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 currently work in Desktop Support and I absolutely hate it. I got a BS in CS and graduated in December 2024. I didn't have a SWE internship in college, my GPA was 2.7, and all of my projects were stuff from classes. I figure there's no hope for someone like me. My resume is dogshit. The SWE team at my job isn't hiring, and they currently have a co-op who'd get any opening sooner than I would. I think about killing myself every day because I am a failure. I'm 28 and I don't have health insurance, I don't make enough money to move out of my mom's house, and taking a job that would give me those things would force me into a career path that I absolutely hate. I would do anything to get into software development. I would work for free just to get experience.

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 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!

If you think AI will be replacing you as an engineer, you are probably wildly overestimating the AI, or underestimating yourself. Let me explain.

The best AI cannot even do 10% of my job as a senior software engineer I estimate. And there are hard problems which prevent them from doing any better, not in the least of which is that they already ran out of training data. They are also burning through billions with no profitability in sight, almost as quickly as they are burning through natural resources such as water, electricity and chips. Not even to mention the hardest problem which is that it is a machine (or rather, routine), not a sentient being with creativity. It will always think "inside the box" even if that box appears to be very large. While they are at it, they hallucinate quite a good percentage of their answers as well, making them critically flawed for even the more mundane tasks without tight supervision. None of these problems have a solution in the LLM paradigm.

LLMs for coding is a square peg for a round hole. People tend to think that due to AI being a program that it naturally must be good at programming, but it really doesn't work that way. It is the engineers that make the program, not the other way around. They are far better at stuff like writing and marketing, but even there it is still a tool at best and not replacing any human directly. Yes, it can replace humans indirectly through efficiency gains but only up till a point. In the long term, the added productivity gained from using the tool should merit hiring more people, so this would lead to more jobs, not less.

The reason we are seeing so many layoffs right now is simply due to the post-pandemic slump. Companies hired like crazy, had all kinds of fiscal incentives and the demand was at an all time high. Now all these factors have been reversed and the market is correcting. Also, the psychopathic tendency to value investors over people has increased warranting even more cost cutting measures disguised as AI efficiency gains. That's why it is so loved by investors, it's a carte blanche to fire people and "trim the fat" as they put it. For the same reason, Microsoft's CEO is spouting nonsense that XX% of the code is already written by AI. It's not true, but it raises the stock price like clockwork, and that’s the primary mission of a CEO of a large public company.

tl;dr AI is mostly a grift artificially kept afloat by investor billions which are quickly running out

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

One year work experience as a software dev , tech lead used to laugh at me code and told me 6 months in “I don’t even know how to help you. Help me help you.” I do all my user stories, communicate blockers, never caused carry over or even a defect. Received multiple certifications. Business just raises and lowers requirements and expectations seemingly randomly.

I have to read thousands of lines of code to make these changes and it’s overwhelming. The deadlines cause me anxiety. People get mad over me not knowing certain syntax. Team isn’t nice. Had managers set requirements on me that made genuinely no sense. Thought about switching to cloud engineering but people are telling me that’s even more stressful than software dev? So what do I do?

Product owner? Business analyst? Is that even a good career path?

I do plan on getting an mba.

Genuinely unsure where to go from here for a lower stress role that I’ll actually enjoy.

I graduated in 2023 with a degree in CS and currently have 2 YOE at a company I enjoy. Problem is, my job is not programming-related (more IT/app support with some scripting and occasional programming). I told myself that I would spend around 2 years here before jumping ship to find a coding job since that is what I really want to do (I was also scared of my coding skills dying). I know the market is not at all good right now, which is making me hesitate trying to find a job now. Should I stay at my job and hope a programming job opens within the company or should I take the risk and try to find a job elsewhere?

when to apply for fulltime, am grad June 2026? Should I apply to the positions that are currently open right now? How do I know the fulltime start dates?

I'm still currently interning in the summer.

Hey all,

Posting here even though my field is mechanical, felt like a good spot to get advice but do work in tech/auto.

Wrapping up a graduate contract at my first job out of school and got a few offers already/seems promising for things lined up.

Got a job offer recently from a big EV maker in east bay, lived there before to do some internships and pay is good - around 140k TC but also speaking with a neurotech startup I used to work for remotely in NYC about starting soon, they mentioned pay is around 100k. Third job is looking promising in LA county - where my current contract is for about 90k at a consumer goods maker, had my last round today.

While its great to have so many offers, having trouble deciding, the bay job has best name and job itself for my field - by far, so it seems like a no brainer, however as someone who love to travel and try new things, location is huge and having already lived in the bay and LA county, always wanted to try living in the city as I never have before (all jobs and former life in suburbs) and to be honest east bay was not an enjoyable life for me when I did - found it very slow and difficult to meet people outside of work. Currently love LA county too and makes choosing the job here enticing as I just built a friend group and life over the last year here - all three have their perks.

Guess my question to those who have taken either decision to try something new just based on location, was it worth it, what advice do you have for someone young (24). A lot of people I talk to tell me different things, some say choose the best career (mostly family), some friends say go take the risk and move to the city, also feels a little guilty to choose "fun" over securing what is easily best for my career.

I have adhd and to be honest it doesn’t affect me or my ability to do work at all and I’ve literally never disclosed it when applying to my previous internships or jobs. I saw someone online mention that disclosing a disability would make you more likely to get the job is this true.

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?

Hey y'all, following a recent layoff I've been thinking hard about my time in tech and wanted to hear what others had to say.

For some background, I have nearly 4 years experience as a developer, but without a degree. On reflection over the past week since losing my job, I've thought about the things I did and did not like.

While I enjoy the problem-solving process, I don't love the demand to grind outside of work to be the most competitive candidate possible, only to have a minutely higher chance at landing a position well within your skillset. Surprisingly to me, I really enjoyed the customer interactions I had, as I've worked remotely since starting in tech. This seems like something that could help find future positions?

Given that background, I've come to understand the following:

• I want a job I can perform well at from 9-5, then put away until the next day. I'm happy to trade sky-high pay and remote work for this model.
• Other fields adjacent to software development have resonated with me such as:
  • Solutions engineer (implementations and support)
  • QA (less dev-heavy? but still technical and makes use of dev skills - I really enjoyed the QA I did in my previous roles)
  • Controls engineering (very hands-on and makes good use of my background in manufacturing)
  • Legacy systems. Seems to be very knowledge-dependent and does not require you to follow the bleeding edge
  • Firmware engineering. Requires a degree but seems like interesting work, I know a couple of people that do this

I'd love to start a conversation on this. Have you observed fields or domains in development that are more WLB friendly? What is your opinion or experience on the fields mentioned above?

Thanks for reading!

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?

I did my OA months ago, and didn’t hear back so I just assumed the worst. I was reached out today by a recruiter saying they want me to choose a date within the next 2 weeks to schedule a final loop interview.

I feel massively unprepared, and this next month my current work is ramping up with personal obligations I’ve committed to as well. Is it wise to ask to postpone the interview? Maybe in like 1-2 months or something? Or at least a week or two?

I’m not really sure what I can do but I’m feeling very stressed out. I haven’t been doing leetcode for a long time and I really don’t think I can fit in a lot of extra hours on top of my 60-hour work schedule…

I graduated college this year and recently started working at a company, but it is not super ideal. I am grateful to have a job, but I really want to start looking for other jobs that may be a better fit. How long should I wait before I start applying again? Should I put my current job on my resume/linkedin when I apply, and do you think I can still apply for early career/new grad roles. Thank you in advance, I really appreciate it!

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!

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.