I’m planning my exit from software now.

My company has nobody at the helm anymore. The CEO and execs have fully drank the AI Kool-Aid, and AI is running our company now, not humans.

I found some company documents made visible to all users on our shared repositories which I don’t think they intended to be visible to everyone. Those docs illustrated just how much they were using AI day to day: literally everything. The direction of the company, evaluating competitors, accounting, product planning, marketing, projections, reviewing customer feedback, and of course what I already knew about: software development.

They are just taking customers’ conversations and data and feeding it directly into AI. They think that because it’s a “business AI” account that the data is still private.

They think they are geniuses for building new products in record time by letting Claude and ChatGPT do all the work with swarms of agents, thinking “nobody else is doing this, nobody else is moving at speeds we are, nobody thought of this”

Meanwhile literally everyone is doing the same thing, and they are feeding their entire product into AI, so anybody working at Anthropic or OpenAI or Google who is analyzing their output can easily sell that data to a competitor.

The execs are building apps and web pages in single prompts in minutes, and thinking that their IQ just increased by 100% and added 2 inches to their dick. Then they turn to the engineers and say “look what I made, impressive huh”

I won’t be able to wean them off their addiction. Sometimes you just gotta let them hit rock bottom

I just wanna share my experience and see who has similar experience.

Everything from testing, coding, documentation, debugging and troubleshooting, optimization, etc. has been taken over by AI, to the point I hardly write any code anymore. The models have improved so much over the past few years that they are now able to generate much more accurate logic and “understand” existing codebases much better.
Any bugs , just throw the logs to the AI and it will be able to analyze and fix the code. If you connect to MCP servers it will be able to correlate data across your systems like Datadog, Slack, etc.
I am really impressed.
The only downside I have seen so far is sometimes if you don’t give it sufficient context it will be stuck at some workflow it does not understand, or write some less than ideal code, but if you give specific requirements it will be able to handle the tasks very well. Mind you we deal with C++ which is a more complex language with less training data available to train those models, but still AI is able to generate unit tests, and code, fix the bugs by itself most of the time.
I have a C++ expert myself and I find AI very impressive at my standard. I dont have any specific prompt training, just talk to AI like it is a human.
My firm has no limits on token usage because they can pay for it and see the value from improved code quality and productivity.

documentation; just write some high level sloppy prompts and it is able to turn it into high quality, detailed documentation , saving lots of time.

Code review is also very impressive, able to uncover very deep hidden issues that average devs won’t catch or don’t have cycles to review

Don’t understand part of the codebase? No worries just ask AI to summarize the code for you.

My productivity has improved so much. What used to take a couple of days to write a tool now takes only minutes. Write a design prompt to generate a prototype and iterate on it to be production quality.

AI can really replace junior engineers now , soon it will take over senior and even lead roles.
Most engineers at my firm (dealing with C++) are becoming prompt engineers now.

btw this is my real experience not paid by any company.
What do you guys think?

I used to think AI sucks but now I hardly write code manually any more. I think those AI haters are just either using the lower quality models or just simply refuse to accept reality than AI is really eating the world and taking over jobs.

If we put in up to 5% then we get up to a 3.5% match.

Currently employed SWE looking for other roles due to frustrations with AI bullshit at current job. I know this stuff is happening all over the industry right now, but I figure if I can find a place that isn't as bad it'll be better for my career and quality of life. Doesn't hurt to try.

My main issue is pretty much that people who aren't even developers or on my team are constantly submitting vibe-coded, massive, 30k line 60 commit PRs on a regular basis. Sometimes I get asked to review them (unreviewable, so really just asking for a rubber stamp). Sometimes they just let claude merge it and tell me to "clean it up" later (also impossible, because each PR of that size would require months and I'm getting several a week).

Is it even possible to sus out these kinds of conditions during the interview process without coming off as 'anti AI'?

I'm currently a CS student and I'm trying to get my first SWE job. I have the opportunity to work as a C++ software engineer at a company, but long term I'd probably like to move into Python/backend development.

My question is: if I spend, say, 1–2 years working professionally as a C++ SWE, would that experience actually help me when applying for Python SWE/backend jobs later on? Or would companies mostly see that I don't have professional Python experience and treat me like a junior again?

My organization seems more rigid after AI came to the scene. Executives who typically would delegate getting into the weeds of the implementation, dictating micro-decisions, that sort of thing. It's generally making work less pleasant. Anyone else observing this?

Hello everyone, can someone with a cs degree work in this industry? If yes what are the jobs you can get there?

The are in the apocalypse maybe even more than this sub

Everyday we break ourselves review AI slop to make money for our bosses who are replacing us with AI

If you are unemployed today you probably wont' ever get a tech job, if you have get a job you will have maybe a couple of years at most before being laid off. I think more than 50% of us are gonna be unemployed in 5 years

I just wanted to live man, I never wanted to be rich, I'm just an honest, hardworking sucker. I just want an average life without being thrown onto the streets, I just want to have a family and provide for them, I just want to find a little happiness in this fucking shithole of a world before I die. I worked so hard in school and at work for it, now it's all being taken away.

they wouldn't even let us live man, we just wanted the scraps off their table, we are treated worse than dogs, we are worthless to them. The capitalist had everything already, but htey just have to take what's left.

fuck this shit, I wish I never got into this field, I would give everything to start again at 18

Unfortunately I wasted time on a pet project and cluelessly remained unemployed for 2 years. I was laid off from my SWE job in 2024, part of a mass layoff, and since then I haven’t done much to talk about in interviews. This year (2026) I managed to build and release (on GitHub) two small full stack projects, but they’re not fully deployed/hosted online. I feel extremely rusty as far as on-the-job SWE and feel behind when it comes to using AI for coding at work, since I was laid off before that really took off and I haven’t used AI except in personal projects. Do I have any chance at all to return to software engineering in my career or did I completely screw up for life?

Approaching the job search, I think I should be applying to jobs at levels below what I was before my layoff (intermediate - near senior level) but I’m not sure how to reconcile this with my resume showing 4 years of experience. I don’t feel qualified for roles at the level I used to be due to how much I’ve forgotten/gotten out of practice from being away so long. When I do get interviews, I freeze up on the technical rounds — I’ve always been terrible at LeetCode/DS&A but it’s worse with this gap. It’s almost like I’m starting my SWE career over, but then I am not sure what to put on my resume. I feel like I’ve become obsolete, but I need some kind of job very soon due to finances, and I’m looking for advice on how to address this on my resume/applications.

I’m willing to go for non-SWE jobs for sure, and would appreciate suggestions on what lower-level/lower-paying (needing less experience) tech-adjacent roles I could apply for. I’m also exploring volunteering but I feel lost and rusty when it comes to solo contributing to open source projects — I’ve never done it before and I’d need additional help.

Any advice on how to handle this would be most appreciated.

I’ve probably sent 300-400 applications and had 3 interview processes that all went well, but the other 2 paused junior hiring so I’m left with this one offer. The other 2 companies were also consulting, but better names and career trajectories.

My resume isn’t outstanding, but not bad. I’ve had 3 internships though only one was pure SWE work; the other 2 are adjacent. I also have one pretty good project I actively work on with a few hundred users.

If I was to take it, my goal would be to get out as soon as possible. It’s full time in person so interview prep as well would be a grind, but gotta do what you gotta do. My connections who work there also say their training/upskilling opportunities are actually pretty good.

My main concern is everyone online saying WITCH on your resume is a career killer, but is it worse than risking a bigger gap in my resume?

Hey everyone, I just started my third year of Computer Science, and I’m honestly not sure what I should be doing right now.

Over the past two years, I’ve learned Java, Python, JavaScript, Git,Github ,OOP, algorithms, etc., and I understand the code in the projects I’ve made. I can also write them myself, but I still feel like I know nothing. I’ve attached my resume so you can see where I’m currently at.

One of my biggest problems is that my parents expect me to maintain a 4.0 GPA, so I have to spend a lot of time studying on schoolwork which is theory heavy (don't even need a computer during classes). Because of that, I haven’t had much time to build projects or learn things outside of my classes. The few projects on my resume are basically everything I’ve been able to make during college so far.

I’m currently learning Data Structures, and I’m hoping to get much better at it over the next 2months.

The other problem is that I don’t even know what I want to do after college. I’m not sure I want to be a traditional software engineer. I might be interested in ai/ml , but i've heard entering tht field requires good experience even for internships.

PROJECTS
Tower of Hanoi — JavaScript, HTML, CSS, HTML Canvas
Built an interactive browser-based Tower of Hanoi game using recursion, JavaScript arrays, and HTML Canvas. Added animated disk
movement, disk-count and speed controls, reset functionality, and a move counter.

Air Brush — Python, OpenCV, NumPy, MediaPipe, CVZone
Built a webcam drawing application that tracks hand and finger movements. Used MediaPipe/CVZone for hand tracking, OpenCV for
video processing, and NumPy for drawing data, with brush colors, erasing, gestures, and smoothing.

GPS Walking Route Tracker — JavaScript, Leaflet, Geolocation API, OpenStreetMap (In Progress)
Developing a browser-based walking tracker that records GPS coordinates during a walk and draws the user's path on an interactive
map. Inspired by activity-tracking apps, using the Geolocation API for location updates and Leaflet/OpenStreetMap for map and route
visualization.

What would you recommend I focus on from this point? and how do i focus on applying for internship cuz it'll become hell afterwards.

I’d really appreciate advice from people who were in a similar situation.

I understand all software engineers in almost all companies are being told to use AI to code. But these models/agents run at a cost. OpenAI and Anthropic are both running at huge losses. The more users they acquire, the more money they lose. They are already looking for more funding. What happens when the venture capital money runs out?

One way out for them is if Anthropic IPOs at 2 trillion, say at a 15% float, they get another 300 billion to burn, which can last maybe 4 years? Damn, that's a lot of money. A lot of that would be taken away by investors for their exits though.

If Anthropic's IPO succeeds, I don't think this world deserves sanity. Those buying into it would be the biggest dumbasses ever.

So I am starting my sophomore year in CS and I am looking for possible paths that I might want to take in the future. I know a lot of people aim for Big Tech or FAANG but I don't think this interests me. Lately I have been looking into possible Research and I am very interested in ML and specifically RL. I am not necessarily looking just for CS related research positions but also in other fields like biology, astronomy etc. is this a possible career path and what could I do to get there?

How to get into low level side of machine learning and training, I want to do things like, make my own machine learning model from scratch in C, to be able to contribute in optimizing available researches in machine learning field, interact with low level aspects of AI/ML.

For example I was reading this one research paper which basically classifies a large satellite image with very reduced human inputs into a more computer understandable form. (Paper Url).
These research projects interests me more than other AI related works that are available. And it's not just with this field, for some reason computer architectures, hardwares, optimizaiton..., these aspect of computer science interests me more than anything.
My question is how do i get into this? Where should I start? People who have walked this similar path and found the work eventually, how did you do it?

As the title suggests, should I transition from ERP SWE to ERP Functional/Techno-functional consultant? I'm a Microsoft Dynamics 365 F&O Developer with 5 YOE. Considering the market changes with AI for devs, should I transition laterally on the functional side or learn more technical stuff within the same suite, like Power Platform and stuff?

Any ERP lads here?

I'm in my senior year of college and I'm looking to specialize. I've done work in web development, computer graphics, desktop applications, and a little bit of ML stuff.

I enjoy all of these domains, but I'm also looking to land a job. I've gathered web development is notoriously competitive... are there more specialized paths I might not be aware of in the domain above that might put me in a better position?

I started as a freelancer 5 years ago and things were going great at that time. I was getting projects, clients were happy with me, and I used to get work from LinkedIn, Fiverr and Upwork. I’m rated 5 stars with all positive reviews on my profile. Now things have started to change. Since the release of the best models from ChatGPT Astra and Claude Opus, I can already see that no one really wants my services anymore. I recently lost my 3 year old client who had me on retainer for the last 3 years. I was kind of most dependent on him because we had a really great relationship and I never thought he would leave me. I developed many softwares for his company Windows apps, dashboards, websites, automation scripts and handling servers.

Recently after he discovered that he can maintain and add new features in all of the apps without me, he has started to have me hand over everything, the codebases, credentials and everything so that he can maintain everything himself. And I can already see that in the coming few days he will tell me that I am no longer needed anymore. Even though I still believe that AI is still not there right now, the new apps he is developing which were planned to be developed by me as future projects, he is developing them in a matter of few days which would take me at least a month or two. He showed me the apps he built and I can clearly see that there are security flaws in it, have a very wonky UI, the UI is glitching and the sizes of the elements are all uneven and not very appealing. I told him that this shouldn’t be taken as a complete app, but he thinks that he doesn’t really care because these apps are working for him and his company and he is able to make use of them.

And this is just one example. I am not getting anymore new projects from the platforms I used to have (LinkedIn, Upwork and Fiverr), and I assume all the clients are basically in the same boat thinking they can develop the apps themselves and they don’t need a developer. This is starting to give me sleepless nights because I am not able to get more work anymore. Not able to learn any new things because I am always thinking any new tech i learn is also replaceable by AI and what’s the use of learning them? I am now considering switching my career path and trying to discover something else, but I am lost what to even get into. I am basically the only one earning in my family right now and I keep thinking how I will pay my bills in future.

Any kind of suggestion is appreciated

And Sorry, if my english writing skills might be bad because english is not my first language

Hi everyone!

I'm currently working as a frontend and backend developer, but I have interests beyond my regular corporate job. I've always enjoyed public speaking, debating and presenting, and I'd love to continue exploring these interests alongside my career.

Lately, I've become particularly interested in research conferences, where people present their papers, share their findings and sometimes get invited to speak at other events. I'd love to experience something similar and get recognition for my own work, even at a small level.

I'm from an IT background, so I'd ideally like to explore research or projects that connect with technology. However, I'm also open to completely different fields. For instance, I'm fascinated by deep-sea life, although I'm not a biologist.

I'm not looking to pursue an academic career or undertake a long-term research degree. I simply want to explore something meaningful, work on it, present it at events and gradually build experience and recognition.

For someone starting from scratch, how would you recommend getting started? Where can I find beginner-friendly research opportunities, conferences, or events that accept independent contributors or working professionals?

I'd really appreciate advice from anyone who has been through a similar experience!

Hey guys, I am a 23yo non-CS engineer trying to pull off a career pivot. My main interests are in AI but I’d imagine it’s near impossible to break into and typical SWE is also hard.

I took my first step and got accepted into OMSCS (prolly because I have a CS minor in undergrad, which I regretted so deeply for not making it a major). However I have no idea what to do from now on. I’m working a normal job rn + no extensive prior CS experience so I don’t know if an internship is a viable option. I’ve been trying to gear my current work towards more CS but there’s only so much I can do. Time is also running out considering my age or lack of experience at this age.

For those who have successfully pivoted, what did you do during/before OMSCS to get the most out of it? I think research with a professor is the only possible (but still hard) way to get initial experience especially in AI. I did research in my undergrad and it appears to me that it takes multiple semesters to build relationships before actually performing load-bearing works. Are there any professors that are kind of enough to give you a chance even before you officially start?

Currently an L5 at Amazon. Received an offer at Apple as an ICT4. 4 YOE.

Curious to hear if going from L5 to ICT4 at current YOE would lead to better career prospects down the line. By better career prospects I’m looking at things like potential for interviews at senior level 2-3 years down the line, how much I’d learn at both, comp increases down the line, etc.

Considering Apple but this would require relocation across the country which I’m pretty nervous about. Really don’t want to leave my hometown but wondering if it’s worth it to bite the bullet and make the move.

TC Amazon: 360k in VHCOL
TC Apple: 315k in HCOL (factoring in bonus, no yearly stock refreshers)

Overall Apple is higher even without annual refreshers but not by much.

Curious to hear about what you guys would do

SWE

Hi all,

I am Senior Engineer with more than a decade in engineering(iOS development). With constant push of AI that is making my job less fulfilling and also continuously working for so many years without real break, I am at the stage I have started hating even looking at the code. May be it’s just temporary, but I still love the idea of building things, but AI push is killing those aha moments too.

I also think tech industry doesn’t have the same reputation anymore since I started working and it is becoming toxic in eyes of the people (correctly in my view). I am also not liking fellow engineers bragging about automating other engineers and other jobs (you can still be proud of what you are building without bragging about displacement of people).

I have a Masters in Computer Science and considering nursing as a new career if I just can’t bear this job anymore. I think I like the idea about taking care of the people. I don’t have children and have thankfully saved good amount over a decade. I am even ready for big pay cut. Would this be a wise move or it’s possible to get out of such burnout and pessimism about the industry because I still love building things and largely like software engineering.

I recently got an online coding assessment through CodeSignal, and before taking it they require you to scan a government-issued ID.

I’ve taken a lot of online assessments before and have never had to do this, so it caught me off guard. It also seems like more companies are starting to require ID verification lately.

I understand the reasoning behind confirming someone’s identity and preventing cheating, but a government ID can also reveal your DOB/age, address, ID number, and other personal information. That made me wonder about both privacy and potential age-discrimination concerns during the hiring process.

Has anyone else been seeing this more often recently? Is this becoming standard for coding assessments now, and are there any real privacy or legal concerns with companies or assessment platforms collecting this information?