>If you don't like them, simply avoid them and try not to get upset about it. If it's all nonsense it will soon fizzle out. If the potential is realized one can always join in later.
I'd love to but if multiple past hype cycles have taught me anything it's that hiring managers will NOT be sane about this stuff. If you want to maintain employability in tech you generally have to play along with the nonsense of the day.
The FOMO about this agentic coding stuff is on another level, too, so the level to which you will have to play along will be commensurately higher.
Capital can stay irrational way longer than you can stay solvent and to be honest, Ive never seen it froth at the mouth this much ever.
> hiring managers will NOT be sane about this stuff
Do you have an example of this? I have never dealt with this. The most I've had to do is seem more enthusiastic about <shift left/cloud/kubernetes/etc> to the recruiter than I actually am. Hiring managers often understand that newer technologies are just evolutions of older ones and I've had some fun conversations about how things like kubernetes are just evolutions of existing patterns around Terraform.
* leetcode, which has never once been relevant to my actual job in 20 years.
* during the data science uber alles days they'd ask me to regurgitate all sorts of specialized DS stuff that wasnt relevant before throwing me into a project with filthy pipelines and where picking a model took all of about 20 minutes.
* I remember the days when nosql and "scaling" was all the rage and being asked all sorts of complex questions about partitioning and dealing with high throughput while the reality on the ground was that the entire company's data fitted easily on to one server.
* More recently i was asked about the finer details of fine tuning llms for a job where fine tuning was clearly unnecessary.
I could go on.
It's been a fairly reliable constant throughout my career that hiring tasks and questions have more often been driven by fashion and crowd following than the skills actually required to get the job done and if you refuse to play the game at all you end up disqualifying yourself from more than half the market.
That's not a hiring manager. Honestly, what does "AI is now mandatory" even mean? Do LLM code reviewers count? Can I add a `CLAUDE.md` file into my repo and tick the box? How is this requirement enforced?
Also I mean, plenty of companies I interview at have requirements I'm not willing to accept. For example I will not accept either fully remote roles nor fully in person roles. Because I'm working hybrid roles, I insist my commute needs to be within a certain amount of time. At my current experience level I also only insist in working in certain positions on certain things. There is a minimum compensation structure and benefits allotment that I am willing to accept. Employment is an agreement and I only accept the agreement if it matches certain parameters of my own.
What are your expectations for employment? That employers need to have as open a net as possible? I'll be honest if I extrapolate based on your comments I have this fuzzy impression of an anxious software engineer worried about employment becoming more difficult. Is that the angle that this is coming from?
I'd love to but if multiple past hype cycles have taught me anything it's that hiring managers will NOT be sane about this stuff. If you want to maintain employability in tech you generally have to play along with the nonsense of the day.
The FOMO about this agentic coding stuff is on another level, too, so the level to which you will have to play along will be commensurately higher.
Capital can stay irrational way longer than you can stay solvent and to be honest, Ive never seen it froth at the mouth this much ever.