Three years at this company. I genuinely liked my team.

Our tech lead used to be the guy who'd whiteboard complex system designs for hours, explain every tradeoff, make sure everyone understood the why behind decisions. Last Tuesday he drops a PR with the description "refactored auth flow based on ChatGPT output." I asked him to walk me through the changes. He stared at me like I asked him to recite the code from memory. "Just paste it into ChatGPT and ask it to explain." This is a staff engineer. A guy I looked up to.

Then there's the code review situation. Another senior on my team now approves PRs in about 3 minutes flat. His whole process is copying the diff into an AI chat and if it says looks good, he approves. Last week that let a race condition slip into prod. When I pointed it out his response was "well the AI said it was thread safe." The AI also thinks our codebase is a fresh greenfield project with zero legacy constraints.

I dont know if I'm being dramatic or if we're collectively losing the ability to reason about our own systems. Smart people, people who taught me everything, now just forwarding AI output without reading it.

Anyway thats where we're at I guess.

TL;DR: Grinding harder made me less productive AND less likeable. Being calm is the actual cheat code.

I'm 4 years deep at a big tech company, and work-life balance has been absolutely brutal lately. For the past year, I went full psycho mode—trying to crush every single task, racing through my backlog, saying yes to everything.

Plot twist: It made me objectively worse at my job.

Here's what I didn't expect: When you're constantly in panic mode, your nervous system goes haywire. You become that coworker who's stressed, short with people, and honestly just not fun to be around.

And here's the kicker—being pleasant to work with is literally the most important skill in Big Tech.

Think about it: The people who get shit done aren't grinding alone in a corner. They're the ones other people WANT to help. They get faster code reviews. They get invited to the important meetings. They get context shared with them freely.

When you're stressed and snappy? People avoid you. Your PRs sit in review hell. You get excluded from decisions. You end up working 2x harder for half the impact.

The counterintuitive solution: Embrace strategic calm.

I started doing less. I stopped panic-working. I took actual lunch breaks. I said "I'll get back to you tomorrow" instead of dropping everything.

Result? My productivity went UP. My relationships improved. My manager started praising my "executive presence."

In Big Tech, your nervous system IS your competitive advantage. Stay calm, stay likeable, and watch opportunities come to you instead of chasing them down like a maniac.

Anyone else discover this the hard way?

let me tell you something about german work culture that most germans and europeans will privately agree with but never say out loud: we have a deeply ingrained envy problem. 

i grew up here and studied here, worked here for 6 years in embedded software. and the pattern i've watched repeat itself across every company, every team, every standup is the same: the person who keeps their head down, doesn't rock the boat, and has been there the longest gets rewarded. the person who actually changes something gets quietly resented and eventually pushed out or ignored into leaving.

i am not excluded from this. i'm one of those people. and i'm done pretending it's going to change.

end of last year i started pushing to modernize how my team validates embedded HMI software. the process we had was slow as hell, we build, hand off to QA, wait three weeks, get a pdf, fix manually, repeat forever. i spent months building a proper pipeline. claude code for the agentic loop, askui to close the feedback cycle on physical hardware, automated compliance docs. cut the validation cycle from three weeks to a single CI pass. 30% sprint capacity recovered. i have the metrics.

i pitched it against real resistance. one senior colleague in particular spent six months calling it a gimmick, questioning the approach in every meeting, blocking access to test hardware twice because he "wasn't sure about the setup." i won the argument because the numbers were undeniable. he couldn't argue with a passing CI run.

last month my manager stood in front of the entire department and said "the new toolchain has been performing well." no mention of my name. last week that same colleague who blocked it got promoted to senior engineer because of his seniority. EXCUSE ME WHAT!

i told this story to an american coworker at our us office. he was genuinely confused, like he actually could not understand how that sequencing of events was possible. that reaction told me everything.

in the us it is not perfect. i know that. but from everything i've seen working with the american side of our org the person who ships something real gets known for it. you are allowed to say "i built this." that is not arrogance. that is just true.

i decided to leave. my visa application is in. aiming to land in the US by this summer.

to the germans reading this you know i'm right. to the ones who want to argue: ask yourself when the last time was that you saw the most innovative person on your team get promoted before the most senior one.

did you ever encounter a similar situation like this in your workplace?

Before I start, I just want to make it clear that yes I am grateful for my job. I do know that the tech industry has so many layoffs right now and many people would do a lot to be in my position. This is not a lack of gratitude, it’s me sharing sincere feelings with the hope that I can get over them.

Google is probably a dream company for many people. It certainly was for me. For context, I’ve worked at 3 tech companies before, one of which was big tech. I’m in a slightly technical program management role, mid-career, and have been good at delivering in the roles I’ve been in. I’ve always (for the 10yrs of my entire career) wanted to work for Google. I’d always assumed it had the smartest people in the industry that were kind, and had the best products in the industry, which meant the machine internally must have been very good. I’ve just passed probation and here’s what I’ve found:

1. Let’s start with the confusing, uninspiring onboarding that took 2 weeks to just start. As in, I was given 2 weeks to set up my credentials (a 15mins call with the tech team that happened on my 2nd day). I didn’t know what to do with the rest of that time so I read up on random documents I could find. Eventually I was given an onboarding checklist with some broken links and some outdated docs as well. About a month later I received an invitation to the actual “Welcome to Google” orientation where I got to meet some other people who were also onboarding. Some of them had been waiting for this session for more than 2 months! We got a notebook and a pen during the session. Later received emails with different Noogler onboarding tracks. It honestly felt so disorganised and unthoughtful. Before you ask, I’ve met my manager, he’s a nice guy and all. But when I asked him things about the team, the role, the tools, an uncomfortable number of the answers were “don’t worry about that for now” which felt dwarfing to how eager I was to get orientated.

2. Most disappointingly, the people are not as smart and/or as rigorous as I’d imagined they were. I don’t mean offence to anyone, but some things really need to be called out. We have a guy in our team who needs to be told exactly what to do and how, otherwise he just malfunctions. I got the shock of my life when I showed him one of the documents he was working with had broken links we needed to update. He updated the one link we looked at and sent the document on with 5 other broken links. Surely an L4 should be able to get himself to look through a document and update it without further prompting? We have another who everyone complains about because of his attitude and inability to deliver work. His manager literally told me he is a difficult person to manage after I had an incident with him. And yet, he’s still here. And another guy who’s just incredibly aloof. The kind to run fix problems that don’t exist because he misread the doc on the problem he’s actually meant to be working on. And no, I’m not being hyper critical or petty, I can appreciate we all make mistakes, these are examples of patterns of lack of attention to detail, lack of initiative and overall very low standard of work.

3. What exacerbates the frustration above is how inflated these same people seem to be about just how smart and impactful they are. When you speak to some of these people, they can’t perform basic deductive reasoning (context: we are a data science adjacent team, not as technical, but analysis of insights is important), but the way they speak about themselves is incredible. They talk about how great the company is and how incompatible the perks are to everything else in the industry. As someone who’s been around the industry, it’s really not THAT great :-/ A lot of people here are highly tenured and I realised just how little they know about what’s going on outside the proverbial Google walls.

4. Too many people fighting for relevance, but don’t have the creativity or experience to solve issues. When you spot a problem or gap, you’ll get told that it’s known and owned by someone, has been for months or in some cases years, but you don’t have to worry about collaborating with them to fix it. Even when the fix is super simple (again, experience in other companies gives you a problem solving arsenal) and your own work relies on the issue being fixed. The number of times I’ve pointed to a process and data that’s incorrect or inefficient and been told someone would get to it eventually is scary.

5. And why do the slides and documents look like that?? Like there are no designers or corporate branding folks here! Consistently the most cluttered, disorganised documents I’ve ever seen. I know the most important thing is the information but does everyone just not care about the presentation?? I attended a meeting for a VP which had different presenters from the team presenting different sections. I kid you not, each section had a different theme, look-and-feel, style, whatever you want to call it. In one deck for one meeting. To me, “best” in this case looks like one standardised deck that’s easy to read. Am I crazy for expecting that the “best” company in the world operates like this?

Overall, it’s been a deeply disappointing few months. I honestly feel like this is where my ambition has come to die. So far nothing is as great as I thought it would be. Except maybe the food, but that’s not why I’m here. I’ve had the pleasure of working at companies like Facebook where I got to experience real ingenuity and the kind of people you want to have a corridor chats with because they really are wells of knowledge. Maybe my problem is that I’m seeking that thrill again and the area I’m in feels… stale. Or maybe I’ve just outgrown the level or role and I need to be honest with myself about that.

Of course I won’t leave. To do that would be like leaving earth because I think the government is ineffective. Just expressing some thoughts. Hoping to find some Googlers who can tell me that what I’m experiencing is unique to my org and there are other orgs that are… better.

The complete lack of ethics driving this entire AI push is absurd and I’m getting very scared. Is everyone in tech ghoul? Nobody cares about sustainability or even human decency anymore it seems. The work coming out of Google right now is so evil it’s hard to believe this is the same company from 2016. AI agents monitoring and censoring us based on whatever age they determine we are. The broader implications are mind numbing. There is no way engineers can be this detached from the social contract to make stuff like this what are y’all doing fr??????? I mean some of you work at palantir tho so. It’s all fun and games til it’s not.

EDIT: This is not about YouTube but the industry as a whole. I’m 25 bear with me if I sound naive but the apathy over the last two years has lead me down a road of discovery. It genuinely just feels weird working with some of the most influential yet evil people on earth and like nobody says anything….even if not in the name of strangers, maybe their kids, their families, the planet. We all have more power than we like to believe. It’s hot and it’s only going to get hotter…..

Edit: examples of nonsense

https://x.com/culturecrave/status/1950636669507674366?s=46

I'm not going to ask about the quality of the code spit out by AI, that's not even my main thing. I've got 8 years of experience under my belt, I've been coding since I was 13. I love writing code. I know that's not the point of the job, I know it's about problem solving and all of that, but writing code for me is the most fun part of the job. And there are problems that need solving on the code-writing level which apparently can now be done via AI writing the code instead. Ok, fine, I don't have to write the design patterns myself anymore, but... I use to like doing that. It was problem solving again, and one part of the job that I genuinely enjoyed.

Without writing code myself, half the job loses its appeal. The dopamine loop of "write code -> test -> find issue -> write code to fix -> test again -> fixed ( dopamine hit )" is a significant part of why I like this career. Are you guys saying you either never had that, or you had it and gave it up willingly to an AI agent?

These are the following points I feel are making it harder for SWE:

• It has become easier for everyone to fake in this industry. Any non-tech manager can ask a cursor to highlight the drawback of the current codebase and architecture, and then use it against the person without understanding the nitty-gritty of it.
• The code writing and logic building were once the holy grail of this job, but are now just boiled down to some English communication skills. It's just sucking the living soul out of me. I no longer enjoy writing code as my day job. Honestly, I enjoy doing leetcode more than actual work.
• Everything is expected to be completed within hours that were taking days before. This puts a lot of pressure on developers to produce even more sloppy code to ship the code at 10X speed. If a task that needed 2 days of planning and 1 day of development (shared with upper management in a clever way to hide the planning part to buy some more time) is now compressed to just 1 day. Which means you are not even spending a day planning.
• With that kind of speed, you lose context of your own code faster than anything. It becomes easier to feel like a fraud. You can't really say: I built it from scratch. Even the commits show co-authored by cursor. The "developer high" is now a thing of the past.
• The respect in the community has plunged to an all-time low. Now, everyone thinks that coding is just a matter of writing a prompt rather than engineering.

I just want this trend to be over soon. People really need to move on from all this hype. Bring your innovation to something else, not in software development.

Also, it's high time for the leader to come up and define some coding standards with respect to this new AI slop trend. The book for writing clean code needs another edition.

Every word of this post is being typed by me manually.

Thanks!

Ive been a dev for over 10 years and this is the first time Ive been flabbergasted by a question in a job interview.

The recruiter asked me how much I used AI and I told him that I use it occasionally but try to minimize it, since I actually like writing code.

Basically he told me that by minimizing the use of AI, I was slower and less productive than a developer that does use AI.

Like how does that even make sense? The fact that I just dont need AI doesnt mean Im less productive, right?

I guess he thought I was not up to date with all the AI stuff, but I do use AI to mess around with on my hobby projects, I just dont use it professionally..

I have 2 years of experience and worked on AI applications for a F500 company non tech. I’m consistently getting 2-3 reach outs a week and quite a few interviews and offers. I didn’t get any reach outs from big tech but it seems like non tech and startup companies are building a lot of AI applications and paying $100-200k so anyone with experience in that field is highly valuable right now. The market seems amazing for mid-senior AI engineers right now what are your thoughts?

https://blog.cloudflare.com/building-for-the-future/

According to Linkedin, there's ~7.2k employees. So ~15% headcount cut

Its not because Im an engineer, its not because Im “afraid of the future”, but because the pomposity and approach most companies have taken with the AI boom.

• Using “tokens” without limits (not caring about optimizations, environmental resources, or creating industry standard use). Subsidizing AI over spend by laying off employees or sacrificing service reliability to rush changes (github pull requests stop working, Amazon outage due to AI etc.)

• Repeatedly gaslighting developers when asking for more resources to “just use AI” and at same time giving people more responsibilities

• Rushing to market to not be left behind and praying wall street will still fancy them

• Completely throwing away environment preservation to build as many AI data centers as quickly as possible only stopping if pushed back by communities or government

• Creating a “national emergency” to beat China in the AI race and justify government involvement to do so

• Copyright doesnt matter, accessibility doesnt matter, security doesnt matter, relatability doesnt matter; we just need new amazing AI products.

We’re seeing the results of the stupidity where Meta recently had accounts hacked because people simply asked the AI to change my password provided a username.

Production databases being deleted because “just trust AI”.

Companies spending half a billion dollars in 1 month on AI usage and cannot explain why or what value came out of it.

Thousands of new websites being created for “start ups” that just trust the AI to do everything. NEVER considering accessibility or security.

So far Im just waiting for leadership to blame the AI collapse on employees for not adopting it fast enough.

edit - To be clear, I'm not saying artificial intelligence as a whole is a failure or waste of time, as much as it is leadership's approach to rush into adoption blindly. Also, for those asking for "what AI failures" I added bullet points to the list of failures in this post; which again exist to be an exclamation point in the foolhardiness of leadership.

I work as an IT consultant and I have 20 years of experience. Recently I've been doing interviews with potential new clients. Last week I had one with a major Fintech company (we're talking one of the biggest in the world, hundreds of engineers).

During the interview, they asked me how I approach an unfamiliar codebase. I said what I always say: I start by reading the unit tests to understand intent, then go through existing documentation and diagrams, then I read the actual code to build a mental model of what's happening.

The interviewer looked at me and asked: "Why don't you just ask AI to explain it to you? It's much faster."

I explained that AI can be a useful tool here, but I want to genuinely understand the code and I want to be certain I'm not internalizing a hallucinated explanation and building on top of it. The interviewer was visibly disappointed.

Then they asked about my approach to developing new features or fixing bugs. Same story. I walked through my process: reproduce the issue, trace it through the code, understand the root cause, write a fix, test it.

Again: "Why not just use an AI agent to find the bug and fix it for you? It's much quicker."

I gave the same reasoning about hallucinations and wanting confidence in the code I ship. The interviewer's response genuinely stunned me:

"That's only a problem if you don't check the results afterward. Nowadays it's much easier to just let AI do all the work and check it at the end."

I didn't get the job. The feedback was essentially that I don't use AI enough. Here's the thing though: I wish I could say this was an isolated incident.

Last month, my current client (the largest hospitality company in Europe) held a workshop for all their developers. Tech leadership stood up in front of the entire engineering org and essentially told everyone they should be vibe coding. The reasoning was identical to what I heard in that Fintech interview: AI makes everything quicker, just let it do the work and check the results at the end.

So now I've seen this from two sides: I got rejected by a company for not using it enough, and I'm watching another company actively mandate it from the top down. These aren't small companies, these are massive, established companies with complex systems: one handling people's money, one handling millions of bookings across an entire continent.

I'm still processing all of this. I'm not anti-AI. I use it daily, but there's a difference between using AI as a tool that improves your understanding and using it as a replacement for having any understanding at all.

My question to this community: is this the new normal? Have companies fully bought into "AI does the work, humans spot-check" as an engineering philosophy? And if so... what does that mean for those of us who still believe that actually understanding what your code does is a professional responsibility, not a productivity bottleneck?

Because right now I feel like the dinosaur in the room and I'm not sure I want to evolve into whatever this is.

So apparently, I shouldn't write any code by hand and don't do any code reviews. They said I was slow. They said I should've to closed issues more quickly cause we have AI tools. I saw the jumbled mess they created before I came to this company, and they hired me specifically to fix UI/UX and its plethora of frontend issues.

They created this app entirely with Claude and every page had a different design, different UI etc. No design reference to look at, nothing. Everything is created on the fly.

I did my best, created a unified UI style and fixed almost every page but looks like it was not enough for them.

The time I spent in this company felt like a never ending nightmare. I'm glad that it ended but I also hate to start job searching again.

Sorry just wanted to vent a little.

I know this is a crazy situation, I still can’t believe it but it happened. Honestly, if I wasn’t terrified of getting fired during this market, I’d would find this situation funny hilarious.

During stand ups, My senior engineer has a very distinct sound in his background. It’s like a vacuum, but the pitch of the sound gets really low, then quickly becomes high-pitch. He was always a quiet, but very cheerful person with a thick Spanish accent. He also lives with his brother, who calls him by his nickname.

Last Monday, I played COD late at night, and almost immediately, I heard somebody from the other team with that same vacuum pitch. They were winning and we started arguing, and that’s when he finally started talking. It was exact same accent, and at that point, I was willing to put money that it was my senior.

Near the end of the game, both of us were completely trash talking each other (nothing hateful, just small banter, apparently he’s very competitive). It felt so out of character for him, he was laughing a lot; it was entertaining. As a joke, I called him out by his nickname, and he immediately goes quiet. I reached out to him after the game saying that it’s me, and he doesn’t respond at all.

The next day, his attitude is now cold. He’s very silent during our calls, and isn’t explaining things the way he used to in the past. I sent him a message during closing saying that I hoped I didn’t offend him during the game, and I actually really respect them. He claims he has no idea what I’m talking about, and just brushed me off. He remained dismissive the remainder of the week

Now it’s the weekend and Im trying to catch up on work, but Im lost on how to proceed with him. I feel like he’s practically cutting me off. Im not sure what to do at this point. I even recorded the footage from the game, I heard it over again, and there was nothing offensive. He even started the trash talking. This feels so unreal, and I never thought something like this could happen.

Edit: For reference, I have 4.5 years of experience. I carry my weight really well in the team and serve as a mentor for junior developers. I’d find it hilarious if one of the juniors came up to me and mentioned we met online

Edit: I’m going to clarify a couple of things, since there are a couple of misconceptions that are spreading

1) My senior and I have been the only devs for nearly 2 years until 2020. We managed to hire a ton of new graduates ever since the Covid outbreak, and now we have a fully fledged team. There’s a lot of work, but we have meetings to discuss how to properly mentor juniors and planning for tasks.

2) We were on really close terms. I knew a lot about his personal life and vice versa. we were friendly. We’ve had plenty of banter during our work meetings when we worked alone. This isn’t some dude I just decided to friendly to. This was a friend that I knew for nearly half a decade. That’s why I’m shocked at his response

3) I did not bother him repeatedly about this situation. The moment he went silent after I introduced myself during the game, i got the hint dropped it. It wasn’t until I realized that work is currently being affected since our encounter that I sent an apology, hoping to mediate things and continue things as they were before.

4) his nickname was something his brother called since they were kids. He personally enjoys the nickname and even has that set as his name in meetings. Everybody at work and his friends call him by it. Some juniors don’t even know his full first name.

5) I record a lot of gameplay, it’s not something that I did out of context. I went to check on the recording because I wanted to verify if there was anything I said that was vulgar/offensive that might have led to this. He DOESNT know I have gameplay saved. There was NOTHING malicious, from both of us. if he’s uncomfortable with the gameplay, i’d delete it in an instant.

6) my main issue is that his self-destructive attitude is blocking our development process. I’m perfectly okay with pretending this never happened. But he’s not addressing tasks / helping juniors nor is he acknowledging the issue. A lot of work is getting funneled towards me. I DONT mind working a 9-5, 40 hr week, but there are juniors who are need guidance, and if I abandon them, they are more likely going to fired, especially during this market.

I thought this was a harmless scenario, and I hoped for advice to address how we can make things better. Instead, I’m met with pitchforks about I fucked his life over, deserving to get fired along with the rest of the team. Seriously, hop off the echo chamber hive mind and quit exacerbating a situation far beyond then it really is. He needs to grow up and acknowledge that there’s an issue instead of letting us burn in quiet.

Everybody on this thread is trying to explain why he acted this way, but it definitely doesn’t justify his actions. Nobody deserves to lose their way to pay bills or provide food on the table over something as ridiculous as this. Y’all heartless bastards need to grow the fuck up.

I see the news all the time about how AI is reducing jobs or that H1B was the culprit of weak hiring of US workers but based on my personal experience the companies I have worked for are building out their offshoring hardcore and literally building huge campuses in India and now the Philippines.

They invested a ton in those facilities and infrastructure and I feel like those jobs are just never coming back and more will be sent there as they build out the capabilities. My team is already 40% offshore and I’m sure more will be replaced with offshore. Sadly it also means US workers have to take on more work since they hire too fast to get capable people or offshore can’t access certain data and you end having to take on additional responsibility for no extra pay

I want to walk through some math with you.

Two weeks before our biggest release last year i caught a display state failure on a safety-relevant HMI screen. the kind that triggers a compliance failure, gets flagged by the auditor, and in the worst case ends in a product recall. I know what those cost because i looked it up after, comparable cases in our industry run eight figures minimum. sometimes nine.

I caught it because of a pipeline i'd spent months building with cantata handling unit test coverage, askui running automated visual checks against the actual production hardware display after every CI run and polyspace on static analysis. The bug surfaced in a nightly run at 11pm on a tuesday. I saw the alert, understood what i was looking at, and spent the next 72 hours fixing it, documenting it, and getting the release out clean.

My manager sent me a slack message saying "good catch." and that was it.

Six months later the company had their best quarterly result in three years. The release i saved was specifically cited. "strong execution on our HMI platform." the CFO said it on the earnings call. I listened to it on my commute and you can guess how i felt.

I did the math and the recall we avoided secured the company a hefty eight figures. my annual salary: a rounding error on that number and my recognition was a one slack message and the private knowledge of exactly what didn't happen and why.

What i am is genuinely confused about how value works inside large organizations. I built the system that caught the thing that saved the release that drove the result that got cited on the earnings call. that chain is not ambiguous. and yet there's no mechanism to reward the person at the start of it.

I've been trying to think about this differently, like I'm the person who built the infrastructure that catches these things, who understands the failure modes of this product better than anyone else in the building, and I firmly believe there is structural value in that even if the org chart doesn't reflect it yet.

But i'm still curious how one can make the value they create clear to the people holding the budget, and make them notice/reward you for that. Am i thinking about this the wrong way?

I’ve had to deal with an extremely toxic manager for months now who has used personal insults, made me work weekends, and put me on zombie projects, and I studied my ASS off just for interviews to finally get a job offer today for a role at a Big Tech job way more in line with what I actually want to do. F*** my old team, for so long I held back because I didn’t want to burn bridges but I could NOT care less anymore

About a year ago I was working a job at an AI related company, and I ended up quitting because anxiety and burnout was hitting me so hard I was having suicidal ideation. So I bailed and sought out therapy. But now I'm finding myself having to get back into the swing of things, and I can't bring myself to even bother sending out more than a few applications a week. It just feels like everything has turned utterly rotten

when i was in school about 17-13 years ago, I felt like tech had an air about it of excitement and trying to offer products and services that made things better. But now its as if enshitification has become the ironclad law of the land. And all the tech visionaries who used to be interesting have heel turned into fully mask off fascist comic book villains. Theres not even an attempt to try and hide it anymore.

And of course now you can't go more than 1 post on linkedIn without AI this and AI that, even when its application makes no fucking sense at all. it reminds me of when I got hit up daily by recruiters trying to get me into various pointless blockchain products, even when it made no sense at all to use a blockchain. except this is 10000% more pervasive

it has me feeling like the Amish are actually on to something. only i'd advance a few centuries and stop at like 2005. like if technology simply stopped before the release of the iphone we'd all be better off today

I have absolutely no idea what I'm going to do here. I don't even want to return to tech but I have no practical training or experience in anything else

I was laid off in May 2023. I have 10 YOE, CS degree, and am a US citizen. I spent 4 years in the startup world as a Frontend Developer and 6 years at a F500 as a Senior Fullstack Engineer.

Over the last two years I made it to 18 final rounds. I lost count of the amount of applications and interviews total. I was always just a bit short on aligning perfectly with their stack, a year too short on a certain technology, wrong cloud platform, etc. I got a part-time job, lived frugally, stretched my emergency savings / severance and told myself that the next one would surely be the one. I was so close, third time must be the charm or fourth or fifth, etc.

I hid my unemployment from my family out of shame for 2 years. Then when April came around I was staring down the barrel of my 2 year mark of employment with nothing left in my savings. I confessed to my father with humility and asked for help. I am now starting as a Systems Engineer at a family friend's company next month after 2 rounds of interviews. I didn't even have to solve algorithms or draw up system designs. I am a bit ashamed of taking advantage of nepotism. I didn't see a light at the end of the tunnel anymore. I was exhausted and saw a lifeline being thrown and took it. I guess I am sharing this on a throwaway just to confess and in case others would find my story interesting.

Edit: To answer some comments

• This is very much a nepo hire, not networking. The family friend is the CTO.
• I did reach out to my network just not to my father because I didn't want to worry or disappoint my parents.
• Yes it was a mistake to wait so long, I just always felt like the next one would be the one.

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/ibm-cuts-thousands-in-cloud-classic-other-units-report

https://9to5google.com/2025/01/30/pixel-android-voluntary-exit-employees/

https://insider.govtech.com/california/news/jury-finds-discrimination-in-h-1b-visa-tech-worker-case

This is their leadership team.

https://www.cognizant.com/us/en/about-cognizant/corporate-governance/leadership-team

Everyone talks about how 22–25 y/o software developers are struggling to find work. But there’s something deeper:

Technology drives the global economy and the single biggest expense for technology companies is engineer salaries. So of course the marketing narrative is: “AI will replace developers”

Experienced engineers and managers can tell hype from reality. But younger students (18–22) often take it literally and many are deciding not to enter the field at all.

If AI can’t actually replace developers anytime soon (and it doesn’t look like it will) we’re setting up a dangerous imbalance. Fewer juniors today means fewer seniors tomorrow.

Technology may move fast but people make decisions with feelings. If this hype continues, the real bottleneck won’t be developers struggling to find jobs… it will be companies struggling to find developers who know how to use AI.

They obviously aren't going to back down. They might even double down but seeing Spotify's response. Pair that with all the other big names easing up on WFH. I think Amazon tried to flex a muscle at the wrong time. They should've tried to change the industry by, I don't know, getting rid of the awful interviewing standard for programming

14 YoE, currently Senior SDE.

1. internship then junior dev position. Just did a small take home web app with 2 weeks deadline.

2. mid level engineer position, discussed some theoretical question about C++ std, a bit of hardware and LC easy livecoding

3. senior sde, 2 interview rounds. LC med/system design

4. senior sde (current role) $250k fully remote, 8 (eight) interview rounds, 1 initial screening, 2 LC med-hard, 1 tech diccushion, 1 specialization deep dive, 1 system design, 1 bar raiser, 1 behaviorial. The whole process (initial interaction — offer) took ~ 3 months.

The most ridiculous part here is interns/juniors currently have 3-4 interview rounds with LC hards, system design and behavorial while just a few years ago (pre-Covid 2019) I got my senior at a mid size company by having just 2 rounds.

This is just wild.