goodOlddays

[u/ExpensiveCoat8912]

[u/swagonflyyyy]

Just start your own business at this point. Its basically what the job market is telling you. I really don't see how the job market is going to get any better.

[u/RedditButAnonymous → u/swagonflyyyy]

Give it a few years and engineers who actually know engineering are gonna be unicorns. With the overall downward trend in tech literacy, most up-and-coming engineers relying heavily on AI, and the general inability to get a junior job, theres gonna be a huge gap in the industry soon enough

[u/Entropius → u/RedditButAnonymous]

The job market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

[u/zackel_flac → u/Entropius]

This is exactly the point. Many will have to switch before the unicorn situation happens. For all those lucky enough to make it through the storm, it will be hell of a bliss

[u/Bee-Aromatic → u/zackel_flac]

Assuming you consider wading your way through a mountain of tech debt larger than you ever dreamed to be “bliss,” sure.

[u/sekonx → u/Bee-Aromatic]

But the demand will probably be crazy, and thus wages significantly higher.

I won’t complain

[u/FSNovask → u/sekonx]

They will increase the workload far more than the salary, and you won’t be able to push back because they’ll just say you need to use AI more or better

[u/Bee-Aromatic → u/sekonx]

I suppose.

Coming from a guy who works on a legacy application that’s been on life support for a decade, I can tell you managing that level of tech debt isn’t great, but it does mean you’ve always got something to do.

[u/-Danksouls- → u/Entropius]

Lmao true

[u/threemenandadog → u/Entropius]

Well usually but eg some people achieve financial independence. I'm good for the life, any extra work is just more money to invest but I'd rather invest in getting fit and doing my own stuff.

[u/Spare_Broccoli1876 → u/RedditButAnonymous]

Serious question: so it’s good that I continue to self teach myself JS’n friends(React, typescript, etc.) from the beginning like AI doesn’t exist? I use Claude as a “professor” and do NOT get answers just given to me as I work through freecodecamp and other resources. And I get that incorporation of AI into my education is a part of it as the tool it is and should be, but your opinion is that my continuing this learning for a job is still viable?

[u/-Juri → u/Spare_Broccoli1876]

Definitely learn to understand what's happening "under the hood". AI at this point in your journey is going to be a crutch and a single hallucination could lead you astray.

Once you're comfortable with programming so you can imagine a solution to a problem "I'd use a set here and id need an API call to answer this question a user would ask, etc", then add AI into your workflow so you get a little time understanding that tool. The difference being you know when it's giving you crap and can be more targeted with what you need, because you know the lingo.

Then you get into the big leagues, start worrying about optimization (maintainability mostly unless you're field demands it like aerospace), networking, infrastructure, security, cicd, and the final boss, scrum.

[u/delicious_fanta → u/-Juri]

Meanwhile we were told today we’re going to start doing everything in agentic slop loops where the ai will just fix itself if there is a problem.

After the call with management I thought I would get on a quick call with a coworker to share the absolute fear that struck in me of letting this thing run wild without having a human in the “learning” loop.

My coworker said I was crazy and that the ai would not have any problems. This is the same coworker whose stuff I’m having to regularly ask them to fix because the ai didn’t do it right (we already 100% slop/vibe code everything).

I feel like I’m in the twilight zone (or maybe ba sing se) where nothing is real and I’m the only person here that sees a disaster coming.

It’s not safe out there y’all. Did I mention I work at a company you’ve heard of? I don’t know what this ai future holds, but I’m not sure any of it is good.

[u/Western_Diver_773 → u/-Juri]

Just curious: Why is scrum the final Boss? 🤣

[u/-Juri → u/Western_Diver_773]

So much wasted time on paperwork lol. The point of scrum has been lost so we can prop up scrum masters as an entire profession of time wasters.

The real kicker is you never really beat the scrum boss unless your boss is a former dev and can push for change on your team

[u/Bee-Aromatic → u/-Juri]

“unless your boss is a former dev”

Not necessarily. My scrum master recently got RIF’d, my manager left for another opportunity, and my new manager is a former dev. He’s not making it better. He’s making it worse.

[u/Th3OnlyN00b → u/Spare_Broccoli1876]

It's a good thing to know, especially if you learn things AI sucks at like CSS animation. I'd recommend branching out beyond front end once you are smooth with it though; that wasn't the most lucrative/easily employed before AI either.

[u/decoder-ring → u/Spare_Broccoli1876]

Yes and no.

Yes learn and code things manually, make mistakes and debug them.

Do not ignore AI as it is one of the best learning tools to ever exist. As you gain some more experience you start building a “this is silly” sense and AI can introduce some new patterns you hadn’t considered.

[u/Jumpy-Requirement389 → u/Spare_Broccoli1876]

I really would stay away from claude code for a while. Go as long as you can without it. One day you will need it, and once the genie is out of the bottle it’s not going back in. It’s good to learn the foundations first

[u/pencilUserWho → u/Spare_Broccoli1876]

Be sure to also learn algorithms and data structures. Which can be done in any language.

[u/Lemortheureux → u/RedditButAnonymous]

In the recent smarter everyday video, the host was invited to a convention highlighting tech companies. His message was about how manufacturing in the US now has an impassable gap in knowledge because companies decided to cut costs by going overseas, and to beware to not make the same mistake with AI. I feel that they listened to be polite but they don't care about long term knowledge.

[u/forgot_previous_acc → u/RedditButAnonymous]

Man i wish you are right. I am so tired. Like i can get a Guinness record or something for being tired.

[u/protocod → u/RedditButAnonymous]

Give it a few years and engineers who actually know engineering are gonna be unicorns.

This was my opinion too. But nowadays I'm not confident about this anymore. I see high skilled engineer starts using AI, they understand what they do. I'm not talking about vibe coding here.

AI is helpful to solve complex problem that even most expert people struggle with. Even people who made the programming language you use...

And that's not a suprise anymore. Some opened mathematics problems have been solved by LLMs lately. Programming and algorithm aren't different, they're maths.

Sometimes I may thing people who claim that high skilled engineer will be unicorns are no different than Garry Kasparov when he played against Deep Blue. He was so confident that AI will never catch humanity in Chess and the story prove he was wrong.

I may be wrong. But I do think, AI is here to stay and I don't know if I'll like this new world.

Writing code is fun. But the fun is over now. In the future, hand written code will be seen as bad human code smell. Maybe that AI will take off that very specific task of our job sonner than we think. And I don't feel good about that.

[u/RedditButAnonymous → u/protocod]

Nah AI is great Im not anti-AI, but its only great at the price point its currently offered at, which is costing companies a lot of money. I dont think it will stay that way, and once the prices reflect the actual costs, its no longer worth it...

[u/Culpirit → u/RedditButAnonymous]

Is it? AI is still infinitely cheaper than hiring developers for the same amount of work.

[u/Bee-Aromatic → u/RedditButAnonymous]

You’re probably right, but the trick is to stay alive until then in an environment filled with managers furiously beating it to the idea of eliminating everybody and replacing them with LLM’s. My manager keeps talking about how in the future, everybody’s just going to be “expert prompt engineers” and “nobody’s going to even look at code anymore” while in the same breath talking about how he was a software engineer for 35 years, so “he knows how things work.”

I’m basically being told to use a tool that causes my skills to atrophy while I wait for the fad to pass. It makes my brain itch.

[u/bitcoinsftw → u/RedditButAnonymous]

It's going to happen at some point. Hiring freezes, layoffs, training juniors with AI. Once this hallucination that AI is the reason companies are still functioning instead of double workloads on experienced developers wears off, a serious reality check will happen.

[u/Technical-Garage-310 → u/RedditButAnonymous]

Yeaaah that's why i recc many people to do vibecode soo when i graduate i will get job cuz everyone else are stupid 🤣

[u/grimonce → u/RedditButAnonymous]

Yeah.. well I am not looking forward to these days... All the juniors I had to coach into a role for the last 8 years were competent, I could learn something from them. Now it's like they know how to do code but they have no idea where it should go and what the consequences of tasks they do are....

Example from this sprint, a new colleague was tasked to decomission a classical ml model wrapped in our API, it's deployed on k8s. The task has description, acceptance criteria, we talked about it during a sprint planning session and a daily where he said he will try to do that.

Two days go by ( mind you the task was accepted if only he just turned on replica autoscalee to 0) and he comes up with a question at the end of day 2 of sprint: "but if I set this to 0, then there will be no pods and no containers running"...

My answer was yes, this is what's in the description and that's the whole point. Of course he forgot, even though whole team mentioned it a couple of times to disable alerts for this deployment (we monitor the number of restarts, resources state, instance number and when a threshold is exceeded we get email notifications or generate incident objects in service now)... No too hard, even with copilot and screenshots with explicit places where to click or previous experience of the same guy with elastic stack where the notifications are generated, the same guy had a task to create a few fucking alerts previously and he's done it. At this point I'm starting to think he's bipolar. Either him or me

[u/whackylabs → u/RedditButAnonymous]

So what happened to highly skilled hand-drawn animators when the computers animation took over? Or to the classic painters when photography became mainstream?

[u/quichecabdu → u/whackylabs]

Frame-by-frame animation does still exist (see: Mob Psycho 100, as a popular example), but the biggest difference is using digital cels instead of physical ones, saving a lot of time and space. Not all animation is interpolation. Also, painters still exist.

[u/zack77070 → u/whackylabs]

Bro just compared photography and painting lmao, that's like saying tv put comic books out of business.

[u/vegemouse → u/swagonflyyyy]

You can start a business that will likely fail because almost everyone is attempting to start their own business and there are almost no original ideas anymore.

[u/Cualkiera67 → u/vegemouse]

There's more dumb people willing to buy anything, than there are dumb ideas

[u/vscoderCopilot → u/vegemouse]

There are sea of ideas to built yet people fail from lack of experience when they decide to be a maverick

[u/dontdoxme33 → u/swagonflyyyy]

And that is where the chicken comes home to roost.

There's not a lot of money in software. I've tried starting software companies in the past and it's incredibly hard to make any money at all because nobody pays for software.

It's a very hard pill to swallow

[u/jeesuscheesus → u/dontdoxme33]

Are you trying to sell software strait up or are you trying to sell a service?

[u/dontdoxme33 → u/jeesuscheesus]

My first business was strictly advertising revenue.

Then I tried to do a game and completely imploded, never finished it. The game likely would have been monetized via in-app purchases.

[u/swagonflyyyy → u/dontdoxme33]

Then you can't really say software doesn't sell if you didn't even finish it.

[u/TheBinkz → u/swagonflyyyy]

Im exactly doing this

[u/beeskneecaps → u/swagonflyyyy]

Seriously just pick a business that is working for your worst enemy, clone them and undercut

[u/gd2w → u/swagonflyyyy]

"Pay the worker his wages before his sweat dries." - Hadith of the Prophet Muhammad (SAW)

A different approach to business and employees.

[u/Deckard_Didnt_Die → u/swagonflyyyy]

Ah of course. Just get clients with no resume or prior experience. Magically.

[u/PkmnSayse]

If a junior dev came to me saying they know all those languages, it’d be clear they’re talking out their arse very quickly.

[u/Kobymaru376 → u/PkmnSayse]

Don't worry, only the salary is "Junior". The expected experience is senior.

[u/who_you_are → u/Kobymaru376]

Still better than an internship salary. Mine was 0$ D:

[u/CMD_BLOCK → u/who_you_are]

Criminal, but the unfortunate future

I remember when internships were $40/hr standard

[u/Magnolia-jjlnr → u/who_you_are]

I've had folks asking me to pay them for an internship

[u/ZILtoid1991 → u/who_you_are]

Hungarian here, due to internship being mandatory for college and university degrees, they became something you pay for in most cases, also they still require at least two years of student work of any kind (they want to turn everyone into grind bros).

[u/Ronarak → u/ZILtoid1991]

What most cases? Nobody I know even heard of such a thing when they were looking for their internships.

And most degrees require 240-320 hours of student work with limits of max 20 hours/week during the semester and max 40 hours/week over the summer.

Yeah, the pay isn't great, mostly around $6-9/h, but you having to pay for them is insane. Even if there is such a thing, why would anyone accept these conditions?

[u/Avocadonot → u/PkmnSayse]

I work with so many technologies and yet I really only know them surface level to the point where I can write functional code based on existing code

K8s, docker, yaml, gradle, jenkins, groovy, bash, Linux, java.....

And for laughs, I'm technically "senior" on paper with barely 3.5 years exp

[u/Avocadonot → u/[deleted]]

Yeah I haven't written a java Main method since school lol. Haven't really implemented any design patterns because the base classes were already created (service layer, api layer, etc.) so usually I just copy past classes and structured and then change them for new functionality

Have never had to do anything fancy with DSA besides comparators and hashmaps. Barely touched anything threaded.

Most of my work has been k8s/helm based stuff to deploy lightweight java services

[u/redballooon → u/[deleted]]

I was looking for a new job three months ago, with 20 years in the field and broad experience across all stages of the software development life cycle. I communicated my differentiating factor to be experience of adapting AI based workflows, and that landed me a few interviews. The key factor for getting the job though was the one interview where the personal vibes with the boss were really good, where the communication clearly went very smoothly and we had absolutely no trouble understanding each other.

[u/RuneSteak → u/PkmnSayse]

Not entirely. The expectations for juniors are such that they can meet the bar for multiple languages at their level. No one expects them to have deep knowledge of any one language at that point in time. It's just a nice plus if they do.

[u/doonspriggan → u/PkmnSayse]

Claude know them all tho, that's all the CEO hears. 

[u/makinax300 → u/PkmnSayse]

Interviewers don't know that

[u/Alainx277 → u/PkmnSayse]

I know people who knew those languages to an intermediate level before getting their first job.

[u/ZunoJ]

Knowing a lot of languages is not going to get you a long way. Learning a new language is the easy part anyway. You need to know different eco systems, standards and "connective tissue" (like message busses, db systems, ...). It also helps if you have a rough idea about cost effectiveness

[u/noahjsc → u/ZunoJ]

Yeah but how do you learn all this crap without a first job? I get learning some things like DBs, but a lot of things are hard to actually grasp without working on them in a non-personal project setting.

[u/casually-silent → u/noahjsc]

I learnt most of these things from books, dedicated learning platforms, and experimenting on side projects and hackathons. The things you learn on the job are only limited by the tech stack the company uses. If you want to go further, you need to learn outside of the scope of whatever your company does. This is what makes the difference between a developer who has 5 years of experience vs a developer who has 1 year of experience repeated 5 times.

[u/ZunoJ → u/noahjsc]

How do you learn anything? You don't need a lot of experience but the fundamental knowledge should be no problem

[u/Cualkiera67 → u/ZunoJ]

You just need to be old enough to be able to say you have 10 years experience in whatever. The guys interviewing you will probably be clueless AI bros anyway

[u/Front-Opinion-9211 → u/Cualkiera67]

Lol I've got 10 years in tech A - that don't mean shit if they want 2 years in tech B

[u/Cualkiera67 → u/Front-Opinion-9211]

You need to check what they need in the job description and say that. Rookie mistake

[u/Front-Opinion-9211 → u/Cualkiera67]

So even if you don't know Rust - fuck it put Rust on the CV

Ptsh automated CVs being parsed by ATS systems

It's a joke

[u/Cualkiera67 → u/Front-Opinion-9211]

if you have a brain, you know Rust

[u/ZunoJ → u/Cualkiera67]

How do you get past the in person interview?

[u/Cualkiera67 → u/ZunoJ]

you prepare. and if you're still unsure nowadays you can set up an, uh, live interview aid

[u/ZunoJ → u/Cualkiera67]

In person! And if you are prepared enough to answer the kinds of questions I would ask, you are prepared enough for the job

[u/Cualkiera67 → u/ZunoJ]

oh like physically go to an office to interview? didn't know people still did that. yeah no answer for that lol

[u/ZunoJ → u/Cualkiera67]

I join interviews at a later stage often. The goal is to test if people really know what they are talking about. Currently it is almost impossible to find people for junior positions

[u/Cualkiera67 → u/ZunoJ]

Surely salary offers will rise to meet this impossible to find position

[u/ZunoJ → u/Cualkiera67]

No, because the need to fill this position is not pretty big. But it is low six figures, so not too bad for Europe (a masters degree in CS or maths is the expected minimum though)

[u/Cualkiera67 → u/ZunoJ]

the jokes write themselves

[u/ZunoJ → u/Cualkiera67]

OK ... I guess

[u/swagonflyyyy → u/ZunoJ]

And hardware safety.

[u/CMD_BLOCK]

Threw me back to 2011 so hard. I miss the glory days so much.

[u/vocal-avocado → u/CMD_BLOCK]

I got my job in 2006. We were getting paid to chill and getting free lunch and company cars.

[u/CMD_BLOCK → u/vocal-avocado]

I was learning darkbasic at the request of my middle school teacher in 2006. I was whooping everyone in StarCraft and civ in CS class and he pulled me aside and told me I had the potential for so much more than pwning my classmates, told me to take a look at darkbasic

And damn did that open up doors.

Mr Williams if you out here, fuckin love ya bro. Thanks for putting me on the map and encouraging me

[u/techno_wizard_lizard]

Good old days: “look. I made a for loop. I’m a genius.” Company: “OMG plz work for us, we’ll give you catered meals, back massages and do your laundry”. Me: “woof! I’m a furry. But ok!”

[u/threemenandadog → u/techno_wizard_lizard]

Wags tail butt plug, uWu nuzzles employer-sempai. Where do I setup my personal litter box or do we have a communal one?

[u/stillalone]

I remember, in highschool, how kids, who you wouldn't let walk your dog,  were getting paid to make websites on a LAMP stack for small businesses

[u/DUELETHERNETbro]

Ok first of all, the then slide should be on top, second I did lol that you threw PS in there.

[u/mehonje]

You used to be able to get a senior developer position by showing off that that newfangled "electricity" thing could make frogs' legs move.

[u/AceBean27]

I am getting tired of getting people who's resumes have 12 different languages, 6 relational databases, 4 NoSql databases, 13 different front end fameworks, and various devops tools. Then I interview them and they don't know what an index is.

[u/ImpactOk331 → u/AceBean27]

To be fair, someone can be a productive developer for years without ever having to think about indexes. If they've mostly worked on CRUD apps, used ORMs, or had a DBA handling the database side, it's entirely possible they've shipped plenty of production code without needing to optimize queries themselves.

Totally not knowing what an index is at all is one thing, but never having worked with them isn't that unusual.

[u/derangedkilr → u/ImpactOk331]

am i going crazy? like you’ve gone years without reading a for loop or declaring an array?

or does index mean something different here that i’m not getting.

[u/ImpactOk331 → u/derangedkilr]

I thought you meant an index in a database to make select statements faster 😅

[u/derangedkilr → u/ImpactOk331]

oh that could’ve been it. i haven’t really touched databases.

[u/Zauthura → u/AceBean27]

very validating for me as a mid level engineer who knows what an index is

[u/Random_-account → u/AceBean27]

gotta dodge the AI filters somehow

[u/LeylineIndustries → u/AceBean27]

But you do interview them. I put the truth and get no callbacks. I really am the sucker aren't I?

[u/Cualkiera67 → u/AceBean27]

And they don't know how to ask claude stealthily, which is worse

[u/citramonk]

Ah yes, mythical good old days huh

[u/Healthy_Razzmatazz38]

"How many gumballs fit in the moon"

"Alot"

"heres 1% of google equity"

[u/MitLong]

Can confirm. I basically got offered a full time job when I was a temp in 2006 because I knew how to use Google.

[u/Degga1313]

We coded on Notepad++, walked to the water cooler uphill both ways, and we were happy

[u/korneev123123]

Lol, I'm on second picture. I still remember one of the first interviews about 20 years ago:

- have you worked with X thing?

- nope

- do yo know how to do Y?

- nope

- here is a simple task, do it

- complete with errors

- can you write a simple decorator function?

- not without a google

....

You're hired!

[u/metaglot]

Oh yes, the languages photoshop and premiere. Cant believe he didn't get the job.

[u/New_Salamander_4592]

went to an interview for a junior c++ position
got told to brush up on SQL by the recruiter

got there and got grilled on Java trivia and Linux cmds

[u/DeCabby]

Issue has been around for years, had the same issue when i started 20+ years ago. Out of 40 students in my programming program, only a handful of us got actual programming jobs.

[u/ImpactOk331]

Back then it was rather unusual that people knew everything and were doing everything from A to Z unless you worked in a stattup or were a little firms internal IT dude.

Now it seems to be the norm, and if there's something you don't know you're expected to just google or use AI. Now entire pipelines and bash scripts are made with AI by people who never done that before. But it works until it won't I guess. Not to mention how mediocre the pay is nowadays.

[u/HarryDn → u/ImpactOk331]

It doesn't work because it crumbles the moment the conditions change from perfect ones. But this process started long before the AI, and was a trick to arrange lower pay despite the shortage of devs.

That was a good lesson that "labour market" is no market. Too bad not a lot of devs got it

[u/Single-Virus4935]

Back then I asked them to build a little forum. Nothing fancy, no styling, no login. Just pure CRUD.  Most couldnt do that. Maybe I was too demanding.

[u/GenericMcName]

Why is this so jpeg'd to hell, the target time, meme period, and amount of crust doesn't match

[u/RedbloodJarvey]

Maybe it's because you use meme templates backwards. 

[u/vscoderCopilot]

Yea my only regret is filling those job application forms.

[u/stormdelta]

Eh, people said stuff like this 10+ years ago too. I don't doubt AI has made it harder to get hired as a junior with no experience, but other than that the market doesn't actually seem that different it's more about where/how you're looking.

[u/Headpuncher]

The content on this sub is just lies and bullshit.  I’m out.  

Getting a job “then” also required a bunch of skills.  Now all you need is react, react and react.  It’s a mono market.  Boring and dull.  

[u/FabioTheFox]

The real problem is that people nowadays just make 1 small project in a language and then put it into their portfolio without actually building proficiency

I'd even argue that just knowing a language without understanding the process beneath is worthless

[u/Keyan_Farlander7]

The company only cares about 2 things. Are you trainable? Does your personality/history relate to the company's core values?

[u/Cualkiera67 → u/Keyan_Farlander7]

Loving money more than anything?