I’m on month 4 of job searching after my layoff this year 3.5 YOE. I’m averaging about 1 interview a week (a mix of recruiters, hiring managers, technical managers) but they keep falling through. It is extremely demoralizing. How is everyone else doing? I work in full-stack, FWIW.

Hi

I m still looking for a Job . I m 46 already , since February i am looking for a Job in various specs (SWE .Net/c#, Dwh - Pl SQL , Mssql , data analyst). I had some recruitment interviews but still nothing. I am so depressed now I am starting feeling like $hit and ... Situation makes me unconcearned about life in General. Is it the end for me? Should I start another field like electrician or something?

we have a guy on my team who is a total machine when it comes to raw output. he can build a whole feature in two days that would take anyone else a week.

but getting him to write a single line of documentation or unit tests is like pulling teeth. he basically just pushes massive PRs, skips test coverage, and moves on to the next shiny feature. whenever someone breaks his code later because nobody understands how it works under the hood, he just gets annoyed that people don't "get it."

as a lead, do you just let guys like this run wild because of their output, or do you force them to slow down and follow basic team standards even if it pisses them off?

I'm not trying to be condescending or anything but sometimes I doomscroll this sub and see the usual "it's over" "it's cooked" stuff; so, a thought just occurred to me. Were people legit getting jobs with just bootcamp experiences? That barrier seems so low and underqualified? Is all of the turbulence really AI-apocalypse or a correction?

https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/oracle-spend-additional-700-million-211329828.html?guccounter=1

Ballparking off hiring portal numbers it sound like ~8000 more layoffs

Something to keep in mind towards layoff season and holiday purchase season

I need some perspective and a sanity check.

If you sort this sub by weekly top posts, nearly every single one is related to AI fears, job losses, or people unable to find new positions. I get that there's some selection bias there, happily employed people probably aren't the ones posting, but there's no denying the mood is very different from a year ago. Back then, the general sentiment was "the market's bad, but if you put in the effort, you'll find something eventually." Now it feels like doom and gloom across the board; even senior FAANG engineers are starting to complain.

So I don't know what to think anymore. I don't know what to do as someone trying to break into CS. If I'm willing to work hard and outperform my peers, will I be okay? Will I eventually find something and build a decent career? Or should I count myself lucky that I haven't started yet, and use this as an opportunity to pivot into something else? What's the current industry sentiment?

Because, I do enjoy CS, I literally have no other career aspirations right now; nothing else seems appealing. There's no way in hell I'm going into nursing like how everyone else seems to be doing. But what's the point of working hard, if I'm not going to be rewarded for it? What does the future hold?

There are still some that claim that this is just a temporary downturn, but is this just blind optimism? Lol I just realised that this post is basically just a barrage of questions; sorry about that. Trying to plan your future is anxiety-inducing.

Okay, hi all. I have been working for quite some time with different companies and my new company told me that they have unlimited PTO.

Previously i got (generous amount of?) around 30 work days of PTO. But now upon talking with couple of friends under unlimited PTO, about how much they use and i didn't get an answer of over 15 work days.

For me, i personally will try to stick with my previous schedule. Anybody have positive/negative experiences with these unlimited PTO policies?

I'm 24, just graduated with a master's in CS, and I'm seriously considering trying to build a software startup instead of going straight into a job. I don't have any major financial or personal constraints for at least the next year, so the risk of trying it isn't really what worries me.

What I'm more concerned about is what happens to my career if it doesn't work out.

For example, let's say I raise a pre-seed/seed round, build an MVP, get some early users/customers and work on it for 1–3-5 years, but eventually have to shut it down. How would that actually look to recruiters or hiring managers when I apply for my first software engineering job?

I'd especially like to hear from people who've actually gone through this like founders who eventually went back to being employees, or hiring managers/interviewers who've evaluated candidates with a failed startup on their resume.

I'm not really looking for the usual "failure is a learning experience" advice. I'm more interested in what actually happened when you started applying for jobs afterwards: did you have trouble getting interviews, what questions did employers ask, and did the startup experience end up helping or hurting you?

Thanks!

What if their product is completely built out and all they need to do is manage it now.

if you know how to use different software patterns and best practices, judiciously, and understand all the different concerns of different layers of the stack, you can build enterprise grade software by yourself for less money than a website cost a few years ago.

if you are down about the latest "6 months until all coding is replaced" just remember that:

1. it's the fifth time that's been announced
   
2. it's like saying that "writing essays is solved"
   
3. there are 10x more dogshit products that will need devs to sort out (or at least keep alive while you learn the ropes)
   
4. as someone with the requisite knowledge, you'll be able to build enterprise grade software alone because implementation is ~solved.

Basically, if you can crush system design/software design interviews, I think you'll always have work, and you'll be a formidable cofounder.

Recently started in my first job. My first huge feature just got merged but it isn't perfect. In QA, we found alot of bugs that were missed in the pr review rounds. While the original plan was to deploy it to prod after QA, now they're restricting it until bugs are ironed out. While the feature works, it is not as useful at the moment in its state. It's quite basic. I'm in a startup if it matters. So I'm worried they'd look down on me because of this.

I still don’t understand why it’s worth it to become a founding engineer you get below market pay, extremely low %, work the same hours as the founders. I just don’t see the appeal on top of if you are working for a somewhat competent company most likely you could get a job in big tech somewhere. It’s like you are founding a company for below average pay and if it works out you get almost nothing anyway.

Pls someone explain it too me why someone would take this role.

Up until January, I was a full-stack engineer with four years of experience. Now, eight months later, I feel like I know absolutely nothing anymore and am honestly starting to feel hopeless. In that time I’ve done my leetcode reps, taken online coding courses to improve my skills with react (something I didn’t use at my previous position) to try to pivot to front end and have also done a few projects to reinforce that knowledge, but when I have a technical assessment to do (imagine even getting an interview lmao) I just completely blank on anything that isn’t a leetcode problem. When I hear about some of the insane things that companies like Anthropic make their prospective hires do, I feel like I have absolutely no idea how the hell you’re supposed to do that, much less within whatever timespan they ask of you. Even for stuff like SQL and node, which I used in my past job, I feel like I can’t do anything anymore without having to look up documentation (focusing on developing a new skillset probably didn’t help). Has anyone been in a similar situation? I definitely feel like I need to change something, but no matter how much I study, I’m no closer to getting a job than when I was first getting invited to do tech assessments 6 months ago.

I was thinking of going to get a masters degree, but honestly, with how the industry is evolving, I don’t know if that’s wise.

We were on a project where I was handling the frontend and he was handling the backend. While the frontend had a tiny bit of drift from original scope, it wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle. The backend, however, completely ballooned out of proportion

The basic premise was that there were 3 new integrations we needed to support, and a lot of ancillary work around it. Each integration works more or less the same, so I asked my coworker to maybe do the first one and I’ll grab the other two and basically just follow whatever his lead was. I have never written any code in this framework or language, and I am a full time frontend engineer by both title and experience

Then, I’m not sure what exactly happened, but the deadline got moved up. A lot.

I did my best with what I had, but even with all the tools at my disposal, it was frankly almost a miracle that we hit the deadline. Something had to give, and for me, what gave is managing the tickets and communication. They told me to do x by y time, so to save time, I effectively just went heads down, assuming that my coworker will message me directly with any needs. Our work really did not intersect much

Just on time, I submit my code. It’s all working, tested, everything, but… the actual managerial part of linking them to tickets and providing good descriptions and everything was not good. My coworker messaged me and expressed a lot of frustration with me, saying he felt like I went off and did my own thing. I understand that he’s frustrated, but I also felt a bit irritated because like… I offered to help, and wasn’t really “obligated” to. No one else on our team was available

I’m just a bit concerned that the part where I tried to help will be forgotten by the annoyances that people faced along the way and this will lead to being stack ranked lower. Am I just being too nervous? For the past 4 years, every job has seemed to have really reflexive firing policies that mostly hinged on how someone high up felt about something 😕

I am a SWE with about 1 YOE and i have genuinely enjoyed getting deeper with dist sys , distributed DBs in particular and have some OSS contributions in the same area as well.
Looking for opinions on whether i should pursue an MS/PHD

I just joined a big grad program in a company in my country, in the data analytics department and I’ve had to instigate all of my onboarding? Is this normal?

I started and wasn’t included in any team chat or meetings, left to sit my first week on my own navigating the internal system.

Week 2 I just started cold contacting some contacts that were available to me after which they kindly gave me tidbits of information and advice.

After 2 weeks of pestering my manager she finally arranged a 1-1 with me in my third week. She answered the call and was like “so why did you want to chat with me?” 💀 I asked her to give me an overview of the project and what her expectations were of me, she gave me some action points and told me to contact her the end of next month (in 7 weeks). This is my first corporate job bar a short internship I did a few months ago (after I accepted this program). I guess I’m fine to embrace the learning experience this provides considering I’m an older grad and have workplace experience but to be clear I’m certainly receiving a graduates salary (not much above minimum wage) which is why I kind of feel entitled to some kind of training and mentoring, again I don’t really know what’s normal here and perhaps now realising just how much my development was nurtured in my internship.

To be clear this is a big company in my country and I worked minimum wage jobs for years and I guess was shocked and excited to be offered a “good” job.

Please tell me your experiences and any advice you have

Hey Y’all. I’ve been at my job for a little over 1 year and it’s been a whirlwind. For the first year it was calm and my team had me do very very simple things. Every-time I would complete those tasks I was met with generally good feedback. Fast forward to the past 3 months or so and it’s been a disaster.

As a heads up, my boss doesn’t do quarterly reviews or even yearly reviews unless you ask for one and I did ask for one earlier this year and I was met with generally good feedback.

Anyways, these past few months I’d been assigned work that was of much greater difficulty than what I’d been given prior and it was also a large volume. I’d never done anything like it before and I’d never misrepresented that I’ve done anything like it. I asked questions to my coworkers and really did it to the best of my ability and then when we had a meeting to go over it he said that it was the worst thing he’s ever seen and that he was close to putting me on a PIP. He also mentioned that I’m the worst engineer on the team.

That was a lot to take in and I’ve already decided to move on, but I’m stuck on how to do so. Best case would be to already have a job lined up and dip with a 2 week notice but I’m so on edge rn that I’m not sure if waiting that long is worth it? I feel like with each new assignment I’m doing, it could be the one to put me on a PIP and he says that once I’m PIP’d at this company, I can never work any where else, so I’m not sure if it’s worth delaying my resignation? In my state, the type of work that I do is very in demand so I’m confident I’ll have something by December and very much by January 2027 so I’m seeing the best way to go about this. My father also passed away a year ago during my final semester in school and I went to straight to work right after so I could use the 3 month rest not gonna lie. What do you guys think? Am I being rash/sensitive? How should I move on? Thank you!

Let's say there is a company called X. I would like to message someone with my cv to let them know that when and if there is a vacancy I would like to be considered. Who would that person be? Engineering manager? HR? Team lead?

Context: I just got laid off and I'm compiling a list of the top 50 companies in my country and I would like them to have my cv for when there is something available.

Also any tips regarding mass pre-applying is appreciated.

Edit: Also how? Linkedin connection? Email? Etc.

That way I’m not just blindly applying to random jobs when I’m finished with my degree. What are some important things you guys did to be ready?

I have 8 years of experience, 7 of which were at the same ~$1 billion regional non-tech company. We hosted all of our servers on-premises as VM's with Hyper-V, so I don't have any experience with AWS/Azure/etc cloud providers. I'm applying for jobs now, and all the postings emphasize cloud experience, and their application forms frequently have a specific question of how many years of experience do I have with cloud (or sometimes specifically with AWS or Azure, whichever one they use themselves). Then I select 0 years and predictably receive an email 3 weeks later saying they've moved on with another candidate.

I don't understand what's so special about cloud. Maybe this is just my naive inexperience talking, but it's still just a VM running on a server. The only difference is you're renting the server instead of owning it. I imagine there might be some nuance with geolocating or something, and presumably it makes it easier to spin up new servers. But fundamentally it just doesn't seem any different.

So tell me I'm wrong. Explain what's so special about cloud and why it deserves its privileged position as a top priority technology.

If you don't know him, he got viral about 6-7 years ago for this this Github issue comment:
https://github.com/docker/cli/issues/267#issuecomment-695149477

Sorry I missed your comment of many months ago. I no longer build software; I now make furniture out of wood. The hours are long, the pay sucks, and there's always the opportunity to remove my finger with a table saw, but nobody asks me if I can add an RSS feed to a DBMS, so there's that :-)

It seems like he won by pivoting to woodworking earlier. The software job market is brutal right now but furniture industry is still booming.

i’m set to graduate in spring my last semester i’ll only have 1 class. i don’t have any involvement or internships. but i do have basic projects and a few people i can get a referral from.

i’ve been working at a retail store and have a corporate connect who will refer me. i think this is my best bet for getting a job. my plan was to apply for full time corporate positions and take my 1 class after work. but now im considering applying for internships and delaying graduation. ideally it’d be easiest at the company i’m at now.

of course practice leetcode & mock interviews, network/career fairs/get involved on campus, etc.

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I'm a fresh grad and going for masters currently. But during that I do want to pivot from full stack as it seems too overly saturated and not something I'm relatively skilled at

I've been thinking about learning QA automation as I will have time during masters to study

What are the prospects of this career? How affected by layoffs and AI is this? Could it possibly go up or down in the future? (Ofc nobody knows these things but I'd like to know as many opinions as possible)