r/softwareengineer • u/Dark_Choco_1124 • 8d ago
that's it for me.
Back in 2022 i started a CS degree in hope to find a good job and get my family out of our financial struggles. I graduated in August this year, with general degree,(skipped an academic year). Now here I am without a job. Applied to several hundred job offers and only got 2 interviews & in both I was interviewed by an AI. Idk what they are expecting, i have plenty of real world experience for an entry level job, I have built & deployed in-production software before AI.
And the other thing is AI. I'm writing this post at 11pm, right after a full work day (freelance) using AI tools, I am tired of talking to AI & reading it's output all day. I'm tired of telling it what not to do. im tired of it pretending me as a dumb fk.
When I was in university I did some labor jobs to earn some money, the work was hard but at the end of the day it felt good. Building software by hand used to feel the same, but things are completely opposite now. I feel miserable & don't want to work tomorrow.
I know AI is here to stay & the this is the new normal. Today I understood that, this new normal is not for me. Im gonna leave the industry & find a blue collar job. Wish me luck. (English is my second language, I'm not very good at it, but i typed this rant by hand, so kindly ignore grammar mistakes)
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u/JbREACT 8d ago
So you graduated and gave up after 2 months?… and you think you are ready for a life of blue collar work ?
2 interviews and you give up? Like cmon man even before AI the same shit will happen
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u/RubyKong 8d ago
blue collar work tends to get outsourced too. e.g. manufacturing gets outsourced. e.g. think about being a carpenter? Well now machines are pre-fabricating in a factory and shipping steel on site. etc.
it's cheaper to get it done in a factory, or manufacture in china.
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u/Character-Comfort539 8d ago
Hey man I know you're frustrated but you gotta toughen up or the world will eat you alive. It's only been 2 months, I spent 5 years working in factories, warehouses, and doing blue collar work like roofing and hardscaping before getting into the industry. You couldn't pay me any amount of money to do those jobs for the rest of my life (although I'm very happy I did them before starting engineering).
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u/needs-more-code 8d ago
Yeah, we all hear blue collar is the solution now. Like it’s some saviour. It fucking sucks to do though. They need to not forget that part when they suggest it.
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u/brunaland 8d ago
Yeah I’m unfollowing this sub every cs sub is just doomer porn. I worked in the fish industry after high school… never again…
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u/Character-Comfort539 8d ago
Yeah for real, I know I mentioned you couldn't pay me any amount of money to do those jobs but the honest fact is that I got paid 10x less doing those jobs than I do now as an engineer. I might actually take a job carrying bags of concrete back and forth all day if it paid $250k a year, but obviously it definitely doesn't. And making that kind of money in construction requires running a firm or small company and the headaches associated with that (not just employees and crazy churn from the people that usually work those types of jobs, but also bidding on jobs and delays etc absolutely fucking you) would be nothing compared to this AI shit
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u/RainbowSovietPagan 8d ago
I think some of it it paid propaganda from blue collar companies who need workers.
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u/LASER-RASTERIZER 8d ago
It’s been 2 months dude…. This is a normal ammount of joblessness outside of the shitty times we live in today
Yall youngins have skewed perception of the reality of career building.
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u/senseven 8d ago
Telling the ai its wrong all the time is exhausting and not how you should use it. 2 month are nothing I know seriously good people who just live in the wrong kind of town for the kind of jobs they are searching. Its the second year. They do adjacent jobs until they might get lucky or decide to move.
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u/Mundane-Tiger-2374 8d ago
I feel your pain. I moved from app dev to DevOps a few years ago when I saw the writing on the wall. I believe you should stay in tech but move to a different field.
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u/YahenP 8d ago
I don't know if this will help you, but what you are feeling is what most software engineers in the world feel today, no matter their experience, level, or type of work. Morale has never been this low.
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u/KreativCon 8d ago
Psshhhh, you clearly haven’t been in the industry long enough. Dot com burst? Pretty low. Covid lay offs, pretty low. Enterprise Java shops pretty terrible (I kid, I kid).
My morale is high as hell. I have an a system that takes my design and brings it to life in record time. Never have we had this kind of velocity.
Sure you can use it to build some shitty stuff, but that’s just cause a filter was removed. Shitty devs always existed, they were just hindered by being so shitty they couldn’t push code. Now they’re just shitty architects.
The quality of homes did not go down because a power tool was invented. Sure the people who only cared to learn how a handsaw worked felt like the world was moving past them.
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u/Gentle_Alien_Being 8d ago
First job in IT 1993 for $6.50 an hour.
1.5 years later I got a raise to $7.25 hr.
Rent was only $235. Today that same apartment is $2800 on Zillow.
Beers were a penny on “Drinkin’ with Lincoln” night.
Life was so good.
IT glory was real. Get the NT 3.51 MCSE and you’re set for life.
I was rich on $7.25 hr. My car was an $800 Subaru.
Then I got hired for $22/hr as a desktop guy in a Novell 3.12 shop.
Saved for 2 years and bought a house for $136k. That house today is $750k.
Kids today are so fucked. Seriously. You are fucked.
It will only get worse for all of you.
Mark my words, all those imaginary bank balances you see on your iPhone will disappear one day.
Chaos will ensue.
The Great Depression is nothing compared to what you’re about see.
Buckle up chuckle fuckers.
Sorry. I’m bored on an outage call.
The largest storage company in the world is sifting thru our JSON logs.
We’re fucked.
Just like that old man in Billy Madison said - “You’re all gonna die…”
Yep.
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u/TreesOfPortland 7d ago
Hey, at least it won't be boring. People have gotten soft. Hard times will change that.
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u/Gentle_Alien_Being 7d ago
Yep. Kids staring at their phones will not make it in the new world controlled by foreign powers who assimilated in America with no guardrails. Watch what they do this November. It is the primary signal of what’s to come.
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u/abrandis 7d ago
Some people there's 30m+ Americans with over $1mln in liquid assets more in real estate , the world 🌍 were headed to is a K-economy
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u/Downtown_Music4178 8d ago
Look at it this way at least you skipped an academic year and didn’t need to stress over CS classes only to end up in the same place. AI is coming for all CS jobs. It’s just a matter of when. Good for you, for starting on blue collar job path sooner rather than later.
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u/fatstupidlazypoor 8d ago
Just whip up a handful of agents and make sure they know they're in a death match and tell them to put food on your table or else
Let them breed and only keep the strong ones
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u/MCFRESH01 8d ago
If you graduated this year it's not unheard of for new grads to take an entire year to find their first job. And not just in CS. I graduated in 2011 with a marketing degree (lol) and it took me a year to land a job and then another 4 to end up as a software engineer. You are giving up too early
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u/Hot-Milk-3507 8d ago
I think you're venting in this post, and that's probably why you got a lot of short answers. I'll try to be more in-depth:
On the one hand:
Totally valid to feel betrayed. I imagine it was hard to learnto code by hand first, and now realize the industry switched to coding through LLMs.
This transition has been hard for many of us who loved coding by hand. I 100% agree with it being a different feeling, and the old satisfaction is not there. New satisfaction is difficult to find. I'm still kinda poking around and looking for it, with some modest success.
On the other hand:
As others have pointed throwing the entire CS undergrad away should have lots of thought behind it. You've been experimenting and you feel like LLM coding is not for you.
Fair. I would invite you to explore adjacent work in tech-related fields or telecommunications before saying you'll just straight up do 'blue collar' which let's be honest, sounds more like a lash-out than a real plan.
Even if you end up doing it, it just happens that 'blue collar' mentioned like that as a general statement has become a meme/joke/trope of current times.
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u/meshifthenelse 8d ago
I think the only way around this is making your own SaaS. Try to make some money on your own.
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u/Ysera66 7d ago
Don't think of yourself as just a software engineer. SWE can be one of the things you do, but don't let yourself be defined by it. If you don't enjoy something, have the courage to branch out and try new things (which it seems like you do). Don't tie your self worth to one single profession or skill. Go wide!! And all the best!!
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u/Fantastic-Cell-208 7d ago
You just have to keep at it.
It's frustrating and soul crushing, but even if it takes you 2 years, once you're in it'll be easier to get more jobs
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u/Capable_Eagle6579 6d ago
AI is inevitable, there’s no stopping it.
As for job, I will be real here, you needed to start at least 6 months before you graduated.
Starting now and giving up only after 2 months and a few hundred interviews? That’s just not a good look.
My advice, keep going for the interviews and applications. Start hard using AI to test their capabilities so you can articulate and showcase it during the interview and go connect with people.
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u/Silent_Aioli_4088 5d ago edited 5d ago
Hard!!! It's hard!!!
For common jobs in your local area. I think old fashioned job hunting will be the near future unless we fix this messed up recruitment hell.
Networking is starting again to be important. Go out to events, online, etc. If you can't in person for some reason then I would visualise job searching as a sales job.
Many other disciplines had this issue in the past. I studied finance during the 2008 crisis. It became almost impossible to get a job in finance after that. I applied to hundreds of jobs and got none. Mostly a few interviews where I got rejected. Then started to go to events and finally got one small job. But you can tell even then there was way too many applicants for the type of jobs. Nowadays that number is multiplied by thousands.
So don't apply to million of jobs. Search the HR people call them email them etc. it's the only way I can see now. The only way it's to be more imaginative and come up with ways to stand up. Maybe it's just as simple as engaging with a brand online. But it's definitely not by applying online.
Can't win again millions using automation. The moment a job post is life, it gets millions of applications. The only way to win is to actually shout louder and put your CV in the hiring person's desk. You can try to hedge your bets. Why not. But I wouldn't rely on it.
All said. You need to do your own work too. Showcase that you have built stuff and you know what you are talking about.
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u/dingo_khan 8d ago
I doubt it is really here forever unless costs can be controlled. The build out costs, training costs and run costs are too high to maintain this rate. LLMs might be here to stay but it probably won't look like this.
Hang in there.
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u/MeineMamaHatGesagt 8d ago
At some point a Qwen model running on a $2000 GPU will be on Opus 5.5 level. Maybe not this year, maybe not next year, but it will happen
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u/dingo_khan 8d ago
I tend to ignore local models because retraining/upkeep costs for newer models are sort of undefined at this point for use at scale. Additionally, for Corp jobs, fragmented model use, particularly when coding and safety standards have to be maintained, will be a huge additional cost.
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u/PyroSAJ 7d ago
That is one of the pain points.
While models can generally be swapped out, the behaviour does change.
I've had reviews run by Qwen, Kimi, Opus, various GPTs... the results varied a lot. You can try to enforce some behaviour with very elaborate prompts, but still the behaviour wasn't quite the same.
Most businesses can't afford to spend a lot of time evaluating the models, heck even telling what makes a good model for your problem space can be hard.
Do you spend $1000s worth of tokens running the same problem past 10 different models and pick the best one? Do you pick the best ones for specific problem spaces?
If I have to constantly decide which model to use, is that a good use of my cognitive capacity, or should I rather go for that model that also knows that the reference to the minions was actually a good review quote.
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u/thilehoffer 8d ago
The world isn’t spending $2 trillion building out AI for it to not be used. It’s going to be used. Coding by hand is over.
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u/dingo_khan 8d ago
Initial spend versus sustainability are different things. Investment and long-term utility are not the same thing.
Coding by hand is not over. There are plenty of areas where deep knowledge and ontological knowledge and epistemic validation are needed. Just because most code does not need it does not mean it is not needed.
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u/thilehoffer 8d ago
Can you give me an example of an application that needs to be coded by hand instead of by an AI?
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u/symbiatch 7d ago
If you really don’t understand and need to ask, that already shows you’ve never actually built things with these.
They can do a lot, but they also fuck up a lot. Just because you feel it’s better to keep correcting them as nauseam is better than doing it by hand doesn’t change the fact that often in many places it is better to do it by hand.
Maybe someday you’ll see it, but with that attitude you’ll probably never get any job above code vomiting.
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u/thilehoffer 7d ago
I actually am a senior vice president. I worked all the way up from an entry-level software support job. Taught myself how to code. Spent 20 years writing code and building systems. I worked as a senior developer, developer manager, solution architect, and now senior vice president. 🙄
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u/symbiatch 5d ago
…and? You want a cookie?
How does that relate to anything except you trying to sidetrack things?
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u/thilehoffer 5d ago
You said, “… you’ll probably never get any job above code vomiting.”
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u/dingo_khan 8d ago
I used to work in Corp research. High performance computing with medical data is a set of mine fields of legal requirements plus technical considerations. It turns into a lot of whiteboarding about whether de-identificstion at scale still works, how cache strategies interact with privacy and the like. Once you get it all figured out for the legal side, you then have to make it faster and scale. You also need to document the shit out of it all for certification.
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u/Any_Mud_1628 8d ago
So it's extremely technical and has to follow a rigid set of rules?
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u/dingo_khan 8d ago
It needs deep understanding and exploration of consequences. You know, exactly what LLMs can't do.
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u/Material-Number2238 8d ago
The world didn’t spend 2 trillion on this shit, a few idiotic pedophile billionaires decided to do that. And we are all paying the price for their incompetence
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u/Infamous-Bed-7535 8d ago
I better like the output of my local 3.8 qwen 27B, than any claude model's. Lot of times I run them side by side to evaluate. For normal daily work a 27B model is already good enough.
And this is exactly why we have an AI bubble. Us labs won't be able to have profits they promised to their investors. If AGI arrives markets will crash and your money will worth nothing, society collapsing.
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u/PyroSAJ 8d ago
While I find small models impressive, there's no way I'll rate a 27B in the same ballpark as a full one.
If memory and compute ever returns to reasonable levels it might become justified, but at the moment it's dirt cheap to offload it to data centres.
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u/Infamous-Bed-7535 8d ago
Not in the same ballpark, but more than enough to handle average daily tasks and boilerplate code, with harness very much capable agentic setups.
Not to mention that in reality for a given field you do not need a full world model. Much smaller models could easily outperform current SOTA models at specific tasks, just labs do not care about this direction as they are racing towards AGI.
Just like a in computer vision, you can have great foundational models, but for very direct task specific tasks much smaller specialized models (or fine tuned foundational as backbone with custom Head) are just better.
When you do software development it is just waste of resources that your model is aware of the trends of average egg size change in Europe between 1990, 2020 and its causes.
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u/Worried_Contest_4182 8d ago
This comments makes no sense at all.
Are you claiming that current Opus 5.5 at current price is not worth the money? If not, why are so many companies (and individuals) using it so much?
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u/dingo_khan 8d ago
I have not idea how you do not understand and I assure you it makes sense...
The current price is extremely subsidized. It is below running costs to OpenAI and does not address the CapEx needed for the service. They have hundreds of billions is upcoming compute obligations.
People use it because giving someone 20 dollars of usage cost for a dollar is a really good deal to the user but not a sustainable business model.
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u/Worried_Contest_4182 8d ago
None of this is true at all. Anthropic's summarized financials clearly state that excluding training costs (and training employee costs), they are running at a massive positive margin.
Are you claiming that they would need to retrain Opus 5.5 repeatedly?
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u/dingo_khan 8d ago
Okay, so, you are clueless. Got it.
- So, minus the actual costs of running their business, they are healthy? Wow. That is... Every company to ever go bankrupt. Also, they are subsidozed compute. Space X told us so in their financial disclosures. Also, Amazon and MS and Google keep pumping tons of money into to them... For them to run a loss... So get out of here with that nonsense.
- Yes. Periodic retraining over drift and issues is a thing. More importantly, Opus 5.5 is not the end of the line and they will be doing more training on newer models, besides interim work on this model.
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u/Worried_Contest_4182 8d ago
?
Just so to be clear - You agree that Anthropic could fire all training employees and stop training new models and just sell Opus 5.5 from here until end of world and make loads of money since everyone (including you) think it is worth the current price?
> More importantly, Opus 5.5 is not the end of the line and they will be doing more training on newer models
Do you not think that they will only spend money on training newer models if they would be even better than Opus 5.5 and hence customers would pay even more? If at any time they can't improve the models, wouldn't they stop training?
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u/dingo_khan 8d ago
No, I do not. They are using massively subsidized compute. Even such, for reasons below, that would be suicide for them.
No, they could not just sell that model forever. "knowledge" in the model is baked in the weights and will go stale rapidly. They don't have a choice but to be on an upgrade treadmill with the current LLM techstack.
No. They will have to either retrain this one as it goes stale, which is jot any cheaper than the current training or train a new, potentially more capable model. The one thing they can't do is stand still. It doesn't work like that. Time will ruin 5.5 as it's baked world ages out of step with any meaningful ability to generate business outcomes.
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u/Creedless 8d ago
I am sorry but wtf does "No, they could not just sell that model forever. "knowledge" in the model is baked in the weights and will go stale rapidly."
"Time will ruin 5.5 as it's baked world ages out of step with any meaningful ability to generate business outcomes."
are you a bot?
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u/dingo_khan 8d ago edited 8d ago
Nope. Just someone who can read. Read up on how LLMs actually encode and use training data. Then, take a look under the hood of a harness...
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u/Creedless 7d ago
Frozen weights mean some facts become outdated, not that the model’s skills expire. A harness can supply current information through tools and searching the internet, without retraining the model. Companies still have reasons to improve their models, but outdated knowledge doesn’t mean a model needs full retraining to remain useful.. Your own reference to the harness points to why.
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u/EGOTISMEADEUX 8d ago
The issue is that nobody can skip these training costs. It's built into the business unless you want to fall behind. So "profitable on inference" is for the moment pretty meaningless, unless they either become very profitable on inference or find a breakthrough on training.
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u/Optimal_Kick_9121 8d ago
It’ll for sure be here to stay, but it’ll be reserved for extremely high cost/high reward situations. There will be huge pressure to cut back on marginal slop tools, as AI fills up its context window and generates extremely complex and broken slop.
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8d ago
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u/gcdhhbcghbv 8d ago
You don’t know what talking to Claude 8h/day does to a man.
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u/Plus-Violinist346 8d ago
Works in the bkg off of your strict specs, until a few days in and it's hallucinating spec right and left.
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u/kyngston 8d ago
how else do you rise to the top of the context compaction leaderboards?
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u/Plus-Violinist346 8d ago
Compaction free sessions, memory files stored to repo, still turns day worth of painstakingly crafted schema and guidelines into Backrooms the A24 movie.
"You're right, and I need to own this. You are right to have pushed back. I totally made that whole thing up, and the when you called me on it, I made up more BS, and poisoned the entire spec."
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u/Plenty_Line2696 8d ago
I'm ok with it, but it is a challenge to design codebases well when everyone is submitting tons of code all the time and too much LLM's slop gets submitted for review without the submitter properly understanding it nor having put time into making it a logical implementation.
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u/InterestingDare9601 8d ago
Honestly many people would prefer blue collar over a "cushy" desk job. Its really not that cut and dry
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u/KreativCon 8d ago
I think it’s better worded that the grass is always greener on the other side. Many blue collar friends and family members are envious of my job, work life balance, etc. I’m envious of being outside, the illusion of building something people care about, etc.
I mentioned this in another post. If you live in the United States, figure out a way to participate in capitalism just enough that you can sleep at night and get out alive (the sooner the better). Blue collar tends to favor the “sleeping at night” with risking the “get out alive”; hard work is… hard.
For OP, I will say from my experience two things:
- That attitude will have you eaten alive in blue collar workplaces.
- You’re focusing on the wrong thing. Network. Of course it’s hard to get your first job. Network. Relentlessly.
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u/AdvancedCharcoal 8d ago
A lot of people enjoy not sitting at their desk all day my guy, he might find his dream job
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u/Rage187_OG 8d ago
If it treats you like an idiot, work on your introduction. Mine knows my skill level because I defined my skills, jobs held, experience, what teams report to me and my leads, etc etc; it’s like working with a contemporary that knows you.
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u/tastygames_official 8d ago
another fake-ass "I hate AI but I still embrace it" post to make AI seem like it's taking over the world so AI companies' stock prices go up.
Fuck you, bot!
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u/OutOfAmmO 8d ago
Imagine grinding a CS degree and giving up before the race has even started. You lack grit and to do well in tech, grit is part of the job description.
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u/YahenP 8d ago
Our profession never required grit. Curiosity, an analytical mind, and a love of adventure/ these were the qualities every software engineer had to have 40 years ago. 25 years ago, the must-have qualities were an analytical mind, endurance, and a good memory. 10 years ago, it was stress resistance and an analytical mind. Today, the most important qualities for a software engineer are stress resistance and sociopathy.
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u/OutOfAmmO 8d ago
Do you even know what you're saying or understand the word you're fixating on? Endurance is "worse" than grit, endurance is about pain and survival. So you think I'm being too soft or the inverse?
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u/YahenP 8d ago
Exactly. I mean physical endurance, not persistence ot grit. being able to work 10-12 hours a day. At the turn of the millennium, we worked like crazy. But it was worth it. Dopamine flowed like a river. Today, at best, our profession will be a source of cortisol.
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u/OutOfAmmO 8d ago
So you think working a desk job for 10-12 hours a day is about physical endurance? I must admit that's an interesting take.
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u/YahenP 8d ago
Engineers don't work "at a desk". Engineers work with their heads. And yes, this is very hard and physically exhausting work.
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u/OutOfAmmO 8d ago
To each their own, I think it's an absolute joy, very demanding yes, but not exhausting, on the contrary, it's addictive to me, I find it hard to let go and not work.
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u/Available_Road_2538 8d ago
endurance and stress resistance are close cousins of grit. You are splitting hairs and poorly
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u/LettuceSea 4d ago
I went this route after a longer career than you in software engineering, made it two years in and the company effectively forced me to switch back to software engineering working for them.
If you’re willing to get a job in a different industry, then just find a high growth SMB, get an entry job and prove your worth. It’ll come back full circle if you put in the work.
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u/AdvancedCharcoal 8d ago
I’m frankly amazed at some of the responses here to this post, the lack of empathy and the ability to imagine their is other career paths and potential passion outside of software engineering.
The career is changing but let’s be honest, a lot of people burn out of it. It’s not this perfect chill gold mine of a job. A lot of the time you are stuck, staring at your computer screen hating yourself, with once in a while feeling ecstasy after finally fixing some nasty bug or putting together an elaborate system.
I myself have thought about getting out of Software engineering not because of AI, but because it just may not be what I want to do my entire life. I’ve seen people get laid off who were frankly not meant for this job, and they did indeed find greener grass on the other side.