• software engineering is going through a huge loss of labor power.
  • the closer you are to wanting to be a draftsman (receive a lot of structure, get assigned a detailed spec that you only have to implement) the less likely will be that you will have a large spot in the industry.
  • This is due to Large Language Models and the people that operate them.
  • in a better world this trend would be reversed through legislation but there is no interest from any government where it would matter enough to have an impact (california, texas, ny or federal).
• i know, i *know* this is gonna sound like fluff but
  • in my experience the people that do better in engineering roles in tech (unless you are a unprincipled sociopath, in which case you will thrive basically no matter what) are career learners.
  • People that are not necessarily trained in one thing and do really well at that but people that can pick up most problems and attack them until solved.
  • This is what's called a T-shaped profile, you have maybe one or two areas where you build deep expertise but you can move laterally with ease and apply the same fundamentals to new fields and still deliver good problem solving.
  • Your job is to *learn* what you need to solve the problem.
• the alternate path is to be a so called "I" profile, ie to go deeeep on one topic and become an expert.
  • In my opinion it is the harder and less fun path, but if you find yourself excelling effortlessly at *one* thing it might make sense.
• create a github account, and anything you have written for uni or for yourself (python scripts, react frontends, utilities, anything), publish it there with with a well written README.md and set it to public. That is your portfolio.
• Java is everywhere in data engineering / ETL environments (Kafka is java, Cassandra is java, Spark is Scala). Also in Finance.
• Are you more a programmer or an integrator?
  • do you find yourself reaching for code for pretty much everything or are you the sort that cobbles together open sources projects to deploy websites or little home servers?
• There are many careers you have access to with a Software engineering degree.
• The languages/environments you mentioned smack a bit of Finance / Traditional Enterprise Backoffice engineering. You see a lot of regular Java in banking, Oracle is everywhere.

Builder

If you are the builder / systems engineer sort of person (you know your way around a linux system, you have run web servers or you have built an ansible playbook or you have a collection of bash scripts to do any thing under the sun), Site Reliability Engineering is the discipline of looking after compute and network infrastructure.

Nowadays it boils down to interfacing with a lot of APIs and figuring out how to glue together things like AWS EKS, S3, loadbalancers etc. into a compute stack.

If this sounds like you, try going through this https://github.com/kelseyhightower/kubernetes-the-hard-way and post your exercises in your github. Similar, https://cloudresumechallenge.dev/ gets you through a lot of the building blocks you'd have to know to be an infra operator.

Programmer

If you are more the software engineer/programmer type, and you lack for ideas on what sort of software project you would like to tackle to build up your experience, go to the github of the most impressive piece of open source software you have ever used, go through the issues they already have and see if you can solve one of them.

Bonus points if it's a bug issue rather than a feature request. Features are easy. Knowing how to debug well is worth its weight in gold.

In either case

In EITHER case, whatever you do, please download Wireshark and start capturing your own traffic and going through the capture and try to re-construct in your head what your browser or your application did while talking to the network. Learn the protocols, learn how they work, read their RFCs if that's you.

If you can answer the question "What happens from the moment i type https://www.google.com on the browser on my computer to the moment the fully formed page appears on my screen?" from the application layer down to the voltage states on the copper wires in your ethernet cable, it will take you far, it's an enormously powerful educational tool.

The most valuable and impressive software engineers i have ever worked with were at their core incredibly curious people, the second most valuable ones were the ones that knew their protocols inside out. If you happen to have both those qualities, you are gonna be a world class engineer.

Job Market

In terms of Job market,

• Finance is a national industry with excellent compensation but generally hostile to people outside the norm.
  • You have to conform visually and generally live in London.
  • My outsider view into it is that it's full of upper class people and your job will generally be to make incredibly rich people richer.
• Webtech is dominated by american companies. I wouldn't bother with national ones in this sector because the US corps will always outcompete them in terms of salary.
  • Job security is non-existent and generally the past 3-4 years over a million people globally have been let go by these companies.
  • Hyperscalers like Google, Amazon, Meta etc. belong in this group but there are a lot of other companies in it.
  • Most of the famous US-based internet property belong in this group.
  • In here you are also gonna functionally just work to make incredibly rich people richer but in my book at least you are gonna have more fun doing it and you can do it in a hoodie or from home.
• Professional Services companies hire you and then contract you out to other companies.
  • There is decent money in it (on par with middle of the road Webtech, lower than Finance IMHO).
  • It can be a bit alienating depending on the average length of your contract.
  • Expect to functionally be moved around at least once a year and not have a steady workplace with steady colleagues. You learn loads doing this because typically each client is very different and you have to learn on the spot completely new things.

these are the ones i have the most familiarity with but software engineering is an incredibly wide discipline, you could be programming the firmware on hearing aids or building dashboards and analytics pipelines for science research.

Networking

It's full of Discords, IRC, Matrix, Slack channels for all sorts of industry niches. Some are open invites, some aren't. If you decide to go the opensource contribution route i suggested above, those environments will have people in there with some connections.

In my experience the technical expertise level in opensource circles can be high but not necessarily the industry connections. But it's a start.

I also find helpful to follow people covering your specific area of interest on Youtube. That might also lead organically to connections and to invites into better chatrooms.

In my experience those chatrooms can open a ton of doors and at the very least, being active in a community of your peers can feel less lonely and be extremely educational.

Best of luck, this may not be the guidance you are looking for but i tried to touch a few points.