Hard to take anything the author says seriously making nonsensical claims like this. The software engineering job market has been getting worse every year since 2022 by virtually every metric. This is especially true at the entry and mid level. For example, computer engineering and computer science majors now have the #2 and #4 highest unemployment rates amongst recent graduates [1]

Students are smart to be cautious about the future, and it's annoying that adults with no skin in the game so flippantly dismiss these concerns without any data to back it up.

[1] https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market?utm...

The focus on building stuff as the measure of accomplishment is one reason I so enjoyed being at CMU a few decades ago, so I'm very happy to see this sentiment is still expressed by the new generation of faculty.

Terrible article. It's full of these; it's tell-tale LLM. I'm surprised people post these, especially after all the articles that got upvoted that people hate LLM written articles.

Nevertheless, my curiosity got the better of me, and I thought the author might have some valuable insight further down. I skimmed forward where he talks about pessimism and came across this:

> the “software engineer” job no longer exists — and both are now within reach: agent skills come with time, and deep specialization, which used to take years, is quick to acquire with agents.

This is just plain wrong with the experience we've had ramping up juniors on my team (compiler backend). It still takes a long time to get to know the domain. Agents can't replace context and knowledge about the whole system and how it fits together with other systems and the use cases it might be subjected to. Agents can help accelerate it, but it doesn't feel like it has been "quick to acquire" for the juniors that joined my team.