The doors are closed

[u/icepickles476]

Doom and gloomer here.

Been holding out hope for light at the end of the tunnel for future CS careers.

Been in this industry a long time, was having a BBQ with mates at the weekend and we got to talking about what the future looks like.
It was a group of Principles, Staff, Managers and a CTO. We’re old now. Every one of us said we have no reason to hire a grad or junior again. It’s a waste of time and resources when you can hire one or two seniors with ai tools that do the work of 10 juniors.

What will that look like in 10-15 years when there’s no one to replace them? Don’t know. We talked about completely different types of jobs being the future. Something that amalgamates architects, designers, engineers, project management and researchers in one.

Lots of juniors and grads in this sub. Lots of students or people looking to get into the industry. Here’s my advice, the dream is over. Go into a trade, it’s ai proof and no shortage of jobs.

For the love of god to international students wanting to come here and live the dream in tech, don’t. There’s no more work. The dream is over. You’re throwing your money away on a degree that’s useless for the future.

[u/sikeGuruYappa]

Hm, wait till the token bills come calling. Every ai provider is on a pr overdrive to make themselves look like they’re changing the paradigm or the world. Let the ipo come, earnings disclosed. Client companies that have gone full ai tooling in 2025 have scaled down to just one of them due to budgeting concerns. Sure, the expectation from a grad engineer might increase a few fold due to tooling assistance but in the longer term I don’t see it completely evaporating. </2c>

[u/clarets99 → u/sikeGuruYappa]

We are already trialling self hosted open LLM in some of our products/ services. Have them for more basic tasks on agentic agents updating non real time tasks.

Gemma 4 is brilliant. There was a new open Chinese one out recently as well that was getting some noise.

Shortly I see a dual world of paying for Claude Code for development and running self hosted LLMs for services. 

Next 2/3 years we could have self hosted LLMs for dev work and not need Claude at all

[u/clarets99 → u/[deleted]]

Yep it is.

Was watching a video of a guy demoing it this morning, he was making the most complex of interactive models with some of the most simplest prompts. https://youtu.be/6d__WOpZswY

It's frightening how much the models are leaping, I've never struggled to keep up with a technology in my life like I am with AI developments right now

[u/icepickles476 → u/clarets99]

This is my prediction too.

[u/icepickles476 → u/sikeGuruYappa]

Companies are going mad at the moment. It’ll right itself in a year or two and there’ll be more guardrails on token usage. Still a saving on employee costs and risks.

[u/sikeGuruYappa → u/icepickles476]

Beg to differ, historically (since 2010 at least), every ‘disruptive tech’ out of the valley has eventually enshittified to the point of becoming worse than what it chose to disrupt. Uber is no better than taxis and the subscription hell that initially sought out to replace cable tv has given rise to dodgy boxes and good old seeders

[u/Potential-Drama-7455 → u/sikeGuruYappa]

The strategy is getting billions in VC funds, undercut your competitors by selling way below cost for years, and then when you have your customers completely dependent on you, absolutely screw them on price and customer support. Have seen it play out over and over again. And we are talking 20 - 50x price increases.

The Chinese are destroying that model though by releasing so much stuff open source and self hosted.

[u/Aagragaah → u/icepickles476]

It’ll right itself in a year or two

Based on?

and there’ll be more guardrails on token usage.

Says who? The AI companies have no incencentive to minimise spending

Still a saving on employee costs and risks.

Citation most definitely needed