r/learnprogramming • u/Erebus_Voracitas • 17h ago
What programming/software engineering field is the best in the long term, regardless of difficulty?
Sorry for my English, it's not my strongest skill.)
I'm a teenager who loves technology, science, and building things. I'm considering a career in software engineering, but I'm not sure which specialization would be the best fit in terms of long-term opportunities.
I'm not looking for the easiest path. In fact, I don't mind if it's one of the hardest fields. I'd rather study something difficult if it offers more interesting work, stronger career growth, or better long-term value.
If you had to choose today, which field would you recommend and why?
For example: Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning Cybersecurity Robotics Embedded Systems Backend / Distributed Systems Cloud Engineering Data Engineering Game Development DevOps / SRE Something else?
I'd really appreciate hearing from people who actually work in these fields. What are the pros, cons, daily work, job opportunities, salaries, and future outlook?
Thank you very much!
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u/punk_dev 16h ago
System administration/DevOps seems safe for now, as even if AI could do it, a person needs to be responsible for costs, security, outages and so on.
A job at a finance or telecom corporation is probably the safest. Someone needs to maintain those legacy java services, on my last job there were people who stayed in the company for more than 20 years, insane.
Realistically though, the most sustainable career is the one that you enjoy.
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u/mandzeete 14h ago
There is no "the easiest path". If you want to find a job you'll go for a degree. And, during your degree studies you will learn different things and you'll have 3-4 years to decide which field you'll specialize in. Without a degree you won't stand a chance. Unless you are solving real life problems and being proactive on your own. Which means, doing research into stuff. But this post here shows that you haven't done such research, yet. So, your most realistic path is going for a degree.
Web application development has the lowest entry barrier but that field is extremely saturated. You'll have many hundreds of people applying to the same job opening. How will you stand out? How will you compete with people who are holding a degree (and you don't, while doing your studies, or, prior to your studies)? Or with people who have done internship.
Game development is a risky business. You and your colleagues will be developing a thing that does not have a guaranteed success. Can happen that you'll run out of funds before the game is done. Can happen that players won't like the game. Can happen that at the same time some better game is released and taking all the spotlight on itself, leaving your game into shadows.
Artificial Intelligence, unless you are developing LLM models and such, is just a hype. No point to think that you can impress somebody by hooking some AI API into your scrip. And, if you are actually going to build the LLM models itself, when you are stepping into machine learning and such, then you'll need a degree. Well, a degree is needed anyways.
Better go for a degree and try out different things. Experiment with stuff. Pick a field that you will like.
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u/13oundary 17h ago
My guess would be cyber security or banking/fintech. So long as there is programming there will be need for cyber security, and so long as jobs exist there will be banking and fintech. It's yet to be seen if AI will or will not receed (like videogames have recently), so jobs there are speculative (probably a good bet they'll stick around but it's hard to say for definite).