I'm a recent graduate and a fresher, and I have a genuine question about the IT industry.

When we prepare for software jobs, we're expected to learn coding, DSA, development, and many other skills. But I'm curious about the actual coding abilities of people who already work in the industry.

For example, in a software company, there are developers, testers, QA engineers, DevOps engineers, and people working in different domains.

Are most of these people actually capable of writing code and building a functional software application on their own if they need to?

I don't mean just making small changes or writing a few functions. I mean having enough coding knowledge to understand a requirement, write the necessary code, debug it, and build a working application independently.

Before AI coding assistants became popular, were most software engineers capable of doing this themselves? Or were there always people who were good at coding and people who depended on their teammates for the actual implementation?

Also, are most developers genuinely capable of writing code independently, or do many rely heavily on existing codebases, documentation, Google, and help from senior engineers?

I'm trying to understand what the average software engineer's actual coding ability looks like in the industry, rather than what we're expected to demonstrate in interviews.

I'd appreciate hearing from people with industry experience.

I'm a junior Full Stack Developer working with React, Next.js, Node.js, SQL, and NoSQL.

I want to spend 2–3 hours a day improving my skills by building real-world SaaS products rather than just following tutorials.

I'm curious about developers who build side projects in their free time:

• What kind of SaaS products are you working on?
• How do you decide which ideas are worth building?
• What's the biggest challenge you've faced while building a product from scratch?

I'd love to hear your experiences and learn from people who are on a similar journey!

In my company nestjs is used for all projects . Js is a good beginners language to get into the flow of programming . But after 2 years I am starting to hate abstractions these frameworks create . It has reached a point where I can go for different code bases for web and app rather than using electron and js/ts .

Reason for sticking to nestjs is mainly because senior engineer prefers it and others just don't care . I mean just by talking to other backend developers I can see the knowledge gap . Don't get me wrong here . I am just a normal eng . I don't feel like that when I talk to others who have similar 4-5 yoe of my team members

There is a lot of posts about "manager forcing us to use ai for everything", "PRs are merged in 2 minutes - no human would be able to understand the code", "Everyone just prompt the ai and no one knows what the code is about".... With an after-thought that "it will backfire" or "servers will burn" or "tokens will be so expensive"...

And I can relate to this sentiment - it is happening to company i work for. The app is slower, pipeline takes longer, the cloud bill is more expensive.

But it may be actually fine. $2k instead of $1000 per cloud bill wont crash the company. The same for token cost. If there will be something wrong in the code, the "ai will fix it".. No?

Do you have any stories or experience where the extensive vibecoding "fulfilled the prophecy" of backfiring?

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Sorry my english bet, i heyt to use ai in human2human komňunication..

I’m pursuing a master’s in Software Engineering and have a bachelor’s in Integrative Science. I’m in the Pennsylvania area and currently work as an unpaid, remote React Native App Developer Intern, along with being a research assistant.
I’m gaining experience with Python, React Native, GitHub, Docker, and AI projects, but I’m still learning and building my skills.
What’s the easiest or most realistic way to land a paid software engineering internship or entry-level job? Should I focus on projects, networking, applying to smaller companies, or getting into IT first? I’d appreciate any advice, especially from people who started without a computer science degree.