I was just reading this book and I came across this question. It really made me think. So I started asking around to my friends, seniors, and professors to get their insights.

One answer that I got from my professor really worried me. He said that only those who know about "agentic AI" ( AI which does heavy duty stuff on its own) will get anywhere in the current market. He feels that Software engineering will die out within 5 years and only machine learning would have job security.

I have been learning Rust for the last 1 year. I will not lie the consistency of my learning at first was bad and was not really putting in 8 hrs a day but now I am slowly changing it. I took up Rust though it had a high learning curve because I see the growing job opportunities for Engineers who are trying to migrate their existing C++ or Go systems to Rust for better performance. My ultimate goal would be to take up senior migration roles which generally require 3-5 years of experience. But currently I want to build backends and want to get a job as a fresher in Rust to gain experience and put a foot in the door.

>But this was the challenge thrown to me by my professor. He asked "So you will become a good Rust developer and you migrate a repository. What do you do after that".

I was quiet then. I knew that my professor was correct. In established companies, they would just have to migrate the code once. So essentially my job would be done at that time. My professor then mentioned that in a few years the AI would have the capability to monitor the system find the bugs and even fix it on its own and at that time I had absolutely no answer.

After thinking a lot about the conversation two things struck me

1. I heard that developers are rewriting the Machine learning libraries into Rust to get a great performance boost.

2. With CUDA support for Rust available, I can work on creating libraries for highly computationally intensive workloads on a GPU.

I took these points to my professor and since my degree is in AI/ML he was convinced that it is a great plan. He said that if I continue building ML libraries in Rust and utilizing the GPU to maximize performance, I will have a great future. He said that today the industry is turning towards Senior developers acting as Architects who will then use the AI to write actual code and all the developers will have to do is test the code.

So I think this is what my future looks like now. The market is indeed turning drastically and we are seeing lots of layoffs due to AI. However I feel that by building libraries and maybe building models, I might be safe for the future.

What do you all think? What is that ONE skill which will have the most positive impact on my career in the near future? I am a bit confused and need guidance.

hi

after my college i started a job but it is a 5 people agency and no documention just my salary at the end and a email offer letter!

no pf no tax etc.

i am not in tax bracket right now but should i keep working at that agency? just been 2 months? is it good for future?

i am owning a product facing clients learning a lot of things but is it professionally good?

Hey everyone,

I’m a college student and I need to pick my track this year, and I’m honestly stuck between Software Engineering, AI, and Cybersecurity.

I get the basic idea of each one:

• SWE = building apps, websites, systems, writing production code
• AI/ML = working with data, models, “intelligent” systems, etc.
• Cybersec = protecting systems, hacking (ethically), finding vulnerabilities

But I feel like the real differences only show up once you’re actually working in the field.

So I wanted to ask people actually in these areas:

• What does your day-to-day really look like?
• Which one is more enjoyable long-term (in your opinion)?
• What skills i need in each filed ?
• How to choose between them?
• How easy is it to switch between these later if I change my mind?
• And if you were starting over, would you still pick the same thing?

I want to choose software engineering, because i really like to build (Apps, websites, backends ...etc), but i want to know the real differences between these specializations, and what you do in each of them

I like coding and problem-solving in general, but I don’t want to pick something just based on hype or salary posts.

Would really appreciate honest opinions (even if it’s “don’t choose AI unless you love math” type advice).

Thanks 🙏

I am in a management role at a fairly large tech company. I like the product, the company, the people, I’m paid well and have job security. However, I absolutely can’t stomach how much the quality has gone down since AI. Code is awful ai-generated slop, there’s infinitely more docs & PRs than there used to be and it takes me 10x as long to digest them because of all of the added cruft, I can’t trust anything that anyone on my team tells me because I don’t know if they applied any critical thinking or are just repeating what Claude told them.

I have an overwhelming fear that bad things are going to come from this — major outages, data leaks, or something. And that I should get myself out before it happens and the job gets even worse.

I'll be honest, I think most of us know this is inevitable at this point. We're already seeing the early waves: layoffs framed as "agentic reshaping," headcount freezes, companies quietly replacing junior roles with AI pipelines. The writing is on the wall.

I've been trying to get ahead of it. I've experimented with content creation, built a fee apps, tried to spin something up on the side, nothing has stuck yet. No passive income, no breakout product. Still very much dependent on my engineering salary.

So I'm genuinely curious: what's your plan?

Are you doubling down on skills you think AI can't touch? Pivoting to a different field entirely? Just saving aggressively and hoping for the best? Or have you actually found something that's working outside of a traditional SWE job?

Not looking for "learn prompt engineering lol" takes. I want to hear from people who are actually thinking seriously about this, especially those who've already started making moves.

I’m planning to do my bachelor’s in Germany and I genuinely enjoy building tech stuff, especially visual/creative things like apps, websites, interfaces , interactive stuff etc. I like the idea of actually creating products people can use, not just sitting and memorizing theory all day.

But seeing everyone say “AI will replace programmers” is making me question if investing so much into a CS degree is even worth it anymore.

By the time I graduate, will there even be jobs for junior developers or will AI do most of the work?

Need realistic opinions

If you're not familiar with the term, T-Shaped Engineer is someone who has surface level knowledge of a lot of domains but specializes in only one.

I've had an argument with my coworker. The company we work for makes a lot of stupid decisions. We both have different opinions on it and I want to know what the expectation in the industry is.

He says, "when someone comes to you with a request, you must first understand why they need it, and how it helps the business. You should question them and try to architect your solution in a way that causes less work for you in the future."

I say, "I'm a software engineer. Analysing business needs and validating strategy is neither something I'm qualified nor responsible for. I just build what the stakeholder wants me to build."

I want to know what the standard for a software engineer is. I'm stuck at L1 for 6 years and my coworkers say that this might be the reason.

Note: I think I am T shaped, I have general knowledge of many technical domains. But I don't know much about running a business or what a business needs.

We all know how hard it is to get a job. I think that like all problems, sometimes the problem is just a distribution problem. With jobs, it's the same. You have to be an early applicant, and you have to apply nonstop, until you get an offer. This is hard to do as a human, because we get focused on a particular job - so we stop applying, or we get discouraged - and we stop applying. Thus, we can solve this problem by using a bot. ​​

Hey everyone,

I’m about to graduate with a degree in Biochemistry & Molecular Biology and originally planned on going to medical school. Over the past year though, I’ve been pretty burned out on that path and started seriously considering pivoting into tech — specifically software engineering.

I’ve realized I’ve always had a quiet interest in coding/tech, but never fully explored it. My only real exposure so far has been taking a computational modeling class, so I’m basically still a beginner.

I’ve been talking to a few people in the field and getting mixed advice:

Some say my science/problem-solving background can transfer well
Others say the market is tough even for CS grads right now

So I’m trying to be realistic and intentional before committing.

Right now I’m:
Starting to learn JavaScript
Planning to build a few small projects to see if I actually enjoy it
Attending intro software dev events / networking with SWE grads

I guess my main questions are:
How realistic is it to break into SWE without a CS degree in 2026?
Would you recommend self-teaching vs going back for something like a Master’s (CS or related)?
What should my first 3–6 months actually look like if I’m serious about this pivot?
At what point did you personally know SWE was right for you?

I’m not expecting this to be easy — just trying to figure out the smartest way to approach this transition without wasting time.
and would also love love love to have a one on one with anyone willing to help and share their insights!

We are a medium sized company. Over 3 years ago, we hired our very first full time software developer. We had several different engineers who had developed some software from time to time but never a dedicated person for it and not anyone with a CS degree. We now have someone full time. He has been working on one single project for over 3 years (updating an existing python 2 application to python 3, adding LDAP integration instead of user logins). He refuses to ever give timelines on anything at all. If you look at his activity in our gitlab server it shows he has made changes maybe 10 days out of the last year. This seems absolutely crazy to me but if I bring it up to anyone else, they act like it's totally normal. I'm not crazy, right?

I’m sure there have been thousands of posts on AI, but I want to share a perspective I’ve been chewing on lately. I’ve been in web dev for nearly a decade, but after taking voluntary redundancy, I decided to take a break and do some construction work with my dad.

Being away from the screen has made me look at the industry differently. I’ve seen the trends—especially on the frontend—and I’ve felt for a while that the "specialist frontend dev" is a dying breed. You have to know the full stack and the internals now just to keep up.

But AI is the real elephant in the room. In my last team, we used it to automate a massive chunk of our workflow. My take is that we used to be rewarded for knowing syntax and memorizing libraries, but that value is evaporating. Tools like Claude are doing the heavy lifting now. It makes a single dev so productive that they can match the output of an entire traditional team.

This is where I struggle: if the goalposts have moved from "writing code" to "solving problems," how many problem solvers does one company actually need?

My last role was at a large org with a complex microservices setup and tons of engineers. Even for a massive e-commerce site, I don’t see how that many people can efficiently solve problems for a single product when AI is handling the grunt work.

It feels like a "too many cooks in the kitchen" situation. If you have Lead and Principal engineers making the big architectural calls, what happens to the army of devs who used to do the implementation?

I don’t think the current headcount at most big tech companies is sustainable long-term or at least doesn't make sense to as you would be churning through the work at a pace and the product owners etc wouldn't be able to keep up and have a snow ball effect.

I predict we’re heading toward a world with far fewer roles. The roles that remain will likely be highly compensated, but the barrier to entry is going to be through the roof.

Curious to hear what others think—especially those in big orgs. Are we just looking at massive "skeleton crews" of high-level engineers from here on out?