The Fall of the Tech Gold Rush

Last night i sleep much later than my usual bedtime. I had random discussion with my wife how our journey as SWE being evolved. I remember when being a coder, programmer, or software engineer started becoming one of the most lucrative careers in the world.

Air-conditioned offices, excellent compensation, stock options, ping-pong tables, free lunches, gyms, massages, and occasionally a company hoodie that nobody asked for. What else could you possibly want?

As far as I can recall, somewhere around 2014–2015, right before I graduated from university, the startup industry was booming. Nice timing, eh? Venture capital was flowing, technology companies were expanding, and everyone seemed convinced that software was going to eat the world.

And apparently, everyone needed to learn how to code. Welcome to the golden age of tech jobs.

The Golden Age of Learning to Code

Every new startup wanted to become the next Google, Facebook, Uber, or whatever unicorn happened to be trending that week. Software engineers were in high demand, and companies were poaching talent left and right, competing to hire developers.

Finding a tech job seemed considerably easier back then. You could probably tell an interviewer you knew how to change a button’s color and walk away with a six-figure salary. Okay, I’m exaggerating 🤣 Haha. But you get the idea.

Coding bootcamps started appearing everywhere, promising to turn practically anyone into a software engineer within a few months, sometimes with job placement assistance. According to Course Report, the number of graduates from qualifying coding bootcamps in the US and Canada grew from around 6,700 in 2014 to more than 18,000 in 2019.

Surprising? Nah, not exactly. When an industry pays considerably more than many traditional professions, people will eventually find their way into it.

Parents naturally wanted their children to pursue promising careers. Computer science started looking like the new medicine or law, and people from completely different backgrounds began switching careers to become software engineers. It’s perfectly natural, really. Supply and demand. I don’t blame them either. We all need money to survive, and if learning JavaScript could significantly improve someone’s financial situation, why not?

Although I imagine some people were slightly disappointed to discover that software engineering involves more than clicking a few buttons and collecting a handsome paycheck.

Sometimes you spend three days investigating a bug. You go home, have dinner, take a shower, and somehow your brain is still debugging why a particular user’s fields cannot be updated on a specific account in Tokyo.

Or perhaps you’re trying to deliver a feature under an unrealistic deadline, sleeping two or three hours a day until your health starts deteriorating. I remember those moments quite vividly.

Congratulations. You’re an engineer now? Maybe.

Then COVID Happened, and Everyone Went Crazy

Fast-forward to 2020. COVID arrived, economies slowed down, and central banks responded with aggressive monetary easing to support economic activity. Interest rates dropped to historically low levels, capital became incredibly cheap, and investors were hungry for returns.

Meanwhile, the pandemic accelerated digital adoption. Remote work, e-commerce, online collaboration, digital payments, and practically anything involving the internet became increasingly important. Technology companies saw enormous opportunities, and naturally, they started hiring. A lot.

Some companies expanded their workforces aggressively, expecting extraordinary growth to continue indefinitely. Apparently, nobody considered that the pandemic might eventually end. Growth was everything, and profitability was something they could figure out later.

For a while, being a software engineer felt almost like being a mythical creature. Recruiters were constantly approaching people on LinkedIn, companies were offering attractive compensation packages, and switching jobs could mean a significant salary increase.

It was a fantastic time to work in technology. Unfortunately, it was also an extraordinary economic environment that many people mistook for normal. And as we’ve learned repeatedly throughout history, extraordinary things rarely last forever, especially when they’re financed by cheap money.

2022–2023: The Party Is Over

Then inflation arrived, and central banks began raising interest rates aggressively to control it. Borrowing became more expensive, investors became more cautious, and suddenly the economic equation changed.

Companies that previously prioritized growth at almost any cost started worrying about profitability, cash flow, and runway. Investors became less interested in how quickly a startup could acquire users and more interested in whether it could actually make money.

And then came the layoffs.

Meta, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and countless smaller companies announced workforce reductions. According to Layoffs.fyi, more than 265,000 employees were affected by tracked technology-company layoffs in 2023 alone. Of course, these weren’t exclusively software engineers, but they reflected the broader correction happening throughout the industry.

I started noticing layoffs around that period, too. Not just from the news, but from people I personally knew who were getting retrenched left and right. That was one of the reasons I became increasingly aggressive about saving and preparing financially. Watching talented people lose their jobs was a useful reminder that even a well-paying career doesn’t guarantee financial security.

How ironic. The same industry that previously couldn’t hire engineers fast enough was suddenly letting them go. The pendulum had swung in the opposite direction, and here’s the interesting part: none of this required AI to happen.

The industry was already experiencing a major correction driven by macroeconomic conditions, unsustainable growth expectations, and years of aggressive hiring. AI wasn’t the original cause of the wrecked job market. It arrived when the damage was already being done.

Which brings us to the next chapter.

And Then AI Joined the Party

In late 2022, ChatGPT entered the public consciousness, and suddenly everyone was talking about artificial intelligence. I was quite skeptical at first, mainly because it hallucinated a lot. Sometimes it would confidently invent APIs that never existed, which wasn’t particularly helpful when you were already struggling with a real bug.

But the internet had already decided that developers were going to be replaced, junior engineers were becoming obsolete, and entire software teams would soon become unnecessary.

As someone who has been programming for almost two decades, I found some of these predictions rather entertaining. We’ve apparently been six months away from replacing ourselves for several years now. Haha.

But jokes aside, I don’t think AI is irrelevant. Quite the opposite. Over time, I started noticing how remarkably capable these systems were becoming. They can generate code, explain complex systems, automate repetitive tasks, and significantly accelerate certain development workflows. I use them myself, quite extensively nowadays.

However, I disagree with the narrative that AI single-handedly destroyed the software engineering job market. The market was already struggling before AI became widely adopted in software development.

AI simply arrived at an inconvenient time. Or a very convenient time, depending on whether you’re a company executive trying to explain why you’re reducing headcount.

Instead of one problem, we now have several overlapping forces: expensive capital, cautious hiring, increased competition, and technological disruption. AI isn’t merely the cherry on top anymore. It’s becoming a meaningful force of its own, and I wouldn’t underestimate its long-term impact.

But blaming everything on AI is like blaming the final raindrop for an already flooded house. The water had been rising for years.

2024–2026: The New Reality

It’s now 2026, and the job market looks considerably different from the golden years. There have been signs of recovery, but that doesn’t mean we’re returning to 2021.

For example, Indeed Hiring Lab reported that US software development job postings had rebounded during 2025–2026, yet remained approximately 27.5% below their pre-pandemic level as of June 2026. Interestingly, much of the recent growth has been concentrated in senior and AI-related positions.

The market isn’t dead. It’s evolving, and I suspect some people who entered this industry primarily because of its attractive compensation are now reconsidering their decisions.

Again, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. A career is also an economic decision. If the compensation no longer justifies the stress, uncertainty, or effort required, pursuing something else is perfectly reasonable. Nobody is morally obligated to love debugging a production issue at midnight. Not even the person who wrote the bug.

But I do think there’s an interesting distinction between people who enjoy software engineering as a profession and people who genuinely enjoy building things with software. They aren’t necessarily the same thing, and that distinction becomes particularly interesting when the financial incentives start changing.

Some people might eventually decide to pursue another career. Others might remain because the compensation is still attractive enough. And some, I suspect, would continue writing software even if nobody paid them to do it.

I think I belong to that last group.

Some of Us Were Here Before the Money

I started learning programming around 2007, long before coding bootcamps became mainstream, before the pandemic hiring boom, before ChatGPT, and before people started putting “AI-powered” in front of practically everything.

I was simply a curious kid who enjoyed making things with computers. Back then, I didn’t even know whether programming was a career worth pursuing. I wasn’t thinking about stock options, high salaries, or achieving financial independence. I just thought programming was another interesting game I could play.

The idea that I could add a silly feature to random MMO browser game to a kid growing up in a small town deep in Borneo is another whole experience.

And somehow, nearly two decades later, that curiosity hasn’t really disappeared.

Of course, my relationship with the software industry has changed. After years of working professionally, I’ve experienced the less romantic parts: deadlines, production incidents, endless meetings, organizational politics, and the occasional urgent request that somehow stopped being urgent five minutes later.

There are days when I’m genuinely tired of working as a software engineer. But here’s the irony: even when I imagine taking a long break from employment, I still find myself thinking about software projects I’d like to build. An app here, a tool there, or some ridiculous idea that probably nobody needs.

Apparently, my idea of taking a break from programming is to program something else, just without the daily standup.

I suppose that’s what happens when something you’ve been doing for almost two decades becomes part of who you are. It’s no longer merely a profession or a way to earn money. It’s something you naturally return to whenever curiosity strikes.

Industries Come and Go. Curiosity Remains.

Looking back, I think the past decade offers an interesting lesson. We went from an industry where everyone was encouraged to learn programming, to one where people are increasingly questioning whether programming is still worth learning.

Quite a dramatic change in messaging, isn’t it?

But perhaps the problem is that we sometimes confuse the popularity of a profession with the value of the underlying skill. Software engineering was valuable before the startup boom. It remained valuable during the pandemic, and it doesn’t suddenly become worthless because companies are hiring fewer people or AI can generate code.

The economics of employment can change without eliminating the usefulness of the skill itself.

Will the market recover? Probably, in some form. Will we return to the absurd hiring environment of 2021? I wouldn’t count on it. Will AI fundamentally change how we build software? Almost certainly.

But none of these questions changes why I started programming in the first place.

I didn’t fall in love with programming because it was a lucrative career. It just happened that something I genuinely enjoyed eventually became a lucrative career. A rather fortunate coincidence, if you ask me.

And if one day I decide to leave the software engineering workforce entirely, I suspect I’ll still be sitting in front of my computer, building something that might only be useful to my cats. Haha.

Probably fixing a bug I introduced myself, which somehow keeps me awake until I finally figure it out. So much for taking a break.

Maybe one day I’ll stop working as a software engineer. But I doubt I’ll ever stop building something fun.

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