Re: the miserable employment situation in IT right now
A painful and probably necessary course correction (social scientists call it a "disruption") is going on right now in software development. IMO it is only partly due to AI. There has been a glut of people with newly minted CS degrees for some time now in the US; they always had issues getting jobs due to the fact that a large corporation such as Amazon can hire a person from a foreign country via H1-B visa. The H1-B folks had to remain employed continuously for 5 years to remain in the country and get a green card, and many were thus willing to work for far lower wages than most US citizens expected. Amazon currently employs about 10,000 people via H1-B visas, and furthermore, those visa people will put up with a lot more crap than someone who can afford to change jobs. The party line is that these corporations cannot find US citizens with appropriate skills. Personally, I don't think they tried; I think it's all about lower salaries and leverage over their workforce.
But the big corporations mainly recruited from the ivy league and high reputation schools; if you got a degree from a perfectly good tech school or regional university, you might not ever even have gotten a shot at applying to the big tech companies.
And now, newly graduated CS students are well and truely screwed. Further, companies are in a panic due to AI and the Trump admin's wildly unpredictable policies, and IMO IT management always suffered from extreme short-sightedness anyway. So right now, the only IT people being hired by corporations are steeped in LLM skills.
Re: LLM's. Those have scraped and compiled almost everything they could find on the WWW, including the crap as well as the cream, so a certain portion of what they regurgitate (as glorified search engines with the ability to summarize) is going to be wrong just because the sources they have scraped (mostly illegally) are wrong. Further, the LLM's bots have ceased honoring robots.txt files and in many recent cases, they scrape so aggressively that their finding a new site to scrape leaves that site in a state as if it were experiencing a deliberate denial of service attack. I have experienced this myself, and desperately casting about, I was able to "save" my website by placing it's DNS behind a Cloudflare screen. Cloudflare parses all incoming requests and discards all those believed to be coming from misbehaving bots and other bad actors.
The market for IT professionals WILL rebound, because it has to, but I am not sure how long it will be. I have advised my young friends who are currently unable to find work to try using Freelancer.com, a place where normal people (not necessarily huge corporations) can find and hire programmers, sysadmins, project managers and many other roles as needed. I have found Freelancer very useful; those who hire leave reviews of those hired, and those hired leave reviews of the hirers. So it is reputation based, and frankly, the profession could benefit greatly from a two-way reputation based hiring system instead of the top-heavy management abusive situation in which programmers have largely labored in recent years. At least, this is how I view things. Of course, Freelancer skims off about 15% for its matchmaking, and workers do not receive any benefits such as health insurance, so they are purely independent contractors, and US law has never favored their situation financially. But 15% is actually reasonable. Most large companies require all independent contractors (and they hired a LOT of them in the past) to come through a few contract houses, and those contracting companies (acting mainly as payroll for the workers and sheltering the company from liability) generally skimmed off much greater percentages, sometimes 50% or more. I contracted for Wyeth for a couple of years back in the day, being paid $110 per hour, and I think Wyeth was paying them about twice that for my time.
