Programmer Humor

Can I just say, I graduated a decade ago and have no idea what you must be going thru.

However, I want to maybe give you a little hope. A college degree is just a piece of paper. I've worked with software engineers that were former teachers, artists, and biologists. Think of the college degree as proof that you're capable of learning.

All that AI has really done is increased the amount of work people are expected to get done, so I don't think there's NO hope for you in software engineering as a whole. You could pivot into another industry that just requires a math or compsci degree. Or keep trying your hand at software engineering.

Good luck

I was in IT 20+ years.

I quit 4 years ago and opened an arcade. My only regret is I should have bailed out 10 years ago.

Hmm, you could work on an open-source project for detecting and/or mitigating corporate and government influence campaigns in the fediverse. I think, right now, the fediverse is still too small for it to make sense for those actors to deploy expensive, sophisticated attacks against it, but if the community grows that threat is going to grow with it, probably at least as long as we're alive. I assume you're talking about financial fraud; I don't know how similar detecting "fraud" accounts would be but I imagine there's some overlap.

I think it would be fun to work on a bot / influencer detector. And if it works, it would hopefully make the fediverse more resilient to coordinated influence campaigns designed to destroy or capture it. Which would help to ruin the corporate media hellscape that has been wreaking havoc on the world ever since the inception of feed manipulation.

Think there is a much higher immediate risk for new developers trying to get going in the market. So much management right now is pretty comfortable that new programmers with zero real world experience offers nothing the GenAI can't do under the supervision of a senior developer.

Problem is historically new developers weren't trusted to make any decisions if more senior employees were aware of such scenarios, so a new developer was pretty much verbatim implement guidance from more senior teams just deal with obvious rote tedium associated with getting it to code. Also the senior dev will have to fix all your screw ups when you inevitably botch it a few times. Awfully similar to the role GenAI can do now. So has to be some cultural shift to figure out how onboarding new generation developers looks.

Note I could be wrong about the middle paragraph, it's what the larger organization thinks, but I kind of got going by being 'senior' for lack of a company having options and moved from there. Similarly, I've never had success onboarding a junior that wouldn't take independent ownership. I'd get too frustrated at lack of growth and having to correct the same mistakes and be painfully specific, much like I do with GenAI. A new college hire that had his own vision and ability to take vague guidance and implement his vision, that I could work with, but it has happened once in a great while.

This is basically me.

I was in restaurant management in the late '90s, and knew it well, but loved computers and had been teaching myself programming for a while.

My last restaurant job was for a small franchisee, and I moved into IT and support for them after a couple of years (while also doing catering, covering vacations for managers, doing graphics on vehicles and banners, pretty much whatever needed to be done).

In 2001 I went to work for the company that sold us our POS Systems. Originally I did installation, training, and support, but started coding pretty quickly, and after a few years became lead.

I now own all of that software / IP, and my own company.

To be fair having been in software for awhile, plenty of people were slinging slop before AI as well.

The difference is back then, we could block the PR, now management demands velocity at all costs.

It will catch up eventually.

You asked wrong! You forgot "no mistakes"

Every other baker gets up at 2am. Be the only 2pm baker out there for fresh evening breads!

I quit programming and became a school bus driver. I'm 100X happier even if I am making like 1/6 of what I used to make. What I'll do after I'm replaced with AI I don't know, but at least it will happen long after I would have been replaced as a programmer by AI. I'm more concerned about what the parents will do when their kids are run over by the fucking AI-driven school buses.

And electricians don't have to interact with human feces nearly as often.

The trades pay very well and are in high demand.

But you'll pay for it with crippling back pain at 45. Maybe some nice cancer as a bonus, from all the exposure to weird chemicals. Oh, and 90% of your coworkers racist, sexist, homophobic MAGA-heads who'll make sure you hear about it at every opportunity.

The trades can still be good, but go into it with eyes open. It's no paradise.

Tell me about it. Giving thought to retraining as an electrician given how in demand they are.

Oops, requirements were written by ai too

Nothing wrong with being an arborist.

~(But to be straight: There are a lot of better options for a career, please try them first)~

Don't let it get you down. You need to remember that this whole AI hype / AI will replace everyone is coming from people who invested a lot of money into it and really need it to succeed now.

Many also have an oversimplified view of what the discipline of software engineering includes in addition to little understanding how different types of AI work.

Besides, skillsets you learned in SE can easily applied to other 'non-virtual' fields. Many people suck at providing clear and specific instructions or requirements; businesses also have many real world processes that need to be optimized; identifying problems in a system (you first need to see there is an issue, if you want to ask an AI to fix it for you in the next step); being able to break down and tackle large, complex topics; ... I could probably come up with many more points.

I know this is a haha community, but software isn't dead. Most corps are going to insist you use AI. Especially as a junior dev. Look for places that say things like "engineers make the decisions". You need to find a place where you can get experience learning how software is built, even if the bot does the typing. People have been getting laid off and that sucks but software devs aren't going anywhere. Ai writes bad code. They need us to make sure bad code doesn't go to production.