Software Quality Assurance Analysts and Testers
Develop and execute software tests to identify software problems and their causes. Test system modifications to prepare for implementation. Document software and application defects using a bug tracking system and report defects to software or web developers. Create and maintain databases of known defects. May participate in software design reviews to provide input on functional requirements, operational characteristics, product designs, and schedules.
š¬Career Video
šKey Responsibilities
- ā¢Identify, analyze, and document problems with program function, output, online screen, or content.
- ā¢Document software defects, using a bug tracking system, and report defects to software developers.
- ā¢Develop testing programs that address areas such as database impacts, software scenarios, regression testing, negative testing, error or bug retests, or usability.
- ā¢Design test plans, scenarios, scripts, or procedures.
- ā¢Document test procedures to ensure replicability and compliance with standards.
- ā¢Provide feedback and recommendations to developers on software usability and functionality.
- ā¢Install, maintain, or use software testing programs.
- ā¢Test system modifications to prepare for implementation.
š”Inside This Career
The software quality assurance analyst tests applications to find defects before users doāexecuting test cases, documenting bugs, verifying fixes, and serving as the quality checkpoint that catches software problems. A typical week centers on testing cycles. Perhaps 50% of time goes to test execution: running test cases, exploring applications, documenting defects found. Another 25% involves test preparationāanalyzing requirements, designing test cases, creating test data. The remaining time splits between defect management, coordination with developers, test automation, and participation in design reviews.
People who thrive as QA analysts combine systematic thinking with persistence and the patience to repeatedly test similar functionality until it works correctly. Successful analysts develop expertise in testing methodologies while building the communication skills that make bug reports actionable. They must advocate for quality without creating adversarial relationships with developers and maintain focus when testing becomes repetitive. Those who struggle often cannot communicate defects clearly or find the repetitive nature of regression testing tedious. Others fail because they cannot maintain testing thoroughness under deadline pressure.
Quality assurance represents the systematic effort to find software problems before release, with analysts serving as the last line of defense against defective software reaching users. The field has evolved with agile development, continuous integration, and automation that changes but doesn't eliminate the need for skilled testers. QA analysts appear in discussions of software development, product quality, and the testing practices that enable reliable software.
Practitioners cite the satisfaction when testing catches serious defects and the variety of applications encountered as primary rewards. Finding bugs that would have affected users provides genuine accomplishment. The work provides exposure to how systems function. Testing is essential to software quality. The field offers entry into software development. The work combines systematic method with exploration. Common frustrations include the pressure to compress testing when schedules slip and the perception that QA is lower-status than development. Many find the repetitive nature of testing wearing. Being the bearer of bug news creates relationship tension. Automation threatens some testing roles while creating others.
This career typically requires technical aptitude and testing experience, often combined with certifications like ISTQB. Strong analytical, communication, and documentation skills are essential. The role suits those who enjoy finding problems and can work systematically. It is poorly suited to those preferring creative work, uncomfortable delivering criticism of others' work, or finding repetitive tasks tedious. Compensation is competitive with entry-level software positions, with advancement into test automation or management offering higher compensation.
šCareer Progression
šEducation & Training
Requirements
- ā¢Entry Education: Bachelor's degree
- ā¢Experience: Several years
- ā¢On-the-job Training: Several years
- !License or certification required
Time & Cost
š¤AI Resilience Assessment
AI Resilience Assessment
Moderate human advantage with manageable automation risk
How much of this job involves tasks AI can currently perform
Likelihood that AI replaces workers vs. assists them
(BLS 2024-2034)
How much this role relies on distinctly human capabilities
š»Technology Skills
āKey Abilities
š·ļøAlso Known As
šRelated Careers
Other careers in technology
š¬What Workers Say
125 testimonials from Reddit
[Breaking] AWS Cloud Chief says "replacing junior employees with AI is one of the dumbest things I've ever heard". The tide is shifting back.
>Matt Garman, Amazon's cloud boss, has a warning for business leaders rushing to swap workers for AI: Don't ditch your junior employees. ... The Amazon Web Services CEO said on an episode of the "Matthew Berman" podcast published Tuesday that replacing entry-level staff with AI tools is "one of the dumbest things I've ever heard." ... "They're probably the least expensive employees you have. They're the most leaned into your AI tools," he said. ... "How's that going to work when you go like 10 years in the future and you have no one that has built up or learned anything?" [https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-cloud-chief-replacing-junior-staff-ai-matt-garman-2025-8](https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-cloud-chief-replacing-junior-staff-ai-matt-garman-2025-8) Slowly, day by day, the AI hype is dying out as companies realize it's basically just a faster google search. What are your thoughts?
Reminder: If you're in a stable software engineering job right now, STAY PUT!!!!!!!
I'm honestly amazed this even needs to be said but if you're currently in a stable, low-drama, job especially outside of FAANG, just stay put because the grass that looks greener right now might actually be hiding a sinkhole Let me tell you about my buddy. Until a few months ago, he had a job as a software engineer at an insurance company. The benefits were fantastic.. he would work 10-20 hours a week at most, work was very chill and relaxing. His coworkers and management were nice and welcoming, and the company was very stable and recession proof. He also only had to go into the office once a week. He had time to go to the gym, spend time with family, and even work on side projects if he felt like it But then he got tempted by the FAANG name and the idea of a shiny new title and what looked like better pay and more exciting projects, so he made the jump, thinking he was leveling up, thinking he was finally joining the big leagues From day one it was a completely different world, the job was fully on-site so he was back to commuting every day, the hours were brutal, and even though nobody said it out loud there was a very clear expectation to be constantly online, constantly responsive, and always pushing for more He went from having quiet mornings and freedom to structure his day to 8 a.m. standups, nonstop back-to-back meetings, toxic coworkers who acted like they were in some competition for who could look the busiest, and managers who micromanaged every last detail while pretending to be laid-back He was putting in 50 to 60 hours a week just trying to stay afloat and it was draining the life out of him, but he kept telling himself it was worth it for the resume boost and the name recognition and then just three months in, he got the layoff email No warning, no internal transfer, no fallback plan, just a cold goodbye and a severance package, and now heās sitting at home unemployed in a terrible market, completely burned out, regretting ever leaving that insurance job where people actually treated each other like human beings And the worst part is I watched him change during those months, it was like the light in him dimmed a little every week, he started looking tired all the time, less present, shorter on the phone, always distracted, talking about how he felt like he was constantly behind, constantly proving himself to people who didnāt even know his name He used to be one of the most relaxed, easygoing guys I knew, always down for a beer or a pickup game or just to chill and talk about life, but during those months it felt like he aged five years, and when he finally called me after the layoff it wasnāt just that he lost the job, it was like heād lost a piece of himself in the process To make it worse, his old role was already filled, and itās not like you can just snap your fingers and go back, that bridge is gone, and now heās in this weird limbo where heās applying like crazy but everything is frozen or competitive or worse, fake listings meant to fish for resumes Iāve seen this happen to more than one person lately and Iām telling you, if youāre in a solid job right now with decent pay, decent hours, and a company that isnāt on fire, you donāt need to chase the dream of some big tech title especially not in a market like this Right now, surviving and keeping your sanity is the real win, and that āboringā job might be the safest bet youāve got Be careful out there
[BREAKING] Amazon to layoff 30,000 corporate employees in one of the largest layoffs in its history
>Amazon is planning to cut as many as 30,000 corporate jobs beginning Tuesday, as the company works to pare expenses and compensate for overhiring during the peak demand of the pandemic, according to three people familiar with the matter. >The figure represents a small percentage of Amazonās 1.55 million total employees, but nearly 10% of the companyās roughly 350,000 corporate employees. This would represent the largest job cut at Amazon since around 27,000 jobs were eliminated starting in late 2022. >Managers of impacted teams were asked to undergo training on Monday for how to communicate with staff following notifications that will start going out via email tomorrow morning > [https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/amazon-targets-many-30000-corporate-job-cuts-sources-say-2025-10-27/](https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/amazon-targets-many-30000-corporate-job-cuts-sources-say-2025-10-27/) What are your thoughts on this?
4 years at Big tech. Being likeable beats being productive every single time
**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 modeātrying 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 kickerābeing 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?
I just watched an AI agent take a Jira ticket, understand our codebase, and push a PR in minutes and Iām genuinely scared
Iām a professional software engineer, and today something happened that honestly shook me. I watched an AI agent, part of an internally built tool our company is piloting, take in a small Jira ticket. It was the kind of task that would usually take me or a teammate about an hour. Mostly writing a SQL query and making a small change to some backend code. The AI read through our codebase, figured out the context, wrote the query, updated the code, created a PR with a clear diff and a well-written description, and pushed it for review. All in just a few minutes. This wasnāt boilerplate. It followed our naming conventions, made logical decisions, and even updated a test. One of our senior engineers reviewed the PR and said it looked solid and accurate. They would have done it the same way. What really hit me is that this isnāt some future concept. This AI tool is being gradually rolled out across teams in our org as part of a pilot program. And itās already producing results like this. Iāve been following AI developments, but watching it do my job in my codebase made everything feel real in a way headlines never could. It was a ticket I would have knocked out before lunch, and now itās being done faster and with less effort by a machine. Iām not saying engineers will be out of jobs tomorrow. But if an AI can already handle these kinds of everyday tickets, weāre looking at serious changes in the near future. Maybe not in years, but in months. Has anyone else experienced something similar? What are you doing to adapt? How are you thinking about the future of our field?
I quit CS and Iām 300% happier.
I slaved 2 years in a IT dev program. 3 internships, hired full time as dev (then canned for being too junior), personal projects with real users, networking 2x per month at meetups, building a personal brand. Interviewing at some companies 5x times and getting rejected for another guy, 100ās of rejections, tons of ghost jobs and interviews with BS companies, interned for free at startups to get experience 75% which are bankrupt now, sent my personal information out to companies who probably just harvested my data now I get a ton of spam calls. Forced to grind Leetcode for interviews, and when I ask the senior if he had to do this he said ā nah I never had to grind Leetcode to start in 2010. Then one day I put together a soft skill resume with my content/sales/communications skills and got 5 interviews in the first week. I took one company for 4 rounds for a sales guy job 100% commission selling boats and jet skiās. They were genuinely excited about my tech and content and communication skills. They offered me a job and have a proper mentorship pipeline. I was hanging out with family this last week and my little 3 year old nephew was having a blast. And I just got to thinkingā¦ This little guy doesnāt give 2 shits how hard I am grinding to break into tech. Life moves in mysterious ways. I stopped giving a shit and then a bunch of opportunities came my way which may be better suited for me in this economy. Life is so much better when you give up on this BS industry. To think I wanted to grind my way into tech just to have some non-technical PM dipshit come up with some stupid app idea management wants to build. Fuck around and find out. Thatās what I always say. Edit *** I woke up to 1 million views on this. Iām surprised at the negative comments lol. Life is short lads. It takes more energy to be pressed than to be stoic. Thanks to everyone who commented positively writing how they could relate to my story. Have a great day š
The era of AI slop cleanup has begun
Iām a freelance software engineer with about 8 years of experience mainly in early stage startups. At this point, I have a pretty steady flow of referrals. I donāt take every project on and not every one works out, but enough do that I can do it more than full time. Lately, though, I have noticed a large increase in projects where they paid a ton of money for an internal software and it does not work well at all. Tons of errors, unreasonably slow, inefficient and taking up a lot of resources, and large security flaws. At first, I thought maybe people just hired bad developers. The bar is pretty low to call yourself a developer or even a software engineer anyways, but Iām seeing the same problems now on multiple projects. When I take on a project on, I always sign an NDA and look at their codebase to look at some upfront issues that I can bring up because, most of the time, the people hiring me arenāt technical and donāt understand what the problem is. This is probably the 5th time now that a lot of the code was obviously AI generated. Comments in the code that were obviously written by AI, algorithms that are inefficient and make no sense, cluttered data structures, inconsistent coding patterns, etc. The overall thing is that, yes it mostly works, but does so terribly to the point where it needs to be fixed. It might be a few years before we start to see this on an enterprise scale, but Iām noticing this becoming a serious problem for small businesses and startups, especially when the founders / people are in charge arenāt technical enough to identify this ahead of time.
Where tf is this industry headed? Layoffs again.
Just had layoffs at the startup I work at. Weāre valued at 3.8Bn. Grew close to 28% YoY. Had a great team. We were working well together. I could honestly see no issues. And yesterday? Layoffs. One of my closest friends and teammates was impacted. Maybe he wasnāt putting in crazy hours but was extremely capable and knew what he was doing. Are we gonna pip people for wanting a work life balance?! What hurts more is the manner in which itās done. We were texting until 4 yesterday and at 5 - his slack is deactivated. Not even a farewell. Nothing. Itās like he just vanished into thin air. Fuck this industry and fuck this company. Fuck the āleadersā who reduce people to mere numbers on this excel sheets. Fuck this shit.
Why I left big tech and plan on never coming back.. EVER.
I used to think landing a job at a big tech company would be the peak of my career. Everyone made it sound like once you got in, your life was set. Prestige, money, smart people, meaningful work. I bought into the whole thing. I worked my ass off to get there. Leetcode, system design prep, referrals, rejection after rejection. And when I finally got the offer, I remember feeling like I had won the lottery. That feeling didnāt last long. What I stepped into was one of the most toxic, mentally draining environments Iāve ever experienced. It didnāt happen all at once. It crept in. The first few weeks were exciting, but then the cracks started to show. The pressure was insane. The deadlines were borderline delusional. There was this unspoken expectation to be available at all times. Messages late at night. Work bleeding into weekends. No one ever said it out loud, but if you wanted to be seen as serious, as someone who "got it," you had to sacrifice everything else. The culture was a constant performance. I couldnāt just do my job. I had to sell it. Everything I worked on needed a narrative. Every project had to be spun into something that could fit neatly into a promotion packet or a perf review. I wasnāt building software. I was building a case to not be forgotten. Because every quarter, someone got labeled as underperforming. It didnāt always make sense who it was. Sometimes it was the quietest person on the team. Sometimes it was someone who just had the wrong skip manager. Everyone smiled in meetings but no one felt safe. The politics were unbearable. Influence mattered more than clarity. Visibility mattered more than functionality. Everything had to be socialized in just the right way to just the right people. One wrong Slack message or a poorly timed piece of feedback could nuke months of work. And if you didnāt know how to play the game, it didnāt matter how smart or hardworking you were. You were dead in the water. Work-life balance was a joke. I was constantly anxious, constantly behind, constantly checking messages like something was going to blow up if I missed a ping. I stopped sleeping properly. I stopped seeing friends. I stopped caring about things I used to love. My weekends were spent recovering from the week and bracing for the next one. And the whole time I kept telling myself it was temporary. That it would get better. That if I just made it to the next level, it would all be worth it. But it never got better. The pressure just got worse. The bar kept moving. The layoffs started. The reorganizations. The endless leadership changes. Half my team vanished in one cycle. I remember joining a Zoom call one morning and realizing I didnāt even know who my manager reported to anymore. People were disappearing mid-project. Morale was a punchline. Everyone was scared but pretending they werenāt. Everyone was tired but still smiling in team standups. I started to feel like I was losing my grip. When I finally left, I didnāt feel free. I felt broken. It took months before I stopped checking my calendar every morning out of reflex. I still have dreams about unfinished sprints and last-minute roadmap changes. I still flinch when I see a Slack notification. People glamorize these jobs because of the compensation and the brand names. But no one talks about the cost. I gave that place everything and it chewed through me like I was nothing. Just another seat to fill. Just another cog in the machine. I left with more money, sure. But I also left with burnout, insomnia, and a genuine hatred for the industry I used to be passionate about. I donāt know if Iāll go back to big tech. Right now Iām just trying to feel like a human again.
STEM fields have the highest unemployment with new grads with comp sci and comp eng leading the pack with 6.1% and 7.5% unemployment rates. With 1/3 of comp sci grads pursuing master degrees.
[https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/college-majors-with-the-lowest-unemployment-rates-report/491781](https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/college-majors-with-the-lowest-unemployment-rates-report/491781) Sure it maybe skewed by the fact many of the humanities take lower paying jobs but $0 is still alot lower than $60k. With the influx of master degree holders I can see software engineering becomes more and more specialized into niches and movement outside of your niche closing without further education. Do you agree?
Reminder: The people on this sub who say that "AI will replace Software Engineers" are most likely unemployed new grads.
I've had this convo way too many times. **Person:** "AI is going to replace us! It can literally code new features in seconds" **Me:** "Oh, what kind of features are you talking about?" **Person:** "Well, I created a TODO app in 10 minutes with it" **Me:** "Oh.. what about a feature for a production-grade, enterprise level application used by real users?" **Person:** "Well considering it helped me in my TODO app so much, it could easily help there too" **Me:** "Oh.. do you have any experience with working on these kinds of systems?" **Person:** "No...." Please, for the love of god, if you don't have any actual experience as a software engineer, shut up about AI.
I Just Got Laid Off ā But It Might Actually Be the Best Thing Thatās Happened to Me!
Guys, I am absolutely freaking out right now, and I had to share. So, here's the deal: The last couple of months at my company have been *rough* ā a ton of layoffs, and I was just waiting for the other shoe to drop. I had this sinking feeling I might be next, so I started job hunting in January (safety net, right?). Fast forward to last Friday, and I land this AMAZING job offer. Great pay, better benefits, the whole shebang. I was stoked, it felt like such a perfect fit, and I was already planning to resign today. But guess what just happened? My SVP called me *just now*. The conversation went something like this: "Tough decision, but we're having to let you go, and we want to part on good terms." And to add a little salt (or should I say sugar?) to the wound, theyāre offering me *five months* severance pay. Iām literally screaming in excitement because not only did I dodge a bullet with the layoffs, but now Iāve got an even better opportunity lined up. Itās like the universe had my back! So yeah, I'm still processing all this, but I just wanted to share this wild, unexpected turn of events with you all. Itās crazy how things work out sometimes. Here's to new beginnings!
I gave up after 2 years and took the easy way out
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.
Genuinely what the HELL is going on?
The complete lack of ethics driving this entire AI push is absurd and Iām 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 itās 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 yāall doing fr??????? I mean some of you work at palantir tho so. Itās all fun and games til itās not. EDIT: This is not about YouTube but the industry as a whole. Iām 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 anythingā¦.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. Itās hot and itās only going to get hotterā¦.. Edit: examples of nonsense https://x.com/culturecrave/status/1950636669507674366?s=46
Uncle Bob predicts a reverse bubble pop for CS jobs
AI is in a bubble just like the the dotcom bubble in the year 2000. Internet is one of the greatest technological advancements of all time - but it was in a bubble because tons of investment flowed into it, companies over hired, and most companies just didn't make it. the ones that did changed the world forever Same is happening with AI. Tons of investment flows in, but companies are doing the opposite with hiring. They are ***under hiring*** because of the expectation that AI will replace employees (it wont). So when pops, companies will rush to hire talent back up. I agree
Wiped my company's production DB last week.
**Preface**: 8 YoE, Big company (where I work) acquired a small but very successful product last year. I recently moved over to this product to help integrate it into our suite of software. **Story**: Unfortunately, this product lacked any sort of staff tooling, so support requests were more often than not accomplished by running SQL directly on the production database (š). One of the most standard requests was updating product codes that were _specific_ to a user's account, i.e. a given product code for one user would not work for another user. The SQL boiled down to: UPDATE "users" SET "product_access_codes" = "..." WHERE "users"."id" = '289571032'; Last week, while on-call, I wake up to an "urgent" request to enable a user's product codes in time for a demo "very soon". Having done this countless times, I whip up and run the following: UPDATE "users" SET "product_access_codes" = "..."; WHERE "users"."id" = '289571032'; Notice anything? Well I didn't until I saw the dreaded "12857294 rows affected" result. There is truly no stronger stimulant than the realizing that you just bricked the production database by overwriting the user table with bad data. After coming to terms with the reality of my situation over the next 10 seconds (felt like 10 hours) I hit up our SRE team and give them the bad news. **Outcome:** Luckily for me, our SRE team had backups configured such that we were able to restore the database to the state ~2 minutes before my mishap. Total downtime ended up being ~20 minutes while we ran the restore. After the dust settled I'm glad to report I did not in fact lose my job. I _did_ feel incredibly embarrassed, but equally thankful for my coworkers being empathetic and understanding that mistakes can happen. My EM blamed the situation more on our lack of tooling, so we sliced up some time last week to write our first version of staff tools. **Takeaway**: Doesn't matter how many times you've done something or how long you've been in the game, fuck-ups do happen and often when you feel the most complacent. This was a query I'd written many times over; the early morning request plus the urgency led me to get complacent and cut corners. More importantly though, in retrospect, **always turn off autocommit in your production DB sessions**. I could have avoided the entire situation had my SQL instead been \set AUTOCOMMIT off BEGIN; UPDATE "users" SET "product_access_codes" = "..."; WHERE "users"."id" = '289571032'; Upon seeing the syntax error and rows affected output I could have just ran `ROLLBACK` and avoided the whole situation. I honestly wanted to write this post mainly just to call out the fact that anytime you run SQL in production it should be wrapped in an explicit transaction.
Just pushed my first PR for my new job at Azure after leaving AWS!
After ~~being asked to leave~~ **voluntarily** departing from AWS last week to search for new opportunities, I am happy to state that I found a new job at Azure! Ā I'm meeting my new team later this afternoon for onboarding, and I wanted to leave a good first impression before that meeting, so I coded my first PR and self-approved it a few minutes ago to show that I'm a go-getter who takes initiative! It was just a one-line change for some DNS settings and I ran it through chatGPT and everything checked out! They are going to be so impressed with me! There were some pipeline warnings that initially prevented me from releasing it to the higher environments, but I managed to find a workaround by borrowing the credentials from my coworkerās laptop! Do you have any other suggestions for what to do before my meeting? It feels good being part of an amazing team and help keep the internet alive!
Hacks to get hired at Amazon
Hey, Iām a software engineer at Amazon and want to share some hacks on getting hired. Couple points: 1) Please do not message me 2) I have participated in many interviews, this is my experience, the morals of these cheats or whether you have success is up to you. First, the coding rounds (not including OA) does not allow you to run your code, itās basically a blank text editor. Many interviewers cannot really tell if your code will run, they just see if it ālooks correctā. Iāve seen a lot of candidates get hired by borderline writing pseudocode. The lesson here is to waste zero time wondering about nit-picky details like if your loop is off by one, or what that built in method to convert an int to a string isā¦ they care about SPEED and just that you have the right idea. Second, Amazon treats their LPs like the holy texts. But the only thing that really matters is delivering to please your superiors no matter what. This means put customer obsession, deliver results, and ownership above all else. These are the rules you live by. You tell these people that you skipped Christmas because you had to fix an open source dependency to unblock some random guy in Indian if you have toā¦ Honestly I hate this company but if this helps you get hired Iām happy for you, just know that if you do get hired and you BSād using my tried and true formula, you may get pipped.
After 4 years at Google, here's my honest take on why their work culture and processes didn't work for me.
I recently left Google after nearly four years. I wish I could say it lives up to all the hype, but it didn't. I honestly felt like I did some of the worst work of my career there. The environment, the processes, and team dynamics simply didn't align with my approach for how to collaborate and ship software. I've been reflecting on exactly why I wasn't able to make it work for me. Just to brace you, I know just how ranty this is going to sound. I'm not writing this as a condemnation of Google, because I know there are people that thrive and enjoy working there. This is just my own personal perspective on it. Take it with a grain of salt. # Agile is a Sin I come from companies that do agile processes. It's not perfect, but it's empowering and very adaptive to change. I've been told that agile processes do not scale. So when I joined Google, I was extremely interested in learning how and what Google does to ship software. They must be doing something slightly different or better to ship software at scale, right? Wrong. They quite literally don't have processes around collaboration. It's basically waterfall. Product writes up a doc. Gets buy-in from leadership. Tosses it at engineering. And then we never see them again, so we're left to implement it as we see fit. It is literally the most expensive and high risk software development I've seen in my entire career. They basically have blind faith they've hired super smart people that will just magically build the perfect product. Which to be fair, they do quite literally have a lot of *rock star* developers. But relying on purely heroics to ship software is a recipe for burn out and knowledge silos. Also, they don't ship software. Deadlines are arbitrary. There are so many times when we approach a deadline only for "X" feature needs to absolutely be there on release so we'll just push out the release. I think deadlines are stupid, so I don't want to pretend like I care about them. But I do care about shipping software. The sooner you ship, the sooner you can start to learn and prove that your core assumptions are right or wrong. So to ship sooner, you need to downscope. If your MVP (minimal viable product) requires several really difficult features to implement, maybe it's not an MVP anymore. But then again, I guess no one called it an MVP, but me, who is used to shipping software regularly. # The Doc Machine So, if you're not regularly shipping software, how can you possibly measure impact? Docs. Endless docs. Countless docs. So many docs that it can be impossible to find what doc says what you did. Google's mission is to "organize the world's information." Internally in Google, they generate a lot of information in docs, and it's very hard to search and find the information you're looking for. What's the point of docs no one reads? Well, since software doesn't get shipped, I assume it just acts as a laundry list of links when attempting to show impact for your performance reviews or promotions. You might not have shipped anything, but at least you left a paper trail of what you didn't ship. You want to know the worst part of it? They want you to write a doc on a system you don't understand. So you write it up, make some assumptions and send it out for approval. No one reads it to approve it. Let's say you get your single approver and start implementing. Guess what, your core assumption is wrong. The data isn't in the right place, or the data you thought had what you needed, doesn't. Now you need to rewrite the doc. What's the point of getting approval? What's the point of a doc that is wrong from the start? What's the point of upfront design that is wrong? Why not just implement and find out what actually is going on and make it work? The point is, it's just theater to make it look like we're doing our jobs. Why isn't the software the evidence we're doing our job? I'm not trying to say docs are bad, and everything should just be tribal knowledge. But I am saying docs that need to be rewritten from the get-go are a waste of time. # Bad docs Ironically, despite needing to write so many docs to implement things. When you read other people's docs, you might notice something. They're very high-level. They're more like a thesis, then like actual documentation on how to use an API. What is the point of docs that don't answer how to use an API? Focusing on the high-level philosophy of a service is honestly distracting and unhelpful. I think I understand why this happens. It's hard to keep docs up to date. So if you keep them high-level, they won't become obsolete or need to be updated. But I don't care about your thesis defense; I just want to use your software to solve my problem. And I know Google can write good docs. [Angular](https://angular.dev/overview) has fantastic documentation. [Proto Buffers](https://protobuf.dev/overview/) have great docs. Both of these are made by Google. I guess the difference is they're public facing and Google doesn't prioritize internal docs like they do their external facing ones. # A Culture of Silence So, there is a lot of lip service towards how open Google is. Say how they're trying to encourage employees in fireside chats to not ask anonymous questions so that leadership can follow up with the individual to gain more context. (This, by the way, does not prevent people from asking anonymously, which they do.) There is also a culture of no-blame retrospectives. They don't run regularly, even when I advocate for them. And worst of all, when we finally do run retrospectives, we don't discuss challenges and problems we are encountering. So, what's the point of a retrospective that doesn't talk about pain points and mitigation strategies? From my perspective, it just looks like theater and a way to paint a false view that everything is good and we have nothing to complain about. Or worse, that we are helpless and we really cannot change anything. Coming from companies with genuinely open cultures where we fostered candid and open discussions, it's baffling to me that no one seems willing to put in the minimal effort to improve everyone's lives. It is better to be positive about a broken system and keep the status quo than it is to ask people to put in a laughable small level of effort to make everyone's life better. Not everything is going smoothly all the time. And assuming we **want** it to run smoothly, we should probably discuss the pain points and workarounds or solutions to them. Knowledge silos are bad. More open discussions can reduce knowledge silos which reduces the burden on individuals and gives everyone a balance for job responsibilities. # A Culture of Bottom-Up (but only if it's top-down) So, in meetings with leadership. They emphasize that our *bottom-up culture* is how we do such great work. And by *bottom-up*, they apparently mean *top-down*. # When Bottom-Up Meets Brick Wall So, let's say our UXR (user experience research team) has come up with an obvious gap in our offerings. What would you do? Perhaps gather some people from multiple disciplines and brainstorm a solution. Or maybe you just get leadership and design in a room and iterate on who knows what behind closed doors for literal months, before you ever even involve engineering. And for those few months, you pull engineering off their current teams in a large-scale reorg and don't give them marching orders instead just give them a bunch of vague ideas of what they might want to build. Like...what is engineering supposed to do? Build against an invisible moving target? The answer is, that is exactly what we do. Not because it's a good use of our time, but because we have nothing better to do and we have no input into the vision of the product. So let's say, you're an engineer, like yours truly, and you think that process is stupid, and instead you really do want to try to implement a bottoms up initiative. So maybe, see a feature, we originally spec'd out but was dropped because they didn't see the current value in implementing it. But it sounds kind of cool, and shouldn't be that difficult to get an MVP for this feature. Maybe you go to reach out across teams, pull in people that own data you need, a team that works on Android and iOS, and try to get people from the backend team so you can make an e2e MVP to demonstrate this feature is doable. Also, act as a test bed to show smaller agile processes work and probably how we should handle work in the org. Sounds pretty encouraging, right? But here is the real problem, one of the teams is a no-show. Not only are they a no-show, they also refuse to work with you and ignore your messages. You escalate to your manager and tech lead, and that team also ignores them too. You work with the other teams and implement everything, but say the one thing to tie everything together and make it work e2e. Let's say a backend team refused to work with you. So, naturally, offer to do the work for them. And they tell you to not do that. Because it's not my code base, I'm not on call, and I don't have to maintain it. So what do you do? What I did was create a video demo that made it look like it should work and presented it to leadership. We were reorged before this demo was even presented, so the feature died on the vine. # The Only MVP Is Minimum Viable Plausible Deniability Let's say that you do still believe in the rhetoric that, *the organization really does believe in bottom-up*. So you take some time and write up a doc (which is an activity you don't enjoy but if that's how the game is played, and you want to play ball, you do it). The doc outlines an open source initiative that is coincidentally attempting to solve the space we just tried to fill. But since there's an open-source community trying to solve the same problem space, maybe we can just leverage that and even help them grow at the same time. Anyway, it was super nice to have leadership hear me out, but they didn't want to go with it, because it turns out that one of the reasons we hamstrung our last project was because we were attempting to skirt a legal definition that the open source project is tackling head on. Suddenly, it made more sense: The original project was destined to fail, not because it was a bad idea, but because they were trying to handicap the implementation to avoid legal scrutiny. Fundamentally, we're not trying to build good software or solve problems. We're just trying to do something without bringing legal scrutiny to Google. I understand getting sued sucks, and the law is often weaponized against Google. But why handicap ourselves? There are so many other ideas out there. Why not pursue things that are higher value and lower risk? I cynically believe it could just be virtue signaling to investors, to show Google is trying new things and still taking risks. But their risks seem high-risk, low-reward, compared to the normal practices I'm used to, which focus on mitigating risk and prioritizing high value. Taking risks here seems to be about signaling growth, but are they truly growing? Wouldn't the more obvious path be to take the calculated legal risk to solve a real problem and potentially achieve genuine growth? I don't know; I'm not in leadership. I just had a worm's-eye view of the machine. # Grassroots Agility, Stomped by Apathy Let's say you came from an agile background and you even believe it. Because you've seen it solve very obvious communication issues that you see arise in large organizations. You've experienced it firsthand, you know it works. You go and explain it to your manager, they say that there are organization issues and leadership is resistant to change. They don't discourage you from trying, but they kind of set the expectations that nothing will change. But, what else are you supposed to do? Nothing? So you have a meeting with your skip manager (your manager's manager) once again advocating to adopt agile processes and maybe get more stakeholder buy-in. And they give you the advice to do it locally with your team. You know, "bottom-up" kind of stuff. You present it to the team. They hate it. They don't want processes. They don't want collaboration or more communication. They say agile practices are dehumanizing and that we are not interchangeable cogs in the machine. A bit of a disservice towards agile processes. But they are willing to try some of the ceremonies. But literally, for any reason whatsoever, they cancel meetings, like retrospectives or stand-ups. Maybe we need more time to finish a feature, or maybe it's a holiday, or we get reorged. And we never start up the meeting again, at least until I ask for it. Followed by it once again being canceled at the drop of a hat. And no one cares. They don't see the value in it. And to be honest, the ceremonies are toothless because we don't discuss actual problems, we don't discuss work progress to reduce knowledge silos, and action items are never done and are also usually not meaningful anyway. The reason people don't see the value of agile processes is not that it's not a good framework to address communication gaps, but because just doing the ceremonies without the communication makes them pointless. There is value in the ceremonies if they're being used to address the problems. But actively ignoring the problems, even with ceremonies, means we're now just wasting people's time. # Bottom-Up, Top-Down, and Going Nowhere If there is a bottom-up culture at Google, it is self sabotaging. There is so much momentum for the status quo that actual process change is near impossible. The only change that appears to work is a top-down mandate, which they try every year with constant reorgs and get the same results. # There is No Team in I So, coming from an agile background (I know I sound like I'm in a cult, with how much I bring it up, but bear with me), I've come to the understanding that I as an individual do not necessarily matter. It's about putting aside ego and working together on a larger goal. This also comes with a nice benefit of distributing responsibility, and reducing burn out. That's pretty damn *ungoogley*. At Google, they're rugged cowboys. They pull themselves up by the bootstrap and don't care about your collaboration. You need to own everything. Your work, your feature, your project, your process, your career. No one is here to help you. You need to just do it yourself. Which is ironic, as [googley-ness](https://staffeng.medium.com/being-googly-62b75dd642df) should theoretically not embody it. But the performance evaluation surely doesn't emphasize trying to make teamwork work. [A bus factor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor) of 1 is seen as a positive thing. It means you've made yourself invaluable. You are the sole point of contact, and despite that sounding like a lot of annoying responsibility, it's perceived as good because you *own* it. I hate knowledge silos. I do not believe it makes anyone more valuable. I fought against the hoarding of knowledge. I'd include people into meetings to make sure I'm not the only one with context. I'd ask stupid questions and repeat talking points in meetings to make sure I understood and we were aligned. These are all considered negative things at Google. Because it is seen as wasting everyone's time in the meeting. It is better to repeat yourself with several dozen 1:1s (or I guess write yet another doc no one will read) than it is to talk it over in a group and make sure there is no ambiguity. It could just be me though. But it sure felt like it, when my manager said I was *"leaning on others too much."* How else am I supposed to read that? I've never seen such an environment that is literally so hostile to collaboration. # Performative Theater I hate 1:1s. I think they're a waste of time. I would even argue that most 1:1s are a waste of time in every context. I'm probably being hyperbolic, as I'm sure there must be cases where 1:1s are beneficial. But I'm struggling to think of one right now. 1:1s are a bottleneck to communication. And judging by how often my 1:1s were canceled with my managers, I'd have to say they don't value them either. So, I'm a huge advocate for openness and transparency. And after one reorg (I went through 5 reorgs in my 4 years at Google, and been through 7 managers, chaos is the norm) leadership was attempting to be more open and transparent and so allowed anyone to join their meetings. So, since I felt like I did not have enough context to understand their decisions, I joined those meetings. When they asked if everyone had context on a doc, I was the only person to raise my hand and said I did not. I guess this was a sin to acknowledge my own ignorance, because it turns out after the next meetings I was removed from the subsequent meetings. I asked my manager if I could be brought back to gain more context, and he told me I had enough context to do my job. While probably true, I had a suspicion that my work was not very high priority. Maybe we should work on something else. Anyway, this taught me that it's all optics. I think my manager wanted to control the narrative. If he wasn't there to be a middle man, what is his job? Like, seriously, what *is* his job? I still don't understand what value he brought. # Tech Debt Forever To say Google's code base is complex is an understatement. Not only is it complicated, it's also a mess. Not only is it a mess, but it's also poorly documented. And not only that, but it actively fights you as you make changes and try to understand it. Cryptic compile errors. Cryptic build errors. Cryptic run time errors. And just when you think you've finally got it working. There are blockers on merging the code because of invisible linting errors you didn't know you were violating. Or there is some weird test case that broke, but only after 3 hours of running tests in the CI pipeline. Or maybe, you just want to delete some code, but it turns out that the code you're trying to delete has a different release schedule, so it cannot be deleted with other code. And the other code is dependent on the first bit of code that you cannot delete being deleted. The code is constantly fighting you. And maybe if we could discuss these issues in a group, we could understand the problems quicker or come up with strategies to mitigate them...but it turns out talking about how much it sucks to write code is frowned upon. So you just need to keep it to yourself. And I'm left wondering, *am I the problem?* Is my career a lie? Do I have imposter syndrome if I don't actually know what I'm doing? It makes you question everything. So I talked with my director (the skipās manager) about my challenges. And I was candid about it. And he said, "It sounds like you need mentorship." And I said, that's exactly what I need. And he said he'd help get me some. I messaged him every week for a few months. He offloaded this responsibility to my manager, who naturally, did nothing. By the time I left, I made the request 8 months prior. I was clearly not getting the mentorship I asked for. My manager's *wonderful* feedback was, "maybe you should find your own mentorship." And it does make me wonder, "what is *your* job if it is not to help me do *my* job better?" Anyway, I also was unable to find mentorship on my own. And it does make me wonder, does anyone truly understand the beast that is Google's complex internally built tech stack with poor documentation? Even the internal AI that is usually pretty good at explaining some of the code, will just straight-up hallucinate how the code works and then it becomes very hard to understand. The AI will tell you a very convincing lie, but you won't know it's a hallucination or how to possibly fix it, because the documentation is poor and the only way to learn how it really works is to reverse-engineer it by performing code archaeology. # I'm out So I left Google. It was amicable. This was, of course, also only my personal experience in my particular organization. I've been told different parts of the org and different teams are said to have different cultures. Heck, even some people might even thrive in the culture I described. But it's not for me. They gave me severance, which was honestly extremely nice. I tried so hard to bring cultural change to Google, but there is no willingness to change. Honestly, with the amount of money they're printing with ads and search, there is no pressure for them to make any changes. There is a clear cultural mismatch between what I value and what Google values. Even if Google pays lip service that they value the same things I value, their actions clearly show they do not. And so, I am honestly happy to be free from them and given the time to look for a place that values what I want. I used to believe I was *a mercenary for hire to the highest bidder*. But you know what? Apparently, within reason. I just want to work, collaborate, and iterate on software. Is that asking for too much? The one thing I can take away from my time at Google is that I now have a clearer understanding of what I'm looking for in my next step.
Big tech engineering culture has gotten significantly worse
Background - I'm a senior engineer with 10yrs+ experience that has worked at a few Big Tech companies and startups. I'm not sure why I'm writing this post, but I feel like all the tech "influencers" of 2021 glamorized this career to unrealistic expectations, and I need to correct some of the preconceived notions. The last 3 years have been absolutely brutal in terms of declining engineering culture. What's worse is that the toxicity is creating a feedback loops that exacerbates the declining culture. Some of the crazy things I've heard * "I want to you look at every one of your report and ask yourself, is this person producing enough value to justify their high compensations" (director to his managers) * "If that person doesn't have the right skills, get rid of them and we'll find someone that does" (VP to an entire organization after pivoting technology direction). * I.e. - It's not worth training people anymore, even if they're talented and can learn anything new. It's all sink or swim now * "If these candidates aren't willing to grind hundreds of leetcode questions, they don't have mental fortitude to handle this job" (engineers to other engineers) * To be fair, I felt like this was a defense mechanism. The amount of BS that you need to put up with to not get laid off has grown significantly. * "Working nights and weekends is expected" (manager to my coworker that was on PIP because he didn't work weekends). * I've always felt this pressure previously. But I've never heard it truly be verbalized until recently. Final thoughts * Software engineering in big tech feels more akin to investment banking now. Most companies expect this to be your life. You truly have to be "passionate" about making a bunch of money, or "passionate" about the product to survive. * Don't get too excited if your company stock skyrockets. The leaders of the company will continue to pinch every bit of value out of you because they're technically paying you more now (e.g. meta) and they know that the job market is harsh. * Prior to 2022, Amazon was considered the most toxic big tech company. But ironically, their multiple layers of bureaucracy and stagnating stock price likely prevented the the culture from getting too much worse, whereas many other companies have drastically exceeded Amazon in terms of toxicity in 2025. IMO, Amazon is solidly 50th percentile in terms of culture now. If you couldn't handle Amazon culture prior to 2022, then you definitely can't handle the type of culture that exists now.
The computer science dream has become a nightmare
https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/10/the-computer-science-dream-has-become-a-nightmare/ "The computer science dream has become a nightmare Well, the coding-equals-prosperity promise has officially collapsed. Fresh computer science graduates are facing unemployment rates of 6.1% to 7.5% ā more than double what biology and art history majors are experiencing, according to a recent Federal Reserve Bank of New York study. A crushing New York Times piece highlights whatās happening on the ground. ...The alleged culprits? AI programming eliminating junior positions, while Amazon, Meta and Microsoft slash jobs. Students say theyāre trapped in an āAI doom loopā ā using AI to mass-apply while companies use AI to auto-reject them, sometimes within minutes."
Big Tech Isnāt the Dream Anymore. Itās a Trap
I used to believe that working at FAANG was the ultimate goal. Back in the day, getting an offer from one of these companies meant you had made it. It was a badge of honor, proof that you were one of the best engineers out there. And for a long time, FAANG jobs actually were amazing: good work, smart people, great stability. But thatās not the case anymore. In just the last couple of years, things have changed dramatically. If youāre still grinding Leetcode and dreaming of getting in, you should know that the FAANG people talk about online, the one from five or ten years ago, doesnāt exist anymore. What exists now is a toxic, cutthroat, anxiety-inducing mess that isnāt worth it. At first, I thought maybe it was just me. Maybe I had bad luck with teams or managers. But no, the more I talked to coworkers and friends at different FAANG companies, the clearer it became. Every company, every team, every engineer is feeling the same thing. The stress. The fear. The constant uncertainty. These companies used to be places where you could coast a little, focus on doing good work, and feel reasonably safe in your job. Now? Itās a pressure cooker, and itās only getting worse. The layoffs are brutal. And theyāre not just one-time events, theyāre a constant, looming threat. It used to be that getting a job at FAANG meant you were set for years. Now, people get hired and fired within months. Teams are gutted overnight, sometimes with no warning at all. Engineers who have been working their asses off, doing great work, suddenly find themselves jobless for reasons that make no sense. Itās not about performance. Itās not about skill. Itās about whatever arbitrary cost-cutting measures leadership decides on to make the stock price look good that quarter. And if youāre not laid off? Youāre stuck in a worse situation. The same amount of work or more now gets dumped on fewer people. Everyone is constantly in survival mode, trying to prove they deserve to stay because nobody knows when the next round of cuts is coming. It creates this suffocating environment where nobody trusts anyone. Engineers arenāt helping each other because doing so might mean the other person gets ahead of them in the next performance review. Managers are terrified because they know theyāre just as disposable, so they push their teams harder and harder, hoping that if they hit all their metrics, they wonāt be next. It used to be that you could work at FAANG and just do your job. You didnāt have to be a politician, you didnāt have to constantly justify your own existence, you didnāt have to be paranoid about everything you did. Now? Itās a game of survival, and the worst part is that you donāt even control whether you win or lose. Your project could be perfectly aligned with company goals one day, and the next, leadership decides to kill it and lay off half the people working on it. Nothing you do actually matters when decisions are being made at that level. And forget about work-life balance. A few years ago, FAANG companies actually cared about this, at least on the surface. They gave you flexibility, good benefits, and a culture that encouraged taking time off when you needed it. But now? Itās all out the window. The expectation is that youāre always online, always grinding, always proving your worth because if you donāt, you might not have a job tomorrow. And the worst part? Itās not even leading to better products. All this stress, all this pressure, and the companies arenāt even innovating like they used to. Itās just a mess of half-baked projects, short-term thinking, and leadership flailing around trying to look like they have a plan when they clearly donāt. I used to think the only way to have a good career in software was to get into FAANG. But the truth is, non-tech companies are a way better place to be right now. The best-kept secret in this industry is that banks, insurance companies, healthcare companies, and even old-school manufacturing firms need engineers just as much as FAANG does, but they actually treat them like human beings. The work is more stable, the expectations are lower, and the stress is way lower. People actually log off at 5. They actually take vacations. They actually have lives outside of work. If youāre still dreaming of FAANG, hoping that getting in will make your career perfect, wake up. Itās not the dream anymore. Itās a trap. And once you get in, youāll realize just how quickly it can turn into a nightmare. The job security is gone. The work-life balance is gone. The collaboration and innovation are gone. If you want a career where you can actually enjoy your life, look somewhere else. FAANG isnāt worth it anymore. \----------- ***I also want to tell you WHY the reality in the real world does not match the fake narrative on this subreddit.*** Pay attention to the comments youāre about to see. Youāll hear a lot of people insisting that everything Iām saying is wrong. That Big Tech is still as great as itās always been. That layoffs are rare, and work-life balance is just as good as itās always been. But hereās the thing ask yourself, who are the people saying this? Who are the ones telling you that Big Tech is the dream? In nearly every case, these people are brand new to the industry. Fresh grads. People with barely a year or two of experience under their belts. The truth is, they donāt know any better. Theyāre still caught up in the honeymoon phase, believing in the myth because they havenāt experienced the grind, the stress, or the reality of Big Tech's toxic culture. They havenāt seen what itās really like once the rose-colored glasses come off. Theyāve been sold a dream a carefully crafted image of what life at Big Tech *should* be. And theyāre happily buying into it, not realizing theyāve been fed a lie. These are the same people whoāve only had a glimpse of what working at Big Tech can be like. And thatās all they need to sing its praises they haven't had to stay long enough to experience the burnout, the layoffs, or the soul-crushing fear that comes with constantly being on the chopping block. They've been treated like royalty for a year or two, and they think theyāve made it. But let me tell you real experience, the kind that comes from working in this industry for several years, will open your eyes to the truth. And itās not pretty. Look at the facts. Engineers leave Big Tech after just a year because the culture is unsustainable. They realize the stability they were promised doesnāt exist. The work-life balance they were sold is a lie. The so-called āinnovationā is nothing more than endless churn, half-baked projects, and pressure to deliver results at any cost. Itās not the dream these new grads think it is itās a pressure cooker where youāre just another cog in a machine that doesnāt care about you. And once youāre in, itās hard to escape. So before you buy into the hype, take a step back. Consider the bigger picture. Why is it that so many experienced professionals are fleeing Big Tech? Why do they jump ship to industries like banking, healthcare, and manufacturing industries that donāt carry the same glamour but offer stability, work-life balance, and respect for their employees? Theyāve seen the reality behind the curtain, and they know itās not worth it anymore. Now, think about this: The new grads in the comments? They havenāt seen that yet. They havenāt lived it. Theyāre parroting what theyāve been told or what they wish was true. But when the layoffs hit, when the stress becomes unbearable, when they start working 60-70 hour weeks to keep their job, theyāll understand. Until then, theyāll continue to claim Big Tech is a dream, because they havenāt been there long enough to realize that itās a nightmare. The numbers donāt lie. People leave. And when they leave, they donāt look back. They go to places where their work is valued, where they can actually *live* their lives. They leave because they know the truth Big Tech is a trap, a fleeting dream that turns into a nightmare as soon as you realize how disposable you really are. So, before you drink the Kool-Aid, ask yourself: Why do so many of these new grads stay only a year or two before they burn out? Why is the turnover rate so high? Why do they look for jobs outside Big Tech? These are all questions worth considering. The truth is staring us in the face, but too many people are too caught up in the shiny promises to see it. Donāt let yourself fall into the same trap. Donāt buy into the lies being sold to you. Because once you're in, itās not so easy to get out. And when youāre stuck, it can feel like youāre fighting for your survival. Donāt let the dream blind you to the reality. Wake up. Look at whatās really going on, and make the choice thatās best for you.
[Breaking] Intel to layoff more than 20% of staff (22,000 employees)
>Intel Corp. is poised to announce plans this week to cut more than 20% of its staff, roughly 22,000 employees, aiming to eliminate bureaucracy at the struggling chipmaker >The cutbacks follow an effort last year to slash about 15,000 jobs ā a round of layoffs announced in August. [https://finance.yahoo.com/news/intel-cut-over-20-workforce-004251026.html](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/intel-cut-over-20-workforce-004251026.html) What are your thoughts on this?
I GOT THE JOB!! F*** MY OLD MANAGER!!!
Iāve 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 didnāt want to burn bridges but I could NOT care less anymore
A m a z o n is cheap
Was browsing around to keep tab on the job market and talked to a recruiter today about a senior engineer role. The role expects 5 days RTO, On call rotation 24/7 every 4-5 months for a week. I asked for flexibility to wfh at least during the on call week and the recruiter fumbled. Iāve been in industry for close to 10 years now and first time talking to Amazon. I thought faang paid more. Totally floored to find out Iām already making 13% more than the basic being offered for the role. And youāre also expecting me to go through a leetcode gauntlet? No thanks. I feel like our industry as a whole is getting enshittificated. If you already got a job and have good team/manager, focus on climbing the ladder and if youāre ever on the side of interviewing, stop the leetcode style stuffs and focus more on digging the experience of a person? Thatās how I been interviewing and got really good candidates.
How to deal with a dev who works constantly?
I am a mid-level dev on a team and we recently hired another mid-level dev. He is really nice, but is constantly working. I am seeing him commit code at 2 am, 7am, 3pm, 10pm etc. And he is taking most the tickets in the backlog. He completed an entire epic in 3 days working overnight. It's starting to make what was once a great team environment feel hyper competitive and stressful, as I have to scramble just to get work before he gobbles up several more tickets. And now I'm spending more time just reviewing his work than doing my own. In standup he is getting praised as a 'superstar', but in my view he is making the work environment a bit toxic. I want to bring this up to my lead at my next 1:1, but I'm not really sure how to phrase it as I dont want to be viewed as petty or lazy. Any advice?
Thanks to all the AI coders out there, im busier than i've been in years
I've been freelancing on the side for more than couple years now, mostly helping startups and smaller teams fix bugs, add features, the usual stuff. Used to be maybe 1 or 2 projects a month. Now I'm turning people away because there's too much work coming in. And I'm pretty sure I know why. About 70% of the requests I get now are basically "we built this with AI and it doesn't work, can you fix it?" tbh I'm not mad about it. The money's good and the issues are usually pretty straightforward once you dig in. Last few weeks alone I've seen zero input validation, hallucinated libraries that don't exist, payment logic that does the opposite of what the comments say. The security stuff is wild. Apparently 45% of AI-generated code has vulnerabilities and I believe it. Don't get me wrong, people hired me to clean up messy code before AI too. But it used to be like 1 in 10 projects. Now it's most of them. And the pattern is always the same, looks clean, runs fine once and then falls apart when complexity hits. My income's up like 40% from last year and I barely market myself anymore. People just find me when their vibe-coded MVP starts breaking under real use. So yeah, thanks AI. Best thing that happened to my side hustle. Hope this keeps up:)
FELLAS, AFTER A YEAR WE DID IT
I LANDED A SWE JOB AND ITS FOR A GREAT COMPANY WITH KILLER BENEFITS AND GREAT PAY FOR MY AREA, IVE BEEN UNEPMPLOYED FOR A YEAR AND HAVE EASILY PUT OUT LIKE 1000 APPLICATIONS AND WE GOT ONE LADS LETS GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
A Graybeard Dev's Guide to Coping With A.I.
As someone has seen a lot of tech trends come and go over my 20+ years in the field, I feel inspired to weigh in on my take on this trending question, and hopefully ground the discussion with actual hindsight, avoiding panic as well as dismissing it entirely. There are lots of things that used to be hand-coded that aren't anymore. CRUD queries? ORM and scaffolding tools came in. Simple blog site? Wordpress cornered the market. Even on the hardware side, you need a server? AWS got you covered. But somehow, we didn't end up working any less after these innovations. The needed expertise then just transferred from: \* People who handcoded queries -> people who write ORM code \* People who handcoded blog sites -> people who write Wordpress themes and plugins \* People who physically setup servers -> people who handle AWS \* People who washed clothes in a basin by hand -> people who can operate washing machines Every company needs a way to stand out from their competitors. They can't do it by simply using the same tools their competition does. Since their competition will have a budget to innovate, they'll need that budget, too. So, even if Company A can continue on their current track with AI tools, Company B is going to add engineers to go beyond what Company A is doing. And since the nature of technology is to innovate, and the nature of all business is to compete, there can never be a scenario where everyone just adopts the same tools and rests on their laurels. Learn how AI tools can help your velocity, and improve your code's reliability, readability, testability. Even ask it to explain chunks of code that are confusing! Push its limits, and use it to push your own. Because at the end of the day/sprint/PI/quarter or fiscal year, what will matter is how far YOU take it, not how far it goes by itself.
Top startups are hiring like crazy. Here's where to actually find them.
Well-funded startups/scaleups are hiring across the board. Sharing a bunch of (maybe) under-the-radar places to still find top startups building cool things. \-Ā [**Welcome to the Jungle**](https://uk.welcometothejungle.com/) (fka OttaĀ (good matchmaking, can choose remote, good UK/EU coverage) \-Ā **Hacker News**Ā [Who's Hiring](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43243024)Ā (very high signal and usually can connect directly with founder/early team. Check out the March 2025 thread) \- [**GrepJob**](https://grepjob.com/) (mostly mid-stage and almost faang, filterable by stack/level)Ā \-Ā [**Startups.Gallery**](http://startups.gallery/)Ā (good directory of top startups/scaleups + job board) \-Ā **Joining a**Ā **VC's talent networks**Ā / job boardsĀ ([Greylock](https://greylock.com/jobs/#talent-network-tab),Ā [a16z](https://a16z-games.typeform.com/1337-talent?typeform-source=www.google.com), [SPC](https://jobs.southparkcommons.com/jobs), etc) \- [**Next Play**](https://nextplay.so/)Ā (lots of founding/early team type roles, mostly SF/NY-centric tho) \- [**Communitech**](https://communitech.ca/) (mostly for Canadian tech) \- [**Hiring Cafe**](https://hiring.cafe/) (less curated, but literally millions of roles and good filtering) Hope this helps. Please add more
My laid-off 4 YOE former Microsoft SWE CS UMich grad friend has capitulated. He had to get a job as a bartender.
Homie was unemployed for around 5 or 6 months? Hundreds of apps later to no success. His resume was peer reviewed by former managers, Reddit, former professors etc. Tons of ghosting, tons of "we've hired candidates that better align with XYZ". Applying for any and all entry level roles, mid levels, senior, dozens of cities around the country etc. He even got rejected from simple local Help Desk roles. The only offer he got was a Help Desk job that would require him to move 2000 miles (remote bait and switch role) for less pay than a Costco cart pusher. His emergency fund is almost dry and he had to settle and get a job as a bartender in Santa Cruz, which he says he actually likes. Luckily he's not autistic or smells bad like most in this field so apparently he is bringing several hundred a night or something with tips. This market is fucked. I guess our emergency funds should be upped to 24 months instead of 6 months. EDIT: This subreddit is ridiculous. Everyone thinks they won't be the one down on their luck for 6 months until it happens to them.
Junior devs not interested in software engineering
My team currently has two junior devs both with 1 year old experience. Unlike all of the juniors I have met and mentored in my career, these two juniors startled me by their lack of interest in software engineering. The first junior who just joined our company- ā¢ ā When I talked with him about clean coding and modularizing the code (he wrote 2000+ lines in one single function), he merely responded, āClean coding is not a real thing.ā ā¢ ā When I tried to tell him I think AI is a great tool, but itās not there yet to replace real engineers and AI generated codes need to be reviewed to avoid hallucinations. He responded, āthatās just what you think.ā ā¢ ā His feedback to our daily stand up was, āSorry, but I really donāt care about what other people are doing.ā The second junior who has been with the company for a year- ā¢ ā When I told him that he should prioritize his own growth and take courses to acquire new skills, he just blanked out. I asked him if he knew any learning website such as Coursera or Udemy and he told me he had never heard of them before. ā¢ ā He constantly complains about the tickets he works on which is our legacy system, but when I offered to talk with our EM to assign him more exciting work which will expand his skill sets, he told me he was not interested in working on the new system which uses modern tech stacks. I supposed I am just disappointed with these junior devs not only because after all these years, software engineering still gets me excited, but also itās a joy for me to see juniors grow. And in the past, all of the juniors I had were all so eager to seize the opportunities to learn. Edit: Both of them can code, but arenāt interested in software engineering.
The "apply to everything, even if you're not qualified" mantra really did a number on the job market.
This advice worked well in 2021/2022 but in 2025, it really is screwing up the job market. We will post a role asking for 5-7 YOE and get tons of applicants with no experience applying. We post what is clearly a mid level SWE role and get people who have only worked retail, help desk, restaurants etc applying. AI is making retail employees sound like they use coding in their day to day workflow somehow. Like why even bother? You are just wasting your own time and everyone else's time. Don't even get me started on the sheer number of people who are not even citizens applying for US jobs. These people are the worst. A job will clearly state "no sponsorship" yet an Army of overseas people will apply anyways. If you're a mid level engineer, or even entry level, a large reason why your resume isn't even seen is because a job posting will have 1000s of literal garbage resumes to sort through. People who probably have a higher chance of winning the Powerball than getting a job offer. You can be a great candidate for the job but have 3000 piles of shit stacked on top of your resume that make it impossible for you to be seen. It's literally a gamble or if you have a personal referral. ATS isn't an end-all-be-all sorting tool either.
A 5 min weekly habit completely changed my performance review and got me a bigger raise
I know like me a lot of yāall are coming up on your performance reviews or they just passed and I wanted to talk about a habit that I feel like a lot of people might not know about. When performance reviews came around I would spend hours searching slack and jira tickets about what I did the last year, it was incredibly frustrating. About two or so years ago I got a new manager that taught me about brag documents, basically you fill it out through out the year to have all your accomplishments in one document. We did monthly summaries, every month Iād fill out what I did for the month and send it to my manager. It helped a lot during last yearās performance review. Unfortunately, I started filling out my monthly summaries a month later or a few weeks after the week ended cause I was so busy. Still helpful but still stressed me out when Iām trying to focus on coding. I realized doing it weekly is the hack. Choose the same time every week for me itās Friday at like 3 and I take 5 mins to log the top accomplishments from the week. Made it easier to make a habit of it rather than forcing myself to write a big review later in the month or year. Feel free to use this template, itās simple but gets the job done. - win: shipped X / fixed Y - before / after: 310ms / 190ms - metric: - who benefited: - evidence: link/screenshot Ive used notion, google doc and sheet and kudos notes and honestly they all work fine. Use what you feel the most comfortable with and will help you keep the habit up. if you track wins, what changed for you at review time? any tricks to keep the habit going in month 5ā6 and beyond? TL;DR: track your accomplishments weekly, it makes it easier to remember what you did the last week rather than year.
My coworker uses AI to reply to my PR review and I hate it
I'm not against him using AI to write code (even though the code he produces clashes with the style, is harder to review, and has been known to not actually solve the bugs.) Given English is not his first language, and he isn't the best written communicator, I'm glad he's finding a tool that enables him to be productive. However, sometimes I'll spend 20 minutes writing a comment on his PR... giving context to some niche code path, how it interacts with other code paths, verbally retracing the conditions that can produce the bug, linking to historical commits helping us both understand the recent changes, etc. Then I'll get back 5 paragraphs of perfect English with a jovial tone saying my points are *so* valid and here's why my coworker made this change, and this and that... >Thanks for the detailed feedback and for raising these points. I've looked through the logic, and I think we're on the same page. Hereās a breakdown of how this change fits in with your observations. >You're absolutely right about the intended system behavior, especially regarding the FooClass workflow and how our SQL query is supposed to handle errors. The core issue we're hitting is a subtle race condition that causes a panic before our self-healing logic can engage. >The "Stuck Bar" Problem & FooClass: Your instinct is correct the foo.error IS NULL check in our query is designed to prevent exactly the kind of loop you described (link). The problem is that the current code panics before it ever gets a chance to call executeBaz(). Because the error state is never saved to the database, the query picks up the same problematic record on every run, leading to a crash loop. >\[Three more paragraphs\] >In short, this change is a defensive fix that ensures our state is updated correctly, allowing the rest of our robust logic (like the SQL query) to function as intended. It addresses the immediate panic while still validating your points about the overall system design. Clearly my coworker took my painstaking reply, fed it into some model with a prompt like "reply to this", and copy/pasted it back. Now instead of trying to work through the language barrier, I'm forced to interact with yet another chatbot instead of a human. The future is here and I hate it.
Iām told that our āengineering-focusedā culture is offputting to women
Iām a computational scientist working at a biotech company at a level equivalent to a Principal/Staff IC at a software company. The world of scientific computing is famous for shoddy software: think one-off Python/R scripts with a single 10k line `__main__()` function, zero version control, and no semblance of engineering or coding rigor. While this is the unfortunate norm in most of academia and industry, the computational biology division of my company differentiates itself by eschewing this trend and acting like a real tech company. We take pride in having a very well-engineered codebase, and itās a large factor in the companyās success in a very competitive market. The companyās customers consistently tell us that we have the best software and analytical methods in the field, which is a big reason why they use our products. The computational biology division is about 90% men. About 25% of our hires are women, but their tenure at the company is much shorter than menās (median of 2.5 years, compared with 5.5 years for men). A VP at the company (āVelmaā) was tasked with improving this attrition discrepancy, and she met 1:1 with all senior members of the division, including myself. Velma told me that the reasons women give for leaving are not the usual suspects, like bro-y culture, intellectual dismissal, outright sexism, etc. Instead, she said that the overwhelming reason women are dissatisfied is our focus on āengineering minutiaeā (her exact words). She gave an example of an interaction I had with āSusanā on our team. Susan wrote a tool that used O(n^(2)) memory, which worked fine on test data but blew up on real data. Rather than implement a simple algorithmic fix that would let it run in O(n) memory, Susanās solution was to just provision a VM with a ludicrous amount of RAM (>1 TB). I was responsible for reviewing her code, and she pushed back when I told her this would be unacceptable for production use. (Her pushback was along the lines of āthe biggest AWS VM has 32 TB of RAM, so until we hit that I donāt see any problem.ā) Furthermore, according to Velma, Susan was actually very upset that I asked her to implement the O(n) fix, feeling that I was ātrying to run circles around her by showing off my knowledge of obscure CS trivia.ā That said, Susan did not directly voice this displeasure to me, and with some guidance, ended up implementing the fix. Her tool now runs great in production. My 1:1 with Velma was eye-opening. Thinking back, there is a definite pattern of women on the team writing code that is generally scientifically sound but poor from an engineering/CS standpoint. I did not realize that women specifically were consistently being put off when asked to address these problems. (The opposite problem crops up with some men on the team, whose code is overoptimized and overengineered to the point of unmaintainability. From what I can tell, they are not upset when asked to simplify things ā the worst reaction I heard was something along the lines of āthat was a bloody clever piece of code and itās a pity people arenāt willing to take the time to understand it.ā) Velma agreed wholeheartedly that we would not change our rigorous engineering standards, and that there is no quick-fix to this problem. She just asked that I be aware of it, and reflect over the coming months over potential ways we can address it. Given the fairly nuanced and levelheaded takes Iāve seen here on gender issues in tech, I thought Iād ask this sub for any advice or experience. Thanks so much! Edit: Thanks for all the great replies! Lots of things to think about. One common thread I want to address: I've seen several comments saying that this is jumping to conclusions based on a one-off anecdote. I only listed the Susan story as an example; Velma gave several other such examples, so she's not basing her conclusions on a one-off. Velma is being extremely rigorous about identifying this as a systemic problem; she went through transcripts of all of the division's exit interviews over the last few years, and interviewed multiple current team members.
I miss having juniors around
Juniors are some of the most creative thinkers in this industry because they haven't been conditioned to use tools and techniques that have matured over time. They're more malleable to new tech. Their solutions come from a place of curiousty rather than ego and it just feels nice to help someone else grow in their career. I miss being a mentor, I miss having study groups for certs, I miss my friends that were laid off this year and last :(
I really worry that ChatGPT/AI is producing very bad and very lazy junior engineers
I feel an incredible privilege to have started this job before ChatGPT and others were around because I had to engineer and write code in the "traditional" way. But with juniors coming through now, I am really worried they're not using critical thinking skills and just offshoring it to AI. I keep seeing trivial issues cropping up in code reviews that with experience I know why it won't work but because ChatGPT spat it out and the code does "work", the junior isn't able to discern what is wrong. I had hoped it would be a process of iterative improvement but I keep saying the same thing now across many of our junior engineers. Seniors and mid levels use it as well - I am not against it in principle - but in a limited way such that these kinds of things are not coming through. I am at the point where I wonder if juniors just shouldn't use it at all.
Finally got an offer after a layoff as a 50+ year old SWE
Giving some feedback about the current job market for old guys like myself. Got laid off two months ago after 25+ years as a generalist Staff/Principal back-end SWE. My company decided to cut the whole domestic US team to move the work to Eastern Europe. I remember getting job offers in 1-2 weeks back in the day, before all the crazy AI/COVID over-expansion layoffs. The market is super different now. I sent out about 100 applications and was seriously depressed by the lack of responses. But then, over the last few weeks, the floodgates opened! I was suddenly slammed with interview requests for jobs I'd applied to a month ago. I did seven full interview loops and landed two offersāone from a FAANG-adjacent company and the other from a well-funded startup. Both packages are better than anything I've ever gotten before. UPDATE 9/4: Accepted an offer from the startup which is well funded by a big name SV VC for 270K base + 440K options (toilet paper). The FAANG just didn't have as interesting work and was afraid that I would be just another cog in a giant machine and I can't stand big company politics.
AI wonāt make coding obsolete. Coding isnāt the hard part
Long-time lurker here. Closing in on 32 years in the field. Posting this after seeing the steady stream of AI threads claiming programming will soon be obsolete or effortless. I think those discussions miss the point. Fred Brooks wrote in the 1980s that no single breakthrough will make software development 10x easier (āNo Silver Bulletā). Most of the difficulty lies in the problem itself, not in the tools. The hard part is the essential complexity of the requirements, not the accidental complexity of languages, frameworks, or build chains. Coding is the boring/easy part. Typing is just transcribing decisions into a machine. The real work is upstream: understanding whatās needed, resolving ambiguity, negotiating tradeoffs, and designing coherent systems. By the time youāre writing code, most of the engineering is (or should be) already done. Thatās the key point often missed when people talk about vibe coding, no-code, low-code, etc. Once requirements are fully expressed, their information content is fixed. You can change surface syntax, but you canāt compress semantics without losing meaning. Any further ācompressionā means either dropping obligations or pushing missing detail back to a human. So when people say āAI will let you just describe what you want and it will build it,ā theyāre ignoring where the real cost sits. Writing code isnāt the cost. Specifying unambiguous behavior is. And AI can guess it as much or as little as we can. If vibe coding or other shorthand feels helpful, thatās because weāre still fighting accidental complexity: boilerplate, ceremony, incidental constraints. Those should be optimized away. But removing accidental complexity doesnāt touch the essential kind. If the system must satisfy 200 business rules across 15 edge cases and 6 jurisdictions, you still have to specify them, verify them, and live with the interactions. No syntax trick erases that. Strip away the accidental complexity and the boundaries between coding, low-code, no-code, and vibe coding collapse. Theyāre all the same activity at different abstraction levels: conveying required behavior to an execution engine. Different skins, same job. And for what itās worth: anyone who can fully express the requirements and a sound solution is, as far as Iām concerned, a software engineer, whether they do it in C++ or plain English. TL;DR: The bottleneck is semantic load, not keystrokes. Brooks called it āessential complexity.ā Information theory calls it irreducible content. Everything else is tooling noise.
Study: Experienced devs think they are 24% faster with AI, but they're actually ~20% slower
Link: [https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/](https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/) Some relevant quotes: >We conduct a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to understand how early-2025 AI tools affect the productivity of experienced open-source developers working on their own repositories. Surprisingly, we find that when developers use AI tools, **they take 19% longer than withoutāAI makes them slower.** We view this result as a snapshot of early-2025 AI capabilities in one relevant setting; as these systems continue to rapidly evolve, we plan on continuing to use this methodology to help estimate AI acceleration from AI R&D automationĀ \[1\]. >Core Result >When developers are allowed to use AI tools, they take 19% longer to complete issuesāa significant slowdown that goes against developer beliefs and expert forecasts. This gap between perception and reality is striking: **developers expected AI to speed them up by 24%, and even after experiencing the slowdown, they still believed AI had sped them up by 20%.** In about 30 minutes the most upvoted comment about this will probably be "of course, AI suck bad, LLMs are dumb dumb" but as someone very bullish on LLMs, I think it raises some interesting considerations. The study implies that improved LLM capabilities will make up the gap, but I don't think an LLM that performs better on raw benchmarks fixes the inherent inefficiencies of writing and rewriting prompts, managing context, reviewing code that you didn't write, creating rules, etc. Imagine if you had to spend half a day writing a config file before your linter worked properly. Sounds absurd, yet that's the standard workflow for using LLMs. Feels like no one has figured out how to best use them for creating software, because I don't think the answer is mass code generation.
Aren't you tired of being a "resource"?
I liked my company ā I was employee 600 (engineer ~150) at a place that's now 3000 employees and tens of billions in valuation I worked hard, they gave me nice promotions, and lots of ownership and equity, and it was great. But now that I'm senior enough to manage people (and by that I mean literally a single intern), the vibes are off. My 1-on-1s with anyone in management is now about: - what projects are we funding this quarter? - how are we going to frame our metrics for leadership? - does [person a] have bandwidth for this? - do you think [person b] is *good*? I just came here to build stuff... I hate performance reviews, I hate kickoff meetings, I hate "stakeholders" and "leadership", and I hate defining growth areas for my intern who y'all judge way too much! The only stakeholder that should matter is the customer, and when every single one of their zendesk tickets is complaining about the same fucking thing I'm inclined to just fix it!!!! I do not want to have a project doc, and a kickoff meeting, and an assigned PM, and director signoff. Just. let. me. fix. the. thing. Please tell me I'm not the only one who feels this way edit: this post has 500 upvotes and 450 downvotes, so I assume only half of you feel this way šš
After 7 years at the same org, Iāve started rejecting "Tech Debt" tickets that don't have a repayment date.
I've been noticing a pattern over my 7 years at this org (currently Lead System Test), and it's killing our velocity. We use "Technical Debt" as a catch-all for two very different things. There's the **Intentional Debt** (we skipped an abstraction to close a deal), which is fine. Thatās a mortgage. We bought the house. But then there's the **Toxic Debt**āthe accidental complexity, the god objects, and the flaky tests that we just "retry 3 times" in the pipeline instead of fixing. The issue is that devs treat the toxic stuff like it's a strategic decision. They assume they can pay it down later, but the complexity grows faster than they can fix it. Since Iām the one designing the system tests that have to navigate this mess, Iāve started pushing back. **My new rule:** If you want to log it as "Debt," it needs a Repayment Date. If you can't give me a date, itās not debt; itās a defect, and we prioritize it as such. Does anyone else have a hard line for distinguishing between "we chose speed" and "we were sloppy"?
Summary of my recent job search and offer - SWE 20+ yoe
There's been a great deal of panic about the job market here and in r/cscareerquestions , so I thought I'd share my experience. For a point of reference, I'm an older dev (56), no degree, no FAANG, I got started 24 years ago. Target salary range 160-170k, fully remote. * Job search began: December 2 * Applications/Resumes Sent: About 40 * Number of interviews: 2 (4 with the company that hired me, 1 with another. That was one that had reached out to me). * Offer accepted: January 10. (so 1 month of search, but the company that hired me began that process after the first week of searching) * I only used LinkedIn. * I only applied to jobs for which my skills were an extremely close match. I sometimes made exceptions for opportunities in industries where I have a lot of experience (usually in ecommerce or education). The one that hired me was a combination of both good tech match and vertical experience (ed related) * I focused on companies in my NYC area so I could sell the advantage of being able to meet onsite as needed. But I did not hear back from any of those, despite it seeming like a solid strategy. * I ignored job listings older than a few days, focusing on brand new listings with fewer than 150 applicants * I tailored my resume for each listing by removing tech completely unrelated to the requirements * I excluded all but the last 15 years of experience to avoid ageism and dated tech * I studied Leetcode problems every day, and made great progress. I was not asked to code on my interviews. * I researched the living sh\*t out of the company's history, mission and products. * When it was my turn to ask questions, I always asked my interviewer what they thought would be most challenging for me about the position. By the next phase, I made sure I could demonstrate expertise in that area. * I wrote thank you notes to every interviewer
Are daily standups ever actually about unblocking?
Every SWE says: "Standups aren't status reports, they're for unblocking". And that's true in theory, that's the textbook. The whole idea in agile is a quick daily sync where people share progress, surface blockers, and get help before issues snowball. It's supposed to be lightweight, team-driven, and focused on collaboration rather than accountability to a manager. But in the 9 companies I've worked at, standups have always been status reports. Every single one of them. People go around the room listing what they did yesterday and what they'll do today, often phrased more to sound productive than to actually solve problems. Managers (and people who don't contribute to the standup) are always present. Rarely does anyone bring up a blocker, and when they do, it usually gets handled later in chat or a side conversation. The ritual ends up feeling more about reporting up than working together. So I wonder: has anyone here actually experienced a standup that truly functioned the way agile describes it? Should we redefine the meaning of "daily standup" to adequately portray what happens in practice?
I now spend most of my time debugging and fixing LLM code
My company got on Claude a year ago. I am the one who introduced it to the team and got us a subscription. It was great for quickly mocking up UI to feedback from customers. It was great for parsing and interpreting Chinese datasheets for me. Maybe 6 months ago I started added to massive pull requests from senior engineers. One in particular was a huge refactor submitted by the CTO. I noticed that every line was preceded by a comment. I noticed that suddenly we were using deprecated methods. Mixing CPP versions. Stuff that didn't make a whole lot of sense. I tried to push back. I did my job, requested changes, called out where methods seemingly did nothing. Ahh well we're coming up on a deadline so let's just merge it and review in a later sprint. Now we're seeing subtle regressions creep in. Edge cases not considered. The long tail of AI-generated code, extended by AI is now consuming the majority of my days. Is this the future of our industry? Just my company? I feel like I'm wasting my life 8 hours per day reviewing and fixing shit LLM code and it's starting to really get to me.
Mods removing the post about unionization
What an incredibly lame decision. What rule did discussing unionization within our industry break? What do you personally have to lose by tech workers unionizing? Sure, those posts are rife with vehement opposition and support for both sides, but unless you personally gain to lose something by people simply *discussing* unionization, then I see nothing wrong with letting the discussion flow. Our industry within the US has witnessed mass offshoring and mass layoffs as the norm for entire teams of tech workers the second the profit line stops going up. We are stronger when we bargain together.
I am done posting here, got an offer after 8 month laid off, I am moving on my with my life.
Got an offer after 8 month laid off, thank you for all your help here. Offer is at Coinbase, YOE 4 Base 179,300 Bonus: 5% = \~8,000 RSU: 75,000 per year TC: About 263k I was hella depressed here that I may not get a job again, but it worked out boys, just keep grinding and a chance will come. Thank you again, and in 2 days I will delete this account, get off reddit, and move now with my life. I love y'all!
I am blissfully using AI to do absolutely nothing useful
My company started tracking AI usage per engineer. Probably to figure out which ones are the most popular and most frequently used. But with all this āadopt AI or get firedā talk in the industry Iām not taking any chances. So I just started asking my bots to do random things I donāt even care about. The other day I told Claude to examine random directories to āfind bugsā or answer questions I already knew the answer to. This morning I told it to make a diagram outlining the exact flow of one of our APIs, at which point it just drew a box around each function and helper method and connected them with arrows. Iām fine with AI and I do use it randomly to help me with certain things. But I have no reason to use a lot of these tools on a daily or even weekly basis. But hey, if they want me to spend their money that bad, why argue. I hope they put together a dollars spent on AI per person tracker later. At least thatād be more fun
Allow me to provide the definitive truth on will AI replace SWE jobs
I am a director with 20 YOE. I just took over a new team and we were doing code reviews. Their code was the worst dog shit code I have ever seen. Side story. We were doing code review for another team and the code submitted by a junior was clearly written by AI. He could not answer a single question about anything. If you are the bottom 20% who produce terrible quality code or copy AI code with zero value add then of course you will be replaced by AI. Youāre basically worthless and SHOULD NOT even be a SWE. If youāre a competent SWE who can code and solve problems then you will be fine. The real value of SWE is solving problems not writing code. AI will help those devs be more efficient but canāt replace them. Let me give you an example. My company does a lot of machine learning. We used to spend half our time on modeling building and half our time on pipelines/data engineering. Now that ML models are so easy and efficient we barely spend time on model building. We didnāt layoff half the staff and produce the same output. We shifted everyone to pipelines/data engineering and now we produce double the output.
Big Tech reality in U.S is just unbeliaveble.
I just came across a post of a junior developer with 2 YOE with a $220,000 TC at Google. He got offered a $330,000+ TC at Meta. I have so many questions... I live in South America and while some things are similar compared to U.S, I've never seen in my life someone with 2 YOE doing the equivalent of $18,000 a month. Thatās the kind of salary you might earn at the end of your career *if* you're extremely skilled. Is that the average TC for developers with 2 YOE or this is just at FAANGs? How hard it is to get this kind of job in U.S? We know the market is terrible right now (and not only in U.S) but when I see this kind of posts, I question whether that's true. The market is terrible or the market is terrible for new-grads? For context: we have FAANGs here too, but you would never make that amount of money with 2 YOE and the salary is way lower than $18,000 per month for absolutely any kind of developer role. Edit: unbeliavable\*. Thanks for all replies!
Got an offer from Meta - here are my tips
Landed a job at Meta earlier this year (got lucky with timing before the Feb 10 layoffs lol). **Job summary:** ``` Position: Mid-Level Software Engineer L4 TC: $350k (193 base, 29 bonus, 128 stock/year) YOE: 2.5 years ``` **The interview process:** * Phone screen: 2 leetcode problems in 45 mins * Final: 2 leetcode rounds (same format as phone screen) + 1 behavioral round + 1 system design round * Total Time: 5 hours From initial contact to offer signing took 2 months. **The framework that worked:** With 2 problems in 45 minutes, you really only get 22 minutes per problem. Here is how I would break it down. 1. **Understand the problem first (3 mins)**Ā \- restate it back, walk through examples, ask about constraints. 2. **Don't code immediately (5 mins)**Ā \- discuss approaches starting with brute force, explain why it's bad, then work up to optimal solution. DO NOT IMPLEMENT THE BRUTE FORCE SOLUTION. You don't have time for that. 3. **Get buy-in (10 mins)**Ā \- make sure interviewer agrees with your approach before coding. I write pseudocode comments first as an outline, then flesh it out. A common failure pattern is coding something that the interviewer doesn't understand. 4. **Wrap up (2 mins)**Ā \- explain time/space complexity, offer to write tests for edge cases, or move on to the next problem. **How I prepared:** * Use Blind 75. It has good coverage over all problems. * I DID NOT buy leetcode premium. If you study and understand the patterns, it doesn't matter what problem you get. I know the market is ass right now and the competition is rough, but stay disciplined and the hard work will pay off! I was looking for a job for 9 months until I got this opportunity lmao. Ask me anything! **Soft Plug:** Building a [website](https://chenaaron3.github.io/drawcode/) to visualize code! Mainly targeted towards beginners.
AI Slop PR's are burning me and my team out hard, anyone else experiencing this?
Background: Current role is a TL (dev/manager hybrid at this place), my team has a large amount of domain ownership so we are constantly pinged for PR reviews. Lately there has been a huge push for teams to adopt tools like Cursor, the problem is that while yes they can generate code, it is just lately rapidly becoming an endless stream of AI slop. In the last few weeks: * Multiple 5k+ line PR's that should be sub 100 lines * PR's that have tons of changed files that in some vibe coding iteration were dropped or my new favourite thing endless redirection where multiple things don't actually do anything. * Very scary PR's where the AI did something extremely dangerous i am assuming to make tests work or something. For example one of the PR's actually did such a very subtle change where it aborted early in a middleware basically skipping most of AuthZ, then mocked out a good chunk of the AuthZ in tests which caused tests to pass. * AI hallucinating external services, then mocking out the hallucinated external services. Forcing me to go look up other repos/service maps and validate that yes this api endpoint actually exists. * AI's ignoring project architecture and structure, dumping files everywhere, or ignoring coding styles. The problem is that these PR's are becoming exhausting as they keep touching on my teams domain, so we are required to review and approve them. Pretty much nobody wants to talk about this, nobody wants to discuss this fact. Today a junior came and dropped a 10k PR that is just all over the place, i just rejected it, pretty saying "this issue does not need 10k LoC changed, and i am not going through this." However instead of well addressing the issues of lack of critical thinking or just copy and pasting a story in, instead i am getting push back for being too strict. My entire team has been complaining about this, on average my team of 6 is getting around 30 PR's a day from various teams now. *EDIT* To clarify a few things: * I have told them my issues in detail with other managers this specifically affects my team and a few others who are not discrete feature specific teams as our domain is much larger. Most don't care since it doesn't actually affect them and they specifically care about increasing their own velocity. Our bosses do not care and just want us to go faster. * We have several large monolith java applications, these code bases are not pretty but do have a decent test suite. Cursor specifically has huge issues with some of these project's structure where it will often just stuff into the first folder with a matching name it seems to find. * We do have code rules however they are nowhere near as well documented and enforced.
Am I the only one on here who feels like shit will get done when it gets done, and that stressing about it will only make things worse?
Context: I was just reading through [this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1nsmx8g/missed_deadline_on_unfamiliar_tech_how_bad_is_this/) written by a redditor who's been working on a particular task at their job for over a month, a task which was "supposed" to take 1.5 weeks, and everyone in the top comment was dogpiling on her and downvoting her, saying she's broken her manager's trust, etc. First of all, Jesus you people, I thought this sub was supposed to be on the workers' side, or at least, helping to support one another. Secondly, I just left a job that had this exact kind of mentality and team dynamic and let me tell you, it is not fun, it is not sustainable, and I don't think I was any more productive at that job than I was at previous jobs where they gave me: * well-defined tasks, * ownership over the solution, * freedom to make my own technical decisions, and finally * the time and space to figure it out for myself, and to just "let me know when it's finished" THAT'S trust. Not this bullshit about consistent delivery. Not every technical problem CAN HAVE "consistent delivery". Anyone who's working in this field knows that some problems involve bashing your head against the wall for 8 days until you suddenly have a eureka moment, and then the solution comes together in 40 minutes. That's life. And if you think that in this hypothetical situation, the employee "wasn't adding value" during those 8 days, then allow me to share with you the stonecutters credo: >When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before. Also, for the record, fuck poker planning, and fuck the concept of "supposed to take X long". If you give me a task, I'll tell you how long I think it'll take ME to do it, and you bet your ass I'll complete it as fast as I possibly can, and if I'm stuck, I'll ask people for help. Oh, you say some other colleague can do it in half the time? Great, then give the task to him, and let's just keep adding onto all of the tribal knowledge that only lives in that guy's head, and keep jacking up the bus factor of our team. Oh, what's that, he's swamped and can't take on the extra work? Ok, so I guess you're stuck with me then; the guy whose skills you apparently deemed good enough during my 7 interview rounds for this job. I will do the best possible job I can for you, but I'm not that other guy. I am me, and I am always learning, always improving, and if you give me time & space to develop a deep understanding of the codebase, our architecture, our team processes, etc., I'm positive that I will soon grow to a place where I can complete tasks like this in 1.5 weeks! Shit will get done when it gets done, and it won't go any faster with a manger constantly harassing the employee about delays and "consistent delivery". In fact, it will probably just make things worse, because now instead of having a calm, clear mind devoted to solving the technical problem at hand, the employee is wasting precious cycles locked in fear-based thinking, increased cortisol levels, and reduced blood flow to the brain.
Execs thirsting over AI is killing my passion for software engineering
Hi all, I work at a search engine giant as a software engineer in privacy. We worked on our privacy product over the past 4 years, launched it in beta and it was ready for production. Suddenly our head of cyber security comes out and says that "People used to care about privacy in 2019 but now they want AI" so they decide to kill our product and repurposed the org on adding LLM malware to the product instead. I get that it's a job that pays the bills but I enjoyed every role I had before this one. This one too, I loved the people I worked with and the product. But I can't deal with constant top level buffoonery. The job market is absolutely brutal, even more so in Canada. I remember being approached 10 times a day on LinkedIn at some point and now everywhere I interview, apparently I'm competing with someone with more experience than me while simultaneously accepting significantly lower pay. FML
Just let the bad offshore devs fail?
Somewhat a rant, somewhat asking for advice. Iām a lead and many of my offshore devs just want to be ticket takers. They do only what theyāre told, donāt bring up issues they are aware of, and put no thoughts into estimates, often delivering late. The part that bothers me most is thereās no indication that they even care. All week theyāll act like something is going to be done, and then the last day just say it wonāt. If I did that as a dev, Iād feel compelled to explain myself. But with them I have to pull teeth to get any explanations. Often I have to step in and hold hands for anything to get done correctly. I donāt even mean perfect. I mean like stop them from introducing jQuery into an Angular project because they think itās easier to grab the data they want from the DOM instead of learning the framework. Given the effort I have to put in just to get them to succeed, while seeing all of the jobs go to them, I often wonder why I try to help them so much. Theyāre a threat to my employment, so shouldnāt I just let them fail and try to get them fired? I guess I assume Iāll be the one blamed if they donāt succeed, or theyāll just be replaced with another cheap developer. Anyone succeed in asking management to pay more for better people? Perhaps like most posts suggest, itās just time to move on!
I don't want to command AI agents
Every sprint, we'll get news of some team somewhere else in the company that's leveraged AI to do one thing or another, and everyone always sounds exceptionally impressed. The latest news is that management wants to start introducing full AI coding agents which can just be handed a PRD and they go out and do whatever it is that's required. They'll write code, open PRs, create additional stories in Jira if they must, the full vibe-coding package. I need to get the fuck out of this company as soon as possible, and I have no idea what sector to look at for job opportunities. The job market is still dogshit, and though I don't mind using AI at all, if my job turns into commanding AI agents to do shit for me, I think I'd rather wash dishes for a living. I'm being hyperbolic, obviously, but the thought of having to write prompts instead of writing code depresses me, actually. I guess I'm looking for a reality check. This isn't the career I signed up for, and I cannot imagine myself going another 30 years with being an AI commander. I really wanted to learn cool tech, new frameworks, new protocols, whatever. But if my future is condensed down to "why bother learning the framework, the AI's got it covered", I don't know what to do. I don't want to vibe code.
How do Amazon devs survive working long hours year after year?
Last 6 months had been brutal for me. To meet an impossible deadline, I worked 10 to 12 hours a day, sometimes including Saturday. Most of the team members did that too, more or less. Now that the project was delivered a week back and I am on a new project, I can tell Iām burned out. I wonder how can Amazon devs or fellow devs working at other companies in similar situation do this kind of long hours day after day, year after year. I burned out after 6 months. How do others keep doing that for years before finally giving in? UPDATE: Thank you all. Iām moved by the community support! It gives me hope that Iāll be able to overcome this difficult situation by following all the suggestions you gave me. Thanks again!
Work isn't therapy. Lessons I learned too late as a Principal SWE
Today is my first day of being unemployed after quitting my job as a Principal SWE due to personal reasons and just wanted to share a few non-technical lessons I've learned over the past few years. They might seem extremely basic to some, but I definitely learned them the hard way. Being somewhat experienced in life and somewhat experienced in the Dev world, I thought I could handle whatever life threw in my direction, but unfortunately, that wasn't the case. **About me**: * **Experience**: 16 yoe. * Company A (15 years): Started off as a co-op, made it to Staff by the time I quit. * Company B (1 year): Joined (and quit) Company B as a Principal. **Lessons learned**: * Prioritize your mental health over everything. Therapy works but only if you take it seriously; just that in itself could take weeks/months, even years. * DO NOT let work be your escape from reality. I definitely learned this the hard way. * You can lose everything - job, relationship, stability and still be okay. * If you're going through some serious shit in personal life, DO NOT try to power through at work. I delivered most of my stuff at work this year, but the quality was horrible. Some of my leads noticed a few discrepancies in some of the ADRs, roadmaps and integrations specs I created, but didn't bring it up to my attention. They knew I was going through tough times at home, and since these discrepancies weren't major, they just let them be. This broke my heart, not necessarily from a "personal branding" perspective, but purely from a professional/technical one. Now on to what lead to these: --- * **Work/Life**: * 2022: * (Life) Wife and I lost a pregnancy (ectopic); one of the fallopian tubes ruptured; severe complications; wife needed lots of after-surgery care that went on for almost a year (into late 2023). * (Work) Work was extremely supportive throughout this experience. * 2024: * (Work) A really good job opportunity came along that I just couldn't say no to, ended up taking this role. Amazing people, awesome product, loved it. * (Life) Towards the end of the year, wife and I went the IVF route, got pregnant again. * Early 2025: * (Life) * (Lost pregnancy #2) Unfortunately we lost the pregnancy due to complications; as long as my wife was okay, we didn't care; we were happy. Doctors told us chances of her surviving the next pregnancy would be VERY low, so not to even look in that direction. * (Wife moved out) After a few weeks, both my wife and I lost it mentally. Reality sunk in. We were there for each other, but not for our own self. We started therapy, it helped a bit, but my wife took this entire experience very hard. She wanted to move back to her parents for a few weeks/months to clear her head. It wasn't easy but I had to respect her wishes. * (Work): * (I wasn't the same anymore): This entire experience took a toll on my mental health, and I just wasn't the same anymore. My ADHD got worse; couldn't focus, couldn't deliver. * (I quit): 2 weeks ago, I gave my 2-week notice. My work was extremely understanding and supportive, but I just couldn't do it. I considered short/long-term disability, but mentally I was done; its hard to put it into words but yeah, I just couldn't do it. * Present: * (Life) Therapy (twice/week). Wife and I are still separated; it's tough, very tough. * (Work) Unemployed; Taking a break from everything for a few weeks. We spent most of our savings on the IVF treatment, but I still have some left to last me through the summer. * Future: * (Life) Continue therapy + looking forward to my wife coming back home. Hopefully soon, but I respect her journey and her wishes as well. * (Work) Let's see what the future holds; I honestly don't know. Perhaps continue being a company man and apply elsewhere, try my luck with YouTube (I know, I know), consider entrepreneurship (SaaS, web/app dev etc), who knows. Edit: Apologies to everyone in case this post is coming across as more of a personal life post rather than the lessons I learned (and wanted to share). As I mentioned in few of the comments, initially it was only supposed to be a few bullet points, and some minimal context, but I found it to be quite therapeutic as I continued to write it. Heading out for a hike now; will check/reply to all messages tonight. Thank you.
Entry level doesnāt exist anymore
This field is done. Iāve applied to over 750 jobs in the last four months and Im still unemployed. Custom resumes, cover letters, reaching out to the hiring team on LinkedIn and still nothing. I have a BS in CS, two YOE , certs and projects. I decided Iād apply to 1k jobs before I gave up but I might just stop now. Just made it to the final round for my second company and again I got rejected. Im just tired. Anyone thatās considering this field, donāt. Unless you have connections and can get in through that or Nepotism donāt bother with this field. I feel like I wasted the last 6 years of my life and all my work, money and time has been for nothing. Fuck the people in charge for destroying this field and giving our jobs away overseas. Looks like a lot of you want to see my resume, here it is: https://www.reddit.com/r/resumes/s/Ah3iYYHT0s Thanks for the feedback, everyone. Looks like I might go back to college now.
Are people no longer capable of reading docs or long text?
Thereās a lot of complexity and nuances in projects and systems that I often find is best communicated through writing. So many meetings could actually be productive discussions if everyone had read a doc beforehand and gotten the same background on the topic. Iāve written engineering design docs before (no one else seems to do that on my team), but then get asked to set up meetings to go over it. In the meeting, I just repeat everything in the doc. afterwards, when itās time to implement, people still donāt seem to understandā¦ they ask basic questions that have been directly answered in the doc When people are new and they message me with questions, I also like to write comprehensive explanations. But Iām finding that they donāt even read them. theyāll respond with a short message, like letās discuss in x meeting. In the meeting, I repeat everything that I had written, but in a worse form, because they keep interrupting and going on tangents instead of letting me finish. Does anyone else experience this? What kind of place should I work at if I want coworkers who are capable of and value reading and writing?
Our CEO confirmed AI will NOT be taking our jobs at our company
We were having a standard all hands meeting but wanted to highlight a good point our CEO made. AI, vibe coding, LLMs etc are seeing great improvement and non-technical people can even build entire applications from scratch. Everyone seems to be on the AI hype train to where some CEO was even posting about making their own CRM using AI (did not go well for him). Thereās definitely some amazing use cases for using AI. One of the CEOās friends even asked him why doesnāt he just fire half the eng team and build xyz feature (thatās taking 3-6 months to build currently) with AI instead. And our CEO just looked at him and said āokay, tell me EXACTLY what youād do to build xyz featureā. And the guy had no idea. He tried like āokay well first Iād start a prompt and build it, then ā¦ā, and slowly realized heās not a dev and doesnāt know anything about how infrastructure works. And after few minutes the other CEO realized he has no idea how he would actually do this and how itād be a terrible idea. Main point is, yes AI is here to stay. Yes AI can speed up development for a lot of us senior devs by a substantial amount. Yes, some people are getting laid off due to AI (plus bunch of other reasons but dont wanna tangent). BUT, in any large scale application with literally millions of lines of proprietary code, huge amounts of context (both technical and nontechnical) required, and a limited context window AIs can maintain, it is not sufficient enough to justify firing a well experienced engineer who knows how to build reliable scalable systems. Reliability matters. Scalability matters. Consistency matters. Which is why 2 of our competitors whoāve been offshoring and cutting back their eng team in favor of AI are behind us in terms of market share. Just wanted to share this. Unfortunate this is not the mindset of other businesses.
The trend of developers on LinkedIn declaring themselves useless post-AI is hilarious.
I keep seeing popular posts from people with impressive titles claiming 'AI can do anything now, engineers are obsolete'. And then I look at the miserable suggestions from copilot or chatgpt and can't help but laugh. Surely given some ok-ish looking code, which doesn't work, and then deciding your career is over shows you never understood what you were doing. I mean sure, if your understanding of the job is writing random snippets of code for a tiny scope without understanding what it does, what it's for or how it interacts with the overall project then ok maybe you are obsolete, but what in the hell were you ever contributing to begin with? These declarations are the most stunning self-own, it's not impostor syndrome if you're really 3 kids in a trenchcoat.
"New Grad" on my team has 4 YOE in his home country?
Early this year, my manger said our team would get a New Grad in the fall to join us. Said "New Grad" joined last week, and the entire team was flabbergasted to know he had 4 years of SWE experience in his home country before his Masters! This is at a well known international tech corporation as well. The dude has more experience than a senior dev on our team and is the oldest of us all! If this is the hiring bar for "New Grad" in these days and age, our college kids are fucked.
I messed up in my 1:1 with my manager ā now I feel like I'm in a corporate Game of Thrones
Hey folks, Looking for some experienced perspective here. I had a 1:1 with my manager recently and I think I said too much. I'm a very introverted, pragmatic engineer (90% technical, 10% social skills), if I'm being honest ā and I usually just want to write code, close tickets, and feel good at the end of the day. In the 1:1, I mentioned that working with a particular coworker (the project lead) has become really frustrating. I said that I feel like I'm only able to get things done in spite of him, not thanks to him. He's very procedural, very rigid, and I feel like that slows everything down in an environment that demands more agility. Wellā¦ that comment kind of opened Pandoraās box. My manager told me, somewhat candidly, that this coworker is notoriously difficult to work with. In fact, they hired me partly because things weren't moving forward with him. The implication I got (not explicitly said, but heavily implied) is that I was brought in to eventually replace him. Now I feel like I'm in some internal Game of Thrones plot I didn't sign up for. I genuinely don't want to take anyone's job ā I just want to code, contribute meaningfully, and not get wrapped up in political drama. Soā¦ Iām unsure what to do now. Would appreciate any advice from folks whoāve navigated similar situations ?? tsym for reading
From startup to FAANG world - how to deal with the BS ?
I recently got my first FAANG job after working in startups my entire career and I feel like my life is a krazam video now. The people are super nice and clearly brilliant but it's painful that so much of their energy is spent on planning rituals and not on actually getting stuff done. For a single feature of an internal API I now have to deal with more sign-offs and planning meetings than I used to get launching entire products directly to users. The amount of bikeshedding at every level just to appear Very Smartā¢ in front of ${N+1} is impressive to witness, and this culture permeates the code directly: everything is overengineered which makes development super slow. Is there any hope? Some coping strategies? Is it a fundamental culture mismatch or will I get used to it? The money is too good to quit, I tripled my TC coming here, I wouldn't mind rest & vest but this place is RTO and if I have to drag myself to the office regularly I would like to enjoy my job at least somewhat. I'll take any advice.
Has anyone actually seen a real-world, production-grade product built almost entirely (90ā100%) by AI agents ā no humans coding or testing?
Our CTO is now convinced we should replace our entire dev and QA team (~100 people) with AI agents. Inspired by SoftBankās āthousand-agent per employeeā vision and hyped tools like Devin, AutoDev, etc. Firstly he will terminate contract with all outsource vendor, who is providing us most dev/tests What he said us"Why pay salaries when agents can build, test, deploy, and learn faster?ā This isnāt some struggling startup ā weāve shipped real products, we have clients, revenue, and complex requirements. If youāve seen success stories ā or trainwrecks ā please share. I need ammo before we fire ourselves. ----Update---- After getting feedback from businesses units on the delay of urgent developments, my CTO seem to be stepback since he allow we hire outstaffs again with a limited tool. That was a nightmare for biz.
I'm so tired
Lately, Iāve been coming to terms with the fact that Iām not a great developer. Iām solid at tracking down problems and fixing them - debugging is actually fun for me. Stepping through code and unraveling bugs feels like solving a puzzle. But when it comes to greenfield projects or building new features, itās a slog. Iām starting to question whether I even want to keep doing this - between the rough job market and needing a decent salary, I feel stuck. What kind of work can a moderately competent problem-solver with decent scripting skills do to earn a living - without spending all day cranking out mediocre code? Iād love to start something of my own. Finding a real problem, building a solution that helps people, and having them actually want to pay for it - thatās the dream. edit: I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who commented. I really appreciate how kind everyone has been - it's encouraging. I've received some good advice and plan to explore a couple of different options. I recognize that I'm massively burnt out. I'd love to quit my job and disappear for a while, but that's not a realistic option at this stage in my life. I'm going to make a concerted effort to start taking better care of myself - and hopefully, I can rediscover a modicum of the passion I used to have for this profession.
AI tools are ironically way more useful for experienced devs than novices
Yes, another AI post about using them to learn, but I want to focus on the topic from a more constructive viewpoint and hopefully give someone an idea on how it can be useful for them. **TLDR:** AI tools are a force multiplier. Not for codegen, but for (imo) the hardest part of software development: learning new things, and *applying them appropriately*. Picking a specific library in a new language implicitly comes with a lot of tertiary things to learn: idiomatic syntax, dependency management that may be different than what you're used to, essential tooling, and a host of unknown unknowns. A good LLM serves as a great groove-greaser to help launch you into productivity/more informed research, sooner. We all know AI has a key inherent issue that make them hard to trust: they hallucinate confidently. That makes them unreliable for pure codegen tasks, but that's not really where they shine anyway. Their best usecase is natural language understanding, and focusing on that has been a huge boon for my career over the past 2 years. Even though CEOs keep trying to convince us we're being replaced, I feel more capable than ever. Real world example: I was consistently encountering bugs related to input validation in an internal tool. Although we enforce a value's type at the entry points, we had several layers of abstraction and eventually things would drift. As a basic example, picture \`valueInMeters\` somewhere being formatted with the wrong amount of decimals and that mistake propogating into the database, or a value being set appropriately but then somewhere being changed to \`null\` prior to upserting. It took me a full day of running through a debugger and another hour-long swarm with multiple devs to find the issues. Now, in a perfect world we'd write better code to prevent this, but that's too much of a "[draw the rest of the fucking owl](https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=34b770eb4fc2a6ee&sxsrf=AHTn8zoGEffY7L5XXyyayCaj0mlU7FNsog:1744718025449&q=draw+the+rest+of+the+owl&udm=2&fbs=ABzOT_CWdhQLP1FcmU5B0fn3xuWpA-dk4wpBWOGsoR7DG5zJBkzPWUS0OtApxR2914vrjk4ZqZZ4I2IkJifuoUeV0iQtlsVaSqiwnznvC1owt2z2tTdc23Auc6X4y2i7IIF0f-d_O-E9yXafSm5foej9KNb5dB5UNNsgm78dv2qEeljVjLTUov5wWn4x9of_4BNb8vF_2a_9-AxwH0UJGyfTMDuJ_sz_gg&sa=X&sqi=2&ved=2ahUKEwidoY-R_dmMAxWg5ckDHUSOF4sQtKgLegQIEBAB&biw=1512&bih=823&dpr=2)" solution. 2nd best solution would be to codify some way to be stricter with how we handle DTOs: don't declare local types, don't implicitly remove values, don't allow something that should be \`string | null\` to be used like \`val ?? ''\`, etc. I really wanted to enforce this with a linter, and there's a tool I've really been interested in called [ast-grep](https://github.com/ast-grep/ast-grep) that seemed perfect for it, but who has time to pick that up? Enter an LLM. I grabbed the entire documentation, a few Github discussions, and other code samples I could find, and fed it to an LLM. I didn't use it to force feed me info, but used it to bounce ideas back and forth to help me wrap my head around certain concepts better. A learning tool, but one tailored specifically to me, my learning style, and my goals. The concepts that usually would've taken me 4-5 rereads and writing it 100 times to grasp now felt intuitive after a few minutes of back and forth and a few test runs. It feels really empowering; for me, my biggest sense of dread in my career has been grappling with not knowing enough. I've got \~8 years of experience, and I've taken the time to master some topics (insofar as "mastery" is possible), but I still have huge gaps. I know very little about system programming, but now with AI as a swiss army knife, I don't feel as intimidated/pre-fatigued to pick up *Programming In a Unix Environment* on the weekends anymore. And I think that's the actual difference between people who are leveraging AI tools the right way vs. those who are stagnant. This field has always favored people who continuously learned and poured in weekend hours. While everyone's trying to sell us some AI solution or spread rhetoric about replacing us, I think on an individual level AI tools can quietly reduce burnout and recharge some of us with that sense of wonder and discovery we had when first learning to program, the energy that once made work not feel like work. I think that the hyper-capitalist tech world has poisoned what should be one of the most exciting eras for anyone who loves learning, and I'd love to see the story shift towards that instead...hence, this post.
Why donāt engineers have unions?
I know historically our jobs have been very lucrative and our working conditions have been pretty good especially the last 10 years or so. However, given the recent turn with how companies are treating engineers now (mass layoffs, offshoring, low ball offers, forcing quitting with in-office policies, etc) im not sure why we dont have unions. Iāve heard of practices from companies that post fake jobs with a posted salary to see how many people apply. Then they repost the same listing with a lower salary to see if people still apply. Rinse and repeat to get an idea of how low they can get offers. Now you can say these practices are all fair game for companies. Sure. But on our end as engineers/workers so is unionizing.
I don't have the stress tolerance for this career
Now that I'm more senior, I just find myself stressed all the time. Big projects are entrusted on me and I'm meant to own them - maybe not do everything, but I have to own them and deliver on time and communicate and plan and code. I get into cycles of avoidance and anxiety that causes a crash-and-burn at some point. There are many skills involved that I'm working on, but ultimately it comes down to personality. More and more strength of personality or resilience is demanded from me, especially as the market gets more brutal and I just don't have it.. you need to be able to look at a crashing project and long odds and say I'm going to do it anyways, but I fold. Have you all faced things like this? How do you build up those personality traits of resilience or stress tolerance, coping with anxiety etc.?
Company is deeply bought-in on AI, I am not
Edit: This kind of blew up. I've taken the time to ready *most* of your responses, and I've gotten some pretty balanced takes here, which I appreciate. I'm glad I polled the broader community here, because it really does sound like I can't ignore AI (as a tool at the very least). And maybe it's not all bad (though I still don't love being bashed over the head with it recently, and I'm extremely wary of the natural resource consequences, but that's another soapbox). I'm going to look at this upcoming week as an opportunity to learn on company time and make a more informed opinion on this space. Thanks all. \----------- Like the title says, my company is suddenly all in on AI, to the point where we're planning to have a fully focused "AI solutions" week. Each engineer is going to be tasked with solving a specific company problem using an AI tool. I have no interest in working in the AI space. I have done the minimum to understand what's new in AI, but I'm far from tooling around with it in my free time. I seem to be the only engineer on my team with this mindset, and I fear that this week is going to tank my career prospects at this company, where I've otherwise been a top performer for the past 4 years. Personally, I think AI is the tech bros last stand, and I find myself rolling my eyes when a coworker talks about how they spend their weekends "vibe coding". But maybe I'm the fool for having largely ignored AI, and thinking I could get away with not having to ever work with it in earnest. What do you think? Am I going to become irrelevant if I don't jump on the AI bandwagon? Is it just a trend that my company is way too bought into? Curious what devs outside of my little bubble think.
Not seen as "staff engineer material" because of my personality (they said technical competence meets the bar). I don't know if I can change my personality.
Some honest advice here would be very helpful. Please give it to me straight without sugar-coating it. I have 13 years of experience and have worked in big tech my entire career. I have been on my current team for 4 years. I am a woman. I work on a niche area in lower-level backend/devops that I intellectually enjoy a lot. I had a performance conversation with my manager yesterday. He told me that my technical competence and contributions more than meets the bar for staff but that I don't have the leadership qualities / traits needed for staff and thus the promo would never go through. I asked for concrete examples and these were what was mentioned: \* **Not being assertive or "authoritative" enough**: in conversations with XFN partners, not acting as the authority that tells everyone what direction we should all go in; "asking instead of telling" \* **Unconfident language that makes everyone else unconfident in me**: lots of "I think"s, posing things as questions in PR reviews instead of assertions, responding to my own PR reviews by being too overly accommodating instead of defending my code and pushing back more \* **Not sharing my opinions loudly and thus not dictating direction**: being soft-spoken and letting others set direction instead of stepping up and taking the dominant leader role I feel so frustrated and powerless by this conversation. I by nature do not have a "dominant" or "authoritative" personality and I have never had that. I value harmony and cooperation and making everyone on the team feel heard no matter how junior or senior they are. I value humility and language that makes people feel safe. I hate to throw the "sexist" accusation around and I always try my best not to do that, but I also can't help but feel that this is sexism. I think women naturally a softer more harmonious communication style than men do, and that our "leadership style" is different than men's but no less valid. But maybe I'm delusional in thinking this and the only "leadership" that is seen as valid in the corporate world is the masculine one? I don't know if I can change my personality to be more masculine/dominant but furthermore, I honestly don't even think it's even a good idea because women who act authoritatively / dominantly / confidently are often punished for it, not rewarded. I don't think the rules are the same. I'm not sure where to go from here. It's becoming obvious to me that there is no path to staff engineer here. Even if I were able to act more dominantly, would it not be weird to suddenly go from acting cooperatively to now trying to act alpha? A lot of the coworkers on my team do this but I have always hated this kind of behavior. Do I just leave? I do feel attached to this team because I love the technical things we work on and I have invested years to building up expertise in the area. But I can't help but feel resentful seeing people on my team who are staff but not better at engineering than I am. I feel that we do the same job but they are getting paid a lot more for it. I don't think I will ever be viewed as staff engineer leadership material on my team. But if I leave, there's no guarantee I would be viewed as that at a different team/company and I would have to restart trying to go for staff. The third option is to just accept being a senior engineer forever and "quiet quit" / coast. How do you suggest I go forward? Thank you in advance. edit: thank you all for the feedback and suggestions on what to do next. I am going to brush up my resume and start interviewing.
I feel like once you get laid off you are done for
I've been laid off at my job for 8 months now as a swe. I feel like once you get laid off it's hard getting back a tech job in this competitive market. I've applied to everything including tech adjacent jobs and I have no luck securing an offer. I have 1 yoe and a cs degree. Now, I'm doing a non tech sales job just to get by. It's rough out here. I use to have a lot of pride about what I did and now I don't even care about my job title. I just want to make a decent living and be able to support family and retire
Is tech job market really cooked ?
I am SWE with 8 YOE. Nothing too niche, full stack developer that knows a few web dev tech stacks with most recent titles of senior and tech lead. No AI or ML. I was laid off in June. Prepared hard, polished my resume with AI many times, applied to between 200-300 jobs in the span of 2 months. Got about 15 interviews, 4 offers. I think I could get more offers tbh but after I found the company I really liked I accepted an offer and stopped the interview process with the rest. I interviewed with Capital One, Visa, UKG, Amazon, Circle, Apollo, Citadel, FICO, GM and some no names or startups. Thatās all to say that after reading reddit I was anxious to even apply but I think I got a decent amount of interviews and negotiated my offers to be either at the higher end of the salary range for the role or even above advertised. I do recognize itās much harder for junior engineers these days but is there really a shortage for experienced engineers? I havenāt felt that. Iām not even a native English speaker although I do speak English fluently. Iām in the US. I also didnt lie on resume or cheated during coding rounds. Some of them I solved 100%, some not. For example for C1 I got 450/600 points on CodeSignal and still got a callback and an offer after clearing their power day. Ask me anything I guess. Happy to help someone if I can. No referrals though, sorry. Iāve just started a few weeks ago, too early to refer especially someone I donāt personally know. Here are a few things that I believe gave me an edge or worked in my favor: - referrals from my network - local jobs that required hybrid schedule - tailored resumes - soft skills - activity on LinkedIn (mostly commenting) I also tried to outsource the filling out job applications part so I can focus on preparing and interviewing but I didnāt have much success with freelancers from Fiverr. I was also approached by a ādo it for youā company but they charge % of your first year salary + a fixed fee and I decided to just do it myself.
Anyone get schadenfreude seeing your old job struggle to hire your position?
Left my old role nearly 2 months ago and they of course had my position posted within days of me leaving. It only stayed up a few days. I just saw the position pop up again. Having been on their side before, Iām almost certain they couldnāt find anyone decent and decided to repost it. Their problem: they are basically looking for a tech lead at a low end senior salary. I was doing tech lead work because Iād been pushing for that position. But despite being told Iād be getting the title and salary bump, they ended up saying theyād only be able to give me the title but no bump. And thatās how I ended up leaving. Anyways, I find it amusing that they are struggling to hire for their unrealistic expectations.
Have we forgotten business logic?
Hey fellow devs š I've been thinking about something that's been bothering me throughout my career - the way we handle business logic in our codebases. You know, that thing we're supposed to protect "at all costs" with fancy patterns and principles? Let's be real: when was the last time you saw business logic being treated with the respect it deserves? Instead, what I usually see is: - Services/controllers that are absolute units š« - ORM models polluted with business behavior - Massive scripts moving data between DB and UI with zero regard for separation - The loud silence of non-existent test coverage Why did we let this happen? I think there are a few reasons: 1. Our hiring practices are broken: Job posts be like "must know 17 JavaScript frameworks" but zero mention of problem-solving or domain knowledge 2. Architecture? What architecture?: Clean/hexagonal/onion architectures get ignored because "we need to ship fast" 3. The eternal time crunch: Always rushing, always cutting corners, always "we'll fix it later" 4. Software engineers being just āticket machinesā: business logic is something that someone else has to define, we just implement it and we donāt need to understand it (depending on companyās culture of course) What if, in our next project, we took a moment to really understand the "why" behind the features we're building? What if we advocated for separating out business logic in our code, even in small ways? Perhaps we can share these ideas with our teammates, sparking conversations that lead to gradual shifts in how we work. Whatās been your experience with this?
Why Software Engineers Rarely Break Free from the quiet burnout of jumping from company to company and doing the same thing over and over again?
This might not have much to do with SWE but careers in general. Hear me out: we join a new company, we figure out our coworkers and the pecking order, we spot the person that carries the team on their back, we figure out our relationships with our manager and stakeholders. And then we do our sprints, our planning, our retros, our demos... you push features, you review PR's ... and the wheel just keeps on turning... In the meantime - you are getting some money, you are moving on in life, slowly, but you are... you're buying that house, you're taking that vacation.... but then you come back... to the wheel...over and over and over again, from company to company.... Why is software so challenging to expand out? Is it the golden handcuffs? Is it the insecurity of starting your own startup? Is it the exhaustion from coding and meetings all day that you can't find another oz of energy to pursue your own thing? Is it the challenge of the quickly moving field that disallows you to have confidence in an idea enoguh to pursue it ?
How to not feel demoralized when working with truly amazing engineers?
I've worked with a certain engineer for multiple years, and every single day I'm shocked by how good he is. I've never seen him stumped. He solves things in days instead of months. It breaks my brain. I've never seen anything like it in my career. Some of it has rubbed off on me, but the gap is still about as large as the pacific ocean. How much could Michael Jordan's skill rub off on your local LA fitness ball player? It extends beyond that though. I'm very certain that there's no skill or talent on earth I could ever be good at on the level that he is at engineering. It's not jealousy, because I know the insane amount of work and discipline he put in and still puts into his craft. When I meet truly exceptional people I'm in awe of them. But it's pretty saddening to be reminded every day that you aren't all that good at the thing you put your heart into. That's not me giving up. I try to improve every single day, but I always end up feeling like: I'm just don't love it enough I'm just not disciplined enough I'm just not intelligent enough At this point those feelings actually hurt my ability even more. I've done so much work with battling things like physical insecurities, but I'm realizing there's an unlimited amount of things I CAN improve or change, and that's 100x more demoralizing.
Rejected a 1 week take home assignment
This was for a mid level IC role asking for at least 6 yoe. I told them the 1 week assignment was a deal breaker for me, and that the 1hr dry coding whiteboarding session should have more than suffice. The rejection came out of me like a reflex response that I even surprised myself. The HR who knew I've been searching for work for a while replied saying this was the first time anyone has rejected their ask, and that they've been through 5 candidates before me, all of whom got rejected. Maybe there's some pattern recognition in me that knew this was just going to be another waste of my time with their assignments. Should I have done it any differently?
āJust join the trades broā fuck that.
The job market is complete shit. Iāve applied to over 500 jobs in just the last two months and only got a few interviews that went no where. The thing though is why tf would I commit to learning a trade after getting a degree and work experience? It just seems like a complete waste of time and Iām personally not motivated enough to study a trade for a few more years just to make 40k while I do the program. I hate how so many people in this subreddit expect us to have this āoh well, time to move on from this careerā mindset. No Iām not going to put in the work because I see that it doesnāt get me anywhere. I actually could live at home for another 2-4 years while I do the program but Iām not going to because fuck that. Iām 31 so I really rather not live in my momās basement for another 2-4 years. America is collapsing in front of our faces so Iām not spending any more of my time supporting this shit system if I donāt have to. That means working only if necessary. If that means living at home and taking another year to find a tech job, Iāll do that. Edit: To clarify, I have 2 YOE as a full stack engineer. Now Iām looking into DevOps or a related role.
Got Laid Off 12 Days Ago and Signed an Offer Today - Here's My Sankey Diagram
*tl;dr: Title,* [Diagram Here](https://imgur.com/a/5THOIEU)*. 5 YoE, no FAANGs. I have a B.S. in CS + Bio from Berkeley. Primarily Healthcare SWE experience. Job market is not that bad for Senior SWEs. TC >$100k + Fully Remote. I'm a US Citizen.* I always see the doom and gloom from this sub regarding layoffs and the struggles of people finding a job and wanted to add a counter-story. I got laid off from my job on July 14th. It was an absolute gut punch and all of my worst fears came true. I saw all the posts from people with years of experience struggle with finding a job and thought I was absolutely screwed going into the market. Thankfully, either I have a really good skill set or people are being overly pessimistic (though it is most likely a combination of both.) I do think that there is still merit to the doom and gloom though. When looking for a job, there were barely any new grad, entry level, or junior level job postings. Most of the jobs that I saw started at senior and made their way up but it seems that the market for mid and senior level roles is still relatively healthy. Almost every position that I interviewed for was hybrid, with a good chunk being 5 days a week in person. A very small minority were fully remote. As for how I went about that job search, the day I got laid off I got an invite to a "Mandatory Meeting" with my boss + some random person that I didn't know at exactly 9AM. I knew then it was over and immediately started polishing my resume and applying to every company that I could think of. I went directly to the career page and found jobs that I thought that I was qualified for. I may have applied to every company that I can think of, but I only applied to roles that matched my skillset. Every single job that I applied to was either directly on the company page or LinkedIn jobs sorted by last 24 hours. I did NOT use any AI - this includes auto-apply software or even tuning my resume. Everything was done by hand, manually by me. The only "automation" that I did was sign up for a [greenhouse.io](http://greenhouse.io) account so that my name, email, and other info was autofilled by them. The first 48 hours was the hardest because it was just sending applications into the void without knowing if it would yield anything. Then starting Wednesday that same week, I started getting interview requests and stopped applying to new jobs. I did not ask my network for any references as I was not desperate yet. For context, I am in the San Francisco Bay Area and work in the biotech industry (and if you're on r/biotech, biotech is equally screwed as tech, if not more.) The job I got is in the healthcare field but unrelated to the job I previously had. TC is a nice bump up from my previous position but I will not share it since people in real life know what my Reddit handle is (but I can say that it is more than $100,000 but less than $1,000,000.) I have 5 years of experience as a Software Engineer in various healthcare companies ranging from small startups to large companies with both a CS and biology degree from UC Berkeley. Of course, this is just one data point. YMMV To those still hunting, good luck.
SF Bay Area - The job market is cooked
Lately, Iāve been wanting to vent about how rough my interviews have been. Iām still employed, but actively looking for a new opportunity where I can learn and grow. Recently, I spoke with a recruiter about a senior-level role. They asked what total compensation (TC) would make me consider leaving my current position. I gave them my exact number, and they immediately said it was fineāthey wanted to fast-track me through the hiring process. I had a conversation with the hiring manager, and it ended with him outlining the next step: a CoderPad interview. So I assumed my intro landed well. But the next day, I checked their careers page and saw the same role repostedāthis time with a noticeably lower salary range. That gave me a bad feeling. Sure enough, I woke up this morning to an email saying theyāve decided to pass on me. Also worth noting: most company Iāve spoken to so far has explicitly told me they donāt ask Leetcode-style questions. And theyāve all said the final stage would be an onsite.
Levels FYI 2025 report is out
https://www.levels.fyi/2025/ Obviously this leans more towards big tech but TC is still increasing. Sorry Doomers! Other interesting things were that senior/principal pay increased much more than junior/mid level. US and India market both had TC increases while Canada and Europe got screwed.
Fired from Big Tech, <1 YOE.
0.7 YOE. When I first started this job, I was so excited to build features. I learned so much in such little time and picked up so many soft skills, such as how to consult different engineers and compile their knowledge to properly add new features to infra way too big for any 1 dev to have 100% knowledge on. But my manager squeezed and sucked all of that passion out of me. Iāve tried my best to work on our relationship, but heās spent all year treating me with explicit disdain, not making eye contact, and ignoring whatever I say in team lunches. I buckled down as much as I could to do better, but every 1:1 became a condescending berating session and I never felt like I truly belonged on the team. Whenever features were delayed, the majority of the time it was because of consistently broken infra, incomplete features from sister teams that mine depended on to start, or inaccurate guidance from devās I was asked to consult. I accepted the weaknesses within my control and improved them, but no matter what I did, I could never beat the narrative. Anything I did good was sarcastically devalued and whenever anything went wrong, my manager would tell me I shouldāve taken X action that I wouldnāt have known to do at the time without privileged knowledge or time travel (hindsight advice). Coworkers and mentor repeatedly told me I was doing fine, but I just had our first performance review, and Iām being offered 2 things: **PIP vs Severance.** This severance side offer is brand new this year and our company has had huge layoffs. The actual meeting was another vague collection of criticisms, in which, when I asked him what I couldāve ideally done differently, he said āIām not here to give specific edge cases for you to iterate literally off of and am just looking for high level resourcefulness from youā. When he would list specifically delayed features, I would tell him how I did everything in my power, including implementing his advice (which I can prove), only for the infra related reasons to delay it. When I tried to show areas Iāve improved in, he would agree but then re-insist how below the mark I am even though Iām never been sure what a āMeets Expectationā counterpart of me hypothetically looks like all year. His goalpost for me always felt fictional. Now, I feel extremely jaded and demotivated being forced into this job market. Iāve been leetcoding here and there before this review to hedge myself, but Iām struggling to hold onto any confidence in my abilities. Maybe Iāll never find an opportunity as good as this one ever again, and I canāt cope with that. Iām going through the motions, contacting some industry friends, and doing those silly LC problems, but I feel hopeless.
Laid off, got an offer, rescinded, couple months later, 3 offers, which one would ya take?
Got laid off from my job, then got an offer, but was rescinded. Was living off unemployment, but now have 3 offers. Which one would ya take? Any advice from people would be helpful. Datadog: NYC - 265k TC - 15k sign on - 280k total TC Coinbase: NYC (remote) - 260k TC - 25k sign on - 285k total TC Meta: NYC - 280k TC - 35k sign on - 315k total TC I have 3 YOE and used all 3 offers to negotiate higher and higher on all, I think I got very lucky and this top band or would like to think.
Finally got a job after 13 months
**Position:** Fullstack Software Developer, US, 40k/yr (less than half my prev role) On-site in a third-world city Backfill position in a profit-center .Net, jQuery, SVN, on-prem **My stats:** Master of Computer Science (non-thesis) from a R1, 3.6 GPA Bachelor of Computer Science from a different R1, 3.8 GPA 2 YoE Full Stack SWE at a fintech F500 3 paid Resume workshops + STAR interview preps Multiple side projects 1100+ applications ~30 actual first round interviews, ~20 ghosted 25 second round interviews 8 third round 6 fourth round 5 sixth round 2 seventh round 1 eighth round -> 3 verbal offers, two of which were rescinded due to "lack of funding". Third was the offer above which I took. I am just so happy the search was over. I was considering going back to school a third time to do medical instead. Good luck out there boys.
Nobody is hiring but yet all I see are SWE job postings
Hey everyone, So Iāve been hearing the same thing over and over again: āNo one is hiring,ā āThe job market is dry,ā āEven juniors with experience are getting ghosted.ā But then I go on job boards, LinkedIn, or even clearances-focused sites, and all I see are software engineering roles ā many of them remote or requiring a security clearance. Itās making me wonder: Are companies just posting jobs without actually hiring? Or are they hiring, but just being extremely selective and slow about it? Iām asking because Iām literally just starting my journey into software engineering and will most likely have 4 YOE by the time I even graduate. So while this may not impact me right now, Iām trying to understand the landscape and where the demand actually exists. For those actively applying or on the hiring side ā whatās the real deal in the market right now? Appreciate the insight.
Stay at Google or jump to n+1 at Meta?
Im currently a junior swe at Google with 2 yoe. Current recurring TC is ~220. I have a swe-2 offer from Meta for around 340k, 370 if counting signing bonus. I know this seems like a braindead question, but considering that I currently only work around 30 hours a week and have a great manager, is the higher comp worth the risk? The new team is not in ads or monetization, so wlb shouldnāt be completely horrible, but the engineer I talked to on the team told me to expect working around 45-50 hours a week.
It is possible to remain an IC into old age?
I'm probably older than most people here - I'm 40. I'm a staff level engineer at a mediocre company. I am making out okay. 200k tc in lcol geo When I look at the long term trajectory for my career - I am honestly not sure if it is possible to stay gainfully employed as an individual contributor into my late 50s and up until retirement age of 65. I see very few to no people of that age still working as engineers. It seems borderline impossible to keep up with the rapidly changing skillsets required for software development as you get into late ages and your brain slows down. (I think my brain is already slowing down) I do see many managers and directors in that age range. But few to no ICs. I'm trying to figure out if it is necessary for me to transition into management or some other aspect of technology to sustain the next stages of my career.
What to do about a dead weight on the team?
We were hired about the same time; she was hired as a Senior with 7 YOE from household F500 companies with an impressive resume. We were originally on different projects, but 6 months after hiring, we were brought to the same team, under another developer for a project that is due this month. Since then, her only contribution has been to run stand-ups; basically scheduling weekly meetings and asking people what they do in the meetings. Worse still, she regularly misses those stand-ups, locking people out of meetings, and only to comes up with pathetic excuses like "plumber at my door" or "sorry I lost track of time" (she is fully WFH). Her technical expertise is a puddle, even for things she supposedly has years of experience in. For instance, not knowing how to use modern python dependencies manager (poetry/pdm/uv), or not being able to use Typescript for frontend development. Her PR reviews are outright atrocious: she commented that we shouldn't be committing .gitignore. I can't even say a positive thing about her work ethic either. She would take several weeks to fix a simple PR and generally do everything to avoid having to work. Image files too large to put on cloud? It's a blockage for this week. Upsampling the image to make it smaller? Nah she will just try again till the connection times out and report as a problem... When she was hired, she was supposed to be the most senior and our team lead. When the lead for our project resigned, I became the team lead since she was "not familiar with our code" enough, despite the project being developed from the ground up, when she and I joined the team. I assigned her a ticket in January, which is a simple "serialise the data to a suitable format" involving calling the equivalence of \`df.to\_csv\`. That ticket has yet to be completed. At first, I was not too unhappy, coming from a shittier workplace with a much worse pay. However, now that the deadline for the project is approaching, I am feeling much jaded from the whole experience. Basically 99% of the contribution comes from me: code design, implementation, CI/CD, testing, documentation, deployment. Her employment has been near 18 months and she has not written more than 100 lines of code. She is also fully WFH with at least 20% higher salary. Should I oust her to our director, or should I just look for another job?
Escaping Legacy Tech: Landed 2 AI Offers After 8 Months of Prep (250k+ TC)
For the past 9 years, Iāve been stuck in legacy tech. I built niche monolithic apps with no exposure to distributed systems or system design. Time flew by, and I got pigeonholed in outdated ādinosaurā companies. Trying to leave my job was incredibly demoralizing. Thousands of job applications and a painfully low callback rate. I was discouraged by this and even more, by my background and lack of modern systems experience. I really felt like I was stuck at a dead end. I posted here asking how long it takes to prep for system design interviews from 0. Ā Many replies were disheartening, like āyou need real on-the-job experience.ā But it turns outā¦you donātāat least not to pass interviews.Ā Hereās what I did while working full-time: LeetCode (6 months): Focused on the top 150 problems, revisiting and practicing each one 4-5 times. (I failed many, many interviews along the way). System Design (1.5 months): Started from almost zero and crammed, studying about 15 systems deeply, mainly through videos and practice. Applications: Sent out over a thousand applications with very low callback. Landed interviews mostly through headhunters. Interviews (6 months): Juggled my full-time job while going through processes with 45 companies (failing most of them early on). It was brutal: endless rejections, self-doubt, and burnout. But I just landed 2 solid offers in AI (around 250k+ TC). If youāre in a similar rut, know that it is absolutely doable with consistent effort. You can break free even without the ārightā background. AMA if you have questions!
Anyone else just content with where they are?
Iāve been developing software professionally for 20 years. Iāve done startups, retail, small companies, large companies, the whole spread. Iāve been with the same company for about 5 years and am currently a Lead. The job pays well (Midwest salary), the benefits are insanely good, work-life balance is great, I get a dependable bonus, and love working with the team on modernizing a decades-old monolith to browser-based tech. Itās a great mix of architecture-esque planning work, interactions with business, and coding. For years Iāve had managers trying to push me into management. Iām not wholly against this except for the fact that nearly every company Iāve worked for has turned management over every few years. Being on the delivery side at least has the illusion of stability. Since I had a kid almost 7 years ago stability has taken on elevated importance. Canāt hop around startups any more. All that said, I just like where Iām at. I like still having a foot in the weeds and problem solving. Keeps me sharp. It feels like IT is always in this state of wanting more. Anyone else content and just wanting everyone else to chill sometimes?
Stay at Google vs Meta NYC
Currently L4 at G with ~3 YOE 300k TC. Got an offer at Meta NYC: Base: 193k Rsu: 450k Bonus: 29k TC: 335k + 35k signing I really want to go to NYC but wondering if I should just stay at G and look to internally transfer instead. Reading a lot of the negative discussion around Meta is giving me cold feet especially since the TC increase is minimal. The team at Meta more aligns with my interests and where I want to take my career in the future though. Plus, my org at google is currently offering voluntary layoffs, so I could potentially take that and get a nice severance before moving to Meta. That plus the free relocation offered by Meta makes this move financially more appealing.
4-Day work week trial period. Is this industry standard?
Hi Devs, So I work a a large tech company probably biggest in my country . They recently announced a volunteer trial 4-day work week program. However the details of it seem bizarre to me and I am wonder if this is how other places have implemented the policy too. So the basis is 4 days a week any monday thursday or friday can be taken off. The expectation is you'll work 32 hrs a week, but be as productive with the expectation that you will also become more productive (which makes sense, this is the whole point of these programs) However, you will lose also 20% of your salary and time off accrual for sick, vacation and personal days. The trial is 1 year so once you start youre also stuck for the year. So to me this seems like they want more work done in less time for less pay??? Am I crazy or does this not defeat the entire purpose of implementing this policy? Its supposed to provide better balance and mental health, but this seem so counterinitiative. Would love to hear from other devs who have had a chance in a 4-day work week environment, how did your org implement it? Did it stay? Did it work for you?
Senior HFT/Quant Trading Engineer with 10+ YoE: Job Search Experience and Sankey in Late 2025
Sankey: https://i.imgur.com/0zOk1wv.png Wanted to add a data point of my experience applying in late 2025 as a Senior with a well-defined domain expertise in quantitative and low latency trading. I was laid off ~1.5 months ago from my previous firm and worked with a specialized headhunter who focuses on placing prop trading SW and FPGA engineers. I didn't personally submit any applicationsāeverything was handled by my HH. We applied to eight firms/quant funds in a targeted fashion. My HH's relationship with certain firms allowed me to bypass a few bureaucratic HR stages and get in front of hiring managers immediately. This was my first time on the market as a Senior and my interview experience mostly aligned with how I chose to prepare. The mix of questions I encountered was roughly 9:1 domain-specific C++ to LeetCode-style DSA. There were a bunch of questions on deep C++ features, trading-specific minutiae (exchange protocols, executing a low latency strategy on a particular exchange), lock-free algo knowledge, etc. Ironically, the rounds that tripped me up the most _were_ LeetCode-style questions, so I regret not doing more than the 10-15 questions I practiced but overall my preparation was accurate. I withdrew from the interview process at three firms since I received a solid offer from a firm I liked (on a desk/team I liked as well). I anticipate I would've gotten another 1-2 offers had I seen those through to the end but I was satisfied. * Timeline from start of search to offer: 1 month * TC: ~$500K * Location: Chicago * Preparation: 10-15 LeetCode questions and implementing dozens of lock-free/high-performance data structures in C++. Reading a few intermediate to advanced C++ books to refresh (think Nicolai Josuttis, et al.). Playing around with some language features in the newer standards (C++23/26).
There is something broken in the hiring process.
We had a Senior SWE req open for a few weeks through a third party hiring agency (not my choice, I don't like hiring agencies) and the best we could find was some guy at the end of his career with a spotty employment history (lots of employment gaps, lots of short stays) over the past decade. We got tons of AI generated and fake applicants. We are just looking for a generalist C/Python/Go/Microservices role and are willing to teach people on the job as long as they have good problem solving / debugging skills. We are also in what I'd consider a desirable sector (Cybersecurity). The problem is that we've consistently had hiring related issues, and basically all hires since I've started have ended up being bombs to the point where we've had to hire foreign contractors to fill positions. This has been over 5+ years of me working at my current company. With the amount of people complaining that they cannot find jobs, especially new grads, why are we having such challenges finding hires? We provide a competitive base salary (near the bottom of our region's range but still competitive), benefits (standard benefits package) and competitive TC which is driven entirely by RSUs. On top of this we are 100% Remote with anything in office being handled by 5 people who live local (includes myself). We are posting to LinkedIn and have a strong LinkedIn presence. The job postings are posted by our company and not the hiring agency. The listing passes my filter for "I'd apply for this". The only thing I can think of is that we are not "Big Tech". I work at a small company (<50 employees). Is this hurting access to the job pool? Are our recruiters being too restrictive in filtering? Are AI-driven applicants stealing spots non-AI driven applicants would be normally populating? Do you have any experience with this? It's driving me insane.
Mid Level Engineer's Job Hunt Experience
After all the doom and gloom of the market I wanted to post my experience. Especially since I am younger in my career (4 years) in comparison to many here who are job hunting. I recently went through the whole shebang and wanted to shed some light for those who are definitely not a junior but may not be a senior yet. TLDR: I started searching in late July. Sent out about \~80 applications until mid August which is when the interviews started to kick in. Out of those 80 I had 5 callbacks (i.e. actual chances to interview). I went through the interview process with 4 out of 5 companies and received 4 offers. The offer I accepted was a significant pay increase both base salary wise and especially total compensation. Okay so the details **Why'd I start searching?** I started searching because I reached a tipping point in frustration at my previous role mainly due to my apathetic coworkers, blame-oriented management, and because of where I am in life outside of work. What I mean by that last part, is that I am young and have no big responsibilities, which allows me to take the risk of making a large jump in my career and even going somewhere to "grind". I also recognized that I was starting to stagnate in most facets of an engineering career such as pay, technical expertise, and breadth of knowledge. I very clearly defined what I **needed** and **wanted** in my next job, those being: * **needed** to be in a different industry * **needed** to make at least the same total compensation * **needed** the new team to pass the "vibe check" * **needed** the job to not be through a contracting agency * **wanted** to have a different tech stack * **wanted** to be in the same city I was or a specific other city * **wanted** to be closer to hardware instead of pure software * **wanted** to make more than current total compensation NOTE: *One thing that is not a* ***need*** *or* ***want*** *for me here that is different than many other people is WLB. This just isn't super important to me at this point in my life and I am hungry to grow.* **How did I apply?** With this and an updated resume I set off on my job hunt. I won't go too into details about my resume simply because I don't have an anonymized version. I don't really think my resume was the biggest differentiator here. However, it was parse-able for ATS systems and contained a ton of "key word" technologies like Kafka, AWS, React, Springboot, Kubernetes, etc. I had a pretty simple routine. I'd go grab a coffee and some breakfast in the wait room or a private area. Then I'd spend the first \~45min-1hr of every work day applying or preparing/studying. Leetcode and practicing my behaviorals was how I studied in the beginning but once I was comfortable with any easy level problems I kind of just stopped leetcoding. IMO, there's heavy diminishing returns with leetcode very quickly. For applying, I first created a list of companies I was fairly confident hit my **needs** and **wants** and scoured their careers pages. After that, it was just straight LinkedIn jobs. Of the 4 interviews I went through 3 of them came from Linkedin and 1 came from direct careers page. As far as applying I sought after anything that hit my **needs** that was recently posted (last week?). I very quickly ran out of recently posted jobs that hit my needs which is when I set my goal of 5 applications every workday. So like the first 30 minutes of this routine would be applying, then the latter half would be searching for postings for the next day. Near the end of my 80 applications I was really struggling to find jobs that were worth applying to and called it quits, then I started getting interviews. **Interviewing** Out of the 80 applications I got 5 different companies wanting to interview which really surprised me after hearing how bad the market was. I really think this came down my tech stack, my location, my willingness to go in office, the fact I am "cheap" to hire compared to seniors, my pickiness of where I applied, and just dumb luck. The 1 company I declined to interview with was simple, they didn't meet by **need** to make at least the same total compensation. I also already had other interviews lined up and did not have the bandwidth to prepare for another even if I was just gonna use it as practice. So for the 4 I had I started studying fairly hard. Some light leetcode, working on THREE different personal projects, behavioral, and company research. Once I finished my first interview and bombed my first ever system design portion that was then added on as well. Out of this preparation I think studying the companies and really honing in on my behavioral helped the most. There's a base level of competency expected via leetcode or other technical interviews, but once that is met I think these matter so so so much more. Studying the companies really helped me prepare for what the interview was going to be like and if there was specific tech or problems they'll bring up give me foresight. This is also where there was the most turmoil.. Companies either got the process over with immediately and wanted an answer with 1-2 days OR they would flip flop around on scheduling because of various issues. For 2 of the companies the jobs either got filled half-way through the process OR the job went away completely due to budget cuts or restructuring. While, in my instance, both of these companies came back with other opportunities it really scared the shit out of me and I could see how unstable the market was. All interviews had at least these portions: 1. HR screening 2. Technical test (leetcode, practical, something else) 3. Behavioral test During this time is also when I'd conduct my "vibe checks" of the teams. Like is often said this is your opportunity to interview them as they are doing to you. 2/4 of the companies failed the vibe checks hard. You could just tell I'd be walking into an impersonal dumpster fire. If I did not have a chance to interview with the direct team I'd be working with, I flat out wouldn't work there regardless. That's too big a risk in my eyes. **Accepting offer** I'll just quickly lay out the companies: * Company A - Big company in different industry, same enterprisey tech stack, fair total comp, lowest base pay, vibe check was utterly failed * Company B- Direct competitor to my current company in big banking, same enterprisey tech stack, high total comp, highest base pay, vibe check was off * Company C - Startup vibe of company but matured (10+ yrs old), different industry and tech stack, total comp was the lowest of all but the base pay was nice, vibe check passed * Company D - More of a true start up (again mature) but gearing up to go public in next couple of years, different industry and tech, total comp was fairly close to company B, base pay was second highest, and I would have worked much closer to hardware When I first started getting offers, company D was one of the ones who dropped out of interviewing. So I initially accepted C. It was the least pay of all 4 but that's not what I was after, I was after growth and learning, plus I still made more than my current job. Literally the day I accepted the offer company D reaches back out saying the position was open again. This was a dream company for me so we went through the process and I ended up getting the offer. I accepted it and renege company C which understandably ghosted me as soon as I sent that email. This again scared the piss out of me because the instability in the market made me worried who I accepted would just rug pull me and be like "jk you have no job". **Conclusion:** I know without a doubt I was very lucky in my search. My interviews expected me to have way more ownership and breadth than I would have expected for someone at my level, luckily I did have that experience. In retrospect I think the biggest differentiators for my success in the search was being really picky on the jobs I applied to, willingness to be in office, and a lot of ownership/breadth from previous role. I didn't end up taking the highest paying job because that wasn't what was most important to me. So far the new role has been great and filled a lot of void I was missing at my previous role, but only time will tell if it was the right choice!
What makes a staff/principal software engineer?
We (Series A startup) are currently hiring for a senior level (7+ years if I had to put a number) at minimum among many positions we have open. We get some candidates that are really experienced, often with back to back 2-3 year gigs ātech leadā or āmanagerā (and back and forth often). One particular candidate sees himself as staff/principal and had salary expectations beyond what we had in mind for a senior. Our compensation are currently being guided by our VC, so Iām going to assume itās āfairā. My personal feeling is that the compensation is also pretty fair. I am all for the candidate seeing himself as higher level. I gave him my assessment for what I deem for minimum requirements for a senior level. However, I am struggling to know what level beyond that real means, esp for hiring someone new. From my past experience, Iāve seen what a staff level is like: code output, quality etc. but this was for someone who I already work with. I am curious how people here 1) hire externally for staff+ level and 2) pitch themselves as staff+ level for new employers?
Leave my current recession-resistant job for Big Tech?
Not trying to brag I'm just curious for some advice: I recently received an offer for a FAANG company on a team that sounds really interesting (Kindle devices) and has a really great TC. However, if would require me to move 3000 miles to a city I've never been to and don't really know anyone and it would also require me to leave my stable job at a big bank. With possible economic instability looming, does it make sense to take this leap? It would really suck to move to this HCOL city just to get laid off immediately especially in a tough job market, but I feel like the career opportunity is hard to say no to. My team really likes me so there's a solid probability I could get my job back if I needed to, but if they implement a hiring freeze, they may not be able to. Any helpful thoughts? Edit for extra details: I am 24 with 3 YoE. Pay bump is $110k TC in MCOL city to $270k in HCOL city (Seattle). I currently have \~$35k in cash and more in stocks but who knows what that will be worth for a while lol. Also considering selling my car since I would like to live in a walkable part of the city which would give me \~$15k.
135,000 TC to 75,000 to TC
Background: No college degree, graduated bootcamp 2 years ago, found job at small start-up offering 135,000 TC and worked for 1.5 years. I got extremely lucky as the interview process was very straight forward (no leetcode, no system design) just talk about a project I've worked on. Situation: Start-up ran out of money and needs funding. They owe me close to $70,000. I've been jobless for three months. I haven't had the chance to study leetcode or system design questions thoroughly and would basically start from square one. Haven't received any leads in terms of interviews. However, I have a extended family member offering a job that offers 75,000 salary at a small local company. If I take the job, I would expect to stay there long term, at least 1 - 2 years as it's a close family member. My biggest regret is not leveling up my skills while at the start-up and now I have 0 confidence in the job market. Should I test the market or just take the job?
My (American) company is opening R&D efforts in India.
I hope this title/post isnāt taken the wrong way, but we all know that there are a ton of talented engineers in India that can be hired for relatively low cost. Our new CTO has enacted a hiring freeze, and just announced that weāll be opening R&D efforts in India, and Iām concerned what this might mean for the safety of my job. For context, our engineering team is roughly 200 people, made up of SE1-3s, and some Seniors. For anyone who has worked at a company that has gone through something similar, I guess my questions are: 1. How long after āopening R&D effortsā might it take until the new engineers are actually hired? 2. Is it more likely that they will be brought in to replace people, or to supplement what we already have? 3. If people are replaced, which people are most likely to be replaced? Will it be performance based, salary based? A mix of both?
Are US devs shackled to the US job market?
I have 20+ YOE with a little management experience but am mostly IC tech leadership. We have been trying to think of plans to live outside of the US in case shit really hits the fan (we are non white and Muslim). But the salaries in the US are so high compared to the rest of the world I don't know how we can seriously do this without a big hit to our quality of life. Any expats here or people who have moved out of the US? Did you have to make compromises?
Got laid off last year for the first time in 12 years. Experienced the worst job search of my career. Here's the Sankey.
[2024 Job Search Sankey](https://i.redd.it/wwa5kzx1nz7g1.png) [Hereās my previous post](https://old.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/rqpfir/the\_result\_of\_my\_passive\_job\_search\_over\_the\_past/) where I got the job I was laid off from. I was there for two and a half years and I hadnāt interviewed at all during that time. It took me four months to get an offer and I managed to get two of them in the same week. One was from an early seed stage startup and the other was Meta. I accepted Meta for more immediate TC and stability, but then I got laid off again just before hitting my year mark. I just finished interviewing again and this time the results are much better. Waiting for the last potential offer/rejection to come in before I post that Sankey. Overall the system design interviews were my biggest weakness again like in my previous search. Hellointerview helped a lot with that and I ended up paying for two mock interview sessions with them. Those are painful but worth it. Besides system design interviews, though, I got rejected a lot in the initial round for not having enough depth in particular tools. Iāve been working in developer tools and infrastructure for most of my career and a lot of places I was applying to wanted much deeper experience with Kubernetes, Terraform, and AWS. I had worked with all of those at the previous two jobs I had in the 6 years prior to this search, but hadnāt really dug in deep on them and it showed in those early screens. I also got several rejections in the final rounds towards the end where the feedback was that I did very well but someone else just had a bit more relevant experience so they were getting the offer. I even had one recruiter say that the hiring manager tried to get headcount approved to extend offers to me and the other candidate but got denied and I was the second choice. Hereās the details of the two offers I did get: **Seed stage startup** * Salary: $190k * Target bonus: 10% * Equity: $88k in options * Remote **Meta** * IC5 * Salary: $215k * Target bonus: 15% * RSUs: $710k over 4 years * TC: ~$425k * Hybrid 3x/week [Sankey source](https://sankeymatic.com/build/?i=IIBxBsEsFMBMAIDaA2AHAXXgOQPbwE7QDOIOAdkdAFCgQwKIDsArJgErQBW0AxgC5wqAeiHwAhkSIBXALaQyAc3Hhw8HADN4fABbRxPHtBACEYsFB5i%2BkckQLEp4E%2DHnxLKogBp4UkLCt6kJpkvMREYvgAnjTm9EgATBjwAMJiKvAA7qKEPPhSkAL4MXRwCZgA8mRQIeKSYTLQZHzFUKWIAIyYABJipuCEvZEuTdD4AG4wGaXqOPhaugQ44NS0rQzx7Lx5BaP2JOSwgqtxHZgAkmQFkGlavNqX7otSZLBUVD19A7BD8oUT0FMEDM5jo9PglnpTvAONx%2BIIqBxcvlCntSC82ht4ABxbQ4IgmN6I7YohqSMQKUoNJDtZAAFkwAHUCtpYIQMgitsjdqTwhSEFSUElUuksvYkTsikSuXMeeTKZDaUkcXiCVKJfBZXyNZD2vToVxeKrOerNfKkHrKtU9BJKJIGk0OeKSWE5fydedLtYbgIePdII9wc9XlRhapRTlibsoQAVMQAaz0uKpNsgCjI9uaocy2WNKI6AE5NrCCVnw7mo8xOvALldvXcHjdAy8Q2kwzmnVGAMyM5msgEtkXtyNzJgVKrya11O2NTOt7Ni4fU1jY3H4%2BGxhPwJOToip9MzsrwJk6PvsjeJnDJyR7jPUouGwTnreXnc3g%2BITEAMXkjZwQaoT7brUu5preULHiybLiOoKJiAYRjWIoajqOooyEtAcG6Agf58FoeAyEMIR8Bksxxne%2BrFoIHCYaUOF4RqhHQMRpHkbgqK2NQVA1l6qg%2Bn6AZ%2Di8CTIPecKvNx1y8fW%2Dq%2DkG1J6t%2BZCyc2El1r6DaqE2DDtAADJgypruJnqSbc6kyZpgkMMugEvsBb4OqpUlmQJcngb2bJccZan8cp2ljlawH1DObyWhOgXTk0SDdhRD6vKFNQ2kFkWIHqEGnlQ8U7kluEpR6tZOT5Fn%2Dpl4VEGB0WKb5byVUVQkdMuMKxVQNVPHVmJpVBYgwbscGGMY8hKBoqFFC1WnkeUKFoaNlnkdGGEyBqVi%2BgNbxzWIC0yEt2gDeNk1FBle3kcA8HGIIE3DeRAAivBWsGABcjVifAADEyTJDpH06VQd1sYQ%2BwUHoz2MLSwPA99pZDtKL0AEbMDwtLxIw30dQCL35vmqDqIwnbfcdfXOM9H2fp%2BH3feduyEzpPD5qTd2OaZhWtQglO0swtPTXJlOMLAtPXTwt0vR9CO0yjGTQbBJ2IYNh3PYcYg0%2DmuOxKUlOfV9D0Yb6tFSLhfD4YxzH4GRqufd9arOmSWpUibtMlYlEW4c9nbxNDnY6Ujd0GQTyDc8g0DqzZV4gfukVOy7btI7uABeehi%2B0%2BbxF9W7wLpqBfZt%2BAKK4qjtPEVAECnedaCnqD59D8CJ1Q0NKDwSyzC9KGN%2Bo%2Bd8PgYgUCAEQHlgVBkDghyZIX%2BfaPAbP5yQcE7SwZezIccxJ6Cyb57X4D189qAb5v%2Bc4J3PAFEM7RUOoq9izwUjjFY596DpAB0zD5%2DIuj4AU6jggtfARBSzRuHXczPejADFZqF3vveAt9WZUHAGISIdFZ49R1peKw%2Dp86cCkPiIIMDn5ZwoNgFBaDrDqEiI0WAdge72DGKMSgCg24gBHmQqwH9lpkFrjICATFiB63gCELu%2BJIFiGhtAcAdgV5rzVqTLckAB5kO2gobQUBZG4VvtPeAMwmjqDgnocIFAAC0lBn7N3gFaCee8kK3yLoQKB1gKHRz0O0XS%2BdNppgwSnUmUCBHgCUsmMAGF8B2AAJrj0gDHFOyB85TFTNoXCtJXH8MEWMNIUhrTeIiP4%2DO6hHDgBADkSAu5yDwACfAUgu5rB5PcTgdkmRoARKiTE9xRSrh5LEAgtIe4wHjy1smBBaTIC%2BNwgI4E1B4DQwGHGUgvwK5fXieARJKjZibVwgAck8DfBZ%2BcsnQHUJAAAHvABZqz4DSBQts3ZqzF7QCGpQXCYh4ChKGW0tw9yEDpyYtcjMNgKDtwTJEeZ%2Dp8n5ygOgmQ0M0jt0MKkmQOAKHwGOKUbRt8dK6R0swbwcKb66niCDKgEKoW%2DWIGiSgYCb5Ip0p2fMKLb66WYLSLFkK9Dm25C6K2ehtHtDvp2ZAyBvAUpBtS7FdLNZYTUDreiBEuFMRIkbQlH12ioGRfAVFnZUCJBxnylIc4ywdjmKitO8R8ztC5WihFOk86qrtlOMqB5UXMHzMwZAnZyU3zdgik1tLqxeQKhpJm8rb7WvZfEA18R44%2BxpVCr2pR4U2vzLSA17RGAIvvqq0W4seqSx2kNXYqK7HxFtTG5AGND6qo5kJBVMrs0Gp0nqzsvLXWB1fKBS14DaT5kVQGukjBQmqses4eF7Qq3lsVcwF1UKk3worS2qVaBEghr0OTLV8LkAVrlai41iRS6qrxghcNRKkXsodanZgCbXV8wFqOn2DqdKs3aIeqFHxlBfB%2BCMcYkxpj11BIsZY3qb60jzagaNn6PqJEVqqtaG0to7UzagTs1rz0XtQAW119K5h%2DTRIcBAqLkDxE7O2h1aBkDWqAA) EDIT: Explaining my terrible labels: * Withdrew after accepting offer: I used this for the companies I withdrew from once I accepted Meta's offer. * Rejected: means the company rejected me at some point * Ghosted: the recruiter stopped responding to me without an outright rejection * Call w/ recruiter: Only used this if it was the first step before anything else after either applying or getting their email or LinkedIn message. A few places slipped this and I also used it to distinguish between getting rejected or withdrawing before or after talking to the recruiter on the phone.
15 years of experience, still a senior backend engineer. Is it bad?
I started working when I was 16 on a freelancer platform, to make a little bit of extra money, emigrated and switched to full time at 18. From 26 to 31 years old I took time to take a degree in mathematics, and then a 1 year course in business administration, formally a mix between a PhD and an MBA in econometrics, which was a waste of time TBH, but I was still working part time as a freelancer. Now I'm 37 so it makes roughly 15 years of experience. I also have a couple of successful startup + cash out under my belt. A few years ago I got promoted to tech lead, but after a few months I asked to switch back to senior backend because I was spending too much time managing people instead of dealing with tech problems. I always thought that what matter is money, and currently I feel like I have a good salary. Am I wrong in thinking I can be an engineer forever? Should I be more career focused? I got the doubt because I see some of my coworkers became directors, head of, .... While I roughly have the same title since forever, but I both hate and am bad at political / people topics EDIT: Thank you all for your kind words. I guess I was being a bit anxious about getting old LOL
Reset Salary Ranges?
Is it just me or does it look like maybe salary ranges are being reset at a lot of companies for otherwise highly skilled positions? For instance, Iām seeing principal level engineer positions at, say, $120k-135k base? Depending on org, thatās almost a terminal position for engineering so that feels a bit low for the amount of responsibilities and experience expected. Maybe nothing new for a lot of companies but feels like a devaluation in the value software engineers provide and demand in the economy.
Real talk - what is people's appetite for forming a software developers union/guild/association?
A few disparite thoughts: - Software engineering has identity of being a meritocracy, with these very high salarys for the people right at the top of the game. There's the thought that 'well that could be me'. So this leads to people working on side projects out side of work etc, because 'I just need to be better than the other developers, then I can I get the 500K job'. Great for the employers. - We've probably all worked with other software developers who we thnk aren't particularly good, and there's a thought that the purpose of a union/association/guild shouldn't be to uphold mediocre standards. - I think agile is suffocating the profession. It's before my time, but I think previously software developers had more power in determining how things got done, because they were able to get together and plan it out. Now, it's all broken down into Jira tickets and the developer is just assigned 'do this thing'. It means we get shoddy solutions and the job sucks.
As a HM, how can I encourage my prospective hires to negotiate their offers
My company has standard offer/signon bands, and recruiters will tend to leave headroom for offer negotiations. Not all candidates negotiate, especially women, and leave money on the table. As their future manager and it's not my money, nor do I manage budgets, I'd like them to max out their comp. It's much easier for them to get that bag at hire, as there really isn't any possibility to change their salary outside of the basic merit/promo cycle, and those increases are much smaller than what they can negotiate up at hire. Wondering how this community handles this situation?
An Ode to the Lost Magic of the 2010s ZIRP startups
It really is incredible how suddenly the world changes. Many of us are now unemployed, facing layoffs, taking salary cuts and enduring grueling work environments to try and get through the worst tech recession since 2008. I myself now work in a fusty, old and stable government department in Europe. But I once worked for a couple of 2010s ZIRP startups. And what places they were. People from across Europe and the world would rock up to these places and bring their seductive cocktail of cultural insight, experiences and languages. And they were motivated primarily to create something new and cool. The types who would have hated the fusty corporate offices that many of us now flee to in search of job security. And the energy was explosive. Sure most of their companies didn't make much profit or, in many cases, even revenue - but the magic was palpable. Not least because the company socials brought together so many people from different cultures and countries. Love, friendships (and even startup founder partnerships) were forged in these places. And this magic was often sparked overseas at global socials that the startups flew everyone to so that we could all party in foreign lands. I myself was flown to New York alongside everyone else in the London office to party for three days. It was crazy. Much of that magic was captured in photographs that disappeared not long before those bankruptcies were declared. Many of those people have since moved on to more sensible lives, corporate jobs and the bright beginnings of early middle age. But for a moment, it was magic.
Having A LOT of difficulty attracting/keeping engineering managers at my start up after years as an IC developer. Any advice?
Update: People seem hung up on the wrong thing here. We pay a competitive salary for a start up manager ($350K + options), it's just low compared to an engineering manager job at like Google. FAANG EM salaries, even for front line managers, are often $600 K a year I have about 20 years experience in the tech industry (16 with big tech/FAANG companies, 4 with startups), mostly as an IC developer. About 18 months ago I co-founded a start up and it has gone pretty well and now we have 15 developers. This is a lot for me to manage and, to be honest, I am not the best people manager. It's one of the reason I have gone back to being an IC developer over and over again. I have been trying to attract engineering managers to the company and both of the first two I have hired have left at after a few months, citing me as the reason. The first one never really seemed to know what he was doing at the company, and really seemed to have a lot of trouble dealing with ambiguity. The second one, who came directly from big tech, seemed EXTREMELY uninterested in doing and hands on work, and actually went to the CEO and tried to take my job. I have reached out to some decent managers in my network I had in big tech but none of them want to work at the level of pay we can offer. The reality is I am going to be a lot more technical than any manager I hire under me unless I promote one of the engineers on the team. Anyone have any experience with this kind of problem? Any advice on going from IC developer to start up executive and trying to attract engineering managers and keep them happy?
Google or Apple for FTE SWE New Grad Role?
Hey guys! I had previously made a post about another company but I was fortunate enough to get opportunities from both Apple and Google starting after I graduate in May 2025. For some background, I am a US citizen (not from a top school) and had 2 previous internships at Big Tech companies. The Apple offer is in the Bay Area and the good thing is that I already know which team I will be working for and itās pretty interesting. For Google, Iām still in PA matching since I interned in Cloud but assuming I do receive the offer (which apparently should happen), it will most likely also be in the Bay Area (where I interned at) and in Cloud, but I wonāt know what team I will be in yet. Apple TC is around 200k and Google is around 215k. I was wondering what your opinions were regarding the state of these companies currently? What do you guys think is the better company to work for, more value resume wise, etc? What would you guys choose? Thanks!
Bloomberg offered my Senior SWE???
I interviewed at Bloomberg earlier this month. I did 4 interviews over 2 days. According to my recruiter I passed all of them. However I didnāt get the offer for an entry level position, they offered me a chance to interview for Senior SWE with only 2 years of experience. Am I being set up for failure? What should I study? My recruiter said Iāll have multiple rounds of DSA and single rounds of system design/hiring manager conversations. The team I was matched with is the Data and Analytics Gateway Platform Team. Anyone have any insights? 2 YOE | 95k TC
Differences I see from my experience in Defense, MAANG and Big tech industries.
Hey all, Im 7 YOE. I have worked in the defense industry my first few years (RTX, Lockheed Martin, BAE, etc), then during the hiring height of 2020-2022 I went to FAANG-level company and spent a few years there in their cloud based system. THis year I got laid off and after a few months I was able to get a job in a big tech cloud based system. I wouldnt consider my current company FAANG level but id say most people would know it. I will pre-face this that it is my experience. Im not saying every project in each industry is like this, I've known people in AWS who claim to not have to do anything past 5 pm and get great reviews and bonuses. I know people in defense who say they work a shitload of hours to get things done. Here are some of the differences I've seen from all three jobs: # Onboarding: Defense - didnt really have an onboarding. It was just kind of, build and run the system. I remember they gave me a task to change the headers of a few files just as an excuse to get me to build. FAANG - they bascially gave me an onboarding doc, that didnt even seem official. It was just a doc that got passed around with steps. I was surpriused nobody had ever took time to put it in a version control style doc system. It was just in the middle of some doc sharing system online. Current: to my surprise their onboarding was the best and most chill. They gave me clear indiciation of where they expect me to be. The first week was just 3 hour courses each day of onboarding for my company. The second week was a self paced class for onboarding for my team. The videos were very instructive, and easy to follow along and my favorite part was they basically gave us guidelines for how to get promoted. # work life balance: Defense - probably had the best work life balance of the bunch. I never had to think about work after 5pm. By 6 the building was a ghost town with a few stragglers. They worked on a 9/80 schedule so I had 3 day weekends 2-3 times a month (26 times a year). I could also work for extra PTO, where if I worked extra hours one week I could save it in a "extra time" bank and use it as future PTO. FAANG - definetely the worse of the 3 so far. It was expected ot be available practically 24/7. I went to that FAANG company because I had heard it was one of the few that you coould have a life, but I never realized that cloud was the exception to that rule. People were respodning to emails late at night, getting on calls late, responding on vacation, etc. THey were cool about taking time off but it felt like if you weren't drinking the kool aid and doing 10x more like verybody else was doing, it wouldnt go well for you. Current - still early to tell but it seems that there isnt as much of a "work late" culture here. People set their own times, some work a bit later but Ive never seen any crazy discussions happen at 11 pm like I did in my last job. A few principal engineers have gone on vacation and not yet have I seen any of them get on a call or message thread to answer any type of question. # Expectiations: Defense - really didnt have much expectations. I practically worked 20 hours, coasted the rest, was my team's scrum master, etc and over excelled in their eyes. There was no real due date on things because contracts in defense last multiple years. I remember when I got there the expectation was to complete the project within my first year. It took 3 years to finish and nobody batted an eye. FAANG - expectations were very high. If you were finishin up with a major task, theyd throw another one at you before you were even done with the first. Seemed even as aJr/mid-level I was expected to lead meetings, always be available, etc. I worked way more at this job than I did at defense and felt like i was underperforming because if I did 8-10 hours, most others did 10-12 hour days. In reviews it seemed like I was compared to my teammates, not so much compared to what the expectation of the job was. Current - again still early. But seems like their expectations are pretty fair. A quote from the first day I like was "if you want to be the person that does 40 hour weeks and gets your job done, you can have a long career here. If you want to be the person that does 50+ hour weeks here for that quicker promotion, you can do that but just respect your work-life balance". # Time and meetings: Defense - hardly had any meetings. We did standup evertday (except fridays) for 30 minutes but it mostly lasted 15 minutes. We hardly went over. I never learned the concept of parking lot until I got to FAANG lol. It was in office so just walking to someone's desk was really just the norm. FAANG - seemed like if your day didnt have 4 hours of meetings, you were underperforming. Everything was a discussion. Parking lot would take an extra hour and most of it was discussing things that I felt didnt really have to take that long. At times some of my tasks were pushed back due to someone wanting to discuss about one simple change. If you had to talk to someone, it was hard to get them on a call and when you did they didnt appreciate their time being wasted. In meetings it seemed everyone was stressed to have the meeting finish. Current - seems nobody is really stressed about meetings. Parking lot items get resolved pretty quickly. Everybody doesn't mind hopping on a call and lasting an hour with you. Edit: someone asked for interview styles. I wont give exact details but ill say more or less how it was. # Interview: Defense: I was a college grad so I got invited to an all day hriing event by the company. It seemed like the interviews didnt ask anything technical, they jsut wanted to get ot know me. At the end of the day they had me list my favorite teams and told me theyd let me know. I've interviewed for other defense companies, tbh there were no leetcode questions or anything like that. Technical questions were more like "what is OOP?" or how I would design a simple code. FAANG - first was a pre-round codesignal style question to see if I knew what I was doing. Once I passed that I went through 2-3 rounds of interviews asking leetcode style questions and then a manager meet. Big tech - similar to faang. Pre-interview exam to make sure I knew what I was doing. Once I passed that it was 2-3 rounds of code/system questions. Edit 2: people asked about TC # TC \- Defense: as a college grad in a HCOL state I started at about 78k wiht a 5k bonus. Within 4 years and 1 promotion I was making 90k and yearly bonuses that was around 5k-8k. No stock. I know people who jumped to other defense company and they are around 120k. Promotion seemed like it happened every 2-3 years. \- FAANG - I never got promoted in my few years though I doubt I deserved it in their eyes. I never really saw anybody get promoted really. Like one mid level SWE had been working more than most seniors and she didnt get promoted. AS for TC it was about 220k between base stocks and signing bonus. I moved to a low COL state shortly after joining and my base pay dropped by 20k so it ended up being around 200k \- Current company - TC is about 200k with just basepay and stock (no signing bonus) but according to them, im promised up to 10% bonus that would bring my total pay to around 215k. # Benefits \- Defense: 3 weeks of accrued PTO. But since there was timsheet we technically were not allowed to do overtime. A work around was if I worked 90 hours in a 2 week period, I could use 10 hours and save it in a special bank that I could use later on. So If in a 4 week period I worked 200 hours, I could set 40 hours to that special bank. And if I had a 2week vacation I could use the special bank for the first week and my regular PTO for the second week. It was good benefits outside of that, tuition reimbursement which I used to get my master's degree without taking on more debt. Discounts on personal travel (it wasnt amazing but good enough) etc. \- FAANG - Unlimited PTO. Some of the best benefits i've ever seen will probably will ever have. There were multiple different types of reimbursement programs for almost anything. Discount codes on almost any store that were actually pretty good discounts. Similar benefits when it comes to tuition reimbursement, etc. \- Big tech - unlimited PTO. Again good benefits, just not as good as FAANG. Company will give random 3 day weekends to employees that they announce pretty early so people have it prepared.
High TC Remote First companies?
Iām at 350k TC and am looking for possible next steps. Iām at a tech lead / senior 2 level, and WLB (rarely more than 40 hours a week) is important. Tech stack is JVM (Java, Kotlin, Scala) with a heavy emphasis on big data and distributed systems. It seems like most of the companies I used to look at potentially working at one day (Google, etcā¦) have gone RTO.
How can I tell if it's time to leave my company?
First job - been here 5.5 years. I'll try to break it down as simply as possible: Pros: * Free to come and go as I please (start time, end times, hours worked) * Manager and skip don't micromanage - let me plan my tasks * Great relationships with people in key positions - I'm currently building a course on few subjects to lecture the entire R&D department * Potential to climb ladder, clear path - I'm a Senior now, can pivot to TL if wanted * Job is 25 minute bus commute from home * Above average pay for the field - getting stock refreshers but small amounts (cleared 120k with bonuses this year in a MCOL-HCOL area) * People are very friendly - lots of people I'm close with at work Cons: * Company is doing poorly - stock has dropped 90% since its peak in 2021, no recovery in sight * Previous stock refreshers (1-3 years ago) dropped significantly in value * Really good engineers are getting poached by FAANG, no clear replacements for them in a niche field * Less than good people are jumping ship to other companies * Company is stingy with new stock refreshers - which makes me feel like there's no point in committing to it - if I'm busting my ass I should be in position to get rich if the company climbs out of the hole - this isnt the truth. Im having troubles convincing myself to use logic and get up and apply for the FAANG poachers - they're offering 50% more salary with a brand new stock package worth 100-150k over 4 years. Has anyone else been in a place like this and made the move?
Backend software engineer in oil and gas, long term career advice needed
Iām currently working as a backend software/data engineer in a mid sized oil and gas company. Depending on how well we do my TC is anywhere from 200k - 240k. I live in a MCOL city. The company I work for is great in terms of work life balance, it is 5 days in the office with on call rotation, but we do have 6 weeks PTO and another 1 week of sick days. We also surprisingly donāt do layoffs, weāve never had layoffs even when oil hit negative during covid. I currently have 4 years of experience in software and before that I was an electrical engineer with 4 years of experience. Iāve been with this company for almost 4 years now. Right now Iām currently a Senior within the company but probably out in the market Iād be considered a mid level. Iām working my way up in the company pretty quick and I have a good relationship with my manager. I believe within 3 years Iāll be at a manger role with my TC somewhere around $350k. In terms of the work I do, itās a variety of backend work from API development, to ETLās, managing database schemas/SPās, and working with real time data. The tech stack on the backend is mostly Python with a little bit of .NET, Iāll be dabbling in GO soon as well for our realtime data calculations from RMQ. On the database side Iāve pretty much worked with every sql/nosql database you can think of. Iāve been thinking about my long term career growth. Iāve seen posts about people making 500k - 1m TC and would like to work towards that. Iām absolute dogshit at LC, however at work Iām able to architect out solutions for new projects and solve issues quickly. I would say I still have room to grow here, Iām still learning new things and have the freedom to introduce new technologies. Wondering what I need to do to prepare for that next big jump? And howās my career here so far?
What's going on in the world of small, local software companies?
Hello! I took a sabbatical in 2023 to focus on a different career outside of tech, intended to take a break for about 6 months but things have been going well enough that it turned into 2 years and counting. Anyway, I was thinking about dipping my toe back into the industry next year. I don't really want to work at a FAANG company, and I don't really need huge TC. I'm pretty content to work at a smaller company that isn't doing anything in the AI realm, a company that makes "boring" software with a "boring" tech stack. Does anyone know what that world is like right now? I'd be pretty content to take an $80k/year TC package doing, say, PHP if it meant I didn't have to go through months of screenings and assignments competing with 200 other resumes. Or are even the small companies inundated with applicants, doing 4+ rounds of interviews for mid-level positions? Thanks!
2025 Front End Job Search Experience -> Offer
**Here's my job and interview experience in 2025. 14yoe.** To not bloat the main thread, some topics will be in comments below. I was working at a fintech company and they did huge layoffs after acquiring 2 companies, nearly every engineer from our division was cut. it frikin sucks but it is what it is. 350 applications -> 18 recruiter calls -> 12 tech screens -> 3 final rounds -> 1 offer; i applied to practically every single front end position in existence. Sankey diagram here [https://i.imgur.com/pwHagNt.png](https://i.imgur.com/pwHagNt.png) Time elapsed: 3 months. I landed an offer with Marvell Semiconductor as Staff UI Architect! This position is unique- hybrid of Front End Engineering + UI/UX Design. I was tested on designing UI's for semiconductor (switches, data center etc) data visualization, as well as javascript fundamentals. I initially asked, wouldn't you want a graphic designer since bulk of the work is UI/UX design? but they said no, they could never understand the technicals of FE dev nor EE. they wanted someone who knew UI/UX design, FE, AND EE. So i was a unique fit for the role. **Stats:** \-TC: Years 1-4: 248k -> 276k -> 303k -> 330k (Includes estimate of guaranteed refreshers) \-High level role with Data Center Network UI design + some front end dev \-4 days a week, 30mi commute 10AM-2:30PM, avoids traffic, 45mins. On call for overseas folks 8-10PM. + Occasional travel overseas to india. \-highly rated on glassdoor, low layoffs compared to peers \-incredibly smart EE folks; I studied EE in college but pivoted to FE dev and now this is almost going back to my roots. Interview: \-I didn't even expect a call back, the position seemed out of my league, but behold, i did. Told recruiter my background in FE dev, not a pro UIUX designer but i know the concepts and i work with them. Said he'll get back to me and the next week they want me for a GIGA HARDCORE FINAL ROUND with 6 directors/vps/staff engineers. 6 1:1's PLUS a presentation to all 6. Oh my god Iāve never got grilled on UX design this hard in my life. One of the directors (PhD from MIT) asked me: Say aliens are invading earth. You need to design a control panel for a missile defense system that is user friendly to the operators. Button? Console; command line etc? Whatās the design like, how about communication? How do u communicate to others, alarm system? Should there be a mute button? If the operator is in a hurry and needs split second decision how do u ensure the cleanest UI design? Security? Another director (ex-AWS) asked: Say u have a data center with servers and switches that transmit data, but data can be failed / low quality / bad transmission, design a gui for this. VP asked me: Say thereās a bar graph. X axis is quality and Y is number of items. Title of graph is āamount of items of various qualities over the past 24 hoursā. Now, we donāt like this presentation and instead want the X axis to be time. But we still want to show the data for quality/# , so weāre adding another data point. How do we display the graph now? Staff FE dev grilled me on js fundamentals such as closures and promises. I fumbled on a few questions but managed to get most, explaining thought process. Crazy interviews, hiring manager told me as a closing thought "This position is challenging to fill" and i had that thought RACING in my head 24/7. what could it mean? Did he like me and i'm a contender? Or did it mean "this is a tough role to pass"; i asked chatGPT and it said "THIS IS A HUGE GREEN SIGNAL" i was like lolwut really? ok then! Week later recruiter emails me "I wanted to connect with you regarding feedback and next steps" im like NEXT STEPS?? GG? lets fkin goooooooooo. and boom offer. Craziest part is i couldn't prepare for these UI questions, came leftfield, i just winged it and somehow i had enough intuition to pass them. Recruiter told me many candidates were able to pass coding, but struggled/froze on the Design Mission Control System design question. I guess i have some semblance of talent in UI design? Update 12/18/25 - been 2 weeks, i've gotten the repo of the data center network ui prototype vibe coded by offshore folks and i've been tasked to improve it. So far it's all dev work. \---- Some FE coding questions I had this year: **Discord -** tech screen - failed Create a UI for a formula parser that has fields a, b, c. You can type numbers in the field and the output of the fields would be those numbers, but you can also type letters in the fields and they would add up the numbers stored. For example in field A if you type 3 the output of field A is 3. Then if you type A in field B the output of B is 3. In field C if you type in AB you get 6 (3+3) the reqs were so ambiguous so it took me awhile to understand the problem. NO AI, write on own IDE with screenshare. **Crunchyroll** \- tech screen - passed Create a react app that renders a collection of anime titles and its image, from json data; for(var i=0; i<5; i++) setTimeOut console.log(i) "trick" question whats the output and why? **Crunchyroll -** final coding round - failed Polyfill the "getElementsByClassName" function. Aced system design though, the interviewer was impressed. **Walmart -** tech screen - ghosted Write a "deepclone" function that copies an object with variable depth and contains anything, including other objects, arrays etc. **Oracle -** tech screen - failed (passed question but they chose another candidate with more backend exp) Create a react app that displays a credit card, with buttons to switch which cc to view, cc data comes from json. Clicking on cc will replace the text with X's- X's correspond to how many words there are, so FIRST LASTNAME will be XXXX XXXX. **Anduril -** tech screen - failed You know in your IDE the directory structure, with folders and files? Given a pic/mock of that, Build it. **Amazon -** https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/1iudddy/rainforest_loop_experience_frontend_l5_12_yoe/ \--- Closing thought: It's rough out there for Front End devs. There are fewer positions than before, but way more AI/ML positions. However, FE dev compensation is still competitive, u just needa know so much. I'm not incredibly smart or talented, most other engineers are more brilliant than I. The biggest source of my success is the resilience to failure. The amount of rejections and failures is so high but every time, i write down what went wrong, study it, and gain knowledge, so over time every failure builds up to more and more knowledge. *^(Note: I didn't run any of this thru AI.)*
(meta) Let's talk about rule 3: No General Career Advice
It seems like many interesting and highly relevant to SWE folks posts seem to be deleted via Rule 3. The examples listed in the sidebar are: >No general career advice, including "should I take company/role X or Y", questions about hot markets, equity, salary, FAANG, job titles, interview questions, or negotiations. and >Any career advice thread must contain questions and/or discussions that notably benefit from the participation of experienced developers. Career advice threads may be removed at the moderators discretion based on response to the thread." >General rule of thumb: If the advice you are giving (or seeking) could apply to a āSenior Chemical Engineerā, itās not appropriate for this sub. However it seems like this rule gets applied far too broadly in this sub. It feels like what it actually is interpreted to be is, "if answers might apply to other people in other industries, it's probably a Rule 3 violation." For example: [https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1icxkmr/is\_being\_the\_wildcard\_developer\_a\_good\_or\_bad/](https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1icxkmr/is_being_the_wildcard_developer_a_good_or_bad/) was deleted this way recently. It was one of the more interesting and applicable to SWE folks I've seen here but because it tangentially is relevant to other fields, it was deleted. Responses here absolutely benefit from the participation of experienced developers, as called out by the sidebar. What I'd like to see is a lessening of how broadly Rule3 is applied. I struggle to understand why the above was deleted but of the [top posts](https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/top/?t=year) from the last year, so many of those are still present. Of the last year top 10: * [https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1g0m8mb/be\_aware\_of\_the\_upcoming\_amazon\_management/](https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1g0m8mb/be_aware_of_the_upcoming_amazon_management/) \-- Amazon has many non-tech managers and this is far more than tech-specific * [https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1b89gqf/the\_cto\_of\_my\_company\_challenged\_all\_engineering/](https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1b89gqf/the_cto_of_my_company_challenged_all_engineering/) \-- this applies to all managers. As someone who was a different engineer type before being a dev, the same root problem applies to all managers - many managers exist who have NO idea what their team does and cannot do even the most basic of job tasks. * [https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1gz9ksj/my\_senior\_engineer\_interview\_experiences/](https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1gz9ksj/my_senior_engineer_interview_experiences/) \-- this is just blatantly an interview question/experience Rule3 violation * [https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1gtoe56/after\_5\_years\_of\_working\_in\_tech\_ive\_surmised/](https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1gtoe56/after_5_years_of_working_in_tech_ive_surmised/) \-- this is the case in most engineering disciplines * [https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1fic0db/amazon\_moving\_to\_five\_days\_a\_week\_inoffice/](https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1fic0db/amazon_moving_to_five_days_a_week_inoffice/) \-- this applies to all amazon employees. FAANG is also explicitly called out as a Rule3 violation * [https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1g6j7vi/overwhelmed\_at\_new\_faang\_job/](https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1g6j7vi/overwhelmed_at_new_faang_job/) \-- most of the comments/discussion apply to anyone joining a new job and overwhelmed. FAANG is also explicitly called out as a Rule3 violation So of the top 10 posts in the last year, 6 of them seem to be Rule 3 violations as well (but not deleted). As someone who was a different engineer in my first career (though not a chemical engineer, as the sidebar lists), all those threads apply just as well to my prior engineering discipline. And by the definition of Rule3 seems they should have been deleted. This is just an example of the inconsistency in how it's applied. An additional and even more fundamental problem with how Rule 3 is applied is that the further you go in your career, the less specific to "tech" and the more intermingled tech/people/processes are for the types of questions/discussions you have. And these are the types of discussions which get deleted with some regularity here. The impact here is it feels like r/ExperiencedDevs is more like r/MidlevelDevs because essentially everything in the staff+ category and much of the senior+ category has a lot of overlap with other engineering disciplines and end up deleted. The specific changes I want to see: 1. lessen enforcement of Rule 3 when it's pretty clearly a discussion that is beneficial and related to SWEs. I would not be in favor of deleting any of the above, for example, even though I believe they are current Rule 3 violations. Because even though the advice is basically generic engineering advice, it's still beneficial for devs. 2. Remove the "general rule of thumb" section from the sidebar. 3. Clarify somewhere what this means: "notably benefit from the participation of experienced developers" because most of the Rule 3 violations I comment in seem to fully fit this. So either remove this text entirely or define more what this means.
Two offers, how much does tech stack matter?
Company A: 95k TC, fully in person working with Python, AWS, dockers, K8s. 25 minute commute Company B: 100k TC, fully remote, Java 21 + spring and AWS (some migration from on-premises) I would like the remote offer but I wonder if Iād be hurting myself long term taking that. K8s seems harder to learn alone and so many postings have it listed. End goal is to work remote. How easy is it to switch from Java enterprise dev later? The Java market seems very saturatedā¦ thoughts?
Amazon vs DoorDash New Grad
I recently received an offer from DoorDash and Amazon (AWS) for new grad. Amazon: - AWS, Team TBD - Location: Seattle - TC: ~$175k first year DoorDash - Team TBD, I give preferences later - Location: SF - TC: ~$200k first year Any advice on how career advancement/growth, job security, culture, etc. looks like at both companies would be great. I haven't heard the best things about WLB for both but it would be interesting to compare the two. I do not have info on what teams I would be joining at either company at the moment. Thank you!
How common is it for managers to act more like secretaries?
In my organization, the engineering managers function more like secretaries. They book meetings, handle logistical issues, conduct initial interviews with new hires (nothing technical), and set our salaries. The managers Iāve had have never had a good idea of what Iām actually doing. They donāt know much about the product and have probably never looked at the code. In my experience, whenever they try to make decisions on their own, things tend to go awry. Is this common? I feel like it would be much better to actively encourage engineers within the teams to take on managerial roles while still doing some of the teamās actual work. But about 4 out of 5 manager hires in my company come from outside. Maybe itās a Sweden thing.
How are people over 50 finding it changing jobs?
I moved country so had to take a step back in my career, UK (outside London I mean) had much less options and salary than New York. Have a reasonable role but probably have to change roles in a few years and wondering how those over 50 find that process?
Is the dream of moving to the US for big tech dead?
28M. 5 YOE. I work for an American company while living in Canada. When I joined it wasnāt terribly uncommon for them to do TN Visaās if you went from Junior -> Senior internally. Fast forward to today, they slashed all salaries, never do relocations and thereās lots of immigration uncertainty in the US. I now want to jump ship but am nervous about the market. How hard is it to get a role/relocate to the US (Seattle, SF, Austin, NY) with 5 YOE?
Company getting acquihired. What should I expect as a tech lead?
Our small (-25 person) startup is getting acquired by a much larger late stage startup in a similar space. Weāre a strategic acquisition as we focus on a smaller but growing niche. I lead the technical side of a product that is core to the value proposition of the company and I am identified as a key person for integration into the acquirer. Being at the acquiring company in a former role, I saw that the exec team of the acquired usually gets Director/VP titles, but what happens to the ICs? Iām currently making below market rate and would probably fetch 1.3-1.5x my salary if I were to go for roles at larger companies. Should I expect anything beyond a salary bump (maybe not to 1.5x)? Maybe a signing bonus conditional on staying for a year, etc.? Trying to understand what a āfairā offer would be. āJustā getting another normal employment contract doesnāt seem very appealing to me, and Iād almost rather start my own company in the same space if I felt the offer wasnāt very good.
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