Learning to code was supposed to be the safe bet.
Land a job at one of the big tech companies and you were set for life. You saw the documentaries on CNBC: the coding bootcamp in a strip mall, the kid who taught himself Python and walked out of poverty into a six-figure job. Stories like that showed up in your feed every other day.
Landing that first programming job out of college felt like the whole future was handled. In mid-2026, we couldn't be further from that dream.
Junior programmers are losing jobs by the thousands. Every new version of GPT or Claude shows up with the same quiet promise: now the senior ones are replaceable too. Company profits keep booming while the number of programmers keeps dropping.
A Google engineer found out at 3 a.m. that his job was gone. The company locked him out of its systems twenty minutes later. The machine forgets you before a human tells you.
In early 2025, Meta cut about 3,600 people and Zuckerberg branded them in public as the "low performers." They didn't just lose their jobs. They got stabbed with a dagger that haunts every application after. And the man who threw it kept getting richer. Since the AI boom took off, Zuckerberg's fortune has more than tripled, from about $64 billion to over $220 billion in three years, by Forbes' count.
I have a friend who had it all planned. Get the software job. Buy the starter home, even at 7 percent, because you refinance in a couple of years when rates come down. Climb as the industry grows. Start a family.
It was a reasonable plan. In 2021, the job market for software engineers was very different. You stayed two years, you jumped, you got a 20 percent bump. You did that twice and you were senior. So two years ago he bought the house. Nothing fancy. A starter at 7 percent, about $2,100 a month. He was 29, with a new baby and a wife at home. Tight, but it worked.
Then his job was replaced by AI. He's sent 250 applications in six months. A few interviews. Zero offers. It is not his resume. Postings for software developers sit about two-thirds below their 2022 peak, according to Indeed. The rung below him got automated, and the rung above wants ten years he doesn't have.
The refinance never came either. Rates for a new loan sit around 6.5 percent, and nobody refinances a 7 percent mortgage to save half a percent. Selling doesn't work. It would mean writing a check at closing he doesn't have. House poor without a house.
His wife stays home with the baby. She doesn't have a degree, and her work history is grocery store and retail. He's done that math several times. Subtract the childcare, the gas, the second car, and her paycheck comes back as a few hundred dollars a month and a baby in daycare all day.
The savings are nearly out. And the advice he gets is the usual. Sell and move in with the in-laws. Drive Uber on weekends. The advice is not wrong, in the same way that "eat less" is not wrong advice for a person whose problem is not their plate.
So here's the question: what is the path forward?
This essay isn't about airing grievances over jobs lost to AI. It's about a bigger question, and an older one. Many times in life you feel like you have it figured out. You have a plan. You did everything right, the way you were supposed to, and then life comes at you hard. The doors start closing, one after another, and you feel helpless. So you double down on what you know best. The same applications, the same path, the same plan. The more you try, the harder you fail, and the helplessness sinks in deeper, until it feels like there's no way out.
The past and social media have built an expectation of how your life is supposed to look, what you're supposed to have by now, and anything shy of it feels like failure. There's a feeling that comes with this. It is not panic. It is the slow, daytime version of panic. You sit at the kitchen table on a Saturday morning and you run the budget again.
My friend's situation is all too common, and not just for programmers. Most of us, at some point, stand in front of a door that has quietly shut. The point of this essay is not to hand you the right move. It's the opposite. It's to say out loud that the door is shut, so you can stop spending another two years pushing on it.
Acknowledging that the developer job market isn't going back to its 2022 peak. That the dream job you assumed was coming may never arrive. That the college all your friends went to isn't happening. Each one stings to say. Each one is cheaper than the years you'd spend pretending otherwise.
Acknowledging reality isn't surrender. It's what frees your mind to find another way to the thing you actually wanted, which was never the door itself. The door was a means. The goal was a life. A plan that depends on pushing harder against a shut door is not a plan. It is hope.
The trap is thinking the software job, the house, or the refinance was the dream. It wasn't. The dream was stability. Time with your kid. A life that did not feel like it could be destroyed by one email at 3 a.m. Once you name the real thing, you can start looking for new ways to get it.
My friend's plan had three doors. The mortgage that would refinance. The career that would climb. The second income that would come back when the baby got older. All three shut at almost the same time, and none of that is his fault.
Seeing it clearly isn't giving up. It's the first move.
Sources
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Indeed Hiring Lab, Software Development Job Postings (via FRED), 2026. Basis of the "two-thirds below their 2022 peak" line (index ~73 in late May 2026, Feb 2020 = 100). https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE
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Forbes, The 10 Biggest Billionaire Gainers 2024, and 2026 Billionaires List. Basis of "more than tripled... $64 billion to over $220 billion in three years" (≈$64.4B March 2023, $177B in 2024 after a $112.6B gain, $222B in 2026). https://www.forbes.com/sites/hyunsoorim/2024/04/02/the-10-biggest-billionaire-gainers-2024/ and https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/
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Freddie Mac, Primary Mortgage Market Survey, June 4, 2026. Basis of "rates for a new loan sit around 6.5 percent" (30-year fixed averaged 6.48%). https://www.freddiemac.com/pmms
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CNBC and Fortune, January 14, 2025. Basis of "Meta cut about 3,600 people and Zuckerberg branded them in public as the 'low performers'" (the "move out low performers faster" memo, ~5% of staff). https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/14/meta-targeting-lowest-performing-employees-in-latest-round-of-layoffs.html and https://fortune.com/2025/01/14/meta-cut-5-percent-staff-lowest-performers-layoffs/
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Business Insider, February 2025. Backs the "didn't just lose their jobs" framing: cut workers said they were strong performers, blindsided. https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-layoffs-surprise-employees-strong-performers-2025-2
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Business Insider, 2023. Basis of the Google engineer locked out of company systems twenty minutes after a 3 a.m. termination. https://www.businessinsider.com/google-employee-layoffs-engineer-locked-out-emails-termination-pichai-2023-1
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Stanford Digital Economy Lab, Brynjolfsson, Chandar & Chen, "Canaries in the Coal Mine?", November 2025. Backs "junior programmers are losing jobs by the thousands" and the rung-below-automated claim: employment for developers aged 22 to 25 fell nearly 20% from its late-2022 peak, with the decline concentrated on early-career workers. https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/news/ai-and-labor-markets-what-we-know-and-dont-know/
