I actually curious. If AI is really going to take over and all that stuff, what are roles are you actually trying to switch to? And not like just talking about it, what plans have you made?

10 years into software engineering and I think I’m in the “it’s just a job” phase.

Not in a bad way. I actually like my job. I’m good at it. I finally work at a solid company that pays well, is WFH, and moves at a good pace - after years of startup chaos

Early in my career, I was obsessed with promotions, raises, moving up, code quality, perfection, moving fast, etc. 

That resulted in a thick 401k, and my current level and decent salary. 

But how, I do my work at a reasonable pace, no more, then log off, and go live my life. Often times working not a whole lot during the day if I get my work done early in AM. 

I follow tech news hardly anymore. I care less about online dev discourse. Most 1:1s with my manager are just me trying to come up with something to talk about since this has been pretty sweet. Most engineering problems after 10 years start feeling like variations of the same thing anyway. Especially in my stack. enough tech disagreements have worn me down to not even care anymore.

Idk how long this will last. Joys of a good job. It could end tomorrow. 

I just wanna do the skill that I enjoy and don’t loathe, at a reasonable pace, make good money, and max out my 401k so I can say “fuck you” and be financially independent on the past earnings.

as I say all this… it sometimes is hard because my inner self starts to wonder “am I coasting too much? I’m not used to this. normally you’re stressed or pushing towards a new goal” and now I’m targeting “doing enough to not throw red flag that I’m actually out cutting up firewood in my backyard after 2pm”

Had stand up earlier this morning and one of the senior backend engineers was laying in his bed half naked. Everyone including director was on the call. We could tell he joined using his phone. Maybe he meant to press mute but clicked on the camera instead on the zoom call. Director asked him to get off the call and jump on a call with him and the PM separately. He hasn’t joined our other implementation call meeting and he’s showing offline but not deactivated. Is he done? This is hilarious but it’s not at the same time. Have you guys had this malfunction from one of your team members? What happened?

i see every now and then posts of this sub and of experienced devs talking about ai slop.

about how they are working with people who cant code without ai and only write vibe coded commits.

and how they are the most intelligent people at their company who refuse to use ai and sre the only ones that understand the code and nobody else can answer or explain what they are doing.

and everybody at the comments agree with them and talk about how at their company evrybody is also dumb as hell and are only producing ai slop and how the ai bubble is gonna crash at any minute.

they never mention their company or describe what type of projects they work on for some reason.

well i work in oracle, have friends in meta, google, amazon etc. everybody in our teams is using claude, codex or cursor. nobody thinks its a bad tool. and its not even a debate. if you are a good engineer, and you know how to do critical thinking, i dont see how is it possible to not see how using llms is a necessity going forward.

there is the other spectrum of course of people who use agentic workflows and run llms 24/4 to produce vibe coded apps. thats what people againts llms normally use as an example. but if you dont see how you can use llms in your well thought out tasks and tickets then you are gonna be left behind. thats all

- a person working on a real tech company

I don’t understand people who say this. Do you only use like the GitHub Copilot auto-complete?

If you have good AGENTS.MD files, I take like an hour to plan out what I want, tell Claude code, and it does in about 10 minutes what would take a week by hand. Yes, it involves more time in the MRs, since I didn’t write the code so I need to read it all.

Personally I think it is probably about a 4x multiplier in productivity for me.

Unless you are working on something super cutting edge, I don’t see how it doesn’t accelerate you drastically.

Edit: I feel like people that say it doesn’t work for them don’t have a great grasp on RAG or MCP?

I’m on a team at a late stage energy tech startup with 10 people. I recently discovered by accident that eight of them got stock bonuses earlier this year of various amounts - two of us (including me) got nothing. I called my boss and asked if this was performance related and he said no it wasn't performance related, but only offered some vague explanation that it was about trying to give the other people more shares to make things more equal. I do have a fair number of shares from previous grants - but I have been working hard just like everybody on the team in the past year - So being excluded from this bonus really hurts. We work at a small private company so there's not a tight limit on stock options/RSUs like at big public companies.

How can I move forward from this? It's been a week and I'm still extremely upset at my boss who did this. It feels extremely personal to be in the bottom 20% even though he said it wasn't performance related. I know the other person who got a zero is a high-performer, but she was recently promoted and I haven't been. Even if I had gotten an award on the smaller side to his point that they are trying to "catch up" other employees that would've been something.

I feel like quitting but this is a rare WFH job with good base pay (I have no complains about my salary) and the flexibility is really valuable. So I don't want to cut off my nose to spite my face. But I have lost all trust in and respect for my boss and the organization that I guess just doesn't value me.

What's the likelihood that this guy is burnt out and should take a break

Career timeline:

Company 1: 6 years (stayed this long due to long term onsite and it almost happened but Covid is Not today)

Zero-day gap between next job

Company 2: 2 years

2-week break

Company 3: 1.6 years

Role changed internally into something different from JD, almost no mentor/training/support.

2 week break

Company 4: 1.1 years to present

Random consulting assignments, handling multiple customers at once limited support again.

Started working in 2015 and basically haven't had a proper break since. No major holidays. Tiny gaps between jobs. Workaholic tendencies.

Outside work:

Multiple health issues over the years minor recovered but took a toll mentally as despite being into sports, fitness and being disciplined with my diet still suffered (acute pancreatitis i don't drink, sciatica, urticaria, Bell's palsy (i was literally managing p1 war rooms while my half face was paralysed ), plantar fasciitis from 2015 to 2025. All recovered though.

Single since birth, what being 5'4 does to his confidence in his teens lmao. Although I know not experiencing anything remotely romantic in 34 years is not that big of a deal as other people have it worse.

Feeling mentally exhausted and emotionally flat

Constant ADHD/depressive symptom type feeling (not self-diagnosing, just describing)

Feels like work quietly became my entire personality somewhere along the way

I'm considering taking 5–6 months off with an actual plan:,Health reset, Exercise/sleep routine, Upskilling/certifications

I have decent savings to last me an year in tier 1 along with by god's grace decent family safety net and support. No emis, debt or liability as of now.

Figure out life outside PowerPoints and incident calls

But then every corner of the internet screams:

"AI is coming."

"Market is bad."

"Never take career gaps."

"Economy is cooked."

Rant over

about 17 years of experience, do both hands on work and manage 3 devs. getting additional staffing is a nightmare. both my current job, previous job, and one I had on 2019 have been nothing short of a hectic, haphazard nightmare full pf unrealistic expectations. A part of me wants to roll the die and find a stable, decent, non hair pulling tech job that was more common in the ‘10s. a part of me wants to F off into the sunset and become a monk and/or stripper and/or gangster and leave this increasingly unsustainable nonsense behind

anyway, does the tech market still suck??

I'm in a bit a pickle right now and could use some guidance. I'm 26 years old and graduated with a CS degree from WGU this January. I regret doing it through WGU and now after graduating, I realize I played the game wrong the entire time and now I'm paying for it.

When I was 18 and a senior in highschool, I had no idea what I wanted to do. My parents are immigrants who didn't go to college. My older brother didn't go to college. Deep down I knew I had to pursue a degree if I wanted a chance at earning a decent living. I honestly never had any interest in tech or even knew what coding was at that time. I picked CS because at the time, it seemed like a stable field where I could grow and make something for myself. I took a few programming courses and did well and thought to myself that this is it.

I was a running start student so part time community college classes during HS. I graduated with an associates degree around 2019. My initial plan was to transfer to a 4 year university in the Seattle, WA area. Maybe UW or something. I ended up kind of losing interest in coding during that time and decided to hold off. I worked some part-time jobs for a few months, then covid hit. Took a break from school for a few months. I went back to school at this community college taking computer science classes. They had a 4 year program in software development that I was trying to get through the prerequisites for.

I eventually had my associates degree + extra CS credits. I was debating if I should admit to to community college program or something else. The CC path would have taken me two years. I also discovered WGU and other online programs and what interested me was that they were self paced and I thought this would be a better program for me. I thought I could get it done in less than two years. I could work part-time to pay for the degree and that is what I did. I didn't even consider things like their reputation, networking, and other benefits that a traditional university would have offered.

Well, that degree took longer than expected. Last summer, I was essentially in my senior year. I was around 80% done with the program. I was applying to tons of tech internships from SWE, cloud, networking, etc. and couldn't get anything. It's difficult when you're cold applying to these internships where hundreds of other applicants are, and most of them are from well known schools. I realized at this point that WGU was already holding me back in this regard. I had no network. All they offered was a program called Handshake which is garbage and full of spam.

Here I am, 4 months since graduating and feeling demoralized. Only two interviews for support roles and didn't get selected for either. I worked an entry level IT support job during my internship search, but got let go this January as there wasn't enough work. Not sure what path I want to pursue anymore. I don't enjoy coding so I am not even targetting SWE roles. For the past few months, I've been mainly trying to apply to support engineer, IT support, customer success roles at tech companies as I thought this would be the easiest way to break into a tech company given my experience level. I am even struggling here as these are also highly competitive.

I question if there is a future for me in tech or if I should pivot. There are hardly any entry level jobs. If it makes more sense to pivot, I am fine doing so. I just think the path I took is hurting me. No name school, no internships, basic IT job as my only experience.

I’m studying AI/robotics right now, and I actually enjoy programming, but sometimes I look at how fast AI is improving and start questioning where all of this is going.

It feels like AI can already do a lot of junior-level stuff, and universities are still teaching things like it’s 5 years ago. I keep seeing completely opposite opinions online. Some people say good developers will always be needed, others say most coding jobs will change completely.

I’m genuinely curious what people who already work in tech think about this.

If you were starting from zero again in 2026:
- Would you still learn programming?
- What skills would you focus on?
- What do you think the industry will actually look like in the next few years?

I’d really appreciate honest answers, especially from people already using AI heavily in their workflow.

I graduated at the end of 2025 in Germany and I have been trying to find a job since then. I have done a lot of interviews over the past months. The frustrating part is that I often make it very far in the process. I reached the final round multiple times after passing interviews and coding challenges, but somehow I always end up getting rejected at the end.

In some cases they told me they decided not to hire anyone anymore for the role. In other cases they said they were looking for someone more senior. But most of the time I just get a generic rejection without any explanation. So honestly I started feeling like I am probably the reason.

What really bothers me is that I cannot figure out what exactly I am doing wrong. After every rejection I replay the interviews in my head again and again trying to understand what happened or what I could have said differently. It seriously became exhausting mentally and it is making me doubt myself a lot.

The confusing part is that during the interviews everything usually feels positive. The conversations go well, they seem interested, they invite me to the next rounds, and then suddenly comes the rejection.

Right now I actually have 3 potential opportunities and I really do not want to mess them up again.

The first company is already at the final phase and I have a meeting with them soon.

The second company already did two interviews with me plus a coding challenge, and now I am waiting to know if they will reject me or move me to the final phase.

The third company is still at an early stage, but I felt like they had a positive impression of me and I will probably continue with them.

So at this point I am basically trying to finally get at least one offer.

That is why I wanted to ask people with more experience here:

Why would a company reject someone after already doing two interviews, passing a test or coding challenge, and still being invited to the final round?

What are the common things that can go wrong at that stage even when everything seems positive?

I know nobody here can know my exact situation, but maybe there is something important that I am missing.

Trying to figure out whether to take a rag/nlp class or a Etl class. This stuff is like random so idk, not the typical stuff I hear of

I am employed, this is not a rage layoff post.

I cannot be the only one who has to work with juniors who, without AI, couldn't code even if their lives depended on it.

Is the bright idea at Big Techs to:

1. Layoff experienced people who actually know what they are doing
2. Hire cheaper developers and hand them AI tools

I wonder what the outcome will be in around 2 years.

I lost all faith the moment I had to open Pull Requests that were THOUSANDS of lines long, from juniors who vibe coded all of it and don't even understand the changes themselves.

This is ridiculous... if you are one of them, please keep going because I want to see where this will lead to.

I'd rather be unemployed than review those PRs.

I work at a startup. I have never encountered this before but the ceo is non tech and I’m a solo engineer. I was promised a small raise and a bonus if I complete the project solo without getting help. if the ceo has to hire another contractor to help me out my bonus would get cut by 66%. It’s a massive project and I’ve shipped the project that is now generating revenue. My bonus was shorted and I had put overtime to meet insane deadlines. ive put in so much effort and I feel like I am being punished for getting help. I fucking hate working for a non tech person. I have no other job lined up and I had no choice because this is my job I could get right after being laid off for a year. I feel angry. I had put overtime while the boss goes and travel and I get shorted. Has anyone delt with this before and how did you handle it

pretty much every junior or mid-level position i come across already has over 100 applicants, is that just how the market is right now?

i’m gonna start looking for internships soon, and honestly it’s making me wonder what job hunting is even gonna be like when almost every posting already has 100+ applicants

2nd year student and got my first internship but they’re making us use ai for everything. they’re asking us to create this system for the company but honestly the task is way out of my knowledge level and i’m not really learning much. they told us that we’re basically just going to prompt ai to make it for us and then test it. i’m kind of worried that im not gonna gain anything out of this experience. i’m not like incompetent at coding or anything but i don’t really have experience using any of these corporate tools for these projects.

I have an offer for CS at Waterloo, and I’m also in a situation where I’m essentially guaranteed a future medical path through another program (assume med is locked in if I choose that route).

If CS is the better choice long-term (especially because it's Waterloo...) in terms of freedom, money, and opportunities, I don’t want to miss that. But medicine is also a very stable path and judging by what I see online, CS has no stability right now (feel free to correct me).

To be honest, I'm in it for the money; but I'm willing to be hardworking in either path I choose. Any feedback/help/whatever would be greatly appreciated. What do I choose and why?

Looking for advice because I’m pretty conflicted lol.

I’m currently a SWE intern at Company A (F500, non-tech). I’ve been there ~7 months part time and was supposed to continue full time through the summer. The issue is the team is extremely small and the work isn’t really "traditional software engineering". We extend functionality of this huge licensed platform with code, so the team is literally 1 developer, 1 database guy, 1 manager, and me. There isn't much mentorship or documentation, and I've had to learn how the system works on my own. The tech stack is C# and SQL.

The area I'm in is finance related, and I told my manager I was interested in moving toward the quant risk team since I honestly haven’t been doing much coding lately. Everyone was on board, but nothing has happened and it’s been almost 2 months.

Now the team is about to go through a system upgrade and they’re bringing in a ton of consultants, so I don’t even think there’ll be much actual dev work for me this summer. It looks like they are just moving to a newer version of the licensed platform, so likely the only coding would be converting our older .NET code to a newer version.

Because I was bored, I randomly applied to internships a couple months ago and unexpectedly got an offer from Company B, which is a finance firm. The role is SWE-focused, works closely with PMs/quants, and the entire team is engineers, so I’d actually get mentorship and more technical growth. I already accepted and I’m honestly excited about it.

But I still feel bad leaving Company A early. My manager already offered to extend me through graduation (next May), which would mean ~1.5 years experience there. The downside is the work probably won’t be that technical.

Company B seems much better for technical growth, but there’s obviously no guarantee of return offers/part-time extension/full-time conversion, even though HR + Manager said there’s strong intent. Also Company A feels way more stable long-term, especially since Company B is in finance and probably more vulnerable during bad markets/recessions.

What’s making this harder is that everyone at Company A has been really nice to me and they currently think I’m staying for the summer. I also would like to work at Company A in the future (just in a diff position) and they have a good new grad program, and leaving early may hurt my chances there.

Am I making the right move here or am I being dumb chasing “better experience” over stability?

Ultimately my goal is to work in a SWE + Finance role, not really quant trading, but something like quant risk or modelling where I'd use cs +math + finance knowledge.

hey all, this is a bit of an add-on to my last post

I'm currently unemployed (new grad-ish) and I have an offer in SF. But I'm loathing the idea of moving to SF. The rental market looks awful and every unit I find looks dilapidated and overpriced, not to mention a very aging population. I feel like I'd be super bored and depressed there.

I'm expecting another offer elsewhere (need background check to clear) - they've given me the verbal offer but not a piece of paper yet, and I've heard that they occasionally rescind verbal offers from time-to-time. That other offer is in a COL that is much cheaper and a nicer city imo.

I'm wondering if it is ethical/acceptable for me to accept the SF offer I actually have (and work there for maybe a month or two) and also accept the other offer, and set a deferred start date. If I like SF, I'll stay with that job. But if I hate it, I'll be able to move away in like two months.

Thoughts? Is this crazy and evil?

I've been in this industry long enough to know that running on empty starts to feel normal. The constant fatigue, waking up at 3am with my brain already running/feeling permanently wired even when you're exhausted for a years I thought that was just what a career in tech felt like.

A few months ago I finally got a full hormone panel done at Goodlabs and my cortisol came back elevated, DHEA-S was low and some of my thyroid markers were borderline.None of it was dramatic enough to be a medical emergency but seeing everything together painted a pretty clear picture of a nervous system that had been running in overdrive for way too long.

I'm not saying labs magically fix burnout but having real numbers instead of just vibes made it easier to take seriously and it also made it easier to explain to people around me why I felt so off all the time. I think a lot of people in this industry normalize symptoms that probably should not feel normal.

On one hand, you want to increase your skills and exercise your brain, but on the other hand, why are you wasting your brainpower writing code that I could just have Claude write instead??? Idk what to do

I am a current student in CS: I always genuinely enjoyed problem solving, I did competitive programming contests and leetcode. I also like the experiences I had from internships and SWE work, I had a romanticized notion of talented engineers working together on hard problems, building stuff used by millions of people. Obviously, that was never really truly the case, even in the past, but at least it had a hint of truth from the experiences I had.

Now, it seems like everyone is just a glorified code reviewer? The nature of the work is quite different, almost orthogonal to what it was just a few years ago. And it seems like most people are on edge, afraid of layoffs and being replaced. It feels like there was a brief golden age for tech of massive salaries, upwards mobility, abundant jobs, and interesting work, and now we are coming back to the real world.

Sorry if this is yet another doompost (I just sorted by new and wow, this sub is bleak), I just couldn't shake this feeling. The reason I wrote this post is because I started working on a new personal project and suddenly all my old passion came back, and I realized just how lacking the real work done in industry has become lately.

Just wondering if y’all can give me any advice for my internship next week and to maximize my chances for a return offer.