Clojurians Log v2

"Market" right now feels obliterated for just any kind of jobs, AI or whatever. Most people I talk to (not only Clojurists) are either dissatisfied with their current ones (and therefore looking), or have no job at all (and thus looking) I still don't hate my current job, I only wish they paid just a bit more (and therefore I'm also looking, but not very actively), and from what I can gather, pretty much every teammate of mine is kind of in the same boat.

My experience is that the market is much tougher than in the past, many more rejections, even at very early stages for roles that look like an ideal fit. I left my last role because their top-down AI policy completely destroyed good outcomes and this was after we turned around a project which was failing for historical cultural reasons. The CTO just wanted to throw more AI at every problem, so we looked really productive based on output metrics. And so we ended up back at square one, failing. Very demoralising as it was outside of our control. Thankfully I managed to secure a new role and they have a reasonable view of AI, but there are other problems that are causing me to look elsewhere, typical.

Man, I've been out of work for a year at this point. Between the AI bubble, HR having no idea what to hire for, and the market instability resulting from the actions of the current US admin, the job market is completely FUBAR.

Hiring was pretty much broken before even. I've been interviewer many times and the decision is fairly ad-hoc / arbitrary, there is just not enough information to make a properly informed decision. So there is a huge dose of luck in getting hired.

It's gonna take a little while for all the irresponsible vibe-coding companies to pay the cost of their short-sighted choices. I would expect a lot of companies to collapse under their own tech debt and pave the way for new companies. That is my prediction, at least, based on seeing how easy and fast with no second thought a mid-sized company can go from careful maintenance of legacy code to full on irresponsible meat-proxy architecture.

@soltanzadehramin I think we would have to wait for the frothiness in the capital markets resulting from ai hype to die down too. At my last permanent role, all the push for AI was coming from the board trying to cut engineering costs while floundering to get a product/market fit who had absolutely no technical standing with which to evaluate the technology, and from a fractional CTO they hired whose only contribution to engineering was waltzing in to waste an hour on standup ranting about how anyone that doesnt adopt ai is gonna lose their jobs.

> irresponsible vibe-coding companies to pay the cost of their short-sighted choices. I would expect a lot of companies to collapse under their own tech debt this is my predication, that said, since so many companies are taking the short sighted approach, many will be successful in spite of their AI policy. They will then write articles, books and give talks about their "success" without acknowledging that all the failed companies did exactly the same.

> waltzing in to waste an hour on standup ranting about how anyone that doesnt adopt ai is gonna lose their jobs same experience 🤦

In the end, I think it's mostly a blessing that our field in general is so clueless. Competence prevails, but sometimes with delayed reward.

@krisleech inb4 it was the same guy lol

@soltanzadehramin having a long time preference for wealth is generally the more sustainable and fruitful approach

Otherwise, it seems like it will take some time for the bubbles to burst and for everyone to gain a better understanding of AI’s capabilities and how to work with it effectively.

A few more months and we have AGI!

Yeah, already. 😂

I hope he hacks something the moment he shows up.

Blockchain and nosql didn't affect capital markets to the same degree we're seeing with the AI bubble

I’m no expert on capital markets, but cryptocurrencies likely play a significant role here.

Not sure abou that, Blockchain industry valuation is 27 bill, including the entirety of the Web 3.0 market. AI spending is floating around 2.5 trillion. Blockchain is a rounding error by comparison.

My point here is more that something similar has already happened in IT (though not necessarily in terms of the scale of investment, etc.). If we’re talking about economics, the key interest rate in the US likely has a greater impact on the markets than AI does.

@sky.fion development always had their "hype" moments, but this is different. I remember people trying to put NoSQL databases on everything, or trying to use blockchain for nonsense situations But these were still restricted on systems and software. Now, it's everything Some "top player" on sales recently left the company - the CEO sent a "thank you" text with the words "Claude told me that he singlehanded...." We had a production problem related to data inconsistency - the tech leaders used Claude to make the postmortem, and then we all had to review to check if that made sense Most of my tickets now have an "AI-diagnosed issue and solution", and the prediction on how many "points" they will take is based on that AI assumption that, so far, was always wrong Finally, our CTO debugged on OOM problem in production with Claude (asking it to read the logs) then made tickets based on what Claude suggested it was going to be the solution. I took a ticket, my intuition was that it was wrong - profiling the issue, indeed it was not what Claude debugged - by far.

@sky.fion well, interest rates are one of the factors underlying the drive to pursue ai as a hyperscaling investment, so it's really a question of how far up the causal chain you want to take things And the scale of the malinvestment is having effects on the job market that just weren't there in the other hype cycles you raised

I agree with you, but this has always been the case. I’ve seen the exact same thing happen with junior-level staff, where underfunding or a push for efficiency led to such mistakes. The only difference I see now is that any manager can step into our field and make a mess of things. 😁

C-suite people just outsource their thinking, I think. They follow what bigger companies do, and what the big tech gurus have to say. Surely Anthropic, OpenAI, and Elon Musk wouldn't be deceitful regarding the power and future of AI.

for me this AI hype is very different to blockchain, noSQL etc.

@soltanzadehramin someone should start a company and try replacing C-suite with an agent as a statement lol

Claude-suite

@edward.hughes1911 I was honestly thinking about doing exactly that 😄

@mauricio.szabo if you do, please hire me, I need a job where I can verbally abuse c-suite for wasting my time with insipid suggestions after the last debacle.

Is this... a Clojure company?

I think were all being a bit facetious about the AI corporate leadership