It does not involve high level problem solving or organic though. At the end of the day all you are doing is typing out algorithms. It is boring and eventually it will largely be automated.
It does not make the world a better place. Technology is destroying society and poisoning minds.
The job market for tech is unstable and prone to huge swings.
Have you considered Barber College?
Sitting at a computer for a chunk of your day will lead to long-term health problems. But it beats working in a coal mine.
Dial up wrote:
It does not involve high level problem solving or organic though. At the end of the day all you are doing is typing out algorithms. It is boring and eventually it will largely be automated.
It does not make the world a better place. Technology is destroying society and poisoning minds.
The job market for tech is unstable and prone to huge swings.
Automation software requires engineers to write it.
Dial up wrote:
It does not involve high level problem solving or organic though. At the end of the day all you are doing is typing out algorithms. It is boring and eventually it will largely be automated.
It does not make the world a better place. Technology is destroying society and poisoning minds.
The job market for tech is unstable and prone to huge swings.
Do you think they type them out in a typed or untyped language?
The price for a H1NB visa is going up to 100k. Still chump change to an American mega company, but it might make the field a little bit less competitive for smaller outfits.
Clearly OP is not a software engineer and knows nothing about it. Software engineer is a broad term including anything from making games to writing banking software. Of course there is high level problem solving depending on your job. I do it, having a masters I work remote and make good money.
Software engineering is such a varied field that some positions are terrible and some positions are great. I would imagine there are some people out there whose entire job is tweaking HTML/CSS based on feedback from businessy people - terrible waste of time.
Most of the developers I work with probably average 10 lines of code / day committed to dev. Most of the time is spent deriving equations or writing proofs. Of the 11 people on my team, 0 have CS degrees. 5 have PhDs in math, 1 in EE, 2 masters in math, 1 undergrad physics, EE, aerospace.
scitamehtam wrote:
Software engineering is such a varied field that some positions are terrible and some positions are great. I would imagine there are some people out there whose entire job is tweaking HTML/CSS based on feedback from businessy people - terrible waste of time.
That’s neither a waste of time nor software engineering.
Ob server wrote:
Clearly OP is not a software engineer and knows nothing about it. Software engineer is a broad term including anything from making games to writing banking software. Of course there is high level problem solving depending on your job. I do it, having a masters I work remote and make good money.
Yup. SE here in biotech writing "recipes" and connecting laboratory equipment to our manufacturing systems. As much as I need to know coding languages, etc, I also had to get a black belt in Lean Six-Sigma manufacturing and learn a lot about medical device regulations.
The major downside of software engineering is that, more than any other career by far, your employability (what kind of job you can secure if any) is entirely dependent on your "tech interview skills", not your proven experience. There's no point at which you've finally made it into the industry and, from now on, your experience speaks for itself, the real-world skills you exercise make you more employable in the future, etc. You have to change jobs often to stay competitive, and that means passing competitive interview processes again and again. It never ends. In fact, as you reach Senior+ level, interviews get much harder.
This is different than other high-paying fields like Medicine or Law. Once you score high on the MCAT, you never have to take it again. You have to interview for Medical School, yes, but if you already look good on paper, you should be able to get accepted into, say, 2/5 schools you interview at. Then, of course, you have to get into Residency. Then you're done! Now you can focus on work, building your professional reputation. If Medicine were like Software Engineering, you would have to re-pass the MCAT five times over your career, except it would be a different test every time, and the overall difficulty would get harder.
Software engineers nowadays will spend as much as 6 months "interview prepping." Tech interviewing has become a cottage industry, with countless companies offering practice courses for "cracking" interviews. Many software engineers say that they spend more effort applying to, practicing for, and interviewing for new jobs than they do at their actual job. So being a software engineer is like having 2 jobs.
A typical interview process is like
(1) Make it through the resume stage (probably <5% for most people)
(2) Talk with recruiter for 30 minutes
(3) Hiring manager gets your resume from recruiter and decides you're worth interviewing (probably 40% success rate for most people)
(4) Either a tech screen (usually algorithms i.e. brain-teasers) or a hiring manager screen (probably a 25% success rate for most people)
(5) Now the real fun begins. You're only about 20% done with the interview process. You have to do 4 1-hour interviews in a row and pass them each with flying colors.
Be prepared for rude, arrogant interviewers. Because tech is so competitive, everyone who works in it has a big ego for having passed a competitive interview process themself.
Once again, this is your entire "career," this interviewing thing.
I know guys 40 years old who spend their weekends sitting in coffee shops doing LeetCode or reading Grokking the System Design Interview or some bull**** like that. It's pathetic.
But this is the result of everyone crowding into Computer Science once it became common knowledge that software engineers make a lot of money.
Software engineering is not one thing
Software engineering is not an in-demand field. People say "Oh, I heard my friend with a PhD in ML at Stanford, who currently works for Google Cloud, just got 2 offers in 1 week, both over $700K." Yea, the top 1% of professionals in any career field are always in demand! The top 1% of sales people can easily get a high-paying job. The top 1% of real estate agents are pulling similar pay as the top 1% of doctors.
An actual in-demand field is something like Medicine. If you are a Medical Doctor, you are virtually guaranteed a high-paying job unless you're totally incompetent. If you look at job openings for MDs on LinkedIn, they usually have only 1 or 2 applicants, sometimes 0 (By contrast, any decent software engineering job opening will have over 100 applicants in the first hour). The main reason why an MD interviewed for a position at a hospital won't get an offer is because they don't want to work the schedule/hours or because they're asking for too high of pay. That's what an actual in-demand career field looks like!
Dial up wrote:
It does not involve high level problem solving or organic though. At the end of the day all you are doing is typing out algorithms. It is boring and eventually it will largely be automated.
It does not make the world a better place. Technology is destroying society and poisoning minds.
The job market for tech is unstable and prone to huge swings.
You are an H1B fraud thinking you can discourage Americans because even more changes are coming. You are garbage coders.
"Relative to a few years ago, there are far fewer jobs in technology and far more computer science graduates who want them. The rapid boom and bust of the tech industry, combined with the four-year lag of a college education, has killed these kids chances at getting the career they trained for. In 2024, the number of undergraduates majoring in computer science topped 170,000 in the United States, more than double the number in 2014. Most of them chose that degree to work in an industry that no longer exists. One young man whom the Times profiles graduated with a computer science degree from Oregon State University. He has applied for 5,762 tech jobs, been invited to 13 interviews, and received zero offers. He is now living at home and receiving unemployment benefits after being rejected from McDonalds."
We are headed into a dot com style bust with AI at the moment. It already is very hard for graduates to get jobs in the field with all of the layoffs in the last 2 years and it is going to get worse. The rest of your assertions are pretty far off the mark.
