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@Mario - I looked for contact details in your profile but did not find any. We are currently hiring senior Rails engineers, fully remote in Europe (see an older job ad here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42923191 EDIT and a current one here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46466732).

Please feel free to reach out, and then we can see if there is a good match.

Domain-specific knowledge, having no relation to software engineering per se, is a necessary skill set.

The best analogy I can find, if not a tired one, is the equivalence of software engineering to tool-and-die making.

In prior generations where manufacturing was king, it was a necessary operational skill set in order to produce things at scale, yet is much less (if no longer) relevant in the age of additive or subtractive manufacturing, where quantities can be varied according to immediate requirements.

Along the same lines, a skill set in traditional software engineering is less enamored in the age of AI agents that can better regurgitate boilerplate code.

The corresponding next-level-up analogy is the tool-and-die maker that learns 3D modeling + additive manufacturing, with FE analysis and CNC skills as a fallback. For software engineers, it's AI agent prompt engineering and data modeling, according to use cases defined by business needs.

You need to put on your entrepreneurial hat and figure out how to do things faster, with greater accuracy, relevant to business needs - not navel-gazing at package management and build automation exclusively.

This is, of course, an extremely naïve view of the state of things, though I cannot imagine, as a generalist, how one could survive with increasingly niche skills that, a decade ago, would have commanded six-figure salaries.

Good luck!

If the op is looking only for remote roles then I'd emphasise that competition for these is extremely high. My advice would be to broaden your search to include hybrid and-in person roles.

I wish that rto was being handled with more flexibility and empathy, and I appreciate that travelling to work can be very difficult to reconcile with location and parental/caring responsibilities, but this is unfortunately where we are.

I'd also recommend looking beyond startups and pure software/tech companies. There are many businesses in eg manufacturing, or in less mainstream locations, that struggle to hire decent devs.

For context: I'm a UK-based developer and have recent experience of a fairly substantial period of unemployment. I now have a job with a great business, but also with a substantial commute.

I'm fortunate to still be in a role, but I've always kept an eye out for other opportunities, and it looks very rough out there in the UK job market.

I don't know if companies are just in a "wait and see" stance to see the effect of AI coding agents, or if it's the sign of a wider slowdown.

100% remote is also a tough ask. I've noticed increasingly job roles are listed as 2-3 days in the office as companies awkwardly transition back to the office.

I understand that the market in the UK is particularly tough now, across many sectors.

Is there a particular specialisation you have, and then how does someone who needs that specialisation find you?

Particularly if the job is 100pct remote, you’re participating in a global market.

Or if there’s a local company that needs you… even if the work isn’t the most challenging… Can at least leverage the real-world relationships? Anyone at prior jobs who can help with connections? (Never hurts to ask).

I hope you are able to find something that provides at least an emotional boost while the broader search continues!

Stop chasing remote roles - show up at the office and then maybe go remote after a while.

Remember that for remote roles you are competing against the best talent in the world, and most of them can afford to work for a tiny fraction of what you are asking for.

There are still plenty of jobs at local software shops, banks, consulting firms, hospitals, government agencies and more, and you are at the front of the line for all of those. A lot of them enforce as little as 2-3 days in the office. Apply there instead.

Remote role? Why would anybody pay UK wages instead of $developing_country wages?

It is happening as a reaction to covid and ai.

What covid did to office work lasted many years and now there is finally a reverse reaction where people (not just office managers) are rediscovering that hey we actually get things going if we sit in the same room, at the same time, working on the same problem.

AI is a bit like outsourcing / off-shoring. Best results are on tasks that are well-defined, of a fair size, and well-documented. Incidentally the tasks that used to go to someone sitting remote.

Very similar situation. I have been cancelled, and I can't face going back to employment, but finding a way to earn a crust as a solo engineer is proving somewhat hopeless. At least I'm not paying tax any more. Checkmate Rachel Reeves.

I'm curious where in the funnel you fall off. Do you get a phone screen? Coding interviews? Or just crickets?

I've been going through the same thing for over a year now. I dropped out of the job search and started focusing on building my own product instead (though I can't say that's going particularly well either). Since I don't have physical access to EU/US markets, I'm only looking for remote positions.

After the post-COVID boom, companies started laying off people in large numbers. Couple that with tightening restrictions on remote work, most US companies now require work authorization, EU companies have tax compliance requirements, etc.and remote options without a formal employment relationship have become nearly impossible to find.

I don't think learning new programming languages will make much difference at this point. There isn't a new shiny technology that everyone's chasing, and AI companies are hiring very few people. Your best bet is probably finding an in-person job and relocating.

Still have a job but I'm stuck in a role with no growth and no challenging or even valuable work.

Idk how I'm supposed to talk about the last 2 years in interviews and every move up and out. I would have left earlier but it's challenging

Can you provide a link to a resume ?

This is the new default lay of the land. Get an internship in college and job right out of it or get fucked

Are you able to move / relocate away from the UK?

Unless the company is a FAANG company or hedge fund, the UK tech scene is dead.

I don’t see any good UK startups worth joining in the UK. All the good ones are in SF / NY, etc.

Funny story: in 2025 I interviewed with multiple Ruby/Rails companies in San Francisco. I performed really well in the interviews. For one company, I went through a full on-site interview at their office. And still — no offer. The interview went great.

I have ~20 years of experience. I wrote a book about Ruby. I have GitHub repositories with thousands of stars. I have my own successful projects written in Ruby/Rails. I’ve spoken at conferences and contributed a lot to the Ruby/Rails community. I was a perfect match — and I still wasn’t hired.

This wasn’t a one-off. The same thing happened with several Ruby/Rails startups.

You know what I did next? I switched to Gen/Applied AI. And the difference was huge. The feedback became much better, and salaries were 25–50% higher. The tech itself wasn’t that different — mostly dynamic languages. I had to learn new things, but it took months, not years.

I also pushed myself deeper toward understanding AI properly. I genuinely enjoy this space. I started learning the fundamentals and even built my own learning materials (for example, howllmworks.com). You don’t need to go that deep to get hired, but I wanted to. The field is fascinating.

What’s funny is that many companies hiring “AI engineers” don’t really know what they’re doing. I’ve had interviews where they openly said: “We don’t really have AI expertise, but we know we need AI.” That’s how things are right now. It’s both good and bad. They can’t really judge your skills properly — but that also means your chances of passing are higher.

As for the Ruby/Rails world — I’m honestly very disappointed. The market feels completely saturated. There are too many experienced engineers competing for too few roles. Being good is no longer enough.

One company literally told me my interview performance was too good. They suspected I was using AI. That was the feedback. Twenty years of experience, open-source work, a published book — none of that mattered. “You’re too good, and there are too many candidates like you.” That’s how I understood it.

I’ve seen this happen repeatedly. It’s not just one bad experience.

At this point, I genuinely believe the Ruby/Rails ecosystem is shrinking. The whole “one-person framework” idea that DHH has been promoting made sense years ago, but not anymore. The problems it was solving simply don’t exist in the same way today.

With LLMs, the world changed. You take the best tools available. Next.js with standardized React components instead of Stimulus and Turbo. Hosted auth instead of rolling your own. When I needed to integrate something like Clerk, I just dropped in a component and moved on. There are tons of ready-made solutions in the React ecosystem.

Now compare that to Ruby. Are there modern AI libraries? Yes, technically. Are they well-maintained? Not really. You’re often dealing with abandonware. LangChain officially supports Python and TypeScript — not Ruby. And like it or not, AI today is happening in Python.

The more time you spend clinging to Ruby/Rails, the further behind you get. That’s just reality. My advice is simple: if you can, move on. The opportunity window in AI is wide open right now, but it won’t stay that way forever. 2026 is probably the last really good entry point.

When I was starting out (in the US), I didn’t have a CS degree, but I did have one very cheap client connection who was interested in a large project; and almost a decade of hobbyist experience.

It was $22 an hour. No benefits, not even healthcare. Solo, no other developers. Before AI. My theory - $22 an hour is better than school debt, and if it works, then I’ve got money + experience at a level I can’t get anywhere else, which will overcome the lack of a paper degree.

I stuck at that job for almost half a decade, under those conditions, building experience. It paid off - I joined a startup, doubled my salary, got a benefits package, and know some technologies we’re using better than anyone else on the team. The point though is that it took embracing conditions that most people consider themselves too good for, or almost unthinkably difficult.

My recommendation: I think you should entertain the idea that if there is a God who cares about us, praying earnestly is a good idea. He gave me that new job on my first application anywhere, a complete cold call, in a personal moment of weakness, in the Summer of 2025. With nothing but a solo project on the resume at a company nobody knows.

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Why is Hacker News so interested in regular software jobs?

Isn't the idea of the site to "hack" as in thinking outside the box, building your own projects and companies, doing things in interesting new ways?