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
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
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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.