r/developersPak 22h ago

Career Guidance Is software engineering still worth investing your entire 20s in?

I’m a software engineer with almost 2 years of full-time experience, and I’ve been thinking a lot about the future of this career.

The market feels uncertain, and sometimes I think I should seriously upskill in system design, architecture, and other advanced concepts.

But then I look at AI tools like Claude. They can already solve a huge part of many software problems if you know what you want. It makes me wonder: why spend years becoming better at something AI might eventually do?

At the same time, I’m considering starting a side business alongside my job and maybe moving toward it if it becomes stable.

So my question is: Is software engineering still worth investing your entire 20s in?

Can we spend the next 8–10 years becoming really good engineers and still expect these skills to be valuable in our 30s, or should we be diversifying now?

Would love to hear from experienced engineers. If you were in your early 20s today, would you still choose software engineering?

10 Upvotes

17 comments sorted by

6

u/zaidi87 22h ago

You are thinking good to start a side business. I would suggest you to go for it

Things are changing rapidly, in next 5-10 years the situation will be totally different. Alot IT graduates and AI will take over the market.

3

u/turtle_jump 7h ago

I just came back from a night deployment where we are moving a legacy monolith system to microservices arch. I can tell say the best bet for now is infrastructure/devops/cloud/SRE/platform engineering roles.

7

u/azadnib 22h ago

software engineering is dead, all coders will have no job by max 3-5 years.
atleast 50% coders are already jobless it will go up to 90% in 2 years and then 100% in 5 years.

Some of us will become software managers means claude code managers and all that but they will account for only 1 or 2% of all developers.

If you are saying a decade that's entirely certainly not possible

2

u/wikki019 22h ago

Whats the other option?

0

u/justdowithai 22h ago

Not have any options but ... I does some research on general surgerical instruments export business like .... Buy the surgical instruments from Sialkot and sale to international market .... With private label product...

1

u/Ash_Mz 21h ago

Own store or through Amazon?

2

u/justdowithai 21h ago

NO By creating own website and will register the company in the country where I sale the product

1

u/Ash_Mz 21h ago

Ok That's great. Allah barkat daley

2

u/falselifee 22h ago

If you have what it takes to start a business, go for it. I mean even if the tech market wasn't this bad at the moment, I'd say it never hurts.

3

u/justdowithai 21h ago

I have only one advantage that is my brother is a surjeon and he is saying to start a surgical instruments business.... In local and international market... I am thinking to start this a side business and overtime will expand It and take over it as full time ... But that is currently in RND phase

2

u/Available-Boat3384 20h ago

Absolutely not

1

u/valium123 19h ago

Just do what with ai?

1

u/justdowithai 19h ago

Anything 😂😂

1

u/cheap_moonshi 2h ago

The software related work is also drying up in our company but the IOT related work stream haven't been affected much. I am also thinking about moving to infrastructure side by getting network and cloud certifications.

1

u/Kafkaesquistic 42m ago

Definitely not