neverminder

I'm talking China attacking Taiwan, WW3, another mega pandemic and stuff like that. Would you stock up on essential components like CPUs, GPUs, motherboards, hard drives, RAM, etc? Make backup images of your Linux distros with all the apps included? Download Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap?

I'm a Java/Scala dev in London with over 12 years of experience and I've been unable to find a job for almost a year now. Long time ago I chose what I thought was the most popular tech stack, so that I would never have a problem finding a job. Up to this year it never took me longer than a month to find a new gig. What happened? I thought if the day came when a guy like me can't find work, we would have bigger problems, like WW3 or extinction level asteroid heading for Earth.

Thing is, I've never worked for FAANG, I was always content working for random non-tech companies that were definitely not a target of the so-called "rock star engineers". The world runs on software and most of that software isn't FAANG. I've been in the trenches for a long time, and most of it is endless vastness of legacy code. Java is the new Cobol times 1000, there should be a demand for countless number of devs to maintain and rewrite this legacy code. How did the market go from developer shortage to developer surplus overnight? Is there an end to that?

I've noticed that Java fell from 1st to 4th place on Tiobe Language Index which it dominated for like decades, effectively swapping places with Python. It's also a lot more difficult to find jobs with it recently. Is Java in decline? Was it caused by all that Oracle bullshit in recent years?

Back in the day there were two choices: refuse do do it or jump through the hoops. Today nobody I know bothers with automated skill assessment tests any more. Folks just feed it into ChatGPT and be done.

Yesterday I've applied to a role I found interesting, received a confirmation email and seconds later - skill assessment test link. So it looks like nowadays humans no longer bother reading the CVs, it's all left to the bots. The test involved a tech stack I was not familiar with, so I thought it would be a good opportunity for the ChatGPT and it handled it well without even breaking a sweat. The though occurred to me that today one side uses AI to create and evaluate these tests and the other side uses AI to complete them. Is this the new reality? What's even the point?