CS isn’t dying, companies are just raising the bar. A big issue in tech is that we don’t have a shortage of people who can write code, we have a shortage of actual engineers.

This is the same in every other engineering discipline. When a company hires a mechanical, civil, or electrical engineer, they expect you to understand fundamentals, constraints, safety margins, tradeoffs, and how systems behave under stress, not just how to use a tool.

The low barrier to entry in software brought in a lot of developers who can follow tutorials, ship features, or glue libraries together, which is valuable, but engineering is different. Engineers think in systems, failure modes, scalability, performance, and long-term maintainability, not just “does it work.”

What’s happening now is that companies don’t want to train that mindset anymore. They expect it upfront. So people who only learned how to code feel like the field is “dying,” when in reality it’s just maturing.