I had a post yesterday asking how I would navigate an HR meeting where I was sure I'd be fired.

https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/1w5pzs5/third_meeting_with_hr_tomorrow_just_take_sick/

I attended the meeting, today's my last day, the company policy is that there's no severance for performance based firing, but they gave me about 5 paychecks' worth of severance.

I asked what new issues came up since the last HR meeting for them to decide to fire me, since I know I had no complaints at all, they just gave some vague response that my overall progress was not satisfactory, and couldn't give any reason remotely specific.

They mentioned one concern was my use of company AI tokens, which was <70% of my given quota, lol what BS

It's clear there's really nothing to say at this point, and it was inevitable.

At least the severance is a cushion for the next steps.

I got laid off last year from big tech, so my most recent memory of work was the good ol’ days where code was mostly human written, but slightly AI assisted. Guess you can say I’m an outta touch grandpa with how much AI really infiltrated the day to day.

I went to a dinner party and met some peeps, all the way from Junior to Senior SWE who kept their jobs and work at mid to high tier companies (de facto big tech, or fintech).

They claim they legit spend the whole day prompting completely and haven’t coded at all in months. I’ve always anticipated the “prompt engineering is the future” buzz, but I didn’t expect it to be this rampant and 100%. I thought on some level, the risk of code reviews going wrong would keep most devs uncomfortable with blanket automating everything.

They legit say they’d struggle to write basic code on an IDE live if asked and have become heavily reliant on Claude or other agents. They say they haven’t written mere lines in months.

We all know the brain doesn’t retain much well by passive reading and writing is arguably the only way to actually have a skill.

Is this happening to you guys? Are you seeing this at large?

Just got fired today, been applying for a month, submitting 20-30 applications daily, with just one recruiter calling back so far.

It would be nice to hear people who were both fired/laid off etc and also got a job in this horrible market.

Please go ahead and comment, share your joy.

Whole teams laid off at mag7, and all laid off teams were exported to India.

The only work available for Americans is contract offers for $20 to train your AI replacement as the norm now.

What the news isn't talking about at all, is that all the layoffs in all the FAANG companies are immediately replaced by India.

The demand for labor actually increases when you get more productivity from AI. But, companies realized they can get 4-5x more labor by exporting it. So by offshoring teams, you could be getting up to 10x the output. The opportunity cost of hiring blue collar in U.S. is too high.

A $20/hr salary in US is equivalent to a $200k salary in India, where buying power is 4.6x than of the United States.

So you can pay a senior Indian engineer the salary of a costco worker in the states. And they'll have the buying power of a doctor in U.S. This is a similar arbitrage case for the Phillipines as well.

If your job can be exported at 1/5 the cost, you will be geoarbitraged by your employer.

What does this mean for juniors? There's 0 hiring of them, training new hires is extremely expensive. Given the opportunity cost, the demand for juniors has dropped to basically 0. There's probably a >95% chance a junior is hired through nepotism in this environment.

Geoarbitrage hiring is only accelerating, with layoffs of domestic workers accelerating as well.

I would not recommend cs over any physical job that is resistant to offshoring. It's unlikely that politicians will do anything when their pockets are enriched from equities earnings growth.

Mid dev in a small startup.

Last week our freelancer devops guy added more server instances for our app and it was a disaster.

I had to cover him for the whole week help find and analyze bugs it caused.

Yesterday when the situation finally calmed down, I went straight to the CEO office, put my big balls on his table and asked for a raise + moving some of his responsibilities to the in-house dev team.

Today the devops guy found that I accidently leaked our env file...

our backend language has a build in function which prints a nicely html of some harmless configs like max execution time and memory which I use sometimes to debug so I thought why not serve it through a random get route for easier access through our environments.

I didn't know that if you don't pass params to this function it also prints the whole server secrets and their mothers.

Honestly, I'd expect the opposite. I hate PHP.

What a day

TLDR: more senior developer has become a slopmonger, this makes it really hard to review their code or documentation. What do?

My company, and specifically my org director, are fully committed to using Claude Code. Most developers use it sensibly. I personally only use it for find-and-replace type changes that require a little bit more effort than a clean swap, boilerplate code, and as a way not to have to learn CLI tools’ syntax for one-off stuff.

But a senior dev in my team (for reference I’m mid-level) has replaced basically their entire output with Claude Code. Which I have no** issues with in principle, but it also makes it really hard to work with them.

Right off the bat, 2-3k lines changed per MR, minimum.

Descriptions are full of jargon and formatting that makes it hard to read. They are also extremely long.

Code is full of nonsense: Tests that cover things like a variable being equal to the expected value immediately after assignment, comments that refer to the design doc for the feature being implemented, etc.

And the worst part imo, whenever I leave a review, I immediately get a reply addressing it that is very clearly Claude output. I can only assume they have some sort of automation for this.

I am very supportive of people optimizing their work with whatever tools are provided. However I feel like this is to the detriment of everyone else. I am not sure how to bring it up though, we have had sessions with my team to address MR size before, but it didn’t do anything.

I don’t feel comfortable calling them out in a public or private setting because every time this person receives constructive criticism, they double down. On top of them being a lot more experienced on paper and probably in practice as well.

i am tempted to just let ai review their code and wash my hands. but i dont want to be associated with approving code that i dont really understand due to the sheer size and complex

Any suggestions?

Edit: ** no issues

Applied to two positions.

The first position was a bait and switch where the position was listed as remote and was last minute changed to relocate at own expense.

For the other position the interview was cancelled 15 minutes before the scheduled meeting without any communication.

My overseas colleagues barely do any work

I work at an EU based company with some presence in the US. My team is one of the teams with some members in America, and I've been in 2 different teams now with this setup over the last couple of years. Naturally, we only overlap for a few of hours, towards the end of my EU working day and the start of the US working day. However, Im increasingly noticing that despite working on the exact same sprint and BAU, the US colleagues do much less.

Some of it is an imbalance of where the expertise is spread.

Our manager and principal engineers are here in our HQ, so there will often be decisions and questions they just can't get to the bottom of and have to delay it to the next day. We have on-call & support shifts, but most queries and issues will naturally come up in our busier EU markets and so even though we have the same "expectations", anything barely happens in the US time zones that the workload is just so obviously different to me.

But most annoyingly, I feel like some people purposely take advantage of this time difference to do much less work but exaggerate how much they seem to do. The most common patterns are:

- We have team meetings and standups in the hours we cross over. EU folks will talk about what they've done in the day but US folks will mention what they plan to do that day. Often, they say shit like "I was gonna do this first thing today, but we had the other meeting this morning, so i'll work on this today". They hardly ever mention what they did the previous day and for whatever reason this is never asked of them either.

- The day goes by for them, and they have a question that requires someone from the EU team or our manager. So the next day, this is raised as a "blocker" during standup. If we've responded to their question they'll say something like they're gonna "chew on it" , which typically means nothing else will be done till the next day.

- 4 days after this back and forth, they will finally post a PR to be looked at, and most of the time none of the other US engineers want to make the call to approve it since "Marco will know best about this part, so probably would be good for him to look at it" (there are various Marcos in the EU for different parts of our work, but none in the US despite everyone being "senior engineers" at the same seniority on paper) so again the merge has to then wait until the next day.

- If god forbid there's a review comment, then best believe their standup update the next day will be "I got my PR raised and I think i got some PR comments to look through today" - meanwhile its a minor clarification that theyve now made seem like their whole day is about to be taken up.

- The same process wouldve taken the EU folks a day or 2 of an active discussion in a slack thread, immediate decision making, writing the PR, and getting it reviewed. All summarized under "Today I closed this ticket".

All the while, in the time between those "blockers" and "chewing on things" they have the aforementioned non-existent support queue, very few alerts/incidents to deal with, and no PRs from the EU team awaiting their review. But they are also not picking up more work in between waiting around for us so truly, what the heck do they get up to most of the day?

Anyways, im moreso pissed at the management and organization that have lead to this being a very easy pattern to fall in to. I couldn't care less if you wanna do as little work as possible, heck don't we all. But their "less work" is typically at the expense of more work for us, meanwhile we're paid at the same grade.

Just curious because people on here seem to hate daily standup meetings. Its true that it can waste time but my company does it and it's like 15 minutes everyday. And as a more junior dev, I do see it as kinda useful. I think there are hundreds of things I can complain about before daily standup.

I've been at my current job for 7+ years. Was just notified today that my contract will not be renewed and ends by November. While I appreciate them telling me this early, I'm at a lost of words as I haven't navigated job hunting and interviews since ages ago. I am also guilty of not staying on top of all the new tech as much as I should. Finally looked at my resume earlier and holy jeez I need an update. I'm looking for direction, maybe some advice or info to help me cope. Luckily my wife works, so we won't be struggling too much. But she makes little less than half of what I make.

My wife and my kids are my life. But with the recent devastating news, I'm not sure where to go from here. It's a bummer because you stay so loyal and work your butt off only to get treated like a business transaction.

Got placed into a project where the scope was not defined well and I have to figure everything out myself. I got my design turned down by senior engineers like 3 times cus there were flaws I could not anticipate or answer. I’m really fucking tired and I think I’ll be stack ranked and piped out of here given my talk with my manager’s expectation. Manager is allocating more people to my project but idk if that will be enough. I also have not taken vacation days and work about 9 hours per day. Sometimes I work during the weekend designing just for it to get thrown away.

I really question if this career is even right for me considering I am not that smart and various attributes are making the job market worse. I already lost like two internship return offers cus of my bad performance. This is a repeating thing probably cus of poor communication or something, but I don’t know what to do with my life. I have no friends or family to fall back to rn. I made a similar reddit post I taken down two weeks ago.

My four years at college and this job has finally made me mad and insane. I have nothing now except a money flow that will run out soon. I want to find a very stable job that pays decently at this point. I only done CS cus I like video games and computer I never expected my life to be like this.

Will probably take this post down. I wanna vent to people who will probably say I suck or I am an AI bot farming views. I’ll update my resume I guess. I really hate my life rn.

I just got this feedback after an interview. It’s not the first time I’ve gotten this feedback. My former manager used to complain about me being reserved as well. Not relevant but I actually got dumped a few months ago because my ex thought I was too reserved for him 😭.

I’m a software developer and I work in an open office with a bunch of other developers. The office is extremely loud, almost like being in a cafeteria. Everyone talks loudly, nobody wears headphones, and people constantly interrupt each other.

I haven’t been here very long, and I feel really bad wearing noise-cancelling headphones because my team is very close and has a very “family” culture. I feel like wearing headphones could come across as antisocial or like I don’t want to interact with them.
The problem is that the noise is becoming unbearable.
I’ve started wearing noise-cancelling headphones because otherwise I genuinely struggle to concentrate and get my work done. People also interrupt me while I’m working, which makes it even harder to get into a focused state.

I’m trying to stay employed and adapt to the culture instead of making a big deal out of it, but I’m finding it really difficult.

How would you handle this without coming across as rude or antisocial?

I’ve been a full-time SWE for a little over two years. It’s alright. I love coding and have released several apps and video games as side projects, but I am not crazy passionate about the day to day responsibilities of my actual job. 

I work for a mid-sized, non-tech company and it is extremely chill. I rarely work more than 6 hours a day and my team is great. TC 100k. 

I recently interviewed and was accepted for a fullstack role at a tech startup. Base is 170k. Though small and new, the company seems to have a good reputation in its niche and is growing rapidly.

This probably seems like a no-brainer, but I’m quite torn. A 70k salary increase is obviously significant, but the work environment will be significantly more demanding as well. I don’t know anyone at this company and have seen mixed reviews online re: its workplace culture. 

I was hoping to hear from SWEs with more wisdom and experience than myself who have been in similar situations when deciding between roles. On the one hand I have a stable job with incredible WLB and a team of genuinely good people. However, this role does not offer me much upwards mobility, the work can be quite boring, and I live in a high COL part of the US. On the other hand, I have an offer that will require 50 hour minimum weeks every week and could potentially have a really toxic culture. However, the work is more interesting and impactful, and the salary is a huge step up. 

Any advice would be appreciated. I know that ultimately, it comes down to what I personally care about more (free time vs $$$ mainly) but I wanted to make sure there weren’t any other factors I should be considering. 

I'm a CS grad. I was never interested in this field, I hated coding. I only got into this field because my friends and family really insisted that it is a really good field with high pay.

Fast forward now. I'm struggling. I hate debugging. I hate getting stuck with a functionality or project. I hate developing things from scratch. I have certain strengths with communication, assessing user expectations and roadmapping products etc but I HATE CODING. I hate being a developer. I'm so tired of being slow and lost at everything I touch.

I keep getting complaints and fired at nearly every job I take. Im almost 25 with not even 1 year experience.

I'm not making any money. I'm not having a good work life balance. I'm stressed out. I picked the wrong career. I should have listened to what my heart feels and not what others tell me when choosing my life decisions.

I feel so frustrated and almost suicidal because of my unemployment. Not to mention my plummeting mental health with anxiety and depression unrelated to the work makes my work interactions even worse. I'm so unsuited for this. I want an escape. Is there no saving for me? Do I just quit everything and just start a business or some shit? Do I just become a home maker and and let my partner handle all our expenses? I don't know what to do. But I sure know my parents see me as a pathetic failure and an embarrassment compared to all my tech savvy high earning cousins.

We have started in a team with 3 projects, (1,2,3 for easyness). 1 is seperate, but 2 and 3 are closely related where I was responsible for 1 and 2 and another for 3.

There was a period where many of our senior developers and software architects left for different jobs, and I was asked to fill in the role. I was working for 3 years at the company at that point (now 1 year ago), but liked the challenge and idea to be more responsible for decision making and architecture.

This worked pretty well for projects 1 and 2, but now project 3 is something I am not getting my head around. My teammates, one junior dev 3,5yoe and another senior with 11yoe are better versed in the core principles of the project, and just seem to grasp the overall issues and logic better. I have a feeling I am not really fit to handle the architecture for the project. They recently noted that they were lacking some vision in the project. We have a tight deadline and very busy schedule to deliver an MVP and I did not have the time or mental space to think about vision after this MVP yet. Mostly I handle certain new architectural questions that are needed for MVP, but am still a lot of the time developing.

But all in all, the last time I have been feeling more and more that I was the wrong person to be asked for this role. I have received positive reviews however, and am still learning and growing. But I feel I am not doing a good job if the other colleagues seem to handle what should be my responsibility better.

Are there other people with similar experiences, how was this for you? Is this a normal feeling?

Man it's absolutely brutal. Ppl are stack ranked and I heard atleast 15% under my skip manager are given below expectation on ratings and are either given a PIP/GVSA(4 months pay) or terminated immediately depending on the rating. Seeing so many posts on internal blind. Worse than Amazon with stack ranking this time jeez

I am looking for experience devs to help me answer this question

I have 6 YOE as a full stack dev. I have built SAAS solutions from the ground up but never where the issue of scalability had become a problem that we'd require cloud.

I have build solutions in the cloud but never to the point where the product was experiencing thousands of users

I want to advance in my career and while I will be undertaking cloud and architectural certificates, we all know that hands-on experience triumph theory. I feel until I am working in high demand, high data environment, I will not understand distributed systems wholly

Has anyone ever been here and what have they done to bridge that gap

Hi all, so out of desperation I took a job in graphics programming where all I do is just prompt like an idiot. I am not required to work on any complex systems or anything like that due to security issues. So im stuck here just doing openGL stuff. Very low visibility unimportant stuffs.

The main problem is, after my contract ends im absolutely FUCKED because im not making anything relevant to today's market. I am just a labourer for shit nobody cares about. People there also dont really see me as part of their team and more of a pseudo dev and honestly its depressing af, its not great to be treated like you're invisible.

I am looking for serious advice, I am a noob and im not from CS, I only know basic stuffs. How can I buff up my side projects, which direction should I be looking at, maybe open source I can contribute to? I dont know a lot of things but I will do anything to get out of this rut. If anyone here has projects looking for people to work on I would be interested to hear as well. Thank you for reading

Syntax feels like the obvious thing that matters less now. There isn't much value in remembering every method or writing boilerplate from memory when a tool can do it instantly.

Debugging is different.

Getting code that runs is easy. Knowing why it runs, what assumptions it makes, and whether it's going to cause problems somewhere else in the codebase still takes actual understanding.

One thing that seems worth teaching juniors is to treat generated code almost like code they inherited from someone else. Read it, question it, test it. If something looks unfamiliar, go figure out what it does instead of just leaving it because the tests passed.

There's a useful exercise here too: ask AI for two different ways to solve the same problem. REST vs a queue, sync vs async, whatever fits the task. Comparing the tradeoffs probably teaches more than just asking it for "the solution."

Curious how people mentoring juniors are handling this. What skills are you pushing harder now, and what have you basically stopped caring about?

Hiya friends!

I've had long amounts of time to consider whether as sabbatical is right for me for 6-9 months starting next year and have decided to go ahead and do it and step away from my job! Financial advice aside, I'm curious what tips you folks have on things to remember / do just before a sabbatical, during, or even near the end. Things like health insurance or other factors to consider before coming back, I'd love to hear about.

Lots of the time posts are around *if* someone should go on a break, so I'm wondering what to do during to keep myself fresh and ready to re-enter and any tips folks have!

I am a multi-year experience fullstack dev and I don't see my future in this industry, not necessarily because I think our industry is doomed, I just don't see myself in it long-term. what are the obvious choices for our skillset to move into?

I previously had 1 year and 7 months of experience as a .net developer. Then I pivoted to a business intelligence and consulting role, mostly because it was the only company that accepted me at that time. Been here for 11 months.

I still want to pivot back towards SWE. It's a career path I've wanted to follow ever since a young age. I'm still applying to different companies right now for SWE roles, and to be fair, my title at my current job makes it seem like I'm still doing dev work on my resume, so it's not too bad.

I got a job offer as an Integration Engineer. Better compensation and better yearly raises (10% minimum raise every year + 25% higher salary as opposed to 3% raise yearly). There wasn't even a raise this year since the company preferred to invest that money into AI (I'm not kidding that's actually what they said, in a more corporate way).

That said, my current role is pretty good because it's fully remote + very chill. I'm talking like 4-5 hours of work a day on average. Sometimes it can go higher.

My problems here are: - low compensation compared to peers (I heard from my seniors who started 3-4 years ago, junior salaries used to start at 65% higher than my current one) - Low raise every year unless promoted

The pros are: - I still get to keep the title of developer, so I can indeed still apply to developer related jobs - Career ladder is very well defined. If i continue here, i'm pretty confident I can get a promotion every 2 years because I'm doing very well, and I've gotten good compliments from clients and managements - It's opened up to me opportunities to do more interviews for Big Data and Consulting roles. I haven't gotten a job offer for these yet, but it's surprising how much better it made my response rate in job applications (100% for consulting roles).

If I take the integration engineer role, I feel like I'll be even more pidgeon holed than I am right now. But the new company also promised me they could help me transition into an AI engineer role later on considering I'm doing a masters in AI right now.

I've been reading a lot of posts online, and it seems like the general advice is to not use a job offer to get a counter offer from your current company because it could lead to trust issues or issues where they may fire you later on. My preferable end goal right now is to work as a backend software engineer. I don't even want a higher salary, I'd be perfectly happy if it was my current salary with that role. If I transition into an integrations engineer role would it hinder my opportunities to work backend later on?

Any advice on this would be appreciated!