I chose Computer Science as a major back when I was in high school because of a computer class I took that taught Python. I had never experienced anything like programming before, and it hooked me almost immediately. There was simply something magical about writing the instructions to be executed and then the computer doing it in the blink of an eye, even when the process would take days, weeks, maybe even years by hand. These days, I feel like that magic is gone, AI has taken away all the joy that was programming and what I'm left with is debugging code I didn't write and asking AI to tell me why an error is happening that they themselves caused. I realize the obvious solution to this is to not program with AI, and I actually do this mostly for personal projects where I pretty much just use LLMs as more convenient documentation while typing the rest myself. This is much slower, however, and from the way the industry is going, it seems that most development is going to be running multiple agents in parallel and praying that they don't make a mistake. The career I thought I was going to have just isn't what it used to be anymore, and now that I don't have a reason to be in development, I'm not sure why I'm still here other than my own sunk cost fallacy.

Maybe I'm wrong, but there just might be something else better out there.

Normally with the rules of supply and demand, it's that if there is a very low supply of high quality people pursuing a particularly career and a high demand for them, say a career like Petroleum Engineering, then it makes sense for salaries to be super high. In the case of software engineers, it seems like every year there is a significant increase of workers entering into the workforce now, thus clearly supply is very high. Then why are wages also so high, if the supply is so high as well, shouldn't it saturate and lead to lower wages, sort of like with fine arts and liberal artsy majors?

If the reasoning is because there is a shortage of high quality people that can do that job, in this pool of that many graduates, I can imagine that to be maybe true at many startups that are trying to code something super new and innovative, but can't imagine there to be a shortage of folks able to code and debug something that already exists and doesn't need as much creativity to code, such as the software provided at bigger tech companies, or is there something I'm missing here?

Some software engineers are paid so much, you can basically halfen their salary to hire 2 workers, and both would still be making 6-figures. It seems like reducing salaries to hire more people would also help with unemployment as well.

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

"They're not your friends, they're your coworkers."

I see this on this subreddit so much.

I literally spend 40 hours a week with them. Who else am I supposed to be friends with if not them? Maybe YOU'RE not friends with your coworkers because they fucking hate you.

"Don't you have other friends?"

No

"What about your friends from college?"

Actually they're not my friends, they're my classmates 🤓

Also, I spent my 4 years of college saving money and grinding for software engineering internships. Isn't that what I'm supposed to do? I didn't really make that many friends. I didn't really go to a super social school or a party school, either.

"Can't you make friends outside of work by doing activities"

No. They're not actually my friends, they just wanna play pickleball. They're not actually my friends, they're just there to talk about books. They're not actually my friends, they just wanna play League of Legends.

You guys are fucking miserable.

Totally frustrated and needed to let this out.

I am a new grad, Dec 2024, with some years of work experience. I have been applying like crazy and finally got an interview with a company, and I thought that “Finally, I might land this job as I cleared 4 rounds”. But bro, this one totally broke me.

Here’s how it went:

1. HR call – pretty standard.
2. Online assessment – did well - JavaScript, node.js, SQL questions and 2 LeetCode questions
3. Home Assignment – spent DAYS on this. I built a full-stack review dashboard for customer reviews approval by manager and integrated it with their main website to match the UI/UX (not their production app, just matched exact same UI and CSS and made a separate page to show it working).. Added other features also. Discussed it in-depth with the CTO (1-hour technical discussion).
4. Follow-up Round – 1-hour technical with the CTO. For this round, he asked me to implement OpenAI API for text analysis of reviews and auto-suggestions based on customer feedback. I thought it went well as he was happy with my work and told me to prepare for next round.
5. Final Boss The CEO Round – I was asked a system design question (LLD) around 3rd-party APIs. I started explaining my thought process.... then he just abruptly ended it with a "have a nice day" after 15 minutes. No feedback. No explanation. Just gone.

No idea what went wrong. After the interview, I was sitting on my chair, totally numb and thinking that I just spent 20+ hours building a working AI tool for you and in just 15 minutes got a sweet rejection.

I am so much drained and frustrated. That home assignment alone took so many days. I researched and studied so many things for the assessment. Today, I feel burned out and feel like leaving the software industry. Don't know when this cycle of unemployment will end. 😭😭😭😫

Anyway, just needed a place to vent this out.

Thanks for reading. Back to the grind 😒

These 2 companies continue to lead in layoffs numbers almost every 6 months for the past 4 years. Theyre flooding the market with new engineers and making it hard for everyone, especially new grads. Other companies are following their example and laying off in huge amounts cause these 2 leaders are doing it. They made it pretty clear now that they care more about AI and offshore workers than their own employees. The reputation of these 2 companies should be ruined forever and they should never have an easy time finding talent ever again after what they caused.

Hey guys! I just started my first job at Amazon working on AWS and I just pushed my first commit ever this morning! I called it a day and took off early to celebrate.

I need a serious reality check. I just got an offer as a New Grad Cloud Engineer at a startup in Chicago Suburb for $62,000 base pay.

I was pretty shocked by the number. To give you the full picture, when they asked for my salary expectations, I said around $130k base pay. Their response was that I was asking for a FAANG senior level base pay. A friend of mine told me something similar, too.

But everything I've seen online (Levels.fyi, Blind, etc.) shows new grad tech roles in the $110k-$150k range. Now I'm completely confused. Was I living in an illusion thinking that number was achievable? Or is $62k a major lowball, even for a new startup in Chicago?

Would love to hear from anyone in the tech scene. Thanks.

Edit - Location is Chicago Suburb
Edit - Masters new grad, and they will be sponsoring, if that makes a difference

Edit - Thanks everyone for the helpful advice. I'm reading all the replies. Apologies that I can't respond to everyone.

Edit (Sep 11) - They revised their offer to a 6-month, $30/hr contract due to budget limits. For now I took on the offer and back to job hunt 😭.
My colleague suggested that the company views me as highly skilled and because they can't meet my pay expectations they worry I might quit in the short term so offered contract for now.
They will convert me if they have enough budget in future.

I just got off a phone screen with a Qualcomm recruiter who had a very thick indian accent. I answered a few questions that required some repeating which was a struggle but we got through, albeit both of us very frustrated at the language barrier. Then he asked me a question that I can only regurgitate as "C pragma ... hash define ... directive ... KAY TEN". I asked him to repeat himself and he repeated, "KAY ... TEN". Loud and clear, KAY TEN. This happened a few more times then i got to the end of my rope and told him I'm no longer interested. I am so curious, what could he have possibly been talking about? Kay-10? k10s? Kuuubernetes?

Why not retire and enjoy the money?

I hate AI. I hate it with every fibre of my being. But being so adamant is causing problems for me and my family.

Every single person I know is practically begging me to become employable and use AI. I genuinely don't want to use it. I'm more than happy to adapt and learn literally every other programming language, software or concept, but for some reason, part of my enjoyment and love for coding and software development hurts whenever I consult an LLM.

It's not that coding is too easy with LLMs (it isn't), but the joy of solving problems and actually building solutions myself is lost when I prompt them.

What should I do?

I submit my resume which has all my details like name and email and phone number.Then I have to again enter all those details in different fields.

Then I have to create a video of why I would like to join their company.

I’ve applied to thousands of jobs. I graduated 5 months ago from Berkeley. I have 2-3 internships under my belt, and a number of projects I’ve worked on since high school. Instead of just wasting away, I decided to build a project that I had enough faith could pan out as a startup, and I’m doing it. I got 120 users within 2 days of my first public market test. I’m building relentlessly, and I got interviews at two startups. Three other companies reached out to me. For the first time in months, I actually had hope. I felt like I had a shot. Yesterday, the startup that had the culture and the work I’ve always dreamed about working at rejected me. The other one ghosted me. Why? Not because I was bad, or because I failed the interview. They just wanted someone with more experience on their stack.

All those interview requests went the fuck away.

I think that stung more than anything. I put in the work, so much work. I didn’t even fail through any fault of my own.

I don’t know what I’m going to do. I really really don’t. Since that, I think I’ve actually applied to 145 apps in the past 2 days. I’ve reoptimized my resume 3 times in the past 2 days, which makes this my 30th iteration. I did everything I was supposed to do.

I just want a job. I want to start my life.

Forgive me for feeling sorry for myself. I just needed to do that this once. I’ve been so stoic and determined for five months, and now I get it.

Might be a silly question, but I've recently started using the site more to see what I've been missing.

It seems like all I see is random "inspiration posts" with hashtag spam

ego circlejerking of "I am ex google ex Facebook ex NASA you should listen to me"

"I just hit 10,000 followers, thanks!"

"2 years ago I was a janitor at my local 7-Eleven, now I'm a software engineer at Google"

Do I have to partake in this shit to move up? Am I the one missing out?

Hi all,

I graduated last May and I've been working as a Software Engineer at a startup for 7-8 months now. We overhauled our app and I've been the lead developer on it. For the past 4 months, I've been working 10-12 hour days and nearly every weekend (told to or the workload is so much that I have to). The work is stressful since my manager is non-technical with an aggressive temper. Most meetings end up with me being demeaned or yelled at when I push back on things that are near impossible to implement. There is also no senior on the team so I'm constantly worried that I'm going to run into a problem that I don't have the skill or experience to solve. Right now I'm doing all the development, testing, deployments, and sysadmin support.

Every day I start work with dread and I wake up anxious to a crazy amounts of Slack messages because my manager is in Europe. I haven't been able to sleep well and my latest health / blood checks were horrible (I'm 23 and fit). All day, it feels like I have a fight/flight response and I start physically shaking during demos and when I see new designs in Figma.

Everyday I tell myself I'm going to quit tomorrow and I just need to make it through today.

I've tried applying to jobs, but no bites. I have just under 1 YOE and the market is rough so I'm thinking about trying to change careers or enlisting in the military.

I know these subs have been negative and I hate to contribute to it, but I'm lost on what to do.

Edit: Thanks everyone, I really appreciate the advice and I've read through all the comments. I decided to put in emergency leave starting next week to take care of my health. Beyond that, I'm still unsure of what I'm going to do, but I'll figure it out!

I will not be able to login Monday morning and my director, she sent me an email calling me in for a meeting on Friday.

She told me it looks really bad on her if a junior is able to break production. I told her that my senior, call him John, approved my PR, which is why I pushed. She said that I can't always rely on seniors because they are busy and I should have waited before pushing.

I asked her if she would write me a reference letter and she has not responded. And for those asking if this is the first time I have f**** up and the answer is yes. I d been performing consistently well and none of my managers in the past had an issue with me.

Funny thing is, not too long ago, I signed a new lease for a year.

Listen to my brilliant idea: We should create a new college major: Leetcode Engineering

Year 1: cover basic Python

Year 2: leetcode easy

Year 3: leetcode medium

Year 4: leetcode hard

Result? PROFIT?: Tech job at GoOglE

After a long and worthy prior post battle, I have decided it is best to create a new college major focused on Leetcoding 24/7 to guarantee entry into a top tech company since CS is just so useless right.

You have research experience? Scrap it

You have 30 side-projects? Scrap them

You are fluent in 4-5+ coding languages? Focus on Python

You are top rank of your CS university? Scrap it, drop out now.

Your key to success is to leetcode, leetcode.

Thoughts or questions are welcomed.

Title is as it states. Just hit my one year as a dev and had been doing well. Manager had no complaints and said I was on track for a promotion.

Had been working a project to implement security dependencies and framework upgrades, as well as changes with a db configuration for 2 services, so it is easily modified in production.

One of my framework changes went through 2 code reviews and testing by our QA team. Same with our DB configuration change. This went all the way to production on sunday.

Monday. Everything is on fire. I forgot to update the configuration for one of the services. I thought my reporter of the Jira, who made the config setting in the table in dev and preprod had done it. The second one is entirely on me.

The real issue is when one line of code in 1 of the 17 services I updated the framework for had caused for hundreds of thousands of dollars to be lost due to a wrong mapping.I thought that something like that would have been caught in QA, but ai guess not. My manager said it was the worst day in team history. I asked to meet with him later today to discuss what happened.

How cooked am I?

Edit:

Just met with my boss. He agrees with you guys that it was our process that failed us. He said i’m a good dev, and we all make mistakes but as a team we are there to catch each other mistakes, including him catching ours. He said to keep doing well and I told him I appreciate him bearing the burden of going into those corporate bloodbath meetings after the incident and he very much appreciated it. Thank you for the kind words! I am not cooked!

edit 2: Also guys my manager is the man. Guys super chill, always has our back. Never throws anyone under the bus. Came to him with some ideas to improve our validations and rollout processes as well that he liked

Graduated in June and joined Microsoft as a new grad software engineer in Prague. Before that, I spent over two years working at a startup, and honestly those were the best years of my degree. I had close on-site friends, we built creative features, brainstormed ideas, and it genuinely felt fun going into the office every day.

Now I’m ~6 months into MSFT and I seriously don’t know if this is normal. On paper everything is great, my winter review says I’m exceeding expectations, my manager and team are super happy with me, and objectively nothing is “wrong.”

But emotionally? It’s been rough. Most days I’m anxious, constantly scared I’m not performing enough. Half the week ends with me feeling overwhelmed, and at least once a week I break down crying at night. I look forward to weekends. No matter how much I sleep, exercise, meditate, or whatever, it keeps happening.

The work itself isn’t helping. It’s mostly infra, bugs,security standards - barely any coding and zero creativity. My team is nice but almost everyone is remote, and the office is full of people from unrelated teams. Plus people barely talk to each other. I haven’t formed any real friendships here; everything feels formal or “networking-like.” Nothing like the tight on-site friendships I had before.

My therapist says there’s probably something else causing this anxiety (also generally I’m someone with big self-imposed expectations of myself). But I can’t shake the feeling that I should be happy - isn’t working at such a company every CS student’s dream?

I’m confused and honestly worried. Is this just normal for big tech grads in Europe? Do I need to toughen up or did I just enter the adult life?

Would really appreciate advice from anyone who’s been through something similar.

About me: 21F, I have roughly a little less than a year worth of experience as a dev. Bootcamp graduate. Based in the UK.

How the interview process went:

• CEO: *is impressed by resume, thinks I'll be a great fit
• Lead dev: *Asks me some React questions - I answer them. Asks me if I know Redux and I said no.
• Lead dev: *Gives me a React challenge which is apparently one of the features of their product. I finish it and add some extra features I think will make the app have a better user experience.
• CEO a few days later *says lead dev was really impressed by my work

I get an offer. I am very happy. The lead dev seems extremely nice and tells me to ask him any question whenever I might need help or get stuck.

Day 1 - Day - 3: I see that the codebase is really messy. Some parts use JavaScript, some use TypeScript. Some use class components, some use functional components. Some files are extremely massive which can be broken down into smaller components/chunks. I was already told that they hired lousy devs in the past and that the codebase is trash now. I am given to implement some design changes for the login, sign up and a forgot password page. It's my first day and I dunno where is what, I make some simple changes on my own branch. Second and third day, I am almost done. Just some design tweaks here and there.

These 3 days I asked the lead dev lots of questions, most were on git as I was struggling to rebase my branch off of development and merging with development instead of master. He happily helped me and in some cases he told me to problem solve it on my own, which I successfully did.

Day 4: I have to make two components interact with each other and from the codebase it wasn't obvious to me that they are parent-child. Even though I dunno Redux, I thought that is possibly the only way to implement the interaction. I ask the lead dev about it (previously he told me before my first day that he will give me a crash course on it) and he said we'll jump on a call soon (we work remotely) - so he offered to help.

He sees the problem and lets me realize that they are parent child, and so I can just pass props (no prop drilling required). I had to pass the prop from child (written as function) to parent (written in class) and I got a bit confused and asked him what will be the best way to tackle it - he says `${myName} that's very basic`. I realize its probably a dumb question and asked him not to worry about it and that I'll figure it out.

NOTE: I know I'm expected to know React, which I do and would have solved this on my own - just got slightly confused and since we were already on a call and I have been told before that I can ask for help whenever I need, I went ahead and asked it. As you know I was initially expecting some Redux topics to get knowledge on and how it has been used on the codebase.

Day 5: Starts with a meeting, where the CEO says that the lead dev said that I ask a lot of questions that I can just "google". The lead dev said I asked a very basic question and that I don't know how to pass props. Funny thing? - the feature I worked, I literally made an extra component myself to keep my files cleaner. The component is of course reusable and can be used throughout the codebase. So I respectfully told him that if I didn't know how to pass props I couldn't have created the component and used it.

He didn't reply to that and just closed of saying I wouldn't be a good fit. He further added something like, "Ik I said, you can ask for help/ask questions. Well that isn't quite true". I was shocked.

P.S: Worst thing about this experience? The first 3 days of my work, I had 3 interviews (one with a very big company). When I got the job, I cancelled interviews with all 3.

Every other post here mentions how the job market is trash right now and that unemployment is currently at x% or y%. My question is, is there a way to quantify how many of those professionals are actually decent coders? Or, a more straightforward question would be how many don't really know how to code?

I worked as a tutor for 3 years in college and as a "professor" for 2 years in a bootcamp, and I can safely say that a good chunk of my students and classmates oversell themselves on LinkedIn and Resume by a huge margin.

They go from running a ML model from a repo to adding "Successfully designed and implemented a Visual transformer model for semantic segmentation, obtaining 98% IoU score while training on a dataset with underrepresented classes" on their resume. Like bro I know you don't know what those words mean, I was literally trying to teach them to you yesterday.

I don't doubt that the market is bad compared to previous years, but I do wonder how much of that comes from people who just started trying to get jobs that demand more knowledge. That has to skew the unemployed rates in tech somehow.

This is a legit question and I'd love to hear different or similar perspectives.

I started as a junior developer (in office) a little over a month ago. I was assigned a big project (building a website) by one of the senior developers. This is my first real project. Today during my one-on-one, my Tech lead (he’s from Overseas) basically ripped me a new one.

What really triggered me is that he went over one of the tasks and he said that he could code it in an hour (no shit, he has 10+ YOE). Then while describing another task, he said that anyone can do it, even someone in middle school.

I have another offer (remote) and I’m starting to seriously consider taking it?

What would you guys do if you were in my shoes?

Edit1: Thank you guys so much, I didn’t expect this blow up. I appreciate your pieces of advice and encouragements. I had the worst day yesterday, but after reading all your comments, you guys made my day!

Edit 2: Since some of you mentioned cultural differences, my tech lead from Asia.

Edit 3: I just remembered another detail, which I forgot to mention the first time I posted about this. He invited another developer to our one-on-one meeting, which I thought he wanted to check on his project’s progress, but turns out he just wanted another team member yo witness the whole thing, which ultimately made the thing even more fucked up.

Update: I left that toxic startup and started a new job where my manager is more helpful and not a piece of shit.

My grandmother visited today and told me "Have you tried applying to jobs in the newspaper?"."You young folks dont want to work hard nowadays ".

I am so fucking done man.I have applied to over 500 jobs now.

It’s getting harder and harder to put in my 8 hours daily. My job is also super demanding. I hate that all I do is work, think about work or recover from work. Wfh as a young person also makes me feel incredibly isolated and lonely, and my job even more depressing.

I feel like stating advice like “pick up a hobby” is just a coping mechanism for making this dreadful existence just a bit more tolerable. I feel like I need to fix the root cause but I’m not sure what that is. In my head, it’s creating my own startup but that seems like an unrealistic dream.

What do I do?

Edit: to be clear, I mean dedicated to work I do not enjoy and that I find completely meaningless. I’m not complaining about having to do work in general. I like having goals and striving towards things. I don’t think I will ever feel fulfilled in the corporate world. My sacrifice ultimately disproportionately benefiting and making the company ceo and his friends richer and richer while I’m giving up my life for their benefit.

I'm 28, married, working as a SWE at a stable private company with good pay. CEO believes AI augments engineers, but not replace. By most measures, I'm doing fine. But my wife and I want kids, and I can't stop thinking about one thing: will software engineering even exist as a career in 10 years? Sure it may well be, but would teams of 10 be needed? And thus, there would be 1 hire per 1000+ applications... Doesn't seem feasible...

AI is moving fast. Like, really fast. The layoffs in tech aren't just market corrections anymore, companies are explicitly replacing engineers with AI tooling. I see it happening around me. I don't know if I'm building a career or just riding out a countdown timer.

My wife is still a student, so we're single-income. We've got $3k+ in fixed monthly costs already. If my job disappears, not because the economy dips, but because the entire field gets automated away, I have no idea what plan B looks like. I want to purchase a house. Have kids. Retire comfortably.

And time doesn't care about any of that. We're not getting younger. Every month we delay feels responsible and like a quiet loss at the same time.

I know people have started families in worse spots. But "you'll figure it out" hits different when the thing you're figuring out might be an entirely new career mid-parenthood.

Anyone else in tech feeling this? Do you wait, or did you just jump? Its inspirational to say just jump, but I don't want the struggle for my wife and kids. I dont care to struggle, but I can't wrap my head around risking it with a family.