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this post was submitted on 31 May 2025
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TBH, it has never been a good time to be a programmer. I'm 1000 years old so I can tell you, there are brief bursts of "Oh fuck we need warm bodies!" but overall, you're rarely in a great spot.
During the .com bust, which basically limped on for five years from '99-'04, there was no work but you could do garage startups at least.
Then there was 3 years of "Oh fuck we need warm bodies!" before it suddenly got real quiet in late 2007 in terms of job listings because the overlords knew The Great Recession was coming. The bright side was garage startups were still viable, and if you could secure clients, software engineering consultants made BANK because the Dartmouth educated genius 23yos from Deloitte who laid us all off incorrectly thought websites run and implement themselves right as web dominance hit, but it was a BAD time to be looking for work coding if you don't know someone with sales skills or have them yourself until like 2012 still.
The need for warm bodies didn't kick in this time until like 2019, and by now, we're all laid off again, and everything is corporate, locked down and more committed than ever to replacing you with a robot.
So that's like 8 years of "we need warm bodies" against 10 years of no work and 8 years of it being not great but not awful out of the last 26 years, and the overlords are COMPLETELY bought in to paying any price to replace you with a robot going forward.
+1 to this. It matches my experience as well where 2003 to 2007 was a slow rebound after the dot com bust and post-9/11 recession, 2007 to like 2010 was a fucking disaster. 2011 to about 2014 was slow grind back to "normal" and then 2014 to like 2020 was a really hot market. 2020 to about 2023 was just weird, because tech was absolutely insane while everyone else was getting fucked, and then from 2023 to now has been "oh now it's our turn to get fucked" and it's just waiting for the other shoe to drop.
I fucking hate this industry but I am trapped
This is a very short paraphrase of exactly what I was just reading in Capital about the English cotton trade, lol
I'd wager it felt similar for the workers!
My dad was a coder who graduated in 77 (I think) (back when it was a subset of electrical engineering at the local university) and did ok for himself.
I on the other hand have not been able to find work in the field
There is none to be had as far as I can tell, unless you are recent .NET, which nobody is, and I can tell you from experience, a few years in the aughts won't cut it to even get an interview. The positive though, FOSS exists, we can use our skills outside capitalism to build a better future for all workers.
I do have to pay the bills in the meantime. Maybe carpentry? Idk
I was thankfully early enough in all of this and have always been skeptical enough to save on the upswings where I think I can just rock a retail job if I can find one that will hire me, I was a FIRE cashier back in the day 30 years ago... If I were retraining I'd go electrician. They'd need pretty tight robots and GREAT insurance for people burning to death to replace you.
Unfortunately, electrician apprenticeships are bonkers competitive here. I did look into it though.
There was a time I considered mortician-ing... there is a cleaning up dead people phase internship, but there will always be dead people... fair warning I did not go into it on the premise it was going too corporate 30 years ago, but...