Panicking Software Engineer
[deleted]
700 comments · 87% upvoted · other discussions
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losaltosavenie
Neophile_b
- I'm just going to ride it out. If I lose my job, I'll find something else
Complex-Emergency-60
It's hilarious seeing posts like this then you go to r/gamedev with posts like this below where someone is trying to do youtube videos for coding as a beginner and people gaslight them, telling them they need to stick to it, where the whole sub downvotes you when you mention to just use claude's capabilities instead of wasting years learning to code. The top reply there is "Start by making a Main Menu" Lmfao, claude could do that in 2 minutes. But people in that sub want this dude to spend weeks part time learning to code for .001% of what makes up his game. Absolutely hilarious and baffling.
https://old.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1vokwa3/how_do_you_stop_making_practicing_programming/
It's a plague in that sub, they are stuck in 2010 lmao - https://old.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1vkdq76/ive_got_a_funding_of_140_000_to_create_a_game/p32vg0m/?context=3
It's like everyone spent their whole life learning to use their hand to dig, shovel comes out and they all pretend it doesn't exist, and trying to teach techniques on how to use their hand, so they feel important still. Want a fun time? Go into ANY thread in r/gamedev and mention claude lol, the rabid replies are absolutely fucking hilarious.
systranerror
I did gamedev pre and post-LLM. You are spot on here.
The thing these guys don't realize:
The actual hardest part of gamedev, by a large margin, is making the game fun.
Needing to be able to code the game was effectively a gate-keeping busywork. One good thing it actually did was made it so that only people who were willing to do the herculean task of actually coding, getting all art, etc. etc. etc. and THEN play-testing the game properly and making it genuinely good, fun, and balanced were able to serve a finished product on Steam.
That gate-keeping felt REALLY good if you were good at coding.
This actually started collapsing way before AI, just with Unity and other frameworks that made it possible to not really have to code. Yes, you should be coding a lot making a good game in Unity, but you also could Unity store patchwork a bunch of garbage together and have a game that looked surface-level like a good game from 2007.
Now with AI, people don't understand that the coding is done. You can literally just use Codex, make a game in Love2d (great angle because it's ALL text with no GUI), and tell Sol Ultra or whatever EXACTLY what you want to do and it will blast the code out effortlessly.
You are now confronted with the uncomfortable truth: You have to be really good at making a fun game now. The coding was just gatekeeping and a means to an end. You're at the end now and realize your idea actually sucks and isn't fun. You can no longer "work on your game" for three years and never get it into a playable state where you realize you aren't good at game design.
Honestly, people should be celebrating this, because you now get to do the actual fun game design part and also the art. If I were going to make a game right now I would still do the art by hand, and it would take forever, but that would be my actual personal decision to have the human element in there beyond the game design itself.
I do think you can have a skillful AI art gen process though where you work hard to generate everything with an attractive and coherent art style, I personally just wouldn't.
Like, basically, look at Balatro. It's the perfect game. It's not that hard to code. The art is much harder than you'd expect (it's incredibly difficult to make clean, functional, attractive pixel art UIs like that) but once you get the basics in you can just draw jokers, and then the real difficulty is balancing that game as perfectly as they did and making it infinitely replayable and challenging.
Complex-Emergency-60
Yep 100%. Most people in that sub blame "marketing" for their game failing too. It's a cesspool of people who don't want to take ownership or face reality.
The IDEA and executing on it well is 99% of where success is now. But people still want to make platformers since that's what they grew up playing and are upset when the market isn't there, and they don't want to face the fact that they have to make something unique & fun.
ceaseless_horror
Marketing is a massive part of making games visible these days. A game will fail without marketing. Sure theres standouts in this department, but they are the exception. No one can buy your game if they dont know it exists, no matter how good it is. And arguably, a shitty game can still be profitable with sufficient marketing.
WiseassWolfOfYoitsu
Yeah, this kind of thing is why I'm not so worried. I'm not just a code monkey, I'm a software engineer. Domain knowledge, requirements translation, knowledge of the broader environment that applies such as security and other potential systems to interact with. I've always viewed that as more of what I contributed than the raw coding - the raw coding was the barrier to get to those other things. This is where things like Claude really benefit.
I'm much more worried about the newbies, because those simple tasks were often how they learned those things.
Ok_Zookeepergame8714
That was always true, even in the times of C64, people don't remember, but there were tons of games back then, and only some really good, although I remember playing some I would love to play again, and don't remember their names...😔
WhoRoger
People really love to pretend that everything that humans create without AI is a marvelous gem of creativity.
Garbage have always existed even in game dev. Look at Action 52. Shovelware for consoles, copycats, derivatives, scams.
Other programming stuff too. Trash, malware, adware, stuff that doesn't work, abandoned projects, programs that become incompatible due to OS or hw change...
And that's just coding. Nevermind everything else.
I'm now working with AI to make my little 3D engine. I can't follow everything, but I can guide the concepts. Sure, there is a shitton of engines, but this one is mine. And I would never, ever be able to get to this point if I had to slog through all the maths and all the tutorials. I just don't really care about that stuff to that degree. But I do want to know how it affects things when I draw line A before line B or the other way around.
Now I can try out all the crazy ideas and have AI do the grunt work. Haven't we always been told that coding is not about writing code, but the concepts? Well, I guess now when you don't have to write code, suddenly it's about exactly that. How convenient.
digital_hamburger
They tell that to beginners so they learn by starting with easy things. When you let claude generate it, what did the beginner learn? Should he start by building complex systems? You learn to crawl before you walk, ai is stealing beginners the foundation to build more complex stuff on.
And if you say they should let the ai do all the code it always ends in a spaghettified mess. show me the great new vibe coded games, where are they?
Optimal_Start_94
AI is just another abstraction that lets you do more with less. Embrace that or go extinct.
Stunning_Mast2001
Older engineers are more prized now because you can better architect/prompt and can actually sanity check AI’s work. It’s the young engineers that will be forced out first
meenie
We haven't hired a junior engineer in over a year at my company, maybe more. If we did, how are we going to mentor them if we never let them write code themselves? How can you review AI written code if you have no experience writing production code? We won't be losing our jobs; there just won't be any backfill and the profession will die out...
jmclondon97
I’m an old young engineer. I’m 36 with 4 years experience
DreadDirective
By old I think he means time in career, not age. e.g. a 30 year old with 8 years experience is "older" than you.
Calm_Hedgehog8296
The goal isn't to make it forever. That isn't a realistic goal, and probably it will be attained by only about 10% of software engineers.
The goal is to not be one of the first. Try to still be employed when the profession has shrunk by 50%. Thats a good goal, that means you only have to be better than the average.
I dont have any advice for how to do that per se, but political maneuvering and volunteering for obscure and diffuse responsibilities so that it's hard to know what exactly they have to automate are probably two good things to try
Wood_oye
You don't have to be fastest to outrun the ai bear, just don't be the slowest. This is the modern dev environment.
But at some point, the bear will feast on you all.
slifin
The bear isn't even AI it's unmitigated wealth inequality
If we take it to it's logical extreme it will be one guy with all the money all the companies all the mortgage all the properties all the factories all the government debt all the policy choices all the food and everyone else in desperate poverty
AI is scary because it could be used as an accelerant towards this future but if distribution was better weighted towards everyone then this would be exciting for everyone since we could share the benefit
heavy_metal
we're headed for dystopia not utopia unfortunately. maybe after WW3. that's what it took last time (oligarchy->great depression->WW2->great society).
These_Celebration732
I think this is the right advice. Do whatever you have to do to survive long enough for public policy to catch up. Whatever happens from then on is out of your control.
TopTippityTop
It'll be a while before it gets shrunk by 50%. First we'll probably see a rise in demand.
Right now things are turbulent because they are bubbly. Companies are masking their own internal issues by blaming AI when laying people off, because to say the truth is to risk not being able to access loans, losing value, etc. The reality is the economy is struggling, inflation and higher rates took their toll, and AI is the solution rather than the problem.
As the cost of intelligent goes lower we will find MANY more use cases for it. How many will depend on the elasticity of demand in every sector. SWE is one of the more elastic, so while I think the nature of the job will change, and the focus will shift towards a larger quantity of quicker projects rather than one monolith every few years; demand for SWE is likely to go up rather than down.... Especially if we manage to get the cost of hardware down, and robotics sees an explosion. Many in there will figure out that to get an edge would be to open up their machines, Apple style, by having "app stores" for robots, for example, and there will be an explosion of software demand for all kinds of different machines (each with certain limitations, obviously). There will be an explosion of sensors for everything, and software to go along with it. Everything you can put a chip into will get more sophisticated software. There will be a variety of different operating systems coming into the market offering different ways of interacting with compute. Smart homes will become the norm. So will personal assistants handling many aspects of our lives, freeing our time for better things.
It's hard to see any of that now, because our tendency is to imagine a future where life stays as it is, but things simply get "automated", leading to the conclusion that the only path is a major decline in demand. That is unlikely to be the case.
Shakhburz
Also don't fall into the trap of believing everything companies push. They predict a future, but that doesn't have to be immediate. Continue what you were doing and worked well. For example don't stop improving - and adding to - your existing skills.
Dralex75
Agree, by the time half of all sw dev jobs are gone. So many other jobs will be gone as well. It's going to be a whole mess and eventually will have to end up with something like UBI. It will be a struggle though.. and you'll want to be one of the ones that still has a job to ride through it.
My advice to get there? Learn sw eng management . Read books and such. Use as much ai as possible even if you have to get a personal account and do personal projects. Build the skills to know what it can and can't do well... yet. And keep up to see how it is learning and changing. The sw devs that stay will be the ones that can effectively manage a team of AIs.
Educational_Teach537
You’re better off than most software devs with your restaurant experience
ColoringZebra
Real talk. I’m a software engineer and at the very top of this age bracket… but I have a major physical disability and absolutely zero chance of doing any kind of physical job. I have no idea what I’m going to do when inevitably get laid off.
jmclondon97
The last place I want to go is back to working in restaurants. It’s also mostly a young person’s game
Ok_Cauliflower6190
I usually don't respond to these things, but what the hell.
36m here with 12 YOE SWE, been unemployed for 9 months now. It's been brutal man. These past 9 months, I went through several different waves of emotions, and sort of found my footing now, mentally at least. Job search has been a dead end. Savings are drying up, rent is due, not sure what to do really. At this point, I'm actually, seriously, thinking about changing careers, cause I don't know if I can do it anymore.
There are only 3 things that are keeping me sane now, which is my cat, my motorcycle and the gym. I'm rambling now, but I just wanted to chime in and say that you're not alone. Don't beat yourself up too much, and don't be too discouraged because of "AI". Although I'm considering moving on from this chapter, if you still have the drive, just keep pushing forward.
Good luck to you and everyone else in the field.
1512832
Yo same here man, coming up on 9 months with just over 3 YOE. I know exactly what you mean with the emotions, although it’s a lot of emptiness for me. Had to move back to basically my hometown. I don’t really see a field to return to and these (very few) interviews I do get feel like they’re searching for gods of engineering. Got into the field partly for the remote work so all the companies transitioning back to hybrid was also a huge blow. I got no game plan, thought of doing welding but shit man, it’s rough and I feel you.
Laeryns
Your goal is a tech lead position. Or team lead. Or grow into a principal engineer. Plan b - be the last one to be eliminated by embracing ai, creating a bunch of workflows around it, showing off your knowledge to your management, looking like the beacon of the future.
This is my plan so far as a senior se
piedamon
It’s been strange navigating this in game development because the industry is so extremely polarized. Engineers have fully embraced it, but nobody really talks about it because the artists has zero tolerance for it.
ICantBelieveItsNotEC
The artists that I know are quietly embracing it too. They aren't using it to generate entire finished assets, but they are using it for brushes that they then use for manual painting.
Honestly, I think this is probably going to be the norm in gamedev for the next few years: artists will publicly complain that everything coming out of AI is slop, while quietly using it as much as they can get away with without provoking the wrath of the terminally online AI inquisitors.
People who are crunching 18 hours a day are going to take whatever shortcuts they can to go home and sleep.
halmyradov
grow into principal engineer
Except companies are stunting growth because they are attributing stuff to AI. At least at my company they're doing that. I've delivered projects that would make you a staff engineer before ai, but nowadays they are given less weight because "would you have delivered that without AI" and fuck yes I would have, but with ai probably less skilled people would have been able to deliver it as well.
NyriasNeo
Embrace AI. AI is not going to take all the jobs yet but people using AI, and make themselves more productive, are going to take jobs from people who do not.
Don't get me wrong. We will need a lot fewer people, particularly in knowledge work, to do the same amount of work. So you want to be the one who are those few.
wordyplayer
Also, there is an equally good chance that instead of doing "the same amount of work", companies will do exponentially more work, keeping the employees who get good at using AI and 10x-ing their output.
Eye-Fast
I replaced 7 people managing 3 large apps by myself with my skill and AI in a very large corporation I cant disclose. Would only be possible with AI. I got paid much more too. Just make sure you are better than everyone else.
Therianthropie
When DevOps/Cloud became a thing there were many people expecting mass layoffs due to increased levels of automation and at first this was absolutely the case. But just a few years later once it became obvious that more automation means more complexity, there were more people hired than ever before. More people working with AI will always be more productive than fewer people with AI. Companies will never say "well this is good enough", they'll optimize maximizing their revenue and later profitability.
ZaradimLako
Except AI's endgoal is not just automation of certain systems but outright full replacement of anything and everything considered economically valuable work be it either physical or cognitive. The number of jobs AI is able to do is increasing steadily month after month, and one day unless you are one of the top people in your domain, you wont be able to find a job anymore.
darksnes
Agreed that software engineers won’t be needed in large numbers in 5 years, but you could say the same about most white collar jobs
DMKAI98
Embrace AI and try to be the best engineer you can be. I'm in a different country, but even with AI, my company is still looking for great engineers, because some of the current ones are just writing slop code. I don't know about 5 years from now, but you still have some time. Also, swe jobs are not the only thing that will change, the entire world will be different. Interesting times ahead, I'm optimistic about it.
DreadDirective
I've always said that coders are simply digital plumbers. At least that's how they're treated in the corporate world. They're tolerated but they're this odd digital version of a blue collar job. So it's no surprise that there's not much empathy for them from the technically incompetent managerial class that on some level wants to see their fall.
No real solutions. Except to say that if it hits you, if it hits coders, it's probably hitting everyone. And contrary to popular belief, revolutions are usually instigated by upper middle class people.
mountainbrewer
I feel you bro. Im also 36. I've been a working data scientist for over a decade now. The models are now better than me at the coding and analyzing. I literally direct an AI to do my job. I review and steer. It's clear to me that the age of humans making good money on intelligence labor is coming to an end. A new system will have to emerge.
binarypower
not even software engineering
im a sr unix admin, 25+ years experience. i script a lot of stuff in Linux. stuff that i proudly presented to my supervisors are now being "vibe scripted" by people without any experience in less that 3 sentence prompts.
i feel scared.
you can upload logs and get an instant diagnosis and fix... i get paid enough for them to hire 4 juniors and a couple subscriptions and still save money. rip
house almost paid for. considering costco job if it comes to it
M4rshmall0wMan
I'd say the first step is assume you're going to get laid off. Stay as frugal as possible, build an emergency fund. Then do everything possible to be the last man standing. Put your ear to corporate politics, try to get in on projects deemed indispensable, take initiative and find the skills that could save you. It's also important to remember that layoffs have way less to do with AI and more to do with market conditions. In most cases, AI is just an excuse to save face. Pay close attention to the financial health of the company.
wryso
You have the vision to see that this is happening, so you have that going for you. Even in faang people are various degrees of clueless about this.
Your work won’t go away immediately, but the ladder is getting pulled up fast. You just have to run faster than the slowest group as the bear chasing us eats them. Right now, that group is in denial that there is a bear, and they’re not adapting well, so this is fairly straightforward. You can see some of them in this thread.
For the moment this means being good at using / developing agentic workflows will keep you relatively safer. The meta will shift every 6 months or so.
RomanticDepressive
*1-2 months, weeks is a better metric
wryso
The tech shifts every couple months but the career meta feels a bit slower? I could see new tactics emerging but “get good at agentic” has been a dominant strategy for half a year and is still good today.
I guess if you want to get fine grained about strategies, “remove the human from the loop” and “get good at swarms” are definitely newer arcs
FrewdWoad
This pessimism is misplaced.
In my job, we haven't fired a single dev. Claude makes devs more productive, and when a dev can achieve more (per dollar you pay them) businesses want more devs, not less.
Maybe one day Claude will be smart enough that it will be able to fill in all the gaps from an exec with a vague idea and "make no mistakes". But that day is not yet.
WonderFactory
Companies aren't firing but they also aren't hiring at the moment. I work for a software consultancy and work has dried up for us because all our potential customers are saying they dont need extra people because they are able to do more with less people by using AI
welcome-overlords
Yeah fortunely customers/execs are pretty bad at telling what they want, so there's a need for someone with flesh, mouth and ears for a while
ICantBelieveItsNotEC
I already told you: I deal with the god damn executives so the LLMs don't have to! I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people! Can't you understand that!? What the hell is wrong with you people!?
c4ndybar
This is only true until the Product owners realize they can just interact with the AI directly.
The frontier models on "high" quality are already better than 80% of devs. And they are only getting better. At a certain point, they are going to realize they can pay someone 1/3rd the price to feed the AI prompts.
a1c4pwn
What do you suppose the moors law "double life" is for LLM sw dev capabilities? AI is already at the level of a fresh grad in a lot of ways (says the fresh physics grad who took way too long to graduate but also found the local CS courses to be painfully slow), if the doubling time is less than 4 years it kinda sounds like the current sophomores are lapping the last few drops of hope, and I imagine the doubling time is less than 4 years.
Oh, if only we had an economic system that actually allowed progress to benefit the masses. I'm starting to think more and more that the Luddites were right: technological development in the absence of cultural development is nothing but a note sophisticated chain.I guess we'd all better adjust to the fit, 'cause it sure doesnt seem like we have the class consciousness to do anything about it.
mstack
Learn to use ai
HeligKo
Just stop. You are worrying about things out of your control. Stop with the leet code shit too. It doesn't develop real world skills, and if you aren't wanting to work in FANG or whatever they call those guys now or some company that wants to pretend to hire that level of talent you are wasting your time. If you want to ensure your future, you need to network and get connections in lots of companies. The truth is your skills are only one part of the equation. Your connections usually get you past the BS. Your interview skills get you the job. Your skills keep the job. If you are anti-social like me, then you rely on finding good recruiters to connect with who do the networking for me, and I work on the other other two parts.
lucid_point
Senior dev here, we use AI extensively at our company. We're a small team so it's mostly just meant we can ship more features and more often, in fact internally we've come to realise that code is no longer the bottle neck.
The new bottle neck is thinking through features and making sure they're a good fit for our users and the market. I don't see that changing any time soon, humans thinking about how best to service their users through better software.
Also AI isn't perfect, it ships bugs all the time that we need to fix, these mostly have to do with visual regression issues which the AI is too slow to debug or incapable of currently doing, that may change in the future but until then we still need humans to do some level of UX QA before we can ship with confidence.
VisualPartying
The ride it out advice is spot on. If you can find a good company just dig in until your time comes.
Sad this is the case but a few years of getting paid is better than nothing and is about all we have these day.
pingwing
WonderFactory
People are looking at this too zoomed in and too attached to the world as it is. The world is heading for a very drastic change, you have to zoom out and work out how you're going to negotiate that change. The starting point is to let go of the ideas you had about what the next 15-20 years will look like, you imagined working a steady job, getting a mortgage buying a nice car etc. The concept of owning a car for example might not even exist in the not too distant future so it's pointless holding to it.
Unemployment will be the reality for everyone at some point so you have to try to work out how you will deal with that. Try and put in place the support network you need to survive that change and try to prepare for it mentally too. Resisting the change is what causes the biggest pain, accepting it will make it easier to negotiate.
JoelMahon
I believe that if LLMs truly get good enough to mean that they're not even 50% better when aided by me, and that I'm just dead weight, that also means:
AGI is definitely under 2-3 years away, so I just need to survive that long and for better or worse money will be meaningless when 99% of workers are replaced, either we'll be fighting a civil war, being genocided, given a liveable UBI and told to stay behind the fences of the giga rich people owners, be tortured for all eternity, or have a utopia.
seekinglambda
”I’m in massive high interest credit card debt. $50k+” I think this is your problem, not the current or future SWE job market.
AradasugyiMiniszter
I'm 40, principal software engineer, working for a non-tech global market leader's London office, the company has 150000 emplyees.
Next month I'll start a HVAC installer course. I want to stay employeed as long as I can but needed a fallback plan and HVAC is future proof. Maybe not recession proof but there's a huge demand for ACs and heat pumps in Europe and a labour shortage in the field. Also, good luck outsourcing it to India.
jmclondon97
You’re a principal and gonna do HVAC?! Dude you’re freaking me out because if even you are worried I’m for sure cooked
AradasugyiMiniszter
I've got 2 boys, the little one is just a few months old, my wife is home with him. Job market is rubbish. What if the company moves the position to India where we already have 80-90% of our IT team? What if there's a market crash? What if I lose my job for any reason on a dead job market? Nothing gurarantees there'll be a job for me. mugicha is right in his comment but nobody knows how the job market will change and there are more forces pointing torwards shrinking.
It takes 6 months to get HVAC cert, it's a weekend only course. Then I only want to work on Saturdays just as a side gig along with a mentor even for free to get experience. I'm not preparing for tomorrow, I'm preparing for the next 5-10 years.
I'm not sure where you are from but the labour cost of installing a single unit is $1000/€1000/£1000 +-200 in most Western countries. If you just do one per week that's already x3200 per month, not bad at all compared to zero income. Obviously you have to compete will other installers but as a software engineer I can easily beat 99% of installers' online presence.
Advanced_Poet_7816
Maintain a larger emergency fund. Hope by the time you lose your job there will be UBI or some other form of support. If too many people lose jobs there will be some sort of support or whoever is in government will be in for some crazy riots.
All you have to do is not be the first 20% or so of job losses. Or have enough money to get through that period.
CallMePyro
dhaupert
I work at a large consulting company and am 55 in a director role for now. While we are seeing lots of roles being eliminated, we are at the same time having trouble fulfilling roles for AI engineers with langgraph/langchain, python, fast API, etc. I tell all the people who are being let go from positions to hurry and get some knowledge as quickly as they can. May not last forever but they aren’t really that hard skills to learn and you can start building things quickly with them. Best of luck!
Kildragoth
Software architecture. Transition toward a systems view of things. The legwork can be done by AI but having a solid vision you can execute and apply persistent effort toward these long term goals... That's where the value is. Your attention is your labor.
Acceptable-Fudge-816
I'm 31 and I'm out. Well, I've been out of this industry for 2y and I think it's been the correct choice. In my case I had to make a choice:
- Get a 30y mortage in a city where there is a market for software jobs (and I had my job but was WFH till they decided it wasn't an option anymore for anyone). Housing is heck of expensive here. Also rent is hell expensive, I'd barely make any savings with such rents unless I shared a flat.
- Go back to my town where software jobs are unexistent but housing is much cheaper. Buy a flat with my current savings.
I picked the second, now I have a small flat for myself mortage free and a job that pays significatively less, but my quality of life is still better.
Had I picked the first I think it would have been horrible. Rise in competitivity means entering politics, I hate that and my social skills are meh, not bad if I put effort, but that's absolutely soul draining. Then I'd have to work with AI slop which I hate. It's so tiring having to review it and correct the AI all the time... then again the software we were building was already shit code before AI so... that wouldn't been much worse, just not better. And then, how many years until I'm laid off? 5? 10? 15? doesn't matter, it would surely be before I finish paying my mortage, meaning I'd be totally fucked at 40, evicted, homeless, and with zero job prospects.
foxeroo
Make clearing your debt an emergency. Become more frugal and pay it off ASAP. Once that's done, reassess.
amyowl
krootzl88
It's a real problem. Hiring manager here, with responsibility for a tech / dev team.
Right now we are enjoying the wild ride and getting so much stuff out the door that the business side almost can't keep up. This is a great place to be (right now). We have not reduced our headcount.
DreadDirective
Have not reduced headcount sounds a lot like have not increased either.
Weary-Historian-8593
[deleted]
Illustrious-Film4018
This is like a cult sub, no one here cares. People here believe in a post-work digital utopia and that UBI is around the corner. And they have no evidence for any of this, it's like a religious belief.
Neophile_b
So I'm going to roll it back a little bit. You're getting a lot of hostile reactions, not from a lack of sympathy, but because you've been dismissive of other people's struggles while lamenting about your own. Doing that tends to make people a lot less sympathetic.
A reality check for you. Most senior software engineers I know aren't pulling in over $200k a year. The average senior software engineer in San Diego is making less than that. And salary really depends on who they're working for. Some industries can afford to pay developers high salaries, some can't. Not every software developer gets into their particular niche for financial reasons. Some of us write software for a particular field because we have a passion for that field. For example, I write software for scientific instrument control and data analysis for a well-known reasearch instrumentation manufacturer and the materials science. My pay is not as high as in my peers (I do have friends who are pulling in $300K-$400k), but I get to do work that really interests me. I enjoy physics and mathematics, and my job involves both. That's not to say I'm not pulling in a good salary. It's just illustrative of the fact that software engineer's salaries have a broad range depending on the industry they serve.
As for whether I'm in a better financial situation than the one you describe yourself being in? Yes, I absolutely am. I have enough money saved to ride out unemployment for a while. So that's not an immediate stressor like it is for you. But you really should think a little bit more deeply about other people's potential situations. At 56 other issues come into play. The beginnings of physical decline make it more difficult to move into a physically demanding field. Ageism is a real thing and finding a new job after 50 can be a real struggle. People, my age and older are much more at risk for sudden health issues, so we have to plan financially for those things. My wife is a decade older than me, so that's an even more pronounced issue for her. Thankfully we're both in good health at this point. But that doesn't eliminate the worry.
That's my story, other people have very different stories and very different struggles, and you don't know what they might be going through, so you shouldn't assume.
All that said, I do sympathize with your situation. I was in similar financial shape in my mid 30s, and I was struggling with severe clinical depression at the time. It's a scary place to be. My saying that at 56, if I lost my job "I'd just find something else." Wasn't dismissive of your struggle. I was suggesting that that is the mindset you must adopt. That when shit gets hard, you'll find another way through. You might not end up living the life you envisioned for yourself, but few do.
Truly and sincerely, I wish you the best of luck going forward. But also, I believe if you're intelligent enough to be a software developer, that intelligence is a significant resource to get you through whatever comes next.
I have 42 years of software development experience. When I generated my first vibe coded app with ChatGPT 2 years ago i had this moment of complete clarity, like you are about to make a step and find yourself looking into the abyss. Its a 500 feet tsunami that is going to cover and destroy everything and attempts to put a few sand bags are not going to help. My experience tells me that there is only one way if you want to survive this ( that applies not only to people,but to companies, too) - ride this wave. Be the first in your company in adopting AI, use it everywhere, be a step ahead of others, become a company-wide authority on AI use. As a result now I am the top user of Cursor and Claude Code in my company, administer both, train others, developed more AI agents than anybody else and I am also used as a troubleshooter of last resort for failing projects. So, i feel now much better regarding my chances of surviving any layoff. I think thats the only way. People are needed to tell AI what to do - the better you are at this, the better are your chances.
cognitiveglitch 179 points · Aug 2026
This mirrors my experience.
Really AI coding is a tool like many others. A powerful one, but still a tool. It needs someone to drive it that knows what they are doing. For now - which is good enough.
I would not want to be trying to enter the software engineering market or be a contractor right now.
Apprehensive_Rub3897 33 points · Aug 2026
I am getting a lot of contract work in helping organizations/firms adopt AI. They know what it is, but don't know what they want besides "savings" through improved processes and workflows.
Small_miracles 13 points · Aug 2026
I want to echo another thing my friend (manages small software team for logistics). Their whole team uses AI, and responsibly. He said AI will likely replace the people who dont know how to use it. So steer into it.
brain-out-of-order 22 points · Aug 2026
It’s like the big equipment at the job site. The “easy job” with the air conditioned cab. Except if you fuck up somebody doesn’t go home, or in this case, an AI agent goes rogue and deletes your company.
So… accordingly… people should be learning how to use AI, not throwing rocks at the guy in the cab sweating.
heavy_metal 3 points · Aug 2026
spot on metaphor
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VengaBusdriver37 31 points · Aug 2026
Similar. I’m more a DevOps/platform role, and a strategy I’m pursuing which others might also find useful, is to not just use ai, but be building the platforms and enablement, including governance, org knowledge, optimisation, running local models, harnesses, safety and security. I’m starting with the low-risk stuff but plan on being at the front when we start going fully autonomous.
tracker_11 17 points · Aug 2026
There is a major difference in this compared to OP.
You ALREADY do not define your role as "I can write code". People with 10+ years of experience have industry knowledge specific to the companies they have worked at, they have wisdom of how projects have worked/failed, they have experience dealing with other humans, they know when to be brutally honest and say "that is impossible" and they also know how to recognize the people that need to be told "it's going to be a challenging stretch goal, but we're working hard on it", etc...
For younger software engineers, I agree they are fucked. Best you can do is go balls to he wall in AI and have a bunch of AI success stories to discuss.
[deleted] 63 points · Aug 2026
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JamaiKen 15 points · Aug 2026
This is so true. I’ve got brilliant people in my org ignoring/rejecting the future.
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Plenty-Wonder6092 12 points · Aug 2026
This is the way, fighting it gets you unemployment.
gingerp18 12 points · Aug 2026
Agree with this and a point I’d make is that there is always more software to write. What software is ever ‘finished’ ? The limit is the imagination for features, new hardware comes along with new ways to do things. We don’t stand still. Admittedly we may need less software devs but I’m not convinced we’re all dead men walking. You totally are if you’re not riding the wave though.
Doogie90 6 points · Aug 2026
Exactly! Be the best at using AI, focus on productivity. Deliver higher quality.
At my company, no one is supposed to hand code. The tooling is built in a way that you must use a team of agents.
The side effect is that many software engineers are not great at reviewing and testing code. Defects are through the roof.
Focus on improving your skills in the area of testing and code review and submit higher quality code—it is actually a key component of career growth. This is the path to Staff, Senior Staff and Principal already.
MediumSavant 24 points · Aug 2026
I don't know man. I feel like, yeah sure, you could hold off layoff by a year, perhaps even two if you are really lucky, but this will catch up with everyone sooner or later.
Apprehensive_Rub3897 21 points · Aug 2026
Work in tech but not at a tech company.
Singl1 8 points · Aug 2026
i think this is the key here. the overwhelming majority of people are legitimately lost when it comes to anything AI other than “hey chatgpt what is the best way to cook french toast”.
watchthenlearn 7 points · Aug 2026
I help install fairly basic software for very large non-tech industry companies. They are so much further behind than companies who's products are software. If you're an AI leader in those companies you have a lot more time.
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justpickaname 7 points · Aug 2026 · ▪️AGI 2026
Yep, once AI is good enough - in 2 to 5 years, not longer - fiduciary duty is going to go through jobs like a lawnmower.
Hold off as long as you can, save money, invest in well-diversified funds if you can.
Society will come up with something eventually, but it will be bumpy as hell.
Neophile_b 8 points · Aug 2026
Yeah, that's pretty much the same thing that I've been doing. Hopefully it'll help me avoid/delay a layoff, but even if I lose my job I'll find a way.
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