Is tech actually “cooked” in 2026, or am I just drowning in internet noise?

Puppydog04 · vor 3 Stunden

Nobody knows what the job market will look like in 2-3 years, as junior with no experience it will be extremely hard to find a fully remote job but there are opportunities for those that put in the hard work.

If you are serious about learning I would stop spending months "researching" on social medias and start to write some code.

Languages are tools; just pick one, learn the basics and start to build something in a field that interests you.

AI will not replace Devs that work hard to truly gain expertise in their field.

grandmagusriffs · vor 3 Stunden

I've landed a graduate fullstack role starting in a few weeks so there are still positions out there for sure. However, I think the situation for those without a degree is much worse.

magicmagor · vor 3 Stunden

Let me preface this, that i'm not inside the US and have therefore no clue how the US job market looks.

But this is my observation as someone who has worked in software development for 12 years now in germany.

The job market is harder for everyone, seniors included, but it seems junior people, or people just finishing their degree are affected more.
Companies think they can cut on labor cost by using AI instead and thus fewer junior positions are open.

However AI is a hype currently and there are signs that the bubble might burst or at least deflate. AI can't fully replace humans after all and AI costs can also quickly spiral out of control.

What does this mean for your employment options a couple of years in the future? Nobody knows but i would argue that is not as doom as "software development becomes obsolete".
But it isn't the golden days anymore where everybody who knows how to code could get a job easily.

If i were to start now, would i still go for software development? Yes, because it's the only thing which covers all three important qualities needed for a job skill for me:

I'm reasonably good at it
I have fun doing it
It's something that can become a job

In respect as what to learn: Don't focus too much on specific technologies or frameworks, these come and go. The fundamentals are important and you can learn these with any programming language (but then learning a language you might want to use later in professional context might be a good idea).

Unfortunately, the most important skills are skills only learned if you are working on a bigger project with multiple people. How to communicate, how to plan code so it is maintainable in the future by different people, how to talk to non-technical people in charge etc.. Given that AI can produce somewhat decent code and AI won't be leaving, even if the current bubble pops, these soft skills are more important than pure coding ability.

Maybe some of these could be learned if you join open source projects but self-learning to employment isn't really a thing in germany so i have no idea what it actually takes to get a job in that situation.

Quantum-Bot · vor 1 Stunde

The internet is full of tech people making guides and blog posts based on nothing but their own experience (and non-tech people speaking straight up misinformation). No field of tech is completely disappearing due to AI, however jobs are harder to come by. Just choose an area you’re interested in and start learning.

I teach high school computer science and the biggest tip I have heard from any of our guest speakers from the tech industry is to build a portfolio and network. In order to get hired in today’s market you need to do more than just have a college degree. Having a portfolio of work on GitHub that you can show off to demonstrate your capabilities as a programmer/designer will have a bigger impact on recruiters than any degree or certification.

The other most important thing for hireability is your network. Always be networking, speaking to and exchanging LinkedIn with everybody you meet (teachers, classmates, guest speakers, extended family, etc) and telling them about your career aspirations, and if you have the opportunity to go to networking events, go. Every person you do this with increases the odds of you one day waking up to one of them offering you a job out of the blue.

Finally, in terms of what your study, you should aim to make yourself into a “T-shaped” employee. That is, you have one very specific area where your skill level is incredibly deep and you are the best at out of everyone you know, but you are also knowledgeable enough in other areas to deliver a basic product yourself, and to understand the though processes and concerns of your colleagues in different departments.

At the very least, learning to code is never a waste of effort because it’s a valuable skill no matter where your career goes. You can find applications for programming at almost any job you work as well as in your personal life, to set up automation for boring tasks like keeping track of your finances. So go start learning what you want to learn, it will be useful somehow.

ExtraTNT · vor 2 Stunden

In the future we’re cooked more… no juniors = no future seniors…

redhillmining · vor 3 Stunden

The bar is definitely higher. Find out what you like and go deeply into that, there is always money for deep work.

Other than that, don't spend much time on social media, it's designed to trigger your most primal instincts of fear and anger to sell you stuff.

TGrumms · vor 1 Stunde

The below is what I’ve found in my experience (5 yoe, got laid off in 2024 and found a new job in 2025)

There was a lot of hype 5-10 years ago of tech being a golden goose where you get a job that pays $200k and all you have to do is spend like 2h working and the rest partying/playing fooseball/getting coffee/ etc

There was also a lot of people saying that getting a tech job is easy and they’re all throwing money around.

Through the pandemic, this idea of tech blew up, and arguably doesn’t exist after it.

Now there are two “streams” I see
1. The big tech stream -> this is where you get all of those massive pay cheques and cool benefits.
2. The average job -> this is closer to what can be expected from an accounting/engineering/etc job.

1 still has the compensation people expect. 2 has the work load people expect. 1 is very difficult to get, and will lay you off in a heart beat - 2 is more secure as long as you do your job well, but you’ll actually have to be smart with your money, you won’t be a millionaire off of stock grants or anything unless you get in on the ground floor of a startup. I moved from 1 -> 2, took a 20% pay cut (but near my home town so I break even in not travelling) but what I can say is that a busy day at my new job is an average day at my old one.

The problem is that many people went into tech expecting that easy path to buckets of money, and with them graduating and Ai popping off, entry level is competitive. This will stabilize with all of the tech doomerism, and I’m already starting to see some recovery in recruiters reaching out, but in the interim people need to differentiate themselves. You can do that in a lot of ways - I’ve been doing so at my job by improving our development infrastructure and ci/cd so we have less overhead in developing, but you can figure out what interests you and is most needed. But basically you need to show why you are more valuable than just giving a senior engineer an AI licence, and that comes from having ideas beyond just writing code.

TLDR; not cooked, a bit rough right now because there was a lot of people thinking tech was their golden ticket and will stabilize. Understand that AI can code but it won’t understand your whole development cycle as well as a human, so be better than AI by driving value there.

Terreboo · vor 2 Stunden

No one knows what the future for programming is really going to look like yet, not for sure. But if you want to be in it, you still need to be able to do it, and there’s only one way to do that. Learn, practice, repeat.

FuzzNugs · vor 1 Stunde

You’re going about this all wrong, you will never be as good at something you chose to do over something you want to do. Figure out what you like doing, what you’re passionate about, do that full steam ahead and the rest will work itself out. Trust me on this. Passion is king.

Jazzlike_Hamster_761 · vor 2 Stunden

Me and my friend are newly graduates of Software Development. We've sent in a combine 100 applications, so far, not even an interview.

We're based in Europe btw

EdwardElric69 · vor 3 Stunden

I'm 3 weeks into a grad role and we are not allowed to manually edit the code.

FakeBubba · vor 1 Stunde

There’s a lot so I’ll try to put a list:

The firstly and secondly
My observations of tech industry
Addressing your entry-level question
Addressing your “relatively durable” on areas of tech
Time and effort question
The firstly and secondly

Firstly, everyone has their own bias. Someone within the field of backend development, software engineering, basically any role will have their bias based on their experiences and environment they’re in. There’s truths to what each of them say but it’s only one perspective. It’s up to you to discern what’s most relevant for you and useful and not useful.

Secondly, (and here’s my bias), I think you hit it on the mark - Tech is still a good career, but the bar is much higher especially when there’s a majority of entry-levels entering tech. You need to do a lot more to be better than the next best applicant. Very high demand and not equal supply of jobs. Also, you’ll hear more of the negativity than the positivity online.

My observations of tech industry

From my observations working in a major tech consulting company, AI is being implemented where possible for businesses to save costs and accelerate productivity - though outcomes of “productivity” is arguable depending on the business’ use and plan for it... I’ve tried writing this without giving needless scare anymore than it already has but what I’ll say instead is, be a part of the AI ecosystem (a job that helps makes, improves, tests etc on AI) or lifecycle and not as an output of AI i.e. a job that can be replaced/outsourced by AI.

Addressing your entry-level question

In terms of entry-level, I’d say graduate jobs are largely safe, compared to a normal entry in non-grad entry roles, since the business that hired graduates expect them to lead the way in utilising AI for the entire company. Though they may expect more senior-level in developing an internally-housed AI model than entry-level.

Addressing your “relatively durable” on areas of tech

In terms of what areas of tech are relatively durable, I’ll say again that a job within the AI ecosystem or lifecycle looks, imho, “durable” since it’s the trend, it’s being implemented throughout various industries, let alone companies. So either developing AI, understanding and improving AI, testing AI, consulting for AI, and using AI.

Another area of tech are any enterprise softwares/platforms i.e. the Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, etc - I don’t see these disappearing anytime soon but it is kind of a hard-lock once you enter one of these ecosystem platforms so I’d suggest to consider carefully when exploring these.

Time and effort question

Time and effort wise, I think time-wise it’s usually the duration of whatever degree you’re doing but instead it’s more how effectively you use your time, in correlation with your effort. I would suggest to be doing interns, learning and keeping up to date on current tech trends and understanding them. I would suggest to be using AI where you can reasonably, morally, ethically and appropriately. Understand different models and how they work, not at the low-level (unless that’s what you want to do) but at least enough on how they differ from other models.

Wadix9000f · vor 1 Stunde

It depends where you are, I mean there will be more programming jobs in big city with lots of companies than bumfuck, middle of nowhere ville, for now since you don't have experience yet forget about remote work.

Don't look at software engineers as someone who just sit in front of a computer, drink red bull and code all day.

dandmcd · vor 1 Stunde

The job market is tough, especially in areas like Silicon Valley where layoffs have been massive. But you can always break into the industry with strong networking, and continuing to refine your skills.

I would enter this career if you have some passion for it, and also don't mind that the mindset has shifted to where AI does the bulk of the coding, and you are the overseer that guides it.

in_coronado · vor 42 Minuten

This is my opinion as someone with 10 year experience in the industry as a senior software engineer who’s involved in hiring and took the traditional 4 year degree route. I think your intuition is right. Yes we are currently kind of living through what I see as a Tower of Babel style moment in tech. There is an over abundance of information out there. Way too many people who think they understand this stuff but we have way too many false experts and mediocre tech journalist/enthusiast/“programmers” always weighing in on this stuff who probably shouldn’t be.

- No tech is not completely dead by a long shot. However I will say the market has been oversaturated and has been so for a while. There was a bit of a large bubble that formed economically and in terms of hiring even pre imo. Most companies simply way over hired and lowered their standards during covid. Taking on a lot of more mediocre talent, management, and often admin/support type roles thinking the free money printer would last forever. I think we’re starting to see that getting scaled back as economic boom times are coming to an end.

- I could go on for a while about this but Ai massively overhyped and honestly almost a scam. Don’t listen to the noise or believe it going to replace engineers. Ai is an interesting tool sometimes. But I do not see it as any kind of revolution in software development. At best it’s improves your productivity maybe 10-20% in the right scenarios. However it’s incredibly inconsistent and just not an economically viable as a tool most of the time, for most task. And worst of all can be extremely dangerous in the cases if you don’t know what you’re doing. The sheer amount of poor sloppy code and hallucinations causing nasty bugs particularly in existing professional code bases I’ve worked on is mind boggling. Also doesn’t help nearly every engineer I’ve personally seen super hyped on it at work is someone I would have considered an under-performer or imposter prior to Ai. The only thing I’ve seen it change is the quantity of raw output they those people produce. Not the quality. I’ve also seen massive atrophy in the ability of engineers to do things themselves, thinking critically, or reason who use it a lot so I would stay mostly away especially when starting out learning.

- I think some of what’s happening in tech is compute and hardware performance have stopped scaling exponentially. We are running up against hard physic walls that will be tough to overcome here without massive breakthroughs that fundamentally change how digital semiconductors work. This is leading to the death of the old hyper growth era of tech or Silicon Valley approach where you could solve any problem or get away with things by just throwing more compute, money, and bodies at a problem until it worked.

I still think there’s money to be made and new ideas out there in the tech. But critically I just think the lowest hanging fruit has been well picked over at this point. I think after this bubble pops you will be no longer be able to make it just by following the crowd and shit tons of venture capital throwing money at your company for no reason. Those days will be over. I think the longer term direction of the industry is actual product that produces genuine revenue and profits again. There will be no more massive subsidies to gain users or just grow with zero proven plan to make money. It’s why we’re seeing a lot of layoffs and scaling back of many companies that followed that standard Silicon Valley playbook in the past.

- Because of all this I think breaking into the field especially via a less traditional route is honestly just tougher than ever today. You have to keep in mind so many people do have the same idea as you. They see what often is seen or pitched as a low barrier to entry in terms of costs, with the potential of a good salary and ability to potentially work fully remote down the road. They will tell you stuff like oh all you need is a laptop to get started. But truth is it’s going to be hyper competitive if you go that route. And at some point you need to be realistic about where you rank in terms of both raw intelligence, ability, soft skills, and also just real world experience. Like I will say honestly what this industry does not need right now is any more of is mediocre, self taught, talk the talk, ai booster, bandwagon type tech-bro programmers.

So yes it is technically possible to go the self taught route if you’re exceptional sharp and good when it comes to learning or teaching yourself. I’ve seen it happen but it’s just extremely rare in practice. In my experience working with other engineers and hiring most people genuinely need to have gotten into it via a 4 year degree + good grades + having always been passionate about it in their spare time for quite a while. However on the flip side some of the worst engineers I’ve ever had to work or seen get hired only into CS because it was the most recommended degree to them at the time and they then just memorized, brute forced, or crammed their way through school and to a degree without actually understanding much.

- I don’t know any long term l, high success rate, safe shortcuts to the 4 year degree I can recommend besides just getting your foot in the door in the industry however you can. Most often times I’ve seen it happen via software tester/QA roles, as a PM, in IT, or through some other semi- adjacent engineering discipline. If you want to be a true Software Engineer full time one day I would go in expecting to put in a minimum of the same time an effort required for a 4 year CS degree (at which point why are you not just going that route?). The only real substitute most employers will accept for that is a large amount of professional experience or really impressive open source contribution, or genuinely impressive personal project style stuff you can point a hiring manager to.

- I will say though you are smart enough to at be asking the right sort questions and seeking the truth from people on the inside rather than buying or believing all the hype. Sign of good soft skills and realistic approach which goes a long way.

- If you want a more realistic route to break into software without the degree while also having a job that I’ve seen work at my company (large private, non FAANG). As I mentioned see if you can just get any kind of software adjacent role at a software company in something like testing/QA (no you wont get payed as much and no there probably wont be as many remote opportunities off the bat). Then from there really be willing to ask tons of good questions, drink through a fire hose, and put in effort in your spare time. Particularly look into things like how can begin to script or automate testing stuff in your spare time. If you can do that for a year or two and impress the people that matter, potentially other SWEs that can vouch for your work or scripting. You can then think about asking your manager if they’re willing to give you a shot in sort of a junior or mentorship type thing for programming or Software development. Also it’s not super uncommon for many larger, private, non FAANG type companies to be willing to outright pay for or heavily subsidize for you to go back to school for a degree in something like CS. Especially once you’ve got a few years of work experience with them under your belt.

- Let me ask how old are you? What do you do right now? Is this a career change or are you young and have yet to really even start your career?

immediacyofjoy · vor 39 Minuten

Bots talking to bots.

MrWeirdoFace · vor 30 Minuten

It's a time of change, but hard to say where it lands. I say keep pursuing your interests.

Adorable-Log2835 · vor 20 Minuten

The best answer I can give is the future is uncertain.

"Tech is cooked" is a statement that developed over the last two years of massive layoffs. A lot of people attribute this to AI, but there are other factors as well, like the over hiring during COVID.

Tech is cooling down. The market is still hard. It's not like it was by any means. But it is possible to find a job in tech. You just have to really want it.

I also have heard that entry level is bad right now, but that's apparently the case everywhere, not just tech.

ratnik_sjenke · vor 15 Minuten

The whole boot camp to CS job pipeline is dead. The mono language developer is also dead. You need more then just a heart beat to get a job now.

If you want a CS job you need to build full stack applications with working CI/CD pipelines and publish those to github. It doesn't matter the application.

Your projects should use 2 to 3 languages, it doesn't matter the language. With unit test and documentation. You should understand the app end to end and during an interview make changes to change behavior without AI. If you can't handle that find a new field.

What you are seeing now is a correction from the crazy growth the last few years. It would have happen with or without AI. The field is full of room temp devs that can't function outside their chosen language.

deanroiditz · vor 3 Stunden

It's cooked bro. It's over bro.Not gonna make it bro. Bro bro bro. 🥀🥀🥀

niksubishi · vor 3 Stunden

Learn a lot of stuff and how to use AI to make yourself a powerhouse then sell yourself to companies that need an expert. One person can now build so much using knowledge and AI so you can become very important to companies still. But IMO this applies more to smaller businesses or growing companies who need their whole system improved.

GrowFreeFood · vor 3 Stunden

Ai agents will take down the internet within a year. Buckle up

Miserable-Decision81 · vor 3 Stunden

You are swimming in the toxic waste of the internet...

tech_iac_dev · vor 3 Stunden

I completely understand you. I'm in the same exact situation, i just finished my first year at Computer Engineering university, and I still fell like a fish in the sea. Tech fascinates me in all its forms but I can't choose a precise path too, and I have a feeling that university is not gonna make me find it. I always see tech content on internet and I say "Cool, I wanna do it by myself", but as soon as I check the "requirements" to do that, my morale drops to the ground. It's just so depressing the fact that the career I'd like to pursue is constantly being called pointless due to AI. So the question is: "do I have to leave it and follow something else?" That would be sad, tho. I'd like to share a conversation with someone who was in my exact situation and managed to figure out what to do. Also, if I want to talk and share opinions and experiences, don't hesitate to contact me.

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