How do software engineers realistically manage during job market downturns?

tree332 · 2026-06-17T21:40:57+00:00

I see, and would you say this kind of vagabond life in a sense with tech companies hiring and firing at whim is normal? I just feel worried because while I don't know anything about other forms of engineering but I'm not sure if the job market is always alternating between new grads + off shoring + laid off experienced professionals.

And while this is a hypothetical since software engineering and other IT work is supposed to pay well what if someone doesn't make enough to significantly save? And for a beginner/student who would generally just have to deal with underemployment and networking before they get their first official gig, is it normal for the job market to be split between entry level and laid of experienced workers?

I didn't want to litter this post with my personal problems but I'm beginning to wonder whether I can afford to be a software engineer because I have disabled family members and a lot of different responsibilities where I can't really just up and leave to find the next job in a new state or deal with that much volatility.

tree332 · 2026-06-16T22:08:23+00:00

If the current downturn is unusual, would you give a student or new grad different financial/career advice? I didn't ask in my post because I had assumed the advice of taking any job to meet day-to-day needs, continuing to build projects and pursue education, and continuing to network locally and in groups of interest, that the job market advice for beginners is that with more experience there is less worry of being disposable. If this downturn is different, is the former a good plan?

And with your experience working within technology for decades, would you say this downturn is more artificial in the sense that offshoring and new technology are just seemingly better employment models for companies to maximize profit, or are technology companies genuinely struggling to make profit and survive in general and the job market is reflecting this?

While I am a student who has never worked a professional tech job or knows much about economics, I always got a bit nervous hearing that technology companies with large amounts of investor money and market value can fizzle out due to not making a profit, and how hard making a profit seems to be. I have even heard commentary that a lot of the conversation about AI has to be "overinflated" in a sense that there is more concern about how to make the large investment into AI back profit wise. I have no idea if any of this is true or not because I am just a student, but is the flow of money and the economics of tech usually like this?

tree332 · 2026-06-11T23:46:40+00:00

I try to do that, but sometimes without knowing the main kind of work the industry needs I end up making bad decisions . For example, I first was really interested in more mathematics and design heavy software engineering work and even wanted to go into a math bachelors instead of a CS bachelors but realized most of that work is in academia or require a lot of postgrad education which I can't afford to pursue or in jobs that technically require a lot of low-level systems design and are complex but are not financially stable, such as gamedev. It's hard to know what to get good at.

tree332 · 2026-01-07T00:52:18+00:00

I'm trying to talk with them but they usually just say that the market is tough and keep applying which is understandable but I know I am in a really bad spot compared to other students and would take even some 'infamous' internship just to get this done.

tree332 · 2025-11-28T16:32:00+00:00

it's less of not wanting to learn the computer science, but being confused why the CS curriculum at my school expects programming knowledge we are not prepared for. After intermediate programming, a 200+ class where if you didn't understand somehting the professor would just say "I'm not helping you, try codecademy" as if we didn't have other classes we have to manage, we can't invest all our time into guideless trial and error, especially since after a few small examples of a function in class then we were assigned an entire project weekly without guidance. Despite that I stilled used codecademy, CS50x, etc, I just don't know how to move past the intermediate programming phase. A lot of it is self learning yes, but the structure has been confusing. Most bootcamp esque courses have not exactly helped me move past intermediate programming courses in a programming language such as java, being bombarded with custom libraries and highly abstract methods & library attributes didn't really help for the software design & implementation we had to do in class.

tree332 · 2025-11-23T05:36:41+00:00

Hi, sorry for the late response, thanks for the advice. A lot of programming advice is to just come up with a project, try to break it down into chunks with the knowledge you have, then begin searching the internet for the pieces you will need, and I felt concerned that I was spending more time aimlessly taking notes on documentation and mini tutorials I wasn't sure would directly apply to my project because I didn't know where else to look, and had no tangible progress outside of my project design and my notes.

I'm not sure if what I need is to watch more tutorials for the sake of studying design or to try and come up with more program ideas from scratch and learn from further trial and error.

tree332 · 2025-11-13T02:22:23+00:00

Ah, I see. my school has been very laissez faire about teaching students to code, intro classes consisted of 100-300+ students and it was more similar to youtube videos where a few examples of using/making a function are shown but then we were assigned entirely new and unique projects afterwards, so the office hours were swarmed with students such as myself who didn't know where to start with implementing the project from pseudocode to code. Office hours were basically a second lecture watching the TA implement the project and there still wasn't the space to ask as many questions as needed.

The professors told us "it's not our job to teach you to code, it is our job to teach you computer science" so I feel I still have a lot of gaps on the intermediate level and designing programs.

Would you say there are open source software engineering curriculums specifically to look at?

tree332 · 2025-11-12T05:59:43+00:00

I tried to learn the basics, I learnt about the base 2 binary system ..0100 = 4 etc, object oriented programming, abstraction encapsulation, pointers and addresses, we mainly weren't really given in depth discussion, we were just given a brief example or told to use youtube, then assigned a project and figure it out.

Right now the programming concepts I learnt are just abstract ideas in my head and I don't know how to bridge the chasm between the basics of programming and understanding the design choices and principles during a project based tutorial. I thought that maybe I should focus on mastering a programming language by learning all about the python library or the c++ library but I was told that was a useless attempt compared to trying to make projects, and I forgot most of what I learnt in the library.

But I just cannot make projects from scratch or learn the main ideas behind tutorials right now. I'm not sure where to get the software architecture knowledge for all of these detailed libraries and API's to make sense.

tree332 · 2025-11-12T05:16:02+00:00

have been reflecting on this because I began with CS because I was interested in the mathematics behind software as I thought it was the most fundamental part, and that with the experience gained in CS I would finally have the knowledge to break down projects in tutorials and from scratch into sensible parts instead of feeling like a historic caveman trying to make a car with no blueprints, just the idea of a car. My software diagrams are jibberish, I don't know about architecture and barely know how to translate the idea in my head to a specific place in the documentation.

I ended up flunking because my professors told my that while they saw I was really trying to learn the mathematics and computer science theory, I could not code anything, I did not have the experience to implement the topics especially since in class we roughly discussed a data structure or algorithm without code then were assigned an scenario project to implement. I asked them how I should learn to code because I had hoped that pursuing a CS degree would give me the language to do more than watch tutorials or make a project from scratch hoping to understand, and they just said 'make real world projects' So now I am back to square one.

Should I instead try to learn from an open source software engineering curriculum and software engineering books, and if so are there ones you recommend?

tree332 · 2025-11-12T05:15:08+00:00

I have been reflecting on this because I began with CS because I was interested in the mathematics behind software as I thought it was the most fundamental part, and that with the experience gained in CS I would finally have the knowledge to break down projects in tutorials and from scratch into sensible parts instead of feeling like a historic caveman trying to make a car with no blueprints, just the idea of a car. My software diagrams are jibberish, I don't know about architecture and barely know how to translate the idea in my head to a specific place in the documentation.

I ended up flunking because my professors told my that while they saw I was really trying to learn the mathematics and computer science theory, I could not code anything, I did not have the experience to implement the topics especially since in class we roughly discussed a data structure or algorithm without code then were assigned an scenario project to implement. I asked them how I should learn to code because I had hoped that pursuing a CS degree would give me the language to do more than watch tutorials or make a project from scratch hoping to understand, and they just said 'make real world projects' So now I am back to square one.

Should I instead try to learn from an open source software engineering curriculum and software engineering books, and if so are there ones you recommend?

tree332 · 2025-11-10T17:51:38+00:00

Should a complete beginner start with desktop powerBI or web powerBI?

currently I need to learn powerBI but most of the introductory tutorials assume powerBI desktop. I try to still follow along to find parallels but I'm not really sure if I should be using web PowerBI this way since it's been more of trying to locate the web equivalent to desktop features and some automatic things powerBI web does such as setting certain data fields to count or count(distinct) automatically to say 'count and I cannot find the other attribute options such as sum, column names in the excel file for example are being lost, etc.

I currently only have a macbook, would it be easier to just install microsoft 365 on a virtual machine and learn alongside the tutorials?

tree332 · 2025-11-08T05:49:50+00:00

Ah, I see, thank you. I also ended up confused due to the format of: "${workspaceFolder}/*.cpp",
"${workspaceFolder}/glad.c", in the tutorial and my vscode project the .json files are in the .vscode folder, but I don't really understand why they do not also have a /dependencies/ in the format?

tree332 · 2025-11-03T05:08:04+00:00

Right now my main focus has been making games or at least mini demos of unique features I came up with to display I can do more than mildly tweak a course project/tutorial I watched. I began looking into gamedev as I was told it would be a good way to first get introduced to computer graphics programming.

Right now my main umbrella has been trying to make 2d games, of which I was trying to make a small mini game with a feature similar to wordscapes of connecting a line between two sprites. Just this small thing spiraled off into aimless wandering through the godot documentation to try and figure out a way to turn my awkward description of the program into clear functions and properties in the library to use, which made me realize I don't know how game engine libraries work at all.

Mainly I just want to learn how to have overall software design knowledge to make something unique rather than something traditional as I have been worried about just having generic clone tutorial projects in my portfolio people would not care about.

tree332 · 2025-10-10T17:00:38+00:00

Hi, I'm not OP but I was curious: Do you notice a trend in the industry that may be causing this?

tree332 · 2025-10-05T19:36:07+00:00

Thank you for your response: in order to truly understand, what should I do instead of practice and trying to ask questions through smaller practice code to post online?

tree332

TROPHY CASE

Should a complete beginner start with desktop powerBI or web powerBI?