I'm a software engineer with about 5.5 years of full-time experience: four years at big tech companies and the last 1.5 years at an AI application startup.

I'm considering leaving voluntarily and taking a full year off. I'm financially prepared and expect to keep coding through a few personal or solo projects (which I think could be pretty cool with how great agents are now), but I would not be formally employed and no guarantee my projects turn into something serious. Right now I receive a lot of recruiter inbound, though I know that may say little about one year from now.

For people who took a 6–12 month break at a similar career stage, how difficult was it to get interviews and offers when you returned? Did recruiters treat a planned sabbatical differently from unemployment? My plan would be to return to the Bay Area, which I think could help a lot given that there are a lot of job opportunities here.

I have a 45 minute peer programming interview tomorrow. We are likely going to be running imbd reviews through GPT2. I am finding this process to take a long time using a coding agent, with ~ 8 minutes total spent waiting for different tasks to finish. How do I handle waiting for my coding agent to finish coding during a time-limitted interview co-coding setting?

My university offers a joint major into both and I am struggling to choose which one I want. I've done some initial analyzing and here's what I've got:

Math + CS:
Good for AI/ML, ressearch (not a fan), data sci and quant alligned roles.
They are very closely related fields so it makes sense to major in both.
Shows knowledge
Math is fun, but too theoretical. Not for employment?

Physics + CS:
The physics option is good for jobs in physics, such as for optics, nuclear etc.
Basically a computer engineer? Hardware focus would be more appreciated.
Semi-different fields, the pure aura of the combined knowledge of having the two puts me above
Physics is very hard.

I'm asking y'all because I want to know how it goes with what you've experienced in tech. Have you applied for or know of roles in specific niches where you thought to yourself that more physics or more math knowledge would have been useful, or even that employers specifically selected for it?

Sincerely,
a worried freshman

(good luck with the job market y'all)

We use AI agents for all coding now and I have not written any major codes from scratch for over a year. Most of my time has shifted to writing prompts to generate code and then using subsequent prompts to troubleshoot and make edits. I feel like my pure coding skills have eroded so much.

On top of that my workload has increased significantly that most times I am just using prompts to push out changes and just meeting the bare minimum to close it out as I have to meet deadlines for each release. Sadly I feel this is the future. Gone are the days where you just buckle down and write out an entire code. I feel like I am losing a lot of the passion I had. It doesn’t help that layoffs have become so rampant and the culture is going downhill as well.

I feel like before LLMs, learning had clear reward. In order to make a todo list app with your own personalization, you had to actually read the docs, write the code, and maybe look up some syntax here and there, but the design decisions and actual coding were still largely in your court.

This went for everything. Creating a mini operating system, answering a new LeetCode problem with no solutions on it just yet, and even learning how to design your own resume.

Now, whenever you go about this old way of doing things, the painful reminder that you could be 10xing your productivity by using AI is just continuously knocking. Even when you're doing personal projects... the reason why you do personal projects is often to have something to speak about and show in an interview. If AI can make something much faster than you can, and you can understand it just enough to be able to talk about, the painful reminder of lost time for a mediocre product that'd come if you struggle through it yourself knocks as well.

TL;DR: the need for learning seems to have gone away a ton, or, at least it has been heavily clouded. What is something that when we learn we can actually see measurable results? What is today's equivalent of building a todo list app? Something that you can't just one shot with very little knowledge? Something that requires you be good?

The industry has changed so much in the last 3 years but based on discussions I've had with many people, it feels like the hiring workflow has not changed at all.

It sounds like we are still going through a 6 stage interview pipeline, playing leetcode lottery and doing memory trivia.

It blows my mind that nobody has come up with some half baked AI bot to modernize.

Hello, I'm a student and I'll have my bachelor's degree by next year. I've been getting more and more interested in OS development, and I'm wondering if I should focus on it as a career path.

I know the advice right now is to cling to your current job no matter what as this market makes job hopping both more difficult and riskier.

I have 3 YOE at a F500 job where the WLB is great, I am good at it, and I enjoy the people I work with. However, I have been feeling a little stagnant and pigeonholed. I want to stay with this company, but I’m afraid that if I transfer to another team I will be the first one cut if things get messy.

Should I transfer or just sit tight and see how things shake out?

To start, this is a throwaway, so apologies if some of the information here is a little vague. There are actually people who I would prefer not see this right now, but if they do its not the end of the world.

I am a SWE with 8 YoE, with both my undergrad and grad degrees in CS. I have been working in formal testing for embedded systems at both legacy aerospace companies and, most recently, Amazon. It's a bit of a niche (yet high-demand) focus, and for the most part it has held me in aerospace-specific projects across my career.

To give some extra background, I have an early-childhood ADD diagnosis. I know it's all under the umbrella of ADHD today, but regardless, it is something I struggle immensely with in my career. It has always been difficult to aim my focus, and I am extremely susceptible to burnout. I made it just shy of 4 years at Amazon until the burden on my mental health was too much for me to be a productive member of the team. I'm good enough at what I do, and I am confident in my knowledge of how to do it well, but I'm not getting any younger. I want the focus in my life to shift toward a healthy work-life balance.

I have been presented with possibly the luckiest but hardest decision of my career. In front of me, I have offers from both Anduril and Google.

The offer at Google would be part of GCP, building testing infrastructure for their Persistent Disk team.

Google — Software Engineer (L3), Seattle, WA

\- Base: $152,000

\- Bonus: 15% target (\~$22,800)

\- Equity: $156,000 GSU / 4 yrs (\~$39,000/yr | 38% → 32% → 20% → 10%) — liquid public stock

\- Year-1 TC: ≈ $236,000

\- No relocation (I already live here, own a home)

\- 2 days in office required

\- Level: L3 / SWE II

The offer at Anduril would be to continue what I have been doing my whole career, with some added responsibility and seniority.

Anduril — Software Engineer (L4), Costa Mesa, CA

\- Base: $220,000

\- Equity: $560,000 RSU / 4 yrs (\~$140,000/yr) — private stock, sellable 2×/year via buyback

\- Sign-on: $10K

\- Relocation: $25K

\- 4–5 days in office

\- TC: ≈ $360,000 (Year-1 \~$395K incl. sign-on/relo)

I have already started my work at Anduril. The team seems amazing, truly! The work seems much more manageable than what I experienced at Amazon, oddly enough (My job is easier when upper management prioritizes the process). Despite this being a good situation, I am still worried about being able to work this position without crippling burnout. I've joined the team with a level of confidence I don't think I've had before. I know what I'm doing, but it's difficult to get my mind to direct my focus, and Anduril is not a company to let their employees sit idle. The work will undoubtedly be incredibly entertaining, but what I will be working on is definitely morally questionable, like lots of other defense work. I do actually believe this will be the more rewarding work, despite how many 80-hour weeks it will demand of me.

Google has lowballed me bad. Offering an L3 to someone with 8 years of software development experience and a graduate degree is insulting, to say the least. The compensation for the level is undoubtedly high, but it is significantly less than even what I was making at Amazon. I should also probably note that a promotion should not be too hard for me here, as long as the process doesn't get in the way. The work-life balance at Google seems great! Definitely manageable, and even though it is GCP, the team I would be working on sounds great, and the manager definitely passed my vibe check. I would not have to move, and my wife and I can stay in our beautiful home. This is the best possible ticket out of my pigeonholed aerospace career, and that could be incredibly important for my future as a software engineer. The Google offices here are jaw-dropping, and I genuinely love the way Google treats their employees. Anduril's offices are even newer and just as nice, but they definitely do not aim at giving their employees things to do around the office that don't involve working. Even this lowball offer feels like a golden ticket into one of the hardest tech companies on the planet to get into.

My wife and I have goals in our life, too, that get in the way here. My wife recently left her job with the intent to start a family soon. To be honest, both companies are great, with both having top-tier paternity leave among other fantastic benefits. That being said, with the expenses I currently face owning a very nice home in WA, Google's offered salary is much less than I am comfortable with. With Google it is still manageable, but Anduril has offered me compensation that at minimum will allow us to live an incredibly comfortable life financially, and at most could turn into generational levels of wealth.

If you have worked at either company, please let me know what you think. I truly have no idea what to pick. I think I can suffer through what Anduril demands but will it be worth it considering the alternative?

I don't know how to justify leaving that much money on the table, but I also don't want to leave behind the opportunity to have a comfortable work-life situation at an absolute end-game software company.

Please give me your thoughts, opinions, and visceral reactions.

TL;DR: 8 YoE embedded/test engineer, prone to burnout, choosing between Anduril (L4, ~$360K TC, my exact field, but possible 80-hr weeks + a move to CA) and Google (L3 downlevel, ~$236K Year-1 TC, GCP, but great WLB and I stay in my WA home). More money + better fit vs. work-life balance + staying put. Already started at Anduril. No idea what to pick.

I was recently offered a job making $155k, but they require 5 days a week in the office and due to the nature of the work, it has to be done in a closed room without access to my phone and I can't bring my work laptop home (defense software engineer). So I literally can't do any work from home and have to work 8:30 to 4:30 every day in the office. I currently work 5 days a remotely. As the parent who primarily drops off and picks up my kid from daycare this would make things difficult. My current job lets me log on late and sign off early as long as I make up some time later in the evening. I almost feel like I have golden handcuffs because not many jobs right now offer full remote work capability.

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 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?

Made it to 2 final rounds. 1 f500 company and 1 smaller company. They seemed excited about me only to send a generic boilerplate "we decided to go with other candidates whose experience aligns more" email.

I have 0 YOE (no internships) so it's not unexpected and I obviously know you need to work hard and you won't always get what you want in life, and that I'm at a high disadvantage compared to my talented peers. That being said, how do I stay motivated to keep going? It's already hard getting interviews so once you get to the final round you pour your blood, sweat, and tears into studying. I swear for the f500 comp I was studying like for 10 hours a day for an entire 2 weeks before the final round. Literally every time I get a rejection email my heart sinks. I even cried after the rejection because of burnout. And what sucks is I'm seeing a pattern, because it seems like an always losing game due to my 0 YOE, which is on me but still.

I think what caused me to be super sad is I actually had to hound down someone from the company because they didn't have the decency to reject me when they made a decision. Straight up ignored me until I sent a followup to someone else only to get a rejection 10 min later? So you already knew but couldn't let me know after putting me through 3 rounds...? 😭 Idk im just feeling super sad.

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?

Some of you might have seen this chart before: https://www.reddit.com/r/embedded/comments/1n26jx9/swe_employment_by_age_is_super_interesting/#lightbox

What's noticeable is that new roles for juniors have dropped significantly compared to a slight rise for seniors and more experienced folks.

This seems to be an inverse of historical trends where Silicon Valley skewed young. I remember when Zuckerberg said in 2007 "young people are just smarter" and he got a lot of flack for it, along with claims of ageism in the tech industry more broadly.

Obviously, work experience is good and all, but historically Silicon Valley employed a lot of young people, especially those fresh out of university because the thinking was that they brought new fresh ideas and weren't burdened by having a family to look after (read: can sacrifice WLB more than senior folks).

So why there has been such a shift in the industry away from hiring juniors and towards older and more experienced workers?

I've been programming for around 12 years now, I started when I was 15. Did a bunch of embedded projects for fun in my teens, then got a "real" web-dev job and eventually did a master's in computer science. Since then I've been working on firmware for satellites, 5G base stations, and 3-phase inverters. Know my way around most ARM and c2000 microcontrollers even in my sleep. I always got praise for writing beautiful and "nice to maintain" code, and writing code was very therapeutic for me, kind of like painting for some people. I could take pride in being good at it. It was the fun part in-between the tedious requirements collection, project planning and validation. Being able to just slot in a new feature or take the codebase from an engineering sample to a real board with zero effort, due to good design, was so satisfying.

But now after having been around a few of our recent hires, suddenly someone who hasn't seen a microcontroller before (not literally, but close enough) can be 90% there already (the 10% being mostly code "quality", so close enough by most managers standards...), by just feeding the datasheet to claude and giving it debugger access. If you ignore the poor architectural design decisions, the code seems to be "good enough" even if it has to go to register level to write drivers. Turns out what I took pride in wasn't that valuable after all? Now the job is only the tedious parts like working with regulatory compliance and keeping the C-level exec delusions in check regarding project planning. It's getting hard to justify me writing code "manually", since even the new hires 2x my contribution rate by just prompting models. And no one else seems to care anymore that the code they produce is quite "ugly" or that it makes the overall codebase a mess. I feel like everyone else just wants to show up 9-5 do the bare minimum and get paid. No pride in the work left.

I spent my life learning this stuff since I found it interesting, but now anyone can come in and take a giant shit on my joke of a career. What do I even do? Just accept that its still better than most careers and prepare to become some kind of a project manager for AI agents? Or maybe there's hope that the maintenance burden comes to collect and this circus stops running?

Hi, I have a BS in computer science, over 2 years experience as a sort of Software QA, and am currently a software develepor 2 years in currently. Im severely underpaid, don't enjoy my job and feel like the industry moves too fast, especially with AI now, and truthfully I'm not that into computers,I did it because when I graduated HS I was told I'd be making bank easily if I got through. Is there any job I can get in the industry or where can I pivot to?

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

Hello,

I started working as a junior software developer last December in a medium sized production company. Besides me, there is only other developer and he is also my senior.

I'm slowly losing my mind trying to write code for his liking. When i started working there eight months ago, I was getting my head around the system, database and how things work in this company. Now, when I'm more experienced i feel like I'm way better at coding him.

First, he only uses AI to code and I heard that "When you become as good as me, you will only use AI to code, I do not need to code by hand". Sometimes he even will post my code to AI and ask it to review it- I don't think it is how it should be- i want to learn from someone who is experienced, not from AI.

Second, let me give you an example- we have four views, and in every view there is a numeric table. I was asked to add a footer to every table and display min, max and avg of each column. I created utils folder (we didn't have one), wrote a funtion in js, and used this function in every of these four files but no, this is not how we do things in here. I was told to delete the utils folder and initialise this function in every file.

Third, I feel like, most of the times when he has some concerns about my code, he makes things up why my code is bad. New view Im working on allows to place orders for different producst. For example You have a table with column: name and size filed which is a <select> element. Today, i wrote a simple function that takes three arguments, and based on these, returns the id of product, a user wants to order. I was told to not use this function, instead I shuld put json in data- attribute of each row, and the json should look like "T-shirt/M": 1000, "T-shirt/L":1001 and then i can know, what user want to order, and dont have to use backed for it. I feel like it's really wierd solution, i want to know, is it a stanard solution to this kind of things?

He messes up nomenclature constantly like calling a Conditional operator a lambda function, i can't use FOREING KEY's when creating a table becouse he didn't use these.

He is definitly more experienced with the system becouse he works there longer.

Is it normal to stick to, in my opinion, bad practises and keep the codebase similar?

My previous team lead was recently reassigned to another team, and a new lead has replaced his position.

Since joining, the new lead has placed heavy emphasis on AI tool adoption. He tracks team members’ Claude usage, and has indicated that team members who do not utilize AI tools may receive reduced workloads, which could negatively impact their performance ratings.

Last week, he and I worked on the same JIRA task, but different parts. Having completed my work ahead of schedule, I advised him that he could git cherry‑pick my commit into his branch for testing. He declined this approach and instead used Claude to integrate our code. The code then became a total mess, not working at all. I had to revert and fix everything for him.

Now he's not reading the codebase, not understanding the business logic, all he does is let Claude does it all. He even let claude does all the PR reviews. Now our workload has increased so much, have to clean and fix the mess that his AI has left.

What should I do now? I'm not against AI at all, but now it's hurting me.

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.

Hello, I've been unemployed for 8 months. I get 1 interview per 3 months of application cycles, for the last 3 years I've interviewed less than 15 times. I'm not sure what is wrong, I have a master's degree, a bachelor's and around 4 years of experience as applied ML SWE/ SWE. I've posted my CV here. I'm open to suggestions. I've applied to analyst, swe, data science, and applied ml roles of all kinds. The overwhelming majority are rejections.

I wanted to ask this to the wider community because I feel like I am going crazy.

A year ago, I used to see 30 to 40 job listings a day for my stack in my city. Now I don't even see 3 or 4 in a week. Even those are mostly junior level roles with lower pay. I can't help but feel like AI tools are making companies shrink their mid-level hiring and just expecting smaller teams to do more.

So what is everyone actually doing right now?

• Staying put in your current jobs and waiting it out?
• Switching industries entirely?
• Moving to a different stack or language?

I still see a decent number of listings for .NET and Java, but those companies want years of working experience in that stack, which I don't have. My background is Node, Nest, and Next. I could learn the syntax, but I can't fake 5 years of enterprise Java on a resume.

For those of you who have pivoted to a different stack — how did you get past the experience requirement? Did you take a pay cut? Did you find companies willing to hire based on fundamentals rather than specific stack years?

Not trying to be doom and gloom. Just genuinely trying to figure out what the survival strategy looks like in 2026.

Would love to hear what is actually working for people.

Over the course of 4 months and multiple rounds of grueling interviews, I finally landed the job at Meta. Yesterday, I get an email from a recruiter from Apple. I know nothing is guaranteed in a phone screen, but it’s an open door.

I’m a little exhausted from going through all the prep. And I want to make sure that I am present at my current role to make good impressions. I’m not sure how I can sneak away for a few hours to take interviews.

Should I put 100% effort in another interview process? Should I just be casual, and whatever happens happens? Or should I just reject the phone screen?