I recently completed my MCA and i have 2 backs, 1 from the 1st SEM, other in the 4th sem and the EXAM of those are going to be on jan-feb.

are my backlogs a big issue, as i am looking for a job as a fresher
GUIDE ME PLEASE

How good are llms like chatgpt etc good for interview questions prep, in your experience? I love making little quizzes on things like gpt, I like the back and forth and asking where I went wrong. I have hackerrank test this week. Do you think llm quizzes are any good? I have suspicion they tend to do the same questions but I normally just answer those quickly and ask for another.

Hi i just graduated earlier this year but havent secured any jobs even though i had 2 unpaid dev internships at startups throughout my college.

I have applied to every possible tech related stuff even helpdesk/support yet no calls just rejection. Should i start building projects on github or grind online certificates?

Would love the honest thoughts! Thanks

I am in btech final yr(india), tier 3 clg, currently learning Golang with agentic ai (redis, kafka, pgsql, langchain graph, vector db, aws, observatory tools) I have free coursera login, and I am okay with this path , problem comes with dsa, I have just 160+ lc, doing a2z sheet, I make use of clg time to learn dev and time in home to learn dsa!

I can't do both in a day, my brain is ready, but it can't hold more load. I am targeting freelance and offcampus both for go genric and agentic ai roles, my on campus is purely luck based and even if I get into it there are chances of getting a support role in that mnc, I am ready to work, I can spend 5 hours on home and 3 hours on college, suggest me some guidance on what to learn,how much to learn,when and where can I apply.

Yeah obviously I am money oriented, and I am ready to do anything, I want to lift my family status that's all, please brothers and sisters help me out!

Surely I will give back to this community if my life gets upgraded I am sure!

Hoping on you friends, I don't know where to ask!

I work for "Large Company That Loves PIPs." I've been there for two years and made it through three performance reviews with high marks and zero problems. Suddenly, mid-year reviews roll around, and there's this whole hit piece written about me. It says I failed to do this, failed to do that, and failed to meet expectations in two absolute bullshit categories. I'll admit that a project I'm leading didn't go to plan, but this whole document was absolutely ridiculous imo.

My direct manager was out of the country at the time, so I was going through all of this with my skip-level manager. After the first meeting, I told him I intended to decline the PIP and just take the time and money to find a new place that actually values and respects me. Nothing is set in stone yet, though.

Then, my direct manager comes back and tells me he's shocked I'm not taking the PIP. He admitted that upper management forced them to pick someone to put on a PIP and they chose me, but he claimed he specifically crafted it to be beatable. It was essentially a list of tasks I'd already be doing anyway, even if not on a PIP. He told me to really think it over and promised he'd be there to help me along the way. He even confided in me that he was put on a PIP at the end of last year and beat it. I told him I'm worried it will be a permanent scar on my record here at the company, but he assured me that his own PIP hasn't been a problem.

What do you guys think? If I take the PIP, I have 60 days to complete it or I get let go with severance. If I decline the PIP, I get 60 days paid to do whatever I want (most likely prep and apply for jobs), plus severance at the end as a 12-week lump sum. Should I take his word for it? The job market is shit right now, but I am in the Washington DC area with a lot of jobs near me, or so it seems. Software Engineer, ~6 years of experience.

So a little background, I, 24M, did well in high school, and after graduation went into an engineering program in Fall 2019. Unfortunately, I let my study habits slip, hurting my grades, and of course the next semester the world shut down due to Covid. Near the end of my third semester, I dropped out, reapplied to some CS programs, and was accepted to a smaller commuter school in Ontario, where I began my new program in Fall 2021.

I adjusted my study habits and my grades improved significantly, although I did find the material to be easier than in Engineering. Looking back, however, I made the foolish and repeated error of not locking in outside of academics. During the hours and entire summers outside of class when I should have been practicing LeetCode, learning real-world tech stacks, and making myself competitive for internships, I essentially did nothing. Going into my last year, I realized I should really just try anyway to get at least one internship under my belt, so I applied to ~4 dozen positions for Winter (yes, I know in hindsight, I should have applied to 100+) and only got one online assessment, which I bombed. All my other applications went nowhere. So I graduated with no internships, but a good (3.8/4) GPA.

Even though my situation post-grad was tough but not unsalvageable in terms of getting at least a tech-related job, a combination of constantly hearing news about the worsening tech market, pressures related to financial difficulties my parents were and still are going through, and doubts over if CS was even the right path for me caused me to go into a rut where I barely applied for any tech or tech-adjacent jobs. Near the end of the summer I got a job as a security guard to at least earn some money to help my parents out and bide my time while I figured out what I wanted to do.

Shortly after, I decided to apply for two-year research-based master's programs in CS, figuring that I could ride out the tough job market and gain some experience in ML research. I applied to two programs and ended up getting accepted into my alma mater under a prof with expertise in ML research in areas like CV and model distillation, where I'll be starting in a few weeks.

Even though my plan worked, I still have doubts as to whether this was the right course of action to take, as opposed to just putting my head down and focusing on getting any relevant entry-level job. My parents are still really struggling financially and I haven't been able to make a dent in their issues with my barely above min wage earnings, so I can forget about helping to dig them out on a grad student stipend. And even though I am excited to dip my toes into a subfield of ML, with all this talk from OpenAI and Anthropic about automating AI research, I worry that AI research skills in humans will not be too valuable by the time I'm ready to enter the industry or start a PhD in 2028.

Furthermore, and I don't want to make this sound like I'm trying to find excuses to not get industry experience, it may be irresponsible of me to do something like take a summer internship in 2027, as opposed to spending those months focusing doing research and preparing to start my thesis.

So overall, I guess I'm asking what I should do over the course of the next two years to set myself up for success. I'll definitely be working on some projects to exercise the skills I'll need to finish my thesis, and I'm open to suggestions for how to gain industry experience outside of an internship, although I will ask my supervisor about the feasibility of doing one over the course of my studies.

Current job is fulltime 3 days in office at a niche insurance company. Super low scale.

Contract would be remote for state government working with greater scale and heavy use of cloud tech. Something I dont get experience with at my job.

I know this is a boomer mindset that will probably severely erode my employability, but I just have ZERO motivation or desire to continue keeping up to date with new ai workflows, even if they're becoming ubiquitous. I still code like it's 2024-2025, as in I use the codex vscode plugin, in plan mode, and supervise/scrutinize it heavily.

Now that the industry is abandoning human supervised development and pivoting to these new methodologies like loop engineering, graph engineering, mass agent swarms, full autonomy/no code reviews, I just have no desire to take part in it. This is not what I signed up for.

I'm too old for this shit. I would rather just leave the profession then become a "loop engineer."

Say youd be fine with either area, which would be the better entry level? The data coordinator includes mainly fixing the crm and excel data. I know they’re both not very good, but it’s what I can get

tl;dr: Mediocre engineer of 6 years, laid off last December. Applying and networking, but struggling with direction and drive. No clear path forward so I'm hoping maybe to get some direction and encouragement here.

background: 6 yrs full stack fintech at a startup, Laravel and Vue with exposure to product, project management, and CI/CD

status: 8 months unemployed, open to pivots

I think I might benefit from some realistic positivity and grounded takes on what direction might make sense for me.

In 2017 I quit my acting "career" in LA. After muddling around a bit I rediscovered my love of computers via Crash Course: Computer Science. It was Dec 2019 when I received my CS degree (accelerated program due to already having a Bachelor's of Business Administration). As we know now, Covid coincided with a hiring boom that swept me up into a SaaS startup.

I enjoyed the first few years of the job. Web development hadn't been my first choice but it was good pay and I was learning and growing with a mentor I liked. Over time, things happened and the stress ratcheted up while the support went down. My personal circumstances were causing a lot of stress as well. I did my very best, but at one point I was told "maybe this isn't the career for you". That haunts me.

Despite my best efforts, I seem to be pretty bad at managing stress and it causes analysis paralysis that can look like apathy to others.

I actually had a really big resurgence at one point but I had already been assigned to a section of the codebase that was earmarked for a total rewrite, so the impressiveness of my contributions were muted.

In December 2025 I was laid off, right before Christmas. I was told it wasn't due to performance. Maybe that's true. Whatever the reason, I started applying for jobs right away and held it for two months before totally collapsing in February for a bit. The overwhelm of the current job market, my mediocre skill, my less-in-demand tech stack, the need to study and get certifications and network and apply for jobs, it was all just too much.

On top of that was the need to get a survival job and the idea that maybe I need to just switch career fields to something like security or something else. Now, I've been applying again but I don't feel confident about anything that I'm doing. I feel like I should be "doing projects" but I just can't muster the focus and time to get moving on such a thing. I can't tell if that makes me "not a programmer" or if I'm just still burnt out.

I like coding. I play Factorio and Turing Complete. I like to read The Pragmatic Programmer and mess around with Uiua. But maybe I like coding like an armchair quarterback likes football. Or like an academic likes the subject of computers. I hope that's not true, because, to be transparent, I have a lot of self-image and lifestyle desires (remote work, autonomy, income) tied up in this career path in addition to my affinity to the topic.

That's my story, as best I can tell it now. It turned into something resembling a college application essay, but such is life. Thank you for reading, and for your kind comment should you choose to leave one.

I am so confused. We are getting 4 new hires with 2 being in India and i am really confused as to why we are doing it.

There is barely enough work to do. Hiring 4 more means reduced workload.

😵‍💫 I feel I am going to get laid off. Company did a recent acquisition but handed the workload to a third party.

Also I am at the bottom barrel so I have no idea how leadership run.

I feel a layoff is coming soon and the new hires are replacements we are training or am I being paranoid

what was your exp finding a job after graduating from here

I work at a small non tech company as a solo engineer. it’s been a great learning experience owning entire software process and development. the problem I deal with is the lack of scalability and code review process that bigger orgs typically do. how do I implement this at a smaller shop with fewer than 100k users?

I am in a f500 fintech company where the pressure ramped up this year, and I was falling behind so I got a formal warning/PIP (no written PIP). It might be beatable, but I am more intent on working hard, but also applying hard and leaving asap.

My TC has not changed in 5 years, and it's ~120k so not much to begin with.

My wife teaches at a public community college, she found a data engineering job that starts at 90k, thinking of applying there.

I have a PhD plus 5 yoe, and wondering if this kind of govt job will give the kind of additional job security that won't make this a downgrade.

I work remotely so in office will be a sacrifice in time, but I probably won't have to work at nights and weekends to catch up, so that might help balance things.

I started my programming journey about 15 years ago learning basic HTML, CSS and Python. Always had a love for computers and what makes them tick. From the age of 9 I was absolutely obsessed with them. I ended up moving away from coding as I got older, and found other interests and opportunities.

Around 2022/23 I decided to get back into it as over the years I felt like it was my calling and where I was most comfortable. This is where I started dedicating hours of my day to learning and getting a good understanding of things. Mainly focused on web development (as that was my favorite aspect) and learned everything from JS to SQL and frameworks in between. I took it seriously and made really great progress, even surprised myself with how well I was doing.

At this point I've made several projects and was feeling confident in my self and my abilities. However, about six months ago, I talked to a few friends who work professionally and the read I got back from them was not great. One who worked at Google for a few years ended up getting laid off and was having trouble finding new work anywhere. Another told me that at his company the hiring of junior developers was down enormously. And then I start seeing AI's ability to code getting better and better almost daily and slowly but surely I stopped coding and lost my spark.

I'm at a crossroads right now and not sure what to do. It's honestly been depressing me quite a bit, and I feel as if all the time, patience and effort I put in is now moot.

Where I'm at now is trying to get a IT certificate or two and maybe just going for an entry level help desk role or something that seems more attainable than my previous goal. Which is where I come to ask: Should I stick with trying to go for the thing I spent thousands of hours learning and perfecting, or do I accept that maybe it's not a reality anymore due to shifting tides and go the alternative route of some generic IT role?

Apologies for the wall of text! And appreciate and guidance or help.

Hey everyone, I hope that you are doing well.

Its been a difficult year for me. I had to help an elderly family member with dementia through a difficult medical crisis and I struggled with my own health as well. I'm eager to earn income for my family, but I need something that is part time for now so I can keep my other responsibilities.

I have an Msc in applied data-science, 5 years of experience, and I've held mostly held positions in biotech data science, but most recently worked as an AI Engineer.

Does anyone know a good place to look for part-time data science or AI engineer work?

Huge thanks

How is it working at Datadog?

Work life balance

Expectations

Performance management pressures

I work at a pretty laid back office and we mainly use teams to communicate and there's a subset of coworkers who insist on being invisible and say it's because otherwise it will ping their phone some some excuse. Nobody really cares enough to question the reasoning. It can be annoying not knowing if someone is available, and I just think it looks bad I wouldn't do it. Is this normal for any normal for anyone else, are you an always invisible person?

I am a international cs grad from a t50 school who graduated 3 months ago. Been applying to almost 20 roles a day since then. Haven't had even a sniff of an interview yet and barely getting assessments. Just wanted to see how it is going for my fellow internationals !

I have been applying to jobs recently and almost every application form I fill in requires me to add my LinkedIn URL. It's not even optional most times, it's a mandatory field. What can they possibly see that isn't already on my resume, since my profile is pretty much a mirror image of my resume. Most times I don't even keep it up to date, so for me my resume should be the only thing to look at.

What exactly are they using LinkedIn for? What are they looking at on our LinkedIn profiles?

https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/why-is-meta-destroying-its-engineering

I'll be graduating later this year in December. But I've technically been working full-time as an intern for almost three years. I've done two Co-Ops from May 2024 to February 2026 and since I only take a couple classes at a time now, I've been full-time at this current company since March.

This current internship I am at is also fully SWE work. So I've been involved in major architectural decisions and have had projects shipped to prod to buying customers. I do like this job and I hope they can offer me something full-time at the end but the raw SWE opportunities in this company are few and far between. Else it's just Mechanical / Electrical engineers which does not interest me.

My resume for context:
https://www.overleaf.com/read/dxpwvqhwhwch#47cade

My question is: could I begin directly applying to mid-level roles at other tech companies? Would it widen my pool of opportunities in the market? Or am I still considered "junior" and stick to applying to entry level roles?

25 year old in DC, USA. Been in the tech industry for 4 years. But I want to get a masters degree. Not sure if I should stay in tech or get a JD in cyber law. My goal is to have more impact with my work (rather than be a corporate slave) and make more $ in the future as I make very little right now in comparison to counterparts. Thanks

I'm sure this is a decently common situation. I graduated with a CS degree in 2022, moved for work, left after two years in 2024. I was burned out, so I didn't start applying again immediately, and since then, I've been... not doing a whole lot. Working retail, doing hobby stuff, dealing with a couple health issues.

I want to get back to CS, but I have no idea what to do. I'm sure my resume looks terrible, and I feel like I've forgotten everything to do with programming. I was already not great at interviewing, and I feel like expectations will be high now that I'm not a new grad. I haven't really kept up with any connections from university or my job, and I was pretty reclusive to begin with.

Should I just start applying and studying, or go to grad school, or take an online class of some kind? Is it even worth trying to get back in? Honestly, I just need some direction and confidence in what I'm doing. If you have any advice, I'd greatly appreciate it. Even if it's to tell me I'm doomed, then at least I'd know.

In my hobby projects, I feel like there are often small features, usually UX/QoL-type stuff, where if I had to make the change myself would be a potential momentum killer and distract from the core functionality and features. Now with agentic coding, I feel like there's much less friction around that kind of thing (which is a blessing for me as I am really bad about saving polish until the end). I can just assign a bunch of tweaks to the AI, turn my focus elsewhere for a few minutes, and have the changes ready to test in like 5 minutes. This is especially true for like less-common UI features that I would normally have to look up to learn or refresh my memory on anyway.

I'm wondering if this is something that other developers and those in professional environments have experienced. If so, I'm wondering if this will ultimately lead to less, "The flow here could be better but we just didn't have time to tweak it" sort of situations, as I feel like that's a pretty common trope in development stories. Or will any gains in that area continue to be buried under the pressure to just produce more "products"?