> where voicing dissent can have real-world consequences for your job and future employability

Yes. But have you considered that one of those consequences could be that companies who are not pushing AI will see that and give you an interview.

If you have criteria that would make you reject a job, regardless of how unpopular it might be, you should be shouting it form the rooftops. Any company who chooses not to engage with you because of it is saving you time and energy. Any application that gets no response because of it saves you from an interview process that would have failed, or worse - a job you would have hated. Which means that anyone who is engaging with you for interviews already knows your opinion and they are OK with it.

BTW, I'm not sure your opinion is unpopular. The concept of the "vocal minority" seems to be at play these days, as for every dev I know and work with who is positive about AI, 2 others are negative about it.

Look for tech laggards in general. The local supermarket chain that has a POS from 1987, the car dealership that hasn’t modernized, etc.

There are plenty of small/medium businesses that are not tech-forward, and where even SOTA from 20 years ago will wow them. They tend not to pay especially well, and their businesses are often in decline because they aren’t aggressive about improvement, but they are surviving and punching the clock.

I suspect the market won't split into "AI companies" and "non-AI companies". It will split into companies that measure outcomes versus companies that mandate tools.

I've worked at places that mandated a particular editor, programming language, or methodology. Those mandates were rarely the reason people joined. The healthier organizations tended to define the outcome they wanted and let engineers choose the tools, provided the results justified the choice.

I wouldn't be surprised if AI ends up following the same pattern.

Yes we have seen this shift but to be more clear devs who never used AI will be in demand soon enough as the market grows people who uses AI to develop will flood the field.

At times like that every company will be looking for developers who can build without AI assistance and people likeyou will be admired by many who used AI but now realize that was a mistake. Thousands of those AI devs will be unknown to the basics of developing they can't even solve a coding problem themselves.

Keep your morale high and you will see this happening soon and we may want to hire you in future well once we grow enough to hire high standard devs.

There certainly are places that have a “no agentic AI” policy because they don’t want code leaving the premises.

I don’t let LinkedIn bring me down, I mean the performative normality is so cringe that I don’t feel embarrassed at all to have a profile pic there wearing fox ears. On a normal social network you hear a ‘ding’ sound because somebody liked your post, LinkedIn makes a ‘ding’ whenever I post something. It has embraced A.I. slop and slop about A.I. because the average user otherwise wouldn’t post anything at all. That’s how they can tell me I’m one of the most visible users and need to be verified.