u/jmclondon97

If you are a 30-45 year old software engineer, what the fuck are you supposed to even do to make sure you stay employed?

I’m 36, only 4 years of experience (career switcher with a CS degree from working in restaurants).

I’m in debt, don’t have any money saved or invested. I didn’t worry that much before about money because I figured I’d get a high paying dev job at some point and make a lot for at least 15-20 years.

And now I can’t even focus on leetcoding to try and get a better paying job because it all feels so fucking pointless. Like even if I get a high paying job, there’s no way software engineers are needed in large numbers in 5 years or less.

Like what the fuck can I even do to make sure I don’t go homeless? I’m honestly freaking out because these models are getting insanely good and much faster than I think most people anticipated.

People will say shit like “oh well you still need to know architecture blah blah” or “oh it’s too expensive” and I really don’t think you either are even true today, let alone in a couple years. It’s mainly people trying to delude themselves into thinking their jobs are safe but they’re not safe at all.

How do you push on to keep learning and spending time programming if it is increasingly looking like AI is going to take over the majority of SWE jobs?

Especially if you’re in your 30s now and don’t have time to waste

I’m legit losing sleep and can’t focus at work

I’m a dev with a CS degree and 4 years experience at a F500 company.

I was laid off 8 months ago and have not landed and offer in over 800 applications.

Most of my professional experience was in Java, spring boot, and angular at the insurance company I worked for.

I have no money left. My unemployment runs out this month. I don’t know what to do.

Looks like my only option is to give up on this field and become a mail carrier for USPS.

I’m going to be going from $75k a year to $20 an hour and flushing my degree down the toilet. I hate this timeline so much.

Anyone else here follow a similar path?

I’m a software developer with 4 yoe. When I landed my first dev job, I was bright eyed and thought I finally had my foot in the door to an amazing career. I had finally made it after working in restaurants for 14 years.

Well, it’s all going to shit now because of AI. Companies are downsizing. People that get laid off are reporting not being able to get a job for over a year before giving up.

AI is rapidly improving. Just last year Claude Code was brand new and made tons of mistakes. Now, it’s outputting working code the vast majority of the time.

All those years learning coding are now worth next to nothing. We’re in our last years of having tech careers and it’s looking like software devs are going the way of the dodo.

So how the fuck are you all staying sane? There’s nothing to just skill up to because AI is taking over more skills by the day. By the time you master something, AI can do it way faster than you.

Don’t give me the cope “oh it’s too expensive”, “oh it can’t count r’s in strawberry”, or whatever other dumb argument you want to repeat for the 1000th time.

How are you not panicking and keeping your sanity? I’m only getting like 5-6 hours a sleep now because I’m legit terrified, and there’s nothing any of us can do about it.

Seriously, why? I know the numbers have ticked down slightly this year, but these are still two of the most popular majors. Do people not understand that AI is going to take over 80%+ of jobs in this field? Are they just sticking their fingers in their ears and thinking it’s still the late 2010s?

And don’t give me “oh it’s not good enough”. Yes it is. Stop it. I’m a software engineer with 5 years of experience. And it is only getting better.

This career is going to see massive layoffs like we’ve never seen over the next 3-5 years

I struggle with this so much. I want to wear my new true blues but I know when I do they’ll never be brand new again.

I do buy them to wear them, but man after looking at my 2011 true blues and all the dirt stains, paint chipping, etc it makes me sad and I don’t want that to happen to my 2026s

If even Prime has gone team AI, that has to be one of the final nails in the coffin.

We’re going to see absolutely massive engineer layoffs over the next 1-2 years.

What is your career plan now if you’re still nowhere near financial freedom?

I’m literally freaking out right now because I have tens of thousands in debt and work paycheck to paycheck. I’ll go homeless if we’re done. I don’t even have a car and I can’t get one because my finances are screwed (thanks sports gambling!) so getting a different career is impossible

I work for a big US company with thousands of employees. I’m a software developer.

My boss has been promising me that I was going to get promoted for at least the last year. They still have me as a junior when I have 4 years experience, all with them. My senior engineer says I should’ve been promoted at least a year ago and I’m operating above my level.

About two weeks ago an email goes out that another dev on a different team is getting promoted from junior. He has two years experience. I onboarded him. I’ve done substantially more than him. I’ve mentored new hires (including him), led projects, and worked oncall rotations for the last 3 years.
He has done a single oncall rotation and has never led any projects nor mentored anyone. I ask my boss how this happened and he said he doesn’t know, he was as caught off guard as me as this other dev is on a different team. He said he’d check with his boss (my skip). He said he basically told me to not worry about other people. Lol.

Well, our oncall dev just started his 24/7 oncall rotation this week and out of nowhere announced he was going on extended leave.

My boss had the audacity to call me and ask if I would cover his oncall week. Mind you, this is no small ask. Our oncall rotations suck major ass. They’re a week straight from 5pm-8am with multiple alerts waking you in the middle of the night. Did I mention that I’ve done like 16 oncall rotations and the guy that got promoted me with half my experience that I trained has only done a single oncall rotation?

I told my boss no, I’m busy this week. Maybe they can ask the kid they promoted.

Oh yeah, and I’m getting paid a measly $75k with 4 YOE in America.

Am I the asshole?

Why do people on this sub sit here and fight over “oh AI isn’t good”, “AI is too expensive”, “it can’t code on large codebases”, blah blah blah.

Bro, seriously who cares? Give it up and go do a career where you’re actually needed. Business owners are making it extremely obvious that they don’t value you and WANT you gone, but people keep trying to convince otherwise.

It’s like watching a guy beg his girlfriend to keep him when she’s clearly no longer interested. It’s pathetic.

Just learn a new career

I’m a 36 year old software developer. I only have 4 years experience as I got my CS degree at 32 after working in restaurants since I was a teenager.

I don’t make much ($75k) as I work for a large US insurance company. I also live paycheck to paycheck as I try to pay down $50k of high interest debt I accrued due to a sports gambling addiction. I have no car and split rent with my mother. I know, I’m a loser and it’s embarrassing.

I literally lose sleep and am in a constant state of anxiety because I’m terrified my career will be taken over by AI. Every new model that comes out is more and more capable. The narrative has switched from “AI sucks at coding” to “AI is good at coding but it’s too expensive”, which I don’t think is going to hold up as a valid critique over the next couple years.

What do I do to give myself the best chance of financial security? Do I stick it out and really deep dive into becoming the best developer I can be even though it may be all for nothing if AI wipes out millions of jobs? Or do I try to find a way to pivot to another career, which I don’t really know is possible for the foreseeable future as I have no money, tons of debt, live paycheck to paycheck and have no car?

Please help me. If I don’t figure out what to do the stress may literally kill me before I turn 50

Hello all.

I’m coming to you as a 36 year old developer with 4 years of experience (I was a career switcher from working in restaurants and finished CS degree at 32).

From the management side, what is the likelihood of software engineers staying employed (specifically in the US) over the next 5-10 years?

Are you all/those above you planning on cutting a large portion of us?

I’m in financial distress and behind in life as a mid 30s with only a few years experience, and I don’t know if I should continue to hone my skills as a dev or if that will just be a waste of time because we’re all going to be replaced by the time I’m 40-45.

Would spending hours and hours improving my skills as a dev be all for nothing and I should look to nursing school or something before I’m too old?

The large, US insurance company I work for uses AI agents through gitlab. It’s called Gitlab Duo Agent, it’s similar in ways to Claude Code but it has access to all your repos, does code reviews etc.

Last week, the company sent out a notice to everyone that we were out of tokens until July lmao. People were obviously pissed.

Well today we got another email saying that when we do get our tokens back on July 1st, we must be more mindful of our usage, and we are being limited on an individual basis. The best part is they said we should basically never choose Opus because it’s too expensive and we should use Haiku first, and if that doesn’t help then we can use Sonnet.

I laughed for like 5 minutes straight after reading that. Who the fuck uses Haiku as a professional developer?

TLDR- real, billion dollar US companies are having massive issues with token costs

How much longer do you think before we see mass layoffs of devs?

How many employed devs do you think the US has in 5 years? In 10? 20?

And if you’re under 35, do you think you’ll make it as a dev to retirement age (60+)?