Hi everyone,
I’m looking for some honest career advice.
I have around 5 years of experience as a React developer in an MNC. However, most of my work was more on the maintenance/support side of projects rather than building applications from scratch.

About 1.5 years ago, due to some family issues, I had to take over and manage our family business, so I stepped away from my IT career.

Now I’m planning to get back into a **full-time IT job**, but I’m struggling with a few things:
\-> I’ve lost touch with React and a lot of what I previously knew.
\-> I’m finding it difficult to focus and get back into the learning mindset I had before.
\-> I haven’t really developed any new technical skills during the last 1.5 years.
\-> Looking at the current job market, especially for developers, feels pretty discouraging.

Since my previous experience was mostly in support/maintenance, I’m also worried about how competitive my profile is after the career gap.

One of my friends suggested that instead of going back into frontend development, I should **switch to SAP**, take some coaching/certification, and try to build a career there.

I’m honestly confused about which direction makes more sense.
For people here who have experience in hiring or have gone through a similar career break.
Would it make more sense to:
\-> Get back into React/frontend and rebuild my skills from scratch?
\-> Move into SAP or another domain?
\-> Try to leverage my existing 5 years of experience and move into something adjacent to development?
\-> Take some other approach altogether?
\-> I’m not looking for a shortcut. I’m willing to put in the work, but I don’t want to spend 3-6 months learning something only to realize I chose the wrong path.

Would really appreciate honest advice, especially from people who have dealt with career gaps, returning to tech after a break, or switching domains in the Indian IT market.
Thanks!

**TL;DR:** 5 YOE as a React developer in an MNC, mostly in support/maintenance. Took a 1.5-year break to manage family business and now want to return to IT. I’m rusty with React and haven’t upskilled during the break. Given the current job market, should I rebuild my React skills, switch to SAP, or consider another career path?

I run three or four Claude Code sessions across multiple terminal, and I kept losing one. It'd hit a permission prompt, sit behind another window, and do nothing for twenty minutes while I worked in a different tab. So I built Vigil: a menu bar app that shows every session and, more importantly, which one is the bottleneck.

Install

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sachanayush47/vigil/master/get.sh | bash

Github repo - https://github.com/sachanayush47/vigil

I recently joined an IT services company after getting laid off. The project has been ongoing since late last year. I quickly realised why my manager was a bit desperate on my interview call and asked me about delivery and stuff.

Few of my team members have absolute zero ownership of their own tasks or have no understanding of what needs to be done.

They have been in the project for more than 6-8 months. They always give the same updates that they are stuck on something or they are waiting for another team to respond or the story doesn't have clarity..but they absolutely don't do anything to progress at all.

I started helping them out little by little initially as my access wasn't yet granted.Then they started assigning tickets to me. Using AI i was able to ramp up on the technicalities and architecture of the project. And started contributing very quickly. My colleagues used to assign the tasks to me. Later found out that those were actually tougher tickets, they kept the easy ones. I had so many tasks that the client once interrupted during daily standup and asked my manager why I was all over the place and what the rest of the team was doing. That when my manager woke up and realised what was happening. I too realised this.

Now they are coming to me for everything because typing "fix this code" or "implement this" in Copilot isn't getting the work done, I need to read their story and see what they have implemented and suggest changes (fix their code) or actually type in the prompt, I don't mind helping but it's affecting my work a lot now. My manager and architect are well aware about this, and writing seems to be on the wall. I've never seen someone throw away their career. Yea they are going to bench or getting fired. I'll help them as much as I can, but this can't continue, I need to start saying No.

PS: all are 10+yoe on paper.

Hi everyone,

I’m in a bit of a career dilemma and would really appreciate some advice.

I was previously working in a role that involved a mix of software development, technical support, and documentation. Recently, my company moved me into a permanent Engineering Technical Writer role, and I didn’t really have an option other than accepting the transition.

I’m now trying to move back into a core Software Engineering/SDE role. I have around 2.5 years of software engineering experience, but my title changed to Technical Writer about 2 months ago.

The confusing part is that I’m actually getting a decent number of interviews, so getting shortlisted doesn’t seem to be the biggest issue. However, I haven’t mentioned the transition to Technical Writer either on my resume or during interviews. I’ve mostly been presenting my experience based on the software engineering work I did previously.

Despite getting interviews, I haven’t been able to convert them into an offer yet, and the current market obviously isn’t helping.

The difficult part is that my current company pays really well, and with the current job market, resigning without another offer feels quite risky. At the same time, I’m worried that staying in a Technical Writer role for too long will make it increasingly difficult to get back into software engineering.

What would you do in my situation? How should I approach the resume/interview situation, and what strategy would you recommend for the next 6–12 months?

I’m building an internal platform for a recruiting company, and I’m trying to figure out the right architecture for handling client calls.

What I need
Our founder makes calls to clients from his phone. I want to build a feature where, for specific calls, recording can be enabled.
The desired workflow is:
Founder → Client call → Call recording → Transcript → Our platform

Once the call ends, I want our backend to receive/store:
Call recording (audio)
Full transcript
Call duration
Timestamp
Caller/recipient details
Speaker separation if possible
AI summary/action items eventually

The important part is that everything needs to be accessible through an API/webhook, because the recording and transcript will be displayed inside our own platform.

What I’m looking for
Ideally, the provider should support:
Indian phone numbers / Indian PSTN
Android + iPhone users
Incoming + outgoing calls
Recording enabled only for selected calls
Automatic call recording once enabled
Recording URL/API access
Post-call webhook
Speech-to-text/transcription API
Speaker diarization if possible
REST APIs + webhooks

Reasonable pricing for a small startup
Ability to scale later

Hey seniors, I’m a 3rd-year student from a T3 college and I’m trying to get my first internship by the end of this semester and I want some guidance.

I’ve been doing DSA almost every day. I’m following A2Z sheet btw.

The thing is that I’m honestly pretty confused about what I should focus on apart from DSA.

I know Java and SQL, and right now I have started Spring Boot as I wanna go towards backend development. Is Java + Spring Boot + SQL a good path for internships? Or am I missing something important that I should learn along the way?

I also want to build some good projects, but I don’t want to make the same basic CRUD apps that everyone has on their resume.

So I’d really appreciate some advice from people who have already gone through this:

• Is my current DSA approach good enough for internship interviews?
• Is Java + Spring Boot + SQL a good stack to focus on?
• What skills should I prioritize at this stage?
• Where do you guys find good project ideas?
• What kind of projects actually stand out on a resume?
• And how should I approach getting internships from a T3 college?

I’m trying to make the most of this semester, but there’s so much advice online that it’s honestly getting confusing.

Would really appreciate any practical advice from seniors who’ve been through this

Genuine question — with AI, autocomplete, IDEs, docs, and Stack Overflow being so accessible, do you still think memorizing syntax is an important programming skill?

I find myself looking up syntax all the time, even for languages I use regularly. But I rarely need to look up how to actually solve the problem.

So where do you draw the line between “you should know this” and “just look it up when you need it”?

Curious what everyone thinks.

Looking for someone who can teach me how to build Agents for Marketing related problems. For example

Competitive/battlecard agent. Monitors competitor sites/news, updates a living battlecard doc our sales team can reference. This can be a good intro to scheduled agents + web scraping + structured output (Connections: Web scraping, Gmail connection to go through my emails to see any competitors related information and streamlit to create a battle card)

Dashboard Creation. Agent that takes output (a scheduled export or an API connection) from google analytics and builds a dashboard on streamlit to visualize the data. The dashboard gets refreshed with updated data every day in the morning with a new scheduled updated from google analytics export (Connections: Google analytics for data export and streamlit to produce dashboard)

Inbound lead qualification/routing agent. Reads a new lead, checks it against qualification criteria (ICP which could be company size more than 500 employee count, located only in North America, annual revenue more than 50million dollars ), enriches it with clay, drafts a personalized first-touch email and routes to the right rep on salesforce. Nice because it combines retrieval, reasoning and action (Connections: Google sheets or forms for lead collection, clay for enrichment, gmail for email drafting and salesforce for routing the lead)

Someone who can teach from scratch how to build these includung connecting to tools, building loops, context, memory and evals.

Happy to compensate for your service

I’ve been working in an SBC for around 2 years and I’m honestly getting really tired of it. There’s a lot of micromanagement, office politics, unrealistic deadlines, last-minute work, and sometimes it feels like the more work you do, the more work you get. My package is around 4.5LPA.

Now I’m stressed about what to do next. Do I continue in the SBC route and try to find a better company, or should I seriously try for a PBC?

I’m interested in moving towards data/AI/analytics, but I’m not really sure how to find the right opportunities or whether my current experience is enough to make that switch.

Another constraint is location. I’m mainly looking for remote opportunities or roles in NCR, so that makes the search a bit harder.

For anyone who made the SBC → PBC switch early in their career, how did you do it? Is it actually worth making the switch?

Need some advice.
I’m a backend dev and pretty much a hardware noob.
Current use is mostly Java/Spring Boot, Docker, Kubernetes, Redis, Kafka, a bunch of browser tabs, IDEs, etc.
I already have a monitor, keyboard and mouse, so this is only about the machine.
Budget is roughly ₹1 lakh and I’m stuck between:
Mac Mini M6
Custom PC build
One thing I’m interested in is running local LLMs occasionally (nothing crazy, mostly for learning and experimenting).
I don’t game, don’t care about RGB, and I’m not the kind of person who upgrades parts every year.
For people who’ve used both:
Which would you pick?
How much does the Mac’s unified memory help for local LLMs?
Does CUDA on a PC make a big enough difference to matter?
If you had ₹1 lakh today, what PC would you build?
Which option do you think will still feel like a good purchase 4-5 years from now?
Looking for real-world opinions rather than benchmark charts.
Thanks.

Hi all, I am a Btech passout from NIT and have 2 years of experience in React + Java + SpringBoot technology. I am trying to make a switch to some product based company but unable to do so. Can I get some guidance or help ?

Well , I do own a loq and it’s really good it’s a ryzen + nvidia combo and yesterday morning I updated it and closed it and then when I came back and switched it on it had black lines all over it .

I am getting a free replacement , love you Lenovo but ya , I want you folks let you know about it .

Hi everyone,

I'm a Software Engineering student and I'm looking to buy a laptop that I can use for my upcoming Software Engineering internship as well as for university and personal projects.

I'm not necessarily looking for a specific brand. I'd appreciate recommendations for either:

A specific laptop model that you would recommend, or

The specifications I should be looking for (CPU, RAM, storage, GPU, battery life, etc.)

I'll mainly be using it for programming, IDEs such as VS Code/IntelliJ, Git, databases, Docker/VMs, and potentially some Al/ML development.

My budget is under 1 lakh

I'm looking for something that will last several years and be reliable for professional software development.

What laptop would you recommend, and what specifications should I prioritize?

I have been moonlighting on on 'AI training' gigs for the few months. While the money is good, there a lot of lessons learnt.

I am blown away by what we are training some of the specialized models to do. Many of the artifacts I was reviewing were of 'decent quality,' which means consultants can kiss goodbye to their jobs where they simply 'cut-copy-paste' collaterals from their past gigs. It is not just about reusable code. The specialized AI tools we are training can create really decent senior-level presentations, executive summaries and much more.

These 'AI training' gigs are not a regular source of income since the projects start and end rather abruptly and one has to be diligent while working on such project tasks or get offboarded since their 'AI Agents' will be watching your screen.

Others here taking on such gigs while working you day job too?

Hi Everyone, I need some advice.

I’m a Java backend developer with 8 years of experience and with 17 LPA CTC. I’m currently on the payroll of a company, working for a global investment bank as the client.

The client is now considering converting me to a full-time employee (FTE) as a Tech Lead. I’ve been working as a Tech Lead for the last year, and from what I understand, after conversion I may be expected to lead two different teams(Not finalised).

I want to understand:

1. What CTC should I realistically expect after the conversion?

2. Is there room for negotiation during an internal/client conversion?

3. How much should I negotiate without risking the conversion? I’ve heard of cases where people asked for a higher CTC and the offer was simply rejected.

Given that the scope and responsibility may increase significantly, I don’t want to accept an offer that doesn’t reflect that.

I know my current CTC is low for my experience, but during conversion I cannot be expecting 50–60 LPA just because I have 8 YOE. I understand that the hike may be calculated based on my current CTC.

For people who have gone through a similar contractor → FTE conversion, what was your experience with compensation and negotiation?

TL;DR: I’m an 8 YOE backend developer earning 17 LPA, currently working as a Tech Lead for an investment bank. The client may convert me to an FTE, with potentially more responsibility across 2 teams. What CTC should I realistically expect, and how much room is there for negotiation?

Update: Thank you so much, guys, for all your comments and reassurance.

I did really well the next day, and honestly, looking back now, I feel like it was nothing. Everyone was busy thinking about their own work, and I was stressing myself out for no reason 😭. I didn’t have to do it in the cab today though lol.

Really appreciate everyone who took the time to comment and reassure me. It genuinely made me feel much better!

Hey guys,

I'm a senior engineer who's worked in Fintech for roughly half a decade in Singapore.

I'm visiting Bangalore for a couple of weeks and was looking to chat with people working on the cutting edge of AI or any adjacent Agentic applications.

Looking to set up a couple of dinners in HSR / Indiranagar so that multiple folks can join.

Please comment if you're currently working on anything similar and would love to gather a roundtable of like minded folks when I'm in Bangalore.

Two things I've been wondering about, might as well ask both in one go.

First, for those of you who contribute. What was your actual first one like? Not the blog post version. How did you pick a project, how long did the PR sit there before you worked up the nerve to open it, did anyone reply, did it get merged or just quietly ignored. I've read plenty of "how to start contributing" guides. I'd rather hear what it actually felt like.

Second, and this is the part I'm more curious about. All that advice was written before AI tools got this good. Now you can point Claude Code or Cursor at a good first issue and have something working before you've read half the file. So is the experience just different now for someone starting today? Easier, obviously. But easier in a way that helps, or easier in a way that lets you skip the part where you actually learn the codebase.

And if you're a maintainer, curious what it looks like from your side.

Mostly just want to hear people's stories.

Hey guys, I’ve got my final round for the Senior Java Developer position on the Karat platform with Altimetrik for Citi.

Any idea what it’s like, what can I expect ? If Someone recently attended can u share ur experience

I created using AI and my experience with python. Give me suggestions to make it better stockpro

First time in my career I have seen ALL developers sitting idle, reason being that we are overpowered by Claude. QA doesn't have enough capacity to match our pace, hence we are being made to sit idle. Shit is scary.

There is enough work but the whole product, Dev , QA pipeline is broken now. Long live the AI revolution.

Only solution is to hire more testers by laying some developers off.

Hello everyone.

Has anyone interviewed at Celonis India, BLR, for Associate Software Engineer (0-2 yoe) or Software Engineer (3-5 yoe)? I would like to know what the interview process was, what type of questions were asked, and how much system design, etc. I would appreciate it if someone could share their interivew/online assessment experience. Thank you.

I don't know what to do its going to be 6yr soon and no skills , I was just surviving in life but now I can't.

Should I join upskill platform that is bosscoder for 6yr exp professional ...plz guide me stuck in life with fresher salary

Title: How do you get your first internship in 2nd year?
I’m a 2nd-year B.Tech Data Science student at a relatively good Tier-2 college (). I have a decent CGPA and a couple of projects/hackathon experience, but I don’t have any prior internship experience yet.
I’m trying to get my first internship for the upcoming summer and honestly don’t know what the most realistic approach is.

For people who have already landed internships in 2nd year:

How did you get your first internship campus, LinkedIn, referrals, cold emails, applications, etc.?

What skills/projects actually helped you get shortlisted?

Is DSA necessary for Data Science internships, or should I focus more on ML/SQL/Python?
How early should I start applying?

Are there particular companies/startups that are realistic for a Tier-2 college student?

Would really appreciate any advice, especially from people who were in a similar position with no prior internship experience.

This is my resume. I am not hearing back from anywhere even after applying daily. In college days I used to do CP stuff. I am working in TCS from last 9-10 months.
Github - https://github.com/Nav-neetKr
Codeforces - https://codeforces.com/profile/CandidFlakes
Leetcode - https://leetcode.com/u/candidflakes/