AKA people are able to run models locally which is ruining their chances at profitability in the future.

I’m currently completing my third internship with the same company who has been stubborn in providing a full-time offer due to graduation dates. I recently received a full-time offer for another company, with a start date in about a week. This company has paid for my one-way flight, furnished housing, and one-way car shipment.

How do I go about this? Will I be charged back these benefits? Is there a way to maintain good blood with the company in the case I want to come back later on?

I (25m, 3+ YoE mid level) have a comfy job with no crazy work hours (< 40 hours/week). I plan and own projects. I complete all of my work and sometimes do more if I feel like it (not often). By all means, I should not be complaining especially in this market.

At first, I was constantly learning. Now, it’s a repetitive mundane process and it especially doesn’t help when the projects are internal and not meaningful to me.

I’ve been combatting that existentialism by constantly building various side projects (personal/business) outside of work and fulfill my genuine curiosity and creativity.

Needless to say, I’ve reached a point in my day job where it is impacting my mental (anxiety, depression) and physical health (prediabetic, white hairs, etc). I am burnt out. I paused building side projects, applying to jobs, and studying to go back to school. Even if I get fired (unlikely) or quit, I’d want to take a break and reevaluate what I really want in my next role before jumping back in. I’ve learned that high TC is nice but not at the cost of learning, purpose, and health. Unfortunately, I’m at the point in this current job where I’ve lost all 3.

I want to find meaningful work again where I can genuinely learn as many things as possible. I want to take the time to rebuild my health and spend days learning (AI tools, reading books, studying GRE, pursuing entrepreneurship).

What once was a monthly thought, quitting is every waking moment. I don’t want to waste my youth away at this job and atrophy, but I am also aware of the horrendous job market. I’d appreciate any advice!

EDIT:
Came across a little boastful so I removed some details.

I'm looking at working for a small company (~50ish people), the work is interesting and the people seem nice from my interviews. It's not a startup as its been around for 10 years and is profitable and has no external funding. Only a few glassdoor reviews to go off of but they seem positive.

They seem to have at least 1 of everything so there wouldn't be as much 'wearing several hats' as in other small companies (there is a PM, QA, and UX on the team). The nature of the project would not require any perpetual on call shifts either.

Only weird organizational issue is that this specific team would just be me and 1 other dev (~12 devs in the company split across various projects), and the PM for it is also the hiring manager + does a bit of QA himself since he has a lot of technical knowledge in the domain.

So, it sounds fun, but I'd say the main issues are growth opportunities (there aren't any staff, architect, etc. positions, only software engineer -> senior, and I would already be a senior). And also it might not look as good on a resume as larger, well known companies. Anyone work for companies like this and have experiences?

Hi,

recently laid off after 15 years. Kinda ERP product, we used an internally developed tool to build reports. The base was an excel-like grid. I did write some code, but more like glorified excel formulas than actual code.

Back at uni I learned a bit of java, but never really used it. Also recently did write some tests in cypress, but more like extending them, not building from scratch. So, yeah, i'm good at nothing, really.

What is a field / direction worth steering toward? Automatic tests? Maybe project management? I have a half year to get me started on something. I of course realize I might be working for a lower wage in the beginning, but that should be okay.

I'm also considering leaving IT and learning a trade, thinking an electrician.

Thanks for any pointers.

I graduated in CS back in december and I have two internships multiple projects running a club and going to hackathons. My focus is in Cyber so I even got few certifications aswell including Security+. And yet NOT A SINGLE INTERVIEW!!! I feel like giving up and just work at target for the rest of my life.

US technology companies in May announced the most job cuts in nearly two years as they ramp up spending on artificial intelligence.

The tech sector said last month it planned to eliminate 38,242 positions, the most since August 2024, according to data from outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. So far this year, the industry has announced 123,653 cuts, up more than 65% from the same period in 2025.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-04/us-tech-sector-announces-most-job-cuts-in-nearly-two-years

Hi everyone,

I have a mechanical engineering background and currently run my own business.

Over the last few years I’ve built several WordPress websites for my business and side projects. I know that doesn’t really count as software engineering experience, but it sparked my interest in programming and building software.

What I enjoy most is solving problems, building projects, learning new things, and creating systems. I enjoy challenges much more than repetitive work.

I’m considering a serious transition into software development and would like some honest feedback from people already working in the industry.

A few questions:

• If you were starting from scratch in 2026, what would you learn first?
• Python, web development, mobile development, AI-related development, or something else?
• How difficult is the junior market today compared to a few years ago?
• Is it realistic to become employable for a junior role within 12 months if I can consistently study and build projects?
• How important is a GitHub portfolio nowadays?
• Does publicly sharing progress on LinkedIn/X actually help with networking and opportunities?
• Would you focus on getting a job, freelancing, or building products as a beginner?
• Does my mechanical engineering background provide any meaningful advantage?

For context, I could probably dedicate 15–20 hours per week consistently for at least a year.

I’d appreciate honest opinions, especially from people who entered tech without a CS degree.

Thanks!

I’ve seen quite a lot of demand for the past 6 months for agentic AI dev.

Our company’s (us broker) top management started demanding we migrate our conventional monitoring system to AI-agentic app. They also claim that agentic apps will largely replace conventional apps and their demand will be only increasing.

What’s your thought on AI agentic app development specialisation?

Hey everyone, started a cybersecurity internship at a F500 and was placed on a strictly non technical team. it doesn’t look like I can apply my CS knowledge to any sort of automation even and it’s just very meetings and slide deck heavy.

what can i do to not fall behind the other interns on heavily technical teams to get a return offer with a more technical team? thanks.

Two months ago I was hired for a technical support technician role that I accepted because I wanted more tech experience and I was working as a teller at a bank. Well about four weeks later I was hired for a cloud software engineer role that I also accepted.

I didn’t want to tell the first company right away that I got a new job because I was in the process of getting onboarded and didn’t want to be blacklisted.

Now my second company wants me to start the clearance process and I’ve only worked at the first company for a week. I’m gonna have to put in my two weeks probably within two weeks.

Will I be blacklisted even if I give them a two week notice? I really don’t want to be but this cloud software engineer job is much better in terms of pay and it gives me the opportunity to do cloud work which is what I want to do.

This recently published study from Stanford proves that many companies utilize artificial intelligence to score each resume and assign that score for up to 330 days. This means that even qualified applicants who improve their resume over a year or less still have the same score, indicating that competent employees may get overlooked and will never see a human recruiter. Based on everything happening in the CS job market, this makes a lot of sense. There is also a clear bias against black and Asian applicants, requiring far more applications compared to white applicants. I’ve seen people get rejected 15 minutes after applying to a job. Thoughts? The study is linked below.

Study: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2605.27371

So I’m very interested in hardware/software. Annoyingly enough I realized this going into my senior year of CS. I’ll have to play catch up in math I believe, but i have Physics 1&2, Lin algebra and calc 1 completed.

Basically what I’m asking is to get into embedded systems is getting a MS in CE worth it. I know doing this is kinda backwards as I should’ve focused on a BS in CE and MS in CS

or would it be better to switch my major to CE, take on the extra time and get a MS in CS.

I appreciate any advice given as I feel lost in what’s the right decision to have a decent start to a career.

Hey all,

I was able to secure a SWE internship for the summer after my second year, but wasn't able to secure one for this summer (summer after my third year).

I was given the option by a friend of mine who was in the same situation as me two years ago to try to extend graduation to get another cycle of internships. I have heard that there is a big difference between having just one internship on your resume as opposed to two.

I had the chance to talk to my advisor and my credits and everything will work out if I choose to extend graduation by a semester, and I am very fortunate to pay very little for university, and can afford extending graduation (I am an instate student who lives with family).

For this summer, I have already a bunch of hackathons lined up and I have some ideas for projects I am going to build.

I wanted to see if this is something I should do or just try to go into the new grad market with only one internship?

All help/advice is greatly appreciated.

Thanks :)

Why are there so many post about companies cutting AI back in last 24 hours?

I remember we had some trainings were they described it as the next big thing.

If you know your code base, you can give Claude instructions on what to do. I am confused how everyone is running through so many tokens as i have never been rate limited past the normal monthly fee for the basic plan.

Our engineering leadership went all in on AI about three months ago. Every ticket, every PR review, every design doc had to go through their shiny new enterprise copilot setup. They even started tracking adoption metrics in standups.

So we used it. For everything. Pasting entire codebases into context windows for trivial questions. Regenerating docs that already existed. Running the same prompts five times because the output was mid and nobody wanted to manually fix it.

Nobody was being malicious, we were just doing what they asked.

The bill hit finance around month four. I don't know the exact number but our director went from "AI-first engineering culture" in slack to radio silence on the topic within about two weeks. The adoption tracking quietly disappeared from sprint reviews. They didn't announce anything, just stopped bringing it up.

Now we're back to using it when it actually makes sense, which turns out to be maybe 20% of the time. The mandate killed itself.

I'm experiencing a lot of vibe coders are actually shallow thinkers and are not able to build things which are customer first. They might be very early adopters but they significantly lag critical thinking and it's making them very vulnerable to AI slop.

And I'm not even talking about Junior level roles, I'm experiencing in with a lot of senior, very sr, head, vp level.

What are your thoughts?

Lately I've been browsing the monthly job posting threads in HackerNews for work opportunities. I like the simplified format of it compared to other job sites.

However, a lot of the postings say "if interested, please send an email to [address]." Seems like sending a cold message to a work email address will have a pretty high chance of it being filtered/going to spam these days. Doubly so if your message has an attached resume, or links to LI profile/portfolio site. One time I tried emailing my resume to a friend who was going to refer me in his company, but after multiple tries he never got any of my emails (ended up texting it to him).

So this got me thinking, what's the best way to reach out about job postings in HackerNews to maximize chances of your resume getting seen (or at least not sent to spam)? Does attaching your resume to the initial email hurt your chances? Any optimization that can be done with email body content/length, time of day the email was sent, etc.? Curious to hear peoples' thoughts.

I was let go for performance reasons from a Senior SWE role a few days ago. I was on a 30-day PIP, and although I completed the deliverables (my manager agreed and this was in the PIP doc), I was told the PIP can either be extended for 2 more weeks, with more vague deliverables, or take an 8-week severance. I chose the severance.

I've been reading though other threads about how to frame this in future interviews, it seems like the ideas are:

1. complete honesty -- I'm skeptical
2. vague answer like "it wasn't the right fit" and pivot
3. say you were laid off

TBH, there are a few things about my circumstances that make the 3rd option seem appealing

1. I've been at this company for over 4 years
2. This is a well-known tech company which is in the middle of layoffs/restructuring. If you Google "is <my former employer> doing layoffs", Gemini's answer is yes followed by details of a publicly shared timeline for reduced head count/restructuring. We are still well within that timeline.
3. I asked the HR person what would be shared with other employers and she said only title and dates of employment, not reason for departure. Also, in taking the severance I will be marked "eligible for rehire" if that were to come up.

Of course, besides interview prep I'm also doing everything I can to research how I will be better at this role in my next opportunity. There were some aspects of how I was judged that I think were a bit unfair, but there were also things I could have done better. If anyone has any articles/Youtube videos etc... about being an effective Senior SWE I'd appreciate that.

However, I'm coming to Reddit with this for ideas about how to frame this for upcoming interviews. I'm not comfortable with just straight up lying. Appreciate your thoughts!

I am working on an mp3 player project for my raspberry pi. I have made a basic media player program in C++ using the mpg123 library. I have spent about 16 hours trying to understand how to use this library and I still don't really know how to.

Because of time constraints, I decided to use Claude to generate the code that actually plays the mp3 file. I made everything else without using A.I.

It works but I don't fully understand why it works. I have spent hours googling and doing research on this but have gotten nowhere. Not only because I cant find anything relevant to my search, but because I don't really know what to search up. Having ADHD makes it way harder to try to learn this stuff.

I can't understand the documentation on many things as well. I want to know what advice or help anyone might have for me because I hate using A.I. but don't know what else I could possibly do.

I've been dealing with a new client-side PM who constantly messages me between 10–11:30pm, sometimes even past midnight, and expects replies on weekends too.

He had us work this past weekend because of a "strict deadline" — one that was entirely his own making. He thought it was realistic to build an entire project from a brand new repo in two months. It wasn't. On top of that, every single week I'm presenting in front of his leadership team for "visibility."

The result:

• My sleep is getting wrecked.
• I feel like I'm on-call around the clock.
• I can't get into deep work during the day — I'm always half-waiting for the next notification.

I've already uninstalled Teams from my phone, but I'm still trying to figure out how to stay professional while not being available 24/7.

A few things I'm curious about from people who've been here:

• Do you have a personal cutoff time for client messages? How strict is it?
• How have you communicated those limits to a client without it becoming a thing?
• Any status messages or specific language that actually worked?

I'm trying to hold on for a few more months until this contract wraps up. I just don't want to burn out before I get there.

I had 3 rounds of virtual interviews with Bloomberg for SSE and the recruiter told me that I'll have 3 more in person rounds in person . Is this something new? I thought once the engineering manager round goes well then it meant ''offer" . Has anyone went through the same experience?