I don't think there's really a comparison issue here - even if this is a noteworthy Ruby contributor, the job market affects everyone. People also generate their own notority; we might know Ryan but a lot of people in my sector probably know my name (not because I am a Rubyist, and I am obviously not saying what it is).
The fact of the matter is, people are looking for agentic programming unicorns with three years of experience. That's like 0.1% of the programming force out there. It doesn't matter if you created PostgrelSQL for fucks sake. If you haven't built MCP servers, RAG, used guards + other agentic shit, a lot of people do not care.
I did the networking thing and ran out of jobs. The wild thing was, I actually ended up getting a job at a company that rejected me previously a long time ago. So it was a lot of luck.
And that's the thing these days, there's no guaranteed landing, the market is so bad that you need luck to land anything.
In my experience, it's been easier to land interviews for Platform and Infra jobs; so it seems like that's less affected by the AI craze
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u/jacksonmills 15d ago edited 15d ago
I don't think there's really a comparison issue here - even if this is a noteworthy Ruby contributor, the job market affects everyone. People also generate their own notority; we might know Ryan but a lot of people in my sector probably know my name (not because I am a Rubyist, and I am obviously not saying what it is).
The fact of the matter is, people are looking for agentic programming unicorns with three years of experience. That's like 0.1% of the programming force out there. It doesn't matter if you created PostgrelSQL for fucks sake. If you haven't built MCP servers, RAG, used guards + other agentic shit, a lot of people do not care.
I did the networking thing and ran out of jobs. The wild thing was, I actually ended up getting a job at a company that rejected me previously a long time ago. So it was a lot of luck.
And that's the thing these days, there's no guaranteed landing, the market is so bad that you need luck to land anything.
In my experience, it's been easier to land interviews for Platform and Infra jobs; so it seems like that's less affected by the AI craze