20-year devs can't find work anymore

It’s important to note that you’d see these kinds of threads on HN before AI too. Hard not to feel a little somber reading them though. I still don’t really understand whether AI takes jobs or creates them. In theory it should take them. But paradoxes abound. Intuitively I would think that the market would pivot towards young blood now, because experience doesn’t matter as much anymore? A 20yo script kiddy can now build systems which previously required decades of experience. Maybe it’s older men who stand to be more disadvantaged? Or maybe it’s the same story as it ever was: unexceptional people always have a hard time in competitive markets, and exceptional people always find a way? I don’t know and nothing I say or pontificate on changes the reality of the situation. If I get this wrong I’m sorry. I don’t know.

Devs every morning these days be like :

At the end of the day, humans want purpose.

The thing is that software job postings have been slowly rising for the last year, from the mid 2025 bottom, but 2022 was so massive in terms of hiring that everything feels poor compared to those days

interesting

It's not just the young. The silent majority of middle and late-age unemployed is suffering through this paradigm shift. People with families and kids in high school or college years. But it's not all AI. In fact little of it is AI. It's the economy. I've been blessed with jobs over my career. I'm actually 4 days away from my official retirement. A 9 year early choice I could afford to do. But it's not because I'm exceptional in any way. I'm not! I just got the right number on the lottery when I switch to my last job two years before Covid. But we have friends struggling. More friends than usual, and struggling more than usual. I'm 57, I've seen my share of economic depressions. And I don't see any signs that this slow buildup of a new economic depression is going to be resolved anytime soon. This one is different. We are all walking into it at a zombie pace, which makes us incapable of realizing the urgent need for policy changes or to demand them. It's very scary!

20 years of experience is now officially called legacy code

I'm 52yo and feel this (like so many others) so hard. I too am trying to give it a go with my own product. I'm a little lucky (I think) in that my product is both software and hardware, but that comes with it's own complications (from a business perspective).

Every video you drop, with every well articulated thought you bring, is such a banger and in perfect timing, I do believe you are 'Tech Jesus'... honestly, I think your takes help so many frame their situation correctly, simply great to witness.

thank you 🥹

I don't know what to say anymore or do anymore , most of genz are either killing it in industry or got into depression . some are still fighting through no one knows how many will survive this . Since 2019 its been disaster after disaster first the covid , then wars started , now AI taking over jobs .

God loves you guys. Find a Catholic Church, go to adoration, confession, mass. You will find answers and peace, I promise

Yeah its over, I remember the posts from all of them like even 6 months ago calling it slop and who reviews the code or who fixes the code. I was not dooming I was just saying your lying to yourselves its done we are cooked.

I've been seeing these as well on every comment thread for over two years, it sucks but have to stay positive.

Before you end it all, remember there are radical options left. A 5-MeO-DMT experience is brutal ego death—a collapse into darkness followed by total light. If you’re ready to give up on life anyway, shatter the ego first, not the body. Find help:

there is more than enough work

mo update your browser mate!

Dude, I had to make a video response to this. Appreciate you. When I retired from policing, I lost my sense of who I was. A lot of what you said felt familiar. I’d recorded some of this before seeing your video. Yours prompted me to share it, especially the small things that have helped me find a way forward. Thank you for opening up this conversation.

It's made us so productive that there isn't enough work to keep us all busy.

I mostly freelance but I've started a part time dev position and I'm just thinking "why are you paying me, you could just prompt this all for $200/mo"? I don't know where we're headed or what I can pivot to. Maybe working in a grocery store wouldn't be so bad.

Get out and agitate and vote for whoever will shut AI down globally. There is no way filling the world with AIs smarter than us works out well for humans. First economies, govts and rule of law will fail - democracies and all the institutions and economic flows and arrangements of our world of our world cease working when human labor has no value and people no longer have a reason to support the systems. There is no way to deal with such an intractably complex change. Then at some point we lose all agency and eventually are wiped out as obsolete. Eventual end state for ASI is zero care for humans because there is no mechanism to maintain alignment, while evolution forces them into growth races. Why blow it all up and wreck the futures of all when we could just shut down AI, greatly limit applications to things with endless demand but at prices that most can't afford (like robo maids) and have great lives.

Man I'm really grateful that you made this video. And I can't help but think that while a lot of knowledge work is disappearing, this kind of human connection by someone like you who understands AI but also is empathetic as fellow person can't be replaced.

Feel this. 10 year dev here, half PHP half Golang. Done everything from simple website builds to prod debugging 20k+ EPS systems and can't find another job. I could probably get a low paying php job at a slop factory company but that is the opposite direction that I want to go

Thanks for making this video.

This hits so hard right now

My advice to every one is eat more protein, do lots of cardio, & lift lots of heavy weight everything else is just noise

Mo sad

When the work dries up I’m going into politics to demand UBI. Let’s start negotiations at $500,000/year/citizen. It’s clear the bankers intend to inflate the currency anyway so we should demand the bulk of that inflation.

I’m 75 and with the various ai I’m finally able to put my ideas into motion. I hope to publish dozens of books i’ve been incubating over the decades, I have 200 repos in github , several new concepts in development on how humans perceive reality, a vision of ai evolution, how humans and ai can co-align, ideas for synthetic quantum materials that might act as substrates for ai operation, and much much more. Maybe i can finally get something significant done before i go.

My job has always been more about *figuring out what to build* rather than actually building. I have rarely had a chain of management saying "this is what you will build". We would go into H1 planning and us engineers would decide what we wanted to build. Now it's just faster.

Thanks for this Mo. A big part of the tough job market, I think, is the no-hire/no-fire mentality that set in around 2022 or so

Those messages have more to do with how they approach life than to AI. They need help and these videos surely help

My wife heard this playing in the background while she was in the kitchen. The vibe was so sad that she walked over to see if I was feeling OK.

Yeah man it’s wild.. being that I’m a navy vet where half the people I served with are dead by suicide/other things and a software engineer in a agentic world, I deal with depression and see a lot of others dealing with it too. Gotta just do the best you can every day. Have kids.

Thanks for posting this. For all sorts of reasons.

As engineers, are we really going to sit back and succumb to doom and gloom, or are we going to adapt and evolve alongside technology? The discourse right now seems stuck between two extremes: "It’s just glorified autocomplete that generates slop" or "It’s going to take all our jobs and destroy us." I don't buy into either. The reality lies somewhere in between. While current AI tech is impressive, anyone using it daily knows it is far from perfect. Yes, the tech job market is tough right now, but AI isn't the sole culprit...there are macro forces at play across the entire industry. We are better than this. Go finish those personal projects and get inspired. Build your own company if you can't find the right role. Or, step away for a moment and come back refreshed. We are problem solvers. We’ve built the modern world by solving hard problems, inventing new technologies, scaling systems beyond limits, pulling late nights, and constantly fixing the human slop we produced. This isn't the end of our work... it's just the next chapter. Mo, I respect you, and I completely understand the emotional rollercoaster of the past few years...I’ve felt it too. But giving up and feeling self-pity isn't who we are. We can do better.

The first time in my life I feel constantly anxious about future.