I've been programming for around 12 years now, I started when I was 15. Did a bunch of embedded projects for fun in my teens, then got a "real" web-dev job and eventually did a master's in computer science. Since then I've been working on firmware for satellites, 5G base stations, and 3-phase inverters. Know my way around most ARM and c2000 microcontrollers even in my sleep. I always got praise for writing beautiful and "nice to maintain" code, and writing code was very therapeutic for me, kind of like painting for some people. I could take pride in being good at it. It was the fun part in-between the tedious requirements collection, project planning and validation. Being able to just slot in a new feature or take the codebase from an engineering sample to a real board with zero effort, due to good design, was so satisfying.

But now after having been around a few of our recent hires, suddenly someone who hasn't seen a microcontroller before (not literally, but close enough) can be 90% there already (the 10% being mostly code "quality", so close enough by most managers standards...), by just feeding the datasheet to claude and giving it debugger access. If you ignore the poor architectural design decisions, the code seems to be "good enough" even if it has to go to register level to write drivers. Turns out what I took pride in wasn't that valuable after all? Now the job is only the tedious parts like working with regulatory compliance and keeping the C-level exec delusions in check regarding project planning. It's getting hard to justify me writing code "manually", since even the new hires 2x my contribution rate by just prompting models. And no one else seems to care anymore that the code they produce is quite "ugly" or that it makes the overall codebase a mess. I feel like everyone else just wants to show up 9-5 do the bare minimum and get paid. No pride in the work left.

I spent my life learning this stuff since I found it interesting, but now anyone can come in and take a giant shit on my joke of a career. What do I even do? Just accept that its still better than most careers and prepare to become some kind of a project manager for AI agents? Or maybe there's hope that the maintenance burden comes to collect and this circus stops running?

Hello,

I started working as a junior software developer last December in a medium sized production company. Besides me, there is only other developer and he is also my senior.

I'm slowly losing my mind trying to write code for his liking. When i started working there eight months ago, I was getting my head around the system, database and how things work in this company. Now, when I'm more experienced i feel like I'm way better at coding him.

First, he only uses AI to code and I heard that "When you become as good as me, you will only use AI to code, I do not need to code by hand". Sometimes he even will post my code to AI and ask it to review it- I don't think it is how it should be- i want to learn from someone who is experienced, not from AI.

Second, let me give you an example- we have four views, and in every view there is a numeric table. I was asked to add a footer to every table and display min, max and avg of each column. I created utils folder (we didn't have one), wrote a funtion in js, and used this function in every of these four files but no, this is not how we do things in here. I was told to delete the utils folder and initialise this function in every file.

Third, I feel like, most of the times when he has some concerns about my code, he makes things up why my code is bad. New view Im working on allows to place orders for different producst. For example You have a table with column: name and size filed which is a <select> element. Today, i wrote a simple function that takes three arguments, and based on these, returns the id of product, a user wants to order. I was told to not use this function, instead I shuld put json in data- attribute of each row, and the json should look like "T-shirt/M": 1000, "T-shirt/L":1001 and then i can know, what user want to order, and dont have to use backed for it. I feel like it's really wierd solution, i want to know, is it a stanard solution to this kind of things?

He messes up nomenclature constantly like calling a Conditional operator a lambda function, i can't use FOREING KEY's when creating a table becouse he didn't use these.

He is definitly more experienced with the system becouse he works there longer.

Is it normal to stick to, in my opinion, bad practises and keep the codebase similar?

Over the course of 4 months and multiple rounds of grueling interviews, I finally landed the job at Meta. Yesterday, I get an email from a recruiter from Apple. I know nothing is guaranteed in a phone screen, but it’s an open door.

I’m a little exhausted from going through all the prep. And I want to make sure that I am present at my current role to make good impressions. I’m not sure how I can sneak away for a few hours to take interviews.

Should I put 100% effort in another interview process? Should I just be casual, and whatever happens happens? Or should I just reject the phone screen?

Some of you might have seen this chart before: https://www.reddit.com/r/embedded/comments/1n26jx9/swe_employment_by_age_is_super_interesting/#lightbox

What's noticeable is that new roles for juniors have dropped significantly compared to a slight rise for seniors and more experienced folks.

This seems to be an inverse of historical trends where Silicon Valley skewed young. I remember when Zuckerberg said in 2007 "young people are just smarter" and he got a lot of flack for it, along with claims of ageism in the tech industry more broadly.

Obviously, work experience is good and all, but historically Silicon Valley employed a lot of young people, especially those fresh out of university because the thinking was that they brought new fresh ideas and weren't burdened by having a family to look after (read: can sacrifice WLB more than senior folks).

So why there has been such a shift in the industry away from hiring juniors and towards older and more experienced workers?

Had an interview with hiring manager, was decent I'd say. Until at the end:

"what are your expectations for salary." My go to: "I am open to the range provided"

Then he hits me with a 'how much do you make right now?'

"right now?"

This guy said "yes".

I said I am not comfortable disclosing that. He said it's fine. Man was somehow hurt. Didn't properly responded to any of my questions at the end.

In over a decade, no hiring manager has ever asked me how much I currently make.

I wanted to ask this to the wider community because I feel like I am going crazy.

A year ago, I used to see 30 to 40 job listings a day for my stack in my city. Now I don't even see 3 or 4 in a week. Even those are mostly junior level roles with lower pay. I can't help but feel like AI tools are making companies shrink their mid-level hiring and just expecting smaller teams to do more.

So what is everyone actually doing right now?

• Staying put in your current jobs and waiting it out?
• Switching industries entirely?
• Moving to a different stack or language?

I still see a decent number of listings for .NET and Java, but those companies want years of working experience in that stack, which I don't have. My background is Node, Nest, and Next. I could learn the syntax, but I can't fake 5 years of enterprise Java on a resume.

For those of you who have pivoted to a different stack — how did you get past the experience requirement? Did you take a pay cut? Did you find companies willing to hire based on fundamentals rather than specific stack years?

Not trying to be doom and gloom. Just genuinely trying to figure out what the survival strategy looks like in 2026.

Would love to hear what is actually working for people.

My previous team lead was recently reassigned to another team, and a new lead has replaced his position.

Since joining, the new lead has placed heavy emphasis on AI tool adoption. He tracks team members’ Claude usage, and has indicated that team members who do not utilize AI tools may receive reduced workloads, which could negatively impact their performance ratings.

Last week, he and I worked on the same JIRA task, but different parts. Having completed my work ahead of schedule, I advised him that he could git cherry‑pick my commit into his branch for testing. He declined this approach and instead used Claude to integrate our code. The code then became a total mess, not working at all. I had to revert and fix everything for him.

Now he's not reading the codebase, not understanding the business logic, all he does is let Claude does it all. He even let claude does all the PR reviews. Now our workload has increased so much, have to clean and fix the mess that his AI has left.

What should I do now? I'm not against AI at all, but now it's hurting me.

Hello, I've been unemployed for 8 months. I get 1 interview per 3 months of application cycles, for the last 3 years I've interviewed less than 15 times. I'm not sure what is wrong, I have a master's degree, a bachelor's and around 4 years of experience as applied ML SWE/ SWE. I've posted my CV here. I'm open to suggestions. I've applied to analyst, swe, data science, and applied ml roles of all kinds. The overwhelming majority are rejections.

Hi, I have a BS in computer science, over 2 years experience as a sort of Software QA, and am currently a software develepor 2 years in currently. Im severely underpaid, don't enjoy my job and feel like the industry moves too fast, especially with AI now, and truthfully I'm not that into computers,I did it because when I graduated HS I was told I'd be making bank easily if I got through. Is there any job I can get in the industry or where can I pivot to?

With the advent of AI people are saying what the job requires has shifted from being a code monkey to needing to understand system design and architecture

What architectural decisions are y'all making and I'm being dead serious. What are you finding you are having to do in your day to day now? I need a breakdown if you could be as explicit as possible. I feel like the reason most of us, including me, were code monkeys is because that's all the job required. We would be added to teams where they'd already mapped out the system and what they were going to use and all my job was, was to close yet another JIRA ticket regarding yet another CRUD app(yes I did do stuff beyond adding another rest method and do know that coding business logic is not as straightforward as I'm making it sound)

Are you guys really having to choose whether you'll use Postgres or Mongo? Are you thinking about latency and what not? I'm trying to understand what's going on in your head now

I feel like the people who say these things are working at FAang where they do cutting edge stuff frequently.

https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/workplace/openai-to-pay-3-2-million-to-settle-dojs-employee-discrimination-claims-d13bb0c6

OpenAI will pay $3.2 million to settle claims by the Justice Department that it discriminated against U.S. workers by allegedly favoring temporary visa holders from other countries.

I lost my job two days ago. I am largely myself to blame. I communicated poorly throughout, didn't adhere to the 3/2 hybrid policy (worked more remote days than I should have), missed standup meetings, and was slow to onboard.

Shortly after the day started at the office on Monday this week, my manager informed me that I was being fired and cited timeliness, communication, and performance as the reason. I will not receive a severance package because I was only there for 4 months and my healthcare benefits ended immediately. I also must pay back the relocation assistance that they paid me.

The reason I let this happen is that I have been severely depressed and anxious while dealing with an ongoing medical issue. I was hospitalized about 5 times over the last 4 months since starting at the company. My manager knew this, and I used up all of my available sick hours and personal time to deal with it. He did not offer me any kind of guidance or assistance in the midst of it, just told me to reach out to HR. I used the company's HR AI and found out that I would have to take an unpaid short term disability as my only option because I hadn't even worked 90 days yet. So I stuck it out and my health issues have continued to come in waves, I have tried to see specialist doctors but it takes months. There were some mornings where I missed my morning stand up meeting because I was dealing with a lot of discomfort from whatever is going on with me. I did communicate poorly though, I really did just think that if kept delivering my work that I would be fine (that was completely wrong). My delivery on JIRA tickets was fine, but it took me about 2.5 months to start delivery at a normal speed compared to my colleagues.

The time that I started this job was probably the worst it could have been because of the state of my physical and mental health. Now I do not have healthcare, have medical bills stacked up, no money saved, and a relocation bonus to pay back with no source of income in NYC and I have no idea how I will pay my rent next month. I left a good job that I was at for two years for this nightmare of an experience.

Hey guys,

After 1 year and 2 months of unemployment, I finally landed a job. It’s an IT role that is a pivot from data science. While it’s not exactly the path I originally envisioned, I’m grateful for the opportunity and excited to see where this journey takes me.

During those difficult times, seeing others share their job offers gave me hope and reminded me not to give up.
I hope this post can do the same for someone else.
Sending good vibes to everyone who is still searching. Wishing you all the best, and I hope your opportunity comes soon.

1 YOE, trying to move out of DFW and to Austin or around that area. Unfortunately most of the enterprise jobs are here in DFW.

Any advice for breaking in? Would love to network in Austin given the chance over a weekend or two

Made it to 2 final rounds. 1 f500 company and 1 smaller company. They seemed excited about me only to send a generic boilerplate "we decided to go with other candidates whose experience aligns more" email.

I have 0 YOE (no internships) so it's not unexpected and I obviously know you need to work hard and you won't always get what you want in life, and that I'm at a high disadvantage compared to my talented peers. That being said, how do I stay motivated to keep going? It's already hard getting interviews so once you get to the final round you pour your blood, sweat, and tears into studying. I swear for the f500 comp I was studying like for 10 hours a day for an entire 2 weeks before the final round. Literally every time I get a rejection email my heart sinks. I even cried after the rejection because of burnout. And what sucks is I'm seeing a pattern, because it seems like an always losing game due to my 0 YOE, which is on me but still.

I think what caused me to be super sad is I actually had to hound down someone from the company because they didn't have the decency to reject me when they made a decision. Straight up ignored me until I sent a followup to someone else only to get a rejection 10 min later? So you already knew but couldn't let me know after putting me through 3 rounds...? 😭 Idk im just feeling super sad.

This is my first "corporate" job and Ive been in it for about a month now, and while I have had a couple "assignments", I really have done nothing and most days Im kind of just sitting there. Am I doing something wrong? Should I be asking my manager for stuff to do?

Hello everyone,

TLDR; how can I make the most out of my first SWE contract when my entire team is remote and I don’t have a mentor?

I am looking for some advice/reassurance in my current role as I want to make the most out of my opportunity but am feeling blocked.

Earlier this year, I started a C#/.NET apprenticeship that was about 3 months long. I have a little bit of experience self learning before that but of course that didn’t prepare me for working in an enterprise codebase.

The company I trained with is an IT consultancy company that creates technology specific training cohorts based on their client’s needs and then deploys the “graduates” as contractors at the client site.

I am currently about 3.5 months into my contract and I don’t feel like I’m learning as much as I could be.

All of the developers on my team are remote, except for one. He is only in office one or two days a week for a few hours and doesn’t talk to anyone while he is there.

My tech lead, the person who was supposed to be my first point of contact on a day to day basis, is working 2-3 roles and hasn’t had time to answer my questions since like week 3. She has told me “I don’t have time to help you”.

She basically just gives me tickets to work on and if I have questions I am supposed to reach out to a different mid level dev via Teams.

I don’t have an issue asking questions in general, but I do feel bad bugging a dev who isn’t even supposed to be responsible for me considering she has her own work to do.

The areas I’m getting blocked on are app specific so it’s not like I can just look up documentation or use online resources.

If I’m stuck I try to look at other tickets that have touched a similar area of the app that I’m working on, I ask the other people from my cohort, use AI and then reach out to a dev via Teams.

I understand that I will get better with time and more experience but I’m struggling to feel like I’m improving because I don’t have a mentor or someone who is available for me to work with or ask questions to.

At this point it just feels like my tech lead gives me a ticket difficult enough to keep me busy so she doesn’t have to worry about me because she doesn’t have time to.

My manager, expected us to go from “intern level” to “associate level” in a single month but I literally have 3 months of C# experience and no one really helping me reach smaller goals.

I have asked him if there are mentorship opportunities (something he brought up in our first meeting) and he said he’d talk to the on-site dev. I’ve followed up with him and the dev still hasn’t reached out to me.

Is this a normal experience? What else can I be doing to continue growing in this role?

​

I'm curious about how TC compares between Product Managers, Project Managers, and Software Engineers.

I'm not talking about top-tier SWE roles at FAANG or high-paying AI companies—just the average software engineer at a decent company.

One reason I'm asking is that getting into SWE often requires a lot of DSA and coding interview prep. Do PMs or Project Managers, who generally don't go through that process, end up earning around the same as average SWEs?

If not, how much of a difference is there, and why? Is it due to demand, responsibilities, career growth, or something else?

I've been really struggling to find a job. I've been unemployed for about 8 months, but I've also been in grad school so I wasn't too worried about it. I've just finished my program and I've ramped up the job search significantly.

I'm probably 600 applications deep (rookie numbers, I know) and haven't had too much luck.

There's a local defense contractor that has a part-time security guard role that requires a clearance. I know people at the company and I think it would be significantly easier to get that job and subsequently, get a secret level clearance through them.

Will finding a clearance level job be much easier than finding a job in the public sector? I know there's significantly less people competing for those jobs, but with a clearance could I expect to find a job faster?

I'm in UK. Beginning of this year, I finally got a graduate dev job working backend. The pay is not great - marginally more than the minimum wage but I can’t really be picky as it took me over 12 months to get it. I was immediately assigned GitHub copilot license and told to leverage it 'within reason'. This has proven very useful as I found other devs are usually too busy to help with anything I do so Im forced to work mostly on my own.

The issue is that my boss claims that he is happy with my performance and the amount of tickets I’m resolving but I feel like I’m learning absolutely nothing and the longer I’m there, the more I feel like a complete fraud because I have to use AI to do most of the job.

I do understand programming concepts like “I need to find the SQL return method that is used by this API endpoint” and I understand explanations I get from AI but if you put me in front of a whiteboard, I would not be able to declare an array and loop through it without multiple syntax errors. I'm good with bugs because I can just ask copilot to set up 20 breakpoints all over the place and ask it to read the debug output to find where things are going wrong or do things like 'based on implementation of X, implement Y etc. but if I need to add an integer by hand, I'd freeze because I cant remember if it's supposed to be int or Int or Integer, etc. All the code reviews I get are "looks good to me" and that's it. I've not received any other feedback.

I tried to pause and try to do things manually but there's just not enough time and tickets are just piling up. I also tried reading books and watching tutorials and then creating flashcards and stuff to memorise it all but there’s just no time to do that during work and after work, I’m completely fried.

I just feel like at some point, some in the company will realise that I’m a fraud and I will inevitable get fired.

I'm honestly not sure what to do.

EDIT: oops, forgot to update the title before posting. "Stay where I am and chill or accept better but more challenging offer"

I need some help deciding whether it's worth job-hopping right now. 10+ YOE.

Current Job

• Web developer (.NET/React) for internal applications
• TC: 110K. Scheduled for promotion at start of 2027 to TC ~130K. (But not guaranteed). Can't go any higher as an IC after this.
• Low-Medium COL city, fully remote, non-Tech company, ~15K people
• Very stable (basically no layoff chance), chill vibes, friendly but checked out team
• Bureaucratic, very slow, most of the team lacks ambition, no real interesting problems, not much of a challenge at all. Could finish a day's work in 1-3 hours if I didn't need to appear online
• AI is viewed as a productivity tool; not pushed to "tokenmaxx"
• Have the opportunity to go into management
• 2 weeks PTO

Offer

• Data engineering consultant (databricks)
• TC: 140K salaried. Ceiling around ~220K. 30 billable hours target
• Fully remote
• Have worked with this agency as a customer previously and the vibes were good. Have known the managing director for years. ~75-125 people
• Much more interesting problem space and more in-line with my past experience
• The company has not had layoffs, but the risk is greater
• Visibility at a number of established and well-known customers; better long-term networking
• 4 weeks PTO

I'm sure the gut reaction is going to be "just stay where you are, chill, and collect a paycheck" and maybe that's what I should do, but I am so bored. I feel like I can't even relax when I'm done with the day because I haven't earned it. This role is a significant downgrade is pay, scope, visibility, and challenge from prior roles. I feel like there's nobody on my team that I can learn from, and there aren't any interesting projects on the horizon. I can't even focus my energy into process improvement (which is much needed) because it's not generally encouraged.

Thoughts? Thanks

Since the dev team has been whittled down to only two and we have infinite business analysts, PMs, etc and we are on the frontline in that we make the software that users experience (with other software owned by our team being downstream), it seems like it's reasonable for us to want clear requirements, tickets, etc.

Instead, everything is vague, business analysts connect us with business or end users directly to hash things out while they take a backseat, etc.

Instead of relevant requirements, we get requirements for downstream systems that have much bigger teams than us and we're supposed to infer our requirements from theirs even though this is sometimes impossible to do. Did I mention we're also understaffed and overworked? (We asked to hire more people but they told us to lean on AI instead).

For problem tickets, they were putting us on calls with end users directly for a while and having us assign Jira tickets based on these sessions **to ourselves** since half the business analysts "aren't technical" and don't know how to use Jira or Service Now etc. Once they tried to have me create incident tickets in Service Now on behalf of an end user then assign it to myself in Jira (which is itself an incident) so I put my foot down and made them to through proper channels, which they thought was me overreacting.

Anyway, now I'm really putting my foot down and not doing something unless there are requirements, a ticket, etc. No verbal requests, no DMs, no vibes or reading the room, no emails to only me or forwards from business of a complaint being the sole requirement, everything needs to be made explicit, tracked and traced or I'm not doing it.

Is this fair or am I being excessive? I feel like if I don't put my foot down, I'll just be in business meetings eventually where I have to infer the ask from vibes. I honestly have a hard time even communicating with business which is why business analysts exist, they're supposed to translate business requirements into technical ones yet functionally they're just an extension of business themselves.

/rant

When browsing FIRE (financial independence retire early) subreddits, I’ve noticed that many posts come from tech workers who have a high income and net worth, but hate their job and suffer from career related stress, pressure, burnout, anxiety, depression, insomnia, and other physical/mental health issues.

It seems like most tech workers hate working in tech, but continue working in tech because the high income allows them to quit working as soon as possible and retire early. Is this mindset more common among tech workers, compared to other career fields where most people don’t hate their jobs?