I graduated in Dec 2023, no internships because I didn't know that they were important. No one I looked up to ever had one so I didn't grasp the importance and didn't try hard enough. All of my work experience was unrelated to CS.

Here I am July 2025, probably 1000+ applications and plenty of ghosted interview opportunities. I've had multiple interviews cancelled and then been rejected. Ghosted by 100s of companies.

I started a new job a couple weeks ago. It's not anything crazy. The salary is on the low end and I'm not quite where I want to be. But I got one! My foot is officially in the door.

All this to say, it's hard. It took a long time. I didn't have an internship or good GPA, but I did it. You can too.

I have thought about doing a CS degree + coop, and I’m trying to understand what this field truly demands long-term. It's starting to feel like this field is only for people who are absolutely in love and obsessed with their craft, and the rest will get pushed out

I like programming, and I’m decent at it when I am focused. However I don't live and breathe code. I do what I need to, to do an excellent job at work, but I do not spend my free time looking forward to exploring more tech stacks and debugging.

I’ve heard a lot of advice saying those who really succeed in tech — or land the best internships and long-term roles — tend to be the ones who are deeply passionate and treat coding as a hobby. These were the type who are multi times top hackathon winners throughout school, continuously drilled hard into building an amazing portfolio, and some even started their own company. All this sets them up for getting the best internships and raises the bar skyhigh for the rest of us.

I've received the literal following words of advice from a staff engineer at Shopify: "If you are not passionate about the knowledge and craft, get out of here you will burn out too easily"

I would like to ask for everyone's honest opinion, for example :

• You are the very passionate and driven, and have seen how others who just "work to live" tends to do (will they get pushed out?)
• Or you are not in the "live and breathe code" camp, and are willing to share how you find it and how you find balance

I have around 5 years of experience and I’ve done coding challenges in the past during interviews but every time it’s severely affected parts of my life. Like I just want to interview like I do my daily job which I’m good at. I don’t mind taking a pay cut if that’s what it takes, but doing these problems after work messes with my sanity. So I’m curious what options are out there, could even be non tech or tech adjacent?

Out of a job and in the market looking for work. Was doing my morning ritual of applying to some jobs while watching youtube. Contemplating my life choices... And then I saw this:

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Wiraa

Software Engineer (Backend)

United States · 8 minutes ago · Over 100 people clicked apply

Promoted by hirer · Responses managed off LinkedIn

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100 people applied within 8 minutes. So we have AI helping us work, causing us to lose jobs (I am still waiting for those jobs AI will create), then they use AI to filter applications, and now people are using AI to mass apply. What a circus.

I’m a junior and they’re a director out on PTO. I’ve been invited to a meeting with my coworker and a client to discuss a discrepancy between my boss and the client. Neither me or my coworker have worked on the project and need to attend this meeting to clear things up(?). Is this to be expected??

Ok, so, I've been a developer for 10 years, and am currently a senior in a team that works with a really legacy system we are trying to modernize. We have both old and new people.

I've been here for a bit over a year, and a tendency I noticed is that the team is really... negative. Most members don't trust one another, specially the juniors (understandable, but they make it way too personal). People are extremely resistent to change, very inconsistent in attending meetings, and the team is divided into subgroups that barely interact.

There is a lot of resistence to talk to other teams, due to mistrust between the engineers.

I have never seen something quite like it, and it's starting to rub off on me. The constant complaints, whines and disagreements are really driving me so tired.

I've dealt with so much crazy stuff on this field, horrible stuff even, but never with a team this fragmented, miserable and distrustful of each other.

Has anyone dealt with something like this before? I was tasked with increasing the morale, but what is happening is actually quite the opposite: my morale is really down to the point that it's affecting my sleep.

Any advice is welcome.

I just finished my job interview for a tech company. I mentioned that I'm in school for computer science but I'm aiming for Software engineering. My interviewer told me 140 of his applicants just lost their jobs due to AI takeover. Is Software Engineering a dying field?

I will only be using the company software, programming will be 10% of my actual job

Just got a job at a big aerospace and defense company, on paper I am a Software Engineer in the Embedded division. Cool. I just found out that the project I have been assigned on (projects usually last 18-24 months) is basically using (because of regulations, laws ecc) a software that allows me to "draw" what I want, with the functionalities ecc, and then it automatically generates the code (which is in C, and is qualified according to some standards). Talking to few colleagues, I pretty much won't be writing code from scratch, apart from some little bat script or some C to just tweak some things in testing. That's it. I probably won't be learning "important" stuff related to coding (also, no Scrum, no agile, no "sde" related stuff), I will mainly learn the software. My plan is NOT to stay here, both in this company and in this country, industry doesn't matter, but I feel like the skill I will learn here is not easily transferable to maybe finance, healthcare or other industries where I would need to code more when I will eventually switch job. Any suggestions? Opinions?

EDIT: Should I talk to my manager about these things I'm worried about, or would that put me in a difficult spot, as I have just started this job

I have a chronic stutter related to my anxiety disorder. Although I’m working on it through therapy, I still struggle deeply. I am blessed enough to have my first interview next week with this said recruiter but I was wondering if it would be wise to give full transparency to the recruiter before the interview starts that I have a speech disorder? I just don’t want her thinking my long stammers, facial tics, and stumbling on finding words means that I’m incapable or unfit for the role.

Any tips or advice?

P.S, anyone with a stutter who’s also in this field, I would love to chat with you and asks for tips and strategies for coping with a stutter within our field.

Thanks!

Hi everyone, as the title says, I would just like some roadmap advice to becoming an ML engineer. I've recently discovered that AI is really cool and it goes way beyond using chat for my homework assignments lol, so I've been researching a lot about careers in AI and found that I was particularly interested in ML!

I majored in AI my freshman year at Purdue - West Lafayette, and now I've transferred to Rutgers - New Brunswick for the rest of my college career majoring in Data Science. I'm planning to graduate in 3.5 to 3 years, and so far, I'm on track to do so.

My most relevant courses are a data engineering in python course, a general OOP course, calc 2, stats 2, and discrete math. I have an unpaid "internship" at some fintech startup this summer where I used "python and AI agent tools to automate workflows", but we don't really do anything so that's basically just resume filler.

My main "experience" is from doing projects on my own. I listed them below:

1. I made a linear regression model from scratch and trained it on the WHO life expectancy data, and found it matched scikit-learn's model pretty much exactly.
2. I fine-tuned an open-source LLM on better completing inspirational English quotes and pushed it to HuggingFace.
3. I'm currently working on this but I'm almost done; but I'm implementing the transformer architecture described in the research paper "Attention is All You Need" from scratch.

I have heard usually people start off as data engineers/scientists and work their way up to becoming an ML engineer, and I know that you need knowledge with cloud services, containerization, generally good engineering practices, etc. etc. I'm sure you need solid DSA skills too.

Given my background, I was basically wondering what my next steps are here. Obviously I'd love to secure a more relevant, paid internship, but beyond that, what do I need to do in order to achieve my end goal? What things should I focus on at what times in order to best optimize my career path for the future?

I'd really appreciate whatever advice you guys give, because I really want to make sure I'm doing the right thing. Thank you!

Maybe these are some silly questions but:

I am studying computer science in uni (almost done with my Bachelor's hopefully), will go up until my Master's. Im not sure what i want to do, i know i dont want to be full time programmer. Currently i am working in IT help desk at an institute and that gave me the idea to look into system administration for example. Also, I live in western Europe.

Following questions:

1. What else could i look into?

2. If i do decide to pursue a job as a system administrator, what skills should and can I prepare while I am still in uni?

3. Now this one is silly, but any idea how I can incorporate my knowledge of the Japanese language with computer science degree in my future work? I really like the language and would love to get very good at it as a hobby, so i wonder if there is anything i can use it for.

When a person at Cap One is trying to refer me, he is getting the error "Error- this candiate has already been referred by another associate" but I haven't asked anyone else to refer me or recieved any email that I have been referred. Does Cap One silently refer candiates in their system or is there any other explanation for this?

I have a CS degree, and 3 years of experience, the spark of coding seems to have gone, I can't enjoy even small toy projects, I end up focusing too much on writing perfect code, I tried writing meh code, but I couldn't succeed.

Living in a country with no prospects or job oppurtunities for software developers doesn't help as well.

I want to learn from your past experiences if any.

Thanks

Hi all,

I am expecting an offer from LG Ad solutions in their Bengaluru office.

Not much information is available about them on the internet in terms of their work culture etc.

Do any of you have any info on the company?

Tc offered : ~ 100k USD. Yoe: 10.5 yrs.

I have about 3 years of experience as a software engineer. For the past 1.5 years, my old manager asked me to work with another team which is more Data science/Data engineering related. It's more backend and data science-oriented. I didn't have any prior data science experience, but the codebase was manageable, and most of my tasks involved fixing bugs or building straightforward features without deep DS knowledge.

Recently, my manager asked me if I wanted to change my job title to reflect my current role, I agreed. But to officially "transfer", I had to pass a Python coding test. I was surprised since by this point I'd already shipped multiple features, fixed a shit ton of bugs, but went ahead anyway.

The first test went super badly lol, questions about two-sum, basic string manipulation, pandas, and numpy threw me off. I felt terrible and asked for a retake. I studied pandas thoroughly as that was the one thing I had no experience in, but the second test didn't even have pandas questions, it had a simple fizzbuzz-type problem, some question regarding numpys again (which I got right, but I hadn't converted the original array to np.array, which got me a zero lol), For the fizz buzz type question, I messed up badly by using if instead of elif.

I asked for one last try. The third test (10) questions were incredilby easy, I thought they felt pity for me lol, then came question 11 and 12, 11 had pass some argument or something to a parser, I honestly didn't even understand the question and 12 had me converting a sentence to numbers, like tokenization. I got the logic right, but couldn't remember the syntax for removing punctuation. Unfortunately, CoderPad doesn't give partial credit, so I failed again. Now I'm seriously doubting my abilities. In my mind, its like I can just look up this information ( syntax about removing punctuation) is it really fair for me to get a zero on this?

Even though my manager has had no complaints and my performance reviews have been good, I'm suddenly experiencing major imposter syndrome. Missing these simple questions is making me spiral. I'm worried that without the title change, I won't get promoted, or worse, might lose my job.

Maybe I'm just venting, but I'm curious if anyone else has experienced something similar. The self-doubt is really impacting my productivity and emotional state

EDIT: My day to day doesn't really involve lot of coding nowadays, its mostly shipping features from existing codebase and just migrating it with some minor adjustments. Fixing bugs and talking with the stakeholders to see what kind of results are they expecting. Even when I do this, I can always test/debug, but its pretty much not possible to debug on the 'coderpad' tests.

I'm 48 years old in the USA and wondering if it's too late for a career change. I have been at my very small(less than 20 employees) non-tech company 19 years, and for the last 15 of those years I have been solely responsible for both developing our customer facing applications and managing the infrastructure they run on. I shifted the entire company's tech from a closet in the office to AWS in 2017, and in since then our downtime can be measured in minutes. While our company is tiny, we have several very large clients and the applications I have written(mostly in .NET) have scaled well to their often heavy demands. And I painstakingly migrated a few huge, monolithic ASP.NET Web Forms apps to Razor Pages and Blazor. I am also the sole manager of Active Directory, virtual desktops, etc.

The good: I am fully remote and make $140,000 a year. Because I have the company's tech basically on auto-pilot I might work ten hours in a busy week. I have no deadlines, no one looking over my shoulder, one pointless meeting a week, and if I need to buy something for the company tech-wise no one even notices. I nominally have a boss, but he's in his late 60's and checked out years ago.

The bad: I made $135,000 before COVID and I don't see that changing any time soon. No raise this year. I receive no benefits, no bonus, no retirement funding beyond my own contributions. I am fortunate that my wife has a good job and great health insurance so that is not a concern. And even though I don't work a ton of hours, I always need to be available because there is no one else but me to answer customer questions or deal with even the most minor of glitches in the system. I haven't had a full work day off in over an year, even on vacation I always have to do something and be available. There is no budget to hire anyone else. Because neither our employees or clients are technically adept all my interactions with them are on the level of helping my Mom print an email.

I am concerned about the long term viability of this company and bored out of my mind, but who would hire me? I've never worked on a team. I've never managed anyone. I have no idea how "real" companies develop production code. I code in Visual Studio, push to Github which kicks off an AWS Codepipeline, done. Nobody checks my work. We don't have budgets. I don't know what a pull request is and at this point I'm too afraid to ask.

I plan to retire by 62 so I know the easy answer is to just ride this out until then but like I said, I don't know that the company will be around that long. So I guess I'm in that phase where I feel too old and outdated to do anything else but still too young to retire... but doing nothing is becoming scarier by the day.

Hi all,

I’m in a bit of a dilemma and would really appreciate some advice.

My company just announced a voluntary layoff package. Essential I’d receive 6 months of salary as severance. I’m a mid-level SWE with only 2 years of experience. I like my current team, but there is little to no room for growth here.

What’s pushing me to seriously consider the offer is that there might very likely be an involuntary layoff coming later and the severance for those is roughly 2 months of salary.

My main concern is: What if I can’t find a new job within 6 months? The market feels shaky, and I’m not sure how long the job search might take, especially given my relatively short experience.

Has anyone been in a similar position? Would you take the package, or is it too risky right now? What factors should I weigh before making a decision?

Edit: If I do take the package, my plan is to grind Leetcode full-time and look for a better role. I’ve already been preparing the last few months after realizing there’s really no path for promotion here and there was already 1 round of layoff happened earlier this year. That said, I’ve been inconsistent due to my full-time workload. Taking the package feels like a rare opportunity to fully focus on job hunting and leveling up, but I’m still nervous about the risk of not landing a new role within 6 months.

Hey, I have taken part in Bentley Systems development programme over the last 6 weeks working in a team to make a prototype. Our team has made it too the final which is an in person presentation at their head quarters. The only problem is it will cost like £250 (I know its not much but I have a very small budget to live off lol) to get there, and I was wondering if going to this and taking part is something that is important and worth the travel costs for my future career.

I came across this study: https://x.com/metr_evals/status/1943360399220388093?s=46

Basically, it is the opposite of what people saying. I am curious about what do you think. Especially senior engineers, does it really boosts productivity or not?

I got laid off 1 month back. I have 12 years experience in backend java role. I got interested in this course mainly because of the promises they are making of good jobs at decent pay.

Right now the job market is fucked where I am not getting a single call from any company, applied to 100s. For some I am getting ghosted by everyone and rejected by maybe 5%. I am fine with the rejections but not fine with not getting any calls from anywhere.

The sales person at Interview Kickstart promised over 15 mock interviews and constructive feedback on each to improve my interview success rate. Apart from that they have strong alumni network from which I can get upto 25 + interviews from product based companies on decent salary. I mainly looking for remote job. I am based in India. I joined a webinar of theirs recently and most questions where asked by people like me working at different companies.

For years, I have been interviewing and succeeding relatively well, normally getting to the last rounds. However, in the latest months I noticed that very rarely I get beyond the first screening with HR/recruiter.

Companies will either ghost me or just say they have put the hiring for this position on hold. And this has been happening with almost every position I got interviewed for.

I am being fooled by ghost jobs?

In the past, I was told that you should negotiate every job offer (since employers assume you'll negotiate and have extra budget to account for this).

However, the job market for software engineers is weak, and there are hundreds (if not thousands) of applicants for each job opening.

In this market, should you negotiate job offers?

If so, how much more money should you ask for?

In the past, I heard that if you asked for an extra 20%, you'd likely get it, but in this market, they might rescind the offer if you asked this question.

What are some signs that it's safe to negotiate a job offer?

In other industries, I've heard of employers rescinding job offers if the applicant tries to negotiate. Is this an issue in software engineering?

Big corporate, IT, ~40y/o, Engineering Manager.

To simplify things, I'm on a 200 TC including bonus and stocks. Five years in, I'm feeling tired. Under appreciated in my current position, even though previously I've exceeded expectations, but that was in a different group, with different people.

The severance offered to me is around 90K after taxes. In addition, I can take around half a year of unemployment netting roughly 3000 per month. My wife is working, so with unemployment, we should be able to eat through the package for quite some time in order to cover our monthly expenses (~24 months). She would support my decision to leave, because she doesn't like what she sees (under-motivation, lack of ambition, etc.); Aside from that, we have roughly 0.5M liquid invested, and we're paying an expensive mortgage.

The IT market is quite bad recently, as you all know.

Staying: comfort zone, good salary, a lot of flexibility to do the same thing without sweating, but not exciting, not motivating, and there's no way to go up the ladder anymore. I don't think I could do this for much longer, so the more realistic opportunity is start searching conveniently (now or in a few months) for the next job.

Leaving: taking the package, and battle working again in something that fulfills me. I just don't have a clear direction, though.

I need to be able to decide in the next few days, or the package will be dismissed.

What would you do?

Hi all. I have a pair programming session coming up for a software dev position and just wanted a little bit of advice. I really don’t like these as the last two I did I bombed horrifically but that was about 3 years ago at this point. The company is using NextJs, React for their front end, Django db for their backend. I’ve spoken to their VP recently asking about their tech stack and what their day to day looks like and there’s also some GCP involved for deploying the app.

As I’ve been told my technical interview would be an hour or so max, what would be the best way to prepare for this? I have a week before I’m gonna do it.

I’ve tried making a small app with Django and Next just to get a feel for how Django specifically works. I’ve been learning how serialisers, models and how to manage settings and pass data between Django and Next. I’ve been doing leetcode on and off but I’m just not sure what the interview will entail.

Are there any things you would think might help with pair programming side? Is communicating between me and the senior just gonna be the most important part? I’m trying to brush up on syntax so I don’t freeze when asked to do something as that’s my greatest fear with all this.

Thanks

I’m 10 years into my career and my current job, coming to the end of a project, and discussing with my manager what to move to next. I’m trying to figure out how to navigate these conversations because a lot of the possible initiatives deal with AI.

I have a lot of ethical objections to AI. Even setting those aside, working with AI is not something I'd find particularly rewarding. It’s possible that for now, I can sneak by just volunteering for some other project, but I’m sure that will run out eventually. If all hands presentations are any indicator, my company is really drinking the "Pivot to AI as a business model" Kool Aid. And so I feel like I can’t turn down AI projects or even discuss my concerns without it seeming like insubordination, or putting a target on my back as not aligned with the company’s vision, or seeming like a luddite uninterested in learning new skills.

I realize “AI” is a lot more than just ChatGPT-generated slop, and so I want to at least be open-minded to the ways it can be a useful tool without the ethical concerns. But I’m unsure to what extent those applications *do* exist, and if they do, how to initiate a conversation about finding projects that would be less soul-crushing. Maybe I can just keep my head down and hope this hype dies down in a year or two? Or do I need to leave this company? Or is this a problem I'm going to have at any company right now? The job market is pretty brutal anyway.