The end of the craftsmanship era of software engineering is here - just accept it. I know you got used to nice perks and big pay-outs, but every dream has an end. Software engineering as a career is going only downhill from now on - this is why I am not telling my children to follow my path and go into STEM - STEM is good, but it is not going to give you a good lifestyle anymore. Man up a bit, most of you benefited really well in the past 20y or so, so just move on.
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@1ac, someone can’t get Clippy to work anymore. Imagine taking that long to write that. Wow.
@fp The answer to all your questions is ....because it's Microsoft.
The best thing you can do if you are a software engineer working at Microsoft is to voluntary resign unless you already have a layoff notice in hand. Then you can finally get your d-mb behind out of dearly depressing Seattle once and for all. At the top of your list where to move to next? Your first of locations you should move yourself to, should be West Virginia? You ask why huh? Well in West Virgina every single Coal Mine is hiring Coal miners and if you are hooked on working overtime like you do at Microsoft, you can continue to do so working as a coal miner in West Virginia and make a bundle of money.
Your To Do List:
- Voluntary resign from your boring software engineering Microsoft job, unless you have received a layoff notice already.
- Sell as much of your junk as you can like video games. You want to lighten the load of junk you will move to West Virginia
- Pack the remaining junk you own into your Toyota Prius
- Start driving to West Virginia
- Once you arrive in West Virginia began applying to Coal miner jobs at all the Mines you can.
- With this plan you should have a coal miner job within a day or two.
- About after 6 months where you have saved some serious money, drive your Toyota Prius off the biggest cliff you can find in West Viriginia.
- If you survive step number 7 above, go to the many Ford Dealers in West Virginia and get the best deal you can and buy a brand new 2025 Ford F-150 Raptor Truck.
- Make plans for a vacation. a year after your first day working as a coal miner. But where you decide to go on vacation too, don't chose Seattle.
Satya is a wise man.
You've misspelled: weasel.
Satya is a wise man.
I agree. I've been a software dev for over 20 years. Nice pay.
3 years ago saw GPT 3.5 producing great code. Now apps being built by LLMs.
Most of my peers are in denial.
OP here: that is what I said at the beginning - software development's equivalent of the combine harvester has been invented. It is called AI and will erase the need from slow and inefficient manual labour. Simple. The irony is this time the actual labourers invented the machine that will replace them, unlike in the past 😀
Despite previously being the butt of jokes, Google's AI Overview now provides faster and more relevant results than Bing's Copilot. Why hasn't AI helped MS make a better search product?
Why is there no mention of the fact that the total headcount did not change?
In fact, the number of software engineers in India grew while it went down in the US.
Why pay 180k to an engineer in Redmond which is barely enough to buy a house, whereas you can hire 4-5 in India where cost of living is so much lower and so is healthcare?
• Microsoft laid off over 800 software engineers in Washington alone — because clearly, in the age of AI, nothing screams innovation like letting go of the people who build your actual products
• The company framed the cuts as targeting “inefficient management layers,” yet somehow hundreds of engineers got swept out while only 17% of the layoffs were managerial
• These layoffs were part of a broader global purge of 6,000 to 7,000 employees, all in the name of “cost cutting” and “AI investment,” because job security just isn’t scalable
• Product managers, technical program managers, and even product designers weren’t spared — nothing says streamlining like wiping out every link in the development chain
• Despite the continued global demand for developers, Microsoft appears totally comfortable replacing them with AI that now writes about a third of their code
• CEO Satya Nadella is leading the charge into the robot future, where your co-pilot isn’t just Clippy — it’s your pink slip
• Microsoft isn’t alone: Google and Meta are also leaning into AI-generated code, so at least there’s a consistent pattern of tech giants automating their own workforce into obsolescence
• Mixed messaging much? Microsoft claimed it was trimming middle management, but seems to have thrown software engineering under the bus for good measure
• As former manager Mike Droettboom mourned the loss of long-time colleagues, Microsoft’s main response has been to stay vague and hope nobody notices who’s really getting cut
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Or maybe I do not want to make them do something they do not want to do with the promise of social status / riches, like many immigrants do - and end up in an industry that is flooded with mediocre workers and pay. I prefer them to find their own thing and if they love it they will make enough money.
And I do not think people who do not want to do STEM are stupid - I have a PhD in maths from a top world uni and I have seen many mediocre people getting a PhD... Same with software engineers - nowadays is pretty easy to become one, hence why many low-level STEM students go into computer science degrees.
If you want to be real you have to acknowledge that the era of MBAs actively encouraging mediocre but cheap Indian code is upon us. The critical mass of this code exaggerated with AI is starting to enshittify everything and show up everywhere.
Companies like twitter, meta, Google , and now Microsoft led by incompetents are pushing their luck.
I guess your children are either spoiled or d-mb