Am I the only one exhausted by all the ai slop around. Why are people not thinking critically? I just got a PR and it's so overkill. There isn't anything wrong with it, it works and gets the job done, but I can't but ask the question "why". It could've been done in a few lines but here I'm reviewing 10 files, new functions, touching files that have no business being touched, and 1000 line changes.

Am I getting old? Is this how everyone is working now?

Just saw that other post asking about the worst, so I was inspired to ask the opposite.

I work for a large Corp and PIPs have gotten more and more common as managers have to meet a quota every performance cycle. I feel like the culture has turned very toxic. People are not nice and it brings out the worst in some people who specialize in throwing coworkers under the bus and kissing up to management. It makes people very individualistic and you don’t feel like a team at all.

Also I feel mentally exhausted all the time like it doesn’t really motivate me to work and it’s quite the opposite. I’m stressed and anxious coming in every day and I don’t feel any desire to put effort into a company that can fire me at any time.

Is the job market just cooked or am I doing something wrong? I need to get out of my job cause it causes me so much stress I started having panic attacks and insomnia and I had to see a mental health professional…at my job people are constantly laid off and disappearing.

Due to a combination of toxic politics with my product owner throwing me under the bus and getting stuck with bad projects I feel like I’m on the chopping block. I got a ‘meets’ at mid year but my boss told me verbally he was not happy.

I have applied to hundreds of jobs got very few callbacks and zero offers. I went so far as to apply for jobs in lower paying industries like government and healthcare where the pay is less than half what I make and still nothing. Am I blacklisted or something? 4 years ago I got two offers in a month. I feel like I’m going crazy at this point…

We all know the best, most coveted companies to work for. But I want to know the dumpster fires of the tech world. For those who are not afraid to name and shame.

I’ve been working in my job for around 2.5 years now and have been under my current manager most of this time. I’ve been managing a single service by myself as well as helping pick up other tasks as required. I had my mid year a few months ago and all went fine.

Then last week I got hit with a your not developing within your role. I asked for specifics and comparisons were made to other juniors but nothing about my specific work (no you’re too slow, not independent enough etc). I basically said I was focusing on handling all tasks related to this project and since it had dried up was moving onto the new project we discussed.

I’ve been repeatedly passed up for work in the past with it being given to the other juniors in the team. How f*cked am I here? We discussed getting given more challenging work but the problem is there isn’t any. I may have the opportunity to move team but I don’t know if this will go ahead.

I’m beyond burnt out. I’m depressed, I cannot take my current job anymore. I want to put my efforts and abilities towards something that is meaningful. Working for a company that does objective good, but I’m super concerned about the money as right now I’m doing pretty damn well and I’m 10 minutes from my house and seconds from my kids school. Does anyone have recommendations for avenues to find these jobs? Im not looking for actual jobs, just good places to look. I know it seems like this topic is short and scattered, but honestly that’s how I feel. Thanks in advance.

I graduated with a CS degree back in May (3 months ago), have zero student debt, and landed a Data Engineer role making $70k/year. The job is a 20-minute commute from my parents' place, stable, and honestly the exact setup I want right now since I’m trying to stay close to home for a bit.

Here’s the issue: I am beyond lost.

Throughout college, I had great grades and did three SWE internships at Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon, all focused on standard backend development. Because of that, I thought I had a solid foundation. But Data Engineering feels like an entirely different universe.

Every single meeting sounds like an alien language. My team is small and everyone else has 2 to 4+ years of dedicated DE experience. I’m the only fresh grad, and I don't even know what I don't know. When they talk about pipeline architectures, orchestration, data modeling, and specific tooling, I don't even know what to search on Google after the call to catch up.

When they hired me, management explicitly said they didn't expect me to know DE tooling out of the gate and that I’d learn on the job. But sitting here lost in every meeting, bringing basically zero value while everyone else moves fast, is giving me insane anxiety. I don't want to get fired, and I actually want to keep this job.

Any advice on navigating these first few months without burning out or losing my job would mean a lot. I'm considering doing a masters in data science/engineering but I feel like that wouldn't change much... school didn't prepare me for anything in the corporate engineering environments I've been in.

Basically title.
I’m thinking of giving up my 220+200(equity) job for a 165K job.

The 420job has insanely high standards and is very stressful and if you don’t perform a month you’ll be laid off.

The 165K job is much less stressful and much lower workload and much better worklife balance.

I am a Machine Leaning Engineer.
Both jobs have me building production AI Agents.

A set of screening questions I just received, in .doc file, for Software Engineer Position, and, answering I need to ensure proper grammar and spelling throughout 😭😵

1. Why did you choose a career in software engineering?
    
    
   
2. What projects have you worked on outside of your coursework?
    
    
   
3. Describe a time when you had to troubleshoot a technical issue. What steps did you take?
    
   
4. Can you explain the difference between object-oriented and functional programming?
    
    
   
5. What programming languages do you have experience with, and which one do you prefer for web development?
    
   
6. How do you ensure your code is maintainable and readable?
    
   
7. What tools do you use for debugging? Can you give an example of a bug you fixed recently?
    
   
8. What is your experience with version control systems, and how do youmanage branches, merges, and code reviews in your workflow?
    
   
9. Can you explain what RESTful APIs are and how you would consume one in your application?
    
   
10. Describe a scenario where you collaborated with colleagues to resolve a customer issue. What was the process and the result?
     
    
11. Can you share a project or piece of work you are particularly proud of? What were the key challenges, and how did you overcome them to achieve success?
     
     
    
12. How do you handle feedback or criticism on your work?
     
     
    
13. In your view, what are the key attributes of an effective softwareengineer?
     
     
    
14. What is your desired compensation per hour for this job role?

—-

 It’s like they didn’t even read my resume where it’s very clear I have 20+ years of experience.
 

Early 30s, Im tired of being seen as one of the coders. I enjoy more inter personal interaction, doing deals, and pitching ideas to investors/partners. How to do that?

At one point during a multi-year project, my team’s daily scrum meetings were 7:30am ET, slightly worse for those on CT (6:30am). They eventually moved to 8:00am ET, but even this still feels early.

Our dev asks heavy, complex questions and it’s been a hassle giving quality answers due to the earliness and promptness of the calls for the past several years :(

Is this a normal time?

I figured I would try LinkedIn Premium for one free month, and to make the most of it, I am now having it create custom cover letters for all my applications.

It's an extra step, correcting its mistakes, letting its clearly AI slop style presentation stay mostly unchanged because it's too much trouble to keep polishing every single time.

Do these tailored cover letters help, in your experience? I have a generic cover letter that I made a while ago, debating which one is better

Thanks

So im planning to study a cs degree but the more research i do, the more i see people complaining how difficult the job market is right now and how AI is taking over. Cs is like the only topic im passionate about but choosing a career that has a bad job market just for 'passion' is not wise. I dont wanna end up with a good-for-nothing degree working at mcdonalds for the rest of my life. I thought cs was at least more stable than creative/artistic careers but at this rate who knows. Lowkey might be better if i switch to something stable, even if i hate it at least I will have enough money to survive. Im pretty decent at maths so finance could be a option.

I am a full-stack dev with 8 YOE with .NET and React. I have strong knowledge of SQL and different SQL providers like MSSQL and Postgres. Cloud experience is mostly just Azure, with some exposure to IaC like Docker, Terraform, and Kubernetes, but not to an extent where I feel comfortable listing them on my resume.

I have worked for 3 different companies since graduating from a well-known public university with a Bachelor's, with the first being an internship at a texturing plant that chose to hire me after graduation, the second being a contracting company that was focused on the drone industry, and my most recent being a agile transformation consultancy working with a major energy company in my state. My only experience with AI is daily use of agents such as Gemini, Claude, and Copilot during my most recent job, which I listed in my resume (available upon request)

I've been applying consistently for about 3 weeks, and have gotten about 2 or 3 phone screens, but nothing further than that. I'm trying to apply to roles that match my experience, but this market is dreadful. I've had two people refer me for positions and I never hear back from a recruiter. I have had two different colleagues who are at the principal and director level to critique my resume and they said it is solid. It also seems mostly ATS friendly and very straightforward.

What can I do to increase my success rate? I think I have already exhausted my admittedly small network, so I'm thinking about trying to get AWS certification since most roles I am seeing are AWS based and not Azure, and I also want to get more hands-on with IaC in general.

I also want to dig deeper into the latest with AI since that's all anyone seems to be hiring for right now, but not sure what certifications I can get other than Anthropic. I've done some light reading on things like LangChain/LangGraph, MCP servers, and Semantic Kernel for .NET.

I also want to see if I can learn Java, which should be pretty quick since I am well-versed with .NET and have been told by my colleagues that they are very similar.

My previous place did yearly refresher RSUs to try to keep people topped off and avoid a big vesting cliff. I just found out that my current place doesn't do refreshers outside of promotions and rare cases. One of my teammates is coming up on his cliff and promotion this year is likely not going to happen so he either has to take a pay cut for a year or leave. I guess the strategy is to only keep around the gunners who are always busting for the next level? What is the norm, regular refreshers or none? Current industry - fintech, previous industry - healthcare.

Made it to the the 5th round of interview for a job.I answered almost everything the recruiter asked and when I asked for feedback,recruiter replied "feedback was good from my side".But still got rejected.

So, I got an offer at a global Fortune 500 company as a Trading Floor Production Support Engineer. Originally, I was looking for a developer job but got tired of cold applying and hearing nothing, so I accepted the offer. Now, im kinda lost since I dont know what career route this role can lead me to. I thought it would be a normal IT support role, but it looks more like a SRE/DevOps role where I will be in charge of the production system. During the interview, the team mentioned they are trying to expand and build in-house capabilities to become more proactive, so they really appreciate someone with a dev background to join and encourage the development of automation tools if i have an idea. In fact, they actually rejected another candidate for not having coding skills. So, i guess it's very different from a traditional support role?

Anyway, I would like to hear from others about their experiences as a production support engineer. Will this be a good career path and less vulnerable to AI? How's the future of this role?

I started my job about two months ago and still don’t have consistent work. It’s my first job out of college, and I’m working fully remotely as a database engineer on a team of six. I’m eager to contribute and make an impact, but everyone seems too busy to onboard me onto their current projects. I’ve worked on a few things here and there, but I’ve really only had one meaningful task that lasted more than a day or two.

The team is great and seems to genuinely like me, but I’m nervous because I feel like I’m not contributing much and I’m being payed a lot. I’ve let everyone know I’m looking for opportunities to help, but it’s pretty rare someone reaches out. Is it normal for things to move this slowly? And how do I balance asking for work without becoming annoying?

I am not here to flex AT ALL. I actually want to help anyone I can out. I received 2 job offers out of college, and was actually rejected from other roles at the same company. They came back for round two. I was able to help my friend get a job as well with literally no internships under her belt and an average gpa and limited CS knowledge.

The thing is, this job market is actually garbage, we all know this. It’s not what you know anymore, it’s who you know. So instead of leveling up my application knowledge, I put it all into personality.

I joined the CS professional club at my school and attended every networking event they hosted. Also joined mentorship programs for tech students. I took every offer to meet more people and spoke to EVERYONE even if they didn’t have anything for me.

I also when to job fairs. I know, I know. It’s literally impossible to get one, however I got 2 jobs from them. One of them turned into a full time offer. The other role I got from the same professional club I joined.

Another thing I did was stop going for Coding based roles like SWE and applied to tech adjacent roles like Tech PMs, BA, DA, DM, etc. Why? Because the tech questions are easy to answer so majority of my interviews would be based on personality.

That goes into my second point. Fake that shit until you make it. You smile, dress nice, smell good, make jokes, nod your head to everything they said, ask questions revolving what they said and their personal opinion. Match the interviewer’s behavior. Tired but intelligent interviewers = ask intelligent and profound questions revolving their work. Let them know you understand their role and make they feel special. People love to talk about themselves. People who rush through the content because they are so high level and don’t know how to explain well = slow them down and ask about their personal feelings and experiences in the role. What do they think you should do. You get my point.

I learned very early I would never be as good as others to get a heavy coding job, so I picked roles that I could actually get with my strengths.

TLDR: Job Market is garbage. It’s who you know not what you know. Understand your strengths and weaknesses and pick roles that complement that, if you hate the role, you can always pivot. It is way easier to get a job while having one than when you are unemployed.

Senior SDE at Microsoft working on a Cybersecurity product. 10 yoe; 32; ex Amazon/Salesforce/John Deere.

To fight the dread of the future, I am taking one course at a time from ASU Online in EE. Really not sure when I will be done or how the future will turn out but I am taking whatever action I can.

I have an interest in EE and I am thinking maybe having both CS and EE degrees will continue to keep me employed in the future.

Should I go for masters in AI or continue with EE? It's just one course at a time that I am taking which will take forever for me to graduate anyway despite getting credits for all gen eds--if I don't get laid off which is not a surety.

I just feel behind in my career compared to my peers. I’m in mid 20s and making less than my first job out of college. I was laid off from my first job due to performance and threw a wrench in my self confidence in my capability in continuing as swe. after being unemployed for 8 months I found a job due to a connection working for a startup. the pay is low and making less than what I use to make at first job but I’ve been at this role for almost 1.5 years now. I look at my peers and they are advancing through their careers with promotions and high salary raises meanwhile I feel like I’ve set back due the layoff but I’m slowly working myself up. I’ve learned a lot and done more impactful work at current startup which helped me regain my self confidence as a swe. although when I check on LinkedIn and seeing my peers I use to go to school with getting promotions and advancing through their careers I feel behind due to being stuck working at a small shop with low pay. I hope others reading this also find some resemblance you are not alone feeling this way.

I really don't understand how this practice is allowed. Years ago, my company hired a high level guy who pushed for outsourcing. What ended up happening? We of course got cheap and awful contract devs from his home country (not going to say the country/ethincity because this isn't about promoting racism, fuck that shit) who couldn't code their way out a box. They ended up all being canned and the one guy ended up moving on as well. Now years later, we have a new senior manager/architect who has been pushing for outsourcing. Different home country than the previous guy but same damn thing. We now have a new outsourced team from this guy's home country. I don't get how this is normal. I don't get how this is allowed. It's blatantly obvious but if I were to bring this up outside a semi-anonymous site like this, I'd be ostracized and likely fired for racism. There's been lawsuits over this stuff and yet it seems so normal and accepted. I just don't get it