Every profession is both simultaneously too saturated and too empty. They're always talking about a labor shortage, but also about how it's overcrowded.

There's multiple economic cycles that overlap, and no one cycle fully explains it.

You have the 2010-2020 boom. Killer times to be a programmer. But I only finished school and got a programming job right towards the end of it -- and COVID messed with everything.

So you have years of people being pushed to go into CS. But with ever rising pay, too. Causing even more people to go into it, even if they don't care about programming or even never care to learn.

You also have a cycle of interest rates. Interest rates and tax favor ability meant that tons of VC investment occurred, tons and tons in software development. Jobs and money. Even for so many things that wouldn't create a profit. Often obviously so.

There's also a cycle of offshoring. That is, e.g. US devs being fired in favor of e.g. Indian devs. Often for the same e.g. 5 WITCH companies (that's an acronym of 5 big Indian companies known for this). Where execs hear the promise of drastically reduced dev and IT prices, by firing US employees and hiring contractors that work in India, that can be massively cheaper.

But then they realize that even if you can get by the timezone communication issues, the incentive issue (contractors not being the company owning the work, so they don't care, and actually want to increase prices), culture and other communication issues, and the informational transfer issues (quickly forcefully transferring over easily lost institutional knowledge), you still have another big problem. If those devs working at those companies were any good, they'd work for a company that paid more and charged more. That is, the same price as US devs.

And so the company wastes billions of dollars, loses tons of unwritten knowledge, and loses their competitive edge by handing all that knowledge to a different company and different country. And gets a non-working product, sometimes never even launched.

So then jobs get moved back.

That's three cycles: hype, interest rates, and offshoring. And right now they're all converged in a way that makes things crappy for existing devs.

In 2021 you had good interest rates, not as much offshoring yet, and tons of hype.

But then companies though, "if our employees can work remote in the US, why can't we have remote employees in India, South America, Eastern Europe, or the Philippines?" That is, cheap places of living with enough education to have some dev base to hire remotely. So fire employees and hire them. If devs were identical that's massive cost savings.

And then we had interest rates increase. Essentially, companies couldn't throw money around as much on long shots or things that wouldn't make a profit. Companies couldn't just hire devs to have numbers under them and maybe get something out of it, and keep those smart devs out of competitor's hands. They had to be worth it. And if they laid people off, they could rehire them all across the different companies but lay less in total. Because the devs were desperate and ok with lower pay, due to the layoffs.

And particularly recently, the last two years, the hype has been different. It's not been devs creating the Internet or smartphones or the cloud or crypto. It's AI. AI that creates text, like a human wrote it. For super cheap, vs hiring a human. And paying the humans is the most expensive part of a business.

So what if we replaced all the developers with AI? After all, that's what devs do all day, type text write? (Nevermind communicating with users and figuring out the design and typing the right thing, with there not really being one right answer.) So fire them all and replace them with AI. What do you mean our feature development rate has gone down?

So 2024 has been ass.

Maybe things will get better. Lower interest rates and companies needing to produce something instead of starving themselves. AI not delivering on its promises and so devs must be hired. Outsourced devs being worse and ultimately too expensive vs just having local devs.

Maybe some of things get better instead of all.

Or maybe they don't. Maybe AI can let companies have 10% devs for the same output and quality. Maybe we enter stagflation with high interest and high inflation, with a depression with high unemployment and few open positions, especially for junior devs. Maybe big drivers of new value aren't stuff that devs produce.

Or maybe it does get bad but gets reasonable in a few years, when you'd enter the job market. It was bad to graduate college and enter the job market in the 2008 recession. But leave just as we came out of it and you would've made bank during the 2010s.

The future is unknown. Ultimately, you need flexibility at your age. And even through college, even having picked some major. Being able to adjust to the conditions of reality is super important.

Assuming AI can't replace development anytime soon, I still the software development is a good idea. It's a hyper scale job. You create so much money very quickly for very little expense. Jobs like doctors are super valuable but way more work and stress, and aren't hyperscale. Same with lawyers.

So I recommend being good across all your classes. But it's also fine to follow an interest. Remember, passion and interest comes from time spent, not vice versa. Find something that's interesting enough that isn't too dangerous money-wise -- e.g. you don't want to rely on music or writing as your only ability. But don't force yourself to do what you hate. Follow the specifically interesting bits and you can get far, and expand your ability.

But don't focus too hard on future money making either. You also need to stay mentally sane. Life shouldn't be about the pursuit of money, as much as it forces you to.

Don't put your eggs in one basket. Don't put your self worth in one basket either.

As a dev with a job, make sure to be a person who can communicate and work in a team. While it is real nice to have a coworker who can actually understand and write code and navigate computers, you need to be a pleasant person to be around. And you've gotta be able to navigate bosses.

It sucks, but even in a world without scarcity and money and politics, software is ultimately to help people with something. So you gotta focus on people. No matter that many of us entered this field to not talk to people.

Good luck. I hope this helped.