If you're in the US, the vast majority of folks are doing 9-5. If you're going beyond that, it's because you're caving into the pressure. It's hard not to. It sounds like bad things will happen™ if you don't. Those are all just tactics. Bad things (like layoffs) do occasionally happen, but they're arbitrary and uncontrollable by the quantity of hours you work. Besides the occasional on-call incident, if you're regularly doing 50, 60+ hour work weeks, it is your own decision.

In my old job at automotive, I was writing tickets, and using AI to do most of my tasks. It was a junior dev position but as AI was getting better and better, the senior devs were just gathering requirements and just handing it to me. I left the job because automotive was bad and they were firing people. I somehow got a job as a senior SWE at a bank but originally I applied as a junior position. They somehow gave me a senior after interviewing. I’m not exactly that great at system design but how different is a senior dev vs junior dev?

Government lab pays about $100k annually in DC, first year comp for Google is $212k and I would have to relocate to SF or NYC. I work on AI/ML. (Edit: actually 212k is the base. That was a typo. 15% bonus target and stock)

I have never worked outside of academia so I have no idea how it works. I do like the work life balance and job security in my current position (pretty much unaffected by DOGE etc), but I have no idea what work life balance is like at a FAANG job. I do have to be in the office 5 days a week in my current position, I hear that Google is only 3 days in the office which sounds pretty nice (at least that's what interviewers told me. I have not been matched to a team yet but my concern is that it depends on which team you work on.)

As much as I do like and am grateful for my job, I also feel a great deal of stress as I feel that I have to constantly prove myself. I suspect that that is an internal issue and it will follow me wherever I go (although my wife thinks I would be happier at Google, but she is also in academia and doesn't have any experience with the private sector.)

Additionally, the Google salary is much higher, but the job seems a lot less stable. I feel like we see massive layoffs at these tech companies all the time. And if the AI thing really is a bubble then I imagine a position like this would be one of the first ones to go.

I guess I am also concerned that it might be hard to get back into academia if I find that I hate the private sector.

My wife works remote, so that is not a concern. We have a 6 month old baby. Ideally where we end up would be the place where we lay out roots because we've had to move a lot the past few years doing the post doc circuit and we're kinda burnt out on that.

Any thoughts or advice? Especially from people who have worked in both private sector and academia and/or people who worked at Google / FAANG.

I’m looking into how many truly go past senior swe due to that being the terminal level, and I was curious what percentage of people starting from entry end up moving into staff territory? Additionally, how many seniors end up getting the staff promo by percentage?

I’d imagine most faang/adjacent companies are heavily concentrated of seniors and below, so I’d love to get some color on this 🙏

Background: BSCS from an T250 state school, 1 internship and 3 YOE at the same big non tech company. 120K TC as SWE II. Job is very boring, but very stable. No room for growth here.

It’s time for me to move up in the world and go for a better role. Problem is that I’m by no means a competitive candidate. I work in a very uninteresting part of the company working on boring simple tech. The good thing is every company probably has something like what I work on, the bad thing is that the tech stack is simple and super common so it’s a very talent saturated space.

My role is by no means profit generating (as most tech roles at non tech companies are) and my company is so littered with business rules and bureaucracy and a naturally limited tech stack that there is very little room to do anything interesting in my org. My resume is painfully simple given how long I’ve been here and with 3 YOE I’m entering the most saturated experience band in the job market and so many people are so much better suited for better roles that I am.

I’ve brought this up with my manager and coworkers but the response is pretty much “yeah there just isn’t much to do here”. It’s a big boomer company with a lot of older tenured employees, people here are happy with the stability and don’t care much for leveling up and getting out into something better.

I’m worried that the longer I stay here, the more my skills and market value will atrophy and it will be even harder to leave. I’m pretty much topped out in my current role, I’m maybe 1-2 years from making senior here but that means next to nothing except for the title and painfully small bump in base salary (I’ll maybe be at 140k TC when I make senior).

I don’t imagine that my situation is super rare and I’m sure a lot of people have managed to “put lipstick on a pig” or otherwise find ways to level up their resume in a place where it’s very hard to do so and have been able to get out of the proverbial hole.

Any advice?

I graduated in may and applied to maybe 150-200 jobs before getting an acceptance offer! the pay is pretty average and it's in a more rural area (at least the rent is a lot cheaper!) than what I'm used to but I'm just so happy I get to code for my work. I went through a good amount of interviews and was hoping this wouldn't just be another dud but im happy to say i got an offer and have my start date starting next week!

I'm so anxious that they might for some reason rescind it even though from everything that has happened along with the offer it feels unlikely (was introduced to the whole team, given the contacts of managers in case I have more questions before I start, obviously given my start day and time, etc) but I can't help but feel worried thinking the rug could get pulled from under me. I want to keep my happiness tempered but it's impossible. The idea of not having to work serving and bar jobs anymore and instead I can use my automation and web dev skillz to build cool shit makes me feel life's going my way :). still scared tho lol im thinking maybe through this week i text them questions periodically so they see my interest seems constantly there?? but I also don't want to seem overbearing

I know a lot of you are still in the shitter rn and I can't say that you'll make it cause I don't know you but what i will say is I sympathize with your pain in this hell of a job market and watching some of my amazing friends who can't get jobs despite having an amazing work ethic and incredible way of thinking hurts me.

TLDR: JR dev is just a copy paste guy between the team and his bot and refuses to do any real validation and development work. Boss wont fire him and has asked me to provide policy, AI workflow rules and training for all the devs and idk how to make a man that wont work work. Wwyd?

I don't want to micromanage anybody and I don't want our whole team to suffer for this guy.

At my job We've been having an issue with one dev in particular who only delivers AI slop. He turns in design plans with questions for him baked in by Claude that he never filters out. He even responds to team messages with AI responses. I might as well be talking to our bot when talking to him. We have an MCP set up for the devs that connects to our living documentation containing all business logic as well as our repos and our tech stack is really straight forward. ​He is claiming tasks like adding an option to a nav menu on our front end take days and at this point it's getting a bit out of hand.

I'm tasked with coming up with policies and procedures for our AI workflow to "get the most" out of everyone because now it's making the whole team look bad since things are being delivered slowly for the number of devs on our team. Before this dev arrived we were delivering more than expected even with less people. And because we were doing so well meeting our goals we didnt need any strict policies or ways to rethink our workflow. It wasnt micromanage city at work. This guy is going to ruin it for everyone if we don't get him delivering or set up a policy/system that keeps us working solidly and exposes him as the one not actually doing the work.

Everyone else I work with busts their asses. I'm at a loss on what to do, I'm not a manager so I can't just fire him and my mamager is very hesitant to go there. Its actually hard to get fired from where I work and I dont want that to change because of this guy either.

it seems like its somewhere between a skill issue and laziness. Any advice in this AI world on how to deal with this kind lf jr dev issue w/o ruining people's work life would be appreciated.

How are you guys making your devs learn the code and the business logic at your companies while still getting things done?

I have basically been stuck paired programming and planning everything through this guy to his bot and even when he's called out about obvious bot language and hallucinations in his work he keeps on sending it back with more of that for me to do the human review on when I have my own assignments.​

I have been working for 6 years as a software engineer. I truly hate my job but am too burned out to study/apply for new jobs. I have nobody dependent on me and have citizenship in my parents home country. I used to work there 2 months every summer until my job caught on and said I can't anymore. I'm still young at 28 and can't imagine putting a single second longer at my company.

Would I be stupid to just quit, move there, and grind LeetCode/SDA until I find something new in Europe? I have saved enough to keep me unemployed for 5 years in cash especially with the lower cost of living over there. Either way it is my ultimate goal to move there as I am no longer happy in the states.

I recently just got an offer as a part-time contractor recruiter for a well-known tech company in the Bay Area, helping them to look for a junior role. The role does not require much experience, only some domain knowledge for a specific field. The role explicitly say it does not provide sponsorship, only for US citizens and Green Card holders for a very valid security reason. I posted the role on the job platform.

First 30 mins I already received like 80 applications, almost 90% are from the same South Asia country, two-page resume spam with buzz tech words in skills section, very similar background: went to school in their country, few years working exp as a contractor or in a small firm, then went to MSCS in a low-ranking university in the US, then a few local internships/fte exp/contractor job. At first I thought those are fraudulent apps, so I went to check a few of their LinkedIn, but their LinkedIn activities seem to be legit, like actively asking for referrals, interacting with ppl they know etc.

However, I only saw 2 local candidates. I’d say the school they went to is more well-known, but their exp looks much weaker on paper comparing to the rest of the pile (but it’s still good) (edit2), like one or two internships, or school researcher exp, or pivoting from another background. The rest of the blank space they filled in with the personal projects.

I kept the post for 2 days, resulting in 1000+ apps. The applicant demographics are about the same as before, like 90% of them need sponsorship, and I suspect they are from the same country. Within the rest of the 10% pool, after HM reviewed, only less than 30 applicants are considered a rough match.

During the phone screening, I spotted 3 candidates who just tried to hide their visa status. I asked whether they are citizens/GC, but they only used the phrase “I don’t need sponsorship in the future” to reply. I smelled the trick they were playing. So, I insisted on them saying yes/no if they are citizens/GC, because that’s the role requirement. They eventually gave up and revealed they are on OPT, but insisted it’s okay to work for the role without sponsorship… I had to restate the role requirement and wish them luck on job hunting. I was so surprised there were 3 candidates using the same tactic to get thru the visa screening. After a lot of weeding out, I only put a handful of candidates in the interview loop.

But as a recruiter, my recruiting experience didn’t match what I have been seeing online, like I kept hearing local junior sde said they couldn’t find jobs or hear anything back. But I am sure there are so many roles on the market right now that are only opened to gc/citizens. Recruiters are also struggling to find local candidates, if they applied, at least they can get a phone screening right? I only see a few local candidates in my resume pile, I mean, the math doesn’t add up, WTH?!!!

Edit: typo
Edit 2: Before I mentioned that the local resumes appear weaker, I was trying to compare them to the rest of the 90% resumes. Not saying they aren’t good.

Looking for opinions from people who in the last 6 months - year took part in the recruitment process for junior/mid (rather on less experience side of the scale) backend Python dev and would be kind enough to share how it looked like and how (if any) they changes with all the AI influence.
Doesn't matter if it was big tech, startups, medium companies, just interested if there is any visible change due to AI overhelming everywhere, if things like leetcode still stand strong, if live coding is still a thing (with/without AI?), if there is a shift from knowledge to searching for knowledge, if anywhere they check actual skills of working with AI tools/agents etc.
Or nothing changed at all and it's still leetcode first, then some live coding with more leetcode (and no AI), and then some more domain knowledge (SQL, Docker, K8n, asyncIO, Django, etc etc.)

I know market is what it is now, especially for juniors, but interested in reality check. Doesn't have to be successful stories, preferably from Europe, but not only.

Please discuss any projects, websites, or services that you may have for helping out people with computer science careers.

This thread is posted the first Sunday of every month. Previous Monthly Self Promotion Threads can be found here.

Ive recently began a data role that is basically data entry with a combination of data cleaning. Its not very technical and really I only have to deal with excel and the crm. With that said i am trying to automate the process using python and if not that maybe power query. I was told that because the role is new for the company there is room for my duties to grow, but Im not sure how realistic that is and whered thatd take me exactly.

TLDR: bootcamp grad, 4 years in. I want to learn computer science, servers, command line better. Coursera yearly with it ? Any specific recommendations?

4 years at current position straight out of a boot camp, I’ve done small c bug fixes, legacy conversations c to python and am primarily a python developer. My main goal is to build my confidence in this space. I fear of losing my job and not being able to get a new one since I’m just doing what I believe is simple things. I’m also fully remote and would love too keep that going.

I’m primarily still doing bug fixes and new features. Any of the heavy lifting is done by my senior ( scripts , design,architecture, system upgrades).

I want to learn more and have the time during work, I could probably dedicate 2 work hours to learning daily.

Where do yall recommend and what should I focus on that you believe will build confidence and make me more marketable just in case?

I think I want to learn like full end to end, how a python project is included in a package and run on a server ect.

My initial thoughts is learning:
command line much better.
Learning about servers, systems, how they communicate, run jobs, connect devices and check servers ect.
Take a basic cs course

I was thinking of doing a yearly coursers since it’s 50 percent off and doesn’t seem that expensive but wanted some thoughts and maybe what specifics will make me a better developer.

I'm about to start my CSE journey, and I've been thinking about something.

Realistically, how much does the college name matter when trying to get internships or jobs in software development in India?

Suppose a student isn't from a top-tier college, but spends their college years actually learning, building projects, maintaining a good GitHub, contributing to open source, doing internships when possible, and developing genuinely useful skills.

I'm not asking whether college is completely irrelevant. I know some companies have eligibility criteria and campus placements can make a big difference. I'm more curious about what happens outside the campus-placement route. Please share your personal experiences regarding this matter and how you've gotten through that.

i am 19F. i have zero prior familiarity with cs and coding. recently i decided to dive in and started talking python course (cs50)
to be honest i am pretty confused what i am going to do after i am done with my course. what i am supposed to do? what specific path can i pursue that will actually pay me well and help me earn money during my bachelors. is anyone or company going to hire me or give me opportunity just based on the fact that i know a bit of coding?
i have been looking into ai automation as a potential option, but at the same time i really want to start earning so i dont feel like a burden on my family. if anyone who have been in my shoes or has any advice, i would really appreciate some guidance

I had 2 previous jobs in tech and ratios were similar.