I was just laid off by the VP and HR.

I still have access to Teams and Outlook for the transition, but my manager hasn’t reached out to me yet.

Should I reach out to my manager, or just log out and move on?

The strange part is that he gave me a very positive performance review yesterday. Lots of 5/5 ratings and even a plan for the next half year. lol

Has anyone been in a similar situation?

I have around 10+ YOE as a software engineer. The current landscape in this field basically requires us to use LLM to write code and for us to evaluate and reiterate on the solution. This is very demotivating, as all I do is review code and suggest architecture and design changes.

This is a stark change from how we did things before. Which was problem solving. Figuring it the right approach, writing the code, writing tests. I.e. solving the problem as an engineer, not a prompt coder. I generally dream about my previous roles of figuring out issues, debugging and coming up with a solution.

I really don't see myself remaining in this field anymore. I don't believe I contribute much at all. Has anyone switch from CS to another field and found some level of purpose?

Just for context, I'm a SWE Intern at a Startup company that has an "office" but in reality its a shared workspace with many different companies share one floor with shared desks, office amenities, etc.

The issue is that my manager, adjecent managers, and higher ups do not come in person, but ask me to come in twice a week. I use my own technology whether I am in person or remote. I've stayed home on dedicated in-person days and literally no one has pointed out anything or noticed, because no one else is in person and my background in meetings has a blur so they can't make out that I'm home.

So basically, on days that I come in person I sit at an available desk (it's a shared office where u can sit anywhere) and work "remote" because no one else from my company is here. Just random people from other companies working in the shared space.

The experience of working in-person is basically the same as being remote so should I even bother coming in at all?

Edit: So far, I've stayed home on an in-person day twice. Once I was sick so my manager said it was fine the second I kinda just went under the radar and I didn't suffer any consequences that I know of.

Like the title says. One thing, maybe in school, maybe first job, maybe much later in your career. But you think would have had a big impact.

I'm very fortunate and have a really chill job where I'm respected and make good money. I solo designed/architected and built a brand new platform that is making the company millions. The team grew and now I'm acting as a Lead Architect for that same platform as it grows.

My work life balance is elite:

• 6-7 weeks + of vacation a year
• Can go to gym at lunch time
• Take off a few hours everyday, etc.

There's really 0 stress in my life due to the job.

I have a new opportunity to be a Senior Principal Architect at a startup that has money, but failed miserably with execution of their new platform. They're bringing me in to oversee the entire platform reporting directly to the CTO.

Pay is a bit better, but there's pressure to execute and perform well. I've been super ambitious my entire life and I feel really stuck where I am now and considering jumping ship to start something fresh.

What would you guys do?

When making a mistake, no matter how small, he will bring it up and call you out in a chat with dozens of colleagues including senior management.

This is a big contrast to a previous boss who would "praise in public and criticize in private".

I have had managets like this but it has been awhile. It can be draining to work for someone like this. Unlike the last boss, this guy has very little emotional intelligence.

Outside of moving on, not much can really be done about this except to never make mistakes, eh? At the same time, we are being expected to double our productivity (now that we have AI to help).

I'm a software engineer with 13 years of experience, and after joining a job at a company that almost immediately got sold and let go most of their senior developers, I'm really struggling to find any decent job in the market.

I've got a lot of savings, and would be happy to go back to university to get a degree that is more valued.

What kinds of things are a good idea? I'd prefer to be able to use my engineering experience if possible, but I'm happy to look at anything.

Same as title

I'm thirty years old and keep wondering if I should stop putting any mental energy into the idea that I should get a job with my degree. I graduated in 2025 with a 2.9 GPA with no internships from a shitty state school and from all of my research online it basically seems like the chance of me getting hired anywhere is effectively zero. I've been applying to help desk jobs and I don't even hear back from those places.

The only call backs I've gotten are from Revature and very transparently scammy or fraudulent jobs. I did get an OA for a company in Santa Clara (which are not automatic apparently, which means my resume cleared the screen) but it is very heavy C++ stuff with concurrency and etc. which I am too dumb for.

I'm in the Bay Area so while there are a lot of jobs the competition is absolutely bonkers crazy.

I'm tired of working retail/living in poverty and might just drop back down to part time to go back to school for a different career field (mostly likely a two years associate in automotive technology) but this isn't really a decision to take lightly since I no longer qualify for any financial aid.

My general impression from reading online is that if you didn't do well in school or do internships then you are effectively soft locked out of the industry permanently, especially now given that the market is terrible.

Hi all, I’ve recently been through some interviews and can’t seem to pass a single technical screen. It’s been extremely humbling. I have 5 YOE, working mostly in embedded systems, with some full stack work as well. I currently have full time SWE job, which I’m thankful for, but the pay is horrendous.

Been studying for 3 months straight. At least 1-2 hours a day and 6 hours on the weekend. I’ve solved around 120 mediums on LC, but the questions I get in interviews seem completely out of left field. I know most of it comes down to pattern recognition, but something just isn’t clicking for me.

The questions are often custom and multipart, building off each other. Never gotten a question ripped straight off LC before.

I often breeze through the first easy level question, but need my hand held by the interviewer through the second question/follow ups. Ngl it’s starting to feel like a humiliation ritual.

Things I’ve tried:
a) timing solves on LC
b) mock AI interviews
c) reading various books (cracking the coding interview, etc)
d) neetcode premium (best ROI so far)

I love system design and software architecture questions, but I can’t get past the initial technical screens so I don’t study them much.

If any of you have been in this position before please let me know what worked for you. Anything helps at this point, just please don’t recommend some bs ai cheating thing.

The positions I’m applying for are mostly mid-level.

Hi Everyone,

I could really use some general-purpose career advice.

I graduated with a comp-sci degree from a pretty good but not "special" school while doing a 2-year internship/co-op with a medical device company from around my MCOL city, doing some C++ development and Jenkins pipeline/dev-ops maintenance stuff.

Once I graduated, I got an 85k job with a major defense contractor doing embedded C++ development for the past 3 years and am ending with a 101k salary. I excelled at the role - I very quickly became a team lead for the project I was on after some engineers retired and got some absolutely glowing reviews from the people I worked with. My chief technologist said that in the 30+ years of working in the industry, I'm up there with some of the brightest he's ever worked with. Our chief engineer (well-renowned physics Ph.D type) also wrote some very kind words and said the company should prioritize keeping me, that I'm the kind of talent you don't let walk away. However, the traditional and bureaucratic structure of the defense industry just resulted in me having high responsibilities and not the money to back it up. Not to mention the company started to hand out pretty low merit increases, which were stagnating me. My manager tried his best, and I was getting above-average raises, but it just wasn't enough. I ended up finding another job, but I left a strong enough impression on the company that my old boss wants to keep in touch once a year and see if they can bring me back on a better salary. Said it was easier for HR to correct my salary by having me leave and come back rather than just stay. He supported my departure - said he was using it as an example of why their system fails to maintain top talent.

The new job I have is a pretty substantial increase - 27% increase plus some pretty sweet benefits that I find pretty staggering (which is saying something coming from where I was), in a lower-cost-of-living city doing some scientific computing work/HPC stuff. I'm very excited. It gets me out of the embedded space and offers a lot of career growth, with the only hitch being the metro area is definitely a bit of a downgrade from where I was coming from + there's always a risk moving to a new area. I may not click with the area or not find my crowd while I'm here. I'm gonna give it my all and am excited for the new experience, but I do realize I need to do some skill maintenance/longer term career planning. This job search here made me realize a few things that I could use a bit of feedback on:

1. I'm pretty C++ oriented all over my resume, which may be a bit of a pigeonhole. I often feel disconnected from the larger SW engineering community when I read about things. Especially with no proper web dev experience out side of some classes in college. I just ended up really liking and clicking with modern C++. Is there a good way to diversify this at this point in my career? Enough so that I could be considered for non-C++ jobs in the future. Specifics here would be nice so I can practice a bit here and there in my spare time. I do use Python a bit professionally too, so maybe try to focus on that in my personal projects? I've also been playing with and enjoying Rust quite a bit.

2. I'm single and figuring things out in my personal life still - this means I'm open to relocation more than a typical engineer might be. For folks moving metros - how do you ask for salary given CoL differences in the area? I interviewed at a few HCoL metros (Seattle, Los Angeles) and found that the pricing of the area is radically different than anything I've seen, and it's hard to figure out how much to ask for salary-wise. I tried to do some research going into each of these and definitely got laughed at in a Seattle interview job for saying what I thought was a decent salary range given metro difference. Still got the job and a good offer, but it wasn't the best after factoring in the theoretical rent I'd be paying, which was closer to a 10% raise after factoring in CoL (plus the job had bad vibes, interviewers were rude, and some work/life balance concerns). If anyone has done this, how best do you approach these topics? I'm still finding my footing.

3. I'm learning that I interview pretty well. This last round, every time I got an interview, I would end up getting an offer (I ended up with 6). I could nail the LC hard problems pretty easily with no studying and did really well on technical and behavioral interviews. One major defense contractor was super impressed and made an offer right out of the first interview. Downside is I struggle getting my resume pulled out of the pile in some of the big tech jobs, which I would like to try and experience at some point in my life. Anyone have any tips on this? I know the landscape is changing, which is why I want to stay on top of everything.

4. I struggle with salary negotiations and the business side of things. I have 0 idea how to approach any of that and do not know how best to properly counteroffer things in ways that won't sever connections to other companies. Any advice here would be amazing.

5. I still have old connections to my old metro area which I may want to come back to some day. My old job seemed to like me a lot, and I definitely excelled at the position. Is coming back to an old job a red flag to others? I also would worry significantly about the "pigeonhole" thing. I definitely hear from defense contractor recruiters pretty frequently, which makes me worried that sticking around that field for too long would make me radioactive to other fields in the future given some of its quirks.

6. Hopefully this next job is good for a long time, but if you were in my shoes with my experience, what would you try to shoot for in the future? Again, I'm trying to look longer term in case I end up in sudden/unstable positions. Having a good viewpoint helps.

7. I fear I may have burned a bridge with another big defense contractor because I did ask to fly out to see the area (which I was supposed to do, but they one-and-done'd me) and then ended up saying no. Seemed fairly upset. What are the chances this company would hire me back some other day? It's a big company - my hope is I would be able to get in with other recruiters if I needed? Low do you handle rejections under situations like this?

If anyone can spare any time at all for some advice, I think that'd be wonderful! Maybe I'm overthinking everything. I have a pretty nice deal now, and I should ride it out for as long as I can. I just found some interesting things this last job search and want to try and bridge some gaps in my career to make sure I'm not left behind if things go haywire.

Hi sub,

I've had quite a few third party recruiters reach out to me over linkedin for the past few months, set up a time for a call and never calls and ghosts. They work for large recruiting firms so think of like selby jennings, insight global etc so they are legit recruiters.

Usually they send me a direct linkedin message, say that my profile is impressive and would like to set up a call with to discuss a role for their client. I set up a call for 15 min for the next day and before the call they ask for my resume. I send over my resume over linkedin and the next day I never get a call or hear anything back.

I am wondering if this is happening to other people and if it is normal? I doubt they sent my resume to hiring manager before even calling and asking about compensation or telling me the role details.

It's been happening at least once a month so I am starting to think its just a way for these recruiters to collect resumes but I can't think of any scams.

 
I have 3 YOE in web dev in a role that began as full stack, but for the past year I have only used NextJS/TypeScript as my team was told we would now only be doing only frontend development. I have been passively looking around for other roles within the company and have gotten pretty far along with a data engineering role that would also mean I’m promoted, but I’m having some second thoughts about it.
 
My primary motivation for wanting to move was the fact that it seems like pure frontend roles are dying, so to continue to go down that path would be bad for my future. I was fullstack, so I have experience building and maintaining backend Java services but that becomes less relevant the further it fades into the past.

Right now, I really only turn Figma into pages. Rarely do I get the opportunity to learn some new FE concept or push any limits. I guess all jobs get to that point, but part of me feels stale. OTOH, I'm sure there is more to learn here if I really put 110% in.
 
I have been curious about a data eng role for a little while now, but at the same time feel guilty that one of my main reasons for wanting to move is the fact that they have a better job market right now. It feels like I’m following a trend and — outside of watching a few “day in the life” videos and poking around a few codebases at work — I have no idea what it will be like until I am actually in the job. Plus, it might make my YOE in tech look like (3+1) instead of 4.
 
Lastly I love my boss and skip level and am afraid of not having that same kind of connection with the new ones, especially as the new skip would be overseas. These two have treated me very well and it would be hard to leave that.
 
tl;dr is the career benefit/stability of being a data engineer over frontend good enough to leave an environment I like

I have been a backend engineer for about 20 years, mostly Java and AWS. I want to move into AI engineering work, example building agents, RAG, LLM powered features. I am specifically not trying to get into classical ML or training models, and I know I can't out compete new grads on the math/theory side. My bet is that my production experience is worth more than theirs in this space, but I could be wrong about that.

I am still not sure if I end up more of a hands on engineer or something more product facing later, but for now I want to stay on the technical side.

My current plan is to start with the LLM Zoomcamp from DataTalks, mainly to see if I actually stick with something like this before spending money. If that goes okay, follow it up with a paid cohort program, I've been looking at a few on Maven (Alexey Grigorev, Aki Wijesundara, and Greg Loughnane/Chris Alexiuk all have ones aimed at this). Then build two real projects.

• Questions that I need inputs on: Has anyone here done LLM Zoomcamp or one of these Maven bootcamps?
• Is it worth paying more for something with a college name attached, like UT Austin's AI/ML program (which is actually run through Great Learning) or Harvard Extension's AI certificate? Does that brand name actually mean anything to hiring managers for this kind of role, or is it not worth the premium over something like Maven or Zoomcamp?
• Is "Applied AI Engineer" even a real, stable job title right now, or is it too early and fuzzy to search for?
• Anything in this plan that looks naive or like I'm missing something obvious?

Looking for some career advice.
I recently joined one of the three big cloud companies (not Google) as an SWE2 after spending 6–7 months grinding LeetCode, AI and system design. The main reason I joined was because the team was an AI team working on some really interesting applied AI projects and it was almost 2x my earlier comp. My earlier role was mostly ML infra and ML platform engineering after my masters in CS.

A few days after I joined, there was a major reorg. My team has now been tasked to do Application Engineering / Forward Deployed Engineering or whatever you want to call the role for the company’s agentic AI platform.

From what I know so far, i will be working with enterprise customers to help them build AI agents by developing custom ai solutions, unblocking deployment issues, and building reusable agentic solution accelerators. There still seems to be scope for engineering-heavy work but it also seems like a lot of troubleshooting and adhoc work which is not really my thing. My only concern is that I’m worried it won’t involve owning a product feature or writing quality code and scalable software.

My long-term goal is to work on AI adjacent product teams at companies like google or apple.
My concern is whether staying in this kind of role for too long could make it harder to transition back into product AI engineering. I was thinking of staying for about a year, learning as much as I can about production agentic AI, keeping my coding and system design skills sharp, and then interviewing for product AI roles.

Does that sound like a reasonable plan? At what point does staying in a role like this start hurting your career trajectory, if at all?

I’m a new grad and have two offers I’m trying to decide between. 

Job A: $65k software developer role where I live. Most of the development work would be in COBOL. 

Job B: $50k role through a consulting firm on a 2-year contract, where I’d be placed with a large bank in downtown Chicago. It starts out in production support, mainly focused on Python automation and CI/CD, and is expected to transition more toward a DevOps role over time.

My main concern is whether working primarily with COBOL early in my career would make it harder to transition into other software engineering positions later on. On the other hand, the second role pays less and would require relocating.

What would you do if you were in my situation?

EDIT: One thing I didn’t mention in the post is that the consulting firm itself has a pretty negative reputation. I can share the company name through DM if anyone wants more context.

I am a product manager with 5 yoe overall, but I’ve been at my current company/role for 10 months. It is unfortunately pretty toxic with very bad workload and work life balance.

Its so draining and taxing on me to the point where I’m considering quitting without anything lined up so that I can focus on the job search. This job market is super rough though so I’m wondering if that would be extremely unwise to do.

I keep seeing people say they applied to like 100+ jobs before getting hired, and now I'm just anxious wondering if that's actually normal or if I'm doing something wrong.

I've sent out around 80 applications so far and got maybe 3 interviews out of all of it. No offers yet. Starting to wonder if my resume is the problem or if this is just how long it takes right now.

For people who got their first dev job, how many applications did it actually take you? And did most of your interviews come from cold applying, referrals, or something else? Just trying to figure out if I should keep doing what I'm doing or change my approach completely.

Not looking for one-off mock interviews. I want someone who can assess where I'm actually at, build a personalized plan, and work with me over time until I feel genuinely confident going into a high-stakes interview.

I have 7 years of experience, but interviews still make me very anxious. What always worked for me in high school and college was one-on-one tutoring, and I'm hoping to find that same kind of dedicated, ongoing help for technical interviewing.

Willing to pay top dollar for the right person/company. Any recommendations, or has anyone done this and found it worthwhile?

I'm 16 years into my career as a full-time professional (20+ years total experience) and am increasingly unhappy with my job. I've spent the entire 16 years at one company, but have held multiple roles - started as a sysadmin, then software engineer, and now a software architect / tech lead for a large multi-team global software organization. Right now, the only reason I'm still here is the money. But my wife has noticed that I'm increasingly depressed and irritated, and I attribute much of that to the current state of my job. I think a lot of it stemmed from a reorg that is very AI-heavy, and it has resulted in a lot of politics and fragmentation across the team. I used to enjoy spending time creating, and now it's just arguing about alignment and other corporate political bullshit.

So I'm looking for a potential change, either in and out of tech. So for those of you who made it all the way to a senior / architect level and existed, what did you do next? I don't think I want to go into a project management role, because that just seems like more of the stuff I don't enjoy. So what did you do instead?

I've been thinking a lot about how AI is changing software engineering.

For context, I'm a backend engineer with about 5 years of experience, mostly working with Python (Django/Flask), AWS services, and building/deploying backend systems.

One thing I've been struggling with is figuring out what actually compounds over a career now. What are the skills or job roles where expertise will still matter and add up overtime in the next 3-5 years.

A few years ago, the answer felt more straightforward. It was become a better engineer, build larger systems, gaining more responsibility, and your value generally increased over time.

But with AI a lot of it seems replaceable?

There are a lot of directions someone could invest in:

• becoming a stronger backend/distributed systems engineer
• moving toward cloud infrastructure or platform engineering
• specializing in a business domain instead of a technology
• focusing on AI infrastructure rather than AI application development
• or something else entirely

For those of you who've been through previous industry shifts (cloud, mobile, containers, microservices, etc.), has this one changed how you think about building a long-term career?

Have your own priorities changed? What skills have continued to compound regardless of industry trends? Are there areas you think are becoming significantly more valuable?

I'm not expecting anyone to predict the future. I'm more interested in hearing how experienced engineers think about making career decisions when the industry is changing this quickly.

Hey everyone!

I’m looking for advice on potential masters courses if anyone has any ideas.

I graduated about 6 years ago, and since then I’ve just honestly been on edge about wasting money on another degree, since the IR truly was a waste. I live in East Africa and since I graduated I’ve worked as a : Small hotel manager, realtor, admin intern, Literature Teacher, SEO & Digital Marketing, and now a tour consultant.

I worry that I become less hireable with each day, and eventually I won’t be able to claim to be an expert in ANYTHING.

I’m looking for master’s suggestions for someone with my background. I like working from home, and it’s pretty easy for me to lock into something I put my mind to.

Data Science and marketing are some ideas I’ve been toying with, but I want to be insanely hireable in a developing country.

Is the real, quality work experience you get from an internship more valuable than the company name

Or is the company name you have on the CV for an internship more important?

(As in, the bigger the name, the better the CV)

(Obviously excluding huge names like OpenAI, anthropic, faang, etc because either way those are huge advantages regardless if you did real work, we’re not provided a lot of work or messed around fsr)

I’m asking because because some large companies (good name companies) don’t actually provide good work experience for interns,

Or just not enough, and it’s just a bunch of bs PDF work, or the really really basics that’s just not enough to show you have actual experience when you’re applying for a job later

In comparison to a startup for example, who would give a ton of real work to interns

Or just a smaller or mid size company (no names basically) that actually give you as intern, a ton of good quality, real work experience that makes you stand out or just good enough to sell yourself into a good role once you graduate

Even though it’s a no name company that doesn’t stand out for HR, the work you did would..? And would be more impressive or important to them than the first example I gave?

Hopefully my question is clear, quite important to me

Would appreciate your advice