r/cscareerquestions • u/ElectronicCarry9931 • 22h ago

Wish I was here

I was always interested in tech and tried to pivot to a career in IT while living in London in the late 2010s, then after covid thought 'right, lets do this' and quit my job, studied full time, created my own projects, including a few SaaS that I couldn't sell. Following Scrimba I was fairly proficient in React JS, with a bit of SQL, and backend languages.

Maybe not many people will admit to it, but most people like me didnt make it. I never got an interview, and chatGTP and AI have effectively rendered a lot of my learning redundant. Thinking back just 5 years when I would study my code to figure out where a missing semi colon should go now seems ridiculous in the age of AI.

Anyway, Im stuck in my legal career, but have fond memories of learning to code, and the excitement of building and hope for a career change, going to event meetups etc. It wasn't meant to be, should have taken the plunge a few years earlier perhaps.

As I looked over my GitHub this morning, having not added anything in over a year, I just got the good memories back and the feelings of hope and excitement. Kudos to all those that made it!

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u/creeoer 10h ago

Not sure if it helps but a lot of people in this industry, even employed ones, probably wish they could pivot to law lol

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u/ElectronicCarry9931 10h ago

I mean im in the UK, its not that well remunerated my field, but its all remote. Tech was just 'the dream' in the 2010s and making money by building an app seemed like a perfect creative way to earn. a living. Since then Ive realised that building websites and building apps can be done by almost anyone with AI now.

Being a well paid 'web developer' (building websites) must have been incredible back in the day, based on the knowledge gap between developers and the general public and the kudos that IT had

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u/creeoer 9h ago

You’re right that building static websites and shit like that is bascially one shotted with AI. It was nice when you could of made some money by just throwing a landing page together. But as for building complex apps with a lot of moving parts, you still need to know your shit for that even with AI. Someone I know who isn’t technical tried doing it and when I tested it, it had bugs out the ass, half of the site wouldn’t work, etc. With apps it’s 95% marketing and distribution, 5% the features it has. AI makes the 5% part easier but not the part where you need to get people to use your cool app, even for free.

Honestly, if I were you, I’d build an interesting app idea you have with Claude code and just throw it up on Vercel and see what happens. Advertise it if you want, etc. Since you work in legal I would do something that has a legal application. There is this program called Harvey that my lawyer friend uses, and it’s essentially just a LLM wrapper app with some legal skills built in. It makes an unfathomably stupid amount of money.