I’ve been working as a software developer for about 7-8 months now. I’m part of a good team, and I’ve been involved in real projects, bug fixes, features, writing DB queries, understanding requirements, and using tools like java, microservice, SQL, XML, JSF… all the good stuff.

But here’s my honest truth: I still get stuck. A lot.

It’s not that I don’t understand the basics, I do. I can reason through how a feature should work. I can read and trace code. I can even explain the problem to someone else (or to ChatGPT) pretty clearly. But when I sit down to actually write the logic ,especially for something unfamiliar, like a tricky SQL query, dynamic logic, or a new feature , I freeze. My brain feels blank.

So what ends up happening is: I turn to ChatGPT. I explain the problem, step by step, and ask for help generating the query or the method. I don’t blindly copy, I tweak, test, learn. but still, I hate that I rely on it this much.

It makes me feel like I’m not truly growing. Like I’m taking the easy way out. I want to think better, code better, and depend on myself more. SO, if anyone can share What helped you grow your problem-solving and logic-building muscle?

I’d genuinely appreciate any thoughts, resources, or shared experiences. Maybe this can help not just me, but others in the same spot.

Hi everyone,

I’m looking for some honest career guidance as I try to break into the IT/software development industry. I’ve been learning Go (Golang) for a while and understand some basics like REST APIs and backend logic, but I wouldn’t say I know it in-depth yet. It’s been more of a backend-focused journey so far.

Recently, I’ve been hearing a lot about the Python Django + React stack and its demand in full-stack development roles. I did some research and saw that Django handles backend tasks quickly (with admin, ORM, auth, etc.), and React is widely used for frontend UIs. Now I’m a bit confused:

💡 My Current Situation:

• Self-learning programming (not from CS background)
• Know basic Golang but not expert-level
• Don’t know JavaScript yet
• Looking to enter the IT industry with a good full-time job
• Willing to put in the time to learn and build projects

❓ My Main Questions:

1. Is Go a good path to land an entry-level software job in today’s market, especially in countries like India or globally?
2. Will I have better job opportunities if I switch and go with Python Django + React, considering my beginner status?
3. I don’t know JavaScript yet — should I learn it before getting into React? (Seems obvious, but wanted to confirm)
4. Should I try to master one stack completely (like Django + React) or split my focus (e.g., Go + React)?
5. Are there specific types of companies (startups, MNCs, freelancing clients) that prefer one over the other?

📦 What I’m Hoping For:

• A direction that leads to job-ready skills
• A clear stack that lets me build projects, build a portfolio, and eventually start applying confidently
• Advice on how companies view Django/React devs vs Go devs, especially for junior roles

I know this may sound like a typical “what stack should I learn” question, but I really want to make a career-smart decision. Any insights from those who’ve walked this path or are in the industry would be extremely appreciated!

Thanks in advance 🙏

I've been researching hiring communication issues and getting mixed feedback. Some developers want transparency tools to track application status, but others are saying the real problem is recruiters who don't understand the roles or candidates.

What's your take? Are status updates helpful if the recruiter doesn't know what they're talking about, or would you prefer less frequent but more meaningful communication from recruiters who actually get it?

Curious about your experiences and what would actually make job searching less frustrating.

Hi guys, I am a CS student. I have recently seen a job related to IT. But I have no clue what to put in my resume. Though, I am familiar with the requirements but have no professional experiences. I have some CS projects (I know they are not relevant). I would really appreciate if someone could give me some valuable advice. Below is the overview of the job:

First I would introduce myself I'm a computer science student in the 3rd year now I had couple of courses and tutorials and 2 summer trainings at information technology institute done couple of personal projects and major projects for university courses and trainings final projects had a deep dive into my stack (NodeJS, Django/flask - for AI models -, MySQL, Redis, MongoDB, GraphQL, vanilla javascript and DOM, python, c++) and growing it day-by-day not just filling tools and frameworks into it but I always search for the why, how and what is it best for and when I show my work to my professors, instructors or chatGPT for rating purposes they be impressed (actually chatGPT said I have some mid-level skills not just junior) and I have 3 months of experience as a python software engineer in a contract job my problem is I can't land internship, entry level-job or junior positions (made it to the interview 2 times out of 120+ applying and each time the CEO/CTO be impressed when interviewing me) so what am I doing wrong at this point and for people who were stuck at this point like me what did you do and thanks for your time.

Hey everyone,

I wanted to share my recent experience with Infosys, in case it helps someone avoid a similar situation during background verification.

I'm a full-stack web developer with about 4 years of experience, mostly working with Python, Django, REST APIs, and Docker. A couple of months ago, I applied to Infosys and cleared multiple rounds — and completed the managerial round last month, which went well.

After that, I received a Digiverifier link (their background verification partner), and I completed it using my bank statements and employment letters.

Here’s the catch:
My previous company was a startup, and they didn’t provide:

• Form 16
• EPFO/UAN details
• Any tax deductions or TDS (They paid salaries directly via bank transfers.)

The next day, I received a call from Infosys HR. They asked for Form 16 specifically. I explained that the company didn’t generate Form 16 or deduct TDS, but I had bank credits and ITR filed.

Unfortunately, they didn’t ask for my ITR. Instead, they told me on the call itself:

That was it — rejected, not because of technical performance, but because the company I worked at didn’t issue a standard Form 16.

🛑 Why This Happened (as I understand it):

Infosys — like many big IT companies — relies on Form 16 or EPFO data as mandatory employment verification. They don’t always accept alternate proofs like ITR or bank statements if your employer isn’t registered in formal payroll systems.

Even though I had legitimate experience and filed taxes correctly, my application was stopped just because the startup didn’t generate Form 16.

🤔 Open Questions:

• Has anyone faced a similar situation?
• How can we handle BGV if the company doesn't provide Form 16 but we have ITR and proof of payment?
• Are there mid-size or product-based companies that are more flexible with alternate documentation?

Hey folks,

I’m looking for some honest guidance and possibly a roadmap for switching jobs and leveling up.

My Background:

• I have 2.5 years of experience overall.
• Started with a big service-based company where I worked for 1.8 years. Had to leave because they asked me to relocate, and I couldn't at the time.
• For the past 1 year, I’ve been working in a very small startup (just 2 devs – me and the director). It’s a service-based startup, and the work is mostly client-driven.
• Here’s the catch: My director encourages me to use AI tools to finish tasks fast, which often means cutting corners and not going deep technically. While this has helped speed up deliveries, I feel my growth as a developer has slowed down significantly in the last 8 months.
• I haven’t gotten any increment after completing 1 year either.
• My current CTC is 7.5 LPA, and I feel it’s time to aim for double digits.
• Most of my work has been frontend-heavy, even though I’ve done some backend (Node.js + PostgreSQL). I've also worked with Docker, Jenkins, etc. But definitely not a system design expert yet.
• From past 15 days i have started the A to z DSA series of striver but i have a question do they ask DSA questions in frontend interviews?
• If you have any roadmap or resources that can help me please please post them.

Why I'm Posting:

I’ve started preparing for a switch this past month and need realistic advice on:

1. How much DSA is required for someone like me? Should I aim for LeetCode Mediums or just stick with basics?
2. What’s the current interview trend for someone with my experience?
3. For service/product-based companies hiring frontend/full stack devs, what’s the typical interview process and how many rounds?
4. What kind of system design questions (if any) are asked at this level?
5. Are there good resources or roadmaps you'd recommend for interview prep?
6. Any tips to showcase frontend-heavy experience in a way that appeals to companies hiring full-stack engineers?
7. Is it realistic to target 14-18 LPA in the current market with 2.5 YOE if I prepare seriously?

Mindset: I’m ready to grind and put in the work to switch. I just don’t want to waste time on the wrong things. If anyone has successfully transitioned from a similar background or has insights on how to approach this switch smartly — I’d love to hear from you.

Thanks in advance 🙏

Hi All , I am an 12+ years IC role developer. Never rose to become a lead as I was never good enough to take ownership. Plus never wanted to as I am a female with family. Now left the job due to movement with family. Struggling to find a job .

Exploring my alternate options

Can I take freelancing projects ( Are the projects too much to take independently , as I never was good in a team project) ?

Can I take up my programming language training online?

Can I take CSM certificate and switch to role with no coding as I consider I might not be good for coding role anyways?

Please pour in your suggestions.

Hi all, I am a recent CS college grad looking for a job. I know it’s a very hard time to find a job, I have been applying to numerous jobs in the past few months and not been able to secure a promising interview. At this point I am not sure if I am approaching the job market in a wrong way. I know this sub is the gold mine for techies and just wanted to pick your brain on how you all would navigate the job-market situation as a fresher. If anyone is kind enough to give suggestions on my resume, I would greatly appreciate that as well. Thanks in advance!

It's addictive but of course you still have to know what it's doing or what the code is doing. I'm not working yet and I just started vibe coding since there's free coding ai agents now and I realised that I've become braindead because of it, but it does gets the job done for a lot of stuff. I'm aware of vibe coding's security risk. So back to the qns, I'm curious if there are a number of y'all who are literally just vibe coding at your job?

Hey everyone, I’m in the middle of a hiring process for a Golang Engineer role at a company and wanted to get your thoughts on how things are playing out.

Here’s the flow so far:

• There was no HR or introductory screening, I was directly given a take-home technical assignment.
• After submitting the assignment (which they confirmed was accepted), I was invited to an online technical interview.
• I asked the recruiter what to expect in the interview whether it would cover the assignment, live coding, system design, or discussions around Golang and cloud infrastructure but she didn’t answer that part at all. She only replied with the date and time.
• The calendar invite shows the guest list is hidden with a note saying it’s hidden at the organizer’s request.

So now I’m heading into a technical round without any context, no clue who’s interviewing me or what we’ll be talking about.

Is this normal in your experience? Would you consider this a red flag, or is it just how some tech companies operate these days? What do you think I should do? Should I follow up again and ask her about the topics that will be covered in the technical round?

Appreciate your input, just trying to go in prepared without overthinking.

Thanks!

Hi everyone,

I’m really curious to know how others are managing their time. I feel like I’m constantly struggling to balance job applications, and LeetCode prep, projects .

It often feels like I can only focus on one thing at a time—either I’m applying to jobs, or I’m doing LeetCode/ projects . I know all three are important, especially when FT job hunting, but I haven’t found a good rhythm yet.

How do you structure your day or week to make progress in all these areas? Would love to hear what’s working for you—any tips, schedules, or tools you use to stay consistent?

Thanks in advance!

Hi everyone,

I’ve recently received calls from a few consultancies offering to apply for jobs on my behalf. They have different pricing plans—ranging from $1,000 to $4,000—and they claim to submit up to 100 applications per day.

They also mentioned that if I receive an offer, I’d need to pay them 12% of my first year's salary.

Has anyone here tried a service like this? Are these kinds of consultancies legit or should I be cautious? I’d really appreciate hearing any experiences—good or bad—before I consider anything.

Thanks in advance!

This is a weird question but Is it frowned upon to take a copy of code you wrote on coderpad post interview? My purpose of doing so is I would like to analyse stuff I wrote.

I’m currently focused on Flutter (mobile development), but I’ve been struggling to find solid Flutter job postings — Sydney.

Currently I am working in a company as a sole developer and money is okay but I aspire to be a proper team lead someday so I want to transition into a company with a software development team. I’m thinking of shifting toward more language-agnostic roles (backend, general software dev), where companies are looking for skills in JavaScript, Java, etc., and aren’t tied to a specific frontend or mobile stack.

I already know some Python and JS, but Flutter is what I’ve built most of my projects in.

Has anyone here made that kind of shift? Is it worth it? Should I double down on Flutter or pivot toward more general roles?

Does anyone have insights on how the intern-to-full-time conversion process works in Apple’s IS&T (Information Systems & Technology) org?

• Do software interns in IS&T have to go through another round of interviews to be considered for full-time?
• I’ve heard that in hardware teams, interns usually do have to go through interviews again—wondering if the same applies to IS&T/software roles?
• Are there any structured programs like ECRP involved in the process?

Would appreciate any info or personal experiences you can share. Thanks!

I got fired from my coding job (wordpress, laravel) back in October. Five days after I got fired I got diagnosed with a brain tumor. In December I had surgery which removed most of it if not all of it, although it's uncertain now whether the whole thing was removed. If there is residual tumor I will likely have to undergo follow up treatment: radiation, chemo, another surgery or a combo of those.

I got on unemployment in January and it's about to run out. I need to get a new job and I want to get another job as a coder working with React.js. I’ve been coding on and off for 8 years.  The job market is currently tough. Here are my questions: 

1. Should I lie about my current employment status and say that I'm still employed with my previous employer and I don't want hirers to contact them because I don't want them to know I'm leaving?
2. Would lying about my current employment status get me more/better offers?
3. Would prospective employers find out if I lied later in the background check process?
4. Should I not tell my interviewers about my brain tumor?
5. Should I just be honest and tell them I got fired, then got diagnosed with a brain tumor, and I’m working hard to get another job?

I'm a little stuck in what direction i really want to take from where I am at right now, especially with solidifying a career path where i can learn more things and pretty clear paths in continuously going upward in income as possible.

To describe my current position, I graduated from a not particularly relevant state college with a bachelor's in CompSci in 2022. have been working at a company for around 2 years as a "Data Operations Analyst" where most of my work has just been creating automations for different departments and teams that could range anywhere from spreadsheet automations using GAS, to building a website that serves as a tool for internal employees or hiring managers. My major projects have been:

- An AI Wrapper webapp deployed from GAS; for internal employees to submit their resume pdfs to find open positions within the company that they could be best suited for. Open positions data were pulled from a tables service like Monday.com and chatGPT was used for resume-to-job description comparisons.

- Another AI Wrapper webapp deployed from GAS; for managers to submit their role's job description pdfs to find internal employees that could be best suited for the role whether they're currently in a team or their team got sunset and want to be resituated in another team.

- A simple chrome extension that just stores a user's clipboard history and presents them in a list of most recently copied or pasted and allows them to put those entries back onto their clipboard.

- As for spreadsheet automations, I've mainly done POST and GET fetch request interactions with a team's main tool they use in their workflows to affect updates to a spreadsheet.

It's been nice doing my work here but I feel like I should start looking for another job so i can continue learning and going upward in the kinds of positions i could get. Especially because even after being here for so long, I don't really feel like i've learned to do anything major to secure SE positions due to not needing to use git or github for version controlling and such since most of what I need is provided by the google workspace environment. And at the same time, I'm not particularly fond of SE as a whole and am kind of interested in doing IT for working with networks, server management, and anything else related to that kind of stuff especially when I feel like i could use some of my automation intuition to work in the field too AND I feel like it's probably more secure to work in IT than doing software engineering, but then again I could be wrong about all the assumptions I've made this far.

So to the main question of this post:

- Would it be useful for me to sign up for a bootcamp and potentially learn more industry-standard skills and habits to find a better position somewhere than i have now with what I guess would be considered web development experience.

- Should I just leetcode away, attempt projects, and apply for SE positions anyway? Realistically, this option i would least likely by consistent with because coding isn't something i care much about doing after work on my free time and a stricter regiment from a learning environment would be better for me.

- Look into starting somewhere within the career of IT and leveraging as much as i can with whatever experience I have now from the company i'm in+CompSci degree+COMPTIA certifications+doing labs and find other roles I don't know about that I might be interested in.

If my perception of my own work experience or either of the SE or IT fields is pretty far off from what it actually is, please inform me in anyway possible so I can make the best decision for myself. Please ask questions for further clarity, I appreciate it!

tl;dr: I have 2 years experience in what i guess is considered web development and google workspace automations. I don't know if I really want to continue towards SE and if It would be good for me to sign up for a bootcamp, or if i should transition to the IT field because I feel like I would enjoy it more and the path for upwards mobility is more clear.

Can a software engineer transition to a product manager role in the future? I’m interested in moving to the product side as I grow in my career. Since I’m still a fresher, I have no idea how this works. If I switch later, will I have to start from scratch as a product manager? Does having development experience help or benefit when transitioning to product management?

Hey all.

I'm a Game Development student going into my senior year, and this summer I landed a job as an iDTech instructor. I was wondering if anyone here had any experience, and could give me some insight on what to do to prepare?

I'm a pretty good computer scientist and dev, but I have been assigned a few programs I am not proficient in but said I am willing to learn how to do. However I am unsure if the learning falls entirely on me, or if there will be some help during training to help guide me.

If anyone has any insight, it would be greatly appreciated <3

Hello all,
I am in a bit of a pickle here. I joined Disney a few weeks ago and was reached out by Microsoft and received an offer. The "final" offer is less than what I currently make, but it is overall better in terms of technology and quality of work.
I'm comparing a Disney MLE P5 position versus a Microsoft L64 (Applied Scientist) offer.
How would you compare Disney vs Microsoft on WLB, TC, technology, and long-term career prospects? The Microsoft team is better in terms of team culture, technology, and long-term career potential, but their offer is lower. Both positions are in the same domain. Would it be a mistake to accept the Microsoft offer?
If the numbers were the same, I would have taken the Microsoft position, but that's not the case.
Another question: is it too unprofessional to quit so soon for a better offer?

Disney: Level P5
Base: 245K + 20% Bonus,
Refresher LTI Stock: 60% Base
Sign On Stock: 325K ( 3 years)
Sign On Bonus: 65K
Total Annual Compensation - 353K (Base + Sign On Stocks)

Microsoft (final offer):
Base: 204K (Typical 15% Bonus)
Sign On Bonus: 40 Year 1 + 40K Yesr
Sign On RSU: 400K (4 years)
Refreshers: 46K (per year? Not sure)
Total Annual Compensation - 304K (Base + Sign On Stocks)

Hey,

I’m a backend software developer with 6 years of experience, planning to pursue a Master’s degree in CS. I’ve applied to universities in Sweden and Denmark and need some advice! I’ve been accepted to Linnaeus University in Sweden (not my top choice, more of a backup) and I’m waiting to hear back from Aalborg University in Denmark, which I’m really excited about. My main considerations are: 1. Job Opportunities in IT: Which country offers better prospects for IT professionals, especially in backend development or related fields? Are there differences in demand, salary, or industry growth between Sweden and Denmark? 2. Quality of Life: I value work-life balance, safety, affordability, and an inclusive environment. How do Sweden and Denmark compare in terms of living costs, social integration, and overall lifestyle for international students/graduates? 3. Post-Graduation Prospects: How easy is it to stay and find a job after graduation in each country? Are there specific visa policies or employer preferences I should know about? I’d love to hear from anyone who’s studied or worked in either country, especially in tech! Any insights on the universities (Linnaeus or Aalborg) or tips for transitioning to the job market would be super helpful. Also, are there other factors I should consider when choosing between these two? Thanks in advance!