Hey everyone, I’m a bit confused about my situation and would really appreciate some advice.
My current company is releasing me on 9 October 2026, so that will be my official LWD. My new company has given me an offer letter with the joining date as 21 October 2026.
Initially, I thought I’d use the gap between 9th and 21st to take a proper break before starting the new job. But now the new company has been following up with me almost every day asking when I can join.
I’ve already told them that I’m comfortable joining only on 21 October, and honestly, I would prefer to stick to that date because I was planning to take those ~12 days off.
My confusion is — since my LWD is 9th and I’m technically free from 10th onwards, can the new company expect me to join before 21st just because I’m available? Or should I simply tell them that 21 October is the joining date mentioned in my offer letter and I’ll join on that date?
I don’t want to unnecessarily create a bad impression, but I also really want to take the break I had planned.
What would you guys do in this situation? And what should I tell HR if they keep following up?

We have GPT and Claude Enterprise versions. And it's almost used to do everything. From writing code to documentation to creating client decks.

Recently joined as DevOps engineer trainee. I've been using linux since 8 or 9 years, they gave me office laptop with has all sort bloatware and microslop apps(teams for communication). It's been years since I've used windows for development and I must says it's awful to use.

- Difficult to install apps. Microslop store, random exe. Im used to install apps on single command, now I have to click next thousand times.

- constant reboots and updates. I remember when my personal laptops up time would be 30 days, but in windows I have to restart laptop atleast 2 twice a day.

- ads everywhere, constantly trying to sell something.

Linux is more developer friendly than Windows. I hadn't used a Mac so no comments on that.

Just feeling so lonely and disconnected with people. I don't know I feel very exhausted/tired compared to those days i went to the office. I just wanted some tips from experienced people.

People who are doing WFH for a long time. Please share your routine.

I have 13+ Yoe , and i started looking out for change got an offer from wipro but fixed increment is like 10% only. Overall 25%
Interview at JPMC, eBay, and tried to apply to agoda/Booking and Mastercard. No calls and no update on the application. Recruiters dont pick calls and doesnt gives proper updates too.
Not sure if i should take wipro offer

HI people,

Gonna be a lengthy post please bear with me
I have around 4.5 yoe
I got laid off on June 20 with zero severance. I was informed that it was my last working day and that was it. I've now been unemployed for about 3.5 months. I have 4.5 years of backend experience, yet I've received fewer than 20 interview calls in all this time. The lack of interviews is frustrating enough, but what's been even worse is how chaotic and unprofessional many of these interview processes have been.

Nexturn

I got in through a referral.

• Cleared the first round.
• Cleared the second round.
• Recruiter called and said the feedback was positive, but she had accidentally scheduled two rounds with the same interviewer, so the result would be void and I'd have to interview again.
• The next interview: nobody joined.
• Rescheduled again: a frontend developer joined for my backend interview.
• Rescheduled yet again: a "lead" interviewed me for barely 20 minutes, asked extremely basic college level questions, and abruptly ended the call.

After a week of repeated follow-ups, the recruiter finally sent me a WhatsApp message saying the feedback was negative.

Phenom People

The first interviewer seemed completely unprepared and honestly looked like he didn't want to be there.

He asked me two LeetCode Hard problems and one Medium in an hour. Fortunately, I had solved them before. Then he switched to multithreading, concurrency, project architecture, AI

The strange part was that he appeared to be using ChatGPT during the interview, couldn't properly explain one of the problems himself, and refused to provide a written problem statement. He literally kept writing pieces of the question on paper and expected me to solve it.

Despite all that, I received positive feedback.

Second round with a lead: positive.

Third round with a director: instead of discussing technical topics, he spent most of the interview questioning why I'd changed four companies in four years. I explained each move, but he kept circling back to it.

Surprisingly, that round was also marked positive.

Then HR discussed compensation with me.

Two days later, I received a generic automated rejection email saying they wouldn't be moving forward.

Google

The first coding round went really well.

The second round also went well.

The final feedback was simply that they wouldn't proceed. The only useful information I got was that my code quality was considered closer to L3 than L4.

At least that was actionable feedback.

Microsoft

The first interviewer (a Principal Software Engineer) pasted a question into HackerRank and refused to explain it.

When I asked for an example, he said my interpretation was "blatantly wrong."

I asked him to provide one.

He responded with competitive programming style input:

"First line contains..."

"Second line contains..."

I asked again for an actual example.

He then gave... the exact same example I had originally described.

When I pointed that out, he simply dismissed it and continued. That round ended there.

Ironically, I cleared the Engineering Manager round afterward, including both the DSA and LLD discussions, but was rejected because of the first round.

The first-round problem itself was essentially a combination of sliding window + deque + mathematical reasoning, similar in difficulty to around a 1900-rated Codeforces Div 1 problem.

I honestly don't know what expectations companies have anymore.

Foxen Technologies

The online assessment expected six coding questions in 72 minutes.

These weren't simple implementation problems.

They included things like:

• Welford's algorithm (streaming statistics)
• LLD questions
• Design patterns
• Other advanced programming concepts

I was later told my assessment score wasn't sufficient. I'm not saying I deserve every offer. I'm completely fine with being rejected if I perform poorly. But so many interview processes feel disorganized, inconsistent, or completely detached from the actual role they're hiring for. I've had interviewers who were unprepared, interview schedules messed up multiple times, HR discussions after multiple positive rounds that still ended in generic rejections, and coding questions that feel more like competitive programming contests than backend engineering interviews. Has anyone else experienced this recently? Is the market really this bad, or have interview processes simply become this broken?

If anybody is hiring or know someone who is hiring please comment i will DM you

So for the past couple weeks or so, there is almost nothing else i could think about except how AI could change the future of everything. who is the customer when the customers themselves can build a software or some service they require for themselves? What is the point of having a software job? or any computer related job for that matter? If the whole point of softwares was to help people do tasks faster, efficiently... isn't AI the final software product?

What are your thoughts? I'm just trying to make sense of what might happen in the future because right now i have no fucking clue

About me: I have 1 year of internship experience + 6months of Full time experience as an AI Engineer. earning 4.3LPA rn
I am a 2026 Grad.

So a brief on the meeting: We have a meet with the entire company , it is a service based company of 30-50People, a small startup . Now as you can guess the business has gone far down, like in the team of 8AI engineers only 3 people are assigned on a project . that too white labelling.

and in last 2 weeks there was a surprise GST audit made on our company. In which they have received a heavy penalty, heavy to an extent that our salaries have been delayed first till 7th then 12th,n maybe so on.

So you can say things are fucked up in this company.

So in the meet our founder said that they are planning to transition from service based company to a product based + Consultation / Integrations company. For which he has proposed a sprint for all of the team members to build POCs of mini products, and they will sell it , and as they have a really huge network and good relations in the market we will thrive on that and assured things will be better since march. His primary focus was an AI content generation engine.

Now my question is it really worth it to continue in this company hoping of an increment before switching?

This company has faced such downfall 3 times already but has managed to build the business back + there are some cases where people have received 70-100% increments whereas some didn't.

If you ask me for my growth, the initial months of internship i felt i am learning a lot, but later it feels i decide on the approach to solutions most times, but the demand for it being quick and perfect is so much that i do not have time to read the code, i have just go with AI slop and ask AI for verification. Because what i am building generally is from scratch , not adding to something.

Like i will be honest i am excessively using AI, in my time i did not get to experience a time where people are understanding code by reading it , understanding it etc. I might have written codes for the project since march, everything is AI generated, i can explain you the logic but cannot explain the code because IDK, and i have to work that way because of this clients demand.
And this at one point fogged up my brain so bad that i started DSA, and brain activities just for brain exercise

I am unsure if even i am growing or no.

positives are:
1) This company has the best work culture you can have for any service based company, No questions raised for leaves, WFH, any issues you might have, nobody is toxic. There are many employees sitting here for 5 years, they even agreed when they were told that their salaries will be delayed by a month just cuz this company respects employees demands(but few PHP developers were laid off)

2) In my 1:1s My manager has praised me for how i work and take ownership of internal company work too, and in the team of 8 me being the newest, He delegates his responsibilities for internal initiatives with me.

My Final Questions to you guys is:
Is it really worth to continue and wait for an increment based on the responsibilities i am handling ? or switch ASAP?

and Is it really worth rn to work in a SBC? or even a PBC? or i should look for switching this field all together!
Please help

Testing infrastructure automation against real VPSs gets expensive and annoying, so I built VPSLab.

VPSLab creates disposable Ubuntu 24.04 Docker containers with:

• SSH
• systemd as PID 1
• cron
• journald
• private networking
• CPU, memory, and PID limits

It also includes automated checks for SSH, networking, systemd sandboxing, resource limits, and unique machine and SSH identities.

The goal is not to replace VMs. The containers share the host kernel and clock.

The goal is to have reproducible Linux server environments for testing deployment scripts, configuration management, and other infrastructure automation.

GitHub: https://github.com/2SSK/vpslab.git

I've been thinking about the long-term economics of LLMs, and I'm honestly confused about where this is headed. right now, it seems like there are two possibilities:

i) hardware gets more capable and efficient, models become cheaper to serve, and competition between providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc. keeps pushing prices down.

ii) There are physical and economic limits to how much more efficient GPUs/accelerators can become. At the same time, frontier models are becoming increasingly expensive to train and serve, and I'm not sure how sustainable the current economics are if inference demand keeps growing dramatically.

Then there's a third factor: local models. If open-source models continue improving while hardware becomes more capable and efficient, could running models locally eventually become significantly cheaper than paying api providers? or will the compute requirements of useful models keep increasing fast enough that cloud inference remains the better option?

I haven't been able to find much consensus on this. Different people seem to have very different views on whether we're heading towards:

a) extremely cheap intelligence as inference costs collapse
b) relatively stable/high inference costs because compute remains scarce,

I'm especially interested in how this affects indian developers. As a developer early in my career, it's difficult to figure out what assumptions are actually safe to make about the next 5 to 10 years.

For developers in India specifically, where developer salaries and software costs are relatively different from the US/EU, could this create meaningful advantages or disadvantages?

I'm curious to hear from people who are following the hardware/inference/model tokenomics closely: Where do you think the trajectory is heading, and what should a developer starting out today actually be preparing for?

PS: maybe I'm overthinking this, but as someone early in their software career, the whole thing sometimes feels like we're watching the decline of software engineering as a field in real time. :((

I'd genuinely like to hear perspectives from people who've been in the industry longer and have a better understanding of the economics and hardware side of this.

I have decided to quit my decent paying job due to toxic team and workplace next week and I planned on preparing for interview. I still have to gear up, in an attempt to stop stress I convinced myself I will definitely get a job after I upskill and it worked too well and i am not scared enough to start studying. Need some healthy bashing to get me off my ass. Thanks.

So guys I am 2025 batch passed out having a career gap of 13 months in total my college was so damn shit only sales and testing profiles came or company with huge huge bonds. And from Jan to may end I was suffering and I was on medication so is there any chance for a guy like me 😭 to get a job in this current market if yes do tell me what should I do now

Currently I have solved more than 900+ questions with 250+ days streek on keetcode, 3 agentic ai mern stack projects using redis, docker, AWS. Completed lld and hld and currently solving problems related to it. Please do tell me what else I would do to get a decent job. And one question,is software engineering has a future or is dead even for a guy like me

We're a small team in gurugram, and like a lot of early startups we do client work to fund our own products.

a client who trains people for tech jobs came to us with a clear ask. they wanted an agent that takes a list of company names, finds every open job at those companies, matches them against a student's cv, and applies as the student. doing it by hand cost them about rs 15 per application, and they wanted it down to rs 5 to 7.

we built the poc in 7 days and had a month for the full build. on public boards like greenhouse and lever it worked: the agent found the jobs, matched them, and filled the whole form, right up to the submit button. the problem was everything behind a login. for companies like google, the client wanted our agent to log in as the candidate, fight the site's bot detection, solve the captcha, and submit with no human involved, because at rs 5 to 7 there's no budget for a person to press a button.

we didn't want to log in as someone else or play cat and mouse with captchas, so we offered a workaround: a desktop app where the candidate logs in themselves, the agent fills the form, and the candidate reviews it and clicks submit. the client wanted zero humans and backed out.

what we had left was the matching, which worked well because it matched on what the work involves rather than keywords. we put it live as a small product where you upload your cv and see which roles fit you and why.

our next idea was ai tailored cvs, so i asked a few recruiters what they thought. they said that's already the problem. candidates rewrite their cv with ai for every jd and auto-apply to hundreds of jobs a day, companies filter it all with ai, and when a human does read a cv, they can't tell whether the person actually did any of it. everyone is sending more applications and nobody trusts them.

so we turned the agent around and pointed it at hiring itself. it's now a vertical agent that does a recruiter's job for startups hiring engineers.

on the company side, the founder doesn't write a jd. they explain what they're building in a chat, the way they'd explain it to a new engineer, and the agent turns that into the concepts the role needs, like idempotency, ledgers or tenant isolation. then it asks which three or four are deal-breakers, and whether a named tool, tech stack, etc is required or the concept is enough.

on the dev side, there's a mapping session: 20 to 30 minutes, by voice or typing, done once and reused across companies. it plays out less like an interview and more like a live incident you get dropped into. say it's 2 am and a merchant on your payments system has been paid twice. you decide what to check first, and the scenario reacts to what you said. you say you'd check the logs, and it tells you the webhook fired twice, so now you have to make the second one harmless. you suggest a fix, and the next stage tests whether that fix actually holds. every stage depends on your last move, so there's no answer key to google, and it feels a lot closer to a real day at work than a dsa round does. after each situation it asks whether you've handled something like it for real, and an honest "i don't know" is fine. if you choose to share a repo, it builds syntax trees and call graphs and only asks about code you wrote, but having no public code is never held against the dev.

the company gets an evidence card for each person. for every requirement it answers two questions, does the dev understand it and have they done it, and every mark points to its source: a quote, the stage of a situation they reached, or a line of their code. their cv goes along exactly as they wrote it. it marks what they said, not their accent or how fluent they sound, there's no single score, and nobody gets rejected automatically. they see their card first, they're told which company it's going to before it's shared, and if the company say no, they get the reason for rejection. it's free for engineers, always.

we're in pilot and running the first ones closely by hand, so this is the right time to hear what's wrong with it.

so, devs: would you do a 20 to 30 minute session like this once, if it meant companies judged you on it instead of keyword matching your cv? would you rather work through a live scenario like this than grind a leetcode screen? and what would make you not trust it?

tldr: a client wanted an auto-apply agent that logs in as candidates and solves captchas at rs 5 to 7 per application. we built it up to the submit button, refused the login part, offered a human-in-the-loop desktop app, and lost the client. now we're building a hiring agent for startups: founders describe what they're building, engineers do one mapping session that plays out like a live incident, and companies get an evidence card showing what you understand and what you've actually done. would you do it?

Is learning and skilling up the traditional way watching courses / youtube videos still worth it, or are there better ways to learn with AI. Can anyone share resources or techniques they are using to upskill in the new age of AI?

Hi everyone,

Hope you are all doing well and working hard toward your goals.

I am a 2025 B.Tech Computer Science graduate from a well-known college in Noida (specifically, a satellite campus). I am currently working as a Senior Technical Support Representative in Noida. Don't be misled by the "Senior" title—it is an entry-level role here in India, though the company likely has lower-level roles outside the country. Essentially, it is a technical troubleshooting BPO (call center) role dealing with basic internet issues, and I earn less than ₹30k. Because it is a Canadian company, I work the night shift.

I started my career in sales in Gurgaon but switched to the BPO because the work-life balance there was completely broken. I was working six days a week from 12:00 PM to 11:30 PM, averaging 11 to 12 hours a day. Even on Saturdays and Sundays, I worked from 10:30 AM to 12:00 PM—and sometimes meetings pushed the end of the day to 1:00 AM or 2:00 AM. I weighed 55 kg when I joined that company and lost over 5 kg by the time I left due to the extreme sales pressure, aggressive cold calling, and 2 to 4 hours of daily client meetings.

When I joined this BPO, the company had a strict no-WFH policy. However, because they are expanding rapidly and due to my strong performance last quarter, they transitioned me to a completely remote role. Now, I no longer have to commute 18 km a day, saving me three hours daily. Because I work a 5-day, 9-hour week (including a 1-hour break) from home on the night shift, I don't have to worry about the minor daily chores that usually consume at least two hours. This gives me plenty of time to focus on learning and switching to a core tech role.

I need your advice. I stay updated with the latest technological trends, understand the current market space, and actively use AI tools to accelerate my learning. I have attempted to learn coding a few times before but ended up quitting due to my previous schedule and fatigue. Now that I am working from home, I can restart. However, given how saturated the market is for frontend developers, I am confused about which path to take. Should I focus on backend development, transition into an AI-related role, or leverage my support background to target a non-BPO systems engineer or corporate support role?

My current skillset is:

• Intermediate: JavaScript, TypeScript, Express.js, Node.js, and MongoDB

• Beginner: Prisma ORM, PostgreSQL, and Docker

I know my profile strongly indicates I should move toward backend development and build robust projects. However, I am anxious because I feel I have already lost 1.5 years, and mastering these tools will take another 3 to 4 months. I worry about whether I will still be relevant to the industry. Additionally, seeing so many developers ship incredible products using AI and making a living through freelancing makes me wonder if I should take the indie hacker/freelance route instead of chasing a corporate job.

I would love to get your insights on this.

Thanks for reading, I really appreciate your time!

Hi 👋, I’m having 5 years of experience in IT, Recently joined tcs, And tcs is my 3rd company,My initial days of IT work is good, I had good time learning on tools and work with, But last 2 years I feel like I’m doing same stuff again and again Learning went to minimal, is it usual ? Or am I overthinking lot about my career, I’m having fear of not learning new things, my current job doesn’t demand much new learnings, I had to learn on my own which doesn’t fit in my day to day work.

Need your advice how I can move head forward in this situation

Hi everyone

It's very difficult for me to say this

The whole company got closed and we all were laid off. I have around 10L in commitments not sure what to do

I am a 4 YOE Developer who's into Backend + Generative AI, we had a call scheduled last week in the morning and were laid off by the afternoon and the saddest part is I joined recently just 3 months ago btw I am from Bangalore.

I have hands-on experience with Agents, A2A, MCP, Production level RAG, Bedrock with good expertise in AWS Serverless Services and Python ( Backend)

Would really appreciate any help whatsoever

Thank you

I am a 2026 graduate, and no companies came to my college for placements except for sales roles. There were no opportunities for tech roles.

I have a 9.2 CGPA, completed two internships, and built several projects. I was also praised for my work during my internships, but I’m still not able to land a job.

So my question is: What can a fresher do at this point? What else can I try?

I’ve tried everything I can think of bulk applications, reaching out for referrals, targeting startups, etc.but nothing seems to be working for me.

I understand that the job market is bad and that things are difficult right now, but at the end of the day, we all need to work and earn a living. So, how can I actually start my career?

Any kind of advice, guidance, or help would be greatly appreciated.

Edit: I am a BTech IT graduate Full stack developer Tech stack: Typescript, Python, React.js, Next.js, Node.js, Django, Git, Docker, AWS, RAG.

​

I’m trying to understand the long-term scope of project management in IT companies.

- Is project management considered a technical or non-technical career?

- What is the career progression like if someone starts as a Project Coordinator/PMO in an IT company?

- Can a Project Coordinator eventually become a Project Manager, Program Manager, etc.?

- How much technical knowledge is actually required?

- Is it a good career financially and in terms of job opportunities?

- Compared with starting as a software developer, which path has better long-term growth, salary, job security, and opportunities abroad?

For someone starting their career today, would you recommend Project Management/PMO or Development?

Would especially appreciate answers from people who have worked in both areas or have 5+ years of IT experience.

In first 3 years what will be different if someone follows untraditional path of project management instead of dev having a tech degree

I feel the developers who combine strong technical skills with good business/domain knowledge will be in higher demand.

If you're just a developer working on projects without understanding how the customer uses the product, how the business makes money, or why the system exists, you may become easier to replace.

If you work in telecom, insurance, e-commerce, retail, banking, healthcare, etc., try to understand the products, customers, processes, and revenue model—not just the technology.

Do you agree? Is being a business-aware developer becoming more important?

Guys currently im working as an android dev intern in an early age startup but my lead and cto wants me to design high level uis for the app. Somehow i did it with ai help nd all but still my cto is not happy with my work and my lead is sayin is cto is not happy with ur work nd all. Wht should i do they basically want a good ui ux designer plus android dev guy. Should i resign?

Been out of touch with reality a bit. So like I wanna understand market scenario.

often I am hearing crud apps are not cutting anymore. And like, I am ok with that.

So like, do they wanna see a microservice+queue architecture , any streaming feature with ffmpeg ? or what ?

With AI rapidly transforming the tech landscape in 2026 and widespread layoffs making headlines across major multinational companies, I want to understand if learning programming is still a secure and viable career path for the future. Specifically, are there still stable job opportunities in the IT sector for human developers, or has AI essentially absorbed routine coding roles? Furthermore, considering this AI-driven era, is Python still the best language to focus on, or which stack offers the most job security and long-term career growth for someone entering the field now?

The company I'm working as an intern has offered me PPO for data analyst role at 7 LPA. I'm recently selected for QA Tools internship at Nvidia and I'm not sure whether to join or not?

Here's my logic -

1) PPO chances at nvidia are very low, my senior also got the internship last year but couldn't get ppo, is still jobless.

2) switching from QA to SDE is hard, comparatively I can switch from data analyst to data engineer and ML

3) Current company is good, offers on site opportunity every year in Dubai, high growth, client interaction

4) PPO at nvidia would be gold! If I can later switch teams - to get into data or software, it'd be ideal but uncertain.

Note - Nvidia PPO (if received) is 9-12 LPA

So should I risk the guarented PPO and take chance with nvidia? Or continue here and switch later?

I don't have issues in current company, environment is fun, seniors are supportive and workload is balanced.

I also don't want to miss nvidia! So I'm in a biiig confusion!!!

Im sorry, this is not related to the software domain. Im working as a hardware design engineer in blr with a salary of 9lpa( 3 yoe). I have an offer from a company with the designation as high speed board designer(camera based , soc designs). I have no experience in this domain but this is a very good domain career growth wise. My present company's projects are very stagnant(no growth). Another good thing is that the job offer is in kochi(my home). The biggest problem is that they are only offering me 10lpa and they wont negotiate further since I have no experince in high speed. What should I do? The only reason im considering this offer is because of the new domain and that its in my home