this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2026
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Programming
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Unemployed principal software engineer here. This graph is a lie.
Was gonna say I took a pay cut and I’m staying at my current braindead job right now because the market is ass.
I got retired about six months before I was planning to. That line would have to be a lot steeper to get me to go back.
I'm only 46 and have been looking since February.
The graph is anticipating the future. Not current. Take a couple years off.
My family had just bought a house before I was laid off, and we're burning through our savings at an alarming rate. If I don't find a job soon, I'm going to have to liquidate my retirement account. I don't have years, I have months.
Yup, nobody can get to senior for the same reason RAM is so high: LLMs. In this case, big-brained execs not hiring anyone at lower levels and replacing them all with AI...a little down the road there will be one old engineer named Lily who still understands how tech works and everyone will call her the oracle.
Just Warhammer 40k things
But if you take a couple of years off, won't it be tough to get back in?
No one knows.
I think a true Sr shortage is likely decade+ away. So if you need money you gotta make ends meet somehow.
I’m leaning into the AI space, becoming proficient at understanding and developing harnesses for different purposes, running local models, adjusting to context switching more often than not, etc.
I’m currently working a short term AI Cyber gig for a financial firm I already had a relationship with, but then taking time off to tinker.
Dev/Sys/Net Operations, Cyber. All great fields for leaning into AI
If few are entering as entry-level because snubbed by LLMs, there will be fewer seniors — eventually.
Yeah that’s what I said. It takes about a decade to become Sr. So that’s when we will start feeling the shortage.
If you can afford taking a few years off in the first place, you can also afford starting a company and doing your own projects for a while. Don’t leave the field behind, put some software on app stores and pick your topics by what skills you want to learn or maintain. Maybe it even makes money.
In the US? There are jobs in Europe.
They are well hidden if so
Uh... Where have you been looking? There are loads of remote jobs in Europe.
Unemployment in our (EU) IT sector is higher than in the US and rising.... What are you talking about?
Source for that?
"[ICT unemployment] 7.5% in 2025 with the lowest point of 5.9% in 2022. In more recent years, the share has increased, while still remaining below its 2016 level. In 2025, it rose by 1.0 percentage points (pp) compared with the previous year. "
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=ICT_education_-_a_statistical_overview#General_perspectives_about_the_labour_force_for_persons_with_an_ICT_education
USA is also rising but still significantly lower than EU:
https://www.wsj.com/cio-journal/tech-unemployment-ticks-up-to-3-8-in-april-amid-ai-driven-layoffs-214b0ca4
P.S. Do you not speak with other devs? Many of us are having a real hard time in Europe right now and almost anyone will tell you that.