I got laid off last year from big tech, so my most recent memory of work was the good ol’ days where code was mostly human written, but slightly AI assisted. Guess you can say I’m an outta touch grandpa with how much AI really infiltrated the day to day.

I went to a dinner party and met some peeps, all the way from Junior to Senior SWE who kept their jobs and work at mid to high tier companies (de facto big tech, or fintech).

They claim they legit spend the whole day prompting completely and haven’t coded at all in months. I’ve always anticipated the “prompt engineering is the future” buzz, but I didn’t expect it to be this rampant and 100%. I thought on some level, the risk of code reviews going wrong would keep most devs uncomfortable with blanket automating everything.

They legit say they’d struggle to write basic code on an IDE live if asked and have become heavily reliant on Claude or other agents. They say they haven’t written mere lines in months.

We all know the brain doesn’t retain much well by passive reading and writing is arguably the only way to actually have a skill.

Is this happening to you guys? Are you seeing this at large?

Companies are laying off people after record profits,this is not a recession.Why do people act like practicing leetcode a little more will change things?

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.

Everyone used to be so nice.There were so many perks of working at big tech.Everyones just scared runninh for their jobs now.

If AI is doing everything how come everyone i know is overworked?

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.

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 😒

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.

Recruiter said I did well and they enjoyed talking to me & encouraged me to apply to other positions but the team felt the role wasnt their best match, went through 9 rounds of this what does this mean

Edit: this was my one golden ticket n its gone. Theres no point

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.

Hi everyone. I graduated from a bachelors from a decent school (T20) and had multiple internships. After graduating, it took me a long time to find a job. Even then, it was a 3 month data analyst contract role with someone I cold emailed. They were impressed by an internship at a relatively well-known company in my town (STL). I also was able to get another internship which I am about to finish at my university despite having already graduated.

After meeting with a career coach and discussing it with a friend, I got to thinking that using my name, Israel, could possibly be hurting my job search. It seems like the word "Israel" is not very popular nowadays. I'm not even Israeli - I'm Mexican. Is this actually a possible or likely thing? I've applied to like 2k data roles in the last year, and I've only gotten interviews for <10 and offers for 3. If so, would a name change to my nickname"Isra" be better?

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.

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?

Started my first role out of college in the beginning of Feb but didn’t fully join my team until March. At first, everyone was nice and gave me a rundown of the services our teams works on. I spent the first 2 weeks getting the accesses laid out in our teams’ documentation and getting familiar with the main service they wanted me to work on. It became very quickly apparent that my teams’ documentation had been out of date for a long time as I started facing issues with accesses and general workflows of our services that often became blockers to completing my work. I reached out for help when necessary, and tried my best to unblock myself when I could.

By May, I was informed that I will be put on a coaching plan because the lead engineer on my team had some concerns about my work and that I will most likely be put on a PIP. I tried my best to perform on the coaching plan, but the goalposts kept shifting week to week. I was told I need to ask for help sooner so I started asking for help sooner. The next week I’d be told that I shouldn’t be asking for help and that I should be the person people go to for help. I felt like I finally found a happy balance by this point and it was okay for a while, but I was told that I shouldn’t be asking questions at all and that I should be a subject matter expert by this point a few weeks later. When I’d bring up legitimate blockers, there was little to no help offered unless the other junior who has a year on the team helped me. I was still running into issues caused by the lack of up-to-date information in our documentation (which I tried to update as often as possible as I resolved said issues.)

This ultimately leads us to July, where I get placed on a PIP and told that I have a month to get it together or else I’m out of a job and things only continued to get harder. My mentor ended up going on vacation for two weeks and I was borderline bullied and harassed by my team everyday. I was constantly told that I’m incapable, not good enough for the company, and that I should opt out of the PIP because it’s unlikely that I’ll succeed. The goalpost shifting became more egregious and it started feeling like I was being set up to fail during every sprint. There were weeks where I was working 12 hours a day and on the weekends to just get through my work for each sprint while my team was logging off at 5PM sharp. I brought up these concerns with my manager to which he responded with “<company> has a very high bar and you simply don’t meet it.”

Safe to say, I was let go of my position and have spent the last few months applying to as many jobs as I can find. Am I mistaken to think I was wronged by my team?

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?

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.

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.

Basically I'm looking for my first real job and I have been grinding projects on my free time for a while and also have been contributing in a repo from https://github.com/buttplugio/

And I'm just scared that it will be a red flag or too weird 😅 I have tried to hide it in my profile but I don't think I can

Hello, new grad from college here , I was in my role for a year and 3 months and I was told I’m not meeting expectations. I was given the options to either take a 40k severance and leave now or Enter PIP and if I fail I get 9k

What’s the best way to make a decision given these circumstances, I feel like my career ended when I had just started and I’ve never been in any scenario like this so I don’t know what to do. I know job market is not the best right now either but I have to make a decision in 5 days.

Please let me know what you think about this situation and if you have any advice or suggestions on how to proceed.

PIP period is a month and half with 3 projects, two of which I’ve never done anything on. I was explicitly told I’m not allowed any help from anyone else and I’m expected to be independent.

I’m mentally crushed but I’m especially worried that it will look horrible on my resume to have left a job this early. and idk maybe job market is so bad that’s it’s worth it to try to take a chance to keep the job.

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.

Please help me get some insight between these two offers.

Lockheed Martin
Position: Associate Software Engineer (Simulation & Modeling)
- $88k + $5k sign on
- Defense
- C++
- 4x10 schedule, every Friday off
- Secret security clearance

Fidelity
Position: Associate Software Engineer
- $85k + $7.5k sign on
- Fintech
- Java + Spring
- Currently every other week in-office, but eventually will return to office 5 days a week
- Better bonus, 401k match, and profit sharing

Which would be better for overall career growth especially as a first job?

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?

Those who didn't got a job after a bachelor's and did a masters degree how are u doing now?