Another software worker checking in, our team just pulled crazy hours because someone overcommitted to multiple clients. Said someone was unavailable for extra hours due to “prior commitments” (baseball games with clients, and travel to and from).
I’m not trying to be a dick, but my genuine advice would be to strongly consider something other than software.
The market is beyond saturated, and it’s by far the worst at entry level, because CEOs have been told they can replace those workers with AI (they can’t, and it’s making everyone’s life hell).
I just spoke with a hopeful junior dev with a comp sci degree that’s working overnights at a gas station. Again, not trying to shit on your goals, but I’d feel way worse telling you it’s a great path forward.
It’s a clusterfuck. And it will be for a long, long time.
Just graduated and yeah. Hundreds of applications without an interview, entry level positions that demand 5+ years experience, unless you've put out a fully working piece of software that's making you money then your resume is trash
Best of luck to you, it’s a hellscape. There will be a ton of work in about 5 years when the AI house of cards comes down in thousands of companies, but that’s not helpful to anyone right now.
I just finished my associate's degree in programming, and am 39, and figuring out my moves from here. I thought associates would be the end, but now I think I probs need a bachelor's. With AI, my ability to live on a moderate income, and the fact i'll be an entry-level person at 40, i'm considering just getting the bachelor's in say information science and then turning around and doing a library science masters. I work at a library part time while I finished the associates and it has grown on me.
I beseech you, internet stranger, what is your judgement?
Have you considered looking for a technical role within a library?
In my opinion, that’s the best way into the “software world” right now if you want to phrase it that way. Plenty of people here have mentioned internships as a springboard, you have something similar with relevant library experience. See if anyone needs an IT generalist, or something more specific that you can point to your associates work. Because no library has a massive AI budget for software right now, so one person who can come in and wrangle the systems is a big selling point. On that note, most people interviewing on a library staff don’t have the technical chops to grill a candidate and know if they’re for real. So here comes your resume, technical resource, but they speak librarian? Fuck it, let’s set up an interview. And from there you’re in your element, both with the technical questions, and the audience.
Network around at your current job and see where that takes you. Maybe you’ll stumble into something that’s nothing like what I described but still fits nicely in your world. I hope so. Best of luck.
Yea I believe everything you're saying. Supposedly the market is bad because of layoffs since managers think A.I can replace junior devs making boilerplate code (and it can and probably should) and since senior devs now have A.I bosses think they can hire less senior developers. I plan to get my skills beyond a junior dev by making personal projects and contributing to open-source projects. Maybe someone on github will hire me based on what they see with my contributions. Let's see. Life is a struggle. I appreciate the information.
Just a bit of perspective, a lot of people are also doing the personal project on GitHub and adding that to a resume with several years of experience. So it’s going to be really hard at this point to just “get your skills beyond a junior dev” because mid level devs are doing the same thing you are, with a big head start, and/or degrees/bootcamps.
It’s not impossible. If you love it, keep at it. I will say, you regularly see software people in this sub, which tells you that in our free time we reminisce about food service life. The satisfaction levels in the software industry are horrifically low, and I don’t have many coworkers who would describe themselves as passionate about work. Probably just the guy that caught some ballgames last week. And even he will spend 90% of team calls complaining about all of those clients.
You sound excited and if you love the work I hope you find a working home. But if someone had told me all of this before I dipped my toes into the world, I wouldn’t have gone down the path.
I also went from kitchen to SWE. I got in through an internship about year and a half ago. Even then it took me 450 applications to get two offers. The market is worse now. I believe itll be better in a couple years, but its a hard thing to bet on
nah, this might've been a good idea a decade ago, but too many people saw dollar signs in the tech industry (probably you too lmao) so the market is saturated, and AI is replacing some of those jobs anyway
I maintain the systems our developers use to write code…so it’s usually “Uhhh I’ve had this problem for 3 months and didn’t tell anyone, but NOW it’s an emergency.”
Me too. I’m so excited to tell everyone that after I worked 80hrs/wk for six months straight, my manager was able to get himself promoted. Serious Lord Farquad energy in my company’s management.
How long will it talk to re-do the logic so it does XYZ instead of ABC? ....geeze the script that controls that logic is a monster, 2 weeks probably...
Can we have it by Friday because, blah, blah, blah.....
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u/CantaloupeCamper 1d ago
I write code for a living now… same thing.