Is this the BEST time to be a Software Engineer?

This is in fact the best time for you to be a software engineer. And the number one reason for that is that a lot of developers are quitting, which means a lot less competition here on YouTube. We went from day in the life videos, like, hey, look how amazing my software engineering job is. To videos, hey, I quit my job and encouraging people to actually quit. And developers are quitting because of many reasons, some of them being AI doomers saying the world it's over and software is not worth it.

And of course a competitive job market. Other people are quitting for the wrong reason. Some people got burn out, others are starting side hustles. And all in all, if you stick to software, you will have a lot less competition in the upcoming years. If you don't know me, my name is Darosh and together with my brother Bogdan, we co founded the senior dev where we help JavaScript engineers worldwide level up to senior and beyond.

If you want to find out how and if we could help you, then check the links below and see what we do. On to the second point, the learn how to code age, it's over. The hype, it's gone from software engineering, the hype definitely went to AI. What does that mean? Well, being a coder became a liability, not an asset. Suddenly, if you knew how to code, you invested all this time to get good for nothing because AI can code and a lot of developers feel like losers because of all the time they spend investing in a skill.

On top of that, graduates are living or avoiding CS degrees. And I think Stanford and Duke University reported a 20% decrease in enrollment in CS and CS related courses. A lot of boot camps went bankrupt so they stopped pumping software devs into the industry. And of course, finally, coding influencers moved on to selling AI courses. You know, software and learning how to code is not cool anymore.

What's cool now is building agents and getting the agent to to do everything for you. And if you cannot do that, you won't have a job. Which is clear BS, but it's taking attention from coding. Which will probably lead to a huge shortage of qualified write software engineers in the short and medium term. So, if you stick around for a while, we will get to a point where you're going to be in huge demand.

And by the way, if you're looking to stay relevant and stay on top of your game as a JavaScript developer, then take this free 10-minute Stingles assessment bug knife put together for you. It will show you exactly what your technical gaps are and give you some recommendations on how to fix them and get to that senior level and make sure you stay in the game for a long time. On to point number three, AI actually generates a lot of technical depth and should I say garbage code, and someone will have to fix that.

And the point here is that LLMs made it incredibly easy to write basically garbage code that has to be rewritten. And guess what? Someone will have to fix it, someone with real software skills. As you can see in this image that we analyzed in another video together with Bogdan, a lot of the code that's been added with AI, and this is a study from May 2024, December 2024, but it still applies from last year.

Uh you see a lot of the lines were reworked. Uh there is a similar more recent study that came out about open source developers which actually reached the same conclusion, a lot of the code that's being pushed with AI has to be rewritten in order for it to be functional. And if you multiply this by the millions of code bases that we have worldwide enterprise startup, you understand that we are creating a huge problem and if you stay around, somebody will call you up to fix it.

Just like this byte coder, who was very famous on Twitter because he used cursor to build his SAS and then the whole app started doing random things and he couldn't fix it. And this is a solo developer. Imagine full development teams suffering from the same. On to point number four, software it's still actually eating the world. What do I mean by that? Well, the world is using more and more software every single day.

And if you can believe it, global software spending reach 675 billion 24 a nearly 50% increase compared to 2020. The world is buying exponentially more software in 2024, 2025, and beyond. And the future is powered by software. There's no other way we can deliver self-driving cars and we can have mainstream robotics, having a robot at your home, doing stuff around your home. And even blue collar jobs are getting moved towards tech, meaning that you won't have a bus driver, but you will have someone driving a bus remotely from their home or from an office and the bus is somewhere miles away controlled remotely.

And this is already being tested, this is already happening. All these innovations that will lead to a more productive society are need software to become a reality. And of course, there is new software use cases, things like clerk, which is a tool to provide authentication, AirX, very famous bank that we use at SF, platforms like Deal, who didn't even existed a few years ago. Humanity runs software and that software is being created and maintained mostly by human software engineers.

On to point number five, building great software got easier than ever and AI is helping a lot. So what happened in the last years is that the JavaScript ecosystem, for example, it's very mature, very well documented, there are tools for almost everything, meaning that if you have an idea, you can basically prototype it very, very fast. Infrastructure, it's also getting a lot cheaper. AI, it's pushing companies to build compute power for AI, meaning that storage and compute power is getting a lot cheaper, even if you just want to host a a simple website.

And finally, if you're a good developer, you will go much faster using AI, because instead of trying to vibe code everything, you can use AI strategically to do the heavy lifting for you. For example, you know, when you're writing repetitive rest endpoints, you can use AI for that. If you're getting into a new domain, like you're a JavaScript developer and you weren't to learn a bit of Ruby, you can use AI for that.

for that. Etc, AI will make programming more accessible for developers themselves first, more than for non developers. And finally, people are more distracted than ever. They are afraid, they are watching videos on YouTube instead of actually learning. Everybody is used to this instant gratification, which coding doesn't offer. Because software engineering coding, it's a complex skill, it takes time to learn and not many people want to do that anymore.

And this is bad news for them. But it's great news for you, the talented software engineers out there who are getting better, putting the work, and staying in this industry and betting on it. Remember, like the great Iron Senna said, you cannot overtake 15 cars in sunny weather, but you can when it's raining. Right now, it's raining in software dev, fear is high, uncertainty is high. And this is where developers who have clarity, developers who stick to it, are the ones that are going to make amazing progress, and others will just get left behind.

With that being said, if you're a JavaScript developer, we will help you get to senior where you don't pay, check the links below to see why that works and how it works and I'll see you folks in the next one.