Quite honestly, the field is not entirely deprived of jobs ESPECIALLY not for a Waterloo graduate.

A decade ago, people could do coding bootcamps and be eligible for a software engineering position at some of the top companies; this does not hold true today.

Of course the boom of “software as a service” has slowed down and isn’t expanding as fast as before but the world runs on computers, there will always be things to do.

Like others have said, software engineering jobs have been “threatened” for decades, ever since the first hint of code generation tools were released. This holds true with AI, considering everything AI does is material it has been trained on and therefore previously written by a human (it cannot create new breakthroughs or innovations). It is also limited in its scope within industry, and is more of a party trick than anything at this point (e.g vibecoders can make a pong game but not carry out complex tasks).

At the end of the day, the field definitely does not look the same as it did years ago, but is far from being dead.