[dathinab]

I wouldn't say it is bad or getting bad.

But for a long time it had been really really good to a point that even people which fairly lacking qualifications could often easily get a job in a very short time frame (through also with some common biases/discrimination e.g. against age, and some positions, like very very well paying ones are still not easy to get).

And I would say that times are about to be over soon.

Honestly what has me worried the most is that nonsensical bias against age often found, as if having experience for 5,10 years is good but dear you have 20 years of experience in server development not its bad .... wtf. Especially given that I don't buy many of the argument people in favor of it often push. Sure the tech landscape is constantly changing but a lot of the base principle aren't really changing that much only the tooling and how you apply them, even with LLM supported programming that is still true. Similar arguments like older people being less willing to work overtime as IMHO misleading as every time I have seen companies (mostly with young people) do a lot of overtime the results where quite subpar in quality to a point that it created some huge issues often just one or two month down the line (or well days later, in some cases). And sure some people really get stuck up with certain approaches with age (but not all), but as far as I can tell that as less of a risk then blindly following the newest trends (e.g. framework) without a deep understanding of the things it implies mid to long term (which is what I have often seen with younger people).

I mean I'm not old yet, but if the industries doesn't fix its mess that will be a problem for me in 10-15 years. (Generally we also need to fix teaching and sustainability of a lot of software development. But that is a different topic, one which has gotten worse through LLMs as they allow keeping unsustainable approaches for a longer time).

[bongodongobob]

Yeah don't let the HN bubble make you think that companies want the newest best tech. That's for startups only. The bigger the company, the slower they move. The company I work for retired tape backups a few years ago and Lotus Notes around the same time. The Lotus notes servers are still running. Our user names are based on an old IBM system etc. There will always be jobs in "old" tech and it usually pays pretty well.

[pnutjam]

100% this ^

For every cutting edge startup chasing young people to abuse, there are a dozen existing companies with tons of legacy technical debt. They don't pay FANG salaries, but they will pay.

In my experience lately, it seems like Engineering and Developer positions have taken a hit, but backend infrastructure and DevOps type positions are still very hot, especially if you have cloud automation experience and know your way around Linux.