I am currently contemplating a similar switch to software engineering or data science. Your post and the comments here are helpful in getting some perspective, as I have been asking myself similar questions. Since it has been a year now, may I ask how has your plan gone so far? How did you go about upskilling in software engineering and did you already start the job seeking process? If you don’t feel like publicly stating these things, also feel free to DM me.
My story may be somewhat irrelevant now, but I did a series of intro courses in different languages (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Python) to test my fit and better understand what kind of things I might build. During these few months, broad tech layoffs were increasing, while LLM/coding assistants were gaining traction. Recent grads from coding bootcamps (the route I was likely to take) were also having more difficulty finding work and the bootcamps themselves seemed ill-prepared for the LLM transition.
My read on the changing landscape was that even if the job market improved for junior coders a year or so out, I might not be much more valuable to a company than an LLM (and if I was, it was likely to be temporary). Without a lot of confidence that this would be a secure career path, I opted not to pursue programming.
I am currently contemplating a similar switch to software engineering or data science. Your post and the comments here are helpful in getting some perspective, as I have been asking myself similar questions. Since it has been a year now, may I ask how has your plan gone so far? How did you go about upskilling in software engineering and did you already start the job seeking process? If you don’t feel like publicly stating these things, also feel free to DM me.
I missed this somehow...sorry for the late-reply.
My story may be somewhat irrelevant now, but I did a series of intro courses in different languages (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Python) to test my fit and better understand what kind of things I might build. During these few months, broad tech layoffs were increasing, while LLM/coding assistants were gaining traction. Recent grads from coding bootcamps (the route I was likely to take) were also having more difficulty finding work and the bootcamps themselves seemed ill-prepared for the LLM transition.
My read on the changing landscape was that even if the job market improved for junior coders a year or so out, I might not be much more valuable to a company than an LLM (and if I was, it was likely to be temporary). Without a lot of confidence that this would be a secure career path, I opted not to pursue programming.
How about you?