After 250 job applications in four months, I'm giving up.
Breaking My Own Rule (Again): AI and the Job Hunt - Jacky Alciné
I said I wasn't going to lean on generative AI but I also said I was going to leave the tech industry. Here's what I actually used to keep applying and what it did (and didn't) do for me.
Work is a cult, here's how to escape
I'm addicted to being useful
When I get together with my friends in the industry, I feel a little guilty about how much I love my job. This is a tough time to be a software engineer. The job was less stressful in the late 2010s than it is now, and I sympathize with anyone who is upset about the change. There are a lot of objective reasons to feel bad about work. But despite all that, I’m still having a blast. I enjoy pulling together projects, figuring out difficult bugs, and writing code in general. I like spending time with computers. But what I really love is being useful.
Microsoft announces 3200 layoffs and four studio departures in "most significant" Xbox restructuring in history
It's a brutal day at Xbox.
‘Shut up and focus on the mission’: Tech workers are frustrated by their companies’ silence about ICE
“I’ve hit my limit of what I’m willing to tolerate”
A programmer's loss of identity - ratfactor
This is the follow-up to last year’s I’m an American software developer and the "broligarchs" don’t speak for me. In that essay, I tried to express why I was so agonized by the leaders in my industry doing a speedrun towards dystopia and how it all felt so divorced from what technology could, and should be. Everything I wrote there is still true, but amplified.
If you think your profession is dying, it could soon be gone
Younger workers once foresaw the demise of horse-drawn carriages — but anticipating obsolescence can be self-fulfilling
“You Had One Job”: Why Twenty Years of DevOps Has Failed to Do it
Let’s start with a question. What is DevOps all about?
Why AI hasn’t replaced software engineers, and won’t
Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kappor take on the question of AI job losses through the lens of a profession that is uniquely suited to AI disruption - software engineering. In …
Inside the latest round of mass layoffs at Xbox
Multiple workers impacted by the latest job cuts at Xbox believe the decision will hamstring some studios.
Why Is Everyone In Tech So Sad?
A lot of people seem to be realizing that knowledge work is mostly pointless. AI might give us the pleasure of finding out what happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers.
Farewell Ai2
This was my last week at the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2), where I got the great privilege to work on the Olmo models, to grow, to learn, and to have broad lasting impacts.
Distinguishing Labor from Work - Aaron Ross Powell
We should get rid of the former, if we can, but we should absolutely keep the latter.
It’s time to drain the Programmatic Swamp - New Digital Age
"Large parts of the programmatic ecosystem are a scam, and I don't mean slightly inefficient or in need of a tidy-up," writes Daniel Gilbert for New Digital Age...
Note on 24th September 2026
The more time I spend working with coding agents, the more convinced I am that they make software engineering even harder. We can do amazing things with them, but unlocking …