👋 AMA: I’m Michael - ex-Meta Principal Engineer + #1 code committer, now co-founder at Formation.dev + interview expert. 📌🎈💥 AI popped the Bootcamp & LeetCode bubbles. Ask me anything about how tech careers have changed in 2025, how to stand out, and what still gets you hired. No 🍬🧥. No 🐂💩

You'll hear people answer this on both sides and the reason is that 'it depends' haha. It's not a good time to career transition into the career "Software Engineer", but it's an amazing time to learn how to write code because AI is going to give people who can code a leg up in almost ANY job. In the bootcamp space you see way too much on both sides because you have these programs turning you into a canonical "Software Engineer" which just doesn't work at scale right now, but they might prepare people ok for the second bucket of "learn some code to better at my old job" - which is a completely different marketing goal but might make people thing a SWE bootcamp is still worth it if that's their goal. So it's confusing for sure and hard to navigate, it's one of the reasons I'm in this subreddit all the time trying to help people navigate. Finally, there is a very small group of hundreds of people for whom they CAN transition to SWE and if you are one of those people, you don't want to give up because of the averages you read about. Some programs try to appeal to these people but they make it seem like EVERYONE can do it and that causes more confusion too :S