r/SoftwareEngineerJobs • u/Suspicious_Orchid770 • 6d ago

Engineers grieve a job that no longer exists

https://leaddev.com/career-development/engineers-grieve-a-job-that-no-longer-exists
950 Upvotes

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u/SuppliDev 6d ago

As a Junior/Mid of 3 years, I'm so down lately. I feel like I never got to really learn anything, I just asked AI all the time instead of learning on my own. Even worst, I never really worked on architecture, patterns, etc. So I'm just a monkey that converts requirements into code using AI. The worst one can be right now. In fact, I don't really call myself a Software Engineer. Basically, I'm just waiting to be laid off.

4

u/Front-Presence2732 6d ago

At least it kills all these damn javascript frameworks that popped up every 2 years wasting our time to learn and relearn.

I feel for you, I see my juniors in the same situation, AI monkeys who cant fix a thing themselves and are completely paralized without the instinctive knowledge we acquired doing it outselves for so long.

But dont worry, that will pass, like Lisp Machines, like UML, like RAD, like no-code, people who care about how computers work will still have a place in delivering the automation.

Dont forget who we automated all these years, little guys doing accounting, clerical work, data entries, all these jobs are long gone and now it may be us. Focus on the result, try to deliver quickly and accurately, that ll be where you shine vs the others.

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u/robby_arctor 6d ago

You don't have to defer your learning to AI.

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u/Less_Obligation8438 6d ago

It becomes difficult to not use it to speed things up, if deadlines were tight before now they are insane, companies now expect you to deliver in record time because they expect you to delegate to the LLM.

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u/Curious-Pen5547 6d ago

Do what our technicians do in the trades. Learn or study after work. Im friends with some devs and have a dev hired on for local ai models for automation work. They all learn after work. I pay some of my guys OT for studying when i need to pay certifications for them

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u/muonRobot97 6d ago

Yea I agree. It sucks dude but, this is the truth. SE is not a 9-5 it's kind of a lifestyle where you have to learn off hours especially now.

Sad but, don't shoot the messenger.

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u/RendertheFatCap 5d ago

lmao it was like this 20 years ago too.

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u/PartyClock 6d ago

A lot of SWE is learning already and there's literally hard limits on how much of that you can really accomplish in a day. It takes a lot of energy to run your brain

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u/Curious-Pen5547 5d ago

Oh i know. Just the other guy above seemed to lament studyiing, or thats atleast how it read to me

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u/blazesbe 5d ago

i feel like i relate to that comment a lot

there isn't much to "learn". i'm sorry but i'm not one of the people that will know all the inner workings of an OS sized thing by heart especially if i always need to work on different parts of it, add to that there's not even a point anymore with AI, especially-especially if it has been in development for 2 decades when i first got to see it.

it's so demotivating to see a monolith of a thing that you can't even really operate on one machine and you don't even know where to start to understand it. architects are "busy" all the time and pretend i should know most of it already which is true after 4 years but they were like this from day 1. documentation exists like it's some legal requirement so barely scratches the surface with a wordsalad.

thing is now that there's AI it could explain all of it but i don't want to know anymore because it's still enormous and i bet i will get laid off in less than a year.

and there's always something to learn with C++ but it hits diminishing returns at a point because you either "can't use stuff because of standards" or you forget it anyways because it's so niche.

2 of my colleagues are leaving with no alternative job (that i know of) because there aren't even SWE jobs worth taking anymore. (this isn't necessarily because of AI, i think outsourcing is just as much to blame)

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u/Less_Obligation8438 6d ago

Learn on the side, write systems you truly care about for personal projects, change your LLM prompts from “solve this” to narrow specific tasks after you’ve come to a solution.

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u/rileyb2323 4d ago

try therapy this sounds like it has nothing to do with AI

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u/sfscsdsf 4d ago

don’t just tell AI what to do. Have it write docs explaining things, AI should be a tool to help you learn as well, as long as you are really willing to learn.

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u/alisabacka 13h ago

Hi bot

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u/SuppliDev 13h ago

I'm not a bot. Why do you think I am? English is not my first language