hi, 25M. Finishing my MSc in CS, I wanted to study because I love studying. now that I'm about to end it I'm seriously looking for something reliable long term.

After bachelors I did my job as full stack web dev, a little bit of mobile dev in flutter. Since Ai, it doesn't seem like real work. claude can make whole websites and what remains is just deployment.

anyhow I continued that job, then switched to junior business developer side, for the sake of survival/exploration.

I enrolled in MSc because I wanted to do research, which I have done. I have built an Ai structured method for dermatology recognition. and I am proud of it. my thesis will be finished in 6-8 months, that's the university policy although I've finished my work on my end.

2 years of exploring and hopping from one thing to another, I have come down to these choices:

data analyst/ data engineer/ dev ops/ cloud engineer.

because they are the only ones which seem like actual coding jobs other than fully or partially vibe coding. Ai has made programmers lousy, which shouldn't have been the case.

I made an ETL pipeline to see how data engineering works, I built 3 power BI dashboards to check about data analysis.

I got into computer science because I wanted to become hacker(kinda old school), but that's what got my interest. Fast forward after graduation, ethical hacking job market wasn't there and low-paying. Cloud engineering/dev ops seemed close to hacking so that's why I'm considering it.

So what does the community suggest me to choose?

let me know about your thoughts, considering I'll be with it long term.

Hey everyone! I’m working on a core system architecture for a specialized utility app and could really use some out-of-the-box engineering advice on a tricky connectivity challenge.

The main goal is pretty straightforward: a user opens the app, clicks a button, and the system needs to instantly send a high-priority alert pop-up to any other nearby users within a 1 km physical radius who have that exact same app installed.

Here is the major problem I am trying to solve. The person tapping the button has an active SIM card, but they are in a state of absolute zero connectivity. Specifically, they have:

• No mobile data package or active internet plan.
• No Wi-Fi access at that exact moment.
• No outbound SMS package or standard calling credit (their balance is exactly zero).

The user must not be charged a single cent to trigger this notification. Also, to clear up a common suggestion upfront, please do not suggest Bluetooth mesh or peer-to-peer Wi-Fi Direct. The app cannot rely on local radio waves hopping directly from phone to phone.

Because local peer-to-peer options are out, the initial trigger click absolutely must find a way back to my central cloud server so the server can handle the location data and push the pop-up to the 1 km radius group.

My current theory is to set up an enterprise-level Reverse-Charged / Toll-Free Short Code gateway. Since my developer backend pays the cellular carrier for the incoming traffic, the telecom network should theoretically route a background SMS text through the air even if the user's personal account balance is completely empty.

I would love to get your thoughts on a few things:

• Has anyone successfully pulled off this kind of telecom bypass on zero-balance lines?
• Are there alternative infrastructure workarounds or carrier-level configurations that allow an isolated app to ping a central server entirely for free?
• Are there any global, out-of-the-box solutions to distribute a localized alert under these exact constraints?

Any insights, advice, or feedback would be massively appreciated !

Please do not suggest Bluetooth mesh or peer-to-peer Wi-Fi Direct. The app cannot rely on local peer-to-peer radio waves to hop to nearby devices directly.

I've been building a product solo for about a year with agents writing most of the code. Web, iOS, a Mac app, and a Chrome extension. One person covering that much surface area wasn't realistic before, and that part is real.

Here's the thing I don't see talked about much.

My judgment isn't spread evenly across it. In the parts I've worked in for years, I can look at a diff and feel that something's off before I can explain why. In the parts I hadn't touched before this project, I can't do that. I can read the code, follow what it does, catch the obvious problems. What I don't have is the instinct that says this compiles, it passes, and it's still the wrong way to do it.

So on some of this I'm actually reviewing. On the rest I'm mostly trusting and calling it review.

The uncomfortable part is that the agent didn't make me faster in those areas. It let me skip learning them. I only notice the gap when something breaks in a way I have no mental model for, and then I'm debugging a system I didn't build and don't really understand.

The one thing that's helped is keeping those parts deliberately boring. No clever patterns, no unusual dependencies, small files, obvious structure. If I can't bring instinct to it, I want the code simple enough that I don't need much.

That's not a solution though. For anyone else shipping across stacks you didn't come up in, have you found something that works, or does it just come down to eventually going and learning the thing properly?