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’ve spent my entire career as a professor advocating that students should pick a minor, certificate, or double major if they’re capable.
My rationale is remarkably similar I think. Literally ever field, hobby, and area of study involve some form of technology. Many of those disciplines lack the sophistication of the tooling and that we have in more programming related fields, which makes people with an additional specialized skill set extremely valuable.
Hell, look around at fintech, bioinformatics, computational arts, etc. We have emerging Fields all the time that are essentially computer science combined with another field.
> 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.
I’d rather be an electrician than a plumber. It’s like a simpler, deadlier Ethernet.
And electricians don’t have to interact with human feces nearly as often.
Three phase PoE anyone?
Powerline networking is a thing and a great choice for bringing hardline connections to remote parts of a house.
I had a shed that had electric but my WiFi couldn’t reach and a cheap powerline kit and a spare OpenWRT worked a treat.
I think all power lines should have a communications protocol. Not every device has to use them, and they’d be lower bandwidth than data-only lines, but I think the era of data-communicating appliances is here to stay, and it’d be better they go over the wires we have rather than clogging up the wireless spectrum.
Within a single building for sure, but even neighborhood lines could carry some data I bet. I wonder if and how that would work. Gonna have to learn some more about electricity and grid infrastructure.
The cybersecurity specialist in me really doesn’t like the idea of having enough wire in public spaces that it’s essentially impossible to monitor, sending infrastructure related data.
But then again, a weekend playing around with a flipper zero and a walk through town is enough to realize that it probably doesn’t matter.
Yeah I imagine for lines outside the home, or in public places, it would be best to assume that the channel is untrustworthy and the data is public. Essential comms would need to have redundancy of course. But for an oven reporting its at temp, or a thermostat reporting its room’s temperature to a central HVAC controller, I think it would be nicer than running everything over wifi.
You could even have a signal smoother at the main so nothing inside the house can get out. The way I’m imagining it, all the household power would come from the home battery, which would be fed by a combination of solar panels and grid power. If the battery’s full and the sun is shining, power feeds back into the main. If the battery’s low, power is drawn from the panels, and if that doesn’t meet demand, power is drawn from the grid. But the whole house is buffered (electrically and informationally) by the battery.
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.
Oops, requirements were written by ai too
For real.
I recently lost half a morning having to go through a slop requirements document and making a list of questions like “are you sure you want this? why do you want this? what does this even mean?”, to which the answers were all “I don’t know, ChatGPT wrote it”.
Like why did you even bother sending me this, you could’ve just sent me the prompt instead and saved me 2 hours of my life
People do stupid things when they don’t know any better but want to look like they know what they are doing. Enter LLMs now people think they look even smarter in an area they don’t know things.
you could’ve just sent me the prompt instead
AI discovers compression algorithms.
Call me a Karen, but that gets an angry email to their boss.
I wish. Sadly it was from the boss.
getting licensed as an electrician has been on my mind recently. i’m so tired of the whole industry
Computer, I need software please!
Why won’t it work? I asked for software!
You asked wrong! You forgot “no mistakes”
I sent this to my plumber to congratulate him on his career choice.
Turns out now he’s an electrician and his company got hired to help build an AI data center. 💀Sixty electricians from his company alone on one job. Drones surveilling the repetitive work overhead.
So much for escaping the impacts of AI.
I know an electrician who moved beyond doing it day to day, he was telling me he knows of data center job sites that are paying regular electrician wages + $250/day. I think the data center boom might be bigger and crazier than we even realize somehow.
Economic news sites for a while have been noting that data-center-related economic activity - electricians, other contractors, chips and other electronic component manufacturing and assembly, transportation (Marketplace has the owner of a barge company on regularly, and for a couple of years now he has said business is good even though all his normal customers are down because he’s transporting so much data center construction material) - is probably the only reason the tariff-related trade disruption hasn’t pushed the US into recession.
It is huge and crazy, was huge and crazy last year, and looks on track to continue the huge and crazy at least through next year.
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.
I worked in IT support for 15 years. Now I work on a dairy farm. Cows are way better than people. Go into farming, fellow lemmings. It’s so rewarding.
“Cows are way better than people” said the prison guard.
I just fucking work there. For minimum wage. I’m the one kindness those cows get so fuck your judgement.
Whatever you need to tell yourself
I’m going to be a baker! just putting it off as long as possible because I don’t want to wake up at 2am.
Every other baker gets up at 2am. Be the only 2pm baker out there for fresh evening breads!
Yes, I’m sick of morning people getting all the good stuff. I want to come home from work and sit in a cafe/bakery and eat nice things.
We need a night owls society.
That’s unironically a good idea if you are just getting into it. The trades pay very well and are in high demand.
How do you do it? I wouldn’t mind being a plumber but I have no idea how I’d get started. I don’t even know what tools I’d need.
You need to find someone who is a) cool and not a bad teacher and b) a good plumber and c) willing to take you on to teach you and d) work your butt off till you’re useful.
I suppose my question is more how do I do A B and C? is it all just knowing someone?
I mean sort of, but you don’t have to already know them. It’s exceedingly hard to find someone who is motivated enough to help and learn. So it’s really more about finding a crew that you vibe with and as long as they’re busy they will probably be happy to have good help. The trick there is you also have to be good help.
I’m a few weeks from graduating in software engineering, I think I’m going back to my old plan of finding a strong rope and a sturdy tree.
You could learn farsi and arabic and join the military. They are always hiring lately and they have lowered their standards a lot I hear. Medical, maximum enlistment age, drug history, criminal background, fitness, intellgence, all lowered. You can start your first enlistment at 42 now. As long as you get in before your 43rd birthday you’re gold.
(I’m just kidding, dont join the military)
Nothing wrong with being an arborist.
I know this is a haha community, but software isn’t dead. Most corps are going to insist you use AI. Especially as a junior dev. Look for places that say things like “engineers make the decisions”. You need to find a place where you can get experience learning how software is built, even if the bot does the typing. People have been getting laid off and that sucks but software devs aren’t going anywhere. Ai writes bad code. They need us to make sure bad code doesn’t go to production.
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
