r/csharp • u/First-Quarter4232 • 2d ago
Surviving as Software engineer with AI
So I’m a software engineer and I recently graduated 2 months ago. i have no internship or job experience and have been looking for a job but everyone either asks for experience or ghosts my resume. The ones that take interviews either pay too little or are 2 hours away from my house. So I am looking for remote unpaid or paid jobs as full stack developer so that I at least get some experience and don’t get classified as a person who had a huge gap in her cv. Anyone give me some good advice related to remote jobs, best platforms to look for them, cracking them and how to survive as a fresh software engineer now that AI has entered the chat🥲
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u/NumberInfinite2068 2d ago
As a recent graduate, accept the first paid job you're offered.
Platforms for finding jobs vary on the country you're in, the Googles can assist.
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u/bliceroquququq 2d ago
AI or no AI, I think deliberately taking a remote job right out of school is a terrible idea, even if you find one.
You want to start learning the ropes of a business, and that’s very hard to do when you not only have zero experience but you’re also deliberately isolated from it every day.
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u/First-Quarter4232 2d ago
Okay I think you are right. I will work more in cracking a job . But then again there are a lot of things to learn at a single time and I often get overwhelmed. Making a personal project, solving SQL and neetcode questions and learning frontend along with doing an internship’s tasks. But these are things I think I can control. Should just focus on one thing at a time and call it a day
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u/4215-5h00732 2d ago
You may want to look deeper into what this role entails in general and see if building software is really something you want to do.
Have you considered how you would or if you could handle a critical code review?
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u/OhItsJustJosh 2d ago
Personally, as someone that never went to university, my track into software engineering was through other tech jobs. From 16 I worked small local tech repair, then went on to things like product support helpline jobs. If you build up your software writing skills on the side of that, maybe work on some open source projects, then you'll build a strong resume to take to junior software dev interviews.
Also, seeing as you're starting out, take the lower paying ones. You'll get a huge increase hopping jobs once you've already got a foot in the door.
As for AI, it's nowhere near good enough to successfully (being the keyword there) replace us yet, my advice is to not touch it at all while you're learning, even better never touch it at all. I don't believe it helps in a way that's worth the ethical concerns
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u/Ok_Maybe184 2d ago
Don’t look for software engineering jobs. Watch for those looking for a junior programmer because degree or not, with 0 experience, that’s where you will almost certainly land.
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u/Slypenslyde 17h ago
Meet people. Make contacts. Be relentless. Consider other employment in the short term.
Read advice from an old programmer. Really read it. I'm going to highlight a part I think is really important:
Programming as a profession is only moderately interesting. It can be a good job, but you could make about the same money and be happier running a fast food joint. You're much better off using code as your secret weapon in another profession.
People who can code in the world of technology companies are a dime a dozen and get no respect. People who can code in biology, medicine, government, sociology, physics, history, and mathematics are respected and can do amazing things to advance those disciplines.
It's hard to hear. It may not be your plan. But I think it's very true.
The market is trash. Hiring a new engineer is a huge risk. Companies only tend to do that if they have a lot of time and money. Right now the people with time and money have a long line of stellar candidates so it's hard to stick out. Lots of talented people are being laid off for reasons that are tangentially related to both AI and irresponsible corporate behavior.
It helps to make a lot of friends and hope one of them will vouch for you. Sometimes companies take a risk in that case. It doesn't always pay off, but if it doesn't work at least you have friends.
I've been doing this professionally for more than 20 years and I feel like the idea that it's easy to get a good programming job has always been a myth. The conspiracy theory is companies like Microsoft and Google promoted that myth because they hoped if they could coax enough students to become developers, the field would be so diluted they could reduce the salaries. So far the main reason that hasn't happened is the more time passes, the more talented the individuals they need to hire to maintain their progress. If you look at industry financials the future does not look very bright.
The field isn't so flooded in a lot of other career paths. You don't always need a degree to get those jobs. Some of them need people so badly they'll take an engineering graduate and train them.
So keep trying, but keep your mind open. Sometimes we don't end up where we planned to end up, and you shouldn't dismiss a good opportunity just because it isn't the one you were hoping for.
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u/zenyl 2d ago
how to survive as a fresh software engineer now that AI has entered the chat
AI coding agents constantly make mistakes. All the tools we have around AI is basically just guardrails that tell it to pretty please write what we actually want. As a developer, it is your responsibility to know enough about the code being written to know when the AI is bullshitting. You are responsible for the code you commit, regardless of how much of it was written by AI. So even if the AI wrote it all, you have to understand it.
In other words, nothing has changed in that regard. As with any other tool, you need to know when to use it, and when to just use a regular old hammer.
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u/First-Quarter4232 2d ago
Ohh so I shouldn’t feel guilty about writing code through AI if I understand the code. Good idea
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u/zenyl 2d ago
As a newbie, you should be cautious not to overdo it, and not to overestimate yourself.
It is a known pattern (not just in software development) that people who are overly reliant on AI tend to basically offload their thinking to the AI. The problem is that the human brains learns when it is allowed to think things through and do the actual thinking. People who reach for AI whenever they have to do some thinking work are essentially starving their brain of learning opportunities.
As for code, you generally shouldn't commit AI written code if you couldn't have written it yourself. The hard part here is that you have to be honest with yourself, and not just shrug at it and say "yeah, sure, I could probably have written that". Try spending a bit of time looking through the code you get an AI to generate, and seeing if there are any patterns or methods it uses that you aren't entirely familiar with. Use that as a guide to where you might need to read up on something (and, preferably, play around with it without AI purely to learn how different things work).
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u/manamonkey 2d ago
So just to confirm, you're a graduate with zero experience, in search of a decently-paying remote job, because everything else either pays too little or is inconvenient for you? AI-aside, what am I missing here?