Has he tried being a senior developer? He should really try being a senior developer.

It makes me so mad that there are CS grads who can't find work at the same time as companies are exploiting the H1B process saying "there aren't enough applicants". When are these companies going to be held accountable?

The difficult part is going to be that new engineers are not generally who people think about to unfuck code. Even before the LLMs junior engineers are generally the people that fuck things up.

It’s through fucking lots of stuff up and unfucking that stuff up and learning how not to fuck things up in the first place that you go from being a junior engineer to a more senior engineer. Until you land in a lofty position like staff engineer and your job is mostly to listen to how people want to fuck everything up and go “maybe let’s try this other way that won’t fuck everything up instead”

Tell your family member to network, that’s the best way to get a job. There are discord servers for every programming language and most projects. Contribute to open source projects and get to know the people.

Build things, write code, open source it on GitHub.

Drill on leet code questions, they aren’t super useful, but in any interview at least part of the assessment is going to be how well they can do on those.

There are still plenty of places hiring. AI has just made it so that most senior engineers have access to a junior engineer level programmer that they can give tasks to at all time, the AI. So anything you can do to stand out is an advantage.

Answer is probably the same as before AI: build a portfolio on GitHub. These days maybe try to find repos that have vibe code in them and make commits that fix the AI garbage.

My path was working for a consulting firm (Accenture) for a few years, making friends with my clients, and then jumping to freelance work a few years later when I can get paid my contract rate directly rather than letting Accenture take a big chunk of it.

No idea, but I am not sure your family member is qualified. I would estimate that a coding LLM can code as well as a fresh CS grad. The big advantage that fresh grads have is that after you give them a piece of advice once or twice, they stop making that same mistake.

I've been an engineer for over a decade and am now having a hard time finding work because of this LLM situation so I can't imagine how a fresh graduate must feel.