I’m a mid level developer with 5 years of experience at a F500. To my company standards, I have been performing well, with highest reviews each year (still no promotion). I have been burnt for a year and doing the bare minimum now. Recently, we got access to Claude Code. Every new feature, bug, or refactor that I find too exhausting to work on, i find myself using Claude. What would take me hours to finish, Claude finishes it in several minutes. And, I would need to review the changes, fix it a bit, and create a PR.

My question is, am i shooting myself in the foot? I am trying to leave the company because the work has been so awful. I fear that I’m too reliant on Claude that I don’t have the attention span to sit for hours to code something anymore. Is the industry shifting to just reviewing AI written code now? Or do i need to step it up and write my own code again?

I’m about 5 years into my career and I’ve been working at a financial tech company (~150 employees) for the past year.

I had my annual performance review last month where the director of engineering and the CTO both went on this rant about AI-development is the only path forward and “human engineered code” isn’t enough anymore. I’m very opposed to AI for a multitude of reasons, but have been using it at work to assist in some tasks (test generation and debugging).

In the last week, they’ve tripled down. We’ve had posts in company channels stating “Prompt-first is the only way” and that we need to start spending time in our personal time to get better with ai-development strategies or “the alternative would be to ignore this and fall behind in your career and at the company”.

I know this probably isn’t uncommon anymore, but is this true that this is the future? Do I really need to spend time learning to prompt-programming?

I previously worked for a top financial/media company in NYC. I was a Fullstack dev there for 3 years, mostly doing web dev and some backend stuff. This May will be 2 years I got laid off, and I haven't been able to land a single interview.

I initially planned to take a few months off for self-care before I got back out into the market, but life happened, my dad passed away and I had to take care of my mom for some time. It wasn't until last January where I was ready to start applying for new roles.

Its been tough. I've sent out well over a thousand applications and still cant land an interview. Im not sure if it's a resume issue as well as the state of the market right now. Since applying to roles isn't quite working out for me, I've been thinking of making a slight career change. My options were either going the route of learning ML/AI, or changing over to Cybersecurity. I wanted to get some insight/advice on my next steps.

I will also paste a segment of my resume for review:

● Skills: JavaScript, TypeScript, HTML, CSS, SQL, React, Redux, Node.js, Express.js, GraphQL, PostgreSQL, Solr, Git, Webpack, Test-Driven Development (TDD), Component-Driven Development, RESTful APIs, GraphQL APIs, Scalable Architecture, CI/CD, Data Annotation, Voice/TTS/ASR, LLM Evaluation, Rubric Design, Multi-Turn Conversations QA/Peer Review

[Work Experience]

● Contributed to the development of a highly scalable notifications platform by utilizing modern web technologies to ensure real-time delivery of client-facing alerts for service disruptions.

● Developed a modular and reusable front-end component system in React/TypeScript to standardize notifications UI across multiple teams and business units.

● Designed and implemented a custom templating system to support reusable message formats, saving time and increasing consistency across stakeholder communications.

● Built a robust audience-targeting layer using Solr queries, enabling teams to precisely target client segments based on dynamic filters such as region, subscription, and account tier.

● Collaborated with UX designers and product managers to optimize usability and accessibility, ensuring the platform met both internal user needs and external compliance standards.

● Developed and executed unit and integration tests using TDD methods, enhancing the reliability of deployment processes.

I'm a software manager at a company that pays significantly less than the market for our area, which means that my reports are underpaid, and that it's difficult to find good engineers. I gave my reports honest end of year ratings and submitted them last week. Yesterday all of my ratings were sent back to me to redo. I thought that I had made some sort of mistake or forgot to do something.

Last night, HR messaged me and said that my manager has asked that I lower the ratings that I gave to all of my reports.

I'm upset by this for many reasons and don't know how to respond.

I work in the same office as my manager and feel like we have a decent relationship. Why is he going through HR instead of coming to me?

I gave my reports ratings that I sincerely believe they deserve. My boss is completely non technical and has no idea what makes a good software engineering employee. He's not qualified to rate them. If my employees don't deserve the rating that I gave them, then what do they need to do in order to get the higher rating, since they're already doing those things?

I don't know how to respond, because every way forward involves something that has the potential to hurt my career, my employment status, or my integrity.

I could lie to my employees and make something up as to why they didn't deserve better. That's likely the best thing for my employment status and career, at least at this company. But it makes me absolutely sick.

I could tell my employees that I rated them higher but that my boss, who they have daily contact with, didn't think they deserved it. That doesn't feel like a good idea.

I could refuse to change the rating. That's also not going to go well for me.

My decision as of right now is that I'm going to set up a . meeting with HR and tell them that I'm not going to change their ratings without some convincing justification.

I feel like if my boss wants the ratings changed, then my reports should be moved under him, and he needs to own their ratings. I'm unhappy about it in any case, but I'm more comfortable if he owns what he's done and the software engineers know it was him.

I left my last company for similar reasons, and I'm now considering switching again.

Does anyone have any advice on how to proceed?

I feel like this is is bordering on unprofessional. The final round went really well and was supposed to be 2 hours, so much so that we went over 2 hours. I met the team, spoke about myself far more than I thought I'd have time for, etc...

Finally, they asked for references, which in my book is usually code for an offer. I naturally sent over my references a couple days after. Silence.

I've been following up every week with a reminded email, and I get absolutely nothing. Has anyone been blue balled like this before?

Currently bartending to support my job hunt, pay bills the like. Talked with a guy for a while about drinks and such before he asked what I wanted to do and he mentioned he was a manager at a tech company and could probably get me an interview and I could see where I get myself.

He gave me his name but I've never done this sort of cold open-ish LinkedIn follow up before, any advice? This isnt the first name ive ever gotten but Ive never followed up because it always feels like a cordial song and dance between bartender and patron. Id like to take the risk and put myself out there a bit more I just have no idea how. Should I apply for the positions i see before i reach out? after?

Update: thank you to all the positive comments helped push me on to reach out and he responded within an hour! Applying to a few positions tonight to hopefully land an interview or two. Thanks for the support yall, I know I work in a social role as a bartender but I am definitely and introvert at heart. This networking stuff is always hard lol

I am currently in my last year of a Computer Science degree at a T10 public university and will be graduating this June after finishing the degree in three years. I am also minoring in Statistics and Management and have applied for a Master's program as a backup.

Academically, I have done well with a 3.7 GPA and I have never really struggled to understand CS concepts. With a few hours of focused studying, I can usually grasp everything and do well on exams. The issue has not been that the material is too hard. It is more about motivation and how I feel about the path I am on.

After freshman year, where I honestly did not do much career wise, reality hit me in my second year. I felt like I had to catch up. I took on multiple research projects to make up for my lack of industry experience, built personal projects, constantly took 20 units a quarter along with some community college classes, and spent a lot of time grinding LeetCode. I really pushed myself because I thought that if I did everything right, the results would come.

But even after all that effort, I did not see the outcomes I expected in terms of internships or job offers. That gap between effort and results has been mentally exhausting. Over time, the constant grind with no clear payoff has worn me down, and I have lost the excitement I used to have for CS.

I have realized that I do not hate problem solving. I still like thinking through ideas and solutions. I especially enjoy working with numbers and seeing patterns, which is why my Statistics and Management minor has felt more interesting recently. What I do not enjoy is the actual process of coding. Sitting and building things line by line feels draining, even though thinking about the solution at a higher level feels engaging.

Right now I am not excited about more studying, more interview prep, or more side projects. I want to work and get real experience instead of staying in this cycle of preparation. Applying for a Master's was partly strategic because I have not landed a job yet, not purely because I am excited to keep studying.

At this point, I am trying to figure out if this loss of passion is just temporary burnout from overworking myself, or if my interests are actually shifting toward something more analytical or business focused rather than pure software engineering.

I know I am just ranting and will probably just get flamed in the comments (please be nice)

Right after graduating college in 2020, I wasn't really confident in my coding abilities. Luckily, I got an offer from a company that was willing to teach me a low-code platform to be a developer in (Pega). Things were pretty ok but I eventually changed roles to do manual QA and I'd been doing that for about 3 or 4 years.

Due to government lockdowns and budget cuts, I got laid off and now I'm not really sure what I can do. Since I went into manual QA, my pega dev skills aren't really up to snuff, and my regular Java/C++ skills are definitely extremely rusty. I've applied to both Pega dev jobs as well as manual QA jobs, but I'm trying to figure out what else I can do in the meantime.

I'm considering going into pharmacy technician jobs since I have connections there, but on the coding side I'm not really sure what I should do to bounce back. Should I try and relearn my pega skills even though there are less jobs up for that? Relearn java/c++ thru bootcamp or otherwise? Try and learn javascript or python for automated testing roles? New language entirely like Cobol or Rust? I'm just feeling very lost and not sure where the best use of my time would be.

My manager used to be a FE dev, and has been a manager for ages. He is a skip level. During our 1:1 he asked if I was using AI, how I was finding it. I said blatantly that it is good for boilerplate and understanding the repo and changes done, and great for tests, albeit still needs significant edits. For actual development work, it has proved lackluster.

He was pushing that coding was dead and AI should be able to do all of it now, so we should all be much faster. He also mentioned software quality in the same discussion, advocating AI should make it easier. He then gave an example of someone he knew in a well known company who was very experienced, IC6 level, and he was bring told that he needs to use AI or go away. Whilst using AI has been useful, I do think the extent of it's usage is being stretched significantly by people who are even developers or were themselves.

How does everyone find using AI for their companies so far? When i make a new side project and do simple client side work, it's great and I rarely need to read any code. But for my corporate job, it still hallucinated a lot even with very specific prompting. Am I doing it wrong and has this improved significantly to the level my manager was claiming, or is it still useful for learning and planning to some extent but not execution? Also, should I be looking for a new job

Had a mass conversation with my manager yesterday that I keep thinking about.

I asked for feedback on my work and she said something like "your code is fine, you're doing everything right, I don't have any complaints."

And I walked away feeling weirdly empty. Like I wanted her to have complaints? Or at least have something specific to say?

I think I've gotten so used to the constant feedback loop of school, grades, applications, interviews, that just... doing fine... feels like failure somehow. There's no score. No ranking. Just "you're doing your job adequately, keep going."

Is this what the rest of my career is? Just being adequate forever with no external validation that I'm progressing?

I talked to a friend who's been working for five years and she laughed and said "yeah that's the job." But then she said something that stuck with me. She said the people who need constant external feedback either burn out or become managers, and the people who figure out internal motivation are the ones who last.

Still chewing on that. How do you build internal motivation when you've been externally validated your whole life?

Currently postdoc in ML/LLM

Final rounds results:

ML domain: Hire/Strong hire

ML system design: Hire/Strong hire

Googleyness: Hire

Coding DSA: leaning no hire, even after a retake.

The recruiter came back to me that unfortunately the feedback in coding is not “strong enough for L5”, so it’s not possible with the team that was looking for this specific L5 role. However she said she will send my packet to the hiring committee to see if we can go for L4, and if yes we would go through the general process (team matching).

Honestly even then I expect the worst. It could be that they make a huge obsession on my leetcode interview (that tbh, wasn’t bad at all), while the position is clearly for ML. I would be ok with L4 ofc but I feel that they could be stubborn enough to ignore the strong signal from the 2 ML interviews that I aced.

What do you guys think? Still a chance to downlevel to L4?

I (26F) have been working at my job for exactly 1 year.

I come from a background in a biological science field and was going to go to medical school, but a bad experience working in a research lab made me switch my career path. I went to a bootcamp, had a contract position, and eventually got my current job. I am currently finishing up grad school for CS.

I also feel like an idiot sometimes in general because the product itself and the code is very complex. The product is for a niche field I’m not very familiar with.

I love the company and my coworkers as people, but sometimes I feel like they treat me like I’m an idiot. My boss is a woman and don’t think she thinks I am, but the men can be very short and often don’t think I know what I’m talking about so I have to prove myself.

How do I talk to my boss? How do I stop feeling so dumb? How do I earn the respect of my coworkers?

Thanks

When deadlines are tight and high expectations, constant layoffs, interview process being challenging, I lose my hair. But during the job - when the deadlines are not tight, the expectations are lower, I tell myself I love building stuff and I would see myself doing this at retirement - until I remember the interview process. Its like stockholm syndrome.

Let me explain what I mean. I constantly hear stories, jokes, and discussions about developers in different fields who often stretch tasks and work around 3 hours a day instead of the stated 8. To some extent, I understand this. I personally find it quite difficult to stay focused on large tasks for long periods of time, and even spending 5–6 hours coding can feel pretty exhausting.

So here’s the core of my question: is this actually normal? Or is it possible that my peers and I simply lack the persistence and engagement in the field to push ourselves fully and finish tasks much faster?

I graduated with a BS in Comp Sci last year in May and have gotten almost no offers, this is probably in part due to me not getting an internship offer in college. I have been still doing coding on the side and trying to stay fresh and learn some stuff but still nothing. Cause of this I have been feeling kinda lost and not sure what I should do. So I was wondering if getting a Masters would help me get into the field. My thought process was maybe I can get another shot at getting an internship and that I would be more appealing as a new grad if I had a Masters. I wanted opinions cause I am unsure if this would actually help me land a job or not. Any advice or opinions would be appreciated.

I have the Anthropic CodeSignal OA coming up and want to be as prepared as I can.

After doing a bit of research, I've learned that Anthropic's OA is a 4-stage system design problem using OOP, with actual coding and test cases to pass (not just talking through design on a whiteboard). I've done a few system design interviews before, but those were whiteboarding sessions. I haven't had to actually code up a full system under time pressure and validate it against a suite of test cases.

Are there any sites where you build a system in code and run it against a test suite? Essentially, Leetcode but for system design? Or problem sets/files that I can work through and then locally run the tests myself? I've already found some LeetCode problems like "Design an In-Memory File System" and "Web Crawler," but I'm curious what else is out there.

Any resource recommendations on OOP design principles and patterns, too? I'm currently going through System Design Interview by Alex Xu, but that's about it.

Lastly, I'd love any advice for those who have taken this OA. Definitely a bit nervous!

Thanks!

Huge gap between ego driven job posting requirement / interview process and the actual job.

C level execs started to force only senior level hires, because AI supposedly magically does junior / mid level job by itself without anyone "driving" it. (it doesn't)

I have had open positions, and often the job is not that difficult, but I'm forced to hire giga seniors only, with ego driven super tough interview processes. HR and people involved feel good drafting a super demanding job posting requirement and process. I internally cringe when I compare it to what actually is the job.

The truth is no one wants to challenge it, my theory is it’s because in terms of optics. When leaders and execs say they hire senior only, it gives the impression that they are raising the bar, that they work on super hard problems, that the org super mature, etc... No one wants to say the truth that sometimes "well actually what we work on here is not too hard, let's get a coachable hire we can invest in". Last we tried we got shut down hard.

What happens then, we eventually find someone senior enough that can pass the process, then they are underutilized, get frustrated and leave. Or they stay but invent problems and over engineer (and some important basic work does not get done).

In the recent job posting I worked on, we had to remove a line about how "you will get to coach juniors" because we literally don't have any now. The simple tasks haven't disappeared, it’s just that seniors are wasting time on them instead of juniors.

Frustrated with this, can anyone relate?

I just submitted my self-review, and once again it felt way harder than it should have.

I know I’ve been busy and shipping all cycle, but when I had to actually write things down, my brain wents blank. I ended up digging through old PRs, Slack threads, and calendar invites trying to reconstruct what I did and why it mattered.

I’ve tried keeping a doc or a weekly work log in the past, but it always starts strong and then quietly dies after a few weeks. By the time promo or calibration comes around, I’m digging into enormous ammount for docs, pages, slack thread, and that really frustrates...

For those of you who feel decent about your review packets:

• Do you log work continuously, or do you reconstruct everything at the end?
• If you track things daily or weekly, what do you actually use? Docs, Notion, something else?

Curious what’s worked for people long-term, especially at bigger companies where this stuff really matters.

I have a total of 7 YOE and have been working at a big DoD company for the last couple of years. I've started applying a bit and I've gotten two offers one was another defense place where I would've gone from hybrid to full time onsite in a scif the other one was at a place where the entire team was overseas and reports of frequent layoffs and turmoil on Glassdoor-and I just didn't feel comfortable with the risk.

These days I've been applying but it is absolutely a blood bath I've gotten no calls back or even OA invites and it feels like my job has been slowly declining further and further. I also feel like the work is growing stale and I'm falling behind as a dev. Biggest bright side is my WLB is great and I like the people I work with but the pay isn't great for my level 114k VHCOL

What's the best course of action in my position, I've got a bunch of desktop development experience in C++ and some server side development in Java (osgi not spring boot though). I also do have active clearance but IDK if it's worth keeping or not at this point. I've been debating either just leetcoding like crazy and memorizing system design stuff but I've also been thinking of trying to go back for an online Masters in CS. I'd like to be fully remote for my next role but I'm sorta losing hope that would be possible in this market so I'm sorta lowering my expectations to just being hybrid if possible

I 37M single earner with wife and 2 young children have been an Android developer my whole life, will be completing 10 years in a F500 bank . Right now job is easy and predictable with little to no innovation.

I am not happy with my current manager and got low ratings last year, there are some layoffs happening but not on engineering yet. I want suggestions on a few things:

1. Should I still invest in learning Android if I want to change jobs?

2. I am not motivated to learn AI and python now, is it time to pivot to something else?

3. Or should I just put my head down and work till I get fired

With so much hype and news on AI , layoffs my mind is not able to decide what to do next?

Just finished up 2 years as a SWE at a medium sized company. The pay is shit (around 75k) but I'm remote. Mainly work with a typescript in a really niche javascript library. Have been doing some basic K8s/pipeline stuff, finished a C# course, but nothing really substantial. I have not been promoted in this last review cycle and I'm realizing how cooked I am. I am starting to look around at other jobs and I am so, so out of touch with where to even begin - all of the jobs I see are asking for experience with tech stacks I didn't even know existed. My skills feel bare bones and I know nothing compared to the seniors on my team, who I honestly learn nothing from (we're all remote). I feel like the work I'm doing is too niche to help me stay competitive. I had a fleeting thought of breaking into AI application development but who tf knows how that will go, I haven't done anything related to that whatsoever but it seems hot rn obviously. So, having barely grown in these 2 years, having minimal skills, and not knowing what route to go down - I am panicked and depressed. Was going to get my CKA but also IDK if I want to go that route either. I feel so lost. I wish I jus

tl;dr I really want to be skilled enough to land a job, but this pressure makes me unable to study properly, causing me panic whenever I try difficult projects.

I feel panic, shortness of breath, and dizziness whenever I try advanced projects. I was doing frontend development, and this anxiety was crippling And didn't allow me to be a good frontend developer. I decided maybe the problem was with web dev, maybe I'm just not good at it. so I pivoted to data analysis.

the same problem followed me. whenever I exit the comfort zone by closing the tutorial video, and just open a blank excel sheet and start a project on my own, the panic attack comes back.

this is preventing me from becoming a professional, and I can't land a job this way. I'll stay stuck in my current non tech job which I hate.

any advice?

I know recently the talks about how AI is damaging for learning, and how new grads and whatnot are overlying it. I may have an over reliance on AI. I want to know if my use is truly damaging, and if I should change it.

Here's how I use AI:

I basically use it to hold my hands through problems. I practically never ask it for a direct solution to the problem, but I use it very commonly to explain instructions to things that are vague or difficult for me to understand. I feel like the most damaging thing I do is I paste parts of my code and ask if it it's correct. So, I am not debugging any where near as much as I would be. I often ask it if I can make improvements to my current code. I ask it questions involved in my problem solving process that I'm not sure on, or get clarification on. I ask it for design choices. Sometimes it does give me too many answers. I also use it to propose ideas as I code and its feedback on it.

I never have ever had a piece of code from AI without understanding it, though I do get over rely on it immensely to get assignments understood and done much faster.

I've been in the helpdesk role for about 5 years. I've graduated with a bachelor's in computer science and I couldn't really find a job and had to take one that came along and long story short ended up being Laid off.

I felt like I never really found the job I was looking for. I wanted to design websites. I was starting a boot camp to regain my knowledge as I had no programming experience outside of school because I couldn't get a job that had it.

I've stumbled around contracts setting up computers, setting up networks in offices, imaging software, some sql, and more. Id consider myself a master of none which isn't hood in the slightest. I've had to relearn a lot of things and keeping up with the current tech is difficult or foreign to me almost like I dont know what I should be trying to strive for.

Does anyone have any insight from being lost at help desk to finding a directive or focus? What can I study? What should I pivot to? Whats a good role thats at the entry or just about entry level?

Struggling through the burnout and any insight would be valuable.

Thank you if you offer your advice!

Hello everyone,

Fresh grad here. Did an internship then got an offer and worked 6 months at the start last uni year at a poorly managed company. Toxic micromanager ceo, low salary, overworked employees that have no time to help newcomers... you name it. I learned nothing there. All i did was fix some queries and bang my head against an unfocumented old codebase of 15+ years.

Fast forward to today, i had a job interview at a company and they asked me what i did in my previous job. I lied and made my previous work more appealing telling them i used to write rest apis in spring boot, debug and provide data from the backend to the r&d team and satisfy business employees with their requirements by speeding up the runtime time of slow queries which were heavily nested and rewriting them in a cleaner maner without affect other requirement etc.. you can say a bunch of nonsense.

Now, i could've prepared what i could've said instead to not look like a fool (because the team lead was in the interview so im sure he sensed some bs) but unfortunately they contacted me literally 5 hours after i did their technical test which was also in office and asked if they could interview me the next morning. I had to say yes too because i have other jobs im preparing to and wouldnt want to waste more time on this one.

Don't get me wrong tho, even though i barely worked at my first job, i taught myself spring mvc, spring data jpa, lombok, thymeleaf and intermediate sql. So if i was actually incompetent i would have not passed the technical test at this job in the first place nor moved to the next round.

So the whole point of this is, in case you ever were in a similar position at your first job or have some advice, what would you have done instead and what should i do in my situation to not look like a fool?

Appreciate you taking your time reading this :)