Went to college to become a programer. Now going to graduate with a literal dead degree (no joke my degree stopped being offered so I am the last to get it) and work the warehouse and food service, along with Uber driving and delivering as I try to get a career in bartending instead.
Edit: 50k in federal loans FYI
Can I just say, I graduated a decade ago and have no idea what you must be going thru.
However, I want to maybe give you a little hope. A college degree is just a piece of paper. I’ve worked with software engineers that were former teachers, artists, and biologists. Think of the college degree as proof that you’re capable of learning.
All that AI has really done is increased the amount of work people are expected to get done, so I don’t think there’s NO hope for you in software engineering as a whole. You could pivot into another industry that just requires a math or compsci degree. Or keep trying your hand at software engineering.
Good luck
The end of software engineering will come when the end of world comes. Many clients have realized the mess caused by AI slop and the bugs it creates, the mess it makes while resolving its own conflicting pull requests and the haunting hallucinating in long prompts. Also, the cost involved in long run is bonkers for the trash quality.
> the end of software engineering
> looks inside
> overhyped slop generator
To be fair having been in software for awhile, plenty of people were slinging slop before AI as well.
The difference is back then, we could block the PR, now management demands velocity at all costs.
It will catch up eventually.
Didn’t management always demand velocity at all costs? This is really not new.
In the last few years prior to widespread coding llms (at least at the shops I worked at then) there was an appreciation for reducing incidents and defensive, clean code.
Now the expectation is if the AI causes an outage, the AI will fix it quickly, so code quality doesn’t matter and just yeet everything into production.
IT guy here, not a programmer per se, but I have given up and am re-training into fraud detection. I want to take down some of the fuckers that ruined the industry before I die
I was in IT 20+ years.
I quit 4 years ago and opened an arcade. My only regret is I should have bailed out 10 years ago.
I’m a non native English speaker , what do you mean by an arcade ? ___
It’s a place with a bunch of games like pinball, video arcades, billiards, etc.
you’ll either be needed to extract dead systems after this all falls apart, or to build new systems for people that don’t want slop service in dead space.
We’ve been predicting the demise of the coding career since the dawn of the coding career, but even if it’s not dying, being proficient in coding and becoming proficient in one other trade is a good way to find opportunities to make software that makes that trade easier. The bar for quality in trade-specific software is shockingly low and money can be made in those niches.
This is basically me.
I was in restaurant management in the late '90s, and knew it well, but loved computers and had been teaching myself programming for a while.
My last restaurant job was for a small franchisee, and I moved into IT and support for them after a couple of years (while also doing catering, covering vacations for managers, doing graphics on vehicles and banners, pretty much whatever needed to be done).
In 2001 I went to work for the company that sold us our POS Systems. Originally I did installation, training, and support, but started coding pretty quickly, and after a few years became lead.
I now own all of that software / IP, and my own company.
That rules. I hope you use your powers for good.
I’d rather be an electrician than a plumber. It’s like a simpler, deadlier Ethernet.
