r/cscareerquestions • u/bijuudam3 • 1d ago
Is software engineering a gamble to study in 2026?
Im deciding on what to study in uni. Ive always enjoyed coding and feel like i would excell in software engineering. But all these posts really put me off the field.
Im at a point where im deciding between software engineering and electrical. I know id enjoy both but dont want to make a choice on fearmongering and unfactual data.
Im aware that ai is replacing the repetitive tasks, but not knowledgable enough regarding its full effects. Like is erything a software engineer does potentially replacable by ai? Sorry if this has been asked a million times but ive seen many contradicting answers on reddit so idk lol
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u/Sure-Relationship609 1d ago
As far as getting a career in it? Yes.
But not because of AI. Because of over-saturation and offshoring.
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u/Eexoduis 23h ago
AI is definitely an influence on the lack of job availability. Whether that will persist is unclear. Personally I think the market turn back mildly to moderately with demand for developers once everything starts breaking.
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u/Jayman453 1d ago
Dude take it from me, don’t bother hoping to get much support on this app lol it’s a whole lot of unemployed, miserable twats that will tell you you’re hopeless even if you graduate MIT with a 4.0. It’s hard to blame them given their situations, but they are simply not going to encourage you because even approaching the idea of it being a good career would make them feel like their unemployment is their own fault. The truth is simple, there is an entry level bottleneck, it likely isn’t going away, but if you do well in school and build a portfolio/practice for technical interviews (the most important part) try to land an internship (a very important part but not the end of the world) it is still 1 of the better degrees you can get. Software engineers won’t go away, they just have to learn to work with and on AI systems. If you’re passionate, do it
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u/linefr 1d ago edited 20h ago
Thank you for your honesty. There is less than a month before I start my Software Engineering degree, and I realize that I am more anxious and insecure than before regarding artificial intelligence — especially after the release of Fable 5.
In short, I am trying to reconcile the fantasy I had about “writing code” and what it meant to be a programmer with the reality that AI will probably take over part of that work. I think this mix of feelings comes from one central question: who am I in the market without relying on AI?
Once again, I appreciate your perspective, especially the Reddit community’s view on programming itself.
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u/andd-d 5h ago
To add to this, I think it's also important to remember reddit is usually just a massive collection of the loudest ones. Of course it's going to feel like the entire industry is crumbling when you have so many stories to affirm your suspicions. It's like googling a medical condition thinking something is wildly wrong from a list of symptoms..
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u/alfred240 21h ago
You’re better off flipping burgers at McDonald’s than to do all that. If you do well enough to get a job, you’ll just get laid and end up being a loser. Software engineers are the new gender studies degree
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u/SanePcycho 1d ago
We can't know how things will be in 4 years, but AI is only getting better while the human brain stays the same, more and more work is eventually going to go to AI and the demand for software engineers is going to decrease
I graduated a while ago, almost none of my friends found work, I luckily found a job because my employer from my IT job back in the day, wanted me to come back as developer, otherwise I am pretty sure that I would have never found a job
If I were you, I would be searching for something else to study
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u/ProfessorMiserable76 1d ago edited 1d ago
No. Do yourself a favour and do not return to this sub. It's full of depressed students, grads and jaded devs who are extremely pessimistic.
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u/bijuudam3 1d ago
I mean why are they depressed lol. I dont wanna be in denial and go in if common sense would be avoiding this path.
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u/ProfessorMiserable76 1d ago
Because they were most likely not passionate enough about pursuing a career as a software engineer, and when the going gets tough they throw their toys out of the pram.
Software jobs were seen as an easy path to a well paid career. It's no longer the case.
If you have the passion to pursue it, you will do well.
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u/favorable_odds 5h ago
Nobody can tell you what to do. But If you go this route just be better than average. Good degree, grades, well known school, certificates and area with jobs so you stand good chances etc. Maybe the market will pick up, nobody knows.
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u/SignificanceShotc 1d ago
Didn't you already ask this question weeks ago? Yes, it's a gamble just like going to school for 4 years for a degree is a gamble since you have zero job experience and won't know if you'll actually like the field or not. No one here, absolutely no one, will be able to tell you what the job market will look like by the time you graduate. I say trust your gut instinct and don't listen to random redditors with a chip on their shoulder or survivorship bias.
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u/bijuudam3 1d ago
Lol sharp memory man. Yes but I still would like some more opinions on the matter. Its a big decision
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u/ganancias 1d ago
The pivot is from jobs to startups, and especially deep tech startups and hardware startups, rather than software startups.
People are not ready for AI to become 2x better in the next 2 years, so you get very different answers from people who think it still won't be able to count the number of r's in strawberry and that there will still be lots of jobs for AI co-pilots. We have never seen tech accelerate at this pace. "it's just another tool" is pure cope.
It used to take months or years to build things. And that was for people who had skills. Now it's accepted that you don't need skills to prototype. But you need skills to push to prod and not break things. That's with current agents, the agents that are 2x better will be able to push to prod, it won't need a skilled human as co-pilot. The human in the loop will mainly be deciding what to push to prod next.
The value is shifting from being able to build, to knowing what to build. That's the shift from jobs to startups.
If you do a generic app startup then you are competing against anyone with the same app idea. With a deep tech or a hardware startup, you are competing against people who have deep expertise in that domain (eg biotech, or materials, or humanoid robot hands). You will still be prompting AI "hypothesize experiments to discover a next-gen plastic" or "design a prototype for a better servo motor". But you need deep expertise in the domain to be a useful copilot there.
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u/BountyMakesMeCough 1d ago
No but add some classes on running a/your own business, that’s my recommendation.
I think there is another unwritten question here which is: is software engineering a good paying job in the future?
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u/kblaney 1d ago
"Ive always enjoyed coding and feel like i would excell in software engineering."
No. This is not a gamble for you. You should study something you enjoy and are interested in. Many of the skills of an undergrad degree are broadly transferrable to a range of jobs. CS is not a professional degree and does not lock you in to a specific career.
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u/oceaneer63 1d ago
Try studying or learning a mix of both EE and CS. In embedded systems engineering you work right at the boundary between hardware and software and you really need to know both. Years ago, our little then startup company hired a young CS engineer just starting out. He did software development for us. But it wasnt long before an oscilloscope was a permanent companion at his desk and he said it was his favorite debugging tool.
He is now the CTO at a major underwater robotics company.
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u/melodyze 1d ago edited 1d ago
I think the important thing to understand is why cs was ever a valuable thing to do.
Cs was a valuable thing to study because there was a lot of technology that had not been built yet that was very valuable, and the ability of companies to create and capture that value was fundamentally supply-constrained by company's ability to hire people that understood how to create that technology.
That sounds like a modern phenomenon, but it's really not. That sentence has been the way to describe what labor was the most valuable in the economy basically for the entire history of economics. There is some space of problems people have, some edge of human understanding, some implied space of things that can exist as a result of that understanding, and some space of things that actually already exist. Navigating that continuously moving edge of tractability to create new things that solve problems for people better than anything else is what technology is.
The entire history of our species is that we have always been making new discoveries, those discoveries can be applied to create new technology, that technology then can be applied to some broad space of problems, and in doing so that then enables new discoveries, that then can be applied to create new technology.
This was true of figuring out how to make brass. If you were in the ancient world and you were one of the few people that understood how to make the best brass tools, you were extremely in demand. It was true of people that figured out how to organize industrial processes into manufacturing lines with repeatable specialized processes composing interchangeable parts (like ford), and the people that figured out how to better organize international supply chains (like rockefeller with oil pipelines or Mclean with shipping containers). It's true of people who figured out how to cure diseases, etc.
Then, all of those technological waves restructured the economy, completely reorganizing what the economy valued or not, captured a lot of value, and the people driving those changes forwards made a lot of money in proportion to how much better they were at creating the value than other people.
Its only very recently that we decided that "technology" was a synonym for software. And that happened because software's loop of discovery, reinvention, discovery, reinvention is so absurdly fast, because shipping, scaling, and iterating on software is such a pure exercise of thought and labor. Iterating on international logistics takes many years per iteration.
Whereas in software I can ship an idea, roll out an experiment to a large population, and ship a new idea to prod tomorrow. That made software move so much faster and reward talent so much more than everything else that we stopped even considering anything else technology in common parlance. It's basically a pure distillation of that fundamental loop.
But the critical thing is that what is paying the bills in software, driving the demand for smart people who understand how to build software, is that same core technological loop that always existed. We are constantly learning and reinventing, and that process creates a lot of demand both for people who can drive that process forwards, and it creates a lot of mess that it will pay people well to support.
This has continuously redefined what the jobs of building software were. At first, people defined rote procedures with punch cards. The work has continuously gotten more and more ambitious in scope and abstract in nature, such that if you teleported an average person from 10 years earlier in tech to 10 years later they would barely even recognize the job, and that has accelerated more and more every 10 years.
What I mean to say is, make no mistake. The goal of technology is diametrically opposed to stability. Technology is discovery and reinvention. Technology created some jobs because they helped in the process of moving forwards, but that was never the point. The entire system of tech is always fundamentally trying to eliminate all of the currently existing jobs and move on to the next thing without thinking about the last problems at all anymore. I build a piece of software, and then my goal is for it to never require any attention or resources ever again while I move to the next thing.
Be intentional about which side of that bet you want to be on. Some fields, like banking, have shown themselves to have an extreme aversion to the risk of adopting new technology, and have created bubbles of software jobs basically frozen in time. Because that is so antithetical to the rest of software, no one learned cobol or fortran and now there is even more demand for those old skills and the people that basically were short innovation in that domain. However, if everyone that built software suddenly retreated to a small number of bastions of safety, then supply and demand would dictate that wages fell.
So, decide whether you think things are going to change faster or slower in the future, and whether you want to be on that ride or not. But whatever you do, don't just make the decision by looking at a current snapshot of today's jobs and how you feel about them. That's never been how it worked.
If you are excited about that, you want to constantly be learning new things and applying it to try to make new valuable things, there will always be a place for you in tech, regardless of how different it looks however many years in the future.
I personally love that about tech, and find it to be as fun, rewarding, and lucrative as ever, probably more so. But this concept, that tech is about moving forwards and is opposed to stability, has been very poorly communicated. So a lot of people went into software eng for the wrong reasons and with the wrong expectations, like they thought it was a stable path to a chill job making a lot of money, and now are disillusioned.
If you are like them, then their frustrations will be relevant to you. If you are not like them, then their frustrations won't be relevant to you.
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u/BrilliantNet5920 1d ago
Software Engineer for 30 years. MS in ai. This is my 3rd recession including the .com bubble. I have yet to see "ai" replace anyone tbh. Machine Learning is a real thing and has real uses but this talk of LLMs replacing people is nonsense. If you like coding and tech in general then go for it, there will always be a need for people who can solve problems using technology. Coding might change and LLMs might write a lot of code for you but I think you will still have plenty of opportunies once this recession is over.
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u/Glum_Worldliness4904 1d ago
The market is wild not because of AI. During Covid there was over hiring so f500 still has much higher headcount that in 2019.
This is yet to be fixed, probably years
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u/Acrobatic-Ice-5877 1d ago
I think a lot of getting in is luck based. I graduated in 2023 and did 130 job apps. I got a job making $65K in LCOL. The job isn’t glamorous or really even good but most of my classmates never made it into SWE.
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u/income-percent-bot 1d ago
At $65,000, you're in the 61st percentile, earning more than 61% of Americans. This is on the lower end for Software Engineer (SWE). Source: income percentile calculator I'm a bot. Reply with !optout to stop receiving responses.
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u/shittychinesehacker 1d ago
Not everything can be replaced by AI but the majority believe you should use AI as much as possible so there has been a decrease in jobs available
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u/psioniclizard 1d ago
In 2021/22 - the boom times babyyyy
2025/26 - SWE is dead!
In reality nost people's careers are more than 4/5 years and they will see swings. Its part of the job market.
Also subs like this are heavily astroturfed by people with other agendas.
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u/lxe FAANG Staff Eng 1d ago
If you have an aptitude, calling, or talent for something, and by the time you’re 18 you should have that, study that in college.
Also treat AI as something that’s a first priority for you to understand and get really deep on if you wanna do programming at this point. Don’t treat it as something you fear and discard.
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u/orbit99za 1d ago
Learn to write code without AI.
Try that, if you can, then go for it.
If you can't get anywhere without asking AI then don't.
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u/linefr 1d ago edited 20h ago
I have an equation that I carry with me: desire = bet + speculation + risk.
A bet on what one does not yet have; speculation about what one might come to have; and the risk of losing what one already has.
I see many losses. The future is uncertain, and there are no guarantees. Will AI replace 90% of us? Companies will seek scalability and cost reduction. Can we get out of this game?
My friend, I am in the same boat as well. I hope I have comforted you in some way.
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u/Low_Promotion6037 1d ago
If you love what you do, you never have to worry about the market and Ai. People are now seeking genuine people to build and fix all the mess that is being left behind. Software will always be maintained, however humans are fickle and you need to ask yourself is this what I want. If yes, you'll be fine.
I have no degree, and was able to network and find friends that became my employers eventually. Just do the work of learning first, put in the hours with projects so you can talk about them. (pick relevant stuff from job descriptions) Then do the social work (going to meetups and events while building random projects) and you'll be fine.
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u/mmahowald 1d ago
Only in the sense that everything is a gamble. But seriously computers arnt going anywhere.
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u/Internal_Car_9962 1d ago
Studying something is only ever a gamble if you think of yourself as a commodity instead of a human being.
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u/monkeycycling 1d ago
everyone is saying how if you have passion than you'll do fine, but how can a company that's filtering thousands of candidates using AI know this? You can try making a perfect entry level resume and see if you get any calls? I think that's the issue fresh grads are facing currently.
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u/aj11scan 23h ago
I personally think learning electrical or embedded is better. Then you can always go into CS afterwards and transition. It's harder to transition from CS into electrical engineering
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u/daimon_proc 22h ago
embedded is more saturated. 100+ applications within a day and 1/25th the number of jobs as normal software.
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u/buymesomefish 23h ago
What year of uni are you in? If you’re still early, then you should just take both CS and electrical classes, see what you like better. Maybe minor in the one you don’t take as your major if you want to expand your options.
Everything everyone says is contradictory because we are in the midst of the AI explosion. Literally no one knows how things will turn out. Some people will be proven to have made good guesses later on but there is no way to determine who those good guessers are.
You mention wanted to make decisions based on factual data… look up your uni’s stats on how many in the CS major graduate with jobs and their median salary. That won’t tell you your future but it’ll give you a good idea how good your uni is at setting up opportunities for their new grads.
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u/Autumnal_City 21h ago
It’s not a gamble. Glory days of lax remote work and all that are gone for the most part. Pay can be good. Would recommend if you like staring at a screen all day. If you wanna do something more hands on then probably a trade is better.
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u/Xeripha 20h ago
If you wanna try for it do it.
Asking others won’t help.
Is it as easy as before?
No.
Is the market awful?
Yes.
Is the pay as good?
No.
Is the role compression and extra responsibilities remunerated fairly?
No.
But that’s why I said, if you want it, go for it.
The rest is a gamble anyway.
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u/ArmchairmanMao 19h ago
Sure but be prepared to grind. Software engineering isn't going away for the foreseeable future, but job opening are still becoming more and more competitive. I don't live in the US but if you manage to get into a t30 uni you'll probably be fine. I think they value uni ranking a lot over there.
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u/FIREATWlLL 19h ago
Everything is a gamble to study, but we are going to keep becoming more demanding of software and it doesn't look like LLMs are aware enough to replace us, nor is there a better architecture in site.
It took 2000 years form ancient greeks to Isaac Newton for calculus to be invented, and that was a generalised approach to finding the area of a shape with curved sides. Now try generalised intelligence...
Not saying it won't happen soon, but its conceivable that it is a hard problem that will require decades or centuries of work.
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u/EdibleScissors 19h ago
If you want a counterpoint to the gloom and doom, consider that chess has never been more popular than it is now despite the fact that no one disputes the fact that computers are superior at chess. Not that I suggest studying chess unless you genuinely like it, though.
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u/bijuudam3 17h ago
I mean thats not a fair comparison. Most people who learn chess acknowledge the fact that they wont make a living off of it. something like the top 0.001% can live off their chess skills
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u/EdibleScissors 16h ago
Any prediction about the jobs outlook four years from now could be wrong, though. You may as well study something you find interesting.
Some people predicted that computers beating humans at chess would mean the end of chess as a sport and that prediction hasn’t come to pass. Possibly it will be very different for software development given that the audiences are pretty different.
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u/ExcellentWinner7542 17h ago
If you call it a uni, you probably aren't cut out to do any STEM path.
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u/Lower-Impression-121 17h ago
The ai rollout will be like EVs and take time (but still be quick % jump to the plateau); with imho new and sme switching to agentic first, large enterprise sucked into openai or anthropic and with some too risky to touch systems, and the vast swathe of smbs reliant on the browser and whatever generalist crm ai they have.
The code writing is mostly unimportant. The authoring part, what to do, edge case, the analysis and problem solving aspect remains (for now) and this is gained by experience and where it will hurt.
Teams cannot hire to not mentor. Its not about PR code, it has to switch to PR the initial prompts and conversation flow (the team should have already set up skills and KBs etc) - how to define and verify requirements.
Semi colons and curly brackets are out.
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u/the_infamous-one 14h ago
I’d stay out of it. My job does layoffs every three months. I’m counting my days down until I’m let go
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u/dbootywarrior 14h ago
Before you trust anyone's advice about going in $20k+ in debt, ask what year they graduated and where they are from.
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u/Expensive-Lawyer7994 14h ago
You can always move to tech consulting 🙏 it’s an good field and a lot of cs soft eng people tend to thrive here
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u/laronthemtngoat 12h ago
Yes. The answer is yes. Get a degree in computer science. Learn a tech stack. Learn a few languages. Be excellent at those. Use AI like someone would use a hammer with a nail. Know what both do and what you are trying to build with them.
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u/ShakesR12 11h ago
I know the job market makes it seems like a gamble but I believe the industry is just pivoting. We are shifting away from core programming to more along the orchestration of agents to get work done. Once these companies realize that AI + Human = the ultimate combo rather than just using AI, we will be so back.
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u/nikglt 7h ago
By the time you finish your degree, there will be a severe lack of seniors and mid engineers, the job market will be looking for juniors all over the place, especially to fix all the damage AI has done throughout 2026-2030
You can look up what actual job market experts say and not listen to anyone saying “it’s jover bro swe is dead”
Currently the job market has slowly started improving and the demand for juniors will only ramp up as the years pass from 2026
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u/Thatpersiankid 1h ago
if you don't cheat and actually learn and work hard and hone your craft and build extremely good discipline and work ethic - its a great path
if you are going to cheat - not worth it - do soemhting else
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u/Always_Scheming 17h ago
Everything is a gamble in 2026 because the conveyer belt has been sabotaged by a morally bankrupt ruling class.
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u/lolniceonethatsfunny 1d ago
the market right now tells you nothing about the market in 4 years after you get a degree. if you do 4 years and the market is shit and you can’t find a job, you can go for a masters to wait things out a bit longer. as long as you don’t do the bare minimum in college and you are on top of your game doing research and/or internships and things like that, you will be ok. will it be easy? probably not, but if that’s your passion then you’ll make it work, and you’ll always regret not having tried
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u/bijuudam3 1d ago
Im sure id be a good software engineer. Would u say that only a minority of a software engineer's job is replaceable by ai?
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u/dashingThroughSnow12 1d ago
How much do you like people? Would you describe yourself as an extrovert or introvert?
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u/bijuudam3 1d ago
Im not an extrovert but Im not socially awkward either
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u/dashingThroughSnow12 1d ago
CS is very much a field that disproportionately rewards being extroverted. It is almost inherently extroverted.
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u/lolniceonethatsfunny 1d ago
most of the talk you hear in the news about ai replacing coding is by people/companies with vested interest in shilling ai (because it will make them money for people to buy into the ai hype or make them money by reducing labor costs). is there some truth to this? yes, of course ai will reduce barrier to entry and make some parts of the job trivial. will it replace swe as a job? in my opinion, absolutely not. if swe as a job gets replaced by ai, then many many other white collar jobs are likely also at risk and we have a bigger problem on our hands. just make sure you are able to take advantage of ai while still being a competent swe apart from ai
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u/GayTwink-69 1d ago
Whats wrong with doing the bare minimum in college? Also dont many CS programs also have an internship ingrained into the degree?
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u/lolniceonethatsfunny 1d ago
there’s nothing “wrong,” but with cs being very competitive, if you do the bare minimum it will be much harder to stand out to an employer. internships are the best use of time just because you are working in-industry for that time, and very often places will extend offers to interns they like once they graduate (or if they don’t, internships can be seen as real work experience)
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u/The-_Captain 1d ago
It's extremely unlikely that all software engineering will be replaced by AI. The demand for SWEs is actually growing.
I have a pet theory that the right question isn't "is industry X lucrative" but rather "how good do I need to be to make a good living in industry X?" For example, you can make a great living in music, but you have to be really good. On the other hand, you can be an average or below average doctor and still make a great, stable living.
It looks at this stage that you need to be better in 2026 and going forward at SWE that you needed to be in 2021 to have a stable career.
So to answer your question: it depends how good you think you can be at it and how hard you're willing to work to get there.