Comment by vipbackchannel

Not done, but hedging my bets. I started licensed life insurance business, also a licensed day trader. I have 40 years of experience. Got laid of in 2003, 2021, and recently 2025 a few months ago. Software development is now just a hobby for me now. From what I have seen the job market is very specific. The recruiters are only looking for rare skill sets, but also folks who have the update skill sets for cloud migration projects. What has made the field bad is fragmentation of development. C/C++ was the meal ticket years ago. I remember in 2003 I had to get a java programmers cert just to get a job, back then 1000 people would apply for 1 job, then in 2004 the job market opened back up.

After a few months I finally got a job interview this week. Someone called back from a previous job I worked on.

I have noticed that a lot of places development is offshore in India or eastern europe.

It's not just ai that is taken jobs, but also cutbacks in government contracting. The tech layoff wave that started in 2022 was partially fueled by a change in the US tax code, specifically Section 174 of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA). This change significantly altered how companies could deduct research and development (R&D) expenses. Previously, companies could fully deduct R&D costs in the year they were incurred, but the TCJA mandated that these expenses be amortized over several years (5 years for domestic and 15 years for foreign). This resulted in higher tax burdens for tech companies, especially those heavily invested in R&D.