Please take my advice with a huge grain of salt. It’s been literally decades since I was an entry level developer. I try my best to keep my ear to the ground and look through the eyes of people at all levels of the industry. Part of my job is mentorship as a “staff software architect” at a consulting company.

What would I do these days? I would stay in computer science and if possible get an MBA. I dropped out of graduate school in 2001. But what I learned helped me a lot.

If you can’t go to graduate school, at least take a few business classes. I think the only way to survive will be focusing more on the business than the technology and work for a consulting company.

I don’t mean being a “consultant” who is really just a hands on keyboard coder doing staff augmentation. I mean working for one of the Big 5 consulting firms or one of the smaller equivalents.

The US is definitely moving toward privatization and the first thing they do is bring in more consultants.

I don’t work for any of them. I specialize in strategic cloud consulting. But that market seems congested at the low end.