Software Engineer "influencers" are dangerous

If you've scrolled anywhere on LinkedIn, youtube, tiktok, and other social media apps you might come across a few software engineers who are pumping out influencer-like content. Sometimes you'll see a few of them completely quit their SWE jobs to sell you courses or pursue content posting full time.

Once someone starts pursuing posting about software engineering full time as their job vs being an actual software engineer, you need to be careful about believing their content. They now have an incentive to tell you nonsense, and I have especially seen this from software engineers who barely have experience.
On LinkedIn you might see the entrepreneur-like behavior coming from SWEs who are barely out of college, have only held a role for a year or so, and even create their own LLC so they can call themselves a start-up founder.

Unless your goal is to get good at scamming people and being a salesman, you should take what they say with a grain of salt and some discernment. You have probably seen these same types selling courses on how to "break into tech", how to pass DSA interviews, and now - how to become an AI/prompt engineer.

It's important to remember that getting engagement (in any way, shape, or form) is now their goal - not to really be the best software engineer. I really implore you to gain insights from people who have been in the industry for a while and have worked in a few different places at least.

A lot of recent grads have joked about how influencers convinced them to pursue CS and now they can't find jobs (which is another topic entirely), but you should be weary of how influencers could influence you to be a bad software engineer. There is a LOT of bad advice out there right now and you don't want to find yourself pip'd within 3-6 months because of it. Use good judgement when consuming content online and do your due diligence about influencers. Media literacy is key.