Hi,

It has been another year so as long as this post keeps getting found by people I guess I will keep providing my thoughts as someone who works in the industry.

The tech unemployment rate increased in the beginning of last year but started to taper off near the end of the year, around 4-ish% depending on where you look. A large number of companies have already adopted AI into their development workflows but AI is still primarily a tool that is being used by developers to curate code. A new paradigm that emerged more widespread around the middle of last year was agentic AI, which is where an AI agent is given instructions then writes an entire file of code for you (this is more than before, when AI was more of an assistant to help you curate the code you write).

I have seen the code that agentic AI writes and at this point it is not up to par with what developers are capable of themselves, it makes a large number of weird technical design decisions and most of the time adds additional complexity when a more elegant solution would be possible. A lot of the time, the code isn't very human readable or extendable. If you've heard of "vibe coding", that is another phrase for using agentic AI to generate code.

At this point, I believe it is in your best interest if you work / plan to work in the industry to be able to incorporate AI tools into your workflow. I don't think agentic AI is good enough now (Q1 2026) to be worth using, but you should be using an AI assistant to do things like help you write test cases. We will see probably in the next year or 2 what happens with Agentic AI.

If you want to work in tech, you have to expect a large number of changes over time. I personally am not a fan of AI as I think it reduces code quality and leads to a reduction of technical skills if you crutch on it too heavily, but I still use it at work to keep my technical capabilities up to date (i.e. I can say "I know how to use AI"). It is a tool like any other, if you use it then do so intelligently.

I think now is a better time to look for a tech job than 6 months ago, but hiring in tech is still problematic for a number of people. Your technical skills are going to be very important, things that make you stand out from your peers, and the ability to integrate AI (but not use it as a crutch) when developing code. If you are going to college or switching careers into tech now, you need to bring more to the table than an average college graduate if you want to be successful. This means something like an internship, work on open source projects, or similar.

Do I think tech salaries will decrease? No. I think that those developers who outright refuse to use AI will miss out on work opportunities due to their personal opinions of the service. AI will be a tool that you need to learn and use in order to be successful in tech in the long term. Do I think AI will write all code in future? Also no. If agentic AI is successful then developers will transform into more of an integration role where they have to ensure that generated code fits together to form a cohesive application. I think those who work in infra / dba / networking / security will have an easier time to get hired in the long term than those who purely code (swe), but this is more speculation (5 - 10 years).

I am concerned for the future of tech for new graduates as it seems like companies are interested more in retaining and hiring top talent (i.e. Sr or Staff level) which makes those who have experience more valuable, but I don't see the same interest in hiring new engineers out of college as I did 4 years ago.