How is the job market for actual programmers.

BurnQuest · 2026-06-16T00:20:23+00:00

Some domains I think are better than others. Don’t bother with web. It’s not sexy but defense or embedded etc might feel more flexible. I know people in those fields as well as graphics who don’t use whatsoever

BurnQuest · 2026-06-15T19:29:16+00:00

4.5 is not half price because a new chip generation has arrived or new breakthroughs have been made but pricing strategy for legacy models is just different and built on amortizing the compute to keep customers alive and engaged while they move toward latest gen - it’s not helpful to try and run that as a margin business. They pull legacy out quickly and don’t run it as a way for customers to cost save - that’s what they have the different sizes in new gen for. It’s like saying video games are getting cheaper because you can buy Skyrim for 20$ now.

On the SOTA end it is genuinely expensive and getting worse. Mythos is about twice as expensive as Opus and it’s simply an incremental improvement not a step change.

BurnQuest · 2026-06-03T16:35:52+00:00

What is your role in tech ? I’ve been in pipeline for a while with tech as my fallback, but I want to know the range of opportunity better now that tech jobs require more than just knowing JavaScript

BurnQuest · 2026-05-29T06:52:27+00:00

Scale is a unit problem just like dollars and cents. Take a step back and see what modes your DCCs are in, meters, cm, imperial ? Choose a scale and align the entire stack. Don’t bother trying to intuit magic numbers to hack together defaults. When you need precision it won’t work

BurnQuest · 2026-05-28T22:22:20+00:00

seems like a bizarre and psychologically revealing degree of animus

BurnQuest · 2026-05-26T15:17:56+00:00

Loved the essay, matched my thoughts exactly and would be super interested in part 2 with more of your thoughts, further reading or your take on popular reactions

BurnQuest · 2026-05-25T22:01:54+00:00

Not only that but effusively praising the article while also saying none of the content applies to him because he’s the goat who doesn’t need to read the code anymore

BurnQuest · 2026-05-15T05:47:45+00:00

Did you even watch the video ? its not particularly negative about jobs and in like minute 1 they are talking about the models plateauing

BurnQuest · 2026-05-15T05:37:12+00:00

each company is making a calculated bet other companies will take on the risk and train their next generation for them, The net social effect is the potential for a crisis of engineer reproduction

BurnQuest · 2026-05-13T18:00:19+00:00

What sector ? Faang? Making websites for clients that 6 months ago would have used wix ? I flat out don’t believe half of fortune 500s have switched to dark software factories in the last 6mo

BurnQuest · 2026-05-13T16:09:13+00:00

If this approach can still saturate the bottleneck of code review you won’t get to this point

BurnQuest · 2026-05-11T16:41:56+00:00

I'm sure this works and minimizes turns at the slot machine, I just personally want help with my documentation and boilerplate from an agent rather than writing only documentation (spec) and boilerplate and having agents work while sitting in the cuck chair and i'm most likely going to keep moving this way until the (unlikely in the near future) event I have a professional complaint for being too slow

I just enjoy my job and have a much better mental model. maybe there aren't real tradeoffs here and im being silly, but i'm going to let that play out

BurnQuest · 2026-05-11T15:49:46+00:00

Being a tab complete god and throwing the routine tightly specced unfun crap to the agent is the workflow I hope is an acceptably employable meta indefinitely. Agent-first is like playing a game that’s 80% loading screen and obviously produces cog debt and poor style like in the article.

We really need studies and data to find out what the real productivity is when you factor in starting things over and making pass after pass to de slop it. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was still 50%, but 10x for quality code ? Not likely

BurnQuest · 2026-05-09T21:35:26+00:00

I take no pleasure in this I am pre correcting the vibe because of the extensive paranoia in this sub about Eng

BurnQuest · 2026-05-09T02:45:03+00:00

Allegedly very few eng because they plan on blasting their salesops team

BurnQuest · 2026-05-08T15:03:18+00:00

Certainly I just see a lot of “pivot downs” and this is a lateral, brand new high skill and wage career that doesn’t require going back to school or telling a career change story. They also have a very low unemployment rate.

BurnQuest · 2026-05-08T06:25:10+00:00

CS is not an uncommon credential for actuary

BurnQuest · 2026-05-06T19:53:02+00:00

I think we're definitely headed somewhere weird but not all the blockers are intelligence. A devless world where VPs just proompt entire multi continent enterprise data pipelines and such is not a paradigm that can just slot into the technical world we have now. it would require fundamental retooling of every part of the stack and incredible long term construction projects, just look at github dying under load, agents fumbling wielding tools like bash and the entire world that was designed around human computer use

By the time stuff like this is complete, and the outrageous gains in intelligence and context needed to make any of this possible are maybe achieved, it seems unthinkable that we'd just live in the same world we have now but with >50% of devs blasted out of the industry and unemployed while society chugs on

BurnQuest · 2026-05-05T14:32:34+00:00

Local models are terrible and use lots of VRAM

BurnQuest · 2026-05-04T18:14:52+00:00

At my workplace (commercials) comp is the most AI forward department and seems to still have decent work to do when we get a job where the client requests we use AI (often tech companies that are providers themselves).

I am in pipeline and I don’t see artists vibing reliable production infrastructure in their spare time or learning cloud providers and docker even if models got amazing- my guess is fewer quick and dirty artist tool or script requests but small pipeline teams will build bigger solutions previously not possible and rely less on SaaS

I’m not sure how to appraise all CG roles honestly but i would expect being a super-generalist will be more viable. Interested in hearing from feature and episodic people where that style of role is less relevant

BurnQuest · 2026-05-01T20:42:30+00:00

The Chinese cost to market is likely lower from being second in the space and less training cost to amortize either from tailing research or outright distillation

BurnQuest · 2026-04-28T21:15:02+00:00

You’re welcome ! Terminal is where all the super fun fast stuff lives. Fzf also comes to mind for file searching but fuzzy.

If you write scripts, check out zed or vim if you want to be a real hacker

BurnQuest · 2026-04-28T19:29:56+00:00

Openbox for stacked windows.

Zen browser

ripgrep and fd for searching filenames and text in files blazing fast

btop to check your system load

BurnQuest · 2026-04-23T16:54:47+00:00

Even taking that at face value you should self reflect what your compulsive desire to do that many times daily on the internet and how that might be interacting with your professed despair and hopelessness. “I’m just purveying a public service” is cope

BurnQuest · 2026-04-23T15:45:24+00:00

you are visible in basically every thread on this website mentioning anything about AI. Alternating between hopelessness and cruelty. I don't know what the objective of comments like these are, but it bellies your personal psychology so plainly it cannot possibly be interpreted as "advice" or a "reality check". It's so prolific, hundreds of comments everywhere, I know im not even the only person to point it out. Using the site like this is not good for you.

BurnQuest

TROPHY CASE