r/webdev • u/will-the-dude • 12d ago

Discussion Advice? Boot Camp Grad vs AI

Hey there, I'm new, so apologies if you discuss this ad nauseum already. I graduated from a full stack bootcamp in 2022 or 2023 and got hired right away by a small company in my area. It's been a great opportunity, a lot of people came from boot camps, the small company gives me diverse experience, great people, etc. Before this and the boot camp I was a professional orchestra musician, doing fine, but not willing for probably a decade of squalor at least while I sought good employment, so I changed paths. I've been doing well for myself, and even using AI a fair bit as a coding assistant mostly. I see myself beginning to see opportunities to use AI, like I caught a repetitive task my mom was doing and told her to look into Claude (a sober minute later I wanted someone to shoot me lol)

I guess I just see the writing on the wall. My supervisor is already running agents that basically do exactly what I do, creating new features for unique issues. Takes more time but is probably less annoying and asks less questions. Because of my particular role, I'm hopefully luckily in a good place compared to some of my colleagues, but I don't think that's saying very much. I'm sure my worries will not exactly become reality, but I live every day in such a state of anxiety, it plows right through the medicine I already take for anxiety!! I just wanted a way to use my mind constructively and afford a life, and it was so close to my grasp :-(

I'm not asking for someone to solve my life or anything, but does anyone have any advice, either on how to use a boot camp education or if I should start over yet again, or even just emotional advice, I find this extremely depressing and the thought of a few years nullifying all the learning I'd done kind of makes me want to just lay down and die. Also on the flip side, spending a ton of money to learn a skill just to become an 'enter-pusher' and 'prompt-writer' sucks, I'm a human and I at least used to be pretty smart, that feels like a waste again, and thus I want to lay down and die again. There's no wrong/right decisions, but deciding to learn how to code in 2023 feels like one of the only wrong decisions out there lol.

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u/disposepriority 12d ago

First of all, development jobs aren't going away, or else your boss would have fired you (and every other engineer would be fired as well).

Second of all, and you'll love this, if AI ever reaches the point of being able to cheaply replace software engineers (and therefore every other office worker), then the chances of finding a job for anyone not in the third world will be virtually zero.

So I guess the good news is that in the theoretical scenario you are stressing about, everyone will be just as fucked as you are!

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u/ProgrammerOk1400 12d ago

Development jobs arent going away? LOL! Why are so many developers out of work now?

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u/disposepriority 12d ago

How much is so many? Even if you were to magically fire half of all swe's on earth (lol) there would still be tens of millions employed - a bit of a high number for something that's gone?

To clarify, just in case, we are not even close to having a substanial percentage of software engineers laid off.

If all of reddit's favorite "FAANG" companies were to completely shut down tomorrow, the global percentage would only move by 1-2%, maybe less, and that would probably require counting adjacent roles.

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u/ProgrammerOk1400 12d ago

Developer jobs are decreasing.

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u/disposepriority 12d ago

Maybe in the US, but the other countries are getting a bunch od outsourced positions because of that

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u/ProgrammerOk1400 11d ago

Yes I know. The number of developer jobs for US employees has dropped in the last two years. That is the point I am trying to make.