Quick update from the trenches. Two things are going on. I’m still learning Rust, and the job market’s still doing its impression of a slowly deflating bouncy castle. Let’s start with the fun one.
I’m learning Rust, and Rust is learning to humble me
If you’ve never written Rust, here’s the short version. Python, my first language, is a golden retriever. Friendly, eager, a little sloppy, loves you no matter what. Rust is a very strict cat. It judges every move you make and tells you, in detail, when you’ve done something dumb.
I picked it for a few reasons. It’s fast. It’s the language my blog’s whole framework runs on (shoutout to my friend), so learning it means I finally understand what’s humming under my own website. And I wanted a challenge that wasn’t “apply to more jobs.”
The compiler and I have a relationship now. Mostly it says no. There’s this thing called the borrow checker, and its whole job is to stop you from making memory mistakes before your program even runs. Great in theory. In practice, I write 10 lines, hit save, and get a paragraph back explaining why what I did is illegal.
Here’s the weird part. The error messages are nice. Most languages scream “ERROR” and let you go cry about it. Rust says, “hey, you did this, here’s why it won’t work, here’s what you probably meant.” It’s rejection with a detailed feedback form. I get a lot of those lately. More on that in a second.
Moving BriefAI over to Rust
The big project: I’m rebuilding BriefAI in Rust. If you’re new here, BriefAI is a little tool I made that does my pre-call homework so I stop showing up to meetings undercooked. I built the first version in Python. It works. So why rewrite it?
Fair question. A few reasons.
One, porting something you already understand is the best way to actually learn a language. You can’t hide from the parts you were fuzzy on.
Two, Rust is fast, and I want BriefAI to feel instant instead of “loading, please wait, thanks for your patience.”
Three, it’s satisfying. Every piece I move over is a piece I understand twice as well.
I’ll be straight with you, though. I’m at the very start. Embarrassingly early. I haven’t touched on the real guts of the app yet. Right now it’s setup, small pieces, and a lot of losing arguments to the compiler about who owns what. Stuff that took me an afternoon in Python takes me days in Rust. But I get a little less lost every week, and that’s enough for now.
Okay. The job market. Deep breath.
I’d love to tell you it got better while I had my head down in Rust. It didn’t. It got weirder. Here’s what’s going on, as best I can piece together.
Tech hiring is way down. Job postings sit about a third below where they were before 2020. For regular software roles it’s worse. Openings are down close to half. The one corner that’s on fire is anything with “AI” in the title, where postings are actually up. Tech didn’t die. It split in two: a shrinking market for normal roles, and a hot, expensive one for AI specialists.
The layoffs keep coming. COmpanies cut more than 150,000 tech jobs in the first half of this year, and more of them are saying, out loud, that the reson is AI. They used to hide it in corporate speak. Now they just tell you.
This next part hits close to home. A lot of the roles I want, customer success and support and that whole world, are the first place companies aim their new AI agents. Salesforce cut around 4,000 support roles and said the AI handles those conversations now. Nice.
The process got heavier too. Companies are drowning in applications, plenty of them AI-generated, so they pile on more interview rounds and take their time. The average stretch from applying to getting hired is now over two months. That explains a lot about my inbox.
So why does it keep getting worse? It’s less about AI doing every job and more about money. Companies spent billions on AI, and the people who wrote those checks want to see the money work. Same output, fewer humans. It’s permission to run lean, and they call it innovation. The joke is that some of them already cut too deep. One company fired a pile of support staff, swapped in AI, watched the quality fall apart, and quietly started hiring people back. A lof of this might snap back. Just not today. Not for my inbox.
So why am I not spiraling?
One bright spot keeps me steady.
The jobs that are actually growing mix real technical skill with talking to real humans. There’s a role called a “forwared deployed engineer,” a technical person who works directly with customers, and postings for it are up something like 700 percent this year.
That’s kind of exactly me. Sales background, technical chops I sharpen every day, and the ability to not sound like a robot in a meeting. Automation eats the routine, script-following work. It doesn’t eat the work where you have to earn someone’s trust and understand the code at the same time. That’s the whole reason I made this pivot.
So I’m doubling down. More Rust. More building. I’m turning into the specific person who can sit across from a customer and understand what’s under the hood. The market’s rough. But it’s rough in a way that rewards the exact thing I"m working toward.
Anyway. Back to arguing with the compiler. Wish me luck. It never wishes me luck back.