Engineering and engineering adjacent industries ebb and flow with regards to employment prospects over a period of about 20 to 30 years.
It's not market related; it's about the number of people entering the industry; where people are incentivized to go by colleges etc.
Software was already beginning an employment downturn, being entirely oversaturated with possible employees, and then LLM output became passable enough for management.
The effect was that was the downturn accelerated earlier than expected and people were caught even more off guard than usual.
So @nprofile1q... is right about the industry sucking right now in his recent blog post (https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2026/05-software-developers-are-not-okay/) but I'd argue that it's for more mundane reasons than one might think.
It's not market related; it's about the number of people entering the industry; where people are incentivized to go by colleges etc.
Software was already beginning an employment downturn, being entirely oversaturated with possible employees, and then LLM output became passable enough for management.
The effect was that was the downturn accelerated earlier than expected and people were caught even more off guard than usual.
So @nprofile1q... is right about the industry sucking right now in his recent blog post (https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2026/05-software-developers-are-not-okay/) but I'd argue that it's for more mundane reasons than one might think.