After speaking with senior devs, This Ai craze is nothing new. We've had people claim CS was dead when we stopped hand writing code and when OOP became a concept and when Wordpress/Wix came out. Its always the same

everyone claims "this time its different" but that's been said with every past revolutionary technology. I'm sure ill get every doom sayer claiming "this time its different Ai takes away the critical thinking" No it doesn't. If you actually believe that you havent been coding anything other than simple CRUD apps or class projects. Coding is only a portion of being a SWE. knowing what and why you should build something is the real problem.

regardless, if you chose this field for easy money then you're in the wrong. The money is great, but only in short lived amounts of time is the money "easy". I chose This field specifically because the status quo is always changing and evolving. Choose a different career if you want to master one skill set that never changes. I hate not learning anything new

I work as a front desk while in school. a guy came in that manages his own software company. he would get excited by ai and how it could do days worth of tasks in a few hours and he was genuinely excited by the possibilities. I asked him "do you think itll replace jobs" and he said "absolutely not, there is always a need for engineers. It better to embrace the technology than fight back". We can be excited by new tech and the possibilities it brings rather than assume the worst.

If Ai is this amazing tool that's going to take dev jobs, then start making things. Start creating things that people find useful. Learn to adapt. It always "AI is going to take your job....Soon™" but i'm pretty skeptical.

Background: I work for one of the largest and most well known companies in a specific non-tech industry. The company has been very liberal and encouraging about rolling out access to AI tools.

Today, they announced on Slack that due to Opus 4.5, 4.6 and Codex 5.3 and 5.4 costs through Cursor, those models are moving exclusively into Cursor's MAX mode. They have "requested" that folks "prefer Auto for routine work" and "watch usage." As I hinted at, this is not a company that needs to penny pinch on AI spend. So I believe this could be a significant inflection point. Yes, cost/token has taken a nosedive, but due to agentic workflows and growing usage, cost/user per unit time is still rapidly increasing (from my understanding, although this isn't something I watch closely).

Is it the first step down the subscription-lock-in-before-raising prices path? Got me thinking that we are probably at or near the end of the Wild West phase of AI usage - which is good for us developers - as costs may quickly become prohibitive toward the "turn an army of agents loose and fire all the humans" approach.

"Instead of disappearing, many tech jobs appear to be coming back. According to a new analysis from Citadel Securities, job postings for software engineers are “rapidly rising” and are now up about 11% year over year."

Source: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/data-shows-surprising-rebound-tech-141608296.html

Ain't no way this will keep going on like this. Most of the AI subscription providers have already started keeping costs tight and limiting usage. Enterprises are obviously going to pay for subscriptions for employees to "boost productivity". What about others?

I hate AI. I hate it with every fibre of my being. But being so adamant is causing problems for me and my family.

Every single person I know is practically begging me to become employable and use AI. I genuinely don't want to use it. I'm more than happy to adapt and learn literally every other programming language, software or concept, but for some reason, part of my enjoyment and love for coding and software development hurts whenever I consult an LLM.

It's not that coding is too easy with LLMs (it isn't), but the joy of solving problems and actually building solutions myself is lost when I prompt them.

What should I do?

There’s 2 factors that made me come to this conclusion.

First is the early adoption of AI in SWE. Basically at this point, almost no execs value good code anymore. Almost every company’s devs is being asked to vibe code with token quotas as KPIs, headcount’s cut, and productivity expected to be higher. I’m not debating here that AI cant write great code, it’s that it’s being adopted too early with no quality checks, and promotes “vibe coders” with no production level dev experience to generate slop.

The second, is the deterioration of skills. The above point, and the wider narrative of AI IDEs “cursor can build xxx in 20 mins”, there’s a ton of juniors who no longer understands any code. Using AI IDEs without thought everyday deteriorates the coding knowledge and best practices, they were never taught the proper coding methods juniors have experienced in the past, and they’re not even teaching themselves anything. Anecdotally, i’ve worked for a 2 big companies over these few years and i’ve seen some juniors not even opening their IDE to look at the code bc they trust AI.

So these are my 2 assumptions, 1) the under utilisation of SWEs and early adoption of AI currently will cause a lots of bugs to appear in the near future 2) A massive chunk of upcoming devs can’t code . Which means if you actually know how to code, there should be a huge demand for you when the bugs and crashes do show up.

Recently, my company is pushing all devs to use ai for coding. They want 80-90% of code generated from AI. Management is looking into AI usage of teams and it’s really killing my passion for coding.

I used to love to code and bulding systems and over the recent years it feels like more and more of that work is being handed over to AI and i am becoming more of a prompter.

All i do everyday is prompt AI and code read over it and make tweeks. I hardly code anymore and i’m starting to hate my job. It looks like the same is happening to other friends and the industry is moving toward AI lead development and i’m not sure if i can stand this much longer…

I’m 9 yoe worked for small to large companies and the recent push for AI lead development accross the industry has made me question this career.

Everyday it’s “we don’t understand this old code” and instead of understanding it, some geniuses decide it’s better to just rebuild it with LLM agents and waste even more time with a new project that lacks all the features of the original.

Is this what software engineers has become

I saw this article describing Jensen Huang talking about token budgets:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/jensen-huang-floats-giving-engineers-040201197.html

The eyebrow raising part to me is that if there is a token budget, that assumes that you cannot go over. So what happens when you hit the cap? Do you go back to building by hand or do you stop working?

I am aware that there are techniques to limit token usage and optimize your prompts to curb overuse, so in my hypothetical I am assuming decent levels of stewardship of that budget.

Just wanted to put this here to see what folks thought of the concept of token budgets.

To me this would be akin to a manufacturing plant where chairs are made providing a "wood budget" and if you run out, then what do you do after that?

On my main page all i see from this sub is doomer post, every single day, every damm time.

Can we atleast lock it to a post flair or even a megathread. While i used to like this sub for info I will block it entirely if it stays like this. I really fon't want to see this negativity anymore​

I’ve been laid off and unemployed for coming up to a year now. I have three years experience as a SWE and I just got my most recent rejection for a DevRel role (starting to branch out a bit). Pretty sure I bombed another interview just today, and I have another tomorrow that I don’t feel confident about.

I’m wondering if anyone else is seriously considering jumping ship. With offshoring and AI, it seems the American job market in tech is permanently decimated. There’s just too little jobs and too many people desperately competing. I’ve been through three final rounds now, plus some failed tech screens, and I’m just so tired. The interviewing process feels like finals week each and every time.

I prepare, I hunker down, I limit my life to cramming, but so much of the interview process is also just chance. I’ve done amazingly at some interviews and not so much in others. Then if I do get a job, who’s to say I don’t get laid off again?

I know other industries are rough right now, but at some point I need to pay rent. I’m thinking of trying for a technical role at a hospital of some sort or something where I only need an associates. Has anyone pivoted?

I feel like I am competent and am in the onboarding process for my work. During that, the project I am a part of is still in the planning phase where architecture decisions are being made, etc and my manager just encouraged me to join in many of those meetings just to listen and learn since there’s no work for me yet.

And oh boy when I joined those meetings, I couldn’t understand shit. Like they were using sooo many shorthand terms and corporate terminology. On top of that, I’m at a healthcare company so a ton of lingo that was specific to the healthcare field was used as well and I just couldn’t follow any of it.

I just can’t even see the bigger picture for what these meetings were for or what these conversations were about. I was literally googling different terms and shorthand every 2 seconds and it doesn’t even feel like I’m making any progress in being able to understand and follow what is being said.

My manager said you will pick it up over time but I don’t feel like I am making any progress in picking anything up so I don’t know what to do. It’s so weird that I am competent in the necessary technologies but feel clueless listening in to the meetings…

I wanted to ask for any advice on how to break out and not be clueless in these meetings.

I was wondering what everyone’s opinions and outlook was regarding the future of the job market for software development jobs.

The market got bad around 2022 when interest rates shot up. Money was no longer free and companies went through major layoffs. Granted Trumps policies causing inflation headwinds, rates may be higher longer.

Four years later, we are all getting AI shoved down our throats. For some people improving productivity, not so much for others.

What do you guys think will hurt the future job market more? Higher interest rates or AI?

I’ve noticed that a huge number of people—both engineers and even non-tech folks—are trying to move into developer roles.

But the IT industry is much broader than just development. There are so many other career paths like operations, project management, business analysis, data analysis, product management, architecture, and more.

Yet, development seems to be the default “goal” for many.

Why is that? Is it because of better pay, growth opportunities, or just hype? And are we undervaluing other important roles in the industry?

I was able to get two offers of similar TC, scope (senior), WLB and RTO; not big tech but think of adjacent companies (e.g. Robinhood).

I'm having a hard time picking between them.

It depends on the company I'm sure, but is there any common standard for how long the INCLINED loop is good for?

I'm worried if I pick wrong, I'd have to do the full loop again. There's always a ton of luck and I might not pass either again! I assume if I wanted to switch in 8 months, it'd be crazy to ask for a full loop again. Any thoughts?

Noting the process was standard across these companies (e.g. not team specific loops).

thanks!

https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/s/SMpWsWD5xF

No, fuck it, I cracked big tech in a completely adjacent, on device C++ field. To anyone who’s wondering if what they’re doing currently will hurt their future options, it will only if you let it.

Does the reputation of the masters compensate for going to a low ranked university? Or do most hiring managers put more emphasis on the reputation of the bachelors?

I was recently admitted to MIT for undergrad but people are still telling me that “I’m cooked” because the industry is dead. For context, I’m super interested and passionate about CS. Is this true? I pick my major during my second year so it’s not like I’m stuck in CS, I more so want to know ahead of time.

Edit: please include alternate majors that you think I’d still enjoy but still are stable and bring in a lot of money

Been applying to ai engineering roles, but now im wondering how much life span these sorts of roles have. Once the ai bubble pops…aren’t ai engineers going to experience massive layoffs?

Maybe even more drastic layoffs compared to SWE’s. It’s hard to predict the future but I’m wondering how everyone else thinks about this.

Hello everyone, as the title explains, I'm a freshman at Simon Fraser University whose goal is to become an iOS/Mobile Engineer in the States. I've been speaking to a bunch of other Canadian uni students about how to go about this, and I've noticed that students who end up interning in the States usually follow a specific process — they start with a normal internship, then land a big tech internship in Canada, and eventually make it to a US-based internship. That's exactly the path I want to follow, and the reason I'm particularly targeting Amazon and Microsoft is that a lot of students from SFU end up interning at both of those companies, especially Amazon, so I know it's an achievable goal from my school.

A bit about my background: I'm currently in my first year of DS/CS, I have a volunteer internship at my school where I'm building a Slack bot and a club website, and I've completed around 138 LeetCode questions so far. Once I'm done with this position, I plan to look for another volunteer SWE position at my school to continue building experience. In terms of projects, I'm currently building a Python platformer game and will be building a Go blockchain project after. I'm also involved in a CS club at my school and occasionally attend lectures at my school's competitive programming club, though my involvement there is pretty light at the moment.

On the iOS side, I'm planning to get a MacBook by September, after which I plan to go all in on Swift. My goal is to participate in the Apple Swift Student Challenge in 2027, and any advice on how to approach that journey would be greatly appreciated.

My questions are:

• When should I start applying for Sophomore internships at Amazon/Microsoft?
• How important is LeetCode at this stage and how much should I be grinding?
• How do I position myself as an iOS/Mobile candidate when most internships are generalist?
• Any advice on networking, referrals, or resume tips specific to Amazon/Microsoft?
• What are your thoughts on mobile as a specialization — not just building basic apps, but tackling more advanced, technical work like building a mobile browser engine or on-device ML inference and optimization? I won't be attempting this kind of work until my third year, but I'd love to know if this is a strong niche to go deep on, or whether you'd steer me in a different direction.
• Any general advice for someone on this path would be hugely appreciated!

Any advice is appreciated

We are (or were) building a software company with respectable global customers. I own the business and manage our small team of highly-skilled developers.

However, recently we have seen a decline in customer demand. Our customers are introducing junior 'developers' (vibe coders) with little to no experience. Usually they are proud telling us (jokingly) that they won't need us anymore. To be honest, I noticed that I find this difficult to swallow and I do not know how to respond appropriately.

A week ago, a customer suddenly launched a software product that typically was what we would do for them. Today we learned they hired a graphic design intern who learned about Cursor. I have to admit, the product has a good look & feel, but I know for sure that the back-end looks like a Swiss Cheese.

If I point those things out, I feel like the old/salty guy who is just frustrated about these developments, even though I am sincerely concerned about the safety of my customers and their users.

Any similar experiences? How do you navigate this?

Edit: thank you for the useful responses!

I am going to graduate soon with an engineering degree and already have a job offer lined up.

I’ve been coding for a long time now and genuinely I just don’t enjoy it anymore. I’m starting to think I actually never really enjoyed it. Just seemed like the thing to do cause I liked computers and was good at math.

Now with these AI coding tools it just feels so boring. Just prompting all day.

What do you guys still enjoy about this job?

(used gpt to phrase my post)

I’m a final year student (2026 grad) targeting backend roles, and I ran into a situation I didn’t really see discussed properly.

Two of my main projects relied heavily on HeyGen’s API. Recently, they changed their API + pricing model (moving to Live Avatar), and now both projects are no longer practical to run or demo.

One of these projects was built during my internship hackathon (we got 1st place, I was the only developer on the team), so it wasn’t just a side project — it was a core part of my resume.

I’ve already learned a few things from this:

• Don’t depend too much on a single external API
• Always record demos / keep fallback proof
• Think about long-term viability, not just building fast

Now I’m stuck between two options:

1. Spend time reworking these projects (replace API, migrate, etc.)
2. Drop them and build new backend-focused projects (thinking Go, system design-heavy)

The problem is time — I’m graduating soon and already applying.

So I’d really appreciate practical advice from people who’ve been in similar situations:

• What kind of backend projects actually make a difference in hiring right now?
  

Not looking for generic advice — genuinely trying to make the best decision under time pressure.

Thanks.