Things have gotten worse

Many people, myself included, had some small sliver of hope. There was no way the job market could get worse than Q4 2025 and Q1 2026.

As a former developer and software product manager, my prediction was the hands-off approach to AI - essentially vibecoding - production apps, left unchecked and unregulated were to introduce a litany of slopcode from things like errant event handlers to one-off business case logic eventually leads to bloating+ general unmaintainability, not to mention all the bypasses visual QA and security risks since AI does such a poor job of handling depreciated packages, dead code, and other security faults.

Well, I guess I was wrong. Companies are doubling down and riding that shit wave. Poor experiences and UI, excessive token expenditure, wonton disregard for security - who cares? It really is a race to the bottom. I’m dumbfounded. Racking up so so much unchecked and foreseeable technical debt was really worth letting me and others go?

The smartest guys in the room decided we were redundant when we probably could’ve worked to accelerate the goals they had. I pegged my self worth to my salary, which was way below market anyway, and a drop in the bucket compared to what they were making, or even the company was making yearly (hint, they were extremely profitable when they laid off half the software division). Surely they could’ve afforded all of us and still met growth targets with smart growth instead of reckless abandon.

Recruiters post things like “the job market is heating up!” and the like… but I’ve heard nothing but crickets the last almost 3 weeks. Not even a phone screen. Ouch.