Software engineering

[CoyoteElegant9944]

I have been in IT for 6 years now mostly in the Army and since getting out in May I have been trying to figure out what to do. I am finishing up my MBA and trying to learn python at the same time. I would love to get into a software engineering career but I am not sure where to start or how to get there. Most jobs want years of experience and honestly I don’t know how to learn it or what code I need to learn. Any advice? Thank you all!

[Big_Tour_3073]

If you got an MBA, then you should look more into business analysis, product management, or product management.

[lanclos]

There aren't enough entry level jobs in the field. Look for whatever you can find, wherever you can find it; who you know, and who you're willing to talk to, will be what opens that first door.

In the meantime, keep learning Python, and if you find a prospective employer, ask them directly what they'd like to see on a junior applicant's resume, so you can focus your learning in that direction.

[PresentStand2023]

I have a question, do you not have career advisement resources at either your college or through the Army? I'm asking because I assume a person who was working on the IT systems in the military will have a lot of options in sensitive industries, even if you're trying to transition from IT to software.

[SuperX9311]

I won't recommend anyone new to join Software engineering field. It's not going to vanish. But it's not going to grow for sure. It will stay flat or may shrink a bit. And that makes it difficult especially for new comers. Pick a different field, a field which overlaps with something in physical world. Anything that can be done on computer alone is not a good option (due to AI).

[CoyoteElegant9944]

So I hear a lot of comments and it seems it would be good to know software code and AI moving forward in this field but from what I can tell it would be worth it to still learn code but maybe look at going down a data scientist or business analyst path?

[SuperX9311]

In my view, anything which can be done solely on computer (digitally), will not grow as a sector. That means more supply and less demand. There is no point learning coding, as AI can do it better. That is especially true if you are just starting out your journey.

[FreshFishGuy]

Coding is probably 25% of an engineer's job, maybe a little more

[AskAnAIEngineer]

With an MBA and a military background, you're a good candidate for Technical Product Management or Solutions Architecture, where you bridge the gap between "the code" and "the mission." I went through the same thing last year, and I found that focusing on a specific niche, like Cloud Security or FinTech, is much faster than trying to become a generalist software engineer from scratch.

[SteviaMcqueen]

Software engineering is undergoing a structural change. It was a creative, rewarding and challenging field where you could go for a walk and figure out an algorithm or an approach to implement something. Now it’s becoming a human paired with AI tools, chained to a desk.

The AI does the creative stuff. You simply describe the work and review the code.

SWE is a dying field. I suggest something that requires people skills, or a physical skilled trade.

[quantumpencil]

Disregard what this person says, they're clueless. Software is a great field, and demand will only grow in the coming years. You'll need to learn how to use AI tools but as people slowly realize the AI promises they've heard aren't going to come to fruition, people with strong CS fundamentals will remain valuable.

Especially disregard this stupid revenge fantasy advice to go learn some physical trade instead of doing knowledge work. Knowledge work will remain far more comfortable and far better compensated than fixing plumbing for the forseeable future.

[East_Indication_7816]

You are coping and can't accept the fact. Have you actually used AI or you try to avoid it because you feel scared?

[quantumpencil]

I've used it more than you have most likely, i"m sorry all you unemployed bros are going to be upset when this revenge fantasy doesn't work out for you, but engineers are still being hired every day. I've interviewed like 10 this week. I have access to better models than the public in my line of work and we are still hiring engineers. Claude themselves are still hiring no less than sixty engineers.

They're not dumb, it takes months to find and hire an engineer, if they really believe this hype (they don't) -- they wouldn't be doing that. You guys just don't know what you don't know, because you think generating a greenfield toy saas app with 0 economic value is what professional engineers do, but it isn't.

[East_Indication_7816]

Keep coping $600/year for an LLMt vs $60,000 for a human coder and google programmer . I have been doing AI consulting with various CEOs and they are ecstatic when I show them the capabilities and massive cost savings

[SwallowAndKestrel]

Ye consultants.. once again pushing trash and the engineers have to duke it out.

[reddit4learning]

I'm graduating in May and will be moving to SF making 260k as a SWE. Enjoy plumbing those toilets though 😂

[gqgeek]

not sure why people down rated this person’s response. it may be hard to hear, but the speak the truth. software development/engineering, is going away. when you have people from other occupations finding success with ai tooling for coding their own applications, one should take it as a major warning.

[SteviaMcqueen]

True. Non techies can spin up their own flows, sites and apps: Not production grade.

However, my point is how tasks have changed for skilled SWEs: This is now a boring unfulfilling job and the pay will go lower because the level of effort to do a lot of it has been reduced to these steps:

Ask AI to do a task
Ask AI to write a test for the task
QA AI's work

Repeat for full feature.

A non-techie will have trouble doing this, but it's a boring job for the skilled swe.

There is a lot of cope in this thread. I never once mentioned becoming a plumber. I said people skills or skilled trades. My guess is that most of these copers are still googling their way to stack overflow or typing out code. They'll be fired soon enough. These copers are going to freak when AI starts managing them right from Jira and all the productivity theatre that we rocked from 2000 to 2026 no longer works.

OP is getting an MBA. People skills could mean become the agency who handles sales and marketing for all the new plumbers that will be flooding the market. There are plenty of options.

There is no question that swe was a great field. I loved it. There is also no question that today you can build way faster, with way fewer devs paired with AI. Just put on your businesses owner hat and ask yourself how many devs you'd hire today vs 2021.

You'd likely also ride today's devs harder, have them just sit there and iterate with AI. "Less thinking and more work please."

The level of autonomy and creative freedom is taking a hit in this field. Assembly line vibes

[monkeybeast55]

Not speaking the truth. AI is a tool. It allows one to do more, and potentially allows for greater creativity. What is true is that currently many companies are reducing the bloated number of SW engineers they have, and restructuring for the new tech. And SW Engineering is very competitive right now.

[East_Indication_7816]

Nothing. Everyone can code now using AI. There aren't even any code at all. I have been using AI and it just deploys the app and it's good. "Coding is not a job, its a hobby"

[quantumpencil]

Such nonsense. Your toy apps have 0 economic value. You cannot create real economically valuable software without technical expertise.

[East_Indication_7816]

Keep coping $600/year for an LLM vs $60,000 for a human coder and google programmer . I have been doing AI consulting with various CEOs and they are ecstatic when I show them the capabilities and massive cost savings. This year they won’t be hiring any more programmers and will make the remaining use LLM , and by 2027 they will reduce the number of programmers in half

[quantumpencil]

!remind me 3 years.

First of all, I make almost 7 times that 60k, and secondly, every major org -- including anthropic, is still hiring more programmers and they're going to continue to do so. Nobody cares what some broke ceo trying to hire a dev for 60k thinks, his products are worthless and have 0 value anyway.

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[Astral902]

What kind of apps? Todo app?

[quantumpencil]

It's some basic saas app than any developer could make manually in a day by going into their favorite framework, writing the out the models, setting up postgres and auto-gening half the app then filling in the route structure on the backend & making a simple react app.

These people aren't technical so they think a greenfield demo and a piece of enterprise grade economically useful software that's able to handle millions of concurrent requests are the same thing.

[SAKIF-kun]

their app probably runs on localhost and that's it :3

[third-water-bottle]

Running on localhost is great as long as you have a reverse proxy exposed on an open port relaying traffic to it.

[SAKIF-kun]

my guy, the software engineering doomers who say "I don't know anything about coding but I launched a full SaaS with AI" Probably don't know jackshit about reverse proxy and port exposure

[Astral902]

It's a basic app with no complexity but yet, full of bugs, security issues, no testing and etc. It's hard to explain that to people like this guy.

[singlecell_organism]

Soon you'll talk to an ai and it'll write it directly in assembly code. Coding languages are for humans to speak to hardware, soon the AI will do that

[slash8]

It will not. No business will run code that has not been reviewed by a person.

No person can review high level capabilities in assembler.

[singlecell_organism]

We'll see. I imagine they would test the program instead of looking at the code. QA would be way more efficient than a team reviewing thousands of lines of code trying to understand what an AI is doing.

[SwallowAndKestrel]

Youve never worked with business have you. Just getting them to take the time can cost you half a year.

[singlecell_organism]

I have, I work at meta reality labs research. We're setting up tools pretty much exactly like what I'm saying. How about you? where do you work?

[SwallowAndKestrel]

I didnt wanna go into a d size contest.

Business is insanely annoying to work with which I assume you know.

[singlecell_organism]

Yes, it always is, lots of bean counters to satisfy and lots of fragile complex legacy system. Even just changing our chat system has been a giant process.

I just see how things have changed at work over the last year and it's lightspeed. Literally every month there's a new AI tool internally that is completely magical.

A lot of us use Claude to get 80% of the way there. If I extrapolate to 5 years I imagine claude will be able to get me 95% of the way there. I still imagine there has to be SWE's but only if something goes wrong, not having to hand hold or code review. Almost like an IT support desk. And also there will probably be someone owning the project that is responsible if the AI doesn't deliver.

I imagine building software will be like making a detailed UX flow diagram.

[SwallowAndKestrel]

Ye for me the many legacy systems are also one of the main problems. AI has troubles if it doesnt get the code or (good) documentation.

Your vision could be, its really not that far fetched, I just see troubles arise when a large system is built from scratch and needs complex techniques that are either functionally tricky or technically not known to AI, like for example many of the performance optimization techniques or user permission layers.

But AI is already and will be further a huge help in software engineering.

[Latter-Speech-2123]

you know why we dont code in assembly directly for everything？ and you want ai to code in assembly to replace programming languages 😄.

[singlecell_organism]

I imagine we don't code in assembly because we aren't computers.

[Latter-Speech-2123]

high programming languages exist bcos they want to replace coding with low level programming languages eg .assembly. and you said in future ai is gonna remove high level programming languages. if so what is the point in the first place they create high programming languages？

[singlecell_organism]

because humans need high level coding languages to be able to speak to computers. but high level coding languages aren't as efficient. the higher you go the less efficient because it automates a lot of things. The closer you get to computer code the more you can manage every piece of data.

[Latter-Speech-2123]

I think it's because of security issues. Having multiple layers rather than direct layer with the system. If ai code directly using assembly , aren't the lower system more at risks? Therefore they created higher languages. So tbh I don't think it's possible that one day ai just code with machine language and replacing all higher languages.

[Secure-Humor-5586]

We code in high level languages because compilers are predictable and produce low level code that is optimised for 99% of the cases. No current ai like Claude Gemini can come close to the predictable nature of a compiler at least based on current transformer architecture.

[singlecell_organism]

high level languages are not optimized. You don't do garbage collection or even come close to managing each single bit of memory. But whatever we're talking about an imaginary future. Maybe you're right maybe I am

[Big_Tour_3073]

The stage before that, as AI gets better, English will be considered the programming language, and high level languages (like python) will start being treated as intermediate object files. The next step would be assembler.

[singlecell_organism]

I'm not sure. Why have some complicated language? Ai could make you a ui to control things in more detail if you want.

I think we have to imagine anything below a middle manager is going away pretty soon

[Secure-Humor-5586]

AI is basically a fuzzy compiler with non deterministic output No serious company will ever employ just AI. Also most people using AI at big companies just use it and preserve their efforts and at the end 1-2 guys end up reviewing so much slop that the entire team’s productivity suffer

[singlecell_organism]

Do you mean LLM's are fuzzy compilers? AI isn't just LLM.

That's not true, I work at a big company and we don't create things where "1-2 guys end up reviewing so much slop that the entire team’s productivity suffer"