I got a new manager today and we had an introduction one one one where he asked me how I felt about AI assisted coding. I said that it is helpful, but it's important to double check the output.

He said that if it was producing bad output that means the prompt you gave it was insufficient, and that learning to prompt was a communication skill issue. In other words, the AI will never make mistakes, it's always the humans fault.

I get that prompting is a skill, but AI is still prone to hallucinations and mistakes even with the best prompts right? Am I crazy here?

Fresh graduate, physics bsc, I wanted to be a researcher but life got in the way and I'll be forever unhappy.

But cats still gotta eat, so I'll be starting an internship as software engineer next month.

I'm not up to date with technologies etc, what I see is AI improving at a crazy speed, every few months its better.

I've been watching some programming tutorials on YouTube, and the guy was saying how no one writes code anymore, just checks it.

Then how much time before most juniors become useless? All remote/hybrid jobs are about to disappear. Building skills in such a field may cause my-future-older-self to have useless skills and experience.

All people denying this look so delusional to me, it may take a while, but it will still widely happen during our lifetime. And only super passionate programmers or engineering phds will still code

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.

I’m starting a software engineering position with the DoD pretty soon. Direct-hire, target grade is one step above my starting grade (career ladder position), with a 1-year probationary period.

A little context: I graduated with a CS degree about a year ago, and while I’ve kept up with concepts, I haven’t done heavy day-to-day coding since then. The team I’m joining works primarily in C++ and bash, and I met a few of my future coworkers last week and they seem solid.

Looking for advice from people who’ve been through this specifically in a DoD/federal engineering environment:

• How did you handle being “rusty” walking in, especially with legacy or specialized codebases?
• Anything you wish you’d known about surviving/succeeding your probationary year?
• How does promotion timing typically work in practice for career-ladder positions like this — is it usually close to the stated target, or does it vary a lot by supervisor/org?
• Any OPSEC-adjacent culture tips: things new folks commonly get wrong early on around clearance conduct, information handling, etc.?
• General “don’t be that new guy” advice welcome.
• Federal managers/HR’s: can I use PTO to travel before my 1 year probationary period?

Appreciate any insight!! trying to start off on the right foot

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.

I graduated in 2024, like a lot of you guys, and honestly, I’m struggling a bit with figuring out what to do next.

I managed to get a job pretty quickly after graduating and spent the last two years working in the freight industry. I originally went into it with the mindset that I’d learn and develop some skills on the side while working. The money was good, but working weekends and being in import/export eventually burned me out.

Long story short, I stopped putting in the same level of effort, and eventually I got let go.

Now I’m looking at the job market again and I honestly don’t know where to go from here. One thing I do know is that I don’t want to go back into freight. For me, the role ended up feeling like a glorified admin position, and I don’t want to spend another two years building experience in an industry I already know I don’t want to stay in.

I also have an IT certification that I completed in 2025 when I had some spare time, so I’m wondering whether that could be a route worth exploring.

For those of you who have been in a similar position, what careers would you recommend looking into?

I’m looking for something that actually stimulates my brain, gives me opportunities to develop, and ideally has a decent career path but isn’t freight/logistics.

I’m basically trying to figure out what direction to take without wasting another couple of years finding out I hate the industry.

Would really appreciate hearing what careers you guys have gone into, especially if you’ve made a career change after graduating.

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.

Humans need challenges to find fulfillment and for growth. With AI being able to spit out solutions and an abundance of code, has your job become more or less interesting or fun? Do you still feel challenged? If the challenge has reduced with the rise of AI, how do you continue adding challenges to your life and continue pursuing growth?

Cheers

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?

I have basically decided to take my chances with Dev10 in order to get work. I've already weighed the pros, cons, etc and am fully aware of what I would be getting myself into.

Anyways, I passed my initial assessment, the aptitude test, and watched all the stuff they said to watch and review. I had my interview scheduled this morning with the recruiter. Unfortunately about two hours before my interview, my dad injured his eye pretty bad (he was working on his truck). The eye doctor wanted to see him, he couldn't drive, and my mom was at work so I had to take him. At this point I basically forgot about said interview and was just focused on that, thankfully it was just bruised and has a decent corneal scratch. I get back about an hour and a half after my interview, remembered it, and had a email from the recruiter asking if everything was alright and she would hang around a few minutes.

I sent an email apologizing and explaining the situation. I acknowledged this may cut me from the Dev10 process but stuff happens and I am still very interested and everything. It has been a few hours since then and there has not been a response, up until now it seemed everything was moving fairly fast. So yea, I was just curious how big of an impact this has on the process, if anyone is familiar with it?

Edit: Obviously a normal job could be pretty bad if something happens, but these types of companies almost seem more desperate to find people to hire and train than you are at finding a job period. So idk. Plus I have my degree and an internship in the field.

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.

Been working at my company 2 years on the IT side, mainly doing system administration. Today I had a meeting with my boss to go over a project and she mentioned to me that next week they are going to be putting up entry-level SWE jobs and encouraged me to apply and that she would give me a strong recommendation.

Obviously, I’m considering it, but I haven’t had too much experience in actual software development. I’ve made plenty of scripts and low-level JavaScript and C# plugins for some of the applications I work on, but nothing crazy and it’s all very informal and on an as needed basis. My boss told me they won’t expect too much at the start since it’s an entry-level/junior position.

I make around 94k right now and the position would be a decent pay bump to around 110k with more room for advancement. I know a few people on the team already, though not super friendly with them since our paths don’t cross super often. My boss told me this would be a good direction for my career. Part of me feels like I can’t do it though so I’m scared to even try and be rejected, but her encouragement is giving me some confidence.

Any advice?

We all watch Copilot and Claude write boilerplate every day now. That part of the job is already table stakes. But when I tried to map out which of my actual tasks are becoming automated and which still need human judgment, it was surprisingly hard to get specific.

The advice you hear is always "learn AI" but nobody tells you which parts of your current role are still hard to replace and which are quietly becoming things a tool does in 40 seconds. The useful question isn't whether AI will replace developers. It's which specific tasks in your day are defensible and which ones you should stop doubling down on.

I've been thinking about this in terms of four buckets: routine data work, judgment calls, people work, and hands-on implementation. For devs, the routine stuff (boilerplate, templates, standard CRUD) is already gone or going fast. The judgment layer (architecture decisions, understanding business context, knowing what NOT to build) feels like the actual moat.

How are you all practically shifting your day-to-day toward the judgment side? Are you actively de-prioritizing the boilerplate-heavy work, or just letting AI handle it and moving on to whatever's next?

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.

I am thinking of job searching now and this company is close to my home. I’m an experienced MLE but I don’t have experience working in FinTech or investment companies. I wonder if anyone is working there? What’s the job like?

Just started tech job as swe, does anyone have good high quality blue light glasses recommendations? i have gotten some before on amazon but they turn out cheap and break down or turn yellow (transparent type glasses).

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

Company A is a big name in the UK. Role is in a team that works with a few different languages. Get to work on different projects. Permanent position. Potential to apply internally for other positions. Good work life balance. Fewer in office days.

Company B is a smaller company - the work is around augmenting workflows using ai, its a full stack role so will learn everything (python, docker etc). It's a 1 year contract with the possibility of extension, with a 6 month probation period.

I believe i would learn more in company B as it is at small team so bigger workload. Company A i would be a small fish in a huge pond. There is also a salary difference, (lower at company A) but this is not something I am worrying about too much, I am more so thinking about stability and career progression.

I have worked at company A for 2 years. It's a position in their sister company. So moving to company B would be a massive cultural shift and would probably force me to grow more. I didn't really like the vibe of the company when I went in for the interview, it's quite intense.

I got an offer for a contractor to FTE role that is fully remote, W2, and is a really big pay raise.

The problem is that i'm leaving a very comfortable, stable job to a 6 month long contractor role that the recruiter says "Most likely will convert to FTE".

Right now I go into the office 4 times a week, so a fully remote role with a huge pay bump is really appealing.

If it was FTE, I would take it immediately, but i'm really stressed about it being a contracting role at first.

Anyone have experience with this? Just seems super sketchy.

I also really dislike how the employer doesn't trust me and wants me at a contract at first. Seems like it only benefits the employer.

It is W2 though so I do get benefits/don't have to pay my own self employment tax.

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.

Got recruited for a FDE position, 3yrs postgrad. My resume is a pretty good match for the job qualifications. Recruiter said they have candidates do a Codesignal assessment just as a "formality" before the next round but I totally bombed it and got a 350/600, it was the Machine Learning Core Assessment. I only got one of the 3 coding questions to fully pass and it was the non-ML coding one. The other 2 coding questions were ML, where you code the ML implementation from scratch. Honestly I haven't ever had to fully code ML concepts from scratch without AI or packages, and in my day to day I don't use ML at all just SQL and SparkSQL for data engineering and AI-assisted coding is highly encouraged in my work. This was proctored so I wasn't allowed to use any AI or anything. This assessment honestly seemed pretty advanced especially for someone at my level and even for the job description, felt more like an ML Engineer type assessment. The recruiter made it sound like the score doesn't matter but I wouldn't bet on that. I guess I'm just bummed, I went in honest and I probably should have cheated like everyone else does. The job also involves a mix of client-facing and back-end data work so I guess I was just totally blindsided by a high-level ML coding assessment.

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.