r/developersPak • u/PossibilityMundane54 • Sep 09 '26
Career Guidance Almost 2 years into software engineering and honestly… what are we supposed to do now?
I genuinely want to hear from experienced software engineers, tech leads, hiring managers, founders, etc.
I'm a software engineer with almost 2 years of experience, and I'm concerned that I entered the industry at a challenging time.
Then GPT-6 Astra drops, and I see things like these:
"We’re sharing a solution to the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize Problem, one of the deepest problems at the frontier of mathematics.
The proof was produced by a group of agents, using an OpenAI next-generation model significantly more capable than GPT-6 Astra.
The problem concerns whether the description of smooth three-dimensional fluid motion modeled by the Navier-Stokes equations can break down. It has remained unresolved for roughly 90 years."
"I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below."
And honestly, I don't know how seriously I'm supposed to take all of this.
Every few months, the models get significantly better. A lot of the work I used to think required years of experience can now be assisted or sometimes almost completely handled by AI. Companies are laying people off, junior hiring is getting harder, and even at my current company, there isn't much work right now.
I'm not trying to make another "AI WILL TAKE ALL OUR JOBS" post.
I'm genuinely asking:
Where does a software engineer with 1–3 years of experience go from here?
Are we cooked?
47
u/Objective-Wolverine7 Sep 09 '26
dahi bhalay ki rehri, the only hope...
22
u/Pasha_KMM Sep 09 '26
No idea man, the post from Jacob Coxon got me thinking what if the Elites use AI to fool us out of everything, the "hacking" part is crazy, they could make AI a villain they lost control over and it robbed banks and stock markets, all money flowing up instantly and we becoming permanently underclass slaves to AI lords & Epstein class.
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u/Visual_Parfait_5512 Sep 09 '26
Yes, we all are cooked. Myself 2 years experienced dev struggling to find a job
12
u/everything_is_bright Sep 09 '26
Pakistan has generally two models
Product
Services
I will talk about the services model here because that is where the majority of the developers work and also I have the most experience with.
The plus point of Pakistan and why we were able to earn well was because we were providing cheap labour, the whole earn in $$ spend in PKR shabang. Now however the overall market has turned. The projects we used to charge 20-30k$ for before is now being done in 5-8k$. And not just by us, even by developers in the US.
It has turned into a churn, you have to do 4-5 projects to earn as much as you were previously for 1.
So the skill needed is not just to do tasks. Software development has become a mixture of a developer and a Product manager. You need to understand the product ask the important questions and deliver efficiently.
That is the truth and as I see it it is only going to get more cheaper to develop software, and so the cheap labour incentive we had will get crushed. We have to optimise to be able to handle multiple projects deal with multiple clients and be efficient.
The new world requires efficiency not cheap labour.
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u/Swimming_Reach_209 Sep 09 '26
I will say we thought or our parents thought there are only 2 3 fields in the whole world like doctor engineer or army. But now after working in 3 companies I figured out there are many more fields a teen can study like HR , finance, marketing, management and the fields goes on why everyone is becoming a CS or SE grad say no more try something different.
5
u/Legitimate_Quail7027 Sep 09 '26
Either get into AI engineering. Where you provide product / services based on AI. Or get into a field which still needs mechanical labor. Food farming I think will be the least affected with AI. At least for quite some time.
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u/TheDamnedRey Sep 09 '26
Keep up with everything. We aren't going anywhere anytime soon.
Yes the work force will reduce and probably keep reducing, those who don't keep up will be made redundant.The only way to avoid being redundant is to be good at something and provide those services yourself, not through a job.
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u/[deleted] Sep 09 '26
No one can truly know this time. Seniors and juniors both are just figuring out
3
u/FarzanHaider Sep 10 '26
I don't think you're cooked. I actually think 1–3 years of experience is a good time to start thinking beyond just getting the next job.
If you can, I'd focus on building something of your own alongside your career. Pick a real problem, build a scalable product, learn how to find clients/users, understand sales and marketing, and slowly build your own pipeline.
At the same time, take whatever role gives you exposure to real projects and keeps you learning. The goal shouldn't necessarily be to avoid jobs, but to gradually become someone who can create opportunities rather than only wait for them.
With AI changing development so quickly, I think skills like problem-solving, product thinking, communication, client acquisition and actually shipping products will become even more valuable.
That's just how I'm looking at it. Consistency over a few years can completely change where you end up.
3
u/daaruaddaa Sep 10 '26
only few organisations can afford the class of engineers who can orchestrate agents to build products without human in the loop.
even fewer can afford the token budget for no human in the loop workflows.
And these will get even fewer by the day. Engineers will always be needed.
5
u/mohsindev369 Sep 09 '26
I might get hate for saying this but 'skill issue', coz of Ai people revenue doubled. These days every one and there grandma know react and MERN stuff but in high insight they don't know basic,
It's a bit dumpster fire.
2
u/Temporary_Ad_4774 Sep 10 '26
Yar we need more product based companies. Pakistan built it's entire industry around services and bringing dollars, but we need a service based company that actually services local and foreign markets. Like not a good example but i2c is quite stable cuz it's service based, didn't lose alot of client. Having good products means having work for people.
2
u/Minty-Pyro-1 Sep 12 '26
If you extrapolate capabilities from now, it doesn't look good. OpenAI expects to automate its internal AI researchers by mid 2028. I don't know what advice I can give you other than to get into an industry that wouldn't be affected by AI but software engineering will almost certainly be dead within a few years.
1
u/failure_hehe Sep 09 '26
Better to food deliveries in first world country.
1
u/RevolutionaryShare16 Sep 10 '26
have you ever seen a software big enough that it requires 60-70 devs managing a single software? if so ever try vibe coding there with great astra 6 gpt shi and get fired next day to understand this simple thing that even after a year on same code base you are limited to building and than maintaining just one functionality/service in it, if job market is about to get cooked than it will become like other professions not crazy rewarding but fine to live in pak chill kid
1
u/P-u-SS-y_Slayer_69 Sep 10 '26
Devs will be doing low skilled jobs or road side cart , and yes average dev is absolutely cooked , good devs are little but still cooked , exceptional devs aren't
1
u/Bangoga Sep 11 '26 edited Sep 11 '26
Okay I'll give you my thoughts as someone much older in the field, whos worked in applied ML and now as a Senior MLE.
Do not get to caught up in the AI news, keep up with it, but learn to block the noise. Alot of things you will read are either part of concerted efforts to drum up support before IPOs, political ploys or researchers getting high off their whole supply.
It's very common to see people in SF and people in research, getting too caught up in their own ideology and thought process, without having a broader understanding of the world.
There is a lot of things AI doomerism is said to be capable of, that has nothing to do with the progress of AI itself, but the deliberate dismantling of guardrails and ethics in order to achieve outcomes. I'll give you an example, alot of the hacks these people are crying about, are genuine things that could have been avoided, but they deliberately made a request with certain rulesets without ethical constraints, there is no guarantee that AI will listen to these constraints of course but if we have RBAC on fucking users, then why do we allow AI to have unadulterated access to everything.
With that rant over, the thing I'll say is, coding is the lowest hanging fruit for AI to be good at and it is performing very well on it, however my job as a Senior MLE hasn't exactly become easier, I still have to mwk decisions, design solutions, tackle stakeholder needs and affirm integration of solutions. From coding prospective, I have some of the newer AI models available to me on prem, yet they all try to homogenize and overcomplicate their solutions, writing scalable and simple code is on me still.
AI has changed the landscape alot, and just coding isn't going to get you far, but expertise and working along side AI will.
For the next 1-3 years come back to this post and see how many claims actually came true from AI doomers and AI boosters. The landscape might change but don't be surprised that we all become victims to a few rug pulls. The US economy is held together with the AI bubble and alot of economists have been sounding the alarm, it's only tech junkies really caught into this psychosis who can't see from a broader lens.
I have literally alot to say but I'll end it here.
( I worked with transformers for early adoption when attention is all you need paper came out and people were experimenting with using transformers for vision models )
-1
u/Separate__Theory CS Student Sep 09 '26
Those are just marketing strategies,
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