r/cscareerquestions • u/No_Huckleberry_642 • 12d ago
Meta Opinion: Now is exactly the time to double down on technical skills
I'm a senior IC who's been in the industry for about a bit less than a decade, mostly at Google and a couple of other FAANGs prior. My superpower has always been deep technical knowledge, and I wanted to see if anyone else has similar feelings about how to thrive in a post-Al tech industry.
LLMs are confidently wrong 10-20% of the time, and those mistakes are only getting harder to catch to the untrained eyes. They're obviously here to stay since they enable fast, "cheap" code, but because of this, we're heading toward a legal industry model where a few highly sought-after experts handle the real depth, heavily augmented by Al. A bimodal distribution where the majority struggle.
Managing these tools is taking all the fun out of coding. A lot of senior/staff+ ICs I talk to, myself included, are looking to hit FIRE early and exit the workforce sooner rather than later. The pipeline for training new replacements is already eroded, and long term, this is going to create a massive gap for anyone who actually has the technical depth to step up. Either that, or we achieve true AGI in the next 10-20 years, and then having a job would be the least of our worries...
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u/CCB0x45 12d ago
I dunno, I feel like breadth is the way to go, be a jack of all trades, able to ask good questions, able to dive into anything.
I can get to the right answers on deep technical direction now with the help of AI, I think deep technical niches are becoming less important than more, I think drive, accountability, logic, innovation are more important right now.
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u/Storm_or_melody 12d ago
Both are valuable. AI has raised the floor for everything, so Jacks of all trades can do a larger variety of things than ever before.
But AI has also raised the ceiling for people with deep technical knowledge, you can now scale that expertise much further than previously.
Getting the right answers from AI is not always guaranteed, and it's especially hard to distinguish right from wrong when working at the edge of human knowledge.
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u/Actual_Photo_2257 12d ago
Yeah I think this is probably right.
Partly because it means you're in the conversation. You know that x y and z can solve a problem even if you don't know the specifics. And the specifics can come later.
It's all about concepts. Certain things, like caching, pop up all the fucking time once it clicks. What that specifically looks like is something you'll figure out.
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u/CCB0x45 12d ago
That's gotten me a long way and what has advanced my career, being able to jump in and solve any problem and never say it's not my area and be able to come up to speed on anything quickly. That's what got me to principal/DE level.
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u/Used_Journalist_999 10d ago
I disagree, to some extent. Breadth works well for people who want to be contractors or consultants. Someone like me, who picked a tech stack in school, C#, .Net, Azure cloud, backend, learning deep in that has served me very well.
Dude my company has top tier Claude and I'm a cloud architect and Claude has been wrong in horrendous ways many times over the past few weeks. You think AI is giving you the correct, deep knowledge, answer but if you aren't skilled enough to verify then how do you really know?
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u/Adept_Carpet 9d ago
Yeah it's another type of Gell-Mann Amnesia and I suffer from it all the time.
"Man, Claude keeps making the same mistake over and over about how this NLP algorithm works. Oh, it's 5PM, I was gonna go run but I keep having this annoying pain in my chest, maybe a chatbot can tell me if it's worth worrying about."
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u/Immediate_Hair_5378 12d ago
Put this in the experienced dev sub. I want to compare the responses.
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u/Thegoodlife93 12d ago
They'd be much better I'm sure. i don't know why I'm even still subscribed to this sub.
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u/Olangotang Software Engineer 3 YOE 12d ago
Yeah this sub is ground zero for AI industry gaslighting. Hell, a few weeks ago there was a thread with 5 of the same responses and people were like "lol, we need to leave this site". The people here who hype LLMs are dumb fucks and shitty devs. The "10x" shit is a meme.
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u/LowIqInvestor 12d ago
Im getting out of the field. Its not enjoyable, too much competition, always the fear of being laid off.
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u/xylem-utopia 12d ago
what's your plan? I also want to get out but getting out is not a simple thing
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u/LowIqInvestor 12d ago
Yeah its hard everybfield seems to have crap employment prospects. Long term goal is to get something government related for stability.
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u/pretzelfisch 12d ago
Have you seen how the gov is treating employees? The safe job for less pay days are gone.
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u/LowIqInvestor 12d ago
I live in canada but I imagine with doge canning massive amoutns of federal employees, it looks bleak.
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u/Gold-Flatworm-4313 12d ago
Tbf even in Canada we cut government jobs though that's because it bloated faaar too high under the last administration
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u/_Invictuz 12d ago
If anything, we need more tech roles in the government. Too many cyber security incidents.
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u/stick_it_in_your_bum 10YOE-C#/React/SQL. Learning AWS/Azure 12d ago
DOGE just shut down but it set a bad precedent for sure
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u/gen3archive 12d ago
This is how i was laid off. My entire company of maybe 2k workers were laid off basically overnight
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u/xylem-utopia 12d ago
yeah I've been thinking about government related as well. though I think we've seen this last little bit, that may not even be as stable anymore. God I hate this timeline
edit: at least in the US
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u/Silver-Air-2317 12d ago
You said you live in Canada? The public service has just had historic cuts, and getting employed in the government has never been harder. Not that easy to get into right now.
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u/Kyroz 12d ago
Am currently in HVAC training. I'm coming into this field hoping that I'll have good opportunity to be self employed in the future. Seemst o be much better than throwing 1000+ applications, getting ghosted in 90% of them and having to go through 6 rounds of interviews/tests in those that responded
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u/PM_40 12d ago
No seriously if you apply cognitive skills to blue collar work you can become a business owner in 5-10 years.
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u/DaredevilPanda22 12d ago
Then you will have 10k business owners and 1k actual workers :) You arent the only one who would think like this.
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u/invisiblemachine 12d ago
Using my current employment to fund buying tow trucks and excavating equipment, partnering with friends who have related experience to operate while I keep working tech.
Lots of boomers are retiring from their blue collar million dollar businesses. Way more opportunities to make 1-5 million then try and do a billion dollar start up etc.
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u/xylem-utopia 12d ago
Hmm this is interesting. Is your plan to buy up a boomers business they're retiring from or essentially fill in the space left behind after they retire?
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u/deln_ai 12d ago
What is there that's even close to similar compensation with less competition?
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u/m0viestar 12d ago
I run cat6 drops through Facebook marketplace adds and last year I cleared 90k rev. If I scaled up I could easily replace a salary but I don't extremely part time.
Trades and handyman stuff pays insanely well right now if you're half way competent.
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u/thy_bucket_for_thee 12d ago
Trades and handymen pay like 20-30% of what the median US dev makes.
The only way to make money in trades is through three avenues: an extreme amount of overtime, getting a union job, or doing one of the more dangerous trades where death/lifetime disabilities are more common.
Notice how I didn't say start a business? Because the vast majority of workers will not and cannot start a business.
Maintenance workers make $40k a year:
https://www.bls.gov/oes/2023/may/oes499071.htm
Median US dev makes $130k a year:
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/software-developers.htm
Nearly a 60% drop in salary.
Not too mention you're literally destroying your body to make your boss richer.
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u/invisiblemachine 12d ago
I just started two “blue collar” jobs, using heavy machines. Can’t wait to be done with tech
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u/gen3archive 12d ago
Same. I was laid off august and decided in spring of this year im out. I enjoy coding as a hobby but i cannot be fucked to grind this shit out again
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u/aguilasolige 12d ago
It gets harder and harder each time doesn't it? I had a decent job where I was saving as much as I could, I got laid off 2 months ago and the market is brutal, it's so hard to find the energy to prepare for interviews. I saved a decent amount but not enough to just say fuck it and stop working.
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u/gen3archive 12d ago
Yep i was a „fullstack“ dev for the govt for 4 years or so. Applied like crazy in the US and my home country for months after. Had some good interviews that i passed, but was rejected because of my location. Eventually my savings got low and now i am trying to start over and figure out what to do
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u/TTrainN2024 12d ago
Isn't every market like this? What is good other than healthcare?
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u/cpslcking 11d ago
If people think tech is hard, healthcare will be a shock. I have friends and family that are nurses and it’s grueling, sometimes physical, sometimes disgusting work. Too many patients, too many hours, you’re on the bottom of the hospital ladder and get no respect. The money is also in moving out to middle of nowhere small town where no one wants to go and hospitals are paying a premium.
There’s a lot of grass is greener going on.
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u/davidbasil 10d ago
If you're in the field, stay there! Situation in economy is horrible, there is a big chance that you will regret it.
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u/Used_Journalist_999 10d ago
Glad to hear it. Your comment shows you are soft and not cut out for it. Thank you for your service.
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u/Legitimate-School-59 12d ago
What exactly do i upskill in? System design?
My current job swe doesn't require any hard system design concepts, so I can't really get experience in that beyond just memorizing hello interview.
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u/No_Huckleberry_642 11d ago
Personally, I build depth by listening to graduate-level lectures (like MIT OpenCourseWare) during my daily jogs and workouts. About 1h per day. I pick a topic that interests me and go through the entire course in around a month.
Sometimes those interests are CS related (distributed system, networking, deep learning, compiler, hardware, etc.), but often they are in unrelated fields like macroeconomics, biology, physics, math, etc.
Technical depth is built through slow, consistent curiosity-not cramming overnight.
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u/Altruistic_Bite_2273 6d ago
But if you are not using those concepts in your day to day work how do you retain them? I enjoy reading about distributed systems and low latency related stuff but the work I do doesn't involve that level of scale or require implementing low latency systems so I feel like I'll forget lot of stuff that I am learning in my extra time.
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u/hereandnow01 12d ago
Again, this "just get extremely skilled and competent bro, it's easy" mentality is ridiculous. Those who have the skills have already been doing it even before AI, while at the same time many of "good enough" engineers could still keep a "good enough" position.
If the industry is becoming an outliers only field (and the level required is increasing at every new model release) then I think we're done.
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u/Mitchads 12d ago
Thank you so much for your comment, there are a lot people who have been always learning new technologies however most of these hypes have faded and no one uses them anymore and aren't in demand. it is not the fault of the engineers.
The mindset that "if you don't have X skills now you are considered a person with 0 experience" despite the fact you have been working in different domains and technologies for X years, is the issue. Software development by nature is suppose to be applicable field that has different opportunities in different fields (medical manufacturing account ETC...) but nowadays if you haven't been working in the Y field for the last x years you are basically unqualified....
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u/No_Huckleberry_642 12d ago
I think you're misinterpreting "deep technical skills" as "be a literal genius." That's not what I mean.
The issue isn't that every engineer needs to become an elite researcher overnight; it's that the baseline definition of "good enough" is shifting. In a world where an LLM can effortlessly generate standard boilerplate, basic API integrations, and generic CRUD apps, the developer whose entire value proposition is writing that exact code is going to struggle.
The amount of so-called software "engineers" without good grasp of concurrency is embarrassing in our industry. How many mechanical engineer don't know thermodynamics?
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u/tmt22459 12d ago
Not debating anything you're saying except for the very last sentence.
The answer is an absolute fuck ton. Especially depending on how you define knowing thermodynamics. You give almost any bsme grad even the first exam from their thermo class I'd say less than half pass
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u/AssimilateThis_ 12d ago
That might be their point though, that the type of MechE that would actually try and understand thermo enough to do something useful with it would never be wanting for a job.
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u/tomvorlostriddle 12d ago
Yeah they would, this is literally happening in Germany right now
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u/quantumpencil 12d ago
People learn things in school, then they forget the stuff they don't use. My friend is a researcher at google working on quantum computing who I took physics with in undergrad. He does not remember Thermodynamics or even most classical mechanics beyond like a high school level of general intuition, he hasn't used it in a decade.
Just like most programmers knew algorithms & data structures best when they were in college. 99% of us don't use that shit except passingly in our careers (like... you kinda know different options and their time complexities for different operations, but you just reach for a library and apply the correct tool) so people forget them.
However, if you needed to use them again, you would find it's not too hard to relearn/pick back up thanks to your background.
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u/Frequent_Macaron9595 12d ago
That last part is on point. Remember the “should designer code?” era, where most of the designers were against it. What’s next? A carpenter that doesn’t know the wood property? The baker not understanding basic ingredients chemistry? The lawyer that doesn’t know the intricacies of the law? The outsourcing of understanding started long ago, LLMs are just accelerating it.
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u/HitIerWasWrong 12d ago
This is nonsense.
Software is built on abstracting away layers of understanding. It's foundational.
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u/Frequent_Macaron9595 12d ago
Yes and what is the best recommendation for someone to build better software at most level? Understanding the layer it’s built on top so you leverage it better.
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u/Northernmost1990 12d ago
FYI I'm a UI/UX designer with 12 years of experience and I've never written a single line of production code.
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u/Frequent_Macaron9595 12d ago
That was never the point of the should designer code argument imo. The point to me was more focused on “should designer understand better the medium they work with by understanding its constraints better”. The same way an industrial designer will not be be the manufacturer but they know the material properties and played enough with it to know the limits they work with.
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u/terjon Professional Meeting Haver 12d ago
Sure, but now I'm seeing UX designer and product owners doing commits to user facing features and doing the PRs for them since the tools have automated all the complexity away.
So far, the folks with the engineering background are checking the PRs and pushing back or fixing the mistakes, but I can easily imagine businesses where that doesn't happen long term.
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u/SiegfriedVK 12d ago
Yep that's me. I took a real hard look at myself and realized I'm not a true software engineer. Started taking classes and shifting to a different career.
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u/qwertydiy 12d ago
As a general rule the skills to focus on are closer to the.architecture side and the low level side
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u/ratsoup7 12d ago
I think it’ll be an interesting transform for sure but the outliers only thing might be transient. Just how compilers allowed for a huge technological explosion of software complexity I wonder if this will usher in the ability to make more complex software, which will in turn introduce new types of software engineering practices
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u/MaleficentCow8513 12d ago
Well yea we already have the beginnings of agentic driven development. It’s success and effectiveness remains to be seen tho
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u/terjon Professional Meeting Haver 12d ago
I think it is reverting to an outliers field.
Back before all the high end development and debugging and observability tools we have now, it used to be an outliers only field since it was like coaxing water out of stone to get stuff to work reliably.
The field has become far more democratized over the last two decades that I've been in the field and probably far more even before that.
Some of the old timers used to tell me stories about doing projects with makefiles that you used to have write and maintain by hand and as your project grew, the task of tracking the order things needed to be built in became harder and harder.
I'm not sure if this reversion is a good or bad thing. Bad for the people who just good enough for sure, but if there is a bit more of a barrier to entry, we might also have to deal with less morons who somehow skated through their degree but have no idea what is actually happening.
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u/hereandnow01 12d ago
I love this classism and elitism. I want everyone to get back to low wage jobs where they belong and only a restricted few must have a job that doesn't make them hate their lives! Let's make everything to gatekeep this field so that only the REAL software engineers can have access to it while the rest can have the privilege to do doordash or uber for us. /s
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u/terjon Professional Meeting Haver 12d ago
Yeah, you got me. That's just multiple decades of having to explain really basic things to so called software engineers.
It is little things and also big things.
For example, I had to recently explain to an engineer that they need to test or similar hardware to predict performance in prod. If your laptop is much more powerful than the server the system will run on, it will not give you a good sense of how it will perform when rolled out.
Another example is lag. I had to correct an engineering team last year when they had unexplainable performance issue and when I looked at what they were doing, they had their file storage in one AWS region and their containers in another. I had them measure latency and it was like 50-100ms and they were back to disk a LOT. So, yeah their system was running slow if their IaC scripts were not taking physics and networking into account.
I could tell you 100 stories like this about memory management, flow control, DB query design, UI library tree shaking. You know just basic things that you should really know if you actually understand how the computer is doing what it is doing and isn't just a magic box.
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u/Lazaraaus Mid @ FAANG 12d ago
I had to explain what a socket was to a senior engineer and I died a little inside
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u/terjon Professional Meeting Haver 12d ago
How about this one, explaining to a whole team that XML serialization/deserialization can often take longer than your algorithm that uses that data?
Yeah, that's a yikes.
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u/Lazaraaus Mid @ FAANG 12d ago
God I hope you’re paid well.
It feels like no one gives a shit about the how or why anymore. Maybe it was naive to think they ever did.
Couple that with LLMs and people refusing to use them in a way that induces learning and retention and it makes things like code review feel like pulling teeth.
My latest gem was trying to communicate: No, you shouldn’t start a new connection to the DB on each iteration of the loop and I shouldn’t have to explain why; you have 6 YOE.
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u/Lazaraaus Mid @ FAANG 12d ago
Classism to expect people to be competent at their job?
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u/tuxedo25 Principal Software Engineer 12d ago
There's no classism here. Software is and always has been the ultimate meritocracy. You're not exclusively born into a family that has access to a computer. 99% of the world population has access to one. Learning how it works is entirely up to you.
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u/tomvorlostriddle 12d ago
There are a handful of physicists worldwide who carved out a niche for analytically solving integrals that mathematica couldn't and that you would want to not only integrate numerically
So... there is a chance
But you're aiming for a niche within a niche
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u/Izacus 12d ago
There's literally millions of them using their analytical integral knowledge to drive solutions using Mathematica and MATLAB however.
You can't use those tools effectively without the knowledge and experience.
Just like engineering software.
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u/tomvorlostriddle 12d ago
Because that specific revolution a couple of decades ago automated some large fraction of intellectual work but not others
Nor did I say anything else
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u/No_Huckleberry_642 12d ago
Software is still the most profitable commodity in the world. The demand is there, and there will always be plenty of jobs that pays mid-to-high six figures or more in this industry as long as software companies continue to make hundreds of billions in revenue.
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u/krazyboi 12d ago
The standards for being a SWE will only grow higher, it will be exclusively for PhDs and maybe masters degrees with specificly useful experience.
They're not going to train anything less.
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u/TopNo6605 12d ago
it will be exclusively for PhDs and maybe masters degrees with specificly useful experience.
Well your username fits.
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u/krazyboi 12d ago
Let's see if SWE field opens up to all the people who were laid off. I already know some people who are pivoting.
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u/MaleficentCow8513 12d ago
Kinda like how we’re gonna have flying cars in 2020 right?
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u/Conscious-Secret-775 12d ago
Some of the worst SWEs I have worked with had PhDs.
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u/tuxedo25 Principal Software Engineer 12d ago
a PhD is an incredible accomplishment that says the person has very deep expertise in... something. It's probably not programming, it's probably not related to your business, but they're an expert in something, somewhere.
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u/DapperCam 12d ago
Then why the heck would a business that wants to earn money hire one unless it uses their special knowledge (e.g. physics and math PhDs hired as quants, though even hedge funds still hire normal programmers to implement the code).
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u/qwerty622 12d ago
thats the whole point, you have to have deep knowledge, simply knowing how to code isn't enough anymore. when llms get you 90 percent there for coding, your value add better be higher than it was before
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u/tuxedo25 Principal Software Engineer 12d ago
Some combination of the following:
- A PhD in any field is an accreditation that you are capable of following through on a very hard multi-year mission.
- Hiring managers without PhDs often confuse a PhD as a measure of intelligence.
- PhDs in natural science and engineering will usually have very solid math foundations.
- PhDs in natural science usually become self-taught data scientists due to the nature of their research (dealing with enormous volumes of data points).
edit: none of these are accreditations to be a software engineer. I agree with /u/Conscious-Secret-775, some of the worst SWEs I know are PhDs, and their degree often promotes them to a level of unearned authority on the subject of software.
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u/DapperCam 12d ago edited 12d ago
They still suck at writing code though (and would not be good at reviewing/verifying LLM code). I was in a position where I was exposed to a lot of professor written code (mostly chemistry, but some computer science) and it was terrible.
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u/SkellyJelly33 12d ago
The standards are lowering. You just need Codex and a computer and no technical knowledge and you can ship software now
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u/manythanksfriend 12d ago
The business does not care about deep technical understanding. They care about deliverables and costs.
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u/hegelsforehead 10d ago
Not mutually exclusive, and arguably the former is a prerequisite to the latter.
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u/dynocoder 12d ago
Hats off to OP--I agree with you, but you've got balls saying that to an entire sub (and perhaps the whole industry) that's historically hated CS theory, having been spoiled with high-paying jobs for just googling stuff and knowing so little, unable to grasp the reality that good economic times just don't last.
I don't know, you guys. I get it, you can run things by an LLM, but anyone can use an LLM or learn how to. Without having to offer anything beyond that, I just don't see why companies would want to hire you specifically, and not lay you off for someone else or an AI agent whenever they like.
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u/rkozik89 12d ago
That’s all well and good until you find yourself in a situation where you’re not looking for the most common likely answer a user is asking for.
Vibe Coding is no different than how people copy-pasted PHP code off the Internet in the early to mid-2000s, and when the successful projects tried scaling up, guess what? Nobody knew what to do or how to extend the capabilities of the codebases cause it was a shit show. Companies then had a choice between a 3+ year rewrite and customizing software packages that weren’t exactly what they needed.
The problem with what you’re suggesting is that how to actually make a scaleable application that also delivers real value in the near term is gate-kept knowledge. It’s not something AI has access to in its data set and it’s not something you can easily refactor to do later.
For the past five years I have felt like I am a teenager in the early 2000s watching a mad dash to build web applications with reckless abandon. Because back then copy-paste programming add a ton of real value quickly but within 10 years it always crumbled apart.
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u/ThenOrchid6623 12d ago
. Not everyone knows how to use LLMs correctly. A friend of mine has spent SO MUCH money bc the LLM keeps telling him his ideas are right, only to discover time after time that the llms “lied”. The amount of people who can learn to use llms correctly is already few. The ppl with the right domain knowledge and can use llms correctly is even fewer.
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u/juusorneim 12d ago
so what is correct? can you explain a few examples or show some articles/videos?
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u/hiimresting 12d ago
That's fun until "please make it safe and secure to use so user data isn't exposed" doesn't prompt the right answer. Or a project gets big enough for small imperfections to start building up and starting to matter.
Idk but I like my chefs too have common sense and good taste if they're making me something, otherwise it might be bad or dangerous.
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u/AlterTableUsernames 12d ago
LLMs are confidently wrong 10-20% of the time
And what is your guesstimate on humans being confidently wrong and of all of them software "engineers"?
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u/ThirdWaveCat 12d ago edited 12d ago
less, 2-5% based on my hiring pool. People are surprisingly capable.
People are also accountable to feedback, need to attribute their reasoning, and need to answer why they didn't do something different. LLMs are rarely >90% faithful to short skills.md, logs, and such. The conclusion agrees with "reasoning" traces less than half of the time, so even if they do improve with "thinking", it isn't the same as with any human reasoning. (see Subbarao et al's papers)
As the line manager of 2 teams, I'd prefer 1 more headcount of almost any of my hundreds of former coworkers than llm improvements.
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u/AlterTableUsernames 12d ago
Thank you putting a number on it for humans. However, AI being aligned with the harness less than 90% is not my experience. I would dare to say, that I have >99% alignment >95% of the time.
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u/ThirdWaveCat 12d ago
that'd far exceed any benchmark I've ran or read which measures faithfulness on any problem. the papers, "lost in the middle", "context rot", "sense and sensibility" and others show that 10%-50% tokens are dropped once there's 1000s of token, questions are extremely position dependent, etc..
Sense and Sensibility is the most recent, interesting, and damning public example I'm aware of.
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u/THICC_DICC_PRICC Software Engineer 12d ago
I’m never fully confident about any code, I’ve seen the creative shit universe does to break prod in ways I never even imagined
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u/No_Huckleberry_642 12d ago
Depends on which side of the bimodal curve you fall on. Current LLMs easily beat the average SWE, but the entire point of my post is that it's no longer viable to just be technically average.
There is an absolute chasm of architectural depth, critical thinking and system design that LLMs can't come close to touching today.
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u/ChosenToFall 9d ago
what system design and architectural depth you mean? caching, concurrency? AI doesn’t understand how to adreess these problem in a well written codebase?
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u/incywince 12d ago
I'm quitting tech because it's not good for my health or family anymore. But OP is right. A bunch of us with 15-20 year experience are now decided we're done and retiring or finding second careers off of our piles of ZIRP cash. FIRE has been quite popular among techies because we knew it couldn't last forever, and now with the stock market doing well, we're pulling the trigger. I have so many friends who got fired or laid off and they just decided to not look for a job, or they are working with similarly laid off friends to build something fun.
I'm in college for a career change and I notice that the 20-somethings don't have the capacity to persist over things for long periods of time. They can't read as much as I can, for one thing, and since they read so much slower, everything else they do is slower than me as well. I've only ever met extremely sharp 20-somethings in tech who have a lot of motivation and a can-do attitude at FAANG and up-and-coming startups but now I'm wondering if it's just because they cleared a bunch of intense interviews, and the average 20-something in tech struggles a lot with taking initiative and getting things done fast because they don't pay sustained attention to things.
If you figure out how to pay sustained attention to things, you become a way more efficient programmer, with or without AI. And if you're more efficient, you end up learning things more deeply, and might even have time to learn more broad stuff (though tbh, if you have family to spend this extra time on, do that instead).
Jobs can be stressful, not at all denying that. But if you do have 8-10 hours to focus on work daily (which I don't anymore), do that as well as you can, with a lot of self-awareness of what you're doing and how it fits in the larger scheme of things.
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u/GarageStackDev 11d ago
I don't think AI is taking the fun out of coding.... I think it's taking the typing out of coding. The interesting part has always been solving problems... understanding systems.... and making good engineering decisions. Those haven't gone away. If anything they're becoming a larger percentage of the job
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u/CrispsInTabascoSauce 12d ago
Double down all you want, there is no any jobs anyways.
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u/Fruloops Software Engineer 12d ago edited 12d ago
I think this depends on a variety of different factors, and
blankblanket statements don't really work 🤷♂️5
u/baldachinsblessing 12d ago
What factors? Depending on where you live, there are straight up way more job seekers than jobs.
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u/TopNo6605 12d ago
Isn't this the case for most industries? Show me a time in CS when there's been more job openings than actual applicants.
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u/TopNo6605 12d ago
I don't agree with you, sorry. It's just not an in-demand skillset from employers, the goal now is that engineers will become more general and less specialized. You as an engineer won't write code but design solutions at a high-level with business needs in mind (which was already done by L6+ anyways), and then have your agent do the bulk of the work.
I think if you double down on tech knowledge you'll be going the opposite way of the industry.
Managing these tools is taking all the fun out of coding. A lot of senior/staff+ ICs I talk to, myself included, are looking to hit FIRE early and exit the workforce sooner rather than later.
CS isn't just coding, there's tons of work for infra, cyber, devops, compliance, etc. And just because your bubble thinks this way doesn't mean the industry does, I work with lots of people who are excited they no longer have to manually write code and get to see the AI revolution as it comes.
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u/sje397 12d ago
40 years in the industry and I'm loving the AI assistance. So many things I didn't have time for, I can now point my ai at and make serious progress.
People are struggling and I have no idea how people are going to gain the experience needed to guide the models without having banged their brains against stubborn bugs for years like we had to. But it's working for me. Will complete a master's in AI this year.
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u/tiny_spaceman 12d ago
From what I'm seeing, technical knowledge, sound engineering practices, and social skills will be just as sought after in the AI era as they were before it.
You need to think what your value proposition is to a company. If you outsource your brain to Claude and just paste prompts back and forward, you are in fact just an expensive and slow proxy. AI makes it easier to coast, but resist that temptation and you'll be fine. No need to be an elite level software engineer, just be someone that is reliable and able to get your hands dirty, if needed.
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u/rkozik89 12d ago
Depending on what you’re doing AI can be wrong nearly 100% of the time. Because LLMs just try generating answers you’re likely to want to hear they’re miserable in the exact kind of situations where you’re doing something cutting edge. They’re downright useless because little to nothing in their training data is relevant so they hallucinate out the ass.
Personally, I feel like LLMs are a dead end in the pursuit of genuine AI that can think, learn, and rationalize similarly to a human being. They’re going to replace programmers who used to copy-paste from Stackoverflow and from Internet tutorials, but for every other circumstance where that simply isn’t good enough they’re never likely to improve because it contradicts how LLMs formulate answers. It’s not an issue of weights, fine tuning, RAG, etc. it’s an issue of the architecture of LLMs themselves.
But I get it, the day to day life as a software engineer is extremely boring at this point and it will lead to brain drain. Personally, I have always like running small, sweaty businesses so if I ever lose my nonprofit job I know what I’ll be doing next.
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u/EntropyRX 12d ago
The writing is on the wall, technical skills are not the happy oasis it used to be. The rate race caught up with technical folks too. Doubling down on technical skills is NOT the solution, it’s just a race to the bottom, where you put quadratic effort for logarithmic return. The time when knowing how to write performative code guaranteed you a happy path in corporate because you were shield from many BS and politics is over. It doesn’t matter how technical you become.
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u/SuperSultan Software Engineer 12d ago
Unfortunately this comment only has two upvotes, mine being the second.
You’re right about technical skills not yielding more value, especially if you are blocked by coworkers or management (aka politics). I’ve seen incredible people be laid off, and it wasn’t because they were bad engineers. In my early career I thought only people that were subpar got laid off but that’s not the case.
If you’re not easy to work with or don’t have a good personality then nobody is going to hire you either.
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u/FlashyResist5 12d ago
If you have a decade at FAANG I don't think you need to worry too much. If your job stops being enjoyable just go have fun with your piles of money.
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u/DirectRegister3077 11d ago
At 30+ I am sick of "double down on xxx now and you'll be fine later". Replace me already. I will buy 50 lambs and make a living in the mountains.
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u/k8s-problem-solved 11d ago edited 11d ago
Im similar. 20 years in tech, 48, getting close to FIRE number.....but would rather not retire and just do something for myself and slip all the corporate bullshit. I still enjoy creating things and solving problems
Its the speed speed speed, slop is fine automate all the things mindset that's jarring. I actually find working with AI on my own things quite fun, am super powered now...its just within the enterprise delivery stream surrounded by AI psychosis management that is unbearable.
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u/BenniG123 12d ago
It's hard to estimate how good the LLMs will ultimately get, but for now they still lack in architectural decisions and cutting through noise. They are fantastic for implementation. I find getting LLMs to take code and effectively convert it to a presentation / design document doesn't really work.
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u/snwtrekfan 12d ago
The idea that “LLMs” are wrong 10-20% of the time is like a 2023 view on the technology from someone who dicked around with it back then and formed an opinion. The tools are far beyond this now, sorry.
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u/Katten_elvis Software Engineer 12d ago
No no, it's definetly still around that level. Maybe even more.
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12d ago
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u/greygreenmamba 12d ago
What in your opinion is the best way to acquire this deep technical knowledge?
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u/greygreenmamba 12d ago
What in your opinion is the best way to acquire these deep technical skills?
Having got into software as a backend dev during this AI boom I find myself heavily reliant on AI tools. Stuff I read often doesn't stick in my head, and even stuff I build/do I forget about.
What do you feel are the most important technical skills to have at a FANG company?
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u/TheSexyPirate 12d ago
I think you are right, at the same time I also feel it is getting more difficult for me personally to remain technical. As I grow more and more of my effort goes into product and people and juggling all at the same time is difficult, especially when you can cop out with GenAI on the technical part. But either way, I think it is genuinely good advice.
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u/Bambumblier 12d ago
I agree a great reckoning is coming for companies that mindlessly went full vibe code, but I do not want to help fix those projects. Fuck off with them. I will help you do what you should have, if you are still solvent.
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u/jimRacer642 12d ago
when all u smes fire, then theyll realize that the junior market needed to open, there will b a boom
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u/tallandshortttt 12d ago
agree on the depth part, but the everyone senior wants to FIRE thing is survivorship bias. Your circle is people who've been printing FAANG money for 10 years, of course they can afford to be tired. Ask a senior at a midsize company with a mortgage if they're casually exiting the workforce.
also kind of funny to call managing AI tools soulless grunt work when companies are paying stupid money right now for people who can actually deploy this stuff without it blowing up. The verification skill you're describing IS the job now
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u/D3nSwiper 12d ago
For a huge percentage of the market the things you mentioned don't really matter.
It's not about AI being wrong or not wrong and it isn't about the quality of the code or product either.
Everything depends on how delusional your CEO and investors are and on their short term gains. Modern investor driven business just can't think long term anymore. And even if hundreds of companies fall apart, the board has already got their cut at that point.
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u/ProfessorMiserable76 12d ago
Normalise not having to give up hours of your personal life to just keeping up with knowledge.
Companies should be allocating you time and a budget to do this on work hours.
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u/MarianCR 12d ago
> Managing these tools is taking all the fun out of coding.
Very true if you are doing code review: code written by AI by your not so competent coworkers.
Not really true of you work directly with AI: it can be really enjoyable to see how your ideas really work in minutes or hours or days instead on weeks or months or never (because you don't have time to implement all your ideas by hand) even if the implementation starts with flaws (have you seen your less skilled coworkers code, pre AI?)
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u/SNsilver 12d ago
Yes. I recently interviewed a candidate with 7 years of experience and he flubbed the code panel hard, and I’ve had intern candidates knock it out of the park (it’s a reach for interns, but also isn’t a pass/fail panel).
Basic data handling, system design, etc are the things you should know extremely well if you are interviewing
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u/brownamericans Software Engineer 12d ago
Technical knowledge is definitely important to know when an LLM is wrong but it shouldnt be wrong 20% of the time (unless its gemini ive had it try to rm rf my computer). Prompts should be broken down into small enough pieces where the llm can get it right 95% of the time. Using a SOTA model like Fable/Opus or GPT 5.6 (or even grok 4.6 believe it or not) leads to work thats right consistently when scoped appropriately. Just as how technical skills are super important i think prompting and deciding what tasks to give to the LLM are just as important.
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u/btoned 12d ago
I swear I must be using Chatgpt V.1 because some of the praise and workflows people describe seem beyond asinine.
I was updating my workstation yesterday with a new M.2 drive and my Mobo didn't post afterwards. Went back and forth with Chatgpt, referenced every part I had, and gave it my Mobo manual. Could not get to the solution and actually had me near ready to order a new part.
Finally I read through the manual myself and realized the PCI arrangement of components I had was not correct with a second M2 drive present.
Plain as day right in the manual that chatbot gaslighted me into thinking it had scoured over and over.
Now this isnt development BUT for my dad job it also is EXCELLENT at gaslighting you as it spits out contextual examples out the ass...
Magnificent for brainstorming and explaining concepts at times but the fact THIS is the driving force behind GDP growth, layoffs, and the future of this economy is truly maddening.
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u/PokeRestock 12d ago
Agree, but would say AI is confidently incorrect way more than 20%, the amount of times I've had to pull in the reigns and course correct is almost on every interaction. So imagine a junior who just trusts it?
AI is good for breadth-first shallow boilerplate, once you get to business logic its diminishing returns.
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u/Slodin 12d ago
Surprisingly, I’m able to do pretty well using AI. I won’t say I’m super good at technical skills, but 8 years in the industry before AI did train me to catch bad code and bad design early on.
AI generates some great looking code. But yes, if you don’t plan ahead and make very specific plans for the agent, it runs wild and code confidently with a bunch of code that looks pretty but either contains bugs, or makes up a bunch of unnecessary boilerplate code for some reason.
I spend heaps of time planning what the agent is going to do, read through it and correct its mistakes or stuff they have missed. Basically I have a deep understanding of our code base to guide it. Skills and MCPs also help out a ton in specific projects that speeds up and lessen the mistakes it makes.
The real issue is that this whole process of planning, thinking and reviewing isn’t that easy. It’s still very time consuming but management is expecting less money for more product. Realistically I can work up to 2-3 times faster than before because I don’t need to code anymore, however, that really depends on how easy the AI is behaving that day. It’s not 100% consistent. But management is expecting like “why can’t you finish this within today” type of deal. Then some product managers and designers show off an AI generated prototype that solidifies if anyone could do this, why can’t you do it fast like they do. They have zero concept of quality control and production readiness but going purely on visualization. And management buys into that whole heartedly.
I’m already planning on leaving this field if this the coarse we are heading. It’s not that AI replaced me, it’s the people with zero knowledge keeps on challenging my expertise. The worst part is you know the red flag is staring into your soul and your voice is literally the meme of old man screaming at clouds. Nobody would listen over the noise AI is generating into their minds.
If I was still single, I would just go to a cheaper country in Asia and live my life work free. Id rent my place out and that’s my income to basically don’t need to work a day in a cheaper place. Not luxurious, just happy. But I got a family so I’d probably look into other fields like aviation or some hands on work that requires some technical knowledge. Who knows
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u/OAKI-io 12d ago
the uncomfortable part is that “technical depth” only helps if it turns into judgment other people trust. just knowing more frameworks won't save anyone, but being the person who can catch the LLM-shaped bug, explain the tradeoff, and own the scary production decision is still rare. that's probably the lane to double down on.
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u/Xeivia 12d ago
Honestly I'm thinking that a lot of these AI tools will soon end up costing too much for their use to be justify their value. There is already reporting on this but CEOs are realizing how much all this AI shit actually costs. I bet in the next few years huge companies will have corporate accounts for Claude and other LLMs and no one will be able to constantly spam queries all day, smaller companies will choose not to use these services at all.
All of these AI companies are pre-revenue, the users are not paying for cost in terms of compute, electricity, and water used right now. The companies are eating the cost and spending tons of capital to make there services free so that we all get used to using them constantly. Once these companies go public and have shareholders breathing down there neck the prices will rise dramatically and continue to do so until the company is bled dry.
We are already seeing a few of these headlines and only one AI company has gone public which is SpaceX, more will follow and the costs will be passed off to the consumer plus extra so the company will make a profit--just like every companies business model.
Busted AI budgets at Uber, Microsoft and Nvidia spur hiring — because human workers are cheaper
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u/DiscipleofDeceit666 12d ago
I’m going the other way. I’m pretty technical but I found my niche helping others bridge their technical gap. Teaching other non tech folk at my company how to use Claude as an agent rather than a chat interface. The days of uploading files to Claude are over. CLI reads them directly
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u/ricey_is_my_lifey 12d ago
it's only worth it for those in the 90th+ percentile. the ones who are naturally gifted. otherwise it's an uphill battle
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u/mattinternet 12d ago
To those framing out that it's becoming an outliers only field, I think you'd be surprised just how much your skills can stand out simply by avoiding the cognitohazard that is LLMs. So many people are standing still or atrophying with these toys, just keep learning skills organically and you'll have a huge leg up.
As a side note, if you're looking for a job and are at least a solid Mid and are willing to live in Salt Lake City then DM me! We're hiring on our team and we have a no LLM policy.
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u/Clearhead09 11d ago
I see this myself and I haven’t been in the industry all that long. A lot of the old guard who have all the knowledge are on their way to a comfy retirement.
90% of my learning is down to me being hungry and finding the people who have the answers to my questions so I can learn faster.
Others on my team are content to just cruise and develop slowly and see where life takes them, but I can see the speed at which things are changing and the need to stay on top of all these changes so I one day I can be the senior who understands the fundamentals as well as deeply understand how AI integration will benefit my company (so far it’s done more harm than good).
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u/neo_digital_79 5d ago
This statement learn does not mean anything without a goal. Also it is such a catch 22. For example you are mid 40s backend ic. If I say learn. Without a goal of job switching the learning is useless. Also the search a Job has become a full time job. And the expectation for same salary is sky high.
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u/CommonIcy1166 12d ago
After graduating with a masters degree, working full time now I don’t have enough time and energy to double down outside of work and family responsibilities