I would encourage you to continue to pursue your interests in programming despite AI advancements. Sticking with something you’re interested in means you can stay motivated even when dealing with less pleasant other aspects of your job that always exist like annoying co-workers. Having the core work you enjoy has been critical in my career as I could get absorbed into it and block out other negatives. It also is a job where its quite acceptable to work remotely and based on your health conditions it seems like a good match.

I totally understand the anxiety around the future, and a degree is a huge financial investment. One way that might help is to think about learning in terms of adding tools to your belt, and less about training for job A and then getting job A. Programming has a lot transferable skills across many industries so you can follow the money into whatever industry is in demand by the time you finish your studies (it will probably be ai related IMHO). Whereas city planning is highly specialised and those skills are harder to transfer to the point you’re locking yourself into an industry with a heavily limited revenue stream.

AI has changed how we work significantly but we will always need humans in the loop who actually know what’s going on. This comes from someone with 26 years in the industry. There is so much more to building software than just coding too. Don’t let the doomers get to you.

My other advice is while support networks can be helpful don’t put your survival onto anyone else’s shoulders. In my personal experience people are human at the end of the day they can let you down, and at the worst possible time. It’s so so so much better to build self reliance and resilience. I think your assessment is true, people are hyper individualistic today, that said people do care still (look at all the replies in this thread trying to help), but there are limits to altruism. So for the question, where to invest to get stability, honestly my answer isn’t community or your career, it’s you invest in yourself and your own capabilities for the best chance of a successful future.

Good luck!

I think there’s value in asking not what interests you but rather how you want to work, particularly in your case. The ugly thing is that you don’t just find that knowledge on the kitchen counter one morning, you usually find out by working a job.

Disclaimer: I live in Europe, I am middle aged and I’ve worked in more than one profession and more than one country.

I think ideally you do some entry level thing, maybe without study if you’re worried about the expense, and you see what “how” suits you. Then you decide if you want to study or not but the aim is to expand the “how”.

Design or Architecture: This usually requires you or someone else to sell your skillset rather well. That someone else is difficult to find, so the question is: Are you cool with doing that? Are you happy to tell people just why your design is the best they can get? There’s niche jobs in this area as with many others, but in my experience not quite as many.

Tech: IT has for a long time served as a great market for people who did some sort of STEM-stuff. As a result of the size and growth of the industry in the past 50 years, people were much needed and earned rather well. This also means that cutting costs by reducing employee count looks rather attractive right now. But it’s also starting to backfire in many ways, be it the fact that AI runs wild in some cases or that in others companies just didn’t really know how much AI would cost them. There’s a lot of examples, but it’ll still take time to sink in that AI can do some stuff, but it can’t do all the stuff all the time, unless you’re fine losing control of your code. There’s also not a whole lot of regulation yet and that will absolutely change.

So here’s what I think you should ask yourself:

• Am I extroverted and happy to spend time with strangers? (This pays into sales jobs and promoter-stuff.)
• Am I someone who is good at disappointing people? (Regulation needs its own people, they often come highly specialised and their job is to tell others what’s safe to do, thus creating disappointment. Management is also a lot of eggshells to walk on, but it’s not always creating disappointment.)
• Am I passionate enough about a field to deeply invest and let it bleed into my life? (Sometimes there is something you absolutely must do and when you know that, it’s okay to embrace it.)
• How well do I work within a team? (Your first team may not be the best team ever, but if you can fit in without hating the situation, cut the others some slack and exist within that system, that’s a skill.)
• Am I someone who gets into that hyper focus kinda state where I just work alone for hours and that makes me happy? (This is going the science route, even IT relies on team work to a certain degree, but the more trial and error and writing a job involves, the more you need to be motivated on your own.)
• Am I a born service provider? (Some of us are not front row extroverts but really just want to make life better for everyone. In that case look at support or some job that cooperates with a team but does their own thing later on. We’re looking at assistant roles, documentation - where AI didn’t ruin it, UX … and as I said: Support.)
• Do I need pressure or stress to get things done? (Some of us do. That’s okay, but let’s then pick something that gives us deadlines or the right amount of pressure to actually perform. Or - if you’re on the other end of this - a place with long-term planning and very clear expectations, so you can settle into a routine.)

Many of these things are completely independent of the area you later work in, if you do the finances for a charity or work on organising funds raisers for start ups, if you end up as a scrum master with a dev team or an auditor for building sites, they are all different combinations of those things above. If you find the right combination, you find what you can do well and what will make you somewhat happy.

My personal advice: Pick something that comes to you with ease (meaning it’s something you don’t look at the clock about), life will find a way to make it challenging anyway.

Good luck!

This is not a new problem, humans since the beginning of our species have had the same feeling. You’ll persevere the way that unprepared and scared homosapiens have since the dawn of our species. Simmer down, you dont need to solve existence.

Stay true to yourself and accept that you can’t win but you also don’t have to settle.

In the biggest picture it really is what you do now. Be mindful of the now. You can’t do anything about then. You might be able to have an effect on the next.

So make your now as better as you can and do whatever it takes to make the next the best it can be.

Do your self a favor and be honest with what you can and can’t do.

If you can, then you should do

If you can’t, then find the way that makes it so you can.

I believe in you friend. I can’t really explain how much you have against you but it’s nothing new. Make sure to figure out your priorities and set goals to make it happen while being ready to take advantage of options.

Opportunity and timing and the truth factors in life.

Make sure you take the opportunity when it comes. It will come and sometimes it comes with baggage or in the most inopportune moment

I think stuff like urban planning and designing walkable environments would be cool, but I’m not sure if that’s a viable path in 2027 and beyond

Without knowing that much about the field, I would think that urban design should stick around long into the future. Those projects take decades to complete, and there’s always new cities and developments.

Even if the US is currently drinking the stupid juice when it comes to what makes a good city, either that will change soon or you can apply your skills to projects outside of the US

Join the union building trades my dude. Wake up early, make six figures, and get paid to be trained. We dont go into debt for education. We go into debt buying boats and shit.

You can’t. Neither can any middle-aged person, nor old person.

I’m in my mid 40s and I dunno. I thought I had it. Now, my company that promised permanent remote work and confirmed my moving was fine, is trying to kill remote work. I live in very rural Japan and there aren’t many jobs out here. No US/Canada companies seem interested in working with a backend engineer on the other side of the world. I have back problems so there are also limits on what physical work I can do so something like construction is basically not an option. So, with my life more than half over, I might lose everything again. If I do, my life will just go to being completely over.

Honestly? Take a small business accounting class and bone up on the tax code (which is more common sense than people think - I do my own taxes and have for decades… it’s pretty easy once you work it out) that relates to it and become a CPA.

THAT one will always be needed because people that run businesses often have the lousiest head when it comes to the numbers.

Done right, you won’t be in any situation that demands too much physicality so if your not as mobile as you’d want, you can stil work.

This book was a great help to me.

“Discover What You Are Best At” by Linda Gail .

It’s a series of self tests you can finish in a day, and then the book lists the jobs that you might find appealing.

For example, a hair stylist and a nurse both need good people skills and good dexterity. Two totally different jobs with similar skill sets.

I found the book when I was abotu your age, and it gave me a push in the right direction

I’ve worked with many people who like stability, and those who embrace change. It really depends on one’s personality.

Problem is that the world of work has changed. There are very few guarantees any more. In that case you have to decide if you want something that appears stable on the surface, but can be rug-pulled in a hurry. Or if you just accept that everything will change and adjust your expectations and life plans.

The former allows you to go deep and acquire expertise in one area. The latter gives you breadth, but may mean you won’t get deep into a single field.

This might seem a bit abstract, but it really means one needs to do a gut check when planning a career.

A third option is to just wing it and see what comes along.

An important thing to note is that AI is actually not capable of replacing jobs. It can streamline some jobs in a limited capacity.

The perception that AI is replacing jobs is a lie that’s spread by both employers and AI companies for various reasons.

The AI companies want to spread it because it makes their products look better to employers. It’s just marketing for them.

Employers are claiming that AI is replacing jobs because they overhired during and after Covid lockdowns and the industry is correcting for the oversaturation now that the economy has gotten tighter. But layoffs from reduced profits looks really bad to shareholders, and the company wants to look good to keep the stock up. Because of thus, they’re trying to spin the narrative that AI’s increase in productivity let them reduce positions despite it not being true.

All that being said, the job market is tough. If you’re good at math, engineering is usually a good pick. There’s been a shortage of mechanical engineers in a lot of the US over the past decade. These are jobs that pay well, and if you’re competent and willing to move you shouldn’t have trouble finding a job. That being said, the areas with the biggest shortages tend to be rural, though they’re often still within 1hr of a city.

The big catch for engineering is that school is damned hard. For my degree, I consistently needed 18-20 credit hours of classes each semester to finish in 4 years. Between that, studying, work, and hobbies that can be a difficult proposition. Plus, you still need to have soft skills like communication. You’re going to have a harder time getting a job if you can’t hold a conversation.

Im sorry but I honestly don’t know what to recommend. I can say I changed my career when it did not work out in my late 20’s and that lasted awhile but now im unemployed in my 50’s and can’t really do that. I can’t move in with family and retrain and such. The one thing I can say is I have gotten more things out of academia than just jobs. I am very glad I was in a LAS program and took an elementary logic class. LAS gets a lot of flack and admitadely its not great at a large school with crazy large classrooms but having a good breadth of education outside of your field is valuable. That being said you mention your 23 which would suggest your passed that point. If not I would recommend doing as much cheap education like community college and searching as much as you can for scholarships to avoid the debt trap.

Man, I remember when I was 23, good times! Yeah, gonna be real things like work, school, and all that productive stuff won’t make you feel stable. I spent a lot of my time wondering about that phrase that happiness is what you make of it.

When I was like 19, I felt I had no path forward and my dumbass served 6 years in the US Army. I had a near death experience in Iraq when I got fucking blown up and you know what went through my head? Was it the incredible team meetings when I was an NCO, the great grades I had in school, the awesome days of work when I got a lot done? No, it was the time I spent with friends, getting so drunk I passed out in a field, going to gaming tournaments, bowling, and all that. So what’s gonna matter in the end isn’t going to be anythong ‘productive’ at all.

Work and school are oh so much fucking applesauce. And hell, making more friends does help with jobs. I got my job now, as a civilian, because of the friendships I made in the Army.

…I feel like I old man rambled. Yeah, get out there and make friends. Literally just talk to people. Out of nowhere. Hell yeah.

Some (possibly incomplete) thoughts:

I think stuff like urban planning and designing walkable environments would be cool, but I’m not sure if that’s a viable path in 2027 and beyond.

So you have the option of looking outside the country? Because there are definitely countries (especially in Europe) who are doing a lot on that direction, that might offer something interesting. Also, tuition will be lower almost everywhere outside the US, so you don’t put on nearly as much debt, for the case that it ends up being the “wrong” degree. Plus, your chronic health issues would likely be much better taken care of there.

I also used to be interested in programming, but ever since AI and mass layoffs hit the scene, I’ve become disillusioned and stopped pursuing that path.

Depending on your situation, you might still be able to learn programming and build your skill set by contributing to the open source works. With some luck, the AI bubble will burst and we’ll be somewhat back to something normal again, where “normal” programmers will be needed.

Is staking your sense of stability on your career the wrong way to think about this?

Generally, you don’t want all your eggs in one basket. Any one thing can break away. I had a job for quite a while which was great and a perfect source of stability, it even helped me through some really dark times. Then things changed and it’s no longer a stability anchor. If I staked my entire stability on that, I would have been a goner. Try to find stability on friends, family (if feasible), hobbies, etc. Of course, that’s much easier said than done, but that is generally the way you want to go.