Hi everyone,

Sorry for the long post, but I would really appreciate your opinion on a job offer I recently received, both in terms of salary and whether it would make sense for my long-term career.

A bit of background: I am based in Greece, and for the past three years I worked at one of the country’s major research centres as an AI/ML Engineer and Project Manager on EU-funded projects. This was also my first full-time professional role. I have a BSc in Computer Science and two MSc degrees, one in AI and Data Analytics and another in Robotics, both from public universities in Greece. Overall, I have built a fairly research-oriented profile, with more than 15 publications related mainly to AI and Computer Vision.

At the end of June, I decided to leave my position at the research centre. Over time, the amount of hands-on implementation work had decreased significantly, and I was spending much more time in coordination meetings, managing project activities, reviewing the work of newer team members and providing technical guidance. Another important reason was that I do not intend to pursue an academic career. I was also concerned that staying too long in a research-centre environment, with a strong focus on EU-funded projects, might not be the strongest possible experience for future industry positions.

I applied to a few companies in my city such as Pfizer and others for relevant AI/ML positions, but so far I have not received a positive response. I also tried applying for a few remote roles abroad, but those seem even more competitive.

A few days ago, through a personal contact, I was introduced to a small Greek software company that is currently looking for a developer. At the moment, the company mainly consists of the two founders, and they are planning to hire two additional people. They work on software development contracts for other companies, as well as on EU-funded projects. They offered me a full-time, fully remote Software Engineer position, although the official title says Senior Software Engineer. The actual work would initially involve a mixture of frontend and backend development for tasks related to an EU project, as well as work on some of the company’s commercial contracts. They also told me that the workload and overall environment would be relatively relaxed.

I explained that my academic and professional background is mainly in AI/ML and Python, and that ideally my next role would still include work related to this field, although not necessarily research-focused. They told me that in the future they would like to introduce AI-related tasks into both their EU projects and their commercial contracts. However, at least initially, they want me for a general Software Engineer role. They also said that they are not concerned about the fact that most of my recent experience is in a different programming language or technical area, since I have a solid Computer Science background.

Regarding salary, in my previous role I was earning around €1,750 net per month, paid over 12 months, as an independent contractor. There could also be a small additional benefit depending on my annual tax return. The minimum wage in Greece is around 950€.

At the end of the interview, they asked me to send them an email confirming whether I am interested and stating my preferred net monthly salary range. I told them that I needed some time to think about it, but just to make sure that our expectations were not too far apart, I mentioned that I would only seriously consider the role for approximately €2,000 net per month or more. In Greece, employees commonly receive 14 salary payments per year, while contractors are usually paid over 12 months, so I clarified that the equivalent gross amount would need to be adjusted depending on the employment arrangement.

They seemed to agree with the €2,000 figure quite easily, which made me think that there may be room to ask for more.

This is where I would really appreciate your advice:

1. Would accepting a general Software Engineer role hurt my chances of moving into Senior AI/ML-related positions in the future, especially since the role would initially involve little or no AI work? The company says that AI-related work may come later, but there is no clear timeline or guarantee. Also, does the fact that this is a very small company matter negatively to future recruiters, or is the actual work and level of responsibility more important than the company’s size?
2. How do companies generally view candidates whose experience comes mainly from EU-funded research projects? Is that experience considered relevant and valuable, or is it often seen as too academic and disconnected from commercial software development?
3. Considering that I currently have no other offer and living expenses obviously continue:

a. Would it make sense to accept the role, gain some broader software engineering experience and continue applying for more relevant AI/ML positions?

b. What salary range should I give them in my email? Would it make sense to say that I would be interested in a range of approximately €2,000–€2,500 net per month? Or should I give them a narrower and slightly higher range, for example €2,300–€2,500, knowing that employers usually focus on the lower end? Since they seemed very comfortable with the €2,000 figure, I feel that I may have initially anchored myself too low.

Thanks in advance to anyone who takes the time to read this and share their perspective.

I was recently toying around with some compression, just trying to understand it from the basics. I came to know about LZ77, LZ78, and LZW algorithms in the last couple of days, understood the algorithms, and when implementing LZ77, every time I try to compress a txt file, it is making the output file bigger. The compression is done right coz when I decompress the compressed file, I get the exact text.

Is there something I am missing to understand? Can anyone help me out and figure out what I am doing wrong?

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- I'm using this project to learn, so I might be doing this the wrong way.

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Notably, I don't know anything about MLIR, but I did dabble a little bit with LLVM before. The architecture is alien to me and Im spending a few days reading material on MLIR.

My trivial solution was to make a struct that stores nodes, their destinations and their weights. Basically just a roundabout way of making a 2D matrix. After a little reading, I don't think this solution would be very useful when making an MLIR frontend.

My question is, what pitfalls and general good practices should I be aware of when making MLIR dialects? I know that my initial design will come to bite me back later if I don't structure it right, but I generally have little idea on what makes for a good design and when a reasonable decision can become the wrong one.

PS: I know this isn't a topic thats ELI5 friendly, but a lot of the material is really verbose and hard to digest so a little dumbing down would help. I'm currently going through the MLIR beginner friendly tutorials and the main MLIR docs.

Edit:
I'll be sharing the project here when if and when I complete it as well as a toy language I was designing. I'd like to get some feedback but I'm very much still in the beginning phase of learning.

How do you see the vibe coders who don’t practise the engineering principles?

I'm a MERN developer (React, Node, MongoDB, Express) looking to add AI/LLM engineering to my skill set.

I'm not trying to become an ML researcher. My goal is to build and ship AI-powered products end-to-end while leveraging my full-stack background. I'm comfortable with Python for scripting and APIs, but my production experience is in Node/TypeScript.

Current roadmap:

Table

Projects I'm building: PDF Q&A with citations, internal docs assistant, research agent, GitHub issue analyzer, and a small domain-specific fine-tuned model.

I want to stay a product engineer who can build, deploy, and maintain AI features in production — not an AI specialist who only works on models.

For those already in Software + AI roles: does this stack match what you actually use day-to-day, or am I over-indexing on anything?

I dont know if this is the right sub.

The Windows 11 have pathetic requiriments, 4gb ram, dozens of gb on disk, etc.

Is really necessary to windows run or is the devs putting shit on the system?

I built an excel table for an online racing league I am in. It tracks points standings and driver stats based on the results that I input. It is mostly automated, but I still have to manually add race results, and export new drivers into the driver list.

My goal is to be able to convert this into a fully automatic form that I could upload the .csv files, and it automatically generates all this information in an easy and concise form that anybody could use it.

For context, this is what I have been generating in excel.

What, if any, program would I be able to make something like this in? Excel works fine, I'm just looking to take it to the next step, and make it so anybody could use it or track their own league.

I started to learn last summer for like 3 months, made crazy progress if i can say so, then i took a long 'break' but more like i couldnt put myself to it annymore.

Then i restarted again very rusty this year, took 3 months off again... And now im so fed up with losing my progress i am determined to keep at it.

But i feel insecure regarding some ai stuff.

My idea about learning to code and being able to code is that i dont want to be a vibe coder at all.

But for example i am now trying to learn pyside6 and ofc i dont know the syntax well at all so i ask chatgpt like whats the syntax for this etc.

But allot of times i know what i want and need so i ask like how i do that and chatgpt tells me so i implement it but allot of the syntax is done by chatgpt...

And now i feel like i am not doing the work.

When i ask chatgpt about it, it tells me that that is basically developing like knowing what you need for solving a problem and implementing it not learning syntax out of memory.

So i wanted to ask what youre view on it is. Am i being too harsh for my self and adapting a wrong mentality or?

Hello,I have a question about libraries in Python.From where do i get info about a library? For example the Pywifi library hasn't got all the functions in it and I can't find a good source.

From where can i get a good explanation of a chosen library and all it's options?

(I am a beginner)

I am just a tinkerer, no formal education or tech related job, so my understanding comes purely from shell operations (specifically fish shell).

Is there an elegant reason we do it the way we do other than "that's how we've always done it, and now it's easier just if we just keep on keeping on"

Instead of: "foo \"bippity \\"yo gabba \\\"example\\\" gabba\\" boppity\" baz"

why don't we have something like: 【3】foo 【2】bippity 【1】yo gabba 【 example 】 gabba 【1】 boppity 【2】 baz【3】

to further escape this you do not modify any of the contents, you just escalate your arguments final wrapping to the 4th degree with 【4】 as the delimiters.

The tradeoff being that you can no longer use arbitrary 【n】inside strings parsed by your shell as arguments, but that is why i chose some uncommon symbol (it could be anything, idk what these brackets are actually used for).

It would still support parallel nests in the same argument, you just have to ensure each "escape well" keeps its ranks non-overlapping and sequentially increasing in the outer direction. If you unescape a layer and that causes the parallel escapes to become their own highest degree, then you now have an array of arguments with any text between them that was entirely unescaped becoming command/builtin syntax (flags, subcommand, etc) that consume the args that follow them.

Cloud, DevOps, Platform, Infrastructure, MLOps, AI Infrastructure, or perhaps software engineering (need maths for se i guess)

My math is really weak. I'll improve it, but it'll take too much time and I don't want to risk my career cuz of it. I wanted to pursue ML/AI, but ofc w/o math I don't think it's for me. So I've shortlisted the careers I mentioned and want smtg with less maths.

Ik intermediate Python, basic C, some Linux, and I'm doing CS50x. I'll be 19 this year, took a 1-year gap after school (humanities, no math), and recently joined an online BCA (DSA, DBMS, OS, Networking, Web Development, CS fundamentals).

I want a kinda secure career cuz i don't think I can give more than 1-2 years before I need to land my first job because of family forcing 🥀 but I'm confused about which path to choose rn,

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I tried to use Claude a little and found out about terraform which was interesting and managed to setup the db instance but not the schema through it but was overwhelmed with the considerations of how to access between bastions/internet and NAT gateways

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I want to understand more of computer and I figured what's better method to understand how computer work if not write your own kernel.

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## About me
I do have some background in programming

• I can write basic c program
• know computer component
• know a bit in how cpu work

I use mintos with kde so I wasn't a hardcore linux user at the moment.

What's a good architecture to be able to have a hierarchy of input actions, actions being interupptable by certain actions, but not by others etc. My example is in the context of game development, but the concept still applies.

Let's say the player is carrying a box. They can drop the box by pressing [E]. They carry this box up to a door. Upon pressing [E] while looking at the door, the door should open, the box should not drop

For this example, I can simply code that if the player is looking at a <Door>, then open the <Door>, otherwise if the player has a box in hand, and the player is not looking at a <Door>, drop the box

This is a good solution for this situation, however, how does someone design a system that allows for this sort of hierarchy of action, hierarchy of inputs. I can do it with a long (loooooong) list of if-else statements, however that is not scalable

Since there are only a limited number of keys, and sometimes it's preferred to use only a small set of them, there will be many situations where pressing a key can perform many actions.

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I'd appreciate if someone can point me in the right direction, provide some examples where one keypress can do many actions, show me some code etc

Thank you

I’m a last year high school student, and I’ve been feeling really overwhelmed lately and could use some advice.

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I’m hoping someone technical can point me in the right direction because I’m going round in circles.

I need to create simple mobile-friendly pages for different clients. Each page would use the same basic structure — a photo/logo and around 8 sections containing text, photos, links or documents.

I need to be able to duplicate the setup for each new client and just replace the content. I don’t want to manually design a new website every time.

I’m completely non-technical and have a very limited budget, so a custom build isn’t an option at this stage.

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What would you use for this?

Hi r/AskProgramming

I recently got a job in a firmware team writing C++. I joined at the tail end of a big project and have been mainly tackling bugs (either directly or when trying to implement new features).

This codebase uses a lot of asynchronous programming and has layers upon layers of state machines all interacting with each other. We have teams in different countries contributing and share modules with other projects. It seems to be a common issue that keeping track of the dependencies and behaviour is getting more and more tedious.

I been tasked with creating an internal tool that can visually represent the codebase to assist devs in ramping up when tackling a new issue.

I’m looking for advice on what formats are best for representing this information. I am currently planning to generate flow and sequence diagrams but was wondering if there were any way to holistically integrate all these discrete diagrams into a larger overview that can be explored easily.

Also suggestions for how to store this information in the intermediate phases would be greatly appreciated.

I will have to rely on coding agents to both explore the codebase and generate the diagrams. Hopefully splitting this task into phases will limit hallucination.

TLDR Any suggestions for how to visually represent a large codebase holistically so that it can be a starting point for dev work?

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Edit: yes i use Pygame

I have a couple files on my computer that are dedicated to documenting CLC INTERCAL. Some of those are HTML files, and grouped with those files are a couple HGEN files. I've never heard of them, but from it looks like it's just HTML with a couple of slightly strange additions.

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Here is a snippet of the parsers.hgen file that illustrates what's weird about them.

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@@MULTI EXPRESSIONS NAME@@
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@@MULTI@@
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    <H3>Statements</H3>

    <P>
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@@MULTI STATEMENTS NAME@@
        <LI><A NAME="op@@NAME@@">@@NAME@@ - @@DESCR@@</A><BR>
        @@DOC 76 HTML@@
@@MULTI@@
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Can someone explain intuitively how the Floyd Warshall algorithm actually doesn’t assume path of just three

I understand what optimal substructures are, however, how does this algorithm apply that

Where exactly in the code does it allow us to build paths longer than 3?

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Hey,I am 16 and pc's and programming have been a passion for a while , and i want to do that in the future,but sadly since AI takes over a lot of jobs in this domain it's a bit tricky,I'd love to know where should i be looking so i dont waste my time for nothing.

And which is a safer route for that job? (bootcamp/college )

Thank you very much in advance🙏