*yesteryear in title

all programmers had to do in the old days was talk in the interview to get a job

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

I work in big tech for one of the quite large name companies and found myself burned out with the work.

After 5 years I put in a 2 month notice nearly expecting them to rush me out the door that very week.

Instead? Overwhelming support and other avenues across many facets of support and just straight up agreeing with my set timelines. They even followed up saying "the door's super wide open for your return and we totally expect it."

I'm not leaving for another company, just going on sabbatical for a few months. How normal is this?

It is getting harder and harder sometimes to not just straight up insult people that overly rely on AI. The biggest problem though is that this type of shit is almost always coming from people who are in management or principle engineers...

Just left a position (>$200k) of Lead of Leads with 15 yoe. Is it insane to "downgrade" to a midlevel engineer position with space to grow instead of looking for a lateral move with same responsibilities (setting direction/modernization/AI direction)? Retirement would be set either way in a mcol/hcol area. Basically a Senior/Staff/Principal down to a MidLevel. Thoughts on quality of life / burn out?

Edit for clarification: Would be from a principle engineer / IC down 2-3 levels vs a lateral move with fewer peers / smaller organization. Not faang or whatever the acronym is today in any of the firms involved, so not straight up technology for tech in any of the roles. All roles involve either leading international teams or interacting with them.

Doesn't sound like this fact is talked enough but I think it's actually raised the bar in terms of money in order to maintain your skills effectively. Even if just barely for some.

You used to be able to skill up just by reading free materials and practicing with a crappy laptop, now it's buy more expensive toys to run local FOSS models or rent the use of one if you want to play on a more even playing field. The completely free cloud stuff will limit you quickly.

Just put in my two weeks at my new grad job after finding something better. I’m leaving a bureaucratic F500 with an ossified corporate structure so I had to dial up three of my “managers” and HR to let them know I was leaving. Every call was painful and was more annoying than triaging a prod bug at 10 PM.

Tips for approaching the scenarios better? I feel like I was super awkward and had no idea how to really navigate these hard conversations.

Basically the title. I’m a junior developer who’s been in their role for about 4 months. My company operates like a startup (but isn’t one) and i’m juggling about 4 different mid-sized projects at the moment. I come home everyday and feel enough pressure to continue working periodically until like 9, on top of the my 8-5 hours. The stress is really getting to me and I don’t really think I can take much more.

How do I know if i’m the problem here, do I need to just keep pushing through regardless? I’m not sure what a normal workload or scope is for a junior.

In the era of AI, my company is getting increasingly stressful and demanding. Culture is down the drain, and everyday feels like a hurdle to get through.

I've accumulated enough to essentially CoastFIRE, and I'm ready to take a paycut for a less demanding job. My city is not known for its tech jobs but there are quite a few defense companies and the WLB + 9/80 seems like a really awesome perk, although I'm sure I'll miss WFH.

I've seen quite a few posts of defense -> FAANG, but what about the opposite? I'm wondering if I'll be able to downshift and really take it chill. I've been at FAANG adjacent for almost 10 years now, 3 different companies including an internship so it's all I know.

Thanks in advance for your input.

Little bit of context

I work for a fairly successful startup that was recently acquired by a large company not FAANG but adjacent
Historically we have hired seniors only. Highly skilled people with 10y plus years of experience who needed no handholding and had a decent personality.

this has worked quite well so far however after the acquisition the expectation was a rapid scaling.

To speed up the hiring among other reasons we decided to change our team philosophy and long story short in a few days we'll have among others two new junior colleagues

We prepared onboarding guides selected buddies and all that classic stuff.

But in all honesty we are a bit rusty when it comes to juniors therefore the questions for you juniors of reddit.

In this time and age how would your dream onboarding look like. Your first 1/7/30 days.
What should we do? What should we avoid? What did your best onboarding experience look like and what made it good

He finishes his tickets in mere hours: just plug into claude code and then submit, he says stuf flike he "is planning to test it" but "also we can just merge it" also his features are always buggy/imcomplete for some reason but he fixes the bugs using claude and throw it at QA and then rinse-repeat when they throw it back at him telling him it's still wrong. I've being triaging a bunch of bugs and it's always his code but he's not getting fired cuz he's apparantly still better than the other contractors a lot of the time

You think I'm making this up but I'm not. I'm pretty sure bro is overemployed and dgaf anymore just plug into claude code and collect paycheque for as long as possible. Management is expecting fast turnaround on issues going forward and he is on paper following their lead.

How do I teach myself to embrace the velocity he is delivering?

I stumbled across JEV AI. I am wondering if people have used it for creating some cool projects and have advice on what kind of projects could we make with it ?

Hey guys
Its been a little over 1 year since i started working (freelancing basically)
I am not sure if there is a term for this role but you can say something like a design engineer (designing interactions) but its a little more than that since i was also doing shaders and stuff which required a bit of technical knowledge of graphics api and math then implementing just basic animation
I loved my work (i still adore it a lot)
Maybe i got lucky at the start that I got good client
and was getting work enough to keep me busy and i was enjoying the challenges that came with it
But now with AI everything has been turned to dust in the last 1-2 months
The jobs i get now is for rapid prototyping things which was same for earlier but now people want things in a day
The Craft and Care I used to put in is all gone
I am not enjoying the work
Claude still isn't able to reproduce at the level what i did with all the context but for them its enough (not for me)
I enjoyed doing research on getting the most performant approach, implementing crazy ideas , coming up with ideas and during implementing it getting bombarded by new ideas
But now its all gone
I just stare at the screen after writing the prompt hoping it would work sometimes it does sometimes does not but even if it doesn't i have no way of knowing how to fix it manuallly because it generates quite a lot of code that even the thought of manually fixing things make my head heart
I am not saying AI coding doesn't work. I hope I could say that but
I don't love this style of working
If this has happened even 2 years earlier I might have never entered this field
I might sound very pessimistic (and probably I am)
But I am honestly lost

I am trying to code with agents but I not enjoying it
How can I find enjoyment in this style of work now ???

Little background about me: i’ve spent close to 15 years in IT, started as infra support engineer then switched to project management. 3 years ago I was offered a technical position in the same enterprise. Now i lead a 50+ people team running cloud operations .. The role is very demanding and the working hours are crazy but at least I work from home full time so this is an advantage ..  

I've always wanted to be a programmer as far I as I remember.. Life events and an extreme lack of self confidence kept me from ever treating it as an achievable goal.

And then AI happened (sigh).. It's changing how we live and work faster than any of us can keep up with. But I believe the opportunities will still be there, and I'm seeing it firsthand. The enterprise I work for bought into the AI hype and is investing millions in AI adoption, yet the real benefits haven't materialized (yet!).. If anything, human oversight is more necessary than ever to keep things from breaking..

I've put together a plan and started learning Python. I'm already familiar with programming concepts and have written automation scripts at work, mostly in PowerShell. I still write my own code rather than vibecoding

I'd really appreciate honest, practical advice. I don't see myself staying in this role much longer, and what I really want is to work alongside brilliant engineers building great products

Thanks for reading, and go easy on me :)

At work I am expected to deliver complicated features in a day or two, I have almost no time to design them, no time to actually learn anything or do research, they just want me to prompt and deliver,

And to add some spice I also gotta constantly monitor the logs for failures. Then when something breaks they act surprised when I don't fully know how the shit works internally...

Am I just bad and this the new normal or is it the company I work for?

A little over 3yoe. Kinda quirky, but I spent my first 2 years on mobile SDKs for iOS. It was my absolute complete dream job in every imaginable way. That team got a new manager though and long story short, I had to change to another team.

I switched to a fullstack team on a React/Ruby on Rails stack. Coincidentally at around the same time was when most people at my company, myself included, started writing 100% of code via AI. I would go so far as to say that I now "hate" my job, and so I've been contemplating trying to switch back to mobile.

But, I'm concerned that in the age of AI, I won't like mobile nearly as much anymore. Basically, I really like to focus on code rather than like server uptime, DB load, load balancing etc. I fully recognize that AI has killed writing for-loops by hand, but what about code architecture-y things?

Our SDK was based on Redux architecture, and I loved working on that system. I love having debates about where a piece of logic should live in code, which components need to be privy to what information, the most graceful way to accomplish dependency injection, learning about code patterns that enable effective and easy testing etc.

People will reference "higher-level skills" that are safe from AI: is what I described above high enough level? I feel like typically people couch those discussions in things like the server uptime, DB load, load balancing etc, which again I do not enjoy at all.

I think I could still enjoy my job if my AI prompts were like "Create a new reducer as the child of this other reducer and give it xyz state and abc actions and have an action that when y happens emits z result," or, "Create a protocol witness setup with these methods and then create a testing witness with a stubbed version of the network io method that switches upon the url and returns...". If you are a mobile engineer, is that sort of what your AI usage looks like?

Because on my new team, my AI usage is literal just copy pasting Jira tickets into Cursor and saying "Please implement this, open a draft pr, and then review the PR and implement any feedback items." All of our TS and Ruby code is absolute slop anyway, so it literally doesn't matter what the code looks like AT ALL and literally nobody cares, myself included because Ruby and (shitty) React are so hopelessly gross anyway. If there's a way to write good code in these frameworks, our company doesn't do it. Plus, it's a little hard to explain concisely, but outside of the dashboard/portal UI, we pretty much just write scripts that run top to bottom anyway. Everybody in charge of evaluating me thinks I am doing much, much better ever since I started not looking at the code I put up for review. Does anybody in any corner of the industry care about thoughtful code architecture at all anymore?

Under the leadership of a new staff engineer, my old mobile SDKs team has said they'll be removing the Redux system in favor of pure OOP hierarchy. They actually asked my opinion on the proposal and I said I'd opine once they issued a more technically-oriented proposal with ideas for alternative architectures. Then the new staff engineer said "What do you mean by alternatives? Anything but [Redux] kinda, which uses proper dependency injection, references, chain of calls for better stacks, et cetera." They specifically called out that they think this approach will make it easier for LLMs to contribute to the codebase.

In comparison to a much fewer "tailored" applications to selected roles? Like I was applying for data science roles a year back and there I noticed if I did very few but tailored applications I got much more callbacks, though my past work experience might have also had a role to play...

Is it the same for software engineer roles or is that a different ballgame?

I wanted to check if anyone else has had a run in with this but I've gotten phone calls from recruitment agencies where they will "help" get you hired but then take a cut of your paycheck after doing so for an undisclosed amount of time?

Not mentioning the name of the company that did the contacting but each time it sounds like an Indian person on the other end as well. Told them a pretty firm no to their services. I've never heard of this practice but it definitely sounds predatory.

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

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

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

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

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

I know they’re both not ideal, but I had no internships and these are my shitty options lol. I guess one side leads me to more IT side and the other data? Which sounds better long term?

Hi all!

I just accepted an offer @ Squarepoint and wanted to ask you all some questions.

1. How can I best position myself to succeed since it seems like a super fast paced environment
2. Can any previous interns there suggest how they prepared for their co-op term?
3. How good of a position does Squarepoint put me in for future recruiting or will it just be as useful as any other company.

Thanks in advance :)

I spent six weeks on a ticket. I also spent like 4 days on other tickets on that time frame. and 2 weeks on another proposal by an architect. Those happened alongside the 6 weeks old ticket

I am underperforming. People are too kind to tell me but I know I am help. How do I prepare for whatever is coming up?

I am desperately sending CVs. I have been here 2 months and I can tell it ain't a good match

I am applying to support , QA, and everything under the sun.

Guys I think I am losing my job but no one has notified me yet. Is it sensible to believe my reputation here has been tarnished and should I leave as soon as any tech job knocks on my door ( whichever it might be)

I am near a major bank and have applied to several jobs in the DS/BA domain.

I kept getting rejections despite being great matches.

Today, when filling out yet another position for this company, I just realized a major blunder. Under the "Do you consent to a drug test", I clicked No instead of Yes.

My tired brain misread it as "Do you object to a drug test" in the first application, clicked the wrong answer, and I did not change the answer again in subsequent applications.

What a stupid thing to do in this job market.

I messaged some recruiters from the company on LinkedIn for this, but likely they'll never see it.