That’s true! Naysayers keep mentioning it’s due to over hiring during Covid. I’d say it’s AI investment related and AI replacing a lot of software needs. Plus, people seem to use just a couple applications or platforms nowadays.
Yes, got contract work and got a couple offers too. In the past, hired developers from the list, as a hiring manager in a previous company. Overall, it’s quite hard to predict but better than nothing!
I'm a Product Engineer and a creative based in London. I’ve built full-stack applications across web, mobile, blockchain and embedded platforms. My client-side work includes React, Electron, Roku’s Scenegraph, and native iOS development with Swift and SwiftUI, always with a strong focus on UX and design-first thinking. On the service-side, I’ve worked with traditional service hosting, containers, and serverless, including (but not limited to) AWS, GCP, Cloudflare, Workers, CloudFormation, SAM CLI, nodejs, bunjs, MySQL, Postgres, NoSQL, grpc, Redis, Docker, nginx, and a few legacy tools best left unnamed (yes, including CodeIgniter and ftp).
I’ve also developed developer tools like CLIs and SDKs, primarily Typescript/JavaScript land, and have written code in systems languages such as Rust and Zig.
I care about clean code, great UX, developer experience, documentation, rapid iteration and automating workflows with CI/CD (GitHub Actions, Bash scripts, etc).
Also familiar with modern development practices by leveraging coding agents, such as pi, opencode, claude and LLM, including kimi over fireworks inference.
Would they be the same person? I'd risk sounding ignorant and say they wouldn't. They could be fed the same food and knowledge, but what shapes them is every random factor encountered in the real world. How would they react when reading or hearing about all the hate they are guilty of without ever participating in it? It's not their lived experience.
Sadly, some people believe that Generative AI output is the same; I find it very hard to watch and extremely cringe. I did see some good examples, but still not the same type of quality. For untrained eyes, all look the same, but I'm definitely not that type of person and very supportive of proper craftsmanship. You can see this same thing happening in software engineering and product design.
Job candidates keep facing a lot of hurdles, including scams, Trojan horses like the one presented here, ghosting, wasting candidates' time, nepotism, etc. As a candidate you can easily spend more than 8 hours a day looking for opportunities, switching stacks, studying, doing take-home projects, etc, for absolutely nothing. Life is precious and shouldn't be burned like that!
That's true! In 12 months, I got two contracts: a 3-month fixed-term contract and a previous 10-day contract role. Let's say that the landlord decides to sell the place I'm renting, I won't be able to rent another place due to unemployment.
Lately I’ve been writing on paper again, sharpening pencils and slowing down. It helps me stay closer to my own thoughts and to a more human pace.
A pencil is just a tool too, but a very unique one. It disappears if we abuse it, leaving only the traces of our existence.