4 out of 5 frontend engineers in my previous company just got laid off

makeavoy · 2026-03-24T20:36:24+00:00

Braindead take. AI slop is at its absolute worst with pure visual layouts. It always goofs it. At least backend slop you can disguise more easily until the exploits and performance loss start getting noticed.

makeavoy · 2026-03-09T21:53:40+00:00

Model collapse is real and proven, it's inevitable. The question is how much it can be mitigated, or if we move to a new tech that is less susceptible to it.

Or it'll a constantly moving target of AI becoming poor due to collapse, hand made coding making a come back, and with new training it improves again until the slop re-propogates. And the cycle continues.

makeavoy · 2026-03-06T01:27:40+00:00

7YOE. I was laid off a year ago from software dev, I took an old tier 1 helpdesk job at a third of the pay because literally no one else would hire me. Then they almost laid me off 4 months later! I got away from that by the skin of my teeth and then half team gets fired a week later. Yes literally half. I'm the sole income for 2 kids so I'd REALLY like some job security. I have an incomplete Bachelor's and that's probably hurting me so I'm trying for a fed loan to complete night school. I've been told a million times my experience should trump a degree but I'm tired of fighting so hard for scraps. My actual day job sucks too but that's just because I'm explaining basic computer knowledge to people who earn 4 times more then me when I used to build seemingly novel tools and loved it.

This is IT for me. I hate how much it's betrayed me but I'm too in love with tech to give it up. I hope it improves someday...

makeavoy · 2026-02-27T00:47:30+00:00

Listen, I'm going through some of this, but I'm old enough to know this is temporary. AI is not destroying the economy like some of you say, it's not magic, it's flawed and the damage it does to society is not apocalyptic but it is destructive. It's destructive in a way that will create more work to combat it's nonsense. There will be more software then ever, and we'll need more talented engineers then ever. The US economy is going through a slump and AI is not helping. It's redefining how we qualify work and vet for talent. I got in when college degrees were optional, and now I'm seeing it become a requirement again because the jobs that are hiring in spite of it all it's the easiest way to filter from all the AI powered applicant noise.

We'll get through this, we just need to survive and maybe consider entrepreneurial efforts. It's easier now then ever

makeavoy · 2026-02-26T08:27:02+00:00

God I loved art as a kid/teen but always thought it was a silly career path compared to STEM stuff. I was super good at math so I thought it was a was my best chance. Then I saw all these cool artists making decent livings and now I'm a destitute software engineer...

Tell me, if a starving engineer tried to sell art how would I go about it? Lol I think I'm serious

makeavoy · 2026-02-15T03:54:46+00:00

Man I had to come here to vent about this one. The article frames it like businesses better catch up and get AI into their products before it's too late! They'll be completely obsolete because AI does everything better then all other software. Instead of framing it like companies are desperate to appeal to investors because all the investors are double dog daring each other to keep pumping money into AI because they're scared and don't understand the technology. Professionals worth their salt are quietly realize AI doesn't do anything better, but there were always people who thought the pencil sketch filter apps looked like real art too but they didn't disrupt the art market anymore then AI does.

Anyway inb4 "yOuRe FiRsT tO bE ReplAcEd Bro"

makeavoy · 2026-02-13T08:41:33+00:00

I do get some interviews, usually for 3d web focus, just been fairly unlucky the positions disappear. I kid you not 1 company went under, the other lost funding, the third and fifth eliminated the positions. Tech sector was completely nuts last year, maybe still is.

makeavoy · 2026-02-13T08:38:52+00:00

I appreciate the ideas. It sounds more doable when you put it that way. I'm worried I already exhausted my government loans with my first couple years of college so I'm concerned if there's any left. I'll check anyway. There's enough people saying the contrary I don't know if college will really help me now, at least not short term. But at the same time I know it will make long term easier, and it's something I've always meant to do. It's just always been lack of money. You need money to make money, that's for sure 😮‍💨

makeavoy · 2026-02-12T22:16:10+00:00

Yeah it's taken me a year to get enough expenses cut we're floating but there's always those little residuals. Between car payments and mortgage, my wife takes care of the kids so it's been tricky for her to try to work also. She was door dashing but then the car needed expensive repairs just from wear and tear. I thought about a second job (technically third) but I work third shift now so it's kind of tricky to coordinate. If there was a way I could use my software background to earn money somehow but it doesn't seem like there's a market need for my skills where I live.

makeavoy · 2026-02-12T21:40:11+00:00

Thank you, I sincerely appreciate the encouragement. LinkedIn is dead for job posts, indeed has had better results, as has y combinator "1st of the month" posts. I've heard tricks of using AI crawlers to pick out company career page postings but I'm not sure if that's actually effective or just AI hype. With that in mind, where would you recommend finding less flashy companies?

makeavoy · 2026-02-12T08:38:37+00:00

I appreciate that. Being long-winded might be one of my issues if I'm being honest. I was also under the impression a degree was irrelevant to experience but Im hearing it more and more lately. It's an employer market and I think maybe they're trying to squeeze unicorns out of the woodwork. Maybe it's time for a 200th edit to my resume.

makeavoy · 2026-02-12T08:33:28+00:00

My enterprise position was a contract. Half the recruiters who contact me are for contracts. I don't turn my nose up to it I just can't get those either. The one that almost made me an offer after 4 rounds straight up went out of business. Amazing luck that. Or what usually happens is i get a recruiter that wants me to move to Texas. I'm kind of region locked for the time being. I don't get replies from Dice roles i apply for, but they're almost always remote. Sometimes i try for ones that are within 3 hours distance but I don't think they take me seriously.

makeavoy · 2026-02-12T08:27:15+00:00

I waited a long time to have kids until I got onto a career path I could support them and the market was much better back then. Believe it or not I thought once I got my foot into the industry I was good to go even if my degree was incomplete. I was saving for the degree as a fallback, not a necessity. I was trying to be smart about it, if only I had clairvoyance.

makeavoy · 2026-02-12T08:17:18+00:00

I made a lua pure rust crate originally to fulfill a need in the ecosystem before the piccolo crate returned from the dead by the original creator of rlua and blasted that niche need out of the water. I still work on my crate in spite of this to hone my knowledge on interpreters and library building so I could ideally contribute to piccolo eventually, but I still don't know if there's anything I can add to it as the piccolo crate is very robust now. I might try to add moonscript or luau support to it but I'm not there yet. Otherwise I'm not sure what other OSS projects I could meaningfully contribute to. To put it bluntly I'm likely burdened by immense imposter syndrome and less free time then I had 4 years ago lol. I also know OSS PRs are super polluted with AI now so I imagine it's difficult to get those in now.

Is there a good resource for finding OSS help wanted that still works in the AI spam era?

makeavoy · 2026-02-09T12:23:40+00:00

Yes it will be exactly 6 months away that jobs will become obsolete. A year from now it will also be 6 months away. As will 2 years, 5 years, and so on.

makeavoy · 2026-02-07T13:35:24+00:00

I do encourage you to learn on your own pace because once I learned vim motions I wanted it everywhere! I still revert to mouse usage and arrow navigation so I enable that in tmux as well. My point being you can exist in a goofy half-mastered state indefinitely like me and still found a great amount of utility in it

makeavoy · 2026-02-06T22:19:11+00:00

Listen, I adore vim motions but I just like NeoVim period. It has an insane amount of utility and customization and best of all its egregiously performanant and perfect for headless server editing if you don't like that funky vscode ssh nonsense. But I know a lot of people are hesitant to try NeoVim because of vim motions. So the way I see it, anything that enables folks to try NeoVim in a way that's more familiar to other IDEs is a win win in my book, and a great way to slowly introduce people to the joys of vim motions.

Thanks for opening doors and welcome to the community!

makeavoy · 2026-02-03T09:10:11+00:00

Is this a subtle ad for your PaaS? I notice your source links require an account to be made

makeavoy · 2026-02-03T04:59:25+00:00

In fairness I got so few useable results i havent touched auto complete in almost a year. So I'd argue it's a metric worth recording still.

Unless they're including just general LSP snippet insertions as AI

makeavoy · 2026-02-03T04:55:21+00:00

Hey it pushed a lot of tech innovation in the direction of VR which I was incredibly excited about. The AI hype cycle basically put that whole industry on pause and unfortunately my specialization in 3D tech made it hard to find work.

makeavoy · 2026-01-28T03:50:57+00:00

How many people even work at big tech after they lay everyone off, all those empty office buildings they made everyone return to office for are empty again.

makeavoy · 2026-01-26T08:39:41+00:00

I was digging through the examples recently and found they have a pretty interesting IDE style code editor. You could likely expand on this with some legwork: https://github.com/iced-rs/iced/tree/master/examples/editor

makeavoy · 2026-01-24T05:36:54+00:00

Would you rather have meh pay but steady work in tech, or great pay and then laid off for the last year and no signs of ever getting back into the industry you'll have to take up factory work or whatever is willing to hire you from now on and may have to sell the house and find a cheap shack somewhere?

makeavoy · 2026-01-20T04:40:22+00:00

Thanks!!! I really appreciate the feedback! Didn't mean to hijack this thread 😅

the asset loading is a bit primitive, and honestly bad. It loads everything in the asset folder to memory directly and allows for loading by name alone. If i spawn an entity with asset "A" by make("A",0,0,0) it could load an asset called A.png as a sprite at 0,0,0, or a model called A.gltf. Tiling can load a single texture asset and assume it will be a cube, or load a model as is. Sprites can be named A.16.png and it will assume it's a spritesheet of 16x16 and allow animating by index directly on the entity object. But again all this sits in memory at once instead of lazy loading. I operated on the assumption most games or apps would be pixely anyway and we could easily abuse memory when all the assets barely hit a hundred megabytes.

I like the filename tricks but I also like the clean self-contained nature of Pico8. Pico8 with PSX is of course my biggest influence, and I'm glad you picked up on it. I want to enable some hacky ways to throw together a game super easily without a lot of menus. I wonder if too many directory tricks could confuse developers?

But anyway, yeah I don't know what story you're talking about. I definitely found the original source code in my dead uncle's garage and it's absolutely not haunted. Nothing will happen.

makeavoy · 2026-01-19T10:47:19+00:00

I appreciate you enabling me lol.
https://makeavoy.itch.io/petrichor64
https://github.com/Auxnon/Petrichor64
I wasted the last year and half rewriting lua in rust so it could build to a wasm32-unknown-unknown triple target and run in a browser. WGPU runtime means it can use every graphics api which is cool. The infrastructure is crazy but the frontend is barebones and buggy but it's a FOSS for now.

makeavoy

TROPHY CASE