r/AskProgramming

Hello!

I’ve been considering dual-majoring for some time and wanted to know if it would be worth following a path in coding and programming while doing art on the side.

Im a 22 year old who currently works as a freelance illustrator and I have done a 4 year academic program in the past during HighSchool for Game Design that has kept me interested in the technical side of things for games and such. I also do 3D modeling and animation on the side!

I know a good bit of HTML and Web design, Python, C#, and have experience with a small handful of engines and software like InDesign, RenPy, Unity, and Unreal that I use in hobbies but don’t have any professional experience in anything except doing commissions and my current progress into my Bachelors Degree for Graphic Design.

My question stems from the fact I’ve been given advice that my current path isn’t going to pay well, especially as a junior, and would be better off as a side gig that I can still enjoy and grow passively but I do want to stay in the tech side of things professionally just because I love design.

I love making things!

Right now I just don’t know what’s in demand, what is actually needed in this current age? I know the things I’d want to do is heavily oversaturated for anything related to game design and similar things like coding video game AI and mechanics.

(Which interests me the most unfortunately, I’d love to learn how to make a living procedural digital ecosystem full of creatures in a digital environment with their own personality’s and systems, like a bigger version of the system in place for the game Rain Word)

So, TLDR, where are new programmers needed right now? What paths should prospective students look into?

I wonder if there are any people today who don't have any agentic AI subscriptions, who code by themselves, read docs, try to understand, and enjoy the process in this fast-growing AI era, where everyone is promoting AI to do everything.

(Note: I'm asking because I write my code by myself and don't use agentic AI, but I do use ChatGPT or other AI to learn things if I get stuck.)

Hello, so for some context, I'm a second-year computer science student, and I really love coding; it feels like my thing. I'm also genuinely interested in space, science in general, etc., etc.

The problem I'm having is that I'm constantly stressing over my future unemployment due to the lack of any relevant projects on my GitHub, for example, and it isn't that I don't want to code; it's more that most of the time I'm already studying for university really hard, so when I do have a little spare time, all I want to do is play video games to relax myself, not break my head over coding. This has been a real source of stress for me, because I love this field and I know that the market is really hard currently, and (from what I've been told) unless you're a remarkable coder, you'll have a hard time finding a decent job. I just need advice on this, or just to know if maybe I'm just breaking my head over nothing and everything will be fine.

Everyone in uni seems to already have a LinkedIn and cool things going on, and I simply have nothing, and I feel horrible because of it. It feels like I won't achieve anything.

Any advice is appreciated.