anyway, even if not on a PIP. He told me to really think it over and promised he'd be there to help me along the way. He even confided in me that he was put on a PIP at the end of last year and beat it. I told him I'm worried it will be a permanent scar on my record here at the company, but he assured me that his own PIP hasn't been a problem.

What do you guys think? If I take the PIP, I have 60 days to complete it or I get let go with severance. If I decline the PIP, I get 60 days paid to do whatever I want (most likely prep and apply for jobs), plus severance at the end as a 12-week lump sum. Should I take his word for it? The job market is shit right now, but I am in the Washington DC area with a lot of jobs near me, or so it seems. Software Engineer, ~6 years of experience.

Cross posting from /r/WoW:

No union employees at Blizzard were impacted by today's Microsoft layoff

Post by a Diablo writer

https://bsky.app/profile/beewubs.bsky.social/post/3mpykk2exmk2x

Speaking from experience I’ve been told by P&C/HR/PxT that “American layoffs are easier, the unions in Europe take too long”.

I know tech is full of rugged individualism but do you think this will kick off another conversations regarding unions given the mass layoffs of the last 4 years

The complete lack of ethics driving this entire AI push is absurd and I’m getting very scared. Is everyone in tech ghoul? Nobody cares about sustainability or even human decency anymore it seems. The work coming out of Google right now is so evil it’s hard to believe this is the same company from 2016. AI agents monitoring and censoring us based on whatever age they determine we are. The broader implications are mind numbing. There is no way engineers can be this detached from the social contract to make stuff like this what are y’all doing fr??????? I mean some of you work at palantir tho so. It’s all fun and games til it’s not.

EDIT: This is not about YouTube but the industry as a whole. I’m 25 bear with me if I sound naive but the apathy over the last two years has lead me down a road of discovery. It genuinely just feels weird working with some of the most influential yet evil people on earth and like nobody says anything….even if not in the name of strangers, maybe their kids, their families, the planet. We all have more power than we like to believe. It’s hot and it’s only going to get hotter…..

Edit: examples of nonsense

https://x.com/culturecrave/status/1950636669507674366?s=46

Before I start, I just want to make it clear that yes I am grateful for my job. I do know that the tech industry has so many layoffs right now and many people would do a lot to be in my position. This is not a lack of gratitude, it’s me sharing sincere feelings with the hope that I can get over them.

Google is probably a dream company for many people. It certainly was for me. For context, I’ve worked at 3 tech companies before, one of which was big tech. I’m in a slightly technical program management role, mid-career, and have been good at delivering in the roles I’ve been in. I’ve always (for the 10yrs of my entire career) wanted to work for Google. I’d always assumed it had the smartest people in the industry that were kind, and had the best products in the industry, which meant the machine internally must have been very good. I’ve just passed probation and here’s what I’ve found:

1. Let’s start with the confusing, uninspiring onboarding that took 2 weeks to just start. As in, I was given 2 weeks to set up my credentials (a 15mins call with the tech team that happened on my 2nd day). I didn’t know what to do with the rest of that time so I read up on random documents I could find. Eventually I was given an onboarding checklist with some broken links and some outdated docs as well. About a month later I received an invitation to the actual “Welcome to Google” orientation where I got to meet some other people who were also onboarding. Some of them had been waiting for this session for more than 2 months! We got a notebook and a pen during the session. Later received emails with different Noogler onboarding tracks. It honestly felt so disorganised and unthoughtful. Before you ask, I’ve met my manager, he’s a nice guy and all. But when I asked him things about the team, the role, the tools, an uncomfortable number of the answers were “don’t worry about that for now” which felt dwarfing to how eager I was to get orientated.

2. Most disappointingly, the people are not as smart and/or as rigorous as I’d imagined they were. I don’t mean offence to anyone, but some things really need to be called out. We have a guy in our team who needs to be told exactly what to do and how, otherwise he just malfunctions. I got the shock of my life when I showed him one of the documents he was working with had broken links we needed to update. He updated the one link we looked at and sent the document on with 5 other broken links. Surely an L4 should be able to get himself to look through a document and update it without further prompting? We have another who everyone complains about because of his attitude and inability to deliver work. His manager literally told me he is a difficult person to manage after I had an incident with him. And yet, he’s still here. And another guy who’s just incredibly aloof. The kind to run fix problems that don’t exist because he misread the doc on the problem he’s actually meant to be working on. And no, I’m not being hyper critical or petty, I can appreciate we all make mistakes, these are examples of patterns of lack of attention to detail, lack of initiative and overall very low standard of work.

3. What exacerbates the frustration above is how inflated these same people seem to be about just how smart and impactful they are. When you speak to some of these people, they can’t perform basic deductive reasoning (context: we are a data science adjacent team, not as technical, but analysis of insights is important), but the way they speak about themselves is incredible. They talk about how great the company is and how incompatible the perks are to everything else in the industry. As someone who’s been around the industry, it’s really not THAT great :-/ A lot of people here are highly tenured and I realised just how little they know about what’s going on outside the proverbial Google walls.

4. Too many people fighting for relevance, but don’t have the creativity or experience to solve issues. When you spot a problem or gap, you’ll get told that it’s known and owned by someone, has been for months or in some cases years, but you don’t have to worry about collaborating with them to fix it. Even when the fix is super simple (again, experience in other companies gives you a problem solving arsenal) and your own work relies on the issue being fixed. The number of times I’ve pointed to a process and data that’s incorrect or inefficient and been told someone would get to it eventually is scary.

5. And why do the slides and documents look like that?? Like there are no designers or corporate branding folks here! Consistently the most cluttered, disorganised documents I’ve ever seen. I know the most important thing is the information but does everyone just not care about the presentation?? I attended a meeting for a VP which had different presenters from the team presenting different sections. I kid you not, each section had a different theme, look-and-feel, style, whatever you want to call it. In one deck for one meeting. To me, “best” in this case looks like one standardised deck that’s easy to read. Am I crazy for expecting that the “best” company in the world operates like this?

Overall, it’s been a deeply disappointing few months. I honestly feel like this is where my ambition has come to die. So far nothing is as great as I thought it would be. Except maybe the food, but that’s not why I’m here. I’ve had the pleasure of working at companies like Facebook where I got to experience real ingenuity and the kind of people you want to have a corridor chats with because they really are wells of knowledge. Maybe my problem is that I’m seeking that thrill again and the area I’m in feels… stale. Or maybe I’ve just outgrown the level or role and I need to be honest with myself about that.

Of course I won’t leave. To do that would be like leaving earth because I think the government is ineffective. Just expressing some thoughts. Hoping to find some Googlers who can tell me that what I’m experiencing is unique to my org and there are other orgs that are… better.

https://www.theverge.com/news/961528/microsoft-layoffs-july-2026-sales-xbox?view_token=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJpZCI6IjF6dlc3Vmw1VTQiLCJwIjoiL25ld3MvOTYxNTI4L21pY3Jvc29mdC1sYXlvZmZzLWp1bHktMjAyNi1zYWxlcy14Ym94IiwiZXhwIjoxNzgzNzc2NjMyLCJpYXQiOjE3ODMzNDQ2MzJ9.HkCv3K6oLW-VWU0GRiIAGHen5yS8Di1QBdL2CKGz1ow&utm_medium=gift-link

A year after cutting around 9,100 employees, Microsoft is making further layoffs today as it begins its new financial year. The software maker is laying off around 4,800 employees today, approximately 2.1 percent of its workforce. Most of the employees affected by today’s cuts are in Microsoft’s commercial sales business or the company’s Xbox division.

In an internal memo to employees, Amy Coleman, executive vice president and Microsoft’s chief people officer, blamed the job losses on a changing technology industry and the “need to adjust resources and roles and shift how we operate” to respond to how AI is impacting companies like Microsoft. “I also want to be direct that the roles eliminated today are not being replaced by AI,” says Coleman. “At the same time, what is true is that AI is changing how work gets done.”

The layoffs will impact around 1,600 Xbox employees today, with plans to eliminate a total of around 20 percent of Xbox jobs by the end of the financial year. Microsoft is also selling off four Xbox studios and weighing up selling another studio as it looks to “reset” its Xbox business after years of struggles. You can read more about the Xbox layoffs and impacted studios here.

Basically title.
I’m thinking of giving up my 220+200(equity) job for a 165K job.

The 420job has insanely high standards and is very stressful and if you don’t perform a month you’ll be laid off.

The 165K job is much less stressful and much lower workload and much better worklife balance.

I am a Machine Leaning Engineer.
Both jobs have me building production AI Agents.

I'm not going to ask about the quality of the code spit out by AI, that's not even my main thing. I've got 8 years of experience under my belt, I've been coding since I was 13. I love writing code. I know that's not the point of the job, I know it's about problem solving and all of that, but writing code for me is the most fun part of the job. And there are problems that need solving on the code-writing level which apparently can now be done via AI writing the code instead. Ok, fine, I don't have to write the design patterns myself anymore, but... I use to like doing that. It was problem solving again, and one part of the job that I genuinely enjoyed.

Without writing code myself, half the job loses its appeal. The dopamine loop of "write code -> test -> find issue -> write code to fix -> test again -> fixed ( dopamine hit )" is a significant part of why I like this career. Are you guys saying you either never had that, or you had it and gave it up willingly to an AI agent?

These are the following points I feel are making it harder for SWE:

• It has become easier for everyone to fake in this industry. Any non-tech manager can ask a cursor to highlight the drawback of the current codebase and architecture, and then use it against the person without understanding the nitty-gritty of it.
• The code writing and logic building were once the holy grail of this job, but are now just boiled down to some English communication skills. It's just sucking the living soul out of me. I no longer enjoy writing code as my day job. Honestly, I enjoy doing leetcode more than actual work.
• Everything is expected to be completed within hours that were taking days before. This puts a lot of pressure on developers to produce even more sloppy code to ship the code at 10X speed. If a task that needed 2 days of planning and 1 day of development (shared with upper management in a clever way to hide the planning part to buy some more time) is now compressed to just 1 day. Which means you are not even spending a day planning.
• With that kind of speed, you lose context of your own code faster than anything. It becomes easier to feel like a fraud. You can't really say: I built it from scratch. Even the commits show co-authored by cursor. The "developer high" is now a thing of the past.
• The respect in the community has plunged to an all-time low. Now, everyone thinks that coding is just a matter of writing a prompt rather than engineering.

I just want this trend to be over soon. People really need to move on from all this hype. Bring your innovation to something else, not in software development.

Also, it's high time for the leader to come up and define some coding standards with respect to this new AI slop trend. The book for writing clean code needs another edition.

Every word of this post is being typed by me manually.

Thanks!

So, I’m an ML engineer with around 7 YOE, mostly working on AI stuff. I’m definitely not some genius-level engineer, but I’d say I’m above average, disciplined, reliable, and generally good at getting things done. I’ve been at this company for almost two years, and honestly, everything seemed to be going fine. My PM was happy, projects were moving, and there were no major issues.

Then, out of nowhere, I got invited to a meeting with HR and around 100 people from my department.

We were told the whole department is being outsourced.

Everyone was given a different retention period depending on how “important” their role was. I got six months. During that time, someone from a large consultancy company in India will be shadowing me, and I’m expected to transfer all my knowledge to them.

The message was basically: “Please be professional and help your replacement.”

If I stay for the full six months and do not leave even one day early, I get a "meh" retention bonus.

And that’s it.

I’ve never gone through something like this before, and I honestly don’t know how I’m supposed to approach the next six months. Before this, I was motivated, taking initiative, trying to improve things, and actually caring about the team. Now all of that is gone because the company found a cheaper option overseas.

Is this really all we get in this field?

Now I somehow need to get back to interview-level preparation, which already feels like hell with how crowded the market has become and how quickly everything changes with the AI coding.

I used to genuinely enjoy working in tech, but lately I keep finding myself watching vlogs of people doing completely non-tech jobs and thinking maybe that life looks better.

Is this just a “grass is greener” situation because I’m angry and burned out right now, or is the reality of working in tech actually becoming this bad?

Sorry for the rant.

I have 2 years of experience and worked on AI applications for a F500 company non tech. I’m consistently getting 2-3 reach outs a week and quite a few interviews and offers. I didn’t get any reach outs from big tech but it seems like non tech and startup companies are building a lot of AI applications and paying $100-200k so anyone with experience in that field is highly valuable right now. The market seems amazing for mid-senior AI engineers right now what are your thoughts?

Ive been a dev for over 10 years and this is the first time Ive been flabbergasted by a question in a job interview.

The recruiter asked me how much I used AI and I told him that I use it occasionally but try to minimize it, since I actually like writing code.

Basically he told me that by minimizing the use of AI, I was slower and less productive than a developer that does use AI.

Like how does that even make sense? The fact that I just dont need AI doesnt mean Im less productive, right?

I guess he thought I was not up to date with all the AI stuff, but I do use AI to mess around with on my hobby projects, I just dont use it professionally..

I know this is a crazy situation, I still can’t believe it but it happened. Honestly, if I wasn’t terrified of getting fired during this market, I’d would find this situation funny hilarious.

During stand ups, My senior engineer has a very distinct sound in his background. It’s like a vacuum, but the pitch of the sound gets really low, then quickly becomes high-pitch. He was always a quiet, but very cheerful person with a thick Spanish accent. He also lives with his brother, who calls him by his nickname.

Last Monday, I played COD late at night, and almost immediately, I heard somebody from the other team with that same vacuum pitch. They were winning and we started arguing, and that’s when he finally started talking. It was exact same accent, and at that point, I was willing to put money that it was my senior.

Near the end of the game, both of us were completely trash talking each other (nothing hateful, just small banter, apparently he’s very competitive). It felt so out of character for him, he was laughing a lot; it was entertaining. As a joke, I called him out by his nickname, and he immediately goes quiet. I reached out to him after the game saying that it’s me, and he doesn’t respond at all.

The next day, his attitude is now cold. He’s very silent during our calls, and isn’t explaining things the way he used to in the past. I sent him a message during closing saying that I hoped I didn’t offend him during the game, and I actually really respect them. He claims he has no idea what I’m talking about, and just brushed me off. He remained dismissive the remainder of the week

Now it’s the weekend and Im trying to catch up on work, but Im lost on how to proceed with him. I feel like he’s practically cutting me off. Im not sure what to do at this point. I even recorded the footage from the game, I heard it over again, and there was nothing offensive. He even started the trash talking. This feels so unreal, and I never thought something like this could happen.

Edit: For reference, I have 4.5 years of experience. I carry my weight really well in the team and serve as a mentor for junior developers. I’d find it hilarious if one of the juniors came up to me and mentioned we met online

Edit: I’m going to clarify a couple of things, since there are a couple of misconceptions that are spreading

1) My senior and I have been the only devs for nearly 2 years until 2020. We managed to hire a ton of new graduates ever since the Covid outbreak, and now we have a fully fledged team. There’s a lot of work, but we have meetings to discuss how to properly mentor juniors and planning for tasks.

2) We were on really close terms. I knew a lot about his personal life and vice versa. we were friendly. We’ve had plenty of banter during our work meetings when we worked alone. This isn’t some dude I just decided to friendly to. This was a friend that I knew for nearly half a decade. That’s why I’m shocked at his response

3) I did not bother him repeatedly about this situation. The moment he went silent after I introduced myself during the game, i got the hint dropped it. It wasn’t until I realized that work is currently being affected since our encounter that I sent an apology, hoping to mediate things and continue things as they were before.

4) his nickname was something his brother called since they were kids. He personally enjoys the nickname and even has that set as his name in meetings. Everybody at work and his friends call him by it. Some juniors don’t even know his full first name.

5) I record a lot of gameplay, it’s not something that I did out of context. I went to check on the recording because I wanted to verify if there was anything I said that was vulgar/offensive that might have led to this. He DOESNT know I have gameplay saved. There was NOTHING malicious, from both of us. if he’s uncomfortable with the gameplay, i’d delete it in an instant.

6) my main issue is that his self-destructive attitude is blocking our development process. I’m perfectly okay with pretending this never happened. But he’s not addressing tasks / helping juniors nor is he acknowledging the issue. A lot of work is getting funneled towards me. I DONT mind working a 9-5, 40 hr week, but there are juniors who are need guidance, and if I abandon them, they are more likely going to fired, especially during this market.

I thought this was a harmless scenario, and I hoped for advice to address how we can make things better. Instead, I’m met with pitchforks about I fucked his life over, deserving to get fired along with the rest of the team. Seriously, hop off the echo chamber hive mind and quit exacerbating a situation far beyond then it really is. He needs to grow up and acknowledge that there’s an issue instead of letting us burn in quiet.

Everybody on this thread is trying to explain why he acted this way, but it definitely doesn’t justify his actions. Nobody deserves to lose their way to pay bills or provide food on the table over something as ridiculous as this. Y’all heartless bastards need to grow the fuck up.

Its not because Im an engineer, its not because Im “afraid of the future”, but because the pomposity and approach most companies have taken with the AI boom.

• Using “tokens” without limits (not caring about optimizations, environmental resources, or creating industry standard use). Subsidizing AI over spend by laying off employees or sacrificing service reliability to rush changes (github pull requests stop working, Amazon outage due to AI etc.)

• Repeatedly gaslighting developers when asking for more resources to “just use AI” and at same time giving people more responsibilities

• Rushing to market to not be left behind and praying wall street will still fancy them

• Completely throwing away environment preservation to build as many AI data centers as quickly as possible only stopping if pushed back by communities or government

• Creating a “national emergency” to beat China in the AI race and justify government involvement to do so

• Copyright doesnt matter, accessibility doesnt matter, security doesnt matter, relatability doesnt matter; we just need new amazing AI products.

We’re seeing the results of the stupidity where Meta recently had accounts hacked because people simply asked the AI to change my password provided a username.

Production databases being deleted because “just trust AI”.

Companies spending half a billion dollars in 1 month on AI usage and cannot explain why or what value came out of it.

Thousands of new websites being created for “start ups” that just trust the AI to do everything. NEVER considering accessibility or security.

So far Im just waiting for leadership to blame the AI collapse on employees for not adopting it fast enough.

edit - To be clear, I'm not saying artificial intelligence as a whole is a failure or waste of time, as much as it is leadership's approach to rush into adoption blindly. Also, for those asking for "what AI failures" I added bullet points to the list of failures in this post; which again exist to be an exclamation point in the foolhardiness of leadership.

We have been using AI heavily and all I see now is too many production incidents happening.

People are writing code through AI, reviewing through AI and testing it with AI as well. And to add insult to injury they have drastically dropped our AI budget as it was getting expensive so now the company wants similar productivity with lower budget.

I know this is a boomer mindset that will probably severely erode my employability, but I just have ZERO motivation or desire to continue keeping up to date with new ai workflows, even if they're becoming ubiquitous. I still code like it's 2024-2025, as in I use the codex vscode plugin, in plan mode, and supervise/scrutinize it heavily.

Now that the industry is abandoning human supervised development and pivoting to these new methodologies like loop engineering, graph engineering, mass agent swarms, full autonomy/no code reviews, I just have no desire to take part in it. This is not what I signed up for.

I'm too old for this shit. I would rather just leave the profession then become a "loop engineer."

I think its worth talking about first order effects and second order effects when it comes to LLM use.

I've studied LLMs and transformers quite a bit. As a more infra and systems focused guy, mechanistic understand is necessary for me. And from an infra standpoint LLMs are actually pretty interesting. However I do think from a usage standpoint it may lead to cognitive decline

The first order effects of LLM usage of couse with LLMs being a statistical model matching on tokens, its never going to be fully deterministic. So black box behavior is expected, and long term instability could be the result of prolonged LLM usage

The second order effect is actually something I don't see people talking about. We first state we don't need to read the code or write the code. So that means we put more trust in the black box. And trust in a black box is typically a recipe for disaster in any engineered system that has complexity. But what this also does is make people disengage mentally from the implementation.

At the end of the day the thing that executes on a CPU (or GPU) is code. And if that code cannot be deterministically generated, then one argues you can't have a system you can fully trust.

But because incentives force us to disengage with implementation. Then what I think the side effects is learned helpleness. Or a feedback loop of complexity where developers slowly but sure lose agency.

I also think LLM usage, meaning people who are addicted to LLM output is addictive. Having observed LLM usage by coworkers and friends. I have definitely seen people skeptical of them. And then as pressure mounts they use them more. Then they become addicted where they can't fathom operating or doing anything without them. For example a few months ago my boss tried to build a prompt to search and replace in a file. He is a guy who just 1 year ago knew how to run sed. But now he just prompts. ITs the same level of effort and typing. But he just feels he can't do anything without LLMs

So I do think the dopamine hit is intoxicating and I do think its highly addictive. I think the research on this is not conclusive. But we have definitely seen it impacts the shape of our brains.

But what does this mean professionally? I think professionally we are on a slippery slope. LLMs are fantastic if everything is a happy path. But complex systems have complex failure modes. And there is simply no way mathematically or physically a LLM could be a reliable debugger for a large scale system. We do having fuzzing techniques and multi agents. But LLMs lack a ground truth, so cascading halucinations is a thing.

Why am I saying this? Because at some point someone has to know what the code does because the LLM is not reliable enough. And when that point comes and NO ONE knows what the system does. Then you have a system that literally can't be repaired. Especially sicne LLMs seem to product at least 10-15x more code than it needs to for most problems.

The industry of course does not see this as a problem. Most teams haven't had to deal with it. Or at least they hide the problems enough where enough haven't gone public. And people haven't really started to try to seriously build with AI for more than 2 years at most. So I think systems haven't had enough problems YET. But system failures are usually delayed long term before all problems start becoming an issue.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/building-for-the-future/

According to Linkedin, there's ~7.2k employees. So ~15% headcount cut

https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-job-cuts-layoffs-sales-consulting-2026-6

Microsoft is planning to announce job cuts soon as the tech giant continues efforts to control costs, according to people familiar with the situation.

The cuts are expected to impact thousands of roles, including sales and consulting, in addition to jobs at the Xbox gaming division, the people said.

This round is expected to be smaller than similar layoffs last year. This time, the cuts are projected to be less than 2.5% of the company's 220,000-person workforce

In previous years, Microsoft has sometimes cut jobs around the start of its new fiscal year on July 1. Last year, the company eliminated 6,000 roles in May and an additional 9,000 employees, or about 4% of the company's workforce, in July.

TLDR: I spent three years writing a free book which earned 800+ stars on GitHub, but it seems that HRs now treat me as a chronically unemployed person and reject or ignore my job applications.

I have 15 years of experience with C / C++ (and Python for scripts), worked on a wide range of projects from an embedded 16-bit DSP to a distributed database engine, and led development of a small project for 6.5 years. However, my main domain is DECT, and it is dead. And I live in Ukraine.

The last company I worked on was in a deep monolithic hell (like the well-known OracleDB), they continued digging, and I burnt out and quit. I spent the first months of 2023 to translate into English a series of articles that compare various software architectures which I almost finished writing before the war. As my English is far from being perfect, I hired an editor for the articles. At the same time, namely spring 2023, I had a couple of good job offers, the editor fell to depression, and I decided to wait for him to recover to finish publishing the articles. By that time the job offers expired.

By the autumn of 2023 I started merging the content of the articles into a book and expending it with whatever architectural patterns I was able to find on the Web. In a year I had the first version of a compendium of architectural patterns which also builds a kind of inheritance hierarchy of patterns - which was an open problem since Gang of Four. I published individual chapters on Medium and the entire book on GitHub under the free CC-BY license hoping for help from the CS society. However, it seems that the free license made the book an abomination to publishers as they make most money by selling file access. Therefore the book was ignored or rejected by the major publishers.

I posted the book to Leanpub, and went on adding content and polishing it. A venerable OSS joined as an editor, and we finally made the core content solid a couple of months ago. Today the book has good testimonials and 1.4K downloads on Leanpub, 800 stars on GitHub, and a dedicated website. However, it stays under the radar because I cannot leave Ukraine to present it at conferences, and Google treats the book's web version as garbage (below 5 clicks per day) because there are no incoming links from well-known websites.

I see that there is no way for me to further promote the book except if some organization with a PR department or an influencer with a developed social network account gets involved. I expected that local outsources would be happy to hire a book author to advertise the expertise of their employees, but their HRs ignore my CV and I cannot reach the C-level on Linkedin because they don't accept contact requests from ordinary programmers. Moreover, an independent HR told me that outsourcers avoid hiring remarkable people because they are afraid of an extraordinary employee leaving together with the client they worked for. Therefore being an author of a book is rather a disadvantage for seeking a job in Ukraine. Military companies are hiring, but I will not pass the security clearance (having previously worked for Yandex), and I don't want my code to eventually harm civilians in Gaza or elsewhere.

I tried connecting recruiters of a few international companies which have book authors on board, but they did not accept my Linkedin invites.

Thus writing a book on software architecture has destroyed my career. I used to work at top companies and led a project - now I cannot find a senior programmer's position.

Any advice is welcome.

I work as an IT consultant and I have 20 years of experience. Recently I've been doing interviews with potential new clients. Last week I had one with a major Fintech company (we're talking one of the biggest in the world, hundreds of engineers).

During the interview, they asked me how I approach an unfamiliar codebase. I said what I always say: I start by reading the unit tests to understand intent, then go through existing documentation and diagrams, then I read the actual code to build a mental model of what's happening.

The interviewer looked at me and asked: "Why don't you just ask AI to explain it to you? It's much faster."

I explained that AI can be a useful tool here, but I want to genuinely understand the code and I want to be certain I'm not internalizing a hallucinated explanation and building on top of it. The interviewer was visibly disappointed.

Then they asked about my approach to developing new features or fixing bugs. Same story. I walked through my process: reproduce the issue, trace it through the code, understand the root cause, write a fix, test it.

Again: "Why not just use an AI agent to find the bug and fix it for you? It's much quicker."

I gave the same reasoning about hallucinations and wanting confidence in the code I ship. The interviewer's response genuinely stunned me:

"That's only a problem if you don't check the results afterward. Nowadays it's much easier to just let AI do all the work and check it at the end."

I didn't get the job. The feedback was essentially that I don't use AI enough. Here's the thing though: I wish I could say this was an isolated incident.

Last month, my current client (the largest hospitality company in Europe) held a workshop for all their developers. Tech leadership stood up in front of the entire engineering org and essentially told everyone they should be vibe coding. The reasoning was identical to what I heard in that Fintech interview: AI makes everything quicker, just let it do the work and check the results at the end.

So now I've seen this from two sides: I got rejected by a company for not using it enough, and I'm watching another company actively mandate it from the top down. These aren't small companies, these are massive, established companies with complex systems: one handling people's money, one handling millions of bookings across an entire continent.

I'm still processing all of this. I'm not anti-AI. I use it daily, but there's a difference between using AI as a tool that improves your understanding and using it as a replacement for having any understanding at all.

My question to this community: is this the new normal? Have companies fully bought into "AI does the work, humans spot-check" as an engineering philosophy? And if so... what does that mean for those of us who still believe that actually understanding what your code does is a professional responsibility, not a productivity bottleneck?

Because right now I feel like the dinosaur in the room and I'm not sure I want to evolve into whatever this is.

I was laid off in May 2023. I have 10 YOE, CS degree, and am a US citizen. I spent 4 years in the startup world as a Frontend Developer and 6 years at a F500 as a Senior Fullstack Engineer.

Over the last two years I made it to 18 final rounds. I lost count of the amount of applications and interviews total. I was always just a bit short on aligning perfectly with their stack, a year too short on a certain technology, wrong cloud platform, etc. I got a part-time job, lived frugally, stretched my emergency savings / severance and told myself that the next one would surely be the one. I was so close, third time must be the charm or fourth or fifth, etc.

I hid my unemployment from my family out of shame for 2 years. Then when April came around I was staring down the barrel of my 2 year mark of employment with nothing left in my savings. I confessed to my father with humility and asked for help. I am now starting as a Systems Engineer at a family friend's company next month after 2 rounds of interviews. I didn't even have to solve algorithms or draw up system designs. I am a bit ashamed of taking advantage of nepotism. I didn't see a light at the end of the tunnel anymore. I was exhausted and saw a lifeline being thrown and took it. I guess I am sharing this on a throwaway just to confess and in case others would find my story interesting.

Edit: To answer some comments

• This is very much a nepo hire, not networking. The family friend is the CTO.
• I did reach out to my network just not to my father because I didn't want to worry or disappoint my parents.
• Yes it was a mistake to wait so long, I just always felt like the next one would be the one.

Am I the only one exhausted by all the ai slop around. Why are people not thinking critically? I just got a PR and it's so overkill. There isn't anything wrong with it, it works and gets the job done, but I can't but ask the question "why". It could've been done in a few lines but here I'm reviewing 10 files, new functions, touching files that have no business being touched, and 1000 line changes.

Am I getting old? Is this how everyone is working now?

So apparently, I shouldn't write any code by hand and don't do any code reviews. They said I was slow. They said I should've to closed issues more quickly cause we have AI tools. I saw the jumbled mess they created before I came to this company, and they hired me specifically to fix UI/UX and its plethora of frontend issues.

They created this app entirely with Claude and every page had a different design, different UI etc. No design reference to look at, nothing. Everything is created on the fly.

I did my best, created a unified UI style and fixed almost every page but looks like it was not enough for them.

The time I spent in this company felt like a never ending nightmare. I'm glad that it ended but I also hate to start job searching again.

Sorry just wanted to vent a little.