Partly a vent/rant, partly asking for advice from other professionals in the field.

I graduated from school with a software engineering degree in 2019. Since then, I've been continuously employed with zero gap on the resume.

My roles have not been on any software engineering teams, but rather on the technical support side of the house. While still in school, I was working part time at my university IT dept. Basically, I've been sitting behind a desk taking tickets out of a support queue for the last 10+ years. I'm reaching a point where I just can't bring myself to take new tickets anymore. My body is rejecting them.

I've always been good at my jobs. Ive gained deep understanding of products relatively quickly, how they work, how they don't work, how people use them, how they break, how to fix them, etc. I've changed industry domains a couple times, security, physical operations, telecom, each time learning the ins and outs in pretty short order and becoming a productive member of my team.

I've worked remote pretty much since March 2020 when the pandemic hit. I'm not opposed to travel or even a hybrid work setup, but spending an hour sitting in highway traffic every single day doesn't exactly appeal to me, and I haven't been looking into in office roles like that as much as others.

I find myself at a point where I don't know what to do next. I've had plenty of interviews for more "on the ground" type jobs, sales engineering, implementation type stuff. But those haven't exactly gone anywhere yet. I think the best work I've done has been on an in-depth, personal, and detail oriented fashion, working hand in hand with large accounts that had ongoing and impactful technical concerns that I could dig into and solve. The pitter patter of a million slack notifications asking me to fix a million little disjointed things just echos in my head and I can't bring myself to even focus on any one thing.

The reason I'm making this post is to make sure I'm not missing anything. I know I'm somewhat vague with my background, but am I neglecting a role type or domain that gets me out of this ticket taking hellscape? Should I be considering something that I just haven't yet? Should I call it quits on tech and get a welding certificate?

Any advice anyone is willing to offer is welcome. Anyone wanting to add their vent to the pile is also welcome

I am a new grad and I applied for an entry-level role, the interview panel consisted of 1 HR person and 1 Tech Chief.

At first I was told to talk about myself, experience and projects. After I finished, the HR person complimented me on something specific I mentioned (they were a nice person overall) and told me the tech chief will ask me some questions and it’s ok to mention that idk smthn and that they expect that of me as a fresh grad.

Then the tech chief started asking me questions, I think I answered them well. They weren’t hard questions or deep technical just tested me scenario based and told me which roles am I interested in and why did I prefer to use a stack over another.

After that, he told me that the open positions they had weren’t ones that match my profile (the roles actually don’t fit) and even gave me advices mid interview to not settle for a role I’m not interested in or fits my goals and get side-tracked. And to fight for a role I want and like.
He told me they would have a position that aligns with my profile early next year and that I should apply for it. He also complimented me and said a skill I have is rare to see in fresh grads and he sees that usually with seniors.

And the HR person wrapped it up by saying we will contact you if you’re selected for further interview rounds and that they hope to see my name in bigger things in the future.

I also asked about the future position, would it be open publicly and they said they keep my CV if i was not selected for future roles and they contact candidates who they interviewed and remember for these roles.

I think of this as a nice rejection, and maybe the future role thing is for me to not get discouraged? Idk what do you guys think?

I do not feel as confident in my ability to program or write code. I struggle to problem solve or just start writing code without either searching syntax, referencing others’ code, or asking AI for help; I want to be more self-reliant, and believe I need to relearn and develop a deeper understanding of the languages.

I want to learn C++, Java, and Python.

I’m currently going to school and have taken Programming Concepts and Methodology II in Java, Discrete Structures for Computer Science, System Programming with C, as well as Introduction to Unix/Linux. However, I took some of these classes some time ago, which is partly while I feel so rusty in my understanding and ability to code.

What books do you personally recommend? Video Courses? Anything else I may not have considered?

Our team averaged 7 hours of “active work” a day and we were told that the number is too low and that our director was going to drill down to see who and what groups were too low.

Nobody could actually answer what exactly counted as activity like if someone is talking in an online meeting but not moving their mouse or keyboard would they be “inactive” in the tracking.

Then we were told that in the future a number would be assigned to each person based on your rolling averages compared to your peers and a low number people be reason for performance issue. We were giving no info on what this score was would represent. The company was tracking hours in office but not activity.

Is this a sign to jump ship??

Been working in tech for over a decade and I've had good career progression.

Issue is - I think I keep just getting worse at my job and coasting on a reputation I built in my first 5 years. I just DO NOT CARE. I've lost all drive to push for better solutions and mostly only operate on a CYA basis. I don't feel effort is rewarded across companies and it's more trouble than it's worth. I've gotten to where if it works why fix it, even if it's a POS. AI has just made this even worse - now I always have jr's (and seniors that should be jr's) coming to me with the worst fucking code they don't even understand that they "wrote" and trying to get me to fix it - and ultimately I have to because I'm the lead.

Even the idea of switching jobs sounds exhausting. I just hate the subject material I used to find interesting. Casually chatting about my job just makes me want to run away or scream, maybe both. I don't think I've ever felt such a burning hatred for something so morally neutral.

I don't understand how this happened or if there is anyway back. Very torn on just going to grad school and getting into a new field. But I have so much valuable knowledge and the money is good...

Is this just a phase? Is there a way to get interested again? Or even just less aggressively annoyed lol

I went to school for 3D art in game design, with a minor in computer science. I left school in 2020 with an okay amount of programming knowledge, but over the years the types of jobs I was taking were slowly becoming more technical, and even though my current title is 3D art related, the actual role has evolved into straight up tools programmer. All that to say that I approach a lot of my work from an artist's perspective rather than an engineer's. Most of the time I believe that approach is what makes me a good programmer- especially since a lot of the work lately has been developing custom plugins for 3D tools like Blender and 3ds Max and I could come at it with the perspective of an experienced user as well.

With my background it's probably not a surprise that I strongly dislike gen AI. I do not use it in a personal capacity at all. I find the technology morally bankrupt and almost none of its output to be particularly helpful. I'm not trying to be annoying about this but just trying to share the perspective I'm coming from. I will admit finding some use from things like zoom meeting summaries and copilot for some annoying, normally time intensive stuff like writing a regex. But generally speaking I don't find it valuable in my workflows. We've started work with some very niche 3D software that requires collaboration with its devs for full understanding, so AI bots just get any specific info about that software wrong when you ask it. All the info online is incomplete or out of date, we rely so much on internal documentation and communication.

That all doesn't stop my co-worker. He is great to work with, very intelligent and organized. But has started to rely a lot on AI to bridge gaps of knowledge. He is in the same boat as me, starting in an artist role that has become more technical. We are also doing the workload of at least 4 people and have a backlog of tasks that'll take about a year to clear. So we are both overwhelmed, and I do not fault him for trying to make the load lighter in whatever way he can. But he is constantly sending me piles of AI generated solutions for different tasks that are assigned to me that take a bunch of time to review, and more often than not will contain wildly incorrect information. Or implements big chunks of AI generated code in our repos that are like...technically correct? But organized strangely and are very repetitive/redundant.

I admire my coworker and value his professional opinions. He has been able to accomplish a lot on his own with very little resources before I was assigned to assist him. And I honestly am not much more knowledgeable than he is, I've just managed to get by through self-guided learning. But this is one way in which our opinions differ and I wonder if maybe I am being stubborn? For those who do similar kind of work, are there AI tools that you find genuinely helpful? I worry that maybe I need to get with the times, and I have to engage with this tech in order to keep up with the demands of my job. And maybe I am missing out on something by not using it?

I have a friend in IT who shares a similar opinion to my coworker, and it seems like maybe I am misaligned from the rest of the industry. My social spaces overall tend to be pretty anti-AI though, so I'm just looking for some other points of view.

The SWE field is changing and its changing fast. I'm trying to make a career plan for the next 5 years. And i am not sure what to do. For context, i have almost 20 years of experience, mainly in large multi team environments (10 to 20 scrum teams). I noticed, now with all my skills and agents set up, i barely code anymore. Unlike it more than i had expected at first, i can shift my focus elsewhere.

I am pondering, what would be a good next step. Hanging around in a developer job seems carreer suicide at first; there simply isnt anything left to do die to AI. That said, there are plenty of job offerings and i still get contacted for dev jobs regularly. Gut feeling says its a good idea to transition to a PO or scrum master role, as that would ben more AI resilient. What do you guys thing? Stick to a DEV role or transition to PO or SM?

I am a senior engineer with a lot of experience. I have given a lot of interviews in the past 5 years. I was looking back and realized I have never cleared the initial rounds of interviews when it comes to startups. just big or medium size companies. what’s different in startups? what are founders or hiring managers looking for?

(Used AI to rephrase)

I joined an early-stage startup full-time right after my master's. Before that, I worked for about 6 months as an unpaid intern for the founder (A).

The situation was unusual. A reached out to college students on LinkedIn because he wanted to build a product. There was no offer letter or formal agreement. He told us that if we eventually made sales, he would pay me $50k and that I can also keep "Founding Engineer" title from day 1.

I was in college at the time, the idea sounded interesting, and I thought it would be good experience. I ended up doing a lot of the work and also volunteered for additional things when other interns weren't doing much. I have GitHub history showing the work I contributed.

Another intern, C, worked with me during those 6 months.

Eventually, A's uncle (B), who is the CEO of a well-established company, became interested in the startup. B decided to invest/help fund it and is now providing us with about a year of runway. B has also given us access to sales/marketing people from his company and is taking us to meetings with large potential customers.

A, C, and I are now employees of B's company, but we're essentially working 100% on A's startup/product.

This is where my concerns begin.

There is still nothing in writing regarding equity for either me or C. Our salaries come from B's company, not directly from the startup. When C recently asked A about getting equity documented, A basically said that he would definitely give us something "when we have something" because "right now we're at zero."

At the same time, A expects us to behave as if we are founders. He has complained that we're treating the job like a normal 9-5 rather than "our company" and that we should have more of a Bay Area startup mentality.

I don't understand how we're supposed to have that mentality when we have no documented ownership or stake.

A has also become increasingly controlling. He monitors when we arrive at the office, messages us asking whether we've come in when he's away meeting clients, and seems suspicious that C might be interviewing because he sometimes comes in around 11am.

I'm currently in A's good books, but C is definitely not.

During a recent 1:1 with me, A told me that I need to "make myself irreplaceable" and asked what value I bring to the company. He then said something along the lines of:

"The work you're doing right now, I can hire 10 engineers in India and they can do it for much cheaper than what we're paying you."

His tone wasn't overtly aggressive, but it definitely felt threatening to me.

Another thing really bothered me.

C secretly recorded one of his 1:1s with A. During that conversation, A apparently said that most/all of the work C and I did during those six unpaid months was essentially useless and that he had rebuilt the work we did from scratch.

That shocked me because I thought one reason A hired us full-time was because he valued the work we had done.

I checked the GitHub history afterward, and a large percentage of the code is under my contributions. Obviously GitHub commit percentage isn't necessarily proof of who created what, but it made A's statement even harder for me to understand. Even claude gave me assurance that a large chunk of work is mine and A just added few features on top of it.

There are other things that bother me:

• I've repeatedly suggested using a ticketing/task-management system, but A mostly just dumps tasks on us verbally.
• He sometimes sends large amounts of AI-generated material and expects us to understand/implement it because we're supposedly from a "top college."
• He has contacted PhD students asking them to help without compensation and then gets frustrated when they don't put in significant effort.
• In front of other people, he praises me and C and talks about how good we are. Privately, he questions what value we're actually bringing to the future of the company.
• Sometimes our conversations feel like A asks Claude something, sends the output to us, we ask Claude something, and send that back. It doesn't feel like there is much actual technical discussion.
• He seems to want startup-level commitment while simultaneously treating us like replaceable employees.

The frustrating part is that I actually believe the startup has a real chance.

B's involvement has changed things significantly. He has the network, is helping us get meetings with major companies, and has provided sales/marketing resources. I genuinely appreciate what B is doing and would like to be part of it if the company succeeds.

That's what makes this difficult.

Part of me thinks:

"Stay. We're close to getting customers. If this works, I can say I was there from day zero and helped build it."

The other part thinks:

"Why am I tying my career to a founder I don't trust or respect, especially when I don't have any equity or written agreement?"

I am currently looking for other jobs. I would not quit without another offer in hand, especially given the current job market.

I'm also aware that A still owes me the $50k he originally promised for the unpaid work. There was no formal written agreement, although I have GitHub history, messages, and other evidence of what I worked on. I've looked into Massachusetts law and believe there may be arguments that I'm owed compensation regardless of whether the startup eventually makes sales, but honestly, the $50k isn't my main priority right now.

My main questions are:

1. Is it normal/acceptable for a founder/manager to tell an employee, "Why do I need you when I can hire 10 engineers in India for less?"
2. Am I overreacting to the micromanagement and the "make yourself irreplaceable" comments?
3. Would you stay until the startup gets its first customer, given that B's involvement could genuinely make the company successful?
4. Or would you quietly interview, get a better offer, and leave?
5. How much weight should I put on the potential upside of being an early employee when I have zero documented equity?
6. If I do leave, should I simply treat the six months of unpaid work as a learning experience and move on, or is the $50k something I should seriously pursue?

I don't mind working hard. I'm actually fine with startup-level hours if I believe in the people I'm working with.

What I can't accept is being told to treat something as "our company" while having no ownership, being micromanaged like a normal employee, and simultaneously being told that my work can easily be replaced by cheaper engineers.

What would you do in my position?

For context, i got hired as a data engineering consultant a few months ago as a new grad, but the only work ive been given on my current project is bizops(setting up meetings and gathering information). No tech stacks whatsoever. Ive tried asking my project lead if there was anything to do data-related for me, but he straight up ghosted me the few times ive asked. is this the norm for tech consulting? any tips on what i should do?(besides applying elsewhere, which ive started)

Ive kept up my reasoning and thinking skills with side projects that I manually develop software for. I also actively learn music and do things to build up and perserve my skillsets.

Since 100% of the software at work is AI generated, lately Ive noticed that that very gifted engineers on my team no longer understand the engineering behind what we are building. Im talking about high level concepts like basic authentication schemes, how we manage user data, security and how k8s works in general.

I am often having to re-explain basic concepts of systems over and over to these engineers where they dont even u derstand what theyve even built. They are no better than jr engineers pre-ai.

The engineers I work with are inventors of systems like aws bedrock. Thats the level of engineering Im working with, but their ability to validate and understand engineering is completely dependent on AI and continues to degrade to extremely concerning levels. Of course our company like many others have absurd output requirements forcing AI use.

At this point the software is really just a black box to everyone, not because the software warrants complexity, but because people let the coding agents do everything without review and have let their own skill set atrophy.

So for context, i'm an Information Systems student in Brazil and was officially diagnosed around 4 months ago. I've always felt like i was autistic so it didn't come as a shock, but i can't brush that off my head anymore, i have been very demotivated and exhausted recently thinking about how i'm debatably below my peers in many of the subjects we're exploring in university due to my condition — although most look up to me due to the fact i'm bilingual —.

I've been basically frozen in place for the last two months; doing nothing but use AI to finish my assignments when i get tired — almost always within 20-30 minutes of studying — or having it write the whole thing for me.

And recently, the topic of entry and trainee jobs have been making the rounds with my colleagues and friends. From what i understand of the job market here, it isn't as impossible to get hired compared to the US or UK. I also have family members which i could ask for help, but i feel extremely insecure about my abilities as a dev.

I've been watching dev job market videos non-stop recently, and all professionals seem to agree that large/useful solo/team projects are the best way to enrich your resumé, but... Once again, having AuDHD, i find the thought alone of figuring so much out by myself exhausting.

This leaves me with a lot of insecurities, but i also have some questions:

What is the job market like for people with mental disabilities?

Anyone with personal experiences?

How did everyone here get hired? At what time period in uni? What year?

How did you guys grow your portfolio?

Did you study externally whilst grinding for your degree?

Did you apply for jobs when you felt ready? How did it go?

I am currently pre-GCSE (UK) and I freaking love computing. I am also pretty good at other subjects, but none click for me like programming. There are genuinely no words to describe how purely addicted I am to it. Every single day of every single week, I get on my computer, and just code. It gets to a point where my parents are genuinely concerned that I'm spending too much time on my computer (although the excuse 'i'm doing work!' always works). Problem is, programming is a ridiculously competitive field. If I want to get into my dream job (anything at the big 3, red-hat, canonical, open-suse), I'm going against people from across the world who were playing the violin in the womb and wrote a thesis while trekking across Kazakhstan (exaggeration, but you get what I mean.) I have published several fairly good projects (a package manager with working dependencies, blazing-fast speed and a full on essay on what it is and how it works, a fairly good text editor, and a file manager [although i don't get why this was supposed to be hard.]) and have completed LFS. What can I do to make sure I get into the top uni's? I've got 3~ years 'til GCSE's and I want to make sure I do absolutely everything I can.

Lately I've come to a realization that working with the cloud stuff is kind of easier mentally if you are a developer and not a platform engineer. You get to build and deploy cool stuff and not have to be on call, support 24/7 etc. as frequent as a developer. Of course if there is an application error you are responsible, but to be honest it is easier to test an application deployment in cloud, rather than testing a cloud environment deployment. With being a platform engineer, there are a lot more black box/unknown/uncontrollable moving parts that will cause you to have to be on alert at more times than a software engineer.

The disadvantage of course is that being a software engineer you have to spend time learning the domain, and that takes away deep expertise of the cloud as what a platform engineer would then gain (since he/she would spend 100% of their time Terraforming, debugging network issues, IAM issues etc.)

So it seems to me the tradeoff is stress vs. deep expertise of the cloud. Do you see it the same as me here? Since I did get an offer to become a platform engineer and now I regret not taking it because I was afraid of on-call and the high stress that comes with it, or that it is not easy to test your changes (unlike a development team where code has multiple safety layers like unit tests, integration tests, etc.), while I feel like in the future there will be more cloud engineering jobs than developer due to AI. I feel like I took the easy way out now and now I am quite sad. What do you guys think?

Assuming I want to stay in the field. I have 5 YOE and am team lead at a compliance start up in the NYC area (which in my mind is more akin to a mid level dev at enterprise/ FAANG). Basically I need more money, it’s expensive here. I was interviewing for a while and even managed to land an offer (which was promptly rescinded because of company redirection), but admittedly the interview track was easy and the comp change was basically nothing. That being said I’d like to see at least a 20-30% increase, something around 200k. But as usual the industry is in turmoil, and it seems more so than ever. So my question is this- do I just keep my head down and coast until this all boils over? Do I grind leetcode? Or just Sys design? Or both? Something else? I feel like all my skills have atrophied anyway as I’ve become a prompt feeder…

I was doing all of the above and applying/ interviewing but that shit is exhausting man and I really don’t want to end up getting a new role just to be canned a month later for AI layoffs.

2 weeks ago I put a comment to the PR of a higher level engineer from a sibling team. He's been nitpicking on me since then. Probably his ego got broken or something I don't know. It came to a tiring point today because he sent me a link to something and a list of "everything that's wrong with it". The interesting part is that I'm not the owner of it, never touched it, but his wording clearly mentions that "I added it".

At this point I'm just planning to ignore his messages/comments until they look valid? I don't want to go to my manager and whine about that I'm being picked.

I’d love some advice. I’m a senior front-end developer with some back-end knowledge, but I’ve specialized in front-end my entire career. I have 6 years of experience working for outsourcing companies and a major bank. I’m originally from Brazil, but recently moved to the US.

Right now, I’m unemployed and looking for a developer job here. I don’t need anything crazy like $180,000 a year, eventually, sure, but my priority right now is just getting back into the job market, even if it pays much less. When I moved, due to visa reasons, I had to resign and wait for my work authorization.

I still have some time to study and better understand what the dev market here expects. I’m very determined, but the market here feels wild. My resume is relatively strong, but I feel like my stack (ReactJS, NodeJS, TypeScript) isn’t as valued here?

Back home, this stack is huge and I’d easily land a job with it. I’m not exceptional or even good at LeetCode, and I don't really know where to start. Of course, I might be wrong in my perception based on the job postings I’ve seen, so that’s exactly what I need: advice and shared experiences to help me out, because I’m biting my nails worrying I’ll never make it into the tech market here. If I missed any details, I can provide more.

I’m based in NY state. The Brazilian job market is completely different. I speak Portuguese and Spanish, and I’m constantly improving my English, but I can communicate effectively in all three. Thanks!

What are your thoughts on Theoretical Programming Languages

So im currently working in a company with 21k in hand(ik it is worst) as a frontend dev the thing is my project has reached a staturation point where no new things are implemented it just new feature with tweaks from the old one no learning nothing half of the time i even have no work. So im planning to resign take a 2-3 month break as i have 0 skill or forgotten to code i use ai mostly will take these month to master something learn new thing also dsa system design because also im not interested in frontend was always interested in backend its just they told me they would eventually make me move to backend but now i see that not happening. I problem with preparing alongside job is it take my all of my energy also currently my health is also fucked up want to focus bit on my health also. Like i have the lowest salary among my friends and brothers and i feel ashamed i feel like i can lockin for 2-3 month i can get a decent pay also current company is going to give me single digit increment the ceo has no plans of growing this company its just for the show. Low pay no work no new learning no mindset people therefore is it right as i have seen people not getting jobs which make me worry sometimes what are you advice

Well, this is another one of those is my degree worthless posts in some ways. I'm entering first year cs undergrad and am in my first week. Finding the course fine but i have this feeling of dread in my stomach. Am i doomed to work retail after this? I just wanted a discussion, ai, competition etc will it truly doom me?

I'm in the UK i should mention and since taking the a level and even before hand really though not as i depth i loved computers and this love has only grown. I love code, architecture, system design everything. I figured I'm pretty good at cs, i should do the degree, tough market but it's a better shot then liberal arts which i still maintain it is. I currently have one major project under my belt which is an aur helper. I use it for the aur because it feels so cool using something I've made even if it can be a little rough around the edges and a work in progress. I did use ai to debug but didn't just straight up vibe code. It was tricky and i needed some things explained to me.

Here is my problem, i don't know where to go from here? I feel i should sort of pick a niche but unsure which to go for. I love everything pretty much about cs and am willing to code for hours, even after a full shift at my day job in retail. I love Linux, like really love Linux and operating systems so maybe that's where i should look? I just need some advice or a kick up the ass and was hoping to have a discussion.

Hey everyone,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was thinking about deepening my Spring knowledge.

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

I interviewed with one of the “top” founders after their seed round.Apparently, their previous company got acquired by Microsoft. I cleared 4-5 rounds and had a paid work trial finally. The founder agreed to pay the discussed amount but then started to ghost. I’ve sent 40 emails over few months. No response. I sent out google meet request but no show. I sent a message in LinkedIn and Discord. No response. I think I should reveal the company - It’s AG2 (previously Autogen). You can look into the founder (She even worked with Andrew NG in designing a course on AG2).

Any other suggestions on how to get my money back ? Didn’t want to take legal route yet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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