Dear QF Community,
This Friday’s note follows a recent LinkedIn post, The Permanent Underclass, by venture capitalist Deedy Das, in which he describes the growing anxiety among elite graduates who sense that the traditional pathway of good degree, strong salary, and financial stability no longer guarantees security.
For nearly two decades, the graduate career equation seemed stable. Work hard, gain admission to a top university, complete a demanding computer science degree, and secure the offer from Google or Meta, complete with signing bonus, stock options, and the cultural markers of having “made it.” High ability combined with sustained effort appeared to lead not only to safety but to a certain form of elite status.
In the podcast version of this post, we tried to capture the emotional shift more concretely. You graduate at twenty-two, diploma in hand, ready to collect the prize that the system has implicitly promised, and instead you discover that the door is locked. The shock does not stem from personal failure, but from a shift in the economic logic of the current tech landscape.
Indeed, certain layers of software work, particularly routine and pattern-based tasks, have become economically compressible. When a graduate’s contribution remains confined to that level, it is no longer assessed purely against other human applicants but against automated alternatives, including a twenty-dollar Claude subscription capable of generating passable boilerplate at marginal cost.
In that environment, big tech hiring has slowed, startups have become more selective, and some founders openly question whether junior engineers justify the expense when AI tools can handle large portions of routine output. Under these conditions, it is understandable that students at even the most selective institutions are reassessing their paths, and that startup formation appears rational when early-stage capital continues to cluster around AI and adjacent technologies.
Das’ post emphasises individual discipline rather than systemic reform. He encourages protecting several hours each day for sustained, uninterrupted work, committing to one area of depth for months rather than drifting between trends, experimenting broadly including with new AI tools, and writing publicly as a way to clarify and refine thought. His underlying claim is that when traditional educational institutions adapt slowly to technological change, agency and deliberate effort begin to matter more than formal credentials alone.
Additional QF Perspective
At Quantum Formalism (QF), we approach the situation from a slightly different angle. In our post A Short Message of Hope to Software Engineering Graduates, we argued that what we are witnessing is not the disappearance of human-driven software engineering but a fundamental reorganisation of the profession. Over the past decade, entry paths widened and application-layer development expanded rapidly, with onboarding designed for speed and immediate productivity rather than long-term depth. That configuration is now contracting, and the threshold for entry is rising as a result.
The more serious concern extends beyond graduate anxiety to the question of pipeline continuity. Senior engineers are not produced instantly; they are shaped over years through apprenticeship, rigorous code reviews, production incidents, architectural trade-offs, and sustained responsibility for systems that must remain reliable under pressure. When organisations reduce junior hiring in pursuit of short-term efficiency, they weaken the environment that cultivates future technical leadership and, in doing so, introduce a longer-term vulnerability into the engineering ecosystem.
This moment reflects a re-sorting within the engineering stack. Work that tolerates approximation and rapid iteration is more exposed to automation, whereas work that demands system-level reasoning, formal correctness, and architectural judgement continues to rely on human expertise. The profession is becoming more demanding rather than disappearing, and it is reorganising around depth, durability, and responsibility instead of surface-level fluency.
Wishing you a fantastic weekend ahead.
Quantum Formalism (QF) team
