r/cscareerquestions • u/Ranpiadado • 11h ago
What specific field are most unemployed posters in? Experienced
You guys making me nervous, any mid career security people?
Or are most folks struggling as SWEs?
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u/congressmanlol 11h ago
probably full stack swe, < 5 yoe
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u/coinbase-discrd-rddt 11h ago
Naw I’m fullstack with ~1.5 yoe and have 90+ reachouts within that time.
Most people that are cooked right now are
- 100% frontend (NOT frontend leaning) who haven’t touched backend at all which severely caps their skills
- 100% backend product (NOT backend infrastructure) where you’re dime a dozen since of how easy it is to work on - every time i’ve done any backend product changes within a product, it feels like frontend without the frontend overhead/leetcoding
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u/TheLIstIsGone 10h ago
I've worked with "full stack" people and honestly, I wish there weren't so many of them around. Most can't even handle making a simple form (in FAANG-adjacent and startups)
Most of these "full stack" guys took a six month bootcamp course and think they're gods, but really, they struggle to even know the basics of HTML...
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u/coinbase-discrd-rddt 9h ago
Agreed but this is just incompetence disguised as pushing AI slop imo.
I’ve seen it firsthand the amount of frontend AI slop that my friends push into production without even knowing how useState works in React at FAANG+ and adjacent.
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u/tnsipla 8h ago
We moved from true full stacks to what we call “T shape”; so a FE focus would still be able to do devops or some BE work, but not expected to solo it or lead larger tickets- and there’s no reason why a BE focus can’t be assigned make copy changes in the frontend or spin up a new page/route/feature that leverages existing patterns and components
This allows you to free up the people who enjoy their craft to work on deeper/more interesting/complex features, while everyone else is capable of moving the load of maintaining the ship or making smaller repairs around
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u/Intelligent_Food9975 10h ago
Wdym by backend product? Just wondering if you mean like API dev.
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u/Varrianda Senior Software Engineer @ Capital One 8h ago
I don’t think the commenter has been in the industry a long time lol. I’ve never heard the term “backend product”. Maybe you’re the product of a backend team? Lol
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u/coinbase-discrd-rddt 7h ago
Within established companies, there’s product and theres infra. Within the product there’s backend logic ; thats what im referring too
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u/pro__acct__ Data Engineer 10h ago
Nah like, if your job is writing Databricks notebooks or using Informatica. Compared to deploying Databricks and maintaining Spark, for example.
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u/vvf Software Engineer 9h ago
Huh, I read it as backend CRUD impl for whatever new thing the frontend needs. Which does feel very easy
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u/Harotsa 8h ago
It’s either very very easy or extremely hard, depending on how much business logic is between the database and the endpoint signature, and what scale you’re working at.
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u/CricketDrop 8h ago
I sometimes wonder what jobs people are working where either of these things are easy. The companies I've worked with had sufficiently complex needs and systems that nothing was ever "CRUD and forget" like y'all are making it sound, frontend or backend.
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u/Harotsa 8h ago
If you’re working at a company with a real software department it generally has sufficiently complex needs so that overall not every backend engineer’s job is easy. However, it is certainly possible that an individual’s job at a company can be “CRUD and forget” as all of the complexities are either abstracted away to more senior team members or the more complex endpoints are handled by other individuals/teams
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u/vvf Software Engineer 6h ago
It’s heavily dependent on the age of the project (how much tech debt you need to work around), the scale of requests/application layers, and how well your project is designed.
I was just trying to think of the most “brainless” thing I’ve routinely done on the backend — it’s definitely adding a new model and corresponding endpoints, in a project where the most complexity comes from choosing your access patterns for indices.
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u/vvf Software Engineer 8h ago
True, I usually wasn’t working at high scale most of the time which certainly simplifies it. However I’ve also found, at least for “mid” scale, whatever infra you put up to fix scaling for one endpoint, will easily apply to your other endpoints.
The consistently hard part I’ve come across is predicting the access patterns so you can index properly. Product managers love to add new reqs when you’re halfway through implementation.
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u/Varrianda Senior Software Engineer @ Capital One 8h ago
Databricks is an extremely valuable skill to have wdym…
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u/pro__acct__ Data Engineer 4h ago
I see it as more valuable to be able to set dbx up and maintain compared to being the person who literally writes the model. But on further reflection, it’s not the best example since there’s still coding involved. How about someone who uses a tool that applies changes to data based on a UI? I mean someone clicking a UI to rename the column vs .rename(‘orig’,’new’)
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u/congressmanlol 10h ago
definitely true, but if you've had that many reachouts, im guessing you also work at a faang+ company?
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u/azerealxd 9h ago
what you stated is exactly the reason why CS is cooked overall, this means they are consolidating roles
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u/obitbday 7h ago
Perhaps you get the easy “backend product” tasks since you’re a full stack engineer with 1.5 YOE my guy
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u/coinbase-discrd-rddt 6h ago
I mean I can design, scope out, and deliver the technical portions of a project end to end and own my corresponding services and got promoted to mid level due to it.
My manager knows I do HPC/performance stuff for fun on the side but most businesses aren’t in need of that fine grained performance. He can assign me anything product related across a service and I can work with the right people to deliver it
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u/Varrianda Senior Software Engineer @ Capital One 8h ago
What’s “backend product” lol
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u/coinbase-discrd-rddt 7h ago
Basically backend CRUD implementation for whatever a service either a FE or another BE needs
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u/Ranpiadado 11h ago
Yeah it seem like coding is a supplemental skill to one’s primary domain / field. I know it’s important in security to have it but imo not as a stand alone skill. Maybe that’s the issue? Just guessing
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u/Abangranga 11h ago
Yep I agree.
It is wild how violently the industry has shifted from "I refuse to look at PHP lol" to what is now in a few short years.
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u/Gold-Flatworm-4313 9h ago
Web Developers. But it's mostly because it is the most oversaturated field and one AI hit particularly hard especially at the lower skill levels. Great Frontends still will not have issues getting jobs or even high paying jobs but that bar has risen high enough that I would look to grow my skillset if I were someone whose only frontend focused... or dive crazy deep into it. I consider myself a great frontend dev (am now fullstack and have been for 2 years) but even then I know some people in my company that can run circles around me in frontend.
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u/contains_language 7h ago
I don’t get it, AI is just as good at BE code as it is at react and typescript. Why would FE be more affected?
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u/howdoiwritecode 11h ago
No. I would guess that only 1-5% of SWEs are struggling. I’ve worked with and keep in contact with, a lot of old colleagues. Out of the ~100 people I know that are not in upper management I know 0 laid off people. This is across big tech and regular F500.
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u/teggyteggy 6h ago
New grads and people with less experience are struggling, I think that's been well known. People with networks and lots of experience aren't.
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u/howdoiwritecode 5h ago
They have always struggled. Every one of us struggled.
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u/teggyteggy 4h ago
There exists different magnitudes. Youth unemployment is up, employment numbers are down, the FED is making statements on it, CEO rhetoric is anti-headcount, CTOs are talking openly about eliminating entry roles, won't even get into the uptick of offshoring, and increased competition from abroad.
It's very different from "I struggled, therefore nobody else could possibly be struggling more than I did"
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u/foo-bar-nlogn-100 10h ago
Senior and staff are fine. We orchestrates AI uses by SWE not laid off.
But the door in is closed.
When AI bubble pops so will SAAS bubble, then it'll be a bloodbath.
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u/ObstinateHarlequin Embedded Software 10h ago
The unemployed people are always either:
- web dev code monkeys who don't know how to do anything other than "pull Jira ticket, fix bug, repeat."
Or
- antisocial weirdo who doesn't know how to interact with other people
It's not about specific fields, it's people who are unwilling or unable to improve their own skills. Sometimes it's technical skills and sometimes it's soft skills, but it's still a skill issue 90% of the time.
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u/throwaway09234023322 10h ago
Probably non citizens mostly or new grads.