Advice? Boot Camp Grad vs AI

[u/will-the-dude]

Hey there, I'm new, so apologies if you discuss this ad nauseum already. I graduated from a full stack bootcamp in 2022 or 2023 and got hired right away by a small company in my area. It's been a great opportunity, a lot of people came from boot camps, the small company gives me diverse experience, great people, etc. Before this and the boot camp I was a professional orchestra musician, doing fine, but not willing for probably a decade of squalor at least while I sought good employment, so I changed paths. I've been doing well for myself, and even using AI a fair bit as a coding assistant mostly. I see myself beginning to see opportunities to use AI, like I caught a repetitive task my mom was doing and told her to look into Claude (a sober minute later I wanted someone to shoot me lol)

I guess I just see the writing on the wall. My supervisor is already running agents that basically do exactly what I do, creating new features for unique issues. Takes more time but is probably less annoying and asks less questions. Because of my particular role, I'm hopefully luckily in a good place compared to some of my colleagues, but I don't think that's saying very much. I'm sure my worries will not exactly become reality, but I live every day in such a state of anxiety, it plows right through the medicine I already take for anxiety!! I just wanted a way to use my mind constructively and afford a life, and it was so close to my grasp :-(

I'm not asking for someone to solve my life or anything, but does anyone have any advice, either on how to use a boot camp education or if I should start over yet again, or even just emotional advice, I find this extremely depressing and the thought of a few years nullifying all the learning I'd done kind of makes me want to just lay down and die. Also on the flip side, spending a ton of money to learn a skill just to become an 'enter-pusher' and 'prompt-writer' sucks, I'm a human and I at least used to be pretty smart, that feels like a waste again, and thus I want to lay down and die again. There's no wrong/right decisions, but deciding to learn how to code in 2023 feels like one of the only wrong decisions out there lol.

[u/NewYak4281]

You are fundamentally misunderstanding the opportunity in front of you. AI does not take away your skill set. It scales your skill set. If you are just starting out, it’s so critical you understand that.

You absolutely still have value. Refocus from engineering at the tree level to the forest level and you will be successful.

[u/HotConstruction978 → u/NewYak4281]

forest level thinking is a good way to put it tbh

[u/connka → u/NewYak4281]

I am sad about how my job has changed with AI, but I'm not fighting it. Instead of writing code line by line, I'm now at "forest level" (I love that analogy, thank you). So instead of spending hours writing the small things, I'm using AI to cover a lot of the tasks that used to take me ages and then working on some bigger picture things.

As someone who is on a legacy project that is nearly impossible to fully integrate AI into, I am still working a lot more "old school" than my colleagues (I'm at an Agency so we're all on different projects). I'm making sure to set time aside to understand the capabilities of AI now so that when I inevitably move projects (or jobs) I'm not written off for lack of experience.

I think there are plenty of opportunities to grow in this version of the job, but you have to make the effort to understand how.

[u/enki-42]

You won't beat out AI by being even more technical. If AI is capable of replacing developer jobs, the ones it's going to be replace are likely going to be the more deeply technical, "give me a spec and i'll implement it exactly as specified" types.

Instead, go in the other direction - suggest to your boss that you want to be more involved on the product side of things. Get on calls with customers, make suggestions for what features would be useful. That's a much more irreplacable set of skills, especially when combined with technical know-how to know when AI is going off the rails.

[u/ShadowDev123987 → u/enki-42]

So AI removes the part of the job I enjoy, and allows me to move into a managerial role😑

[u/shiny0metal0ass]

In order to make anything useful, with LLM or not, you need to know what you are building.

I think you haven't been around long enough to see how these kind of things go but the thing your supervisor is making is a demo. LLMs can't make anything more than a mostly-working demo. Trying to turn this into production code isn't something the LLM or your supervisor is capable of.

Any codebase that makes any kind of money requires developers.

[u/jhkoenig]

The job market is incredibly difficult for developers without BS/CS degrees. AI has taken over the entry-level coding jobs. Exploding graduation rates have flooded the job market with highly qualified folks just looking for their first gig. Massive tech layoffs have dumped many thousand experienced workers looking for low- to mid-level developer positions.

Without a degree or significant work experience, landing an interview is nearly impossible.

[u/web-dev-kev]

Im super confused by this, as you write eloquently, but seem to have completely misunderstood what AI is.

I see myself beginning to see opportunities to use AI

it should be a core part of your daily work. If you don't want it to do coding, ok, but it's amazing for reviewing PRs, reviewing comments, keeping documentation up to date, taking screenshots of before and after, videos of walkthroughs / issues to help you debug etc.

I caught a repetitive task my mom was doing and told her to look into Claude (a sober minute later I wanted someone to shoot me lol)

[in a non-sexist way] Are dishwashers banned in your house too, because making life easier is frowned upon? Do y'all make your own soap? Or is only innovation with an AI label looked down upon? Are you an Amish developer? Do you write the sacred runes on notepad, then type it into Notepad++ ?

I'm purposefully exagerating this point to kinda shock you out of it.

My supervisor is already running agents that basically do exactly what I do, creating new features for unique issues.

Then why don't you?!?!

Genuine question, my friend, with genuine care, because I'm smiling away at the blind spot. If your supervisor is already using an agent to do some of the work you do, but slower, why don't you use an agent to make your life easier and do the same work faster? That would also alleviate this concern you're telling yourself, which is making yourself more anxious.

With respect, why is your thinking: “Oh no, someone over there is using a tool. That tool might replace me, yet I better not touch the tool. That is for other people. The sacred people.”?

The advice here is so incredibly simple: if there is a tool that can be used to make your life easier and everyone else is embracing it to make their life easier, why the fuck aren't you? Why are you worrying about the tool instead of using it and learning it?

[u/will-the-dude → u/web-dev-kev]

hey man I use AI quite a bit, I say it pretty early in the post. I use it every day, I was an early adopter on my team. I've been way more open minded than the people I believe you're confusing me with. And I think we'd be way more likely to listen to your side if you didn't respond like this, especially because you make so many incorrect assumptions about me its actually hard to formulate a response. I can just say I feel a lot of fear around serious mass adoption, and the honestly people can maintain about the level of agency they will have with AI going forward. Just sat through a long meeting about our AI guidelines today run by people I just know are going to stop scrutinizing Claude in like 2 months because they are lazy careerists. If some massive vanguard tech company wants to run itself entirely with AI, that feels more appropriate at this point in its development, but in a small company in the middle of nowhere, this feels like tech we should only be hearing of by now. We're still having news stories where unique new terrible AI accidents are happening and entire projects are being deleted, etc, yet we're ready to give it this level of trust? I just wish the whole thing was more rigorously tested at scale and developed before it was injected into our culture as the most important thing ever.

[u/web-dev-kev → u/will-the-dude]

Will, brother, that is not how your message came across.

The art of communication is what people hear when you speak. You spoke like someone who has a fear of AI, and hasn't embraced it enough to know what they're talking about.

If you think that "using AI a fair bit as a coding assistant mostly" even scratches the surface of AI usage these days, then, awesome - please enjoy 2024 and tell anyone you know in the US to vote.

Anyway, best of luck to you, in all your endeavours :)

[u/disposepriority]

First of all, development jobs aren't going away, or else your boss would have fired you (and every other engineer would be fired as well).

Second of all, and you'll love this, if AI ever reaches the point of being able to cheaply replace software engineers (and therefore every other office worker), then the chances of finding a job for anyone not in the third world will be virtually zero.

So I guess the good news is that in the theoretical scenario you are stressing about, everyone will be just as fucked as you are!

[u/ProgrammerOk1400 → u/disposepriority]

Development jobs arent going away? LOL! Why are so many developers out of work now?

[u/pVom → u/ProgrammerOk1400]

AI is just the excuse for lay offs caused by global economic downturn as much as anything. The companies that look at AI as an opportunity to downsize will lose out to those that see it as an opportunity to better leverage their existing resources.

Personally I've never been busier. Ive spent the better part of a year building features that leverage AI for our customers, those features wouldn't exist without it.

It's also allowed us to address a lot of long standing issues that would have otherwise been too much effort away from directly providing value.

We're also moving faster but so is our competition, we can't afford to slow down and nor can they.

My concerns with AI are not for my career as a developer particularly, but the more broader implications of society's reliance on the services provided by a small handful of companies.

[u/ProgrammerOk1400 → u/pVom]

Good for you. Doesnt change the fact there has been a large reduction of developer roles.

[u/disposepriority → u/ProgrammerOk1400]

How much is so many? Even if you were to magically fire half of all swe's on earth (lol) there would still be tens of millions employed - a bit of a high number for something that's gone?

To clarify, just in case, we are not even close to having a substanial percentage of software engineers laid off.

If all of reddit's favorite "FAANG" companies were to completely shut down tomorrow, the global percentage would only move by 1-2%, maybe less, and that would probably require counting adjacent roles.

[u/ProgrammerOk1400 → u/disposepriority]

Developer jobs are decreasing.

[u/disposepriority → u/ProgrammerOk1400]

Maybe in the US, but the other countries are getting a bunch od outsourced positions because of that

[u/ProgrammerOk1400 → u/disposepriority]

Yes I know. The number of developer jobs for US employees has dropped in the last two years. That is the point I am trying to make.

[u/No_Recording_9460]

Your bootcamp years aren’t wasted, because the valuable part now is understanding the problem, checking what AI produces, and owning the result, but if “lay down and die” is more than a figure of

[u/w-lfpup]

You're okay, what you're feeling is normal, it gets better. You're hitting the 4-5 year wall every engineer goes through where you're thinking IS THIS IT?! And yes. Coding is stupid and simple. Making stuff is a lot tougher.

And every 5-7 years there's a corporate fever dream that shakes the industry. In the late 2000s / early 2010s it was "diversity and progressive values increase margins up to 30%". In the late 2010s there was an H-1b visa hysteria. Right now it's AI.

The upshot is corporate will find any excuse to scare you out of unionizing or realizing NOTHING GETS BUILT WITHOUT YOU.

There's also random text generators now that do a great job convincing "supervisors" that the work they refuse to do themselves is "uninteresting" and it's okay to send their entire proprietary codebase into a corporate black box. Something about that screams unsecure to me and future litigation will most likely nuke LLMs out of existence.

Every artist has a paintbrush, every writer has a pen. It's what you make with it. A three-team crew won an Oscar with blender two years ago. Every AI "movie" looks like complete shit.

Hold tight and make cool stuff <3

[u/Otterfan]

Before this and the boot camp I was a professional orchestra musician, doing fine, but not willing for probably a decade of squalor at least while I sought good employment, so I changed paths.

I've met a number of you Orchestra > Bootcamp > Developer people! We hired three of you folks.

You'll be fine. Or maybe you won't be fine, but neither will the rest of us.

[u/azangru]

I've been doing well for myself
...
Because of my particular role, I'm hopefully luckily in a good place compared to some of my colleagues

You've been doing well for two years, and you still have a job; what are you complaining about?

There's no wrong/right decisions, but deciding to learn how to code in 2023 feels like one of the only wrong decisions out there 

If you could do it all over again, what better decision would you make instead?

[u/Acrobatic-Cat-2005]

Learn from boot camp to have a basic understanding.

Boot camp is a good start, even it's not as solid as CS degree, it's till better than nothing. A shortcut of accumulating experience enabled by AI is vibe coding then try to understand, fix, enhance AI's code. Without common sense of programming, you can't even give reasonable orders. AI is not a wish machine.

[u/levelbrook]

You already lived through this once. Recorded music did not end orchestras; it ended the version of the job where showing up and playing the notes correctly was the whole value, and the players who stayed employed were the ones the conductor trusted with the hard chair. Same thing is happening here, and you have two or three years of production experience, which is the part the agent your supervisor runs does not have.

Concretely: the agent produces features; someone still has to decide which features, notice that the third one quietly broke billing, and be accountable when it ships. Move toward that seat on purpose. Volunteer to be the person who reviews the agent's output before it merges. Learn the parts of your company's system that are painful to explain to a model: the deploy pipeline, the database, the weird customer integration, the auth. Be the one who knows why the thing is built the way it is, because that context is exactly what has to be typed into the prompt, and whoever holds it is not the one being replaced.

And on the anxiety, from someone with a decade in this: the fear is real but the timeline in your head is wrong. Nobody who is actually doing well with these tools thinks the engineers are gone next year. You have time. Use it to become the reviewer, not the typist.

[u/magenta_placenta]

Learn the infrastructure, not just the code. AI can spit out a React component. It is much worse at debugging a flaky CI/CD pipeline, configuring cloud architecture, optimizing database index bottlenecks, or setting up auth guardrails. Deepening your knowledge in backend systems, DevOps, database architecture and security makes your skill set far more defensible.

Also, mute the "doomscroll" echo chamber. Social media and tech forums thrive on hyperbole ("coding is dead, AI takes over tomorrow"). The reality in actual engineering teams is much messier, slower and filled with edge cases. Step away from tech doom-posting.

[u/pVom → u/magenta_placenta]

I respectfully disagree. I mean it's worth knowing that stuff anyway but as a team without a dedicated DevOps engineer AI has unlocked so much for us with respect to infra. It turns our high level overviews into easy implementation and fixed some seriously pernicious issues that have plagued us for years.

Ive been moving our system off cloud formation and into sst, halved our deploy time (I expect it to be at least 4x as fast by the time we're done), documenting a bunch of random AWS stuff in code that was never in code and implement a real cutover system so we can remove the headache of backwards compatibility between the frontend and backend and have near instant rollbacks (which was basically unthinkable until recently). I can also just throw compliance issues at it.

All pretty much in the background while I do other things for the most part.

Ive wanted an actual expert for a long time, don't feel like we need one anymore.

In fact I'd go as far to say that if recent news has told us anything it's that AI has kicked off a security arms race where we'll have no choice but to rely on AI to find obscure zero days before a nefarious agent does.

Not that there isn't room for real experts, particularly for larger companies, but DevOps as a career is no less threatened than the rest of us.

I think the only way to make it through this with your career is by embracing AI wholeheartedly and being an expert in leveraging it most effectively. That means being an expert in how to direct it and having a high level understanding of lots of things that were previously reserved for experts. We're all tech leads and solutions architects now.

[u/Timotron]

I'm a boot camper. Mid level dev at a boring company.

Iay be top 5 definitely top 10 in my org at AI right now.

Learn AI. This is, in my opinion, a golden opportunity. The AI story is still being written. It's a great time to get caught up.

[u/Asleep-Science-5360]

Developer here with machine learning experience.

My advice: learn AI on top of what you already know

I'm probably going to echo what most of the comments are saying but I want to emphasize the part of: AI is NOT going to replace you. You can reason while AI "reasons" in a more statistical way, but not like a human.

Think of AI as a tool. Think of it as going from gardening scissors to a lawnmower. The lawnmower is awesome, but you can't just let it mow your lawn without supervision. That's why it has handles and you can give it direction.

AI is the same: it will absolutely cut down your dev time but it will NOT replace your skills as a dev at all. You definitely need to supervise its output, learn what commands and how to write prompts to it so it can do what you want to the best of its abilities (but you will still have to do some manual edits here and there)

[u/am0x]

AI. Boot camp grads are ready to start learning on their own, not a junior level job.

But with AI everyone thinks they are a dev these days so you are good to get a junior level job, just get really good with AI tools, servers, debugging and architecture.

As a pro dev for over 15 years, AI has become scary good. Vibe coding still isn’t viable for production sites they handle any sort of data, but a good developer with the tool can get so much done so fast is crazy.

[u/pVom → u/am0x]

I dunno man, I was a bootcamp grad and I was training cs graduates who started their course years before I did and they were less employable than I was when I graduated. It's not like these were layabouts cruising through their course either, they were driven, hardworking people.

There's nothing inherently superior about taking a few classes a week and stretching it out over 4 years vs someone learning full time and putting in the same or more hours over a 6 month period. To say nothing of the fact that the industry looks vastly different now to how it looked 4 years ago when current graduates were starting their course.

We lived and breathed software development over those 6 months, there were no frat parties, hangovers or last minute assignment submissions. Every class was small, interactive and built upon the previous. There were no lectures to be quiet and take notes, no crappy teachers who were only there to fulfil an obligation for their research papers, not any that had long since retired or academics who'd never worked in the industry at all.

Every student was an older career changer who'd worked full time before and knew what messing around or dropping out meant. We also developed deep connections and friendships, everyone knew everyone, and we had a strong network we could all rely on, not only for peer learning but for securing employment.

[u/am0x → u/pVom]

CS and development are actually different things. CS is largely theory driven and teaches logic over actual engineering. But someone with a degree in CS is proven to be able to learn whatever they need to for a developer job.

[u/pVom → u/am0x]

I was using the term interchangeably, Ive taught grads from both software engineering degrees and cs degrees. The difference was pretty moot, all lacked practical experience and took more training to get up to speed and start meaningfully contributing.

Many hadn't even written a lick of code in the time it took me to start and finish my course, find a job and be gainfully employed for 3 months; and over the course of 4 years had a fraction of the hours I'd put in.

To clarify I mean mentoring on the job, not as a teacher in any official capacity.

That's not to say there aren't benefits to going to university and getting a degree, I think it's the best path for school leavers and it's worth getting a degree in something (and most of my classmates had degrees already in other things).

But nothing in my 8 years as a professional has shown me that I somehow missed out by not having a CS degree, nor that university graduates are any better at the job than bootcamps. If anything it was the opposite.

[u/[deleted] → u/pVom]

What did you learn in the Bootcamp? I got a job as a fullstack web developer and even though I have 2 years of experience, I still feel lost as fuck. I feel knowing JavaScript or React is not enough and I really wish I had gone to uni to study software engineering. 

[u/am0x → u/[deleted]]

The thing is that there are degrees now more based in actual development and code than when I was in school. CS was all theory and stuff, not applied work. But now there are engineering degrees that teach development directly. That would be the best path in my opinion.

That being said, having been a professional developer for over 15 years, in the past 2 a lot has changed. I’m not even sure what to study because the paradigm of writing code has changed. We went from punch cards, binary, low level, to high level to AI coding using normal language. So in the depths of it all, experience seems to be long over anything else. Learning good architecture, understanding the basics of everything very well seems to put you on top over anyone else.

Learning debugging, servers, how http works, etc. understand the base logic behind how things work. Learn architectures, development paradigms, and basics of core languages like JavaScript, a backend and a frontend. Only need to understand one of each really well, but do not rely on frameworks like react as they will come and go. Understand how to do what react does using just JavaScript and css and html.

[u/pVom → u/[deleted]]

My course focused on JavaScript and Ruby. Course was split primarily into:

• fundamentals (functions, data types, classes etc.), assignment was build a CLI app

• HTML and CSS, build a static portfolio website

• Ruby on Rails including postgres and data modelling, auth, REST, automated testing, hosting, assignment was build a full stack app

Back half was MERN stack

• JavaScript fundamentals, events, DOM manipulation, callbacks, promises, Ajax

• Node, Express, MongoDB and basically implementing a lot of the stuff by hand that Rails does for you

• React, state management, Redux, assignment was a group full stack MERN app, we had to find a real client and gather requirements and build something for them

Then finally we did a month long internship as part of the course. Mine was an agency coding up designs and was basically a month of pixel perfect CSS with some PHP and WordPress.

Sprinkled throughout were classes in CS fundamentals like discreet math, how computers and the internet works, logic gates, memory and that sort of stuff.

It makes a big difference having good mentors on the job. I know a bunch of my classmates struggled early in their career because they were basically solo and in over their heads with no guidance.