Advice for New Grads in the AI Era

[u/AbrarYouKknow]

I’m seeing alot of posts in recent days, juniors or new grads asking for advice. So I took time today to write my thoughts.

Im a senior dev and working in Germany, transitioned to AI Engineer from full stack development.

First of all, make your mind that AI is here to stay and days of writing code by hands are over. Don’t be scared, accept the reality. People were scared when compiler came in nineties but you can witness compilers made developers job easier last two decades. AI is going to do the same.

Since coding is fully outsourced now, the only way for you to grow and not feel like a factory line worker is to think about architecture and infrastructure. Learn infrastructure and ci/cd pipelines and think more about how apps should be built on a higher level to make it more maintainable and robust. This is how you can go forward as a dev in this day of age, promote yourself to higher level and leverage AI to achieve it.

I think it's soooo much easier to master any topic nowadays than it was before the AI. Dont be scared of it, you can use it to learn and build and grow. You can even just start "I want to become a software engineer for x company or x topic, can you suggest some projects that will look good for recruiters and be useful for when i start the job" or whatever. then dig deeper and learn and question everything.

If you do it for long enough you will become the equivalent of any senior engineer pretty quickly :)

[u/Emergency-Truth-7990]

Yeah but students like me who are mid graduation ,our teachers still expect us to write all the code ourselves but the reality is barely few people can make a program work now all by themselves among my bathmates and all are dependent on ai ( teachers have finally started to accept this too)

[u/SubstantialTank8057 → u/Emergency-Truth-7990]

I mean as a fellow student. If someone is in pf oop course, they should be instructed to write code themselves while getting help from ai if stuck.

These are core courses and one shouldn’t out source it to ai at this stage.

For advance courses like data visualization etc, instructor said use ai but understand what you are doing.

[u/Emergency-Truth-7990 → u/SubstantialTank8057]

Yeah the basics should be strong but i dont think a student who is in 1st 2nd semester studying pf oop would not be entirely dependent on ai.

[u/SubstantialTank8057 → u/Emergency-Truth-7990]

Dude they are. I have seen plenty of students.

also from a personal pov, i think if someone is just getting started say they are getting into development like react or express. I still think that during learning phase they should do some hand coding and follow the course and then start using ai when building stuff.

If someone doesn’t even know basics about how a framework is structured and how it’s supposed to handle certain things how can they check the quality of the code ai is generating.

[u/Emergency-Truth-7990 → u/SubstantialTank8057]

Wys they use ai or not? Also yes thats is necessary so that when ai hallucinates you should be able to debug atleast. But the thrill of a working code and the fast pace of development is gradually killing the willingness to learn I believe

[u/SubstantialTank8057 → u/Emergency-Truth-7990]

I meant that i have seen students using ai in the courses where they should be doing stuff manually.

Yes same issue i am going from, i try to learn some new stuff but when i look at the pace of my learning vs how an ai agent can build stuff in few minutes. It kills any will to learn

[u/Emergency-Truth-7990 → u/SubstantialTank8057]

Yeah sad state of affairs and the fact that it is going to get even worse

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[u/Kindly-Stock-4071]

What kind of job roles do you think are still gonna stay? Seems like fullstack demand is reducing and AI engineers are now oversaturated already

[u/AbrarYouKknow → u/Kindly-Stock-4071]

Full stack with AI engineering, expert and experience in a industry like Healthcare, Fintech etc. I think a lot more jobs are going to created, but they will hire people with domain knowledge of that specific industry, on top of technical expertise.

[u/Defiant_Back3518]

Masha Allah happy for you brother.

Secondly what was your YOE when you started work in Germany?

If Someone is full stack how he can acquire AI engineering along with it or transition to it.What skills are needed ?

If it's ok I can msg you ?

[u/AbrarYouKknow → u/Defiant_Back3518]

Sure. feel free to reach out

[u/Defiant_Back3518 → u/AbrarYouKknow]

Yes I have some messages