Ask HN: CS, still a good career in 3-5 years?

However, if you don't get into a FANG, it's not the end of the world. You might still be able to find another job at another software company if you're lucky. As the years go on, it'll be harder to get job due to the rapidly increasing supply of engineers.

The US has not hit peak SE demand yet, so don't worry, those days are still far away from now.

Oh and don't worry about wrong reasons. I know I'll get downvoted for this because it's politically incorrect, but: Working for $$ is the primary reason for work. If you didn't need to make money, then you don't need a job, you could just program on your own time whatever you wanted and have a hell of alot more fun than working as a SE.

In 10-20 years? Maybe

In 50-100 years? Probably not

There's a lot of investment opportunity right now so the industry is white hot.

When new investments dry up, there's still a lot of profitable companies with big moats, not to mention smaller players that have wanted more engineers but have been priced out of it, so things will be okay but maybe without salaries as insane.

In the long run there will always be some jobs but things will probably slow down a lot as big players will want to collect their rent and cut costs (read: jobs) to increase stock values.

Now, this state of affairs won't last forever. Eventually the market will level out. But I would guess we have at least another 5-10 years until that happens, and when it does happen, it won't mean the field crashes. It'll just settle into a more realistic state. Jobs that are "easy if you can understand code at all" will be the hardest hit. You might not get paid 6 figures to throw together simple web pages any more. Jobs that are intrinsically hard will be fine.

So my plan is to stay ahead of the tide. To push myself, get good at my craft, and get into a sub-field that's hard instead of resting on the current boom. Then, when things shift, hopefully my value will speak for itself.

In summary: yes, things right now are too good to be true. But that doesn't mean the whole field is a bubble. CS is very necessary in our world (and increasingly so) and there are lots of very hard problems out there to solve, it's just that there are even more easy problems.

Edit: Here's a source I found on Google (I don't know the source firsthand, but it seems credible enough at first glance) https://www.daxx.com/blog/development-trends/software-engine...

Right now there are multiple gold mines as software used to be more or less ethical/trustworthy, now people are busily trading that trust for $.

As for unsustainable competition like medicine, what do you think the needlessly ridiculous hurdles are for interviews (whiteboarding, regurgitating interview specific algorithmic questions that most people don't need to deal with outside of their CS courses, in vogue requirements that don't necessarily match job duties, etc). And, medicine is a bad comparison, due to it being in the realm of forced scarcity; enrollment caps for medical practitioner programs create a bottleneck in the pipeline that hurts the system (so those only motivated by money don't even make it through regularly - you at least need the study skills and interest to push through the hours needed to get past the various gates in the programs).

Just from my experience: Dev Ops for most companies doesn't need K8 clusters, running Docker instances, on your cloud host of choice, autobuilding through a cloud CI that has autohooks into your company's private GIT repos; no, they just need something, __anything__ that will provide them good enough uptime to keep their current customers and to gain new ones; and sometimes all they need is someone with a bit of domain knowledge that has strong computer skills so that their marketing department isn't also their IT department. Data Science for most companies isn't the newest deep learning algorithms but simple ANOVA, linear regressions, and decision trees to gain basic insights that they haven't had the resources to explore yet; and most of the time that's going to be on Finance, Accounting, and HR data (since your intake and output in dollars is the big quantifier for most decisions).

Lastly, both PG and Thiel's thesis statements in these blogs are more about leading edge creators, not Bob the junior software engineer at Widget Corp; and doesn't apply to even most of the people on HN (no matter how much each of us thinks it does).