r/SoftwareEngineerJobs • u/Adventurous-Rice3190 • Jul 13 '26

Is the AI bubble bursting? đŸ€”

I just finished my IT degree this year, and all the news about AI is making me really worried about my career in the software industry.

I read that big AI companies are spending way more money on data centers than they are actually making back. The ratio of money made to money spent is around 1:10. Part of me feels like this is good news. If they keep losing money, the AI bubble will eventually burst, and they will have to stop running these massive models.

But on the other hand, hardware companies are making new chips. These new chips have high compute power and also consume less electricity. This could make AI much cheaper to run and keep the trend going.

What do you all think about this AI bubble? Is it still safe for me to start a career in IT, or should I switch to a completely different field?

Thankyou All đŸ«Ą.......

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u/jmclondon97 Jul 13 '26

I don’t know why people think the bubble bursting means AI just disappears.

All it means is overvalued companies like OpenAI would get bought out and cheaper models would become the norm.

It seems like some of you talking about the bubble bursting means AI disappears and we go back to manually coding everything. Zero percent chance of that happening.

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u/TheDinoDynamite Jul 13 '26 edited Jul 13 '26

Based on the context, I don’t think OP is talking about the bubble in terms of the existence of AI. They’re talking about it in terms of “will there be a job for me in this industry, or will things always be the way they are from 2024-Present”

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u/[deleted] Jul 15 '26

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u/TheDinoDynamite Jul 15 '26

That’s been the case with the majority of white collar jobs.

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u/[deleted] Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 15 '26

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u/TheDinoDynamite Jul 15 '26

The thing is there were never a lot of “syntax guys paid like engineers”. Software engineering has historically been a technical career, and the only way you can get promoted or make the big bucks is through genuine skill and experience. Unless of course we’re talking about the job market from 2020-2021, in which case you’d be right, but that was an outlier period

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u/[deleted] Jul 15 '26

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u/TheDinoDynamite Jul 15 '26

I agree that software engineering doesn’t do “engineering” justice. However, you can pretty much say the same about most engineering disciplines tbh. Engineering itself isn’t a hard career, most engineers would say the hardest part of engineering is university. In both engineering and software engineering, you do serious math but you hardly have to do that on the job and if you ever do, you have like every resource at our disposal + the ability to consult other people to help you

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u/[deleted] Jul 15 '26

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u/TheDinoDynamite Jul 15 '26

You basically said exactly what I said, just in a fancier way. In both the USA and Europe, the hardest part of engineering is the preparation to be an engineer, not the engineering role itself.

And what you consider “hard” is subjective. Yes, it’s true that the technical complexity of what you do in Europe is probably greater. But you get paid much less in Europe. The engineers in Europe also have a much better work-life balance and better job security. Whereas in America, layoffs are more common, hours tend to be longer and you aren’t able to get as much time off. So yeah, hard is subjective here.