It's somehow still early innings for the energy transition, and there are a lot of fun engineering problems to work on. Join us, start here: climatebase.org

For whatever reason, there’s a strong motivation for people to dismiss the gigantic global effort to transition the energy system away from fossil fuels, and claim that all that effort isn’t really doing anything. Thankfully, this is not true — determined people can change things for the better.

I’ve been unemployed and actively looking for a job for about 6 months, the longest stretch of active job searching I’ve ever done in my career. Several close friends who work in tech or tech-adjacent fields are in the same boat. Anecdata on Hacker News or LinkedIn tells the same story.

A chart showing “total number of jobs” is not meaningful. I took a temp job in a metal shop to make ends meet while I wait for the endless rounds of interviews I’ve now gone through with 4 companies. It pays less than half of what I was making before, and I am barely making ends meet. It’s not sustainable, even though the pay is more than fair for the work.

There are also a lot of job openings for home health care workers, or seasonal resort workers, that used to be filled by immigrants. Those jobs are not going to be taken by any of the engineers who just got laid off by Meta.

I have the strong impression that people who write articles like this are very disconnected from the reality of the economy right now, and that their curiosity ends at the line on the chart they cooked up to make a contrarian point.

Ok, good luck

- Labor organizing

I grew up in a union household, and my dad and my grandfather fighting for better wages, healthcare and working conditions are the reason why I got a good education and work in Silicon Valley surrounded by Stanford assholes.

All of us who work for a paycheck can get together and say, “no, we will not allow you to record keystrokes and mouse movements to train our replacements. No, we will not have our performance or future employment based on an AI leaderboard.”

Previous generations fought and died for our right to do that, but in 2026 we just sit on our hands and complain on this forum. We can and should do better.

The U.S. is absolutely on fire right now with opposition to data centers. We, collectively, can extract concessions or ban their construction altogether.

These things aren’t “easy”. They are also eminently possible.

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Python (web apps, pandas), Javascript/Typescript (all of the web frameworks, data vis), HTML/CSS (Zeldman was right), Java, C++ (enough to get in trouble). CAD, CNC, power electronics, embedded systems.

I am a builder and leader in clean energy and climate tech, with ten years in energy industry software, deep technical and domain expertise, and a long-term focus on climate change.

As a product manager, full-stack software engineer, and solutions engineer, I've built complex energy modeling products end-to-end to accelerate DER deployment and grid decarbonization. In my spare time, I've built custom BESS systems to replace generators, managed logistics to replace diesel truck hauling with EVs, and organized volunteer ecosystem restoration projects.

I am seeking roles that leverage my technical skill, product leadership, and domain expertise, with mission-driven teams focused on decarbonization.

https://matthewgerring.com

The only reason that infrastructure buildout is happening at all is the ideological capture of a small handful of obscenely wealthy people, who are fueling this buildout by spreading the extreme paranoia you’re echoing here.

I do not understand why no one else can see the circularity of this reasoning. There is nothing inevitable about tying up all of this productive capital in the pursuit of AI. There are many, many other projects requiring similar capital and human effort, with much more obvious payoffs, such as decarbonizing the world’s energy systems.

“It’s physically possible to provide abundant electricity without burning fossil fuels” is more provably true than any of the insane science fiction bullshit that undergirds the AI buildout, and yet, the entire clean energy industry is still having to build insane financial Rube Goldberg contraptions to make incremental progress.

“Inevitability” is a lie, period. This entire thing is extremely historically contingent, and we could easily stop this train tomorrow.

The regressions are the issue. If the software was working as expected, no one would be coming after them for “the sin of using AI”.

Let me guess, you stopped reading web standards documents because Facebook told you it didn’t matter, since you could just ship 10MB of javascript with every request

Holy shit, no, they are not. What world do you live in?