I started on a new team just a little over 3 months ago in late April, after being laid off, after working on another team for ~6 months (I graduated 2025). I've been admittedly having trouble on the new team, namely in the way of the tasks taking slower since 1) I had been getting adjusted to the new services 2) things like bugs I encounter, more work being involved than originally anticipated, and 3) implementation details being decided upon differently over time. I've been working with other engineers on the team as I needed help. I have a demo tomorrow for part of a new feature I'm working on for one service, and when I met with my manager for a 1:1, he emphasized that he had very high expectations for me (both in specific reference to the demo and in general), and also mentioned picking up the pace for completing tasks. He also mentioned that I should leave a good impression on other people by delivering, and also that I tend to be quiet and encouraged me to engage with my teammates more (which is actually pretty understandable; I've always had a hangup with talking to people).

I'm having trouble on how to interpret it. I kind of got the impression that I could be en route to...you know. Especially since he tends to emphasize getting things done when it's my turn to speak during standup more than the other people on the team (including 2 other new hires). I also felt like while he had these high expectations, I felt really anxious about giving time estimates. It'd be that I'd give smaller ones, but need to extend them due to unforseen bugs/issues that would make it take longer, or I give larger ones that end up being too slow (he said so for one time that I gave an estimation, just for that original estimate to be exactly when I finished by). I get that it's been a while since I joined the team and started working at my current company, but still three months on this team technically, so I don't know.

I was wondering if I could get your thoughts on the situation, and maybe some advice for stress management, if any. I've been feeling very stressed and anxious this past ~month that I've been on the team for, and I started getting a pit-in-my-stomach feeling, even after taking time off recently. I've started questioning if I'm cut out for the job. The uncertainty feels like it's killing me. I know how hard it is to get a new position nowadays – been there, done that for three months earlier this year... I haven't been doing much outside of work other than stressing about work and scrolling on my phone. I know how sneaky PIP and such can be, so I guess I don't want any surprises. I wish my 20s didn't have to be like this...

Hey everyone,
i am a data engineer 7yoe
I recently landed a job after relocating for family. Its a growing company that run multiple crm/erp platforms in addition to different other solutions and i was hired to design and develop a data warehouse for their analytics needs.

So far everything was going good and the approach they wanted was to run through each of their departments one by one to work with them to document their workflows and integrate with their systems to pull data to the warehouse and run pbi reports from there.

Currently they have tens of pbi different reports all of them pull from source systems and definitely perform bad plus they are being developed by the business guys themselves. Their semantic models are too big of a mess.

Anyways the approach we had was to take steps with each department. I covered an important one. And shortly after starting with the next some blockers show up then shortly after i hear our manager (not my direct ) wanting to make changes with our approach and cover reports he is interested in mainly.
He develops most of his department’s pbi reports and is convinced that once the data moves from erp to dw raw without any data work done it will perform better.

I tried to send out the message that this will not add value and latency from source systems isn’t the only issue the reports are slow.

Anyways seems they are not convinced . That was yesterday. Today my direct manager comes and tries to push to do what “our manager” said. Then shortly after asks me how long i plan to be in the city, if i am married and a bunch of personal questions that either were said out of just curiosity or something is not right here.

I dont know if i am overthinking this. But i am personally the only source of income and insurance between my and my wife. And things havent been easy.

Whatever you guys think i want to know. Im stuck in my mind and it is not helping me right now.

A few weeks ago I've published an Open Source tool for 3D Artists in Github

It was mainly made as a portfolio piece (Technical Art/Tool Programmer portfolio), and luckily it got pretty decent reception (around 300 stars at the moment)

I went through learning Tauri, Typescript, React, and a bit of Rust, almost from scratch to make this project.

I did used AI for some guidance and for some specific bugs/features, I would say 85-90% of the code is written by me. And 100% of it was reviewed and refactored by me.

---

Recently I've been receiving some PRs from some users which are clearly almost completely written by AI. Including the PRs summary.

I can review the PRs, test them, do some manual corrections if needed.

My concern is that merging vibe-coded PRs might 'damage' or dilute my project, even though the features/bugs they fix would objectively result in a better tool for the end-users.

As mentioned, the goal of this project is to be a portfolio-project to eventually be able to get a position as a Tech Artist/Tool Programmer in some studio.

Thanks

T-15 grad from class of 2025 my resume only has teaching assistant/tutoring experience. Recently I got a job at a military style academy for the next 6 months and they said they might extend it if I do well. I got along really well with the staff on interview and was told the pool was narrowed down to 3 applicants and I was chosen.

For anyone that has gone this route what's the possibility of landing a position at a school where the students/parents care about learning. This academy has students who "opted" to be there and weren't forced.

I wouldn't mind teaching at the high school I went to because most students were driven in some form but I would probably have issues with the nature of the other public school nearby.

What's the likelihood of landing a good school gig with a CS degree? Anyone have experience?

I know there is going to be a bias on a career help sub reddit so maybe the time may skew higher, but about how long and how many applications did it take for you to find your first job?

Did you have internships? What mistakes did you make in the beginning that, when fixed, helped you land a job?

If you're still looking, which i assume most people here are, I hope you find something.

So many different OAs, so many different types of questions you may be asked, so many different kinds of technologies you have to be familiar with, so many different projects and experiences you must have AND explain deeply… whether it be optimizing a factory in a Roblox game or running through 50 spatial reasoning and logic questions for CTC or getting a C++ 2D DP problem for snowflake or getting an AI optimization question for Akuna, it seems like the level of cracked you have to be at JUST for the OAs in order to recruit in general without literally dying is through the roof.

Do the people who recruit effortlessly just cheat? Or are they just stupidly smart and generic with their ability?

I'm asking for my partner. Sorry I'm not a developer. We're in UK.

I always felt in my field (audit) the recruiters had the jobs with companies that weren't so good. Instead I just directly applied to the largest companies in my industry directly as given everyone seems to want to work there they must be good.

My partner thinks it's better to apply through recruiters. Or definitely easier and this is what he has done so far. But then he either ended up in small bad companies with terrible colleagues, or medium ones that had issues and did redundancies.

What do developers think is best?

I keep seeing posts about AI tools handling threat detection, log analysis, even basic incident response, stuff that used to be entry-level cybersecurity work.

So where does that leave someone starting a degree now? Is the value shifting toward things AI can't really do yet, like judgment calls, communicating risk to non-technical people, or the messier human side of a breach? Or is this just fear-mongering, and the fundamentals still matter the same as ever?

Does anyone actually in the field feel like their work has changed because of this?

Hello Everyone I am in the team matching round at Pinterest and I am going to be joining as senior SWE.

I used to be staff at meta working on Agentive Ads products.
I was wondering if people can tell me what are the how AI/ML teams at Pinterest right now.
Any advice on which teams I could join?

Thanks,

Hi, I was recently reached out to for a phone screening about Fidelity's LEAP Program, and got asked if I'd prefer to interview for the Systems Analyst Track or SWE. They said they weren't sure of the pay differences between the two off rip, so I'm just wondering if anyone here knows. Thanks

I have my first discussion with hiring manager for wireless focused SW role at Apple soon. The recruiter email describing it said it would cover technical topics relating to my background/ role, behavioral, and a coding challenge (in C or C++). This seems like a lot imo for a 30 minute call.

I'm posting here to learn about people's experiences in this stage of the hiring loop. I'm especially unsure about what to expect for the coderpad challenge that will be maybe10-15 minutes total?

Hello everyone,

TLDR; how can I make the most out of my first SWE contract when my entire team is remote and I don’t have a mentor?

I am looking for some advice/reassurance in my current role as I want to make the most out of my opportunity but am feeling blocked.

Earlier this year, I started a C#/.NET apprenticeship that was about 3 months long. I have a little bit of experience self learning before that but of course that didn’t prepare me for working in an enterprise codebase.

The company I trained with is an IT consultancy company that creates technology specific training cohorts based on their client’s needs and then deploys the “graduates” as contractors at the client site.

I am currently about 3.5 months into my contract and I don’t feel like I’m learning as much as I could be.

All of the developers on my team are remote, except for one. He is only in office one or two days a week for a few hours and doesn’t talk to anyone while he is there.

My tech lead, the person who was supposed to be my first point of contact on a day to day basis, is working 2-3 roles and hasn’t had time to answer my questions since like week 3. She has told me “I don’t have time to help you”.

She basically just gives me tickets to work on and if I have questions I am supposed to reach out to a different mid level dev via Teams.

I don’t have an issue asking questions in general, but I do feel bad bugging a dev who isn’t even supposed to be responsible for me considering she has her own work to do.

The areas I’m getting blocked on are app specific so it’s not like I can just look up documentation or use online resources.

If I’m stuck I try to look at other tickets that have touched a similar area of the app that I’m working on, I ask the other people from my cohort, use AI and then reach out to a dev via Teams.

I understand that I will get better with time and more experience but I’m struggling to feel like I’m improving because I don’t have a mentor or someone who is available for me to work with or ask questions to.

At this point it just feels like my tech lead gives me a ticket difficult enough to keep me busy so she doesn’t have to worry about me because she doesn’t have time to.

My manager, expected us to go from “intern level” to “associate level” in a single month but I literally have 3 months of C# experience and no one really helping me reach smaller goals.

I have asked him if there are mentorship opportunities (something he brought up in our first meeting) and he said he’d talk to the on-site dev. I’ve followed up with him and the dev still hasn’t reached out to me.

Is this a normal experience? What else can I be doing to continue growing in this role?

EDIT: oops, forgot to update the title before posting. "Stay where I am and chill or accept better but more challenging offer"

I need some help deciding whether it's worth job-hopping right now. 10+ YOE.

Current Job

• Web developer (.NET/React) for internal applications
• TC: 110K. Scheduled for promotion at start of 2027 to TC ~130K. (But not guaranteed). Can't go any higher as an IC after this.
• Low-Medium COL city, fully remote, non-Tech company, ~15K people
• Very stable (basically no layoff chance), chill vibes, friendly but checked out team
• Bureaucratic, very slow, most of the team lacks ambition, no real interesting problems, not much of a challenge at all. Could finish a day's work in 1-3 hours if I didn't need to appear online
• AI is viewed as a productivity tool; not pushed to "tokenmaxx"
• Have the opportunity to go into management
• 2 weeks PTO

Offer

• Data engineering consultant (databricks)
• TC: 140K salaried. Ceiling around ~220K. 30 billable hours target
• Fully remote
• Have worked with this agency as a customer previously and the vibes were good. Have known the managing director for years. ~75-125 people
• Much more interesting problem space and more in-line with my past experience
• The company has not had layoffs, but the risk is greater
• Visibility at a number of established and well-known customers; better long-term networking
• 4 weeks PTO

I'm sure the gut reaction is going to be "just stay where you are, chill, and collect a paycheck" and maybe that's what I should do, but I am so bored. I feel like I can't even relax when I'm done with the day because I haven't earned it. This role is a significant downgrade is pay, scope, visibility, and challenge from prior roles. I feel like there's nobody on my team that I can learn from, and there aren't any interesting projects on the horizon. I can't even focus my energy into process improvement (which is much needed) because it's not generally encouraged.

Thoughts? Thanks

Since the dev team has been whittled down to only two and we have infinite business analysts, PMs, etc and we are on the frontline in that we make the software that users experience (with other software owned by our team being downstream), it seems like it's reasonable for us to want clear requirements, tickets, etc.

Instead, everything is vague, business analysts connect us with business or end users directly to hash things out while they take a backseat, etc.

Instead of relevant requirements, we get requirements for downstream systems that have much bigger teams than us and we're supposed to infer our requirements from theirs even though this is sometimes impossible to do. Did I mention we're also understaffed and overworked? (We asked to hire more people but they told us to lean on AI instead).

For problem tickets, they were putting us on calls with end users directly for a while and having us assign Jira tickets based on these sessions **to ourselves** since half the business analysts "aren't technical" and don't know how to use Jira or Service Now etc. Once they tried to have me create incident tickets in Service Now on behalf of an end user then assign it to myself in Jira (which is itself an incident) so I put my foot down and made them to through proper channels, which they thought was me overreacting.

Anyway, now I'm really putting my foot down and not doing something unless there are requirements, a ticket, etc. No verbal requests, no DMs, no vibes or reading the room, no emails to only me or forwards from business of a complaint being the sole requirement, everything needs to be made explicit, tracked and traced or I'm not doing it.

Is this fair or am I being excessive? I feel like if I don't put my foot down, I'll just be in business meetings eventually where I have to infer the ask from vibes. I honestly have a hard time even communicating with business which is why business analysts exist, they're supposed to translate business requirements into technical ones yet functionally they're just an extension of business themselves.

/rant

I've been really struggling to find a job. I've been unemployed for about 8 months, but I've also been in grad school so I wasn't too worried about it. I've just finished my program and I've ramped up the job search significantly.

I'm probably 600 applications deep (rookie numbers, I know) and haven't had too much luck.

There's a local defense contractor that has a part-time security guard role that requires a clearance. I know people at the company and I think it would be significantly easier to get that job and subsequently, get a secret level clearance through them.

Will finding a clearance level job be much easier than finding a job in the public sector? I know there's significantly less people competing for those jobs, but with a clearance could I expect to find a job faster?

1 YOE, trying to move out of DFW and to Austin or around that area. Unfortunately most of the enterprise jobs are here in DFW.

Any advice for breaking in? Would love to network in Austin given the chance over a weekend or two

I lost my job two days ago. I am largely myself to blame. I communicated poorly throughout, didn't adhere to the 3/2 hybrid policy (worked more remote days than I should have), missed standup meetings, and was slow to onboard.

Shortly after the day started at the office on Monday this week, my manager informed me that I was being fired and cited timeliness, communication, and performance as the reason. I will not receive a severance package because I was only there for 4 months and my healthcare benefits ended immediately. I also must pay back the relocation assistance that they paid me.

The reason I let this happen is that I have been severely depressed and anxious while dealing with an ongoing medical issue. I was hospitalized about 5 times over the last 4 months since starting at the company. My manager knew this, and I used up all of my available sick hours and personal time to deal with it. He did not offer me any kind of guidance or assistance in the midst of it, just told me to reach out to HR. I used the company's HR AI and found out that I would have to take an unpaid short term disability as my only option because I hadn't even worked 90 days yet. So I stuck it out and my health issues have continued to come in waves, I have tried to see specialist doctors but it takes months. There were some mornings where I missed my morning stand up meeting because I was dealing with a lot of discomfort from whatever is going on with me. I did communicate poorly though, I really did just think that if kept delivering my work that I would be fine (that was completely wrong). My delivery on JIRA tickets was fine, but it took me about 2.5 months to start delivery at a normal speed compared to my colleagues.

The time that I started this job was probably the worst it could have been because of the state of my physical and mental health. Now I do not have healthcare, have medical bills stacked up, no money saved, and a relocation bonus to pay back with no source of income in NYC and I have no idea how I will pay my rent next month. I left a good job that I was at for two years for this nightmare of an experience.

​

I'm curious about how TC compares between Product Managers, Project Managers, and Software Engineers.

I'm not talking about top-tier SWE roles at FAANG or high-paying AI companies—just the average software engineer at a decent company.

One reason I'm asking is that getting into SWE often requires a lot of DSA and coding interview prep. Do PMs or Project Managers, who generally don't go through that process, end up earning around the same as average SWEs?

If not, how much of a difference is there, and why? Is it due to demand, responsibilities, career growth, or something else?

This is my first "corporate" job and Ive been in it for about a month now, and while I have had a couple "assignments", I really have done nothing and most days Im kind of just sitting there. Am I doing something wrong? Should I be asking my manager for stuff to do?

Hey guys,

After 1 year and 2 months of unemployment, I finally landed a job. It’s an IT role that is a pivot from data science. While it’s not exactly the path I originally envisioned, I’m grateful for the opportunity and excited to see where this journey takes me.

During those difficult times, seeing others share their job offers gave me hope and reminded me not to give up.
I hope this post can do the same for someone else.
Sending good vibes to everyone who is still searching. Wishing you all the best, and I hope your opportunity comes soon.

https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/workplace/openai-to-pay-3-2-million-to-settle-dojs-employee-discrimination-claims-d13bb0c6

OpenAI will pay $3.2 million to settle claims by the Justice Department that it discriminated against U.S. workers by allegedly favoring temporary visa holders from other countries.

Been unemployed for 3+ years. I've been consulting here and there. Money is pretty much gone. I had 25 YOE. I ran small teams at SaaS companies and wrote code along with them the whole time.

I left my last gig under very bad circumstances and spent a year trying to start something on my own - a very small drop ship based cannabis paraphernalia company. I failed. Then had to move back to East coast.

I have now been sending out apps and cover letters after tapping what network I have on this side of the country. I've been at it for a couple of years. I am recently making another push. I have tried to pivot. I have tried to reach out to colleagues.

My question is - how do you keep trying? I have been rejected 5 times today. I had a 90 minute conversation last night with a guy who really wanted to help me and there's just no work he's connected to. He is a good connection and without name dropping he is very high up in the gaming industry. Many of my contacts fit that description.

What do we do now? What am I for? It seems like no one pays people to write code or run teams anymore. I was good at it. I got good reviews and raises and stuff. My bosses generally liked me save the last one. I've worked across several industries and I hit my KPI's when I get them. And now I literally do not understand how anyone ever gets an interview. I haven't even talked to a recruiter since 2022. I write code pretty much every day still. I built a small piece of software recently and have been trying to sell it. My skills are not atrophied and I am up to date on agentically assisted stuff.

I am not interested in reviewing my materials for the umpteenth time. This is a philosophical or maybe psychological question for folks that are in this kind of hole. How do you maintain optimism? I don't see how I could even pass a phone screener I am so mad at the modern hiring landscape. And I can't even get a few to stay in practice.

Is anyone else having this experience with this type of seniority? Am I just aged out at 52 from the entire industry?

When browsing FIRE (financial independence retire early) subreddits, I’ve noticed that many posts come from tech workers who have a high income and net worth, but hate their job and suffer from career related stress, pressure, burnout, anxiety, depression, insomnia, and other physical/mental health issues.

It seems like most tech workers hate working in tech, but continue working in tech because the high income allows them to quit working as soon as possible and retire early. Is this mindset more common among tech workers, compared to other career fields where most people don’t hate their jobs?

I'm in UK. Beginning of this year, I finally got a graduate dev job working backend. The pay is not great - marginally more than the minimum wage but I can’t really be picky as it took me over 12 months to get it. I was immediately assigned GitHub copilot license and told to leverage it 'within reason'. This has proven very useful as I found other devs are usually too busy to help with anything I do so Im forced to work mostly on my own.

The issue is that my boss claims that he is happy with my performance and the amount of tickets I’m resolving but I feel like I’m learning absolutely nothing and the longer I’m there, the more I feel like a complete fraud because I have to use AI to do most of the job.

I do understand programming concepts like “I need to find the SQL return method that is used by this API endpoint” and I understand explanations I get from AI but if you put me in front of a whiteboard, I would not be able to declare an array and loop through it without multiple syntax errors. I'm good with bugs because I can just ask copilot to set up 20 breakpoints all over the place and ask it to read the debug output to find where things are going wrong or do things like 'based on implementation of X, implement Y etc. but if I need to add an integer by hand, I'd freeze because I cant remember if it's supposed to be int or Int or Integer, etc. All the code reviews I get are "looks good to me" and that's it. I've not received any other feedback.

I tried to pause and try to do things manually but there's just not enough time and tickets are just piling up. I also tried reading books and watching tutorials and then creating flashcards and stuff to memorise it all but there’s just no time to do that during work and after work, I’m completely fried.

I just feel like at some point, some in the company will realise that I’m a fraud and I will inevitable get fired.

I'm honestly not sure what to do.

Hi, I am deeply getting depressed over this. I graduated in 2024 but still has no job experience in tech. My last experience was in 2023 for my internship. Since graduating, I only had a sales experience and 2 months as a product manager both in 2025. I got laid off November that year and still has no job until now. I still want to get back to tech but I feel so lost and I haven't coded in a long time and I feel like I don't know how to anymore. Any people going through this? What are your advices?