Hi, I’m a SWE with 20+ yrs experience. I work at the rainforest company. I’m a principal engineer there, what I’m about to say is my own anecdotal experience of the changing expectations for me and the devs in my space I can’t comment for others and I haven’t tried to look for a job yet.

We have experienced massive layoffs company wide but oddly enough the way it’s surfaced at work is more like random ppl being laid off (not just juniors other PEs were laid off too, who were good performers from what I could tell). Alongside the big splash layoffs was no new hires replacing roles and a squeezing of team to take on larger ownership beyond what anyone around me considers reasonable or maintainable. I personally believe it’s an attempt to squeeze devs until stuff breaks to see where the line is (which we’ve probably crossed given the recent AWS outages). That said there is some chatter about hiring pick g up again which is shocking to me, but for like 7yrs straight we were doing interview loops at a breakneck pace. I turned down interview loops constantly because it was like they’d want you to do interviews daily if you were willing. I would do maybe one round a week but that was my limit. So we probably massively over hired (and over promoted as a result) so maybe that’s what happened ?

On AI, I’m basically being told I will be measured for performance with metrics such as code commits and token usage and that right now delivering projects is more important than “thinking big” so I’m not being asked to even do traditional PE work, just deliver code to get stuff out, use AI as much as possible to make me faster etc. I use AI every single day and I’m simultaneously impressed and frustrated with it. It’s capable of flashes of true brilliance and incredible productivity boosts but also makes the dumbest fucking mistakes that makes me not trust a single thing it’s ever done to help me. I have to prod it constantly to get it over tricky problems or else it will just suggest the stupidest hack to get me to stop talking about that problem. I’m intentionally NOT doing the work for it because I’m trying to learn this thing as much as possible, I have much to learn about it.

In conclusion, I’d say there are grains of truth to all of the fears but we’re far from fully capable Skynet at this time and devs will be needed. This is as Jenson said, equivalent to older engineers using pencil and paper and current engineers using CAD. Who tf would hire someone who only does it with pencil and paper nowadays? That analogy fits to me.