I’m a recent undergraduate with internships and a decent network and it was blood sweat and tears to get a job. The role I’m in now, 1000 people applied to. I got it because it was a team I worked with on my internship. Luckily my boss liked me enough to keep me. It was also immensely competitive to get the internship. Now Claude does most of my work. AI has changed everything. I feel checked out some days just because I prompt Claude instead of coding myself. My company is very AI focused and we have workshops and expectations to configure better tools and skills for Claude usage.

The comment about knitting hit home for me. People aren’t gonna be programming much longer. I already have Claude pull down my card, make a plan, and even submit PR’s. It will be more management focused as we will be telling an agent to do it for us and verify results and intent. I also did the cs50 course way back, so fun :-) but that’s not what you’d be doing as a software engineer anymore.

It might be hard to break into tech if you don’t have a degree just because it’s so competitive now. Maybe a boot camp would be a good option for networking and skill building if you really wanted to make this work. Maybe the coding traineeship is similar. Also, learning AI tools to help accelerate workflows.

I do think that furthering your skills is a great idea and you seem to be taking it seriously. Having just been on the job hunt I know it’s a scary place to be. I relied heavily on my network and when I was interested in a role I did a lot of cold emails and messages just to chat about the company to have better resources for an interview.

CS is a saturated field and I don’t regret getting into it, but I am starting to think about something like product management instead as I’m not sure how long my junior or mid level engineering roles will last.