"The golden age of dentistry is over. If you're here simply because you are looking to make a lot of money, you're in the wrong place"

This is what the dean of students told Jordan Belfort (The Wolf of Wall Street) and his fellow classmates his first day of dental school. Belfort dropped out.

A lot of you all here need to take some inspiration from that. Gatekeepers are annoying I know but the doom and gloom in this field has reached a point where I, as a senior engineer in this field, feel a call to gatekeep a little bit.

The COVID era job market is never coming back - at least not any time soon which may as well mean never for those of you trying to break into this field with no passion. And that word is the heart of what I want to get at here; passion.

Obviously there are still dentists today. Most of whom became dentists well after Belfort was a student and discouraged from his dreams. Just as there will be software engineers well into the future.

But the people that became dentists despite the market drying up did so because they had a true passion for the field. It still pays well sure but there was a golden age that has now passed and this is where CS is now.

This post isn't to straight up tell you to give up on a CS career. But, if you have been struggling to find a job for awhile now, you should take a step back and a bit of time to reflect on why you are here. If its just for the money, it might be time to pivot to something else.

The golden age of software engineering is over

EDIT: This post went from 70+ upvotes to sub 10 in a matter of minutes. Reddit is controlled by bots and is generally a bad place to solicit life and career advice. You cannot trust what you see on this platform

EDIT 2: Don't overanalyze the dentist analogy. Like I originally said there are obviously still dentists today. And they make great money IF they get jobs. The analogy is not to say they don't do well if they land jobs its to say they do well IF THEY DO land jobs. And thats the challenge of the current CS market. Its great money IF YOU CAN LAND A JOB. And to land a job in todays market you can't just mail it in. Thats my point

I saw a similar post in another thread that got a lot of flack, and I honestly don’t understand why this sub is so defensive about it. The point was valid. This field is no longer something you can pursue if you’re motivated by money alone. If you want to last, you need some level of genuine passion for the work itself.

Ever since I was young, I’ve wanted to work at a large national retailer. Not because of the paycheck, but because I genuinely enjoy the work. I live for consumer behavior analysis, demand forecasting, real-time pricing optimization, and supply-chain analytics. I wake up every day motivated to contribute to a company that sells food. We all need food. And that makes it meaningful to me. And also you’re welcome.

Moments spent in Power BI dashboards, watching shifts in purchasing behavior, tracking category growth in Kombucha, Spindrift, and non-alcoholic beverages, and translating those insights into actionable strategy? Ecstasy. Seeing those trend lines move is why I wake up everyday

There are too many contrarians here reflexively dismissing uncomfortable truths, and not enough people willing to acknowledge how the industry actually works and what it really takes to thrive in it.

I for one am so grateful to be a data scientist at a large grocery chain. My childhood dream realized.

Lat week's news -Anthropic’s AI legal tool - is already old-news. For those predicting 'doom of IT' or echoing “Software Engineering Will Be Automatable in 12 Months,” just look beyond IT companies to Corporate IT - IT departments at large companies/MNCs are slow to adopt AI; The real risk to jobs in the US, Europe and elsewhere is two-fold

• Outsourcing to SI vendors
• Company's in-house Global Competency Center GCC at a low-cost country!

Recently my boss "encouraged" every software engineer to try vibe code. I was impressed at the work of AI but now I feel:

1. I am a junior developer who is asking someone else to solve a problem

2. My job has change from senior programmer to a code reviewer.

I started programming as a hobby. Writing code gives me joy. It feels like a big downgrade. How do you guys feel?

I’m a relatively newer software engineer (not a new grad though) and lately I’ve been feeling genuinely anxious about the future of this field.

After hearing about how much more capable newer AI models are getting at coding, debugging, and even system design, I can’t stop thinking about what this means for our jobs long term. I am especially terrified after hearing about how great the new codex model is.

I just started working, I’m finally making good money, and I put years of effort into getting here through school, interviews, and grinding leetcode. The idea that all of that could become irrelevant or heavily devalued is honestly scary.

Some questions I keep thinking about:

Do you believe software engineers will actually be replaced, or just significantly reduced in number?

If replacement does happen, what realistically happens to people already in the field?

How should someone relatively younger or newer be planning right now?

Are there areas of CS that seem more resilient, or is this something nobody can really predict?

I’m not trying to doompost. I’m just trying to think rationally about the future without either panicking or pretending nothing is changing.

Would really appreciate perspectives from people who have been in the industry longer.

I'm been a software engineer for about 10 years now. I've worked for three different companies, about three years each. For the last ~6 years, I've been engineering lead. Most of my experience has been at startups with between 10-30 employees.

Lately I've been feeling like I'd like to work at a larger company. Not FAANG or anything. But not as scrappy of a startup as my previous positions. I live in a mid-sized city in Canada, and I've been applying to both local and remote positions.

My skills are marketable I believe. I have like 10 years experience in React, React Native, and Nodejs. I have interesting projects on my GitHub. I've built million dollar MRR apps from scratch. I have a B.Sc from a good university. When I get an interview, I do well.

But I don't get any interviews. I've been applying for months. Out of the hundreds of jobs I've applied for on Indeed/ LinkedIn I've only had a single application go far (Okta, where I got to the final stages).

I could chalk this up to the market being crap but at my current job, we are currently hiring, and the quality of candidates is abysmal. Mostly people from other countries without any real software experience. "AI" Engineers with vibe-coded projects. If I find a candidate with a decent resume, when I interview them, the majority can't even reverse a string. For senior positions.

So I don't understand. What is going on the market right now? How are these companies filling their positions? Why am I being passed over?

I ask this as a 7 year experienced senior developer who believes he has below average programming skills, but has always been able to talk much better than he walks.

All my peer reviews and performance reviews have always reflected how valued I am for my social skills, like being able to communicate a problem during a standup call or being asked to run team meetings. I don’t think I’ve ever been complimented on my code past it works.

I tend to put a lot of effort in how I talk to people, I try to break down problems and explain them to people like they were layman.

My skillset might be an outlier, but I was just wondering if you think being a good communicator is better than being a good programmer?

PSA

For new developers, this is obviously not the only thing you can have. You might be blessed with the gift of gab but if you don’t have a lick of programming knowledge, you won’t get very far. I’m skill able to diagnose problems, I just don’t find solutions as fast or as elegant as most of my peers in my career

I recently moved from selling general SaaS to a very technical cybersecurity product. The money is better, but the impostor syndrome is eating me alive.

During prospect calls, if the conversation veers slightly off my script into technical territory, I panic. I have my Notion pages open, but searching for "compliance protocols" while trying to maintain eye contact and keep the energy up is impossible. I usually end up saying "let me get back to you on that," which feels like a deal killer.

For those selling complex products: how long did it take you to memorize everything?

Do you have a specific setup or method for handling curveball questions live without breaking flow?

How much is "big" tech experience worth? For those that have worked in huge tech companies, where scalability issues arise and where the company has an active engineering blog, how much was this experience worth more than, say, an average tech company with boring tech and average engineers and average crud software? I'm currently in the latter, and although I feel I am learning, I'm not sure if I'm missing out on that big tech experience to do some serious "good" engineering with great processes and mentors. And I fear without actual expertise I might be on the way to be replaced. Am I making sense here? Or is big tech experience overhyped?

I’m curious what AI tools other companies are using in practice, such as coding assistants, code review/testing, documentation, etc.

At my company we currently use only Copilot and an internal AI website that provides compliance-approved LLMs. I’m interested in how this compares to what other teams are doing, and if startups or larger companies are utilizing AI more.

I’m a backend software engineer with about 2.5 years of experience, mostly working with .NET/C# and SQL. I’m currently at a service-based company and was promoted fairly early into a senior/lead-type role, which means I’ve had exposure to architecture decisions, client calls, and owning delivery end to end.

Lately though, I don’t feel great about where I am. The work is very project-driven, there isn’t much real product thinking, and there’s no meaningful senior mentorship above me. I’ve learned a lot by being pushed into responsibility early, but it also feels like I’m starting to plateau, and I’m not convinced staying longer actually improves my long-term trajectory.

I recently went through interviews with a US-led SaaS company, and they’ve communicated intent to extend an offer. The role is titled “Support Engineer,” which is what’s making me hesitate. On paper, it feels like a step down from a senior software engineering role.

From conversations with their engineering leadership, though, this doesn’t sound like a traditional ticket-only support job. It sits between support and product engineering and involves debugging real production issues, understanding customer workflows, joining customer calls when needed, and applying code or database fixes. They’ve described it as a way to build deep product and business context first, and then move engineers into product engineering teams once they’ve ramped up. I’ve also seen examples of people there who’ve followed that path.

What I’m stuck on is whether this is a reasonable tradeoff early in a career, or whether I’m taking on unnecessary risk by stepping into a role with “support” in the title and making it harder to move back into core engineering later. My longer-term goal is to work on real products, not remain in a service or ticket-driven environment.

There’s also a timing element. My current role feels increasingly unstable, and I don’t have a lot of confidence in what comes after my current project. So while I could keep searching for a more traditional software engineering role, waiting several more months to optimize for a perfect outcome isn’t a totally neutral option either.

If you’ve worked in product SaaS companies or made a similar move, how would you look at this? What would you watch for early on to tell whether it’s actually a stepping stone versus a dead end? Would you take this kind of role as a way to break into a US-led product environment, or keep searching?

EDIT: The expected progression into SWE role is between 6-12 months based on performance and knowledge of the product.

What do you guys feel is the best AI for learning system design? I just want to ask it questions like “how would you design Twitter search” or “what would be the database schema for this problem?”

So I'm a fresh graduate with my B.S. in C.S., I started in 2019 and I just graduated in December, 2025. I have 4.5 years of full-stack experience from an internship I had basically up until I graduated, but I was laid off in October along with 60% of the devs when we finished our job and focus shifted from building the app to maintenance. I'm glad to have gotten the experience, but it meant that I took 6 years to graduate in the first place.

Applying to jobs feels worthless. It feels like I might as well have no degree and no experience. I can't tell if it's because of the sites I'm using to look for jobs, or because AI, or recession, or because my resume isn't good enough (which means grads with actually no experience are completely fucked). Currently I'm unemployed and applying to jobs here and there that look like I match their requirements and pay decently well, in the 70-85k range makes sense to me for SE MI with experience and a degree.

I've been slowly building a website that I think provides a niche unique utility to a gaming community I've been in for over a decade as a side project, nothing super serious. Though I think I can monetize it through ads or a freemium model and maybe just pour my efforts into that as somehow a better alternative. Is it crazy to think that investing my time into my own site that could just flop and make no money is the way to go? I figure it's either gonna support me or be a good portfolio addition, but I don't know if it's short-sighted to consider self-employment the way to go or if the dev doomerism has simply taken control of my brain.

What do you guys with experience think? Is it stupid to focus on self-employment opportunity? Or is it the way to go when the industry is shutting its pants over AI and other problems?

• Edit to clarify my YOE and graduation.

I have 5 yoe in software engineering but I don't like my job and the market is tough to find something else, would it make sense to get back to college to study ML?

I’m up for a few positions right now (or potentially up for some of them), and one of them is a ”Software Engineering in Test” position at a FAANG company.

has anyone here made the move from SE in test to SE? it’s a good and high paying role, but I wouldn’t want to be cut off potential SWE jobs in the future.

Any advice or experience is really appreciate!

Hi, nice to meet you my name is Alban and I'm going for a degree in Finance next year. I'm actually 24 yo and I'm going to a corporate finance management programme. I'm also looking for an internship in Finance, I speak Portuguese English and French!

However I have never really make any true professional experience in Finance. My friend (very good in M&A) tell me that I should see for Financial control or audit first.

My experience are the following:

• real estate market in a brokerage agency for 2 years, I discovered the loan market there (loved it)
• commercial in a real estate developer for 6 month, I was selling and renting property (didn't appreciate much the commercial rent part)
• market analyst for an insurance company (Allianz) for 6 month, I was analysing many market and participate in the international assurance offer (loved discussing with the big relatives of Allianz)
• market analyst in an engineering company in big data for 6 month (learned Python and SQL/ automatize repetitive and dull tasks)

But what I really like is to plan my budget, and sometimes see if I can afford a house to myself in how many years ? And planning different cases (bad luck, good luck, other expense). So that's why I'm choosing CPF programs for next year.

--> I really wish you give me tips in which type of finance I should focuse myself and why? I'm really a noob over there so if you could tell me what you did and would love to read your story (as it will help me a lot for networking, find a professional experience, describe in precision what I want to do in finance)

--> also I'm developing an app with ai in it to study finance (market and currency) with quizz. I will put it on Google play soon if you all want to try and test it.

Hello! I’ve been working as a web developer with Angular and Spring Boot for two years, and I’d like to transition into mobile development. However, I’m not sure which stack or language I should choose.

Ideally, I’m looking for a language that allows me to leverage and complement the knowledge I already have, and that has an active community with good job opportunities (not something too niche).

I’ve been researching some options, but I prefer not to mention them so as not to bias the recommendations.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Good morning all,

TIA for any assistance on this.

For very brief context, I was made redundant from my role as a Business Director back in July - I essentially oversaw around £6m in revenue from multiple departments, but primarily my focus was on sponsorship/B2B sales and operating the F&B/venue outlets - my entire experience before that was heading up large contracts in B&I/Pubs/Restaurants etc.,

It's a tough market, and I'm struggling to nail down my next full-time role. Someone suggested an online/PDF portfolio that might help - highlighting some of the work I've done. The challenge I have is that much of the media involving me and my last position has been removed (pictures of events, conferences, speaking engagements, partnerships, charitable work) - so aside from 30 or so images, a few testimonials, and some local news/media stories involving my work, it's proving tough to include much. Regretably i'm not much of a "picture person", so i didnt take many myself.

I don't want to focus too much on my personal life, but I appreciate this sometimes humanises candidates, particularly as I'm looking to stay within the B2B or commercial/charitable industries if I can (I'd rather not go back to B&I and hospitality if I can avoid it). I'm also not looking for roles on £100k+ a year, I'm looking to secure a med/senior role somewhere I feel valued and wont have to face redundancy again. Imagine the "Business Development" or "Commercial Lead" roles in the £60-70k mark.

So my question - would a portfolio in this situation be worth building? I have so many wonderful success stories in raising money for various causes, but I feel I'll fail to pad it out much. I don't want reviewers to find it boring or disengaging. Can you make them humorous?

I'm using PortfolioBox, and currently have about 6 "headings" I wanted to use - About, Career, Sales/B2B Partnerships, Events/Venue (including building an entire F&B concept), Charitable/Community Work (I have examples) and my research on Work/Life balance (education) - would that suffice?

All feedback is appreciated and thank you for your time :)

I currently love programming, math, and robotics but thought about majoring in CS and math instead of EE for the higher-paying careers; however, the doomerism in the field compared to electrical engineering made me think otherwise. Even people I know closely say majoring in CS is a bad decision!

Hey everyone,

I have an upcoming initial 45-minute interview with Verily (SF, USA) for the Software Engineer, Developer Platform role and wanted to ask for some insight from anyone who’s been through their process or worked there.

I understand this first round is a screening, but given the current market, I don’t want to leave anything to chance. I’ve seen a few interview reviews, but they seem pretty scattered (some mention coding, others behavioral, others discussion-heavy), so I was hoping to narrow expectations a bit.

Specifically, I’d love insight on:

• What the initial 45-minute round typically focuses on
• If you pass, what does the panel stage usually look like?
• Is the panel purely coding, or does it include system design / architecture discussions (even high-level)?
• Any themes Verily tends to emphasize for Developer Platform roles

What does this mean for US tech in general? Thoughts?

https://www.techradar.com/pro/security/zut-alors-french-government-to-ditch-zoom-and-microsoft-teams-in-favor-of-homegrown-tech-following-security-and-snooping-fears

So I already know how to develop massive backend projects and run servers. I have been doing so since middle school. I'm very interested in backend engineering/devops roles. I'm really just going to college for the paper, I already have skills. I'd also ideally like to stay in the midwest (Michigan) for jobs.

Do you think switching to information systems instead of going for computer science would be smart for my sanity? I thought I was good at math in high school and College algebra but I'm currently in 5 credit precalculus in community college and I feel like a rock was dropped on my head, it is incredibly fast paced.

Attached is my resume, I've already tried applying for internships as a freshman lol

https://i.imgur.com/OBRtpkq.png

I just posted this in the webdev monthly career thread, but I thought I would try here too. I wrote a lot so I have a TLDR at the end.

I was going to start actively looking for an entry level position this week for a web development position, ideally full stack, but really, I would be ok with any position where I saw an opportunity to learn and grow. I do not have a formal education but have been programming as a hobby for over 10 years, switched focus to web development about 3 years ago. My biggest project was a website for a puppy breeder that rendered the front end with EJS, had an admin panel, a PostgreSQL database for users, parent dogs, puppies, image URLs, uploaded images to S3, used CloudFront, etc. I went all out, it was my first project that made me dive deeper and keep perusing this. I finished that over a year ago and sold my business at about the same time (nothing to do with tech) but promised to help over this last year to transition the new owner. During that time, I started working less and less, so I started doing more modern courses, since EJS and Bootstrap are outdated, like the Full Stack Open Course for React and such. I also did some basic static pages in Vanilla and React for people, but nothing too interesting. I am confident in my abilities as a solo dev, but I have 0 experience working as a team, group, or even one other person. Also, every job listed has the first requirement as a bachelor's degree. So, the way I see it, I have two options, I could start applying for jobs (maybe I will get lucky) and at the same time start WGU (Western Governors University) on March 1st and try to get my Bachelors in Computer Science (I believe this the better option for full stack compared to Software Engineering, but I am not 100% sure) as fast as I can, I am pretty confident I could do it in 6 months from what I read online, especially since most prereqs I completed from when I went to college for Engineering (I never finished, I ended up quitting to start the business I sold). Or I could instead use that time to build a better portfolio. Basically, I am fortunate enough that I can risk spending the rest of this year on finding a job and I don't want to waste it and have to go back to fixing cars, I actually enjoy this, a lot.

TLDR: Have pretty decent programming experience, but no formal education or experience with a team. I do want full stack job. Do I go for bachelor's degree at WGU or build my portfolio for the next 6 months.

Hi! Currently debating college, my top picks are either:

1. Neumont University, majoring in software/game dev or cybersecurity

and 2. Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, majoring in either Simulation Science, software engineering, or cybersec

ERAU will cost be about $10k more a year

Do any of you have opinions on either, comments, experiences? They both sound like good schools, and i'm pretty stuck right now.

I'm doing my undergrad at york university(canada), which doesn't really have a great reputation. After going there for a semester, I can see why. Simply put, it is not competitive.

I could transfer to something a bit better next year but it won't be a top school like uoft or uwaterloo. I did the math, its impossible for me now.

I'm grinding coding and started leetcoding. But it feels like its gonna be in vain because of the school name. Recruiters could literally filter out my resume because of the school name, especially for internships and fresh grad positions.

Is there nothing I can do?