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.
Computer, I need software please!
Why won’t it work? I asked for software!
Did you try turning it off and on and then ask for software again?
Brb, restarting all data centers.
Hey maybe we need to keep them off until the coin battery dies so the bios resets?
You asked wrong! You forgot “no mistakes”
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.
yeah it’s not a great idea, I’ve been seeing a crap ton of AI ads for relatively bland services online, like insurance and weight loss, some known brands mixed in, and I keep thinking, what does this benifit the company other than not paying someone more than the AI to make an ad, and I feel it mostly just let’s less legitimate business look more sleek, but the bounce back from that is going to be people associating AI ads with garbage and scam businesses, which is plush the bigger corporations away from it. Anyway, yeah it’s all to try and get the user of the AI service to look more polished in intent.
Call me a Karen, but that gets an angry email to their boss.
I wish. Sadly it was from the boss.
I’ve gotten fired for going over heads before and will do it again!
you could’ve just sent me the prompt instead
AI discovers compression algorithms.
In before the AI shills show up, nice
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 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.
~(But to be straight: There are a lot of better options for a career, please try them first)~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.
I got a degree in development a few years ago and couldn’t find a job. There was nothing out there for a junior dev. I was persistent for about a year then, I just gave up.
Now I work in Commercial Real Estate but I can see this industry is about to be decimated by AI also. They are slowly starting to figure it out and build AI tools that do their job.
They need us to make sure bad code doesn’t go to production.
what worries me: that’s not something a junior can do.
I see it with the local lawyers office, they have stopped hiring junior lawyers and are replacing the junior’s tasks by AI. Fine for now, but I wonder what happens when the others retire, who’s going to replace them if no juniors are trained?
I am a junior dev and I am not earning that great, but at least my company is not forcing me to use AI, which from some reports I have read is quite the exception. They do mention it a lot (“just let claude generate this or that driver”) but they actually understand when I say I dislike using it because I need to learn this stuff and build experience, which simply does not happen when I offload my brain, like some do.
Bet on it, there will be (or are already) big revolutions in engineering/programming and art (and music), especially these 2 areas.
Instrinsic/individualistic expression (also motive) is going to become a new form of rocketfuel in that vacuum being created by clankers. Human potential and what really defines existence scales faster than boring exponential growth of calculation power.
It’s interesting and scary; if the human spirit is worth anything creatively, we’re about to find out how much.
Bold of you to think they wouldn’t replace AI with more AI and lie to their own face in the mirror that their company collapsing is good just because, AI.
Ah so you’re a black man in a predominately racist white county with a strong police force?
For real though. If life sucks, try something else. Teach English abroad, move to another state or country. Not much to lose if you’re struggling.
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)
I’m no an american, and i would rather die than support the people who put pinochet in power and are currently gutting south america once again
Nothing wrong with being an arborist.
I work in software but I have a side job working for an arborist, and you might have been joking but it’s legit a great industry to have a backup plan in.
Most arborists near me have more work than they can keep up with. You see, the thing about trees is, you trim them, wait a year, and the bastards grow back! It’s like a giant scam and the trees are all in on it!
It’s a pretty fun job too, if you’re relatively fit. You get to climb trees, throw logs into giant scary chippers, and you get first dibs on all the best gun and sword shaped sticks.
I was half joking. 😅 Of all the tradesfolk I’ve hired to do work on my house, my arborist is the only one who’s job I could see myself actually liking. He gets paid to be a nerd about something (trees, tree health, tree care), the work itself seems a lot more pleasant than dealing with plumbing or electrical repairs, and at least my guy is a one man band who just shows up and does his thing, which is certainly appealing after a career of various EMs, PMs, TPMs, and other people who need to be appeased when doing work. Also the fun tools.
Don’t let it get you down. You need to remember that this whole AI hype / AI will replace everyone is coming from people who invested a lot of money into it and really need it to succeed now.
Many also have an oversimplified view of what the discipline of software engineering includes in addition to little understanding how different types of AI work.
Besides, skillsets you learned in SE can easily applied to other ‘non-virtual’ fields. Many people suck at providing clear and specific instructions or requirements; businesses also have many real world processes that need to be optimized; identifying problems in a system (you first need to see there is an issue, if you want to ask an AI to fix it for you in the next step); being able to break down and tackle large, complex topics; … I could probably come up with many more points.
In my career as a programmer mostly writing custom software for smaller companies, 90% of the job was understanding the clients’ businesses and working out what they needed the software to do. Designing, writing and supporting the software was relatively trivial. My bosses never understood my lack of enthusiasm when they would hire newly-graduated Computer Science students and stick them on my team. Never mind that they knew almost nothing about the actual process of producing complete working software – they were completely useless for the main task of gathering requirements.
That’s unironically a good idea if you are just getting into it. The trades pay very well and are in high demand.
The trades pay very well and are in high demand.
But you’ll pay for it with crippling back pain at 45. Maybe some nice cancer as a bonus, from all the exposure to weird chemicals. Oh, and 90% of your coworkers racist, sexist, homophobic MAGA-heads who’ll make sure you hear about it at every opportunity.
The trades can still be good, but go into it with eyes open. It’s no paradise.
I agree that the trades can be hard on the body and there is a decent risk that your career can be cut short due to injury. However, the characterization of tradesmen as all ignorant MAGA types is unfair. I imagine this varies a lot by region and market but I live in a fairly liberal-leftist area and happen to know a bunch of folks in the trades and they are not like that.
FWIW I am in a fairly affluent city and my friends will sometimes complain about working with subcontractors who come in from the exurbs who will throw fits about not being able to easily park their giant trucks wherever they want or make sideways comments about crime in the city. The response to that is usually something like “oh, you don’t have all these annoying parking rules in your rural town? Maybe you should go work on building multimillion dollar projects over there then? Oh, what’s that? There are no multimillion dollar projects in the middle of fucking nowhere? Hmmm”
There are also trades and regions where unions are still highly regarded.
Anyone going into the trades for money is going to be fucking miserable. The pay is nice but the pay is nice for a damn good reason. You will have no time, be perpetually tired, and wind up working in some really shitty conditions. Also a lot of that money will constantly be getting spent on tools. Sure most companies provide their techs with some tools and a stipend, but that stipend is never enough and you’ll wind up wanting to replace most of the provided tools with your own anyways once you find ones that work better for you.
If you’re going to get into the trades it better be because you like working with your hands and beating your head against brick wall problems. In that regard though going from software to the trades isn’t that weird of a move. I’m a tradesman now but I nearly got my bachelor’s in Computer Science. I loved how coding made me use my brain. I only dropped out when I got a desk job and realized that I wouldn’t be able to stand working a desk job. In the trades I get the same intellectual fun without having to sit at a desk all day.
Woman here, can confirm. Worked as an aircraft mechanic for a year and a truck driver for another, you will encounter the scum of the earth. So glad to be back to working with civilized humans.
People whine that women wont enter the trades, theres a reason they dont want to and its not because the work is too hard.
People seem to discount how much having a pleasant, or at least neutral at best even, work environment is essential for any job. And decent coworkers.
Tell me about it. Giving thought to retraining as an electrician given how in demand they are.
I want to get training as an electrician so I can take my house completely off the grid (or at least, be independent with the grid as a redundancy) one day without accidentally burning it down. Then I want to make free software to monitor and manage home power usage, and share it with the world so we can all have nice, efficient, futuristic homes without some corporate combine demanding a monthly fee and invasive surveillance for the pleasure.
I also want you to do this
It’s coming along slowly. I don’t have any formal training yet, still trying to find a coding job that pays the bills before I commit to a paid educational course, but I’ve been out of work for a while now and it may be time to take the plunge.
So far my education is mostly just watching youtubers who are doing things similar to what I want to do, like this one: https://www.youtube.com/@ProjectsWithDave He seems legit to me, but I am very new to the field so I feel like I’m the kind of person who could be taken in by correct-sounding nonsense.
> 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’m thinking cake decorator. Or florist. Maybe grave digger.
florist
This sounds nice. Working with something green and alive. Arborist too.
Granny worked as a florist, not her own shop though. She had incredible strong hands.
As a pupil I did a work experience day in the shop. It was really chilly (Germany usually has not Air Con), we consistently had to clean the floor in the back room to not slip on the leaves, it was tiny in there and we were four people. I got to wash a fake flower decor and rearrange it for a doctors office. That was nice.
Don’t do plumbing, join us in HVAC-R. There is way less training and fewer certs required. The bar is so low it’s derailing subways.
Refrigeration?
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
who are the people that ruined the industry ? who do you blame ?
Hmm, you could work on an open-source project for detecting and/or mitigating corporate and government influence campaigns in the fediverse. I think, right now, the fediverse is still too small for it to make sense for those actors to deploy expensive, sophisticated attacks against it, but if the community grows that threat is going to grow with it, probably at least as long as we’re alive. I assume you’re talking about financial fraud; I don’t know how similar detecting “fraud” accounts would be but I imagine there’s some overlap.
I think it would be fun to work on a bot / influencer detector. And if it works, it would hopefully make the fediverse more resilient to coordinated influence campaigns designed to destroy or capture it. Which would help to ruin the corporate media hellscape that has been wreaking havoc on the world ever since the inception of feed manipulation.
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.
getting licensed as an electrician has been on my mind recently. i’m so tired of the whole industry
I quit programming and became a school bus driver. I’m 100X happier even if I am making like 1/6 of what I used to make. What I’ll do after I’m replaced with AI I don’t know, but at least it will happen long after I would have been replaced as a programmer by AI. I’m more concerned about what the parents will do when their kids are run over by the fucking AI-driven school buses.
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!
Not a bad idea, would be nice with fresh sandwiches instead of shitty burgers or sausages when going home from some event at night.
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.
I’d rather be an electrician than a plumber. It’s like a simpler, deadlier Ethernet.
Also if you become an electrician then you have an excuse to run Ethernet poorly. Gotta love when the electrician runs unshielded cat6 cable through 100ft of conduit containing 480V wires. Talk about POE, you could probably run a toaster off that Ethernet cable.
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.
Think some intelligent opsec is needed when acquiring a flipper?
In these grand United States, that is
I don’t think so. Ultimately, it’s a low power computer with a software defined radio in it. Nothing inherently nefarious.
I am Canadian however, so jury’s out about the US
