I'm a full-stack developer with about 20 years of experience, having worked with classic ASP, VB, .NET, PHP, JavaScript/TypeScript, and modern frameworks and tooling. I'm searching for a job and expected that background to make things easier, but the market has been surprisingly difficult.
At the same time, I keep seeing developers say that AI agents now handle so much of their work that they spend parts of the day waiting around. I'd honestly be thrilled to have that problem, although I realize those roles may not be secure either.
Are other senior developers experiencing the same squeeze? How are you adapting, finding opportunities, or coping with the job search? I don't have much of a professional network and feel embarrassed asking people for help, since this isn't a situation they would normally expect me to be in.
4 Answers
I’m dealing with something similar after about ten years in the field. I’ve sent hundreds of applications, received almost no responses, and haven’t reached the interview stage. It’s hard not to take that personally, but the current market seems genuinely bad rather than simply being a reflection of one person’s ability.
It may also be worth considering whether your resume is signaling too much experience for the roles you’re targeting. Age bias is real, and presenting every year of experience can sometimes make employers assume you’ll be too expensive or overqualified. That doesn’t mean hiding your background, but you could tailor the resume to emphasize the most relevant recent experience.
You probably need to focus less on applications and more on getting in front of actual people. Automated hiring pipelines are overwhelmed with AI-written resumes, so it’s extremely difficult to stand out there. Reach out to former coworkers, acquaintances, recruiters, and hiring managers directly, even if networking feels uncomfortable.
A personal introduction can matter more than dozens of applications. Someone I know with similar experience applied to more than 60 jobs without an interview, then happened to mention the search during a casual conversation and was introduced to a hiring manager. That conversation led to an interview and eventually an offer. Luck played a part, but the broader lesson is that personal contact can bypass the application pile.
The people sitting around while AI agents do their work may not be safe either. My company adopted AI aggressively, laid off roughly half the staff, and I suspect my own role is next. I’ve been trying to make myself more attractive to employers, but it hasn’t produced much yet. From management’s perspective, it’s difficult to justify paying a highly experienced engineer a large salary if they think the job is mostly prompting an AI tool and making minor UI changes.
AI adoption hasn’t made senior engineering judgment irrelevant. Companies still need people who can design systems, understand tradeoffs, untangle legacy applications, review generated code, handle production incidents, and take responsibility when things go wrong. The strongest positioning right now is to show that you use AI as a force multiplier while still owning architecture, quality, security, and delivery.
The market may eventually place more value on that once companies discover that generating code is easier than maintaining a reliable system. Unfortunately, that shift doesn’t help much if you need a job immediately, so it’s worth making those abilities very explicit in your resume and interviews.
AI still struggles with important parts of development, especially maintaining structure and quality in a real codebase. Without experienced people guiding the architecture and reviewing the output, things can deteriorate quickly.