Software engineering as a career is in its downhill

A bit about me. I have 8 yoe and am currently working in Google. I was discussing with a friend yesterday that juniors are having a very difficult time to switch or to find jobs, we had a lengthy discussion about it and I thought I should post it here as well.

I'll start by saying that this is not a temporary situation. Look at the pace at which AI has developed so far.

Back in 2023, ChatGPT was only a pretrained model and couldn't answer any questions that happened after its training cutoff date (2022 or something).

I joined Google last year and back then our internal AI used to make so many bugs that it was just simpler not to use it. Then around Jan or Feb of this year it got better and I stopped coding by myself.

Today it drafts most of the design docs by itself. It does make a few mistakes but it is still pretty good than an average L4 engineer at Google.

Freshers or college students who are expecting to join this industry some day, it is much more better to join some other industry like Finance or Law or prep for UPSC or some other govt job.

The industry doesn't need freshers anymore. A common argument to this is, how will they find senior engineers a few years down the line if they don't groom freshers today, and the answer to that is, a few years down the line they won't need senior engineers as well.

I'd seriously suggest folks to join some other industry, as software engineering will cease to exist in a few years.

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