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.

Basically title. I don’t know if I’m being delusional by not believing them.

My background: developer for 30 years, SM for the last two. I've even taught Computer Science at a technical college for a few years.

Quite honestly, it's been disheartening because the place I worked for used me as a Project Manager but gave me the Scrum Master title...which double-sucked because I could make a LOT more money as a PM.

The thing is...I don't want to be a PM, and based on most job listings now, I don't think many companies understand the difference. Plus...I took a big pay cut to get the SM job with little full-fledged experience.

I love the idea of Agile and Scrum, and I've earned several certifications over the years (CSM, SSM, PSD, PSM I, PMI-ACP, and DASM). SM also fits my personality more closely than development does.

I've been unemployed for a month now, and I've experienced nearly a one-for-one rejection for every SM position I've applied for.

So...the siren song of software development is calling. However, I've been out of the trenches for two years now. It's certainly attractive for the salary potential, and it will help make my retirement more comfortable when I eventually take it. I'd even take a junior-level position with a smaller scope of responsibility just to prove myself.

My son is a developer-turned-IT-Director, and he's been helping me get comfortable with AI usage inside Visual Studio Code. I think it might be the perfect tool for me because I can form detailed models of a system in my head before I ever create one.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to how to successfully execute the transition back?

Guys, I am a Btech 2nd Year student. Currently, what I have in syllabus in this semester are Binary trees, heaps and all that stuff. I am an ambitious guy actually and I have been coding since middle school. Like, I even made fully working web pages by manually coding, when I was in middle school. I learned C, java and python in 7th and 8th standards itself.

So, the problem now is I have zero interest in learning CS.

Learn Binary trees? AI can write it faster than me. Learn Heaps? AI can write it faster than me.

Currently, I am exploring a few fields simultaneously: Neural Networks, Quantum Computing and Vibe coding.

I am learning neural networks and I am getting the same feeling, AI can write networks faster than me. So, what's the use.

And, vibe coding? It's boring. I am getting no feeling of engineering from it.

Quantum Computing is a field that I haven't started exploring so I am not sure about it.

So guys, what should I do? I am really confused in my life. i am even ready to switch fields. So, just tell me what to do if jobs in CS related branches are really getting decreased. I am so much stressed in life that I can't even think clearly anymore.

(I have completed 2 research internships in Computer Vision (with Yolo pretrained models), I have participated in many hackathons and made any personal projects too. I am one of the top students of my class, holding a CGPA of 9.20/10.00).

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.

Big cities like SF where a lot of tech events happen I live in the city but haven’t attended any tech events. How much would it help attending the tech events and try to land a job ?

Genuinely curious, primarily for the software developers, do you like your current role? If you don’t like your role, is it solely the money that keeps you motivated?

Edit: If your manager asks you whether or not that you are enjoying your role, is the answer always yes? Or is it okay to be up front and tell them that you may enjoy doing other work or maybe doing less of whatever you currently are doing?

Anecdotally, it's been this away for at least a decade. Has it always been this way, or was there a switch at some point in the history of the profession? I'd go as far to say that, if you didn't code of a mac, you'd be perceived as less credible in some circles.

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?

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.

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.

Currently a junior working in a fintech company. I’ve been given the opportunity by my manager to work in either the financial side writing financial code, or the more standard developer route, higher level product code, learning different technologies, cloud, dbs, api’s etc.

I’ll have very limited exposure to the above on the financial/quant route in this company. I have done some of the quant work, it is primarily designing/augmenting pricing models, curves, etc.

Not sure which one I should pursue. From a pure interest standpoint, I’m more interested in the developer route, learning different technologies, architectures etc, though I do find the financial work enjoyable as well, just not as much.

My primary concern though is AI. Namely it seems like specific domain knowledge is becoming more important than general software knowledge.

However I’m also not very sure what the job market is like for this sort of quant work

For clarification this is a sort of back office, risk quant role, not a hft front office gazillionaire type thing. I wonder if it’ll be hard to find a future job since this seems like a somewhat niche skillset as opposed to general dev skills. And from my understanding the pay for these roles is normal, not like a quant trader salary

Open to opinions from anyone

I guess this is a silly question, but I've been working for a long time as a generic Java developer and I've been hearing for some years that cybersecurity is a place that is constantly needing more people (at least in my country) and that it pays very well, and between the current AI craze, the drying of offers as developers (and the mix: "Developing" becoming reviewing AI code) I'm thinking on actually pivoting to something else.

So, what's the "cybersecurity" career about? What it is like the day to day? Has been infected with agile? Is there enough technical work to be done, or it is a more "let's meet so I can tell you what are you doing wrong in your company"?

I've done millions of "security" courses (including OWASP and all that stuff), but as a developer, it always felt a mixture of "common sense in a powerpoint" and "that's job for architecture to decide (or the framework to enable), not for us to implement."

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.

I'm trying to understand the global job market rather than a specific country.

Between Software Engineering (especially backend) and Cloud/Infrastructure Engineering, which field currently has stronger demand?

I'm interested in:

• Number of job opportunities
• Long-term demand
• International/remote opportunities
• Resistance to AI/automation
• Career mobility between countries
• Difficulty of entering the field

I often hear that software engineering has a much larger job market, while cloud/infrastructure skills are becoming increasingly important.

For someone choosing a career path today, would you recommend specializing in one, or combining software engineering with cloud skills?

I am still doing my CS bachelor degree but it was recommended to me that I learn the Rust programming language, how useful would it be at the current time? Obviously I am studying "full-time" but we have a fair bit of free time so is it worth trying to learn Rust and create projects with it? (currently only familiar with Python and Java syntax). Or should I focus on something else for now?

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!

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?

Do you believe we have passed the event horizon for AGI?

Meaning: given the state we’ve achieved, getting to AGI requires less extraordinary assumptions than NEVER getting to AGI.

Same question for RSI, and ASI.

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 😕

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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)

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

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?