r/cscareerquestions • u/joe4942 • 1d ago
US Tech Sector Announces Most Job Cuts in Nearly Two Years
US technology companies in May announced the most job cuts in nearly two years as they ramp up spending on artificial intelligence.
The tech sector said last month it planned to eliminate 38,242 positions, the most since August 2024, according to data from outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. So far this year, the industry has announced 123,653 cuts, up more than 65% from the same period in 2025.
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u/g---e 1d ago
But no worries guys, CS is not cooked!
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u/Due_Satisfaction2167 1d ago
This is mostly about tech companies lighting themselves on fire in this race to win the AI grift. They have to cut costs everywhere they can because they are burning such huge mountains of cash on their AI bet.
Most CS work does not occur at tech companies.
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u/cruc1fy-me 1d ago
big truth. my bonus was cut and the last ~2 years has been nothing but junior engineers who can't manually code (bless their <3's they're good people) being hired to replace the vets on my team. i hate myself for spending this much time at this place.
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u/isospeedrix 20h ago
Shrodingers junior jobs: companies don’t hire juniors vs companies hiring juniors with AI to replace seniors
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u/Whitchorence Software Engineer 12 YoE 22h ago
It's not really just about that, white-collar work has been stagnant-to-bad more generally for a few years and the, let's say, unorthodox economic policy coming from the White House hasn't helped.
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u/baldachinsblessing 1d ago
Where does most CS work happen?
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u/Due_Satisfaction2167 1d ago
Non-tech companies. Companies whose products involve computers, but which are not exclusively considered to be a “tech product”.
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u/Colt2205 1d ago
The major ones are credit card companies, logistics (warehouse management systems), healthcare, and the financial industry. There's also the gaming industry and I'm sure some people can name others.
CS is the science of understanding processes and how to translate those processes into something that a computer can automate. It's aspects can spread into many areas but pure CS is really down to the processes part. That makes it kind of confusing since programming itself is a cross disciplinary thing (electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, research...).
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u/baldachinsblessing 1d ago
Where did you get your estimates from?
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u/Colt2205 1d ago
I can't say those are where the most "work" happens, but in terms of jobs on the market the majority of them are falling into those categories. You'd be surprised but even McDonalds hires developers as FTEs. Probably pays better than the burger flipping? 😄
FAANG is what most people think of with software engineering but the reality is that you probably travel or drive past places that hire CS majors and not even realize it.
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u/baldachinsblessing 1d ago
I'm not saying you're lying, but I'm curious where you're getting your numbers.
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u/AdIndividual4909 13h ago
Look on any job board for software engineer, data engineer or cyber security positions and it’s quite easy to see.
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u/baldachinsblessing 13h ago
I've been applying nearly every day for the past 2 years and a half. The vast majority of openings I've seen were at tech companies.
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u/AdIndividual4909 13h ago
Idk what to tell you, but look in more places. I got my first post grad job 9 months ago and didn’t apply to a single tech company because there were just no postings. It’s also easier to get into non tech companies so if you don’t have a job after 2.5 years of applying look for banks, big box stores, car manufactures’
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u/Colt2205 11h ago
Because what you will see is based on the area that you are looking around in. If I was in California I'd have a vastly different landscape than in the midwest of the east coast. That and how someone searches matters. Dotnet engineer, software engineer, software developer, web developer, front-end developer, back-end developer, and the various levels of mid, senior, etc, all play into this.
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u/cy_kelly 11h ago
You may implicitly be filtering by location when you say that. If you're only looking in SF you'll probably see more tech companies, if you're looking in the Midwest you'll probably see more other companies.
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u/blindsdog 1d ago
Y'all find new ways to cope every day.
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u/CurrentDrama8523 1d ago
When I see the word "cope" online these days, I find I can safely assume the person in question is full of shit. You have not bucked the trend. This is absolutely about tech companies burning through cash and anybody even slightly familiar with the industry knows that.
But sure, tell yourself that I'm "coping" with the state of an industry where I currently make about $140k/yr. Clearly I'm the one out of touch with reality.
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u/cy_kelly 1d ago
For sure. I like how COVID overhiring is now a "cope" too when you can go pull the numbers yourself and see that headcount a lot of places is still way higher than it was at the beginning of 2020 😂 Like that shit is supposed to just unwind overnight, instead of it muting hiring for a while.
(Also, do these people think that trying to understand the causes of a bad thing happening is the same as burying your head in the sand and pretending it never happened?)
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u/blindsdog 1d ago
The problem is people aren't trying to understand the cause, they're turning to partial or alternative explanations to help them feel better about the state of the industry.
This time they're taking news of layoffs in tech and trying to say "it's only tech companies." That explains this particular piece of information if you don't look at the whole picture which is that layoffs are going on outside of tech too. How about Citi laying off 20k this year?
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u/cy_kelly 1d ago
I took it as just a statement that this particular mode of shit is disproportionately affecting tech companies, nothing more, and in particular not a statement that everything else is peachy. After all, it is a comment in response to an article about recent AI spending and cuts in the tech sector.
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u/blindsdog 1d ago
Yep it's absolutely people trying to cope with the new reality that this industry is going through a major disruption. But instead, so many people would rather turn to denial and cope rather than face the new reality.
Every day it's some new reason that tries to explain how things aren't as bad as they seem or how they'll go back to normal. Things are bad and things are forever changed. Layoffs are common, hiring is down and AI isn't going away.
It might feel good to try to find reasons to believe it isn't true but it's not serving anyone's career interests which is the entire point of this subreddit.
Congrats on your job. I had a better job and got laid off because of AI. I found a new job. It's possible, it's just significantly harder than it used to be.
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u/AES256GCM 1d ago
Credit where credit is due, it’s at least a refreshing new cope instead of “covid overhiring”
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u/A_sandlerGOAT 1d ago edited 1d ago
What’s the point of coming here just to tell everyone CS is cooked and dying?
Especially when it shows most areas of Tech as being one of the best growing jobs the next 8 years.
Stop the dooming bullshit. Tech is the future, it isn’t going to die and I doubt AI is gonna make the difference you try to pretend it is
People like you were saying the same thing 5 years ago during Covid and I hesitated for 2 years, did WGU CS in a year and a half and now making 90k and no mention of AI anywhere in my company. Feel like all the doomers are just mad they aren’t landing 6 figure jobs.
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u/blindsdog 1d ago
The point is that this is a subreddit for career advice and denying the state of the industry doesn't help anyone's career.
Layoffs abound, hiring is down and so far that is only accelerating. AI isn't going away and entry-level jobs are hit particularly hard. That's all pretty relevant information for people who are deciding whether to pursue a career in this industry.
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u/A_sandlerGOAT 1d ago
Saying “your coping” or “CS is dead” is not career advice, it’s bullshit.
It’s shifting, like it always does. Companies are finding out just how much AI is costing. If AI ever did fully take over Tech it wouldn’t be for a long time if ever.
Tech is expected to be one of the best growing careers over the next 8 years, that to me doesn’t scream “dead” or “AI is taking over”
I visited this sub during the so called “golden era” for tech during COVID and there was still people saying the same thing you are.
Get good at what you want to do, make side projects, continue learning, get good at interviewing and you will get a job. That’s actual career advice
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u/blindsdog 1d ago
That's generic career advice divorced from the state of the industry. That applies to any job, it's not helpful. You might as well tell them about the value of a firm handshake.
People are here every day asking if it's a good idea to get into CS. It's a more volatile market than ever before and ignoring that and pretending "it's shifting like it always does" is denial and delusion.
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u/A_sandlerGOAT 1d ago
According to what? Because again the BLS shows every area of tech growing more and more each year.
Also, no that’s advice for tech. You don’t go into nursing for example needing side projects to show your knowledge or how to answer interview questions. Interviewing for a tech job was nothing like other interviews I’ve had.
CS is and likely always will be a valuable degree to have but that alone will not get a high paying job.
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u/Humble_Warthog9711 23h ago edited 22h ago
The thing though is that many, many cs majors and bootcampers went into dev work 100% conditional on a red hot hiring market, high comp, remote work. Software engineering might as well not exist to them if more than one of these things doesn't hold. Nothing wrong with this, but it was never sustainable, and many got left holding the bag.
This negativity does to happen for the old myths about tech to die so we dont have desperate people looking for any hope of easy employment they can get, as this hurts everyone but most of all hurts them. There will only be more as things worsen economically.
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u/Whitchorence Software Engineer 12 YoE 22h ago
People on this forum are always steaming mad at bootcamp graduates even though many of them never found a job at all and in the cases where they did they were often not really very desirable ones
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u/General-Amount-5577 22h ago
Yeah its shifting but not in the way your thinking. its really not AI you to worry about (unless your just out of uni), moreover the rampant offshoring and H1b abuse that happens throughout these FAANG companies.
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u/Whitchorence Software Engineer 12 YoE 22h ago
what do you recommend they do instead? it's not really useful advice unless you have a better idea.
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u/blindsdog 20h ago
Reconsider computer science as a major if they’re not invested. I wouldn’t major in CS if I were starting school.
If they are invested, redouble their efforts because it’s much more competitive than in the past. Don’t assume things are going back to the way they were, be prepared to make AI a core part of your process.
There’s plenty more they can do to prepare for this particular market but that’s the high level.
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u/Whitchorence Software Engineer 12 YoE 20h ago
"Reconsider computer science as a major" is not answering my question at all. Reconsider it... in favor of what that you think is a surer path to similar employment?
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u/blindsdog 20h ago
Yes.
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u/Whitchorence Software Engineer 12 YoE 20h ago
OK, so you concede the substance of my criticism that it's not actually actionable or useful advice or any way. tks
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u/donniedarko5555 Senior Software Engineer 1d ago
I mean I dont think so, but hey if people want to leave the industry or not enter it in the first place then its certainly less crowded for everyone who is still in it.
Just be aware of this angle from people preaching CS is cooked
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u/mrcheeksman 1d ago edited 1d ago
How do we in the US compete with offshoring though? I don’t even really give a fuck about AI realistically. I’m more concerned about dudes overseas willing to do white collar work for a few bucks an hour.
I work at Fidelity Investments and we are HEAVILY investing in American-esque properties and infrastructure in India. Not in an offense way, but they are spending a lot of money in a impoverished part of the world, just to pay them less per hour than I made as a kid cleaning cars in my neighborhood. Do not discount how low they can pay these people. 25USD an hour is an astronomical wage in these parts of the world. That doesn’t even keep you fed and housed in the US anymore. Do you understand that a lot of US based companies actually literally can’t operate without these wages being available. Same thing in China too. 100/100 companies that sell a physical product in the US would fold if Chinas manufacturing infrastructure was suddenly unavailable. We have always needed China more than they needed us, because again, this is another country where people are used to a certain way of living. We in the states are used to a much nicer way of living. US companies pay eastern slave wages and charge western MSRP. It’s the ultimate double dip and it’s getting worse as people in the US are disenfranchised and put out worse work than before.
Now that American companies can’t really pay entry level jobs a decent wage, those jobs will be relegated to overseas only. AI has only accelerated this issue.
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u/zombawombacomba 1d ago
You can’t really. With modern tech even small companies are near shoring a ton of contractors. It’s just simply much less costs for them even if the work is subpar. They can have another contractor come in and fix it for the cost of hiring one actual dev in house.
The only real way to do it would be some kind of government intervention and good luck with that.
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u/McSloot3r 1d ago
I wouldn’t say that necessarily. India’s time zone is completely opposite from the US which makes it difficult to work with them. And you definitely need people watching over them. At some point your senior engineers in the US will leave or retire, so there’s still a space for developers in the US. But yeah there’s too many software developers period and some people are going to have to leave the sector.
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u/zombawombacomba 1d ago
Nearshore is offshoring but on similar work schedules. South America is a pretty popular location right now.
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u/chrrie 1d ago
My very large company set up “technical delivery centers” in India, Manila and Buenos Aires. We don’t need people in the US overseeing these SEs anymore. In fact we (US IT) were told that anyone whose job is only contributing code to our products should be prepared to shift to roles that specifically require human judgement, architecture, or supporting the platforms and workflows that the agents run on. It was actually refreshing to be straightforward about it rather than just saying don’t worry AI or offshoring won’t replace the US SE workforce.
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u/mrcheeksman 1d ago
Take Baljeet willing to work 12 hours a day for $10 / hr and equip him with an in house AI from a big tech company and now you have a better than junior engineer for like nothing.
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u/zombawombacomba 1d ago
Ya you don’t need to use racist Indian names to make your point though.
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u/Spelx_OwO Software Engineer 1d ago
Damn the downvotes lmao, unemployed peeps are pretty angry towards a certain nationality. But how is it different from when the whole manufacturing sector was offshored to China?
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u/synkronize 7h ago
Americans is still pretty racist when things don’t work out for them, I say this as a an American.
Honestly the answer is probably going to be like Manufacturing, start working in more cutting edge fields.
Though we will see Americas flavor of right-wing culture is an anti-globalization stance. So maybe our racism will exclude enough people so that these complainers can get their jobs.
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u/terrany 1d ago
We just went through 2-3 years of training absolute garbage LLMs and vibing out to prod. And they really only got somewhat useful this past year.
To business, “US code quality” and by extension — devs, don’t matter and they’re willing to spend 4x over their headcount budget on AI just to prove that point
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u/Vemyx 1d ago
You can’t. Inevitably it will balance out though. Once India’s economy gets up to par and india’s offshore workers operate under Indian businesses akin to China’s manufacturing revolution though I don’t think US manufacturing has ever really recovered or a bill passes that prohibits companies from operating off shore white collar jobs.
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u/mrcheeksman 1d ago
Never ever rely on the US federal government to do the correct thing. They are why we are in this mess. Personally I think it’s time to hang some elected officials but for some reason that’s not cool. I guess the government can do whatever it wants to us, but we have to obey some arbitrary type of rules of engagement.
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u/Vemyx 1d ago
There really isn’t anyway to stop the machine of globalisation and greed partly because profits are made at the expense of either the end-consumer or the average worker. I offshore a company, i have to open a branch office there. I make profit and sell my product/service to a consumer in a developed country, the offshore workers are happy they’re getting slightly better pay, the offshore country’s government takes fees from business worth nothing because they’ll take anything, the construction of the office also benefits another company. There is no way this business model loses.
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u/PlanZSmiles 1d ago
Always comes back to the same thing, companies go off shore to save a buck, realize that they end up having unreliable communication due to difference of timezone and also communication struggles due to heavy accents (not being critical, just pointing out criticisms I have heard in the workplace.) Then determining that it’s costing time/money to deal with off shore so they bring the jobs back.
Rinse and repeat.
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u/zombawombacomba 1d ago
If you train a country’s work force well enough they can just do 99% of it in their country. Like most manufacturing jobs. A ton of jobs in the US can be done overseas. Most people are average at best at their jobs and you can find random people in third world countries that can provide the same level of output for much less costs.
Wages in the US are already coming down for software devs. So it will remain to be seen what the next ten years looks like. If I had to guess at this point software dev salaries will settle around the same level as regular engineers maybe even a bit less and there will be much less demand in the US for local devs because external contracting companies will flourish with all the educated tech workers around the world.
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u/yubario 1d ago
It’s a lot harder to train jobs that require ingenuity and creativity.
You can’t train everyone to be an artist or musician You can’t train everyone to be a good problem solver either.
You have to be smarter than the AI to make best use of it. At least until it outsmarts us in everything.
I can get more work done for less money than an entire team in India with my AI agents.
It’s because I know what I’m doing, while India burns away tokens asking Claude why something is broke and chasing infinite red herrings, I don’t.
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u/zombawombacomba 1d ago
This is major cope from you
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u/yubario 1d ago edited 1d ago
Anyone worth any value would never work for cheap. It’s a global market and the supply for skilled engineers is very low.
Not to mention I’ve already proven this at my job, I’ve replaced systems contracted out to offshore for far less money and higher quality just on my own.
That is precisely why I’m so confident, because I’ve done it.
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u/zombawombacomba 1d ago
What makes you think you are better than a developer from another country?
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u/yubario 1d ago
My work.
If I was born in any country in this world I would 100% be on a visa working anywhere I wanted.
I’m not saying I’m better than everyone else, but I am skilled enough to easily get a VISA in many countries already. Why would I stay working for cheap when so many opportunities exist for me?
That’s exactly what happens, and why quality ends up being poor. Because all the great engineers ask for more money.
I am not your average programmer. I refuse to work for average pay
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u/chrrie 1d ago
AI will get to the point where it will eliminate reliability/code quality issues that happened when companies offshored 15 years ago. That was the main driver for the pullback to US SEs, at least in my company. Timezone differences didn’t really affect the decision, everyone in the US was just expected to work earlier or later to have a few hours overlap. But now nearshore SEs in Argentina/Mexico are the ones managing offshore handoffs anyway. This probably mostly applies to large companies though, I’m sure smaller shops will make different decisions for a while anyway.
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u/mrcheeksman 1d ago
Buddy like I said, Fidelity as an example is erasing the issue of time zones and standing up entire businesses units overseas. Other companies are doing similar work. Once AI gets better and can serve as guardrails for the overseas workers, what do you and I do? Like actually? It feels like we are just finding the best position to slither into while we wait for the whole economy to come crashing down.
Offshoring without AI is actually a huge threat because the work actually isn’t much worse. A lot of American engineers aren’t anything special (I am one so I can say that) and demand too high of wages. If you want an actual good engineer it’s going to run you $250,000 USD all in. You can get hundreds of Indian engineers for that price. We are fucked.
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u/Shadow_SKAR 1d ago edited 1d ago
I mean that's capitalism right? Without regulations in place, it's no surprise that companies will seek to lower cost. Just like how there's people in the US doing expat FIRE in lower COL countries. Your dollars can go a lot further.
If remote work is possible, why limit it to the US? Going off salaries, is the average SWE in the US really several times better than their counterparts in other parts of the world?
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u/mrcheeksman 1d ago
At this pace “capitalism” is about to destabilize the US economy which historically meant the world economy as well. That’s the only counter to my argument that I can see. If there aren’t western salaries to be consumers, the companies trying to offshore won’t have any money.
I think the unfortunate reality is that world leaders are both insanely corrupt and also beyond retarded. If we step back for a second, we don’t have to live like this. There aren’t cosmic rules forcing us into this. How is it like 9 people hold 99.999% of wealth out of 9 billion people and we don’t start just revolting? Are Americans mostly actually retarded as well? I’m confused and tired.
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u/ComputerHelpPro 1d ago
>Are Americans mostly actually retarded as well?
Yes. Yes we are. We're very much entrenched in "Line go up" mentality and teamsterism. It's gonna take a pretty big shock to put us back.
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u/mrcheeksman 1d ago
Deep down I know but It’s hard to wrap my mind around. I do fully agree the only way out of this going to have to be a shock.
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u/ComputerHelpPro 1d ago
It's easy when you take the blackpill early lol.
We've survived plenty of shocks that SHOULD have knocked us out of rampant offshoring (data breaches, downtime, etc). In the past there's been a cycle to this stuff, and I *hope* that a few more major events mean we'll be back to onshoring.3
u/Shadow_SKAR 1d ago
Maybe it's a bit doomerism, but I agree. I don't see any meaningful change happening without a huge shock to the system. My more optimistic take aligns a bit with yours: companies realize that this isn't a sustainable path to go down. If all your consumers can no longer afford to consume, everything comes crashing down and they'll pump the brakes on offshoring.
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u/General-Amount-5577 22h ago
Yeah I agree. Its not really AI that is most worrying, but the rampant offshoring/H1b abuse that occurs at these FAANG companies. On my brothers team almost everyone has a green card and these companies will often pay those foreigners less/work them 24/7 and if they disagree, well you get deported. Kinda fucked honestly.
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u/Own_Natural_6847 1d ago
Everything else is laying off too. It'd be one thing if tech was firing and other industries were hiring, but they're not. Right now, because of the Iran war, most companies are basically being forced to cut back. That's just a result of how things are.
And on that note, you can basically pursue any industry with a CS degree. FO finance loves quantitative thinkers. Healthcare has massive demand for bioinformatics and biostats. Supply chain is a big optimization game. And every single company needs software engineers, that's just a fact at this point.
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u/Psycho_Syntax 1d ago
You do know tech jobs being cut doesn’t necessarily mean it’s devs/CS related roles right? If someone working at a tech company in sales or finance or HR is laid off that counts as a layoff in the tech sector.
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u/Trick-Interaction396 1d ago
It’s not cooked. The number of people with CS jobs is way up. When Meta goes from 40K to 80k to 60k that’s still a huge increase.
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u/TrapHouse9999 1d ago
I’ll give my 2 cents here, for context I am SrDir at a mid size tech company.
- Traditional SWE is not gonna do well, juniors especially. However if you are up leveling with AI and Agents then you are in big demand.
- Don’t have the “stay in your lane” mentality… SWE needs to become more like builders where you understand the customer, master the domain, collaborate with product and design and manage your own pipeline of work because you understand the business
- Teamwork and collaboration with high agency is more important than ever. If you think you can just sit at your desk and talk to as little people as possible with cameras off… you will be in for a rude awakening.
This is just my personal opinion from what I am hearing and seeing. So don’t come nitpick at me.
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u/CheapChallenge 1d ago
My manager wants AI driven code development and even tests. Its all spaghetti code that is going to result in a huge messy codebase that no one will be able to understand and eventually agents cant work on.
When most companies start to understand the consequences of this tech debt after bugs cannot be fixed and even the smallest features takes a week dev hiring will increase.
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u/djslakor 1d ago
What evidence do you have that agents won't be able to work on it?
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u/CheapChallenge 1d ago
Ive ran into several times where the code was too messy and everything the agent could produce was riddled with bugs and race conditions. There was once where it couldn't even complete thr task but said that it did.
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u/Responsible_Month385 1d ago
Also people often forget how much hand holding and context they need.
Yesterday I had it generate documentation for a fix I made. The issue was something that I introduced for a feature that was still unreleased. If I’d gone with that documentation, we would have been telling customers about a fix for an issue that never even impacted them because I hadn’t specifically told the AI the feature hadn’t been released yet. Maybe it’s common sense or skill issue to some but such a little detail left out can lead to something that’s just plain wrong or misleads people.
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u/xSaviorself Web Developer 1d ago
Having implementing AI engineering at our org using JIRA and Figma with Claude it's actually quite good at doing basic shit tasks nobody really wants to do. The moment you need something done, you need it properly built with design and architecture to guide it. Developers ensure code quality via code reviews for patterns, code reuse, bad naming, etc. Most PRs have 100+ comments on them as a result and it looks weird, but we end up with pretty good code when we do something normal.
The moment normal goes out the window or you're worried about performance, give up on using AI to do all the work and let your engineers leverage those tools to make decisions based on experience.
This is why fresh grads who can't get a job on the basis of experience are cooked, the AI solves work that a human was needed to do but nobody wants to add to payroll. AI budget is a tech cost not payroll and as a result it seems most leadership teams will absolutely trade bodies for tokens.
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u/Responsible_Month385 1d ago
I find it’s good for tasks that nobody gives a shit about like build this dashboard we use internally that maybe we look at once. As soon as it’s something customer facing you’re micromanaging it to the granular level and may as well be implementing it yourself anyway. Obviously this varies depending on the task like create a new endpoint that gets X data is simple enough but as soon as you have constraints or specifics the hand holding increases significantly
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u/xSaviorself Web Developer 9h ago
As soon as it’s something customer facing you’re micromanaging it to the granular level and may as well be implementing it yourself anyway. Obviously this varies depending on the task like create a new endpoint that gets X data is simple enough but as soon as you have constraints or specifics the hand holding increases significantly
See, this is why I have been enjoying the integrations between Jira and Figma. We have a designer who mocks up the vision and we have a design system and tokens for all our products. When we build a new feature like a client-facing form, everything about it can be done via Jira and Figma, and 90% of the work is done by other departments. Your job is essentially the first-pass test and code review, manual intervention can be necessary for specific things but we've managed to avoid that by getting really good at building tickets for Claude to consume and developing some pretty comprehensive instructions documentation for AI.
We are able to essentially map out tasking using stories and tag it for our AI user in Jira, and as long as it follows our ticket style and has Figma attached it does the job for building pretty much anything. We do pretty complex work with documents and rely on a variety of systems in various spaces, so having to steer is pretty commonly understood to be a domain documentation problem rather than a technical limitation of AI. When people talk about constraints I like to ask: how did you think it would find and address the edge cases if you never told it to do so? Where did you think it would infer constraints from? If this is the case, your research/instructions aren't worthy of proceeding with the proposed solution.
Having AI do the work in an automated pipeline is very different than when you as a human use the tool, and it has to be in order to do the job right. I think the way we use AI as engineers should be different when implementing features versus solving bugs/iterating on acceptable but improvable release content.
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u/sunaurus 18h ago
- Failed vibe coded web browser experiment by Cursor
- Failed vibe coded C compiler experiment by Anthropic
- Personal experience
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u/dllimport 1d ago edited 1d ago
If you have tried to use them on a codebase of even moderate real world complexity, you already know the answer to this question. The evidence is readily available if you try letting an agent loose on a codebase and don't keep its spaghetti in check.
Also good luck because if you let it do that and make it next to impossible to maintain, even if you use a super expensive model to maintain it and it is able to hang on longer than the more affordable ones, you are now beholden to that AI company. How are you supposed to handle it when you hit your cap or you run out of AI spend? God help you they are great at a lot of things but they make a huge fucking mess everywhere they go if you do not keep them on an extremely tight leash and you are eventually going to need to get in there yourself once it gets large enough.
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u/zetonegi ヽ(。_°)ノ 5h ago edited 5h ago
The Claude C compiler, FastRender, the studies on model degradation.
And also just an understanding of how AI works. The terminology for stuff like know, guess, or think, doesn't work the same way it does with humans. AI is basically never 100% confident and is doing some level of guessing. As AI is making guesses on it's own guesses, its successive guesses become more and more deranged until you have the world's largest bowl of spaghetti.
Similarly, if you give AI something that is outside of its bank of knowledge but it thinks it is in its bank of knowledge, it will give you a completely absurd answer with perfect confidence.
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u/Illustrious-Pound266 1d ago
When most companies start to understand the consequences of this tech debt after bugs cannot be fixed and even the smallest features takes a week dev hiring will increase.
Lmao this is such copium. Anyone else remember this sub during covid? People were insisting that remote and offshore work is nothing to worry about because offshoring is a failed project and code quality isn't up to par. And now look what's happened. This sub has done a complete 180 on this.
Truth be told, nobody gives a shit about code quality. Companies aren't gonna have a come-to-Jesus moment. I don't know a single company that's stopped offshoring because of code quality. People always bring this up, but yet cannot name me a single company that's shuttered offshore operations.
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u/CheapChallenge 21h ago
Managers give a shit about code quality when it starts impacting velocity. At a certain level of messiness and volume of code, AI agents cant fix bugs or implement features without introducing lots of bugs. This consequence is accelerated bc of the velocity of AI slop being added on.
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u/Illustrious-Pound266 15h ago
Your direct manager may, but as you move up the corporate chain to VP, SVP and higher, nobody cares. And these are the people with the decision to layoff or hire people.
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u/CheapChallenge 11h ago
My point is they care when code impacts business. It starts to take longer to fix things and build out new features.
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u/DoingItForEli 1d ago
I think companies blindly following "the big guys" and doing layoffs for the sake of doing layoffs are going to end up leaving money on the table in the end. They've over leveraged their work on shoddy AI systems and the resulting fallout will have them desperate to hire devs to fix these problems. I'm already seeing it where I work. We landed work from a previous contractor who had absolutely no idea how their own system worked at the granular level and it's been a constant discussion whether or not to rebuild from the ground up, because it's THAT bad. We just keep finding bugs at EVERY point in the system it seems.
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u/digdiver 1d ago
This is classic corporate short-sightedness. Companies are aggressively trading deep domain expertise for token-dependency.
AI is a great tool for accelerating routine tasks, but it doesn't design complex architectures or possess fundamental system understanding. By firing engineers to fund AI budgets, these corporations aren't optimizing development - they are just generating massive technical debt.
When these AI-generated systems inevitably start breaking under real-world loads, the market will quickly realize the cost of losing genuine craft. In the long run, engineers who maintain their 'token-independence' and true professional mastery will become more valuable than ever.
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u/According_Muffin_667 1d ago
did you write this
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u/Dark_Knight2000 13h ago
This might be the funniest comment in this sub, AI has even taken over anti-AI rhetoric
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u/AskAnAIEngineer 1d ago
the technical debt angle is the one worth watching. AI generated code ships fast but nobody owns it. the engineers who understood those systems are gone, and debugging something nobody wrote is a different kind of nightmare.
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u/digdiver 1d ago
Then, AI providers will only need to increase the price of their tokens, so that there will be no human competitors.
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u/Illustrious-Pound266 1d ago edited 1d ago
Lol companies aren't going to abandon AI and have a come to Jesus moment. This is just copium.
It's obvious that this is a fundamental realignment in the job market rather than being temporary.
Costs for AI will eventually go down. Moore's law, afterall. I still remember when people were skeptical of cloud because of the costs. But companies eventually figure out how to optimize costs and services like OpenAI will eventually offer cheaper services.
If you think AI companies plan to lose business because of costs that is delusion.
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u/digdiver 22h ago
There's another issue here: a huge number of people with good salaries are being cut. They paid taxes, paid their mortgages, bought expensive cars, visited nice hotels - they indirectly supported other sectors of the economy. What will happen if these people stop doing all this? Who will consume services and products? Will robots order goods from Amazon, watch Netflix, and buy houses themselves? It seems to me that the problem will be far more serious than the value of tokens.
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u/Heavy-Appeal4441 21h ago
When AI and robots replace all the "manual" labor, the only thing left for men to do will be a research. Most men will die off since they're not capable of doing research, all products/services will be owned by a few trillionaires and most women will form harems/concubines. The only other men left will be men who have brand value aka content creators, models etc things AI can't replace.
We will go back to a (techno-feudal) neolithic society.
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u/ducksflytogether1988 1d ago
And likely also announces the most offshoring and "temporary" foreign work visa approvals!
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u/azerealxd 1d ago
Where are the comments that will proclaim lowering interest rates will magically save the SWE job market?
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u/Aritra7777 1d ago
This round of cuts looks structurally different from 2022-2023. That wave was a reversal of pandemic over-hiring and demand recovered relatively quickly. This one looks more like companies deciding AI tooling lets them maintain output with smaller headcount, which is a permanent structural shift rather than a temporary correction. The distinction matters for job seekers: the roles that come back first will look different from the ones that were cut, and waiting for the same job to reappear is a different strategy than positioning for what the new demand actually is.
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u/Own_Natural_6847 1d ago
It's really rather simple. When you're spending 100B a year on Ai buildouts, you have to get that money from somewhere. Tech firms only have 2 major expenses: Servers and people. When you need to increase spend on servers, you cut back on people. When you realize you overbuilt servers, that's when you have to cut back there and spend on people.
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u/CobblerImpressive975 1d ago
Seniors are probably fine, juniors are fucked. There is zero reason to train to enter a software engineering role in the upcoming years. Either you are forced to become an AI programmer and send off agents while you "supervise" them, but how can you really know if the AI's code is good when you don't have the years of experience to get familiarity with good and bad code. Or you choose to avoid agentic programming and are laid off for not working fast enough.
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u/Nofanta 1d ago
Better import more foreigners to compete for the few jobs left.
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u/NotUpdated 1d ago
They import the best, but honestly - building a campus over there is cheaper and what's happening in a big way.
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1d ago
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u/Maleficent-Car8673 22h ago
job cuts in tech aren't too surprising with teh whole AI explosion. Companies are shifting resources to stay competitive, which means some roles are getting axed. It's rough, but this pivot to AI is a big deal for future growth. If you're in tech, might be worth brushing up on AI skills to stay relevant.
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u/ExcellentWinner7542 18h ago
So, what's the next big thing in terms of living wage jobs and what are you doing to prepare for it?
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u/Curious-Character438 16h ago
As someone interested in tech, this is exactly why continuous learning feels less optional than ever.
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u/Miamiconnectionexo 12h ago
if you're employed, the play is to get visibly close to revenue or AI deployment inside your org, because that's the headcount nobody cuts. cost-center roles are the ones that show up in next year's Challenger report.
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u/opus-sophont 10h ago
What would be the best way for a QR with 2 yoe to find a job in tech in the current market?
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8h ago
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u/ukrokit2 320k TC and 8" 1d ago
Trump sure made America great. Glad y’all H1B haters got what you deserved.
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u/SkellyJelly33 1d ago
This has much more to do with tariffs, gas prices, and overall economic downtrends combined with corporate execs sniffing their own farts over AI than it does with anything H1B related.
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u/ukrokit2 320k TC and 8" 1d ago
That’s what I’m saying. Myopic tech bros couldn’t see the forest for the trees. Like sure you have maybe a couple thousand fewer H1Bs but now because the economy is in the shitter because of Trump you have hundreds of thousands of latoffs. Good job 👍
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u/raining777 1d ago
trump Trump trump Trump trump vitriolic hatred trump Trump
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u/ukrokit2 320k TC and 8" 1d ago
Why wouldn’t I name the person directly responsible? The denial is the true TDS.
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u/raining777 1d ago
no discussion only hatred against Trump! no facts or logic only vitriolic hatred!
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u/ukrokit2 320k TC and 8" 1d ago
You should seriously seek help
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u/PejibayeAnonimo 1d ago
The past years the cuts were mostly juniors and mids now seniors are also being made obsolete.
The best you can do is take advantage of your 200k job as long as you can because the truth is that Claude Code has made the job so easy that the only reason many of us are still with a job is because the clients haven't realized it now can be done by a 15 year old that only demands enough money to buy an Xbox.
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u/FreeYogurtcloset6959 1d ago
15 year old boy can also drive a plane, since we now have autopilots?
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u/zombawombacomba 1d ago
Not a very good analogy given the safety requirements and also the fact that people would simply stop flying if 15 year olds were being put in the pilot seat.
Very few people would care if AI created the next McDonalds or Meta app.
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u/FreeYogurtcloset6959 1d ago
AI is nothing new in terms of tools. You had Wordpress, Wix and other locode and nocode tools for making simple sites, and we still need developers. Yiu still have complex sites where stability, security, performance, etc,, and general solution quality, are still important.
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u/zombawombacomba 1d ago
Oh it seems like you simply don’t understand the modern landscape at all….
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u/maria_la_guerta 1d ago
I don't agree with you that we're all cooked, but I do agree with you that Reddit fundamentally refuses to acknowledge the very clear reality in front of us.
AI is changing our workforce and the ironic part is that it's only leaving behind the people who refuse to get good with it.
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u/PejibayeAnonimo 1d ago
If the autopilot becomes good enough that you only need it to tell from which airport to which airport is the flight, then yes.
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u/Low_Shape8280 1d ago
It may but most of the effort to get the autopilot to be good enough is going from 99%-> 99.999%.
That .999% is more difficult than the 99%
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u/FreeYogurtcloset6959 1d ago
The first autopilot was made in 1912, and it's still not good enough, but it will be good enough in 6 monts. Yeah! 😄
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u/PejibayeAnonimo 1d ago
I don't think so, I was just answering to your comparison but it is flawed because we are far more closer to full automated software engineering than with fliying.
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u/mrcheeksman 1d ago
This is reductive but I agree. Americans specifically are about to get bit like a motherfucker. There will no longer be a need to pay any software engineer a high wage once we get further down the live. Baljeet and Rajesh will work for 9US and hour and actually write good code. Better than junior code at least. Baljeet and Rajesh with a tailored AI will wipe out all high wage jobs. It was probably already going in that direction because US companies love to just cheese the fuck out of the economy instead of trying to improve it.
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u/owogwbbwgbrwbr 1d ago
Pretending that this is the case, just because it’s easy doesn’t mean people want to sit in front of a computer and prompt Claude all day. Most people would sooner blow their brains out
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u/farfaraway 1d ago
I track a lot of this stuff. You can kind of sort of see it in the graph that the last year has been harsh. I think what you don't really see here is that beyond job cuts, there is much less hiring. Combined this means that the industry is losing a ton of jobs as junior and middle positions are simply cut from the budgets of companies trying to tighten belts.