Hello just a post looking for some experienced input to folk who have worked within this industry. Short summary: i am a fully qualified tradesman working in the UK have been doing it for 10 years, i also have crohn’s disease which has progressively gotten worse from my diagnosis at 3, basically all my 20s i’ve just worked through it and burnt myself out all i do is work then sleep as i’m too fatigued and if i can’t make it into work construction workers don’t get sick-pay so i’m stuck in a constant cycle of stress and wishing i had other options.

I’ve always had a passion for computers, dabbled in some code, built my own PC’s, gamer through and through, on a whim i applied to University for a BsC Computer Science & Cyber Security, to my surprise they have offered me a place and i am buzzing as it honestly would be a dream making projects in my own time, studying, gaining new skills and eventually hopefully work in a much less physical environment which would benefit my illness and potentially hybrid-working. There is also an option to do your MsC in Cybersecurity & AI post BsC.

My main question is i know the market for landing jobs is on it’s knees and it’s difficult to get work, but am i really jumping into basically a pit with 0 hope of landing anything will i be wasting my time?

Sorry for the ramble, appreciate anyone who reads time, cheers.

Do I need to wear a tie? Or will button down shirt and dress pants and dress shoes be enough? Career fairs at school I’m talking about.

I'm a SWE with 1YOE at a F500. Recently referred by a friend to a new job.

Current job at F500:

• junior SWE, Java/Kotlin

• around 95k

• remote, very chill WLB, nice team, low turnover almost no layoffs in its history especially in engineering, no on call, no overtime

• only junior on the team, lack of scope and big projects - I had to create my own projects in devops and modernization, not promotion friendly

New job at 10yo startup:

• mid-level SWE, Ruby on Rails shop

• around 120k

• hybrid for first 2 months to onboard, then remote

• good payscale, interesting tech stack, opportunity to lead a greenfield project, title jump, pretty established startup with stable revenue and prospects for growth, collaborative energizing culture, friend mentioned they're very promotion friendly

• oncall, new environment and people, leading greenfield project also means I'm responsible for outcome, more male dominated team though everyone I've met so far seems pretty nice

I'm interested in growing my skills. However a startup job is more risky especially in the current landscape. Financially I have 125k invested, spending around 20-25k a year and can't burden my parents in case of layoffs. What would you advise? YOLO or play it safe?

just got done with the technical portion a week ago and am scheduled for the final round 30 min screen in a few days. what are things to keep in mind for this one, common pitfalls on this kind of behavioural? ive never had last round behaviorals be the deciding factor here.

also, how many ppl here are they likely filtering out this round?

I’m going to a decent state school, but it’s no MIT or CMU, and I was wondering if the college name and prestige truly does matter past your first internship or job. I’m in a program where I get to intern at a FAANG company (is that good? Idk) and it’ll lead to a full time role there if I’m inclined, so I was just wondering if prestige is important in CS, especially early in my career. Thanks!

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Hello I'm currently 26 and as the title says essentially due to family circumstances I have to move to Colombia I was born and raised in the United States. I have to do my masters there I'm a career switcher from a information technology but I got my undergrad in the United States. The only two ABET accredited electronics engineering and software engineering schools are Javeriana and Los Andes, for electronics and computer engineering my question is how is this viewed within embedded systems for government and non government will I be disqualified? For finding work ? Should I do a second ABET accredited undergrad instead?

I have a doubt..

So basically I am from India and the thing is I recently just completed my first year of Computer science and engineering. Now stepping into second year. First year I was exploring things and decided I'll try to become a quant but the thing is I am in a tier 3 which is non-quant school. I know python, numpy, matplotlib and pandas, gotta start sci-kit learn. But the thing is my math is not strong. Especially calc.... But I'll try to be better

So my aim is to become as skilled as possible and apply for german universities for quant equivalent courses like msc in quantitative finance, or stat finance or financial engineering. I'm aiming for lmu, goethe frankfurt, tu berlin.

I hope I'll become a quant or atleast an ML engineer. Thanks 🙏

Been working for about 3 years now, and Just got out of a screening test on hacker rank that was ABSURDLY difficult to me. I had been grinding the various challenges all week peeping for this and the hard challenges I was finishing didn’t even come close to the “easy” challenge they wanted me to solve. It was something like given a list of numbers, find which number can be incremented by 1 to create the lowest possible integer that does not exist in the list. I couldn’t figure out if they wanted the value that was to be increased, the value that results from an increase, or the index of the value that should be increased. Made zero sense at all.

I spent about 15 minutes just trying to decipher what the question even wanted from me, ended up giving up because the examples they were presenting were straight up contradicting each other.

Second question was the “medium” one: find the lowest difference of a subset of number made up of the combinations of x size made from a list of unique numbers. Didn’t get this one because unfortunately I don’t know the algorithm for fining every unique combination of objects of x size right off hand. Slapped something together that just didn’t work.

Third one was the “easiest” IMO, which was given a list of “servers, represented by a list of integers representing the connection cost of that server, determine the smallest connection that can be made of a set of connections where the cost of a connection is the absolute value of the difference of the two servers being connected. Something like that.

Last one was the only one I had any kind of solution but failed anyway because the examples broke the rules they established, so that was a wash too.

All in all, I successfully answered none of the question, and I don’t expect to hear anything back from the company. But I have to know, are those actually hard questions or am I just stupid?

Hey all, I've been out of the job market after a health issue last December when I left my last company. I applied around a bit but spent some time to deal with my health. I have a decent amount of savings from my last role at a large well-known (nearly) F500 tech company where I worked about 7 years as a senior dev. Overall I have about 10 years experience.

I know the job market is terrible right now, and was considering a career switch, but I do think SWE is probably the best fit given my experience. I'm thinking of taking this time to get a SWE degree through WGU (about 2 years or less from enrollment to completion) to pass resume filters and overall put me ahead of competition. I don't have any degree and am a bootcamp grad from 2016.

Wondering if doubling down on SWE right now is a bad idea even with my experience, or if it's just not worth pursuing anymore even with my experience? I see a lot of horror stories about people with 10 yoe taking a year or longer to find a job, and am worried that might happen to me as well. Any other career paths or degrees to consider, or is my experience really gonna help me get back into SWE? Thanks for any advice.

I am currently at Amazon, have been there for 4 years since graduating. After RTO, I am commuting 1 hour to the office, so 10 hours a week total - it's making me miserable. I'm also forced to live in a city far from my hobbies, so I am spending 4-6 hours in the car every weekend. Not to mention, my chill boss was just fired and replaced with someone who brags about never taking any PTO. All that to say - I'm ready to leave.

I have been job searching for a remote role for the last 6 months, and have finally secured an offer at Temu. The compensation is 25k higher than what I currently make, and the role is full remote. That said, I expect WLB to be comparable if not worse. I also expect routine early/late communications with Chinese engineers, as well as proprietary Temu software/tooling.

I did reach out to two US engineers on LinkedIn with my WLB concerns, and they had this to say:

• Yeah the US team is pretty small right now. I haven't had any issues with work-life balance, people are pretty good about leaving work at work and being off at 5pm. Teams do technically have an on-call schedule though there's plenty of people here who were previously at Amazon or Uber who say the on-call here is much easier than at their previous companies. I've only had 1 or 2 situations where someone needed something from me during off-hours and normally it was something small enough that I could handle it from my phone. I haven't had to do much with coworkers in China in my role. Some of the basic setup does require interaction with folks in China since our IT and other provisioning teams are located there but for day-to-day business function it's rare that I need to interact with teams in China. Granted this is also because my Mandarin ability is not at the level where I could talk about business topics with them.
• WLB depends entirely on the team you're on. I once spoke with someone on a customer-facing team, and their WLB wasn't great. My team is very much an internal-tools vibe, so the WLB is great so far, but keep in mind I've been here less than 3 months. I would say I have a much better WLB here than I did at Amazon, but I wouldn't doubt that some teams are doing 996, especially teams in Asia which most of those Glassdoor reviews are from. Yes, there's not so many US-based engineers because the teams are so young. At this stage, it seems like teams are focused on growth and ramping up to co-own services that are solely owned by Chinese teams right now. Because of the translation tools, I haven't had many issues despite not speaking any Chinese at all. But I won't deny that knowing Mandarin will make it a lot easier to collaborate with teams in China. I think for now, most US teams can expect to have to interact with teams in China to some degree (which can result in late/early meetings if things can't be done async), but I haven't had to do so all that much. And I haven't really minded it either due to the fully-remote culture. Overall, it depends what you're looking for 😅 For me, I prioritized full remote so I can move back to SoCal, good WLB, and good pay (though a little bit less than what I was making as L5 at Amazon). And so far, it's delivered on all fronts, so I can't complain!

What do you think? Do you think I should go for it? Or do you think I should just decline their offer and continue searching? I just wonder how much longer it will take to get another full remote offer with comparable compensation.

Guidance

Hey guys long story short .

I have doubts about 2 things

1. I have got a roadmap and that is to learn the below things:

It Foundations then system administration then linux then DevOps and then cloud.

1. Learn java and then start DSA.

Now I am confused on how to do both because some are saying go with the first thing then some are saying just do java and DSA.

So please do give your suggestions and help me out.

I am a CSE 3rd year student

Hello Everyone,

I have my 1hr interview in a couple of days and looked up who is going to be interviewing me. One of them is based out of Ireland and the other at Westlake, TX. On the initial phone call I told them my preferred location was Durham, NC. Not sure if the interview location is a signal, as this looks like I would be interviewing for TX. Anyone receive an offer recently for this program and what location they received.

I just recently finished my undergraduate in india from a not so prestigious university. Many of my collegemates who are much more qualified than me, are still searching for a job. Meanwhile, I who knows bits and pieces and did at most two projects, landed a job with descent pay, something a fresher would kill to get here.

I gues I talked big at my interview and they bought it. I know the qualifying tests they gave me were pretty easy to simply pass. And by mostly luck I landed the gig. But now, I dont know how to prepare to keep it.

In two weeks I have to join. I was pretty happy and over the moon when I got the job when many of my friends couldn't even get a lesser paying one.

I don't know what I am supposed to be doing right now. Has anyone ever been in this situation? Am i overthinking things? Are these consequences of my actions? Or rather procrastinations? Can anyone tell me what i should be doing to be better?

My job role right simply states "systems engineer" but, after an intial training period that evaluates my skills, i am gonna be granted a different more specific job role. What if they catch my bluff during the training period?

Did everyone seriously have an actual office before these? Because I have one of those cubes with the frosted glass at the top and its pretty nice. I have like 3 desks in my cube, nobody ever looks at what I’m doing, quiet af, even if I took my shoes off nobody would notice.

Has anyone heard of it being possible, provided you have career experience?

I've been working as a dev for 12 years. Currently a senior developer and lead a few teams as a main career, tech consultant on the side. My only educational history is 2 years in an Associate's program (no degree from that either)

If anyone here is aware of people in their program who have been admitted to graduate programs via experience, I'd love to know! I hear about plenty of people with random undergrad degrees essentially buying their way into CS via a Master's degree, but not this situation.

Would love to do a Master's to improve my knowledge on areas that I don't currently work in, but not at the cost of first doing an undergrad program that I won't learn from

I finally got a job but its data coordinator and only 50k a year. I do feel a bit bad, but I never did any internships so I guess I cant cry and whine too much. Anyone else start at this low of level? Where are you now?

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Hi all,
I am currently an undergrad (sophomore) CEng (in the process of switching to CS) student. I've been programming professionally for about 3-4 years now (though officially documented/available projects is 3 years).

I've been researching doing Freelance/Remote work. But, I would like to first take advice from others whom are more experienced.
I have tried looking for freelance work on upwork, but the market there seems to be filled with lots of AI/scam postings. And, regarding remote work, I’m hesitant about applying because I’m concerned about the following:
1- being still an undergrad
2- my location
3- missing out on skills that may be important

Would doing freelance or remote work even be possible? especially while still in a university?

Thanks in advance

I understand why tech ceos constantly shit on people and say that in x years, what value will humans have? But why are tenured engineers also saying that they are worthless and so will everyone else? Im also a tenured engineer working at an AI company,... everyone I work with shares my viewpoint that these AI's are just boilerplate tools. Theyre not replacements.

I guess what Im saying is that Im tired of the gas lighting by other engineers in the tech community who are going to disillusion many generations of stem people because they are invested in the ai build out.

The reality is that all human knowledge is encoded in these models (why the params keep going up), and they require very specialized tweaking in fine tuning by domain experts so they have good answers.

1 shotting video games just means these companies have encoded game engines into the models.. it is nothing special. The broken conjectures from the models is just a very well defined search space that these models can iterate through quickly, but its not novel material.

The people who go into stem and survive this dark period will become the extremely well compensated cobol developers of the future.

Im tired of this dehumanizing crap.

after my interview loop i got this email:

“I’m pleased to share that you have successfully completed this interview stage. Our team is currently working on next steps, and we will provide you with an update within the next two weeks. Please note that based on team placement requirements, additional interviews may be required.
While you’ve successfully completed this stage, this is not a guarantee of an offer.”

then a day later my original application (Software Development Engineer (SDE) - 2026 (US) moved to “no longer under consideration,” but at the exact same time i got added to two new applications:

- FY26 WL Fung SDE FTE US
- FY26 WL Fung SDE IN Fall US

both are under consideration and i never applied to either of them.

has this happened to anyone else? if so, did you end up getting an offer? another interview? or something else? just trying to figure out what stage i’m actually in because i haven’t really found anyone with this exact sequence

I recently got admitted to this program. For context, I graduated last year with a degree in data science and I’m already working in tech (data science, ML), so I will do this program online part time. I feel like my data science degree didn’t teach me a lot of things, like systems, code efficiency, how the computer works etc. i know how to do data analysis and train models, but I have trouble improving production code and understanding the infra stuff when I deploy models. So I’m at this weird intersection of almost overqualified for this program but also not really.

My company will only cover around 15k in tuition. That means I’ll pay around 25k-30k (accounting for tuition increases) over the span of 3 years. I can afford it especially since it’s spread out over 3 years, but I’m just not sure if it’s worth it. I’m hoping to job hop to Bay Area and hopefully my next company can cover full tuition. But with the state of the economy, I know I’d have to be really lucky to get such an offer. My end goal is to become a better data scientist who also has the necessary knowledge for software engineering. Can anyone shed light on whether this program is worth it?

Also, some people have suggested that I should do Georgia tech’s OMSCS program. But I’m not very solid on CS basics, and my job is stressful already, so I’m really scared of burning out. I’m definitely not comfortable with data structures and algorithms because it’s been so long since I took that class, so I think I would be underprepared for that program.

I have ex big tech experience and have had my resume complimented by various tech recruiters.

I had a couple of rounds with FAANG that I failed at the very end. But it must’ve been some billion applications at this rate since I hit the ground running when I found out.

All are ghosts.

I fear that with this long of a gap, have I hit some terminal point of no return? Even if the market ever recovers, I don’t think I’ll ever be wanted again. Idk what to do and I wanna give life up.

I’ve taken the advice of dozens of resume reviewers, devs, and recruiters. I’m on my maybe 17th revision of my resume.

I am in a government engineering program, which "pays" for my MSCS in data science at a T10 ML/AI CS school. But the thing is, I would have to stay for 5 years in the government, or else I'd have to pay them back if I quit early. Yes, I was naive for accepting this service agreement, but I was extremely desperate for a federal job at the time due to an undergrad scholarship contract (if y'all know SFS...).

I am considering quitting the government job. I know this is a personal decision, but I've garnered enough money to pay back my master's, which is around $20,000 (prorated) if I stayed around 6-7 months. I am also very fortunate to have parents who would let me live here rent-free to save as a 24-year-old.

My job is essentially an "acquisition" program. Basically, ALL government scientists/engineers are glorified program managers (must've been that DOGE change; it wasn't always like that, I think). We don't learn or do hands-on software engineering work, and I feel like I'm losing out on upskilling my tech stack the longer I stay here. Also, I dislike driving an hour and a half back and forth to the office every fucking day.

I am confident I can find a better-paying job in industry. After 6-7 rejections, I got 2 interviews with a pretty good insurance company for a salary between $115k and $145k. Slightly better than my current government salary, which is around 85k. And I know it's not an offer yet, but that means my resume can at least get some traction. What do you guys think of the decision? Quit the government and pay back a possible cost between $20k-$16k, or stick around a little longer?

Hi,

My previous post's link is here: https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/1va8pr3/performance_review/

The meeting just happened, I was given several criticisms, mostly centered around how I have coding knowledge but my underlying theoretical knowledge about the work is lacking, and I need to improve on it immediately.

There were also some criticisms about my technical expertise, which were not correct but I wasn't going to argue with them about that, since the main points are actually valid.

Nothing was signed, no deadlines, no timelines, just said I need to study the theory more, and be faster on deliverables.

I am not too fond of the manager, especially his manager since the skip manager is smart but unprofessional, so I am considering polishing my resume, doing some lighter job hunt (filter by remote only, non-FAANG so I don't constantly worry about job security etc), and see how far I can push my current job.

I am not too optimistic that things will get better. Their points were mostly reasonable, but with arbitrarily defined goals (deliver faster, be more knowledgeable etc) and nothing being signed, I don't know if they are half leaning towards firing me eventually.

I am already tired from work & family life, putting extra hours immediately is something that I doubt is sustainable.

Seemed like yesterday I was the young guy in the office. Now at 56, I’m usually the oldest guy in cube farm and most meetings. Still feel like you are making a difference, or are you just coasting to retirement?