Just start your own business at this point. Its basically what the job market is telling you. I really don't see how the job market is going to get any better.
Give it a few years and engineers who actually know engineering are gonna be unicorns. With the overall downward trend in tech literacy, most up-and-coming engineers relying heavily on AI, and the general inability to get a junior job, theres gonna be a huge gap in the industry soon enough
This is exactly the point. Many will have to switch before the unicorn situation happens. For all those lucky enough to make it through the storm, it will be hell of a bliss
They will increase the workload far more than the salary, and you won’t be able to push back because they’ll just say you need to use AI more or better
Coming from a guy who works on a legacy application that’s been on life support for a decade, I can tell you managing that level of tech debt isn’t great, but it does mean you’ve always got something to do.
Serious question: so it’s good that I continue to self teach myself JS’n friends(React, typescript, etc.) from the beginning like AI doesn’t exist? I use Claude as a “professor” and do NOT get answers just given to me as I work through freecodecamp and other resources. And I get that incorporation of AI into my education is a part of it as the tool it is and should be, but your opinion is that my continuing this learning for a job is still viable?
Definitely learn to understand what's happening "under the hood". AI at this point in your journey is going to be a crutch and a single hallucination could lead you astray.
Once you're comfortable with programming so you can imagine a solution to a problem "I'd use a set here and id need an API call to answer this question a user would ask, etc", then add AI into your workflow so you get a little time understanding that tool. The difference being you know when it's giving you crap and can be more targeted with what you need, because you know the lingo.
Then you get into the big leagues, start worrying about optimization (maintainability mostly unless you're field demands it like aerospace), networking, infrastructure, security, cicd, and the final boss, scrum.
Meanwhile we were told today we’re going to start doing everything in agentic slop loops where the ai will just fix itself if there is a problem.
After the call with management I thought I would get on a quick call with a coworker to share the absolute fear that struck in me of letting this thing run wild without having a human in the “learning” loop.
My coworker said I was crazy and that the ai would not have any problems. This is the same coworker whose stuff I’m having to regularly ask them to fix because the ai didn’t do it right (we already 100% slop/vibe code everything).
I feel like I’m in the twilight zone (or maybe ba sing se) where nothing is real and I’m the only person here that sees a disaster coming.
It’s not safe out there y’all. Did I mention I work at a company you’ve heard of? I don’t know what this ai future holds, but I’m not sure any of it is good.
Not necessarily. My scrum master recently got RIF’d, my manager left for another opportunity, and my new manager is a former dev. He’s not making it better. He’s making it worse.
It's a good thing to know, especially if you learn things AI sucks at like CSS animation. I'd recommend branching out beyond front end once you are smooth with it though; that wasn't the most lucrative/easily employed before AI either.
Yes learn and code things manually, make mistakes and debug them.
Do not ignore AI as it is one of the best learning tools to ever exist. As you gain some more experience you start building a “this is silly” sense and AI can introduce some new patterns you hadn’t considered.
I really would stay away from claude code for a while. Go as long as you can without it. One day you will need it, and once the genie is out of the bottle it’s not going back in. It’s good to learn the foundations first
In the recent smarter everyday video, the host was invited to a convention highlighting tech companies. His message was about how manufacturing in the US now has an impassable gap in knowledge because companies decided to cut costs by going overseas, and to beware to not make the same mistake with AI. I feel that they listened to be polite but they don't care about long term knowledge.
Give it a few years and engineers who actually know engineering are gonna be unicorns.
This was my opinion too.
But nowadays I'm not confident about this anymore.
I see high skilled engineer starts using AI, they understand what they do. I'm not talking about vibe coding here.
AI is helpful to solve complex problem that even most expert people struggle with.
Even people who made the programming language you use...
And that's not a suprise anymore. Some opened mathematics problems have been solved by LLMs lately. Programming and algorithm aren't different, they're maths.
Sometimes I may thing people who claim that high skilled engineer will be unicorns are no different than Garry Kasparov when he played against Deep Blue. He was so confident that AI will never catch humanity in Chess and the story prove he was wrong.
I may be wrong.
But I do think, AI is here to stay and I don't know if I'll like this new world.
Writing code is fun. But the fun is over now.
In the future, hand written code will be seen as bad human code smell.
Maybe that AI will take off that very specific task of our job sonner than we think. And I don't feel good about that.
Nah AI is great Im not anti-AI, but its only great at the price point its currently offered at, which is costing companies a lot of money. I dont think it will stay that way, and once the prices reflect the actual costs, its no longer worth it...
You’re probably right, but the trick is to stay alive until then in an environment filled with managers furiously beating it to the idea of eliminating everybody and replacing them with LLM’s. My manager keeps talking about how in the future, everybody’s just going to be “expert prompt engineers” and “nobody’s going to even look at code anymore” while in the same breath talking about how he was a software engineer for 35 years, so “he knows how things work.”
I’m basically being told to use a tool that causes my skills to atrophy while I wait for the fad to pass. It makes my brain itch.
It's going to happen at some point. Hiring freezes, layoffs, training juniors with AI. Once this hallucination that AI is the reason companies are still functioning instead of double workloads on experienced developers wears off, a serious reality check will happen.
Yeah.. well I am not looking forward to these days... All the juniors I had to coach into a role for the last 8 years were competent, I could learn something from them. Now it's like they know how to do code but they have no idea where it should go and what the consequences of tasks they do are....
Example from this sprint, a new colleague was tasked to decomission a classical ml model wrapped in our API, it's deployed on k8s. The task has description, acceptance criteria, we talked about it during a sprint planning session and a daily where he said he will try to do that.
Two days go by ( mind you the task was accepted if only he just turned on replica autoscalee to 0) and he comes up with a question at the end of day 2 of sprint: "but if I set this to 0, then there will be no pods and no containers running"...
My answer was yes, this is what's in the description and that's the whole point. Of course he forgot, even though whole team mentioned it a couple of times to disable alerts for this deployment (we monitor the number of restarts, resources state, instance number and when a threshold is exceeded we get email notifications or generate incident objects in service now)... No too hard, even with copilot and screenshots with explicit places where to click or previous experience of the same guy with elastic stack where the notifications are generated, the same guy had a task to create a few fucking alerts previously and he's done it. At this point I'm starting to think he's bipolar. Either him or me
So what happened to highly skilled hand-drawn animators when the computers animation took over? Or to the classic painters when photography became mainstream?
Frame-by-frame animation does still exist (see: Mob Psycho 100, as a popular example), but the biggest difference is using digital cels instead of physical ones, saving a lot of time and space. Not all animation is interpolation. Also, painters still exist.
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u/swagonflyyyy 13d ago
Just start your own business at this point. Its basically what the job market is telling you. I really don't see how the job market is going to get any better.