At the company where I work (one of the FAANGs), there is suddenly a large number of junior IC roles opening up. This despite the trend of the last few years to only hire L5 and above.
My read of the situation:
- junior level jobs were sacrificed as cost cutting measures, to allow larger investment in AI
- some analysts read this as “the junior levels are being automated! Evidence: there is some AI stuff, and there are no junior roles!”
- but it was never true, and now the tide is turning.
I’m not sure I ever heard anybody in my company claim that the dearth of junior openings was due to to “we are going to automate the juniors”. I think all of that narrative was external analysts trying to read the tea leaves too hard. And, wannabes like Marc Benioff pretending to be tech leaders, but that’s a helpful reminder that Benioff is simply “not serious people”.
In addition the industry has been going through a massive correction post Covid, and all the free money drying up. Any impact AI is having is all mixed up with that.
The expectations for juniors, and how seniors work with them, will certainly change, but it's way too early to be making doomsday predictions.
Of course, that's easy for me to say when I'm not the one who just spent thousands of dollars and 4 years of their to land in an environment where getting a job is going to be challenging to say the least.
Free money did not dry up. I genuinely couldn’t imagine the upteenth saas or data startup trend continuing for another several decades towards the end of the last one. There was almost nothing left to build until AI …
There were symptoms of it right here on HN. Lots of fiddling around with framework churn, not really building anything compelling. The 2010s were not inspiring in that regard, and I personally felt like it was an unworthy field … until AI reinvigorated it (speaking entirely from a creative standpoint).
Agree, the death of the junior SWE is greatly exaggerated. (At least in FAANG)
Maybe there was some idea that if AI actually solved software engineering in a few years you wouldn't need any more SWEs. Industry is moving away from that idea this year.
The death, maybe, but not the lack of hiring. At $BIGCORP, where I work, I haven't seen an externally hired junior dev in at least 2 years in an extended team of ~100 people.
I'm with you on this, though I do think some people are true believers. Say a lie enough times, right?
But a big part of it to me is looking at the job data[0]. If you look at devs during this period you can see that during the pandemic they hired more in early to mid 2022 but currently are lower than any other industry.
Tech loves booms and busts, with hiring and everything else. But more than anything the tech industry loves optics. The market has rewarded the industry for hiring during the pandemic and in the past year it has rewarded them for laying people off "because AI". And as the new year comes around they'll get rewarded for hiring again as they "accelerate development" even more. Our industry is really good at metric hacking and getting those numbers to keep going up. As long as it looks like a good decision then people are excited and the numbers go up.
I think the problem is we've perverted ("over optimized") the market. You have to constantly have stock growth. The goal is to become the best but you lose the game by winning. I think a good example of this is from an article a read a few months ago[1]. It paints AWS in a bad light but if you pull out the real data you'll see AWS had a greater increase in absolute users than GCloud (you can also estimate easily from the article). But with the stock market it is better to be the underdog with growth than the status quo with constant income[2].
What a weird way to optimize our businesses. You are rewarded for becoming the best, but you are punished for being the best. Feels like only a matter of time before they start tanking on purpose because you can't go up anymore, so you need to make room to go up[3]. I mean we're already trading on speculation. We're beyond tech demos pushing stock up (already speculative) and now our "demos" are not even demonstrations but what we envision tech that hasn't been built to look like. That's much more speculative than something that is in beta! IDK, does anyone else feel like this is insane? How far can we keep pushing this?
[2] Doesn't take a genius to figure out you'll make more money had you invested $100 in GCloud vs $100 in AWS (in this example). The percentile differential is all that matters. Being percentile punishes having a large existing userbase. You have double the percentile growth going from 1 user to 100 than from 10 million to 500 million, yet any person who isn't severely mentally incapacitated would conclude the latter is a better business.
[3] Or at least play a game of hot potato. Sounds like a collusion ring in waiting. e.g. AWS stagnates, lets Azure take a bunch of users, Azure stagnates and users switch to AWS. Gives both the ability to "grow" and I'm sure all the users will be super happy with constantly switching and all the extra costs of doing so...
I agree that AI wasn't genuinely replacing junior roles to any important extent,
and the larger investment in AI is spot on.
Fast Company had exactly this take in November in "AI isn’t replacing jobs. AI spending is".
https://www.fastcompany.com/91435192/chatgpt-llm-openai-jobs...
"We’ve seen this act before. When companies are financially stressed, a relatively easy solution is to lay off workers and ask those who are not laid off to work harder and be thankful that they still have jobs. AI is just a convenient excuse for this cost-cutting. "
At my company, we're actively lowering our off-shore dev count in favor or on-shore devs. We're small but we're growing so we're hiring about one junior dev a year. This alone doesn't mean anything, but adding another data point to the conversation.
That narrative never sat right with me. That all these companies decided that AI was going to replace humans suddenly? Just an obvious pit to fall in to and one that conveniently feeds the AI is taking your job meme. Your read makes MUCH more sense.
FAANG has shedded between 81,000 and 87,000 workers in the past 5 years; I suspect a significant chunk of these jobs aren't coming back.
Seems to me the companies are mostly in a holding pattern: sure, if an important project needs more bodies, it's probably okay to hire. I suspect that lots of teams have to make do until further notice.
Are some teams using AI instead of hiring junior engineers? I don't think there's any doubt about that. It's also a trial period to better understand what the value-add is.
Based on listening to engineers on various podcasts, almost all of them describe the current level of AI agents as being equivalent to a junior engineer: they're eager and think they know a lot but they also have a lot to learn. But we're getting closer to the point where a well-thought out Skill [1] can do a pretty convincing job of replacing a junior engineer.
But—at the rate AI is improving, a company that doesn't adopt AI for software engineering will be at a competitive disadvantage compared to its peers.
Meta (Facebook)
2022: ~11,000 employees (13% of workforce)
2023: ~10,000 employees plus 5,000 open positions eliminated
2024: Multiple smaller rounds totaling ~100-200 employees
2025: ~3,600 employees (5% of workforce, performance-based cuts)
Total: Approximately 24,700-25,000 employees
Amazon
2022: ~10,000 employees
2023: ~17,000 employees (split between multiple rounds)
2024: Smaller targeted cuts
2025: ~14,000 employees announced
Total: Approximately 41,000+ employees
Google (Alphabet)
2023: ~12,000 employees (6% of workforce)
2024: Multiple smaller rounds, hundreds of employees
2025: Several hundred in Cloud division and other areas
Total: Approximately 15,000-20,000 employees
Apple
Apple has been an outlier among FAANG companies:
2022-2023: Minimal layoffs (hiring freeze instead)
2024: ~700+ employees (primarily from canceled Apple Car project and microLED display teams)
2025: Small cuts in sales and other divisions
Total: Approximately 800-1,000 employees (significantly less than peers)
Netflix
2022: ~450 employees across two rounds (150 + 300)
2023: Smaller targeted cuts in animation and drama divisions
2024-2025: Minimal additional cuts
Total: Approximately 500-600 employees
Overall FAANG Totals
Across all five companies over the past 5 years: approximately 81,000-87,000 workers
have been laid off, with the vast majority occurring in 2022-2023
during the post-pandemic correction period.
> Based on listening to engineers on various podcasts, almost all of them describe the current level of AI agents as being equivalent to a junior engineer: they're eager and think they know a lot but they also have a lot to learn. But we're getting closer to the point where a well-thought out Skill [1] can do a pretty convincing job of replacing a junior engineer.
The people that comment as such are either so disconnected from the software development process or so bought in on the hype that they are forgetting what the point of a junior role is in the first place.
If you hire a junior and they're exactly as capable as a junior 3 years later (about how far we're in now) many organizations would consider letting that employee go. The point of hiring a junior is that you get a (relative to the market) cheap investment with a long-term payoff. Within 1-2 years if they are any good, they will not be very junior any more (depending on domain, of course). There is no such promise or guarantee with AI, and employing an army of junior engineers that can't really "learn" is not a future I want to live in as a mid-career senior-ish person.
Of course, you can say "oh, it'll improve, don't worry" but I live in the present and I simply do not see that. I "employ" a bunch of crappy agents I have to constantly babysit only to output more work "units" I could before at the cost of some quality. If I had spent the money on a junior I would only have to babysit for the first little while and then they can be more autonomous. Even if they can improve beyond this, relying on the moat of "AI" provider companies to make this happen is not exactly comfortable either.
One of those companies sent me a linkedin request with a specific role. I searched on their website and there were very few roles and none like the one they proposed. So they are doing stealth hiring now. You can't let the world know you need people when you are supposed to use AI.
It doesn't help that a lot of the graduates I've talked to or interviewed seemed to treat a compsci degree as nothing more than a piece of paper they needed to get to be handed a high paying tech job. If you're motivated enough to learn enough job skills to be useful on your own then I guess you can treat your degree that way. But if you got through 4 years through cheating and minmaxing the easiest route possible and wound up with no retained skills to show for it? Congrats, you played yourself and fell for the "college is useless" meme. Coulda just skipped the student loans and bombed interviews without the 4 year degree.
> Coulda just skipped the student loans and bombed interviews without the 4 year degree.
I think college is useless for the ones out there whom already know how to code, collaborate and other skills the industry is looking for. Many out there are developing high level projects on GitHub and other places without having any degree.
Also, most of the stuff you learn in college has absolutely no relation to what you will do in the industry.
Personally, I disagree. Software engineering encompasses a lot more than frontend dev work. In previous engineering positions, I’ve used linear regression, evolutionary computation, dynamic algorithms, calculus, image processing, linear algebra, circuit design, etc. almost all of which I originally learned as part of my computer science degree.
Just because you won't use it doesn't mean it's not useful. Lots of programmers use math. Lots of programmers use DSA knowledge on a daily basis - and if you aren't you're probably writing bad code. I see a lot of O(n^2) code or worse making apps slow for no reason. Pretty basic stuff that most people don't understand despite taking a whole class on it.
Sure I learned lots of stuff I've never used. Like relational algebra. But I also learned lots of stuff I use a lot, and it's unlikely I'd have studied most of that stuff on my own. During my degree I also had time and opportunity to pursue lots of other topics outside the mandated course material, you're not limited to what they force you to learn.
So sure if you have the motivation, discipline and resourcefulness to learn all that stuff on your own go right ahead. Most people aren't even close. Most people are much better off with a degree.
It has happened several times - junior web devs can't find jobs, junior Java devs can't find jobs, etc... usually after a surge wave in the related tech area. We had large overall surge in tech around Covid time, and as usually there is some adjustment now.
The dotcom bubble had comp sci lecture halls with students overflowing into the hallway. I don’t blame people, it’s migratory. Jobs and resources are there, so, go there.
Then we blame the other group of students for not going there and picking majors where the jobs aren’t.
We need some kind of apprenticeship program honestly, or AI will solve the thing entirely and let people follow their honest desires and live reasonably in the world.
I can confirm from consulting experience that India is where the jobs went. My office provides professional services to North American and European industrial customers in manufacturing and distribution. Roughly 85% of these customers have fully Indian IT teams. Running a SOQL query in our Salesforce instance for 'Devi', 'Singh', and 'Kumar' yields over two thousand hits across client contacts, even.
Since the workers are hired for cost over quality, they're typically incompetent. Though many have learned to parasitize SME and support staff expertise by asking highly specific questions in an extended sequence. It's a salami-slicing strategy where the majority of the work ends up being performed by those SMEs and support staff while the incompetent workers collect the paychecks and credit. I'm pushing my teams to more aggressively identify and call out this behavior, but it's so systemic that it's an endless battle with every new project coming in the door.
Personal frustrations aside, it's very dangerous from both economic and national security perspectives for India to be building and administering so much of the West's IT infrastructure. Our entire economy depends on it, yet we're voluntarily concentrating that dependency in a single foreign nation. A Pacific conflict alone could sever us from the majority of our IT workforce, regardless of India's intentions.
Currently looking for a new role in biotech and it seems like at many companies it is almost 40:1 india vs united states roles being posted. This is in R&D not even manufacturing.
If the US actually cared about retaining jobs for the people they would enforce ratios of onshore / offshore with heavy taxes if companies did not reach that ratio.
Companies don't want to pay US salaries, cost of living in the US are not going down, costs of engineering talent in India is cheaper, you can hire 2 devs for the cost of 1 US dev. Why would you ever have any US engineering devs?
It won't change organically unless the costs of India engineers goes up or the costs of US engineers goes down.
Saying that "we're firing to use AI" makes you look like you have ROI on your AI investments and you're keeping up.
In fact there are possibly other macro-economic effects at play:
1. The inability to deduct engineering for tax purposes in the year they were spent: "Under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) from 2017, the law requires companies to amortize (spread out) all domestic R&D expenses, including software development costs, over five years, starting in tax years after December 31, 2021, instead of deducting them immediately. This means if you spend $100,000 on software development in 2023, you can only deduct 1/5th (or $20,000) each year over five years"
2. End of zero-interest rates.
3. Pandemic era hiring bloat - let's be honest we hired too many non-technical people, companies are still letting attrition take place (~10%/yr where I am) instead of firing.
4. Strong dollar. My company is moving seats to Canada, Ireland, and India instead of hiring in the US. Getting 1.5-2 engineers in Ireland instead of 1 senior on the US west coast.
Otherwise AI is an accelerator to make more money, increase profits and efficiency. Yes it has a high cost, but so does/did Cloud, every SaaS product we've bought/integrated.
No it's not. There is no shortage of tech problems to solve and there are no tech jobs that AI can do alone.
AI is sucking up investment and AI hype is making executives stupid. Hundreds of billions of dollars that used to go towards hiring is now going towards data centers. But AI is not doing tech jobs.
These headlines do nothing but increase the hype by pointing towards the wrong cause entirely.
It all depends on how you prompt. and the prompt system you’ve setup.. when done well, you just “steer” the code /system. Quite amazing to see it come together. But there are multiple layers to this.
It seems you've registered this account a couple of months ago only to basically repeat this opinion over and over (sprinkled with some anti-science opinions on top).
great engineering effort was spent to make software at FAANG built on clear service oriented modular architectures, and thus easy to develop for. Add to that good organization of process where engineers spend most of their time doing actual dev work.
Enterprise software is different beast - large fragile [quasi]monoliths, good luck for [current] AI to make a meaningful fixes and/or feature development in it. And even if AI manages to speed up actual development multiple times, the impact would be still small as actual development takes relatively small share of overall work in enterprise software. Of course it will come here too, just somewhat later than at places like FAANG.
Unfortunately if it takes you 4 years to significantly upskill in tech, you are learning way too slow to survive in this industry. Most of the major innovators I know are dropouts, because they realized college is suited to train you to work in academia, where very few jobs exist, almost no one worth working for cares about degrees anymore, and the debt only makes surviving harder.
IMO the best education and credentials come from picking interesting projects you have no idea how to do, then learn everything in your way to ship them as open source so potential employers can see your work.
If you can get a degree on a scholarship for free, wonderful, but college should be viewed as more of a hobby or a way to network, rather than a way of obtaining marketable technical skills.
I would agree FAANGs are an exception who have historically hired almost exclusively academics who hire other academics, and it shows. They let many coast for years at a time and get away with being a specialist unable to deliver value outside of their specialization or rapidly learn new skills. Many get the job with academic success and treat the job as a continuation of their academic career. Many get "tenure" and can do whatever they want and are effectively paid to just not work for competitors.
I know lots of people working at those orgs that brag about how well they get away with doing nothing of value and we all know these people (but of course not everyone is like that).
No offense but I do not feel the overwhelming majority of roles at these companies are delivering value to humanity apart from shareholders, or something most people should aspire towards in a career, and do not think most of the skills learned in these orgs are all that useful in the world outside those walls.
Also those same FAANGs are clearly aware of the above at some level and doing mass layoffs, or not replacing people who leave, and those workers are having a really hard time finding a home in the non-FAANG working world where they are expected to be highly motivated generalists.
Reminds me of that comic where the dog runs a ball up to his owner with the thought bubble "Throw!" When the owner goes to take the ball, the dog steps back, thinking, "No take! Only throw!"
So in the glorious future, well only need senior devs to manage AI. No juniors! Only seniors!
Readit News
At the company where I work (one of the FAANGs), there is suddenly a large number of junior IC roles opening up. This despite the trend of the last few years to only hire L5 and above.
My read of the situation:
- junior level jobs were sacrificed as cost cutting measures, to allow larger investment in AI
- some analysts read this as “the junior levels are being automated! Evidence: there is some AI stuff, and there are no junior roles!”
- but it was never true, and now the tide is turning.
I’m not sure I ever heard anybody in my company claim that the dearth of junior openings was due to to “we are going to automate the juniors”. I think all of that narrative was external analysts trying to read the tea leaves too hard. And, wannabes like Marc Benioff pretending to be tech leaders, but that’s a helpful reminder that Benioff is simply “not serious people”.
The expectations for juniors, and how seniors work with them, will certainly change, but it's way too early to be making doomsday predictions.
Of course, that's easy for me to say when I'm not the one who just spent thousands of dollars and 4 years of their to land in an environment where getting a job is going to be challenging to say the least.
There were symptoms of it right here on HN. Lots of fiddling around with framework churn, not really building anything compelling. The 2010s were not inspiring in that regard, and I personally felt like it was an unworthy field … until AI reinvigorated it (speaking entirely from a creative standpoint).
Maybe there was some idea that if AI actually solved software engineering in a few years you wouldn't need any more SWEs. Industry is moving away from that idea this year.
But a big part of it to me is looking at the job data[0]. If you look at devs during this period you can see that during the pandemic they hired more in early to mid 2022 but currently are lower than any other industry.
Tech loves booms and busts, with hiring and everything else. But more than anything the tech industry loves optics. The market has rewarded the industry for hiring during the pandemic and in the past year it has rewarded them for laying people off "because AI". And as the new year comes around they'll get rewarded for hiring again as they "accelerate development" even more. Our industry is really good at metric hacking and getting those numbers to keep going up. As long as it looks like a good decision then people are excited and the numbers go up.
I think the problem is we've perverted ("over optimized") the market. You have to constantly have stock growth. The goal is to become the best but you lose the game by winning. I think a good example of this is from an article a read a few months ago[1]. It paints AWS in a bad light but if you pull out the real data you'll see AWS had a greater increase in absolute users than GCloud (you can also estimate easily from the article). But with the stock market it is better to be the underdog with growth than the status quo with constant income[2].
What a weird way to optimize our businesses. You are rewarded for becoming the best, but you are punished for being the best. Feels like only a matter of time before they start tanking on purpose because you can't go up anymore, so you need to make room to go up[3]. I mean we're already trading on speculation. We're beyond tech demos pushing stock up (already speculative) and now our "demos" are not even demonstrations but what we envision tech that hasn't been built to look like. That's much more speculative than something that is in beta! IDK, does anyone else feel like this is insane? How far can we keep pushing this?
[0] Go to "Sector" then add "Software Development" to the chart https://data.indeed.com/#/postings
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/amazon-target...
[2] Doesn't take a genius to figure out you'll make more money had you invested $100 in GCloud vs $100 in AWS (in this example). The percentile differential is all that matters. Being percentile punishes having a large existing userbase. You have double the percentile growth going from 1 user to 100 than from 10 million to 500 million, yet any person who isn't severely mentally incapacitated would conclude the latter is a better business.
[3] Or at least play a game of hot potato. Sounds like a collusion ring in waiting. e.g. AWS stagnates, lets Azure take a bunch of users, Azure stagnates and users switch to AWS. Gives both the ability to "grow" and I'm sure all the users will be super happy with constantly switching and all the extra costs of doing so...
"We’ve seen this act before. When companies are financially stressed, a relatively easy solution is to lay off workers and ask those who are not laid off to work harder and be thankful that they still have jobs. AI is just a convenient excuse for this cost-cutting. "
Seems to me the companies are mostly in a holding pattern: sure, if an important project needs more bodies, it's probably okay to hire. I suspect that lots of teams have to make do until further notice.
Are some teams using AI instead of hiring junior engineers? I don't think there's any doubt about that. It's also a trial period to better understand what the value-add is.
Based on listening to engineers on various podcasts, almost all of them describe the current level of AI agents as being equivalent to a junior engineer: they're eager and think they know a lot but they also have a lot to learn. But we're getting closer to the point where a well-thought out Skill [1] can do a pretty convincing job of replacing a junior engineer.
But—at the rate AI is improving, a company that doesn't adopt AI for software engineering will be at a competitive disadvantage compared to its peers.
[1]: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/equipping-agents-for-t...
The people that comment as such are either so disconnected from the software development process or so bought in on the hype that they are forgetting what the point of a junior role is in the first place.
If you hire a junior and they're exactly as capable as a junior 3 years later (about how far we're in now) many organizations would consider letting that employee go. The point of hiring a junior is that you get a (relative to the market) cheap investment with a long-term payoff. Within 1-2 years if they are any good, they will not be very junior any more (depending on domain, of course). There is no such promise or guarantee with AI, and employing an army of junior engineers that can't really "learn" is not a future I want to live in as a mid-career senior-ish person.
Of course, you can say "oh, it'll improve, don't worry" but I live in the present and I simply do not see that. I "employ" a bunch of crappy agents I have to constantly babysit only to output more work "units" I could before at the cost of some quality. If I had spent the money on a junior I would only have to babysit for the first little while and then they can be more autonomous. Even if they can improve beyond this, relying on the moat of "AI" provider companies to make this happen is not exactly comfortable either.
I think college is useless for the ones out there whom already know how to code, collaborate and other skills the industry is looking for. Many out there are developing high level projects on GitHub and other places without having any degree.
Also, most of the stuff you learn in college has absolutely no relation to what you will do in the industry.
Sure I learned lots of stuff I've never used. Like relational algebra. But I also learned lots of stuff I use a lot, and it's unlikely I'd have studied most of that stuff on my own. During my degree I also had time and opportunity to pursue lots of other topics outside the mandated course material, you're not limited to what they force you to learn.
So sure if you have the motivation, discipline and resourcefulness to learn all that stuff on your own go right ahead. Most people aren't even close. Most people are much better off with a degree.
Then we blame the other group of students for not going there and picking majors where the jobs aren’t.
We need some kind of apprenticeship program honestly, or AI will solve the thing entirely and let people follow their honest desires and live reasonably in the world.
"Over $50 billion in under 24 hours: Why Big Tech is doubling down on investing in India" https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/11/big-tech-microsoft-amazon-go...
Since the workers are hired for cost over quality, they're typically incompetent. Though many have learned to parasitize SME and support staff expertise by asking highly specific questions in an extended sequence. It's a salami-slicing strategy where the majority of the work ends up being performed by those SMEs and support staff while the incompetent workers collect the paychecks and credit. I'm pushing my teams to more aggressively identify and call out this behavior, but it's so systemic that it's an endless battle with every new project coming in the door.
Personal frustrations aside, it's very dangerous from both economic and national security perspectives for India to be building and administering so much of the West's IT infrastructure. Our entire economy depends on it, yet we're voluntarily concentrating that dependency in a single foreign nation. A Pacific conflict alone could sever us from the majority of our IT workforce, regardless of India's intentions.
Companies don't want to pay US salaries, cost of living in the US are not going down, costs of engineering talent in India is cheaper, you can hire 2 devs for the cost of 1 US dev. Why would you ever have any US engineering devs?
It won't change organically unless the costs of India engineers goes up or the costs of US engineers goes down.
In fact there are possibly other macro-economic effects at play:
1. The inability to deduct engineering for tax purposes in the year they were spent: "Under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) from 2017, the law requires companies to amortize (spread out) all domestic R&D expenses, including software development costs, over five years, starting in tax years after December 31, 2021, instead of deducting them immediately. This means if you spend $100,000 on software development in 2023, you can only deduct 1/5th (or $20,000) each year over five years"
2. End of zero-interest rates.
3. Pandemic era hiring bloat - let's be honest we hired too many non-technical people, companies are still letting attrition take place (~10%/yr where I am) instead of firing.
4. Strong dollar. My company is moving seats to Canada, Ireland, and India instead of hiring in the US. Getting 1.5-2 engineers in Ireland instead of 1 senior on the US west coast.
Otherwise AI is an accelerator to make more money, increase profits and efficiency. Yes it has a high cost, but so does/did Cloud, every SaaS product we've bought/integrated.
AI is sucking up investment and AI hype is making executives stupid. Hundreds of billions of dollars that used to go towards hiring is now going towards data centers. But AI is not doing tech jobs.
These headlines do nothing but increase the hype by pointing towards the wrong cause entirely.
Edit: You cannot square these headlines https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46289160
There is almost no reason to delegate the work, especially low level grunt work.
People disputing this are either in denial, or lacking the skill set to leverage AI.
One or two more Opus releases from anthropic and this field is cooked
Frontend, backend, animations, design, infra, distributed systems engineering, networking.
It possible that your job is simply not that difficult to begin with?
Really weird.
Enterprise software is different beast - large fragile [quasi]monoliths, good luck for [current] AI to make a meaningful fixes and/or feature development in it. And even if AI manages to speed up actual development multiple times, the impact would be still small as actual development takes relatively small share of overall work in enterprise software. Of course it will come here too, just somewhat later than at places like FAANG.
IMO the best education and credentials come from picking interesting projects you have no idea how to do, then learn everything in your way to ship them as open source so potential employers can see your work.
If you can get a degree on a scholarship for free, wonderful, but college should be viewed as more of a hobby or a way to network, rather than a way of obtaining marketable technical skills.
I work in FAANG, none of my colleagues are dropouts.
Many BigTech founders are dropouts, but that’s a separate game altogether.
I know lots of people working at those orgs that brag about how well they get away with doing nothing of value and we all know these people (but of course not everyone is like that).
No offense but I do not feel the overwhelming majority of roles at these companies are delivering value to humanity apart from shareholders, or something most people should aspire towards in a career, and do not think most of the skills learned in these orgs are all that useful in the world outside those walls.
Also those same FAANGs are clearly aware of the above at some level and doing mass layoffs, or not replacing people who leave, and those workers are having a really hard time finding a home in the non-FAANG working world where they are expected to be highly motivated generalists.
So in the glorious future, well only need senior devs to manage AI. No juniors! Only seniors!