TL;DR: If you could write one thing to every scared new grad and young person in software... What would you tell them? Advice Wanted is our latest writing contest; $10k grand prize, $1k to 2nd through 5th. Free to enter.
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It's looking bleak for people in software. Or... Is it?
In January 2023, Communications of the ACM (one of the more respected journals in computer science), ran an essay called "The End of Programming." Not long after, Jensen Huang said kids shouldn't learn to code. Mark Zuckerberg said AI would soon do the work of mid-level engineers. Dario Amodei warned of a "white-collar bloodbath." By August 2025, the New York Times was doing interviews with CS grads who were applying to Chipotle; in February this year, Fortune ran a piece about how "software engineers could go extinct this year." Thousands of people have published posts about their lives in software, with titles like "Does anyone else feel like nothing matters anymore?" And since the launch of ChatGPT, employment of young people in AI-exposed jobs (like software engineering) is almost 20% lower than where it should be, at least according to researchers at Stanford.
So there are fewer jobs for young people in software, and the ones lucky enough to have those jobs frequently complain about how the work has lost its sense of meaning and purpose. Close friends of mine say similar things ("now I'm just a meat proxy," a software engineer I know recently said). What now?
Well, we could publish another 100 essays about how software engineering is over and young people are cooked and the world is doomed. But there are lots of those already. And I'm sure plenty more people are writing them.
No, we're interested in something else instead: what is the one thing all of these scared young people in software should read? To date, we haven't read a great essay (or story, or piece of writing) addressed to these people. We would like to see one. So we launched a new writing contest, called Advice Wanted, where your task is to write the one thing you think all of these scared young people should read.
You don't have to be a software engineer to participate. You don't even have to write about software! You simply have to write one thing you think would be useful for these folks - people who are being told that their entire livelihood is over and that they wasted their years in college - to read. It's up to you what that writing should look like.
Ah, and it's free to enter. Go learn more details here, if you're interested.
And good luck.