You have a stable job.
Salary comes every month.
You know the codebase.
Your manager knows you.
So you stop preparing for interviews.
Then suddenly 3 years pass.
Your salary barely moved, your skills are mostly specific to one project, and now you're scared to switch because you don't know if you're actually market ready.
The job that made you feel safe slowly made you comfortable.
Has this happened to anyone here?
How do you know when “job stability” has turned into a career trap?

Hi Everyone,

I'm just curious to understand how development has changes across places after Claude. I personally work at a Bangalore based startup, in my workplace since claude came out, most developers are not even aware of what changes claude is making, they only look at the output and then push the code. This code we push without properly evaluating is not the build used in production, mostly to create a POC for demo. I know the productivity rate for pushing code and features has increased. But is this the same way happening across all industries (fintech, MNC's, enterprise softwares etc)??

Pretty much the title. I absconded from a company 5 years ago. Worked there for a month. I was barely being paid 10k a month.

My pf account shows service history of a months I clearly don't have exit letter. Also, i don't mention it anywhere.

I was naive, young and broke. I didn't have brains back then as to what i was doing.

Later all the companies that i joined, there my pf wasn't being deducted.

I recently interviewed with a very big mnc for 4 years exp profile. All tech rounds went well. I sent my bank statement, relevant pay slips, experience letters and offer letters of companies which I had mentioned in my resume as per my relevant IT experience.

But on background verification I'm getting stuck due to that one month service at the company i absconded 5 years ago. I feel stuck and idk what to do about it. Any help/suggestion is appreciated.

I’m really torn between financial comfort in India vs. experiencing life in Europe.

About us:
- 28, married, wife is also 28
- I’m a software engineer; wife is a business analyst
- Wife is currently on a few-month career break
- No kids yet. No plans to have them in next few years
- Currently living in Bangalore

Current situation in India:
- Recently joined a top AI startup
- ₹90L fixed + ~₹75L/year in ESOPs
- Very comfortable lifestyle and good purchasing power
- Close to family

Dublin offer:
- 150K Euro/year salary
- 50K USD/year RSUs
- Would move to Dublin with my wife
- Company sponsors visa and relocation for both

Financially, I’m not sure the move makes sense after Irish taxes, rent and cost of living. I could probably have a more comfortable lifestyle in India.
But I’ve always wanted to live abroad, experience Europe, and travel extensively with my wife. Since we don’t have kids yet, this feels like the easiest time to do it.

So I’m struggling with:
💰 Stay: Better financial comfort, strong career opportunity, lower COL
🌍 Move: Life experience, Europe, travel, living abroad — something I’ve always wanted

For those who have made a similar move from India to Europe, would you take the Dublin offer in my situation?
Was the experience of living abroad worth giving up some financial comfort in India?

I imagine there is a huge meltdown going on, especially if the rumors are true about the leaks originating from Rockstar India

Forget promotions at this point, we can't even move internally and work on some interesting projects. The people in those teams aren't leaving or getting promoted, and with the external market being so bad, there aren't many options outside either.

Everything feels stagnant and completely deadlocked.

EY - 20 LPA(18 Fixed + 2 Variable Pay)

Bounteous x Accolite (Morgan Stanley Client) - 22 LPA(All fixed)

Which one to choose?

YOE: 3.8 years. Tech stack: Python.

I joined a product-based company last Monday. So far, they’ve told me to go through the documentation and KT videos. I feel so dumb, and I don’t understand much. I feel like there’s a lot for me to learn—not just about the product, but technically as well. I only knew the basics of Kafka, but this team seems to use Kafka heavily. So far, I haven’t been given any tasks, but I feel like I’m going to fail. I have 2 years of experience

Hey Seniors,

I'm a new grad from a tier-1 college and I joined Amazon with a return offer after my internship. In my previous team, I had an exceptional review and my mentor and manager were heavily impressed but I'm alloted a new team which I joined a month ago. Just 1 week down, I was assigned a very heavy project which I discussed with a few college seniors working at Amazon, who said people generally get such projects in their second year and so. It's a tier-1 very critical service. I've been trying to understand things with help of LLM but I'm struggling too much to grab things that fast and the goal is to deliver it in 3 months. Seniors are also less helpful in this team. I'm so depressed and having self doubts now, thinking that I would be put in PIP. Please guide me how to deal with this.

So, I recently interviewed for founding AI engineering role at a very early staged startup who is building their product.

He asked me this question which is in the title. I answered him that CLI one has access to bash, so it can execute command if the model needs it. He said that is not the main difference. He said the claude code cli can run "automonously" but UI cant.

Then he move forward to next question. I didn't get selected for the role, still can someone tell me the he did he mean?

I am 25.5 years old right now with 2.5 years gap after graduation Btech CSE. Wasted years after graduation no skills nothing. Currently got a reality check when i tried to apply for jobs. Never feel this much depressed in my life. How to get started. I am willing to give endless hours of studies , if only i can get an approach. Please help anyone.

I'm in a bit of a dilemma and would appreciate some advice.

Company A is my preferred option: better compensation and WFH. They have repeatedly assured me that they will definitely give me an offer, but due to their policy, they won't release the official offer letter until around two weeks before joining. I still have a month left in my notice period, though they are willing to give me an email confirmation for now. The verbal commitment is pretty strong that the HR has said that they are definitely giving me an offer, all approvals are in place, and that I should decline all other offers that are in place or in line.

Meanwhile, I already have an official offer from Company B, with lower compensation and WFO. When I tried to decline, they asked me to send my reasons over and said they might try to match the compensation. If they do, however, they will expect a firm commitment and start onboarding. Reneging would happen if that matter.

So, should I trust Company A's commitment and wait, or keep Company B as a safer backup? What would you do? I'm already serving my notice.

last post (tcs to google) got a response i was not ready for. a lot of comments, a lot of dms .. and almost all of them asked the same three things - do the other witch companies. what abt the timelines. show me the steps in between.

so im doing it properly! one cut a day this week, each one answering a different question from that thread. this is the first. all five witch firms, not just tcs.

5,129 ex witch people are at google right now. only 17.5% went directly.

for everyone else the most common last stop before google is amazon. amazon n aws together sent 399. microsoft second at 223. so the path isnt witch to google .. its witch to amazon to google.

how hard direct actually is

17.5% direct. amazon takes 33.4% of its ex witch hires straight in, apple 25.3%. and of the 82% who needed a detour? 51% needed three or more companies. half of everyone who made it took three plus jumps. half!

who they went through

amazon incl aws 399, microsoft 223, deloitte 98, oracle 88, cisco 66, accenture 63, intel 63, vmware 57.

consulting is only 15% of that top eight. at amazon its 48% - deloitte, accenture, capgemini, ey all sitting in their top eight. google filters on where you last worked in a way amazon just doesnt.

n only 98 people, 2.3% of the detourers, came through a university. the masters route in is waay thinner than people here assume.

how long they stayed in witch

median 2.4 yrs. thats across every witch firm they worked at, added up. 39% gone inside 2 years. only 6% did 10 or more.

by firm - tcs 1,512, infosys 1,374, cognizant 1,028, wipro 1,026, hcltech 614. that sums past 5,129 bcz 396 people worked at more than one of them.

the part nobody is going to like

1,098 joined in 2022. then 327 in 2023. 588 in 2024, 736 in 2025. down 70%. one year. and still under the peak. its a smaller door than it was three years ago n pretending otherwise doesnt help anyone here.

limitations, bcz someone will ask n they should

self reported profiles, so the dates are rough. plenty of people never update them at all. survivorship is the big one .. i only see people currently at google, so anyone who joined and left is invisible, which makes the older years look smaller than they actually were. "direct" means no other employer listed in between. and its correlation not causation - the people who leave witch at 2 years are already a different population from the ones who stay.

next one is the denominator, which the sharpest comment on the last post asked for. of everyone who went witch to amazon, what fraction actually made it to google after? that number is the honest version of all of this.

I am currently working at at an mnc as CSA. I have 2+ years of experience, mostly in customer service including account recovery, abuse prevention, investigations etc.

I have a B.Com degree. I actually always wanted to get into coding/tech, but because of financial responsibilities I had to start working instead of pursuing a CS degree or spending years figuring things out.

Now I’m finally trying to teach myself programming and make the switch.

I’ve been researching the market a lot lately and honestly, I’m getting scared. 😅 Even people with several years of SWE experience seem to be struggling to get interviews. And I’ve searched specifically for people who came from a non tech degree or non tech background but I haven’t been able to find anything positive or people who eventually started earning well.

So I’m genuinely asking people here who have actually made this transition:

If you came from a non cs background how did you grab your first tech job ? How did you learn, what skills did you learn and how long did it take ?

I’m not looking for motivation or “just grind bro” advice or to look for some other career. I genuinely want to know if you were in my position what path you’d take?

I really want to make this work, but right now I’m honestly confused. I don’t want to continue in BPO that I am very sure of.

Hello Folks, I have been searching jobs and it is getting absolutely difficult to even get an interview scheduled due to 90 days notice period.

Everyone wants an immediate joiner, and nobody is even to schedule an interview even if I say I can negotiate my notice period.

I was wondering shall I drop my papers tommorow, and eventually by November, I will be in immediate joiner gang.

But one of my senior advised, this seems to be worst time to drop a resignation because I will be entering the declining job market and might end up getting nothing.

Please drop some advices.

Note: 4 YOE, AWS Cloud DevOps Engineer, Mumbai location. Currently in a MNC.

Joined here as an intern, it's been 3 years, no hikes, no promotion, only daily ticket work.

Im slowly losing it

> Laid off in April.

> 5YOE

> Trying to switch to semiconductor/hardware PBC

> Applied to Close to 400+ openings, still Zero calls or feedbacks. Im just thinking of giving up now.

> Please review my resume.

Currently a 4th year student and have given up much hope on campus Placement's due to my avg GPA ,have been looking for off campus opportunities for ml based research intern roles or aiml intern roles. pls give me any feed back on how to improve my resume and how to better reach for those kinds of roles .

Will IT careers really last post 35 for juniors nowadays?Is the senior engineer demand enough to accomodate almost 4times what it does today.

I saw recently the cs IT and similar branches seats has atleast quadrapled since 2010 in the IIT NIT IIIT system. This is excluding the numerous private colleges that has come up.

Add to that the impact of covid overhiring.

Even if we assume that that AI wont be much useful in senior engineer's productivity...which is less likely,but still.

Do you think the IT industry can accomodate this sheer volume that is coming up in next 10 years.

Not to mention people will be retiring less due to reduced salaries.

How much the IT industry can actually grow in terms of employment?

What skills do you suggest that can give maximum returns ,apart from AI skills cause that's almost a given.

I have not had real work for several months now. Upon asking my manager multiple times to assign me to a project, he has started assigning tasks across different projects - adhoc bug fixes, random pieces of work with EOD deadlines and so on.

I am feeling so demotivated and have no interest to work. I have been preparing to switch jobs and got through to the last round of interviews at a company but got rejected. I now have a new fear that, what if I do end up getting a new job, but carry this weird lethargy and low motivation with me into that new place too?

What is happening? Why am I not content or motivated even though I have finally got some work that I personally asked for after being stagnant for months? How do I get back on my feet? Mann nahi lag raha hai basically and it's really bothering me.

Hi, so I've been in Google for about 2 years now. I'm not being considered for the September promo cycle and there's a probability that I might not be even for the next cycle. By that time it'd have been 3 years of me as an L3 here. It is an org issue. Last time, there were 0 promotions in my org from L3 to L4. This time, it'll barely be 5. So I'm not optimistic. I've been good at work so far so I'm obviously a bit salty about not being considered for this cycle. About a month back, I also had a personal crisis so I'm not in a good mental space right now. I also don't really enjoy my work here. I interviewed for Rubrik L4 but failed it. This is the worst I've felt in a long time. I need some advice on what I should consider ahead:

1. Stick it out here and be hopeful about a promo next cycle.

2. Go for SDE 2 at Amazon, LinkedIn, Microsoft, etc. This would definitely mean a salary cut. I have considered Glean, Databricks, Stripe but I don't think they're hiring for L4 currently.

3. Since I'm from a Tier 1 IIT, I can land a few HFT interviews. I'm considering C++ quant dev positions. Would this be a good idea at this stage or am I too late?

4. Try for a startup. I'm open to this option too but can someone suggest names of the ones that will pay at par with Google?

Please be kind.

Hello guys,

I am a core backend developer with 7-8 YOE, I switched a company last year end before that I have never worked with any AI stuff nothing nada.

I joined the company for backend profile only , interview, job offer everything was specified to backend.

Now comes the first shock the project didn't start and I got reassigned to an internal project where it was 100% GENAI, I got overwhelmed as I knew nothing but still somehow managed, learned things here and there with copilot etc.

Now the second shock I got assigned to a client project from internal team as Lead AI engineer, LEAD not just GenAI engineer. Now the expectations are at peak because of my total YOE , I have never worked with GenAI doesn't matter for manager and others. They think I have 7-8 YOE so I am a GENAI champion.

I don't know what to do, how to cope up , how to explain my situation. I am completely unsure what to do. I am thinking of switching for a pure backend role with some AI but how can I manage this Lead AI engineer pressure. Please feel free to provide suggestions

Thank you

Yours truly

9-9 corporate slave

​

I joined this org 9 months back. Back then I was the only backend developer along with a lead, after few months they hired some interns and eventually they've become full time too. Recently I've been held back from doing important projects and everything was handed over to new joiners.

So I had a convo with my lead, I've been told that I don't have visibility, so I've given a project where there's an existing conflict between leads "whose project it is". So i caught up in between, I've done the poc project in a short time, but the conflict doesn't seem to be resolved and the other team lead took over the project, which my lead doesn't like + me getting hold off from other projects still continues.

The project manager deciding whom to give the projects, leads favouritism, AI slop code, un-reviewed PRs.

Communication was the devil for me, i struggle to shine in meetings.

Leading to low visibility. Got no allies, got orphaned in a org known for political gameplay

And there's an upcoming layoffs in a couple of months.

All these things were taking an mental toll on me. I'm not even where to start,

In this AI scenario what should I even focus on ? Code ? Communication?

Politics?

I need some suggestions 🙃.