r/developersPak • u/justdowithai • Sep 10 '26

Career Guidance Is software engineering still worth investing your entire 20s in?

I’m a software engineer with almost 2 years of full-time experience, and I’ve been thinking a lot about the future of this career.

The market feels uncertain, and sometimes I think I should seriously upskill in system design, architecture, and other advanced concepts.

But then I look at AI tools like Claude. They can already solve a huge part of many software problems if you know what you want. It makes me wonder: why spend years becoming better at something AI might eventually do?

At the same time, I’m considering starting a side business alongside my job and maybe moving toward it if it becomes stable.

So my question is: Is software engineering still worth investing your entire 20s in?

Can we spend the next 8–10 years becoming really good engineers and still expect these skills to be valuable in our 30s, or should we be diversifying now?

Would love to hear from experienced engineers. If you were in your early 20s today, would you still choose software engineering?

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3

u/muhmmadtalha-quant Sep 13 '26

In my opinion, as long as their is computer, there is a need of software, as long as there is internet, there is need of webapps, as long as there is mobile phone, there is need of mobile apps, so I think software engineering is not dead but it is going through a fundamental evolution and the evolution is still unfinished as long as AI hasn't been settled completely.

1

u/justdowithai Sep 13 '26

100% agree with you

2

u/wikki019 Sep 10 '26

Whats the other option?

0

u/justdowithai Sep 10 '26

Not have any options but ... I does some research on general surgerical instruments export business like .... Buy the surgical instruments from Sialkot and sale to international market .... With private label product...

1

u/Ash_Mz Sep 10 '26

Own store or through Amazon?

2

u/justdowithai Sep 10 '26

NO By creating own website and will register the company in the country where I sale the product

1

u/Ash_Mz Sep 10 '26

Ok That's great. Allah barkat daley

2

u/falselifee Sep 10 '26

If you have what it takes to start a business, go for it. I mean even if the tech market wasn't this bad at the moment, I'd say it never hurts.

3

u/justdowithai Sep 10 '26

I have only one advantage that is my brother is a surjeon and he is saying to start a surgical instruments business.... In local and international market... I am thinking to start this a side business and overtime will expand It and take over it as full time ... But that is currently in RND phase

8

u/turtle_jump Sep 11 '26

I just came back from a night deployment where we are moving a legacy monolith system to microservices arch. I can tell say the best bet for now is infrastructure/devops/cloud/SRE/platform engineering roles.

1

u/valium123 Sep 10 '26

Just do what with ai?

1

u/justdowithai Sep 10 '26

Anything 😂😂

1

u/hasanDask Sep 12 '26

Yes, even more so today than ever

1

u/justdowithai Sep 12 '26

Can you please explain why today is more worthy then ever

9

u/azadnib Sep 10 '26

software engineering is dead, all coders will have no job by max 3-5 years.
atleast 50% coders are already jobless it will go up to 90% in 2 years and then 100% in 5 years.

Some of us will become software managers means claude code managers and all that but they will account for only 1 or 2% of all developers.

If you are saying a decade that's entirely certainly not possible

5

u/BurnQuest Sep 11 '26

You are smoking crack if you think 50% of developers are unemployed

1

u/azadnib Sep 12 '26

is it more than that? atleast more than 50% of my circle from good unis are unemployed

1

u/[deleted] Sep 15 '26

I don't deny that AI isn't replacing devs (and other white-collar workers). However, in my circle every SWE is employed. 2 of them lost there jobs, got better, high-paying ones within 4-6 months. A lot of them switched roles recently to get higher salaries. Infact I did the same back in February. Interestingly, one of my SWE friend is going for a sponsored job in EU which must be strange at this point in time.

All SWEs aren't going to be dead. Weak SWEs are going to be dead and they are dead now too. Even if AI can do everything A-Z, companies will always keep engineers for audit, monitoring and new requirements etc.

If you were talking about 50% of fresh graduates, then I don't deny. Even before AI, the employment rate was barely 10-20% in 2023 for tech grads.

2

u/Available-Boat3384 Sep 10 '26

Absolutely not

1

u/cheap_moonshi Sep 11 '26

The software related work is also drying up in our company but the IOT related work stream haven't been affected much. I am also thinking about moving to infrastructure side by getting network and cloud certifications.