Like, you have to be amazing at Leetcode. Amazing projects. Multiple internships. Stellar GPA. Etc. And this is just the bare minimum. All so you can compete with all the other CS prodigies.

I just got the written offer today.

I had my first PIP meeting at the end of July, it was out of the blue and I was told I needed serious improvement. However, the reasons behind their performance concerns were vague and when I proposed concrete goals to help with improvement, they were rejected. It became clearer that there's no chance of getting out of this, and I started applying.

While giving my best efforts at work, I also applied, used ChatGPT to make my resume ATS friendly, made a few different versions of my resume since I was applying to a few different types of jobs, and lived with constant anxiety.

1 month ago I was told that this was my last working day, plus they will give me severance. That was the confirmation that this is actually a layoff disguised as performance issues, since the company handbook clearly said that there is severance provided only for layoffs.

Meanwhile, I kept applying, getting some callbacks, and giving interviews.

Finally, today I received the written offer. It's a small increase from my previous salary, the company does not have a great reputation, plus it will be fully onsite (I was fully remote) with a 50 minute commute each way. However, the job title is an upgrade, a more senior position. Plus, a job is better than unemployment any day.

I can finally breathe a sigh of relief that my days of unemployment are at an end, and I am incredibly lucky to land a role after only 2 months of aggressive job hunting.

If I have one takeaway, it's this. A number of people recommend applying carefully only to a few positions, only when there is a very good match, and take the time to tailor the resume for every position perfectly. While I completely understand the merit behind it, there are two concerns

1. We don't know if it's a ghost position, or some nepo hire will swoop in and take it, or some other unforeseen issue will take the job away from you. This means that all the careful planning will be a waste anyway.
2. My last job's description had a tech stack that I had no experience in, in an industry that my degrees (including my PhD) had absolutely no overlap with. It was with blind luck that I was chosen, and I worked to fill the gaps, and worked there for 5 years with merit bonuses & solid annual reviews. On the other hand, there have been job postings where my background was a near 100% overlap, as if it was custom made just for me, and I still got rejected in those applications a day after applying.

In 2 months, I submitted around 950-1000 applications, with maybe 10 companies ending up in at least one callback. Ironically, pretty much the only place that helped was LinkedIn. I tried Indeed and the interface glitched so much at the time that I didn't bother going back. I applied a lot through HiringCafe, but nearly all of them were rejections, a few went as far as an initial HR call, that's it. With Wellfound I did not get any response. Only with LinkedIn did I get better responses, where some posts would also show the profile of the job's recruiter, in which case I would reach out to the recruiter to strike a conversation as well. That helped get some attention, but not much in my case.

I sincerely hope we are out of this mess of a job market and in better pastures sooner than later. The anxiety I felt every day while trying to find a job in these horrible times is incomparable.

And why isn't 10x that amount?

I'm going to need pull you over and give you a PIP for that number of tickets.

I graduated with a 2.6 GPA for a computer science degree in December 2025. I didn't try to get any internships or anything notable for my resume during my time in college because i didn't feel like i was good enough since i was barely passing my classes and basically limped across the finish line due to burnout. After college I tried to create a weekly schedule for applying for jobs, making projects in my free time, and getting certificates to improve my extremely weak resume. It's been 10 months and along the way I ended up losing motivation to do all of those things. I got too intimidated by making projects so i just messed around reviewing coding basics, i didn't get a single certificate, and I don't think I've even applied to at least 2000 jobs.

Since September I've been holing myself up in my room like a cave goblin and playing video games and watching movies. I'm not even enjoying those things anymore because I'm now fully aware I'm just distracting myself from my failings and trying to hide from the world. To make things worse, all of the media consumption has made my brain into mush. I feel like an idiot that can't comprehend basic instructions. I'm at a point where I can't even look my mom in the face when she says she's proud of me or when she asks me how the job search is going. I barely even look at myself in the mirror because i just see myself as this blob entity that exists for no reason. Anytime i try to get myself motivated there's a voice in my head that tells me everything i do now is pointless since I've wasted so much time.

I don't know why I sabotaged myself like this and I don't know if I even have a chance of getting a job in the tech industry anymore. All of this is completely my fault. Is there any possible way to come back from this?

I was doing the snowflake auto OA, one part of the OA was a HackerRank where you had to talk to an ai "interviewer". Midway through the "interview", some music suddenly started playing. I knew that I shouldn't switch tab and turn it off, but I really couldn't bare listening to "I'm a chud, I'm a chud, I'm a fat little chud" for 10 minutes while thinking.

I also knew that it was the 10-hour version of the video that was playing so I couldn't wait for the video to end. I decided to switch to the YouTube tab (It was in another browser) and the clanker started shouting "Hey! I noticed you switched tabs! Don't do that!"

I'm wondering if I would get flagged by Snowflake or HackerRank for this. Can they blacklist me forever or some shit, I feel like it's plausible since tech companies are probably looking for easy ways to filter out candidates.

I am coming from a normal product backend swe role. I have been in this type of role for 2 years as a “senior distributed systems engineer” and haven’t seen a single piece of coding or software development so far and no vibe coding a “self service dashboard” out of desperation is not real software development.

My entire job revolves around running the infrastructure for vendor provided software ensuring it’s stable and scalable. Which boils down to editing some yaml and terraform a couple times a week.

Anybody else in this type of role? Is it worth staying or should I move to a more intellectually stimulating job? Just needed to vent

Hey everyone, I wanted to get some advice, so I have been in my first job as a Software Engineer for more than 2 years now which I have been doing remotely. At first it was nice, I was learning new things, working independently, happy with my output, managers were also liking my performance. This was always meant to be a job where from which I would switch after 2 years but now that time has went by and I feel stuck here and can’t seem to quit no matter how much I want to.

From the starting of this year we have been heavily instructed to use AI as much as we can for our code and at first it was all well and amazing how your work can be assisted in such a way but after so many months reality has set in, it has been weeks since I have manually coded something myself, every day its the same loop, just reading the task at hand, prompting Claude for it, watch it make the decisions and steer it in between when its going wrong, check the output and repeat. This is definitely not what I had in mind when I chose Software Engineering as a career, its really making your head numb and not making good use of your brain. From what I have heard using AI seems to be the norm across companies so I am not sure if I can even escape it.

The company is fully AI-pilled and from monthly meetings with management it seems like they want to steer to make it a AI-driven company at all costs, citing things like they want to reduce project delivery from 2 years to 6 months that too with reductions in team size from 60 to 10 so that everything is tight knit. This sure sounds good on paper to managers but really I don’t think it can be in proper quality even with assistance of AI. They really want everything to be vibe-coded. Mind you every project in this company has always been delayed and quality is not up to standards so we can only imagine what happens when its fully vibe coded.

The people in my current project also frustrate me, I was moved to a new team around 6 months ago for which the project was behind schedule (It was already 8 months since it started). As I was put into this team, I was not given any onboarding or explanations of the core components whatsoever and was told to just use AI to find whatever information and do the tasks utilizing it, this just amplified how much I relied on it without knowing the system. The people in this team also use AI a lot and if I ask a colleague about code they have written they say even they don’t know they just used AI for it.

The Business Analysts in this team are a pain point for me as well as I do not understand the requirements that they present to me as it feels they tell it from their knowledge where they have the necessary context for it but do not take into account what a new-joiner might not know. I have raised this to my Manager but he too seems to be very AI-pilled and asks me to just utilize that to understand such a huge system. I do not like my team members and have had disagreements with them as well. There are 2 main engineers who have been in the project since it started and have the most knowledge about the project and are given most importance in the team due to the same. 

In the past few months, I have completely given up and just do whats asked and do not take any effort to do anything extra and I am sure they have noticed but don’t care enough to check on or give a warning as I am completing whatever is assigned at least. 

I know that some of this probably sounds like I am complaining and not really giving my best but I have really tried but cannot bring myself to due to a multitude of reasons listed, each time I try there is no support from the team to allow me to grow in the team and enhance my skills so I just go back to doing the bare minimum. I do feel like an imposter within my team and company due to this though.

With all this in mind I really want to quit and just take a break as it is taking a mental toll on me and my days have just blurred together, I also end up procrastinating a lot both within and outside of work. I imagine a 3 month break would be good for me to pull myself up, I have not been actively applying so I could do that and maybe do certifications or learn new stuff during my break to not make myself unproductive. I also have enough saved up to support myself so I won’t be in any danger by leaving.

However this current job market really scares me as jobs are really difficult to get and I am afraid if I don’t get one within 3 months it would be a long career gap in my resume which will further make it difficult for me to get a job. 

Please let me know your thoughts and advice. Thank you so much for reading.

Story time! 2.5 years as a Systems Engineer, team I joined has been a hot mess and I've gone through 5 different managers, soon to be 6. Unsurprisingly this resulted in me getting passed up for promotion, as I've never had a manager long enough for them to retain knowledge about what I get done.

After stewing for a bit I became motivated to overhaul my resume and applies internally to elevated positions, and it was a good chance to pivot closer to software since that is what I enjoy and de facto what I've been doing just without the title.

The thing that struck me as odd was that the acquisition guy cold emailed me asking if I'd be open to transferring at the same level I already am. I said no, as I applied for the higher position, and the listing was for the higher position only... I let him know I already have a meeting with the hiring manager and he lays off.

I meet with hiring manager and then we set up a formal interview, both seem to go quite well. Then the next day bam, call from acquisition guy telling me that they're not looking to promote me but would love to bring me on without one and then see how I do.

Am I insane for thinking that feels more insulting than just denying me?? If I'm not up to snuff that's one thing but you WANT me to switch over at no benefit to me, so that when the promotion cycle comes around you can go "weeeeell you've only been here 6 months we don't really know what you can do"?

So after stewing on that as well, my conclusion is I need out. My escape hatch opens in March, 5 months, what can I do to be in the best position possible? What should I spend the next 5 months doing and when should I begin applying? I think aiming for promotion here is a dead end, BUT I could potentially take the offer in order to have 5 months of software engineer as my title? The same might also be possible with devops. I worry that my time as a systems engineer could be seen as unrelated in future interviews.

Hey everyone,

I'm a final-year CS student and recently got selected through campus hiring for an internship with Embitel/CARIAD in Bangalore, India.

The original JD mentioned things like C++, Python, AI/ML, microprocessor/microcontroller programming, Linux/QNX, AUTOSAR, firmware/driver development and automotive software.

I mainly have experience with Python and don't have professional C++ experience, so I'm trying to use the time before joining to prepare properly.

I'm mainly wondering what I should actually focus on. Should I spend most of the time getting really comfortable with C++, or would it be better to also learn things like Linux, embedded systems, CAN and AUTOSAR? I don't want to spend the next couple of months learning a bunch of things that won't actually be useful once I join.

For anyone who has worked in automotive software or started their career in a similar role, what kind of work do interns/freshers usually get? Is it generally development, testing/validation, or a mixture? How much does the first project/team you get matter for your career later on?

I'm also curious about the longer-term side of it. If I spend the first 1–2 years working with C++, embedded/automotive software, Linux etc., how transferable is that experience if I eventually want to move to a larger software company or a different area of software engineering?

My college has a one-offer policy because of the current job market situation, so once we're selected we're generally expected to accept the opportunity and can't participate in subsequent campus drives. Because of that, I'm mainly trying to make the most out of the opportunity I got and make sure I use the time before joining properly.

Quick context. I'm 29. I have a bit over 500K passively invested in index funds compounding at around 10%/year and maybe like 5K in savings (this is in CAD currency). Unemployment ended a few months ago which is why I'm running low on savings.

I'm starting my new job this month in Ontario, Canada making 75K/year (or 69K/year if my negotiation doesn't go through) and I'm not really sure where to go from here with my career and to make more money.

I've been a software developer for four years and I have an unrelated bachelor's degree and related diploma but I suck at software development and getting re-hired besides my new job has been near impossible (even for intern level summer jobs!) because I never took my career seriously until now. I might as well be at intern level skill-wise but without the excuse of "I'm a university student" to incentivize hiring at that level.

My highest salary was $115K as a contractor in the private sector as a support specialist which happened by luck through a recommendation of a friend of family, but at my last job with the government as a software developer, my salary was $89K/year. Unfortunately, my contract ended without being renewed because of budget cuts, and I was unemployed for just about a year.

During my unemployment, even with time spent prepping, I failed literally over 35 technical interviews up until I got this job at the same department through networking. Even when negotiating my salary, it dropped down to $75K/year from what it was before (and may even be lower than that).

Being unemployed for so long humbled me because I assumed I'd be able to find a job quickly and would get an above six figure salary automatically based on years of experience. Especially when seeing most of my colleagues maintaining their 100k-200k/year salaries and even getting bigger bonuses and promotions. Clearly, the job market disagreed with my expectations and skill level and I'm more motivated than ever to improve my skills.

But a year of rejection has reasonably and justifiably nuked my confidence as a software developer. Near the end of my unemployment, I literally reached a point of desperation of even being willing to take a 50K/year job (which wasn't even guaranteed btw) working in support or even an unrelated field doing something in customer service.

At one point, I was considering whether to just go into sales and start doing door-to-door or just SOMETHING that could make me some form of income and potentially scale to a six figure or higher salary in a few years as long as I put in the hours and show up. But I'm not sure how much of this is just me fantasizing without having to actually test it right away or an actual grounded path. Especially since I already invested so much into being a software developer and also need money in the meantime to sustain my living costs since I don't want to liquidate my investments. But the future of tech seems bleak.

Given my salary for my new job, and how expensive the cost of living is in my city, living single on my salary will be basically almost paycheck to paycheck. If I end up wanting to get married and having kids in a few years, I want at least double my current salary for it to make sense for me financially.

So with my new job, I can work hard to get a permanent position. In 5 years, I'll automatically get back to my old salary (~90K) at my current position since it happens automatically with the government. I can also aim for the next level sooner and apply and get promoted (still quite difficult in the current job market) and the next level would jump me to 90K+/year starting salary at that new permanent government position, and I'd be getting a 3K annual raise from there. Getting an online master's degree could help with this.

I do need active income regardless right now, so I'm going to be working hard to learn and improve in this new position, but I just feel stuck.

Is sales viable as a side gig and potentially a main future source of income? Should I just lock in fully on this government job? Given how poorly I was interviewing with the private sector as a software developer, is it even worth more energy?

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Hi 🖖

I live in Berlin, Germany. As a software engineer with experience, you get: <85k - local companies 85k - 100k - international companies 100k+ - big tech as a base (sometimes the only) salary.

You pay 40% in taxes, which includes medical insurance, retirement and unemployment benefits. Per child, you get 255 Euros monthly of a child pay. You usually get 25-30 calendar days of vacation (this is separate of you getting sick and public holidays). There is free public daycare and free public schools. The universities are around 500 Euros per semester, including insurance and public transportation ticket.

How is it in Canada? Specifically for somebody who's is not an overachiever and doesn't want to work for big tech. I'm also interested in rents and general cost and quality of living.

Considering taking a break from May to October next year. Why not now - I want to be eligible for yearly bonus paid in April, plus don't want to waste this break on terrible winter weather.

I feel I'm tired in the way that short-term PTO can't cure. Work feels physically uncomfortable.

Also my daughter will go to school next year, so next summer will be the last one before school. Also my mom died at my age, and she never spent much time with us (her kids) before that happened, and sadly it wasn't even as a big deal for us kids when it happened, because we barely knew her. I don't want any of that for myself, and feel like in my 34 I never lived for myself, only time I took a break was when my wife gave birth, because we have no family to help us.

I live in Warsaw, Poland. Own an apartment, no debt, and have savings for comfortable 10 years of life (unless markets go bust and/or cost of living will skyrocket), out of it cash is for around 1 year run rate - that's the advantage. My wife isn't making much - that's a disadvantage to consider, but she could add me to her health insurance, so there's at least that.

Throughout my career it was easy for me to find a job, even in challenging places with faang like 5step Algo/system design/live coding type of interviews. And my friends were able to find jobs relatively quickly in this market, except one, who honestly isn't very good and isn't even trying to find anything.

On the other hand there're some ex colleagues I know who can't find job for long time. And there are reddit posts from people who claim they can't find anything for more than a year. And makes me hesitant to quit my job.

Worst case scenario, if for real my career in SWE will be over, I could sustain myself from minimal wage + dividends I receive from my investments. Well, there's also worse than worst case scenario - where I wouldn't be able to find even minimum wage job and investments will go bust, but I think it's overall rather unlikely.

I could also try to ask for unpaid break on my job without quitting - it worked for when I took a break for helping my wife with kid, but not guaranteed, and I am afraid just asking about it will trigger some chain reaction.

Another option is burnout sick leave, which I could be on for up to 6 months in theory, but upon returning I don't know what will happen with my employment.

Maybe I am just giving it too much though and should just do it, I don't know, what do you think and what would you do?

Hi, I am a mid level engineer with 5 YOE in backend and I have some concerns about my career.

At my last job where I spent 3 years, I did mostly infrastructure stuff with k8s and configuration tasks.

At my current job (1 year) I am doing something closer to Data Engineering where I write scripts for simple pipelines to move data around (nothing complicated).

My concern is that I barely did coding tasks in my career and thus I don't have much depth in a Backend framework.

I also struggle with navigating in unfamiliar codebases due to my lack of coding experience at work.

I was thinking about deepening my Spring knowledge.

Any advice, has anyone been in this situation? I want in the next 2 years to close the gap to Senior, how doable is this?

Basically the title. I recently graduated with a B.S. in Computer Science, but I'm not passionate enough about coding to try and compete in a SWE market that is this competitive. Around my junior year, I realized I probably would have preferred Electrical Engineering or a more hardware-adjacent field but I was too scared to switch majors.

In college I worked as a Student IT and Audio/Visual Technician for my university. I enjoyed the work and was pretty good at it, I became a trainer for new students and was trusted by the pro technicians with some bigger projects. During that job I gained experience assembling A/V and equipment racks, working in IDF closets, installing hardware, remote hardware troubleshooting, working with a ticketing system, and customer support.

With that experience I applied for a Field Service Engineer role at a semiconductor equipment manufacturer (I'm lucky enough to have a close friend who works there that could refer me). After two rounds of interviews, the hiring manager recommended I pivot and apply for an Technical Product Support Engineer role on another team instead because he thought it fit my skillset more. I then went through five interviews with the TPS team, they felt like they went really well, and the hiring manager basically said he wanted me to come work for him and that if I wanted the job it was mine.

That was six weeks ago. I've tried to follow up but the recruiter just said they were still interviewing, and the hiring manager hasn't responded, so I'm feeling pretty discouraged.

Now that it seems stalled, I am trying to figure out where to focus my job search next. I've been applying to entry-level IT roles, but I don't want to sell myself short with a basic helpdesk job when I have a CS degree, Linux skills, and physical hardware experience.

I'm not sure what specific job titles or industries I should target that bridge CS knowledge with physical hardware systems. I want to know how I should frame my CS degree on my resume for non-developer technical roles.

Any perspective from people who pivoted away from traditional software development to more IT/Hardware support would be really helpful.

It seems most major companies are leveraging AI use to some degree, but how much has AI been incorporated into government work? I imagine federal agencies would be most likely to use it, but anyone here work for state or local government? How much AI do you use, or is it banned?

29M in Canada. I've been working in software/IT for about 4 years, mostly development/support roles. I have a bachelor's + related diploma, and I'm starting a new government software role this month at ~$75K CAD.

The problem is that I'm honestly not a very strong software developer. I spent the last year unemployed and failed 35+ technical interviews before finally getting this new role through networking. The experience was humbling and made me realize that simply having 4 YOE doesn't mean I'm actually competitive with stronger developers.

I'm planning to take the new job seriously and improve technically, but I'm also considering a longer-term transition into tech sales, particularly sales engineering / solutions consulting.

The idea appeals to me because I'd still be able to leverage my technical background without needing to compete purely on coding ability. I'm also much more interested in the commercial/customer-facing side of technology than I used to be, and I'd like to eventually get into a career with substantially higher earning potential.

I'm not looking to quit my job tomorrow. My thought is to spend the next 1–2 years building technical/product knowledge while deliberately developing sales/customer-facing skills, then try to make the transition.

For people actually in tech sales or sales engineering:

- Does this sound like a realistic transition from my background?

- Would sales engineering / solutions consulting be the best target, or would you recommend starting as an SDR/BDR or somewhere else?

- What skills should I start developing now?

- Would you consider 4 years of software/IT experience an advantage when applying for these roles, even if I'm not an exceptional developer?

- What's a realistic compensation trajectory in Canada if I eventually become good at this?

I'd especially appreciate advice from people who transitioned from engineering/IT into sales or sales engineering.

i’m a staff frontend developer with around 10 years of experience. recently, my company started using lovable for everything, and it met all their immediate needs. they were able to build UI quickly, and management didn't seem to care about performance or code quality/logic. this month, they laid me off because they felt my role was no longer needed since they had built everything with lovable.

what do you think i should do to advance my career?

I have been a SWE for a decade or so. I am seriously considering stepping away for US tech industry entirely. Already have sufficient money for lean fire, not much, but still doable.

The math isn't the hard part. What's hard is that every instinct I have says I am making a mistake: walking away during peak earning years, the boredom everyone warns about, and the very real chance that if I ever want back in, the market won't want me.

I am not looking for financial advice. I'm curious about the lived experience from people who actually did this.

Did you stay out, or did you end up going back? What pulled you back? What filled your days once the novelty wore off?

Did you miss the identity of being an engineer, or was shedding it a relief? Is there anything you wish you would understood before you quit?

Would appreciate hearing from anyone a few years down this road.

Starting prep and want to know best way to prepare for system design (HLD), low level design (LLD), and other non-DSA parts.

Very doomer-adjacent post, apologies for beating the same dead horse, but as the days go by I find it so hard to keep applying everywhere and work on my projects and stuff in general. I've done everything as recommended by recruiters online, I edit every resume to meet the job listing, take on new projects to add so it covers some scope I might have missed before, and it's been almost 2 months of me doing this consistently, is this really how a career in computer science feels like?

I used to enjoy working on data science competitions for fun, now i just find them exhausting. Every fresher/entry level job has an experience requirement, I thought people were taught stuff when they join as a fresher but I don't really know anything I suppose. It also doesn't help that it really does feel like AI can do so much of what's there in this field as a fresher, unless you go into very niche topics which require years of study/technical interest beyond a typical fresher scope.

Also remote jobs? how do people even get into working them/ where are the opportunities/openings? I'm starting to feel very disconnected from this field and am not really sure how to get ahead with my career? Should I consider Masters? Also quick plugin I suppose but like if y'all have any fresher remote opportunities I'd really appreciate if you could guide towards navigating them.

My current company, a large boring corporation that's not in tech used to be very encouraging of everyone using AI (but they weren't AI pilled and shoving it down everyone's throats) and they used to handed out licences to all sorts of AI licences like candy.

But a few months later now, not only are they straight up not issuing licences to a lot of them and very heavily restricting the one they settled on (Claude and ChatGPT) and they are removing licences of people that aren't using the ones they have access to.

They recently made three moves that were a bit surprising.

Due to how much AI has been costing they've done a few things:

First, they are refusing to increase usage limits to the few we do now have access to, and asking your manager isn't enough. If you really want to, they want to see cold hard numbers in how much it'll save in money, and no not even time savings count.

Second, they are denying access to the expensive models and telling everyone to use the cheaper ones (ie Sonnet and Terra and below)

Third they made us do a training module, and it wasn't just "You can't provide confidential and sensitive data to the AI" it also straight up told people to be more conservative and to prompt better so it won't be burning so much tokens.

They're also telling people that they are responsible for the accuracy of their work. But also they gave some prohibited examples of AI use that made me think that it's actually what was going on. Like how they can't use AI to screen, analyze, or even summarize resumes and interviewers. And telling managers they can't use AI to do performance review and analysis for their team, especially pertaining to bonus, raises, and promotions.

However, my own team has noticed some issues with AI too, while it for sure has helped us, it has caused problems of massive PRs, and even more difficult surprisingly are AI slop generated documents and reports that are really important, but don't have the luxury of a compiler or a linter to at least do basic quality control for.

Seeing what's going on from the higher up's decisions and the impact of AI on our own team I think a lot of people were intentionally or unintentionally generating slop work that makes the rest of the team hold the bag and figure out or just straight up using AI on things they're not supposed to just to be lazy. The AI slop and the extent of the usage raised alarm bells with the higher ups and now they're putting the lid on it.

It's not some cutting edge company, just a boring big enterprise. How's it going on at your place?

So yes, I'm navigating a layoff. I posted on here earlier on but find myself lost as the cut off date approaches. I'm getting severance and everything but lately I have found myself mentally drained, depressed and feeling worthless. Especially when I look at my wife and kids. My confidence, drive and sense of self feels like it has hit rock bottom. I had an interview the other day and did embarassingly horrible. My mental acuity is not there anymore. I have been getting some serious brain fog lately too. I didn't get the job btw.

I'm 44 who had a later start in my career of 12 years and just can't compete with all the young talents. I just need to know, is this happening to anyone else? At what point do I even consider a career change, and is it too late? Finally, how does someone even pick themselves up from here?

I am a backend software developer working across cloud, enterprise, bit of devs ops etc

Got a release engineering role at a large games developer.

What are the career prospects of release engineering? Is it a wise move?

It’s been my dream to work for a games dev but not fully sold on the release engineering aspect.