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as the title suggests, I've been increasingly worried about the current trends in replacing all sorts of SWE with agentic coding, and would like to shield myself (as I'm sure everyone would...) from the upcoming changes in my career field.
I do mainly embedded work, so microcontrollers and -processors with RTOSes and baremetal. I've always been very passionate about this field, so much so that my main hobbies revolve around making PCBs for myself and tinker with new technologies. In the past I've also had positions in which I did mainly 3D design, though that was at a "junior" level, so to speak. Right now I'm considered a halfway senior in my role, both in terms of IC skills and managerial skills, though I'd personally like to learn much more stuff before hailing myself as a senior dev.
I think I'm gonna be replaced in the near future, whether AI can actually perform my job or not, because that's the trend all companies are pursuing; so I wouldn't mind just changing careers, since I could still pursue embedded work in my own free time, though I really wouldn't mind working in something adjacent to that field (hardware/firmware).
What do you personally recommend doing in my position? I realize we're all in the same pot and that I have no right asking guidance to other people that may be struggling even worse than I am, nevertheless if you feel like sharing a suggestion (in any direction) I'll be very thankful for that.
this is a follow-up post to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43282410
TLDR of that post: 5yoe embedded engineer, started a new role within a highly dysfunctional organization with no clear responsibility or supervisors after a semi-burnout within a startup, felt extremely discouraged. Company is in aerospace development.
It's been little over a couple months since I've started and things have not improved yet. Sspposedly a lead engineer is going to start working with my team soon; however due to continuous changes of plans, lackluster collaboration coming from other teams and still no clear directions for the future of the project the morale of the other members of my team is that of extreme gloom, and there are days I find it very hard to bother doing what I'm being paid to because 1. I feel like fighting an uphill battle against not only work activities but also my own peers and 2. the feeling is almost always that we're simply doing busywork that will have to be redone in a few weeks/months time.
Keep in mind that all of this is simply technical writing (requirements) and involves no coding at all nor a particularly deep knowledge of the underlying technology, since it's iteratively monkey-pasted until it appeases some subjective and still unclear measures of the main customer, which also seems to have its own internal strifes regarding variability of staffing, which eventually leads to repeated re-thinking of the overall project. Worst of all is that we have to closely follow suit because some deadlines are approaching and if the project team does not manage to respect those basically the whole company is royally f*cked in the hindquarters.
Due to the overall situation, we (the SW team) received recent news from the project manager that for the foreseeable duration of the project (4-5y more or less) there will be no internal SW development made because of de-risking, and everything will be outsourced instead. I will personally not delve into why I think this is a dumb decision, but it is what it is; only that at this point I really don't understand which reasons I have to keep working here, aside from the relatively cozy position (which btw does not differ much from previous positions I held). I have plans to open up a small SW startup i 5-10y time for development in this field, but that requires a non-indifferent amount of expertise whose growth would be obviously stunt from sitting idly for years to come, especially for someone with so little experience such as me.
I do not want to turn this into a meaningless rant, so I'm asking again for HN opinion on this: what would you personally do in this case? I feel like I'm being irrationally capricious and ungrateful for leaving a cushy job in these trying times and markets, OTOH I fear that developing no experience for several years to come is going to leave me stranded when I'll eventually try to scale up into new roles or future endeavors, nevermind the expectation of an extremely dull day to day experience.
Another thing is, I really like the space sector and would love to stay in it, but the feeling I get from working in it and hearing from other people that have been doing it at different levels of seniority is that you either get startups that do not know what the hell they're doing at frantically try to spin up some working satellite with hopes and strings, or immovable giants in which you're parked in some role and hardly move anywhere. Considering how much I love working with low level stuff, PCBs, CPU architectures and so on, maybe this is not the right call for me, and I should be better off working in some other fields...
Thanks to anyone that takes their time to respond, appreciate it immensely.
I wanted to pose this question here as I know lots of people have probably experienced the same situation as I'm doing now and many others have success stories after having been stuck in a rut.
I'm 30, embedded sw engineer by trade, have been working for 4-ish year in this field and some more in my spare time; I've switched industry from consulting to flight software engineering for satellites, though I don't have an aerospace background, and I've just switched companies from a small startup to a bigger-but-still-startupish company. The switch has been done for several reasons, including high employee turnover, toxic workplace, relentless workloads at times that left me severely burnout for a while (I would feel sick at my stomach just looking at code in the morning) and worst of all a complete lack of sense of accomplishment and organization within the company.
Unfortunately I could not take a short sabbatical between my leave and the start of the new employment since I have to support some relatives and cannot afford risking to be unemployed right now, so I jumped ship as soon as I got an offer from this other satellite company.
Though it was described by some to be a more congenial environment, the new workplace has _some_ of the problems the old one had, in that it is very frantic and unorganized, documentation is sparse, turnover not quite so high but still there, and sometimes lack of communication that severely impairs advancement of projects. I've been there for only a month now, but the onboarding has basically been to leave me to my own devices to figure out stuff to do and basically reverse engineer horridly written (as said by OG devs themselves) firmware to simply gain a basic understanding on how things are supposed to work, even though the frantic nature of management is such that whatever thing I might do or any insight I might gain may prove completely useless in a short while as soon as all prototypes that have been done to this day could be scratched for [reasons].
Honestly I'm feeling extremely let down and fed up with this and feel no small amount of disappointment in my own choices; though I love working in embedded I'm questioning a lot of my life decisions up to this point and I can feel symptoms of the past burnout bubbling up again. I try my hardest to be useful everyday and to actually understand what's going on (though the hardware stack and ISA is very alien to me (though alluring i must admit) and extremely badly documented even by the OEM), but there are days in which I feel like I really can't do anything and basically idle until it's time to go home, and this last part is really killing me with guilt.
I've noticed it's mostly when I'm reading or trying to implement stuff that I halfheartedly know it's gonna mean jack shit in a short while and would rather do in my spare time and concentrate on something of more immediate usefulness, like an actual working prototype instead of just idle work, but I can't help it.
It may not seem much but I've also had some other personal issues that exacerbated this whole let-down sentiment and there are evenings like I feel at my wits end and don't know where to turn. Worse of all, I feel like that if I don't find a way to solve this, I might end up really badly burnout and be unable to work, which would be a disaster for my own family.
So after all this rant, I would like to know your honest opinions on this: am I just a whiny asshole? Should I simply quit and go somewhere else (though I'm horrified at the thought of it going from "bad" to worse), or grit my teeth and go on? How would you handle this situation?
Note: sorry for the linkedin-ish way of ranting and offering engagement questions at the end; I want to know your opinions, I really do, I've nowhere to ask or turn around.
Thanks a million.