this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2025
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Funny how everyone and their mom was screaming to study computer science 3-5 years ago. Bragging about earning 6 figure wages. This is what that kind og hype gets you. A saturated job market with high unemployment rate. Next the wages will plummet because people will be so desperate for a job, they'll gladly work for half of what they're worth.
Have you used software/online services lately? It seems that half the stuff out there is broken in some way.. I don't think the problem is a saturated market at all but a lack of understanding of the profession by business leaders. I actually believe there's a software crisis happening and the tech debt is only going to get worse with over/misuse of AI. At this point, considering the chaos this might create, I don't even know if I want to be right.. There have been plenty of examples of this mismanagement causing havoc in the news the last few years and we're still moving in the wrong direction imo..
Companies have been pushing that for many years because they wanted wages down.
This is all payback for the power the workers gained during the pandemic.
Ding ding ding ding!
This is the correct answer
This is what planning education around fantasies creates. Demanding so many go into any one field is silly. The reality is that we need many different kinds of skilled work and no one is immune from market fluctuation.
I’m not so sure. Coding is a skill, just like any other. A project or construction manager who knows VBA can automate 1/5 of their job. A mechanical engineer who knows code can modify a CNC. A sales rep with coding skills is an unstoppable force for leads, outreach and reports.
Yes, coding was long a job and it long still will be for the best in the business, the well connected, or those who focused on archaic languages. For the rest of us, it becomes a skill like trigonometry or knowing a foreign language.
It’s a lot easier to teach yourself coding with a degree in a different field versus teaching yourself an entire different field with a degree in coding though.
So true. And why stop at one? I've had to teach myself 9 fields, so far, to apply my degree in coding.
Haha, I was going to say "Let me introduce you to contracting". I've had to be everything from an agronomist to a supply chain manager to make things work.
Yes. Most of mine are from contracting, as well.
most software engineering isn't actual computer science, it's plumbing. and most coding isn't software engineering, it's scripting. we overproduced CS majors when we should have taught scripting as part of the curriculum for ME, finance etc.
and even the plumbing should be separated into a different major. it's like hiring electrical engineers as electricians.
Naa, this isn't from to many people, this is from companies trying to hire people who know what the fuck they're doing. The number of people I run into on a daily basis that have zero understanding of the basics is way to high, and these people are usually devs. It's like someone wanting to build a house but all they know how to do is roofing. Colleges pop out these CS majors and they think their degree is going to land them a job, while having zero actual skills outside of what they did in college. You can't expect me to hire you for six figures if you can't even install windows or linux. Go take a help desk job to learn the basics first.
No don't take a help desk job, you'll be forever tarred as a support person who's at best a wannabe programmer.
Everyone I have ever worked with that's worth a damn started with help desk. If you can't start there and learn the basics and move up, you don't need to be in the field.
There's a big difference with help desk jobs and data engineering, for example. What's the point of having someone that knows spark and sql solving tickets about permissions because some dipshit from middle management decided to randomly start removing permissions? (Sorry, it's infuriating and I'm sorry for the people that need to reenable my user)
"Moving up" might make sense in regards to people management within a company, but that's not a very smart take when talking about technical fields. I get paid to analyse data and to propose, implement and test data solutions. That's what I know, it would have been dumb to ask me to start at help desk. I started in a startup to get diverse experience of several tools,and then directly moved into specialised jobs in bigger companies.
In fact, that's my take, people should start at startups to get a wide range of experience before specialising, helpdesk jobs don't really compliment a generic software developers skillset.
That's not the point of help desk, it's to teach you the basics. How are you supposed to be worth a damn if all you know is your siloed app? You should understand the basics of AD, domains, networks, firewalls and basic security. You shouldn't be developing apps if you don't understand this stuff. That's how shit devs operate.
The number of devs that don't know the basics and put out shit apps that end up being security nightmares or just function like shit is mainly because they don't know how the rest of the ecosystem works.
Yeah, no. I shouldn't know the basics of active directory because I'm not at the administrative end of that tool, I'm at the user end of it. I work with wildly different tools where AD and domains are completely irrelevant for my job. It's not even a siloed app, it's the whole sector of data engineering that doesn't touch systems management. That's a completely different speciality and it's as useless for me to gain experience there as is for my buddies that work in helpdesk and security to learn about distributed programming.
I agree with your assessment that having a global view is important, but that's not what helpdesk offers, that's what working on a startup of your sector offers, a wide array of tasks around the job you are specialising in.
Knowing how AD domains work doesn't teach me shit about proper terraform structuring, what's the best way to join multiple tables via spark, proper data manipulation, bash scripting skills (invaluable for my job and my buddies working at helpdesk know shit about bash).
You mention security, but disregard that there are tons of Devs that don't work on user facing apps, right now I'm working on automatic processes that access very well defined tables and write again in well defined places. I'm not the one designing the permission scheme on Azure or anything like that, what I need to know is how to analyse data, how to design proper ETL systems that are able to make and efficient use of distributed systems, and plan good validation tools of the coded systems. None of that interacts with whatever someone would do in helpdesk.
Helpdesk has a good vision on security issues facing users and how the access and permission architecture of all the tools at a company works. Very valuable work, yet irrelevant for me to have experience on it.
I don't know why you continue to argue about this. Understanding the foundations of the entire ecosystem is helpful. You're argument is basically the same as those kids who say they're never going to use math. I'm not telling you, you should learn trigonometry, I'm telling you, you should at least know how to add/subtract/divide/multiple.
That's absolutely what help desk does. You don't just learn the basics, you learn how to interact with people as well.
You're buddies need to dig a bit deeper if they're not using bash scripts. That's like basic shit.
Are you suggesting apps that don't have user interactions don't have security vulnerabilities?