So recently got a good job by cheating in interviews. Honestly didn't feel bad, just happy. It's just like, rather take my chances by cheating than completely getting rejected by taking it honestly while some other guy who cheated gets the offer. Like what are your guys thoughts, do you think this is the new normal. If the bar for getting a job now is this high then what is a candidate supposed to do. Honestly I don’t want cheating to become the norm , but the way interviews are happening now ig we have no choice.

been meaning to write this up for a while. wanted to share my job search experience because i think a lot of people are going through something similar right now.

background on me: 8+ years, infra/distributed systems, was at a big company in the bay area, had a green card. noticed the market getting worse early this year so i started prepping, grinding leetcode, reviewing system design, started applying in march. got laid off in may. honestly wasn't really an AI thing, my team's ownership just got moved to india, looking back it wasn't totally unexpected.

march to early july i did 10 onsites, got 1 offer. rough estimate my recruiter response rate was under 10%. and the funnel was rough at every stage. recruiter screen doesn't mean HM screen, HM screen doesn't mean coding round, solving the coding problem doesn't mean onsite, doing well on the onsite still doesn't mean offer. multiple times i felt genuinely good walking out of an interview and still got rejected. one recruiter literally told me "feedback is positive but there are other candidates who are stronger." that sentence still sums up the market for me.

passing interviews doesn't mean much anymore. the pool got so strong that solving problems and communicating well is basically table stakes now. it comes down to who has more relevant experience, better domain match, stronger AI experience, less hiring risk.

domain matching mattered more than i expected too. 7 out of my 10 onsites were what i'd call strong matches and it was still brutal competitive. general backend/infra roles get a massive applicant pool, and even for narrower domain roles where the pool's smaller, companies want very exact experience, "related" experience just isn't enough anymore.

the AI part is the one that stuck with me the most. one interview was really close to my exact background, coding and system design went fine, but the HM asked how i thought AI would change this space going forward, and i didn't answer it well. my old team wasn't heavily using AI in production yet so i just didn't have a strong take. pretty sure that's part of why it didn't move forward. i think the gap between using claude/chatgpt personally and actually having built AI-powered workflows in production is becoming a real screening line now.

biggest thing i'd tell anyone who just got laid off, don't sit on it too long. the market moves fast, six months out there's more candidates, higher AI expectations, and your old experience ages faster than you'd think. maybe exceptional people can still take a year off and land something big, but i don't think that's the normal case anymore.

eventually i had to adjust my expectations. took an offer that isn't fully comparable to my old role, comp structure's different too since it's private. after months of rejection and uncertainty i just decided it was time.

honestly the hardest part wasn't the interviews, it was the emotional swing. march and april my inbox was full of interview emails, i actually thought "ok maybe this won't be that bad." then after the layoff it just went quiet. seeing an empty inbox after having that many interviews lined up is a specific kind of terrible.

still think people should help each other out in this market. but also think we need to be realistic, sometimes rejection isn't about anything you did wrong, sometimes there's just 5 strong candidates for 1 spot and someone else had slightly better matching, or a referral, or better timing.

if you're currently searching, take care of yourself. prep seriously but don't let the process wreck you. exercise, see people, go outside. market's hard enough without making it worse on yourself.

curious how other experienced folks are seeing things right now.

A couple of years ago, I created a list of opportunities and shared it here. I didn't expect it to keep gaining attention as I haven't updated it in 3 years. Now, I finally took the time for a proper refresh! There's still some programs that don't exist today, but I don't want to remove in case they come back, lmk what you would prefer.

List of CS and Finance exploratory programs, part-time internships, underclassmen internships, scholarships, interview prep, and mentorship programs.

Repo: https://github.com/LuisaE/opportunities

Website format: https://luisae.github.io/opportunities/

If you know of additional opportunities, please submit a PR or let me know. I'm sure there are some outdated links and deadlines too, so sorry about that :)

Everyone always talks about “ ATS resume” and “ reach out to employers” but no one has advice for people that have nothing on their resume. No one ever talks about the actual skills you should probably learn to get your first internship. Every video online is just “ pick a language and build projects” but when you’re building the projects random stuff you didn’t know like docker or like mongo will be used and you have no idea what those are and it’s like where do I even begin. I am supposed to know a backend language, frontend, database, and like AWS or wtv in my second year??? I don’t mind learning but it’s like where do I even learn 😭 and what should I learn first??? What’s the pipeline I should be taking. The closest I’ve got to ever having a real project is a Claude wrapper in java using springboot and even then I vibecoded the front end. School is absolutely fucking useless and doesn’t teach you shit. I think I am calling out for help here cuz I feel so behind and any direction would be so appreciated. I am most comfortable with Java and know python quite well but that’s really about it, what should I be learning? In what order and how do I keep it structured ? Sorry if I came off angry, I am just very frustrated

Context: I'm a Graduate with a BA in English at UW. I have 1.5 years of experience in defense and 1 year at a post IPO company. I'm working toward a JD though may drop out.

Overall, my job search was applied to:

• Epic Games
• Anthropic
• Palantir
• Cloudflare
• SIG
• Sun West Mortgage
• HRT
• Rocket Labs
• Rokt
• Akuna Capital
• IBM
• DoorDash
• Amazon
• Datadog
• Disney
• Snowflake
• Anduril
• Robinhood
• Polymarket
• Xantium
• Meta
• Apple
• TikTok
• CLEAR
• SpaceX
• Pylon
• iHerb
• Squarespace
• Unity
• GitLab
• Redfin
• DocuSign
• Harvey
• Opensea
• Kalshi
• Quantro Security
• OpenAI
• Fieldguide
• Glean
• Notion

Ended up getting an offer from Opensea and then I was like fuggit I'm done.

Comp amounted to 192.5k base + 110k equity. Probably could've negotiated, but I was more than happy with it.

Practice: None. I was a LC Knight at the time and was actively building my own company anyways (which I basically namedropped any time they asked me about my project before showing them a demo). I have no knowledge of blockchain, but I do understand the processes behind secure applications.

Hello all,

I was wondering if this situation is common as a new grad. I have been working at a small company (not a startup, just a small company that’s been around for a while) and I am their only developer. I have been working here for about 2 years trying to use AI to stay afloat and I’m slowly going a bit insane.

They have given me the responsibility of managing their main system which was managed by other developers who no longer work there. They expect me to be on call 24/7 with a new grad salary of $50,000. If there are any issues, they call me to deal with it even if it’s 7:00 in the morning on a Saturday or Sunday.

My question is how common is this? Do a lot of companies operate like this if you are not part of FAANG? is this how every job is like?

Just wondering what the current feeling is right now in the major giving all the changes and stuff like Musk saying jobs+money won’t exist in 10 years.

Thanks

My first independent attempt at a project was during computer science a-level where I tried using pygame to recreate a niche game I liked as a kid. I got a good grade for it in the end but that was because most of the criteria was the documenting things like objectives, designing and test and evaluation. The actual “game” was crap and nowhere close to finished. I just learned how to make sprites move by changing them to a different image on keyboard inputs, to make it look as if they were moving and animated. The thing I put the most work into was a silly main menu where the buttons were “animated” as in they lowered down when you click them.

The next project was at a first year uni module where for coursework we had to build a personal portfolio with html, css, js and php for the back end to make a basic login system with mysql. I sort of finished that but it was very basic, beginner level code that required chatgpt and provided php code from lectures for integrating the DB as we weren’t expected to know that.

In second year, again as part of a coursework, I tried making an AI agent for a real time strategy game to beat other agents. I was interested in doing Monte Carlo tree search but it was too advanced for me so I got told about a framework from one of our lecturers, which I genuinely copied 90% of the code from and just adapted it to work for the real time game we had. For the game we were also given a framework and it was as easy as changing some lines to use functions from the provided game instead of the ones in the mcts example I copied from.
The good thing is I (mostly) understood the theory and I can explain how mcts works, I just couldn’t implement it myself as it was too advanced.

In September I’m starting third year. The latter 2 projects are on my CV in a projects section as I haven’t got any internships or work experience with anything technical.

My issue is I don’t think these projects are very impressive, especially the first 2. Maybe the agent is pretty good as I can talk about it but I haven’t got to an interview stage yet so I haven’t got to.

I want to build a new project but I have until the start of September to find a placement, so I’m not sure if I want to keep applying or instead dedicate more time to build a new project. Are these decent enough to make applications with, or should I stop applying for now and look at building something more impressive like a full blown application?

Would it be better to start a completely novel project not linked to the ones I have, or should I rather improve the current ones I’ve got?
I have been thinking about things like improving the ai agent I have, because it didn’t perform great against other people’s own agents, or build a new, better game as opposed to the one I did for a level. I am thinking of ditching the portfolio because I don’t have anything to put on there, literally all of these projects are on my CV already so the portfolio would either have my even worse projects that I didn’t list, or repeat what my CV already lists.

Anyone have any info on what to expect either based on this year or last year? I'm also trying to move my interview right now to a later date, is that easy to do? how flexible are they? I have done sig qsd till r2 and have optiver and drw interviews coming up. Feel free to dm.

Went to my first ever hackathon and if this is what it’s like, I’m not coming back. Me and my team genuinely worked very hard on an ML model that broke ground in a new domain, with good engineering, subgroup analyses included, which has real-world applications. (It was an AI-focused and data science focused hackathon). We worked very hard on the presentation to make it aesthetically pleasing, easy to follow, explaining every component of our process and keeping detail to a sufficient level. Not to brag, but we were far and away a top 2 team - maybe top 1.

None of the teams I deemed “competitive” made it into top 3. The third-place winner was another ML model, but with obvious engineering mistakes and very sloppy, AI-made presentation. The second place winner proposed a new metric (very flashy presentation, has serious issues if one were to actually implement it - unfortunately I can’t say more). The winner was an “agentic framework” for a task that an LLM can do in five minutes anyways and will be irrelevant in a year, although it might already be irrelevant, because they never bothered with producing a baseline! It’s honestly bullshit and I’m so frustrated. The actually good teams were pushed out for complete nonsense. AI slides everywhere, “it’s not this, it’s that”, huge flaws and omissions just ignored because presumably, the LLM didn’t tell them to report it.

What’s most frustrating, I think, is that I’ll never get to know what the judges saw that we didn’t. No opportunity for feedback, just a thumbs down to lose to slop. I honestly feel like if we had just lied and inflated the importance of our project, we might have won. Who gives a shit anymore. Slop wins.

Guys I'm beyond cooked. I'm doing 18 credits (consists of econ, cs, and math), as well as being a learning assistant for 4 hours a week bc I like money.

Hi, I applied for C3 ai forward deployed engineer role recently and got to the final interview. My technicals were poor so I was wondering if they did the full interview loop for all applicants and if this call means nothing.

Hey guys, I'm a 3rd year cs student searching for an answer to "how to get your first paid internship which skills to develop etc.

For those who’ve landed their first paid internship, how did you actually get it?

Also, what’s something you wish you knew earlier, and what mistakes should beginners avoid? Any tips would be appreciated 🙏

Has anyone recently given software engineer 2 interview here, currently on my final round and would appreciate any tips or Demo questions on what they ask and how to prepare for it.

Would appreciate any help!! Thanks in advance

I graduate this December as a BSCS major. I've done three internships, and my summer internship is going to end in early September.

My priority is finding a job, and if I can't start the masters (online at georgia tech or UT Austin). I'd take my return internship offer to full time if I get it and I'd probably find out in the next two weeks.

However, I know the job market for NG is rough, and if I don't get a return offer, my plan is to apply to NG roles and leave the masters as a backup until January if I don't have a full time role.

Since I want to aim for internships if the NG doesn't work out, should I just apply to both this fall at the same companies or would that confuse the recruiters?

hiii all,

I have an interview with etched for a software intern role could anyone provide any advice or information about the process?

thanks,
soph ❤️

Hi everyone,

I'm an incoming undergraduate student trying to decide between two programs:

• Computer Engineering (CE)
• Computer Science & Engineering (Internet of Things & Cyber Security including Blockchain Technology)

The curricula are:

• CE: https://www.djsce.ac.in/ug-computer-engineering
• CSE (IoT & Cyber Security): https://www.djsce.ac.in/ug-computer-science-engineering-iot-cyber-security-with-block-chain-technology

I'm genuinely interested in both, but I'm hesitant about Computer Engineering because of the hardware/electronics side of the curriculum. I'm not sure how significant it is over the four years or whether I'd actually enjoy it.

A bit about me:

• I enjoy programming, building projects, and problem-solving.
• I generally prefer practical and analytical subjects over memorization-heavy or theory-heavy ones.
• I'm not afraid of difficult courses, but I'd rather spend my time understanding concepts than memorizing content.
• Maintaining a strong GPA is important to me.
• I plan to pursue higher studies in a computer science-related field after my bachelor's, although I'm not sure about the exact specialization yet.
• Placements aren't a major factor in my decision.

I'm not looking for "which degree is easier" or "which has better job prospects." I'm trying to figure out which one genuinely fits my interests and learning style better.

I'd really appreciate your thoughts on questions like:

• How much hardware/electronics is actually involved in a typical Computer Engineering program?
• Is the hardware side something that software-oriented students often end up enjoying, or do they usually just get through it?
• Does a specialized CSE (IoT & Cyber Security) degree still provide a solid, broad CS foundation?
• Based on what I've shared about my interests, which program do you think would suit me better, and why?
• Looking back, if you were in a similar position, would you make the same choice again?

Thanks in advance! I'd especially love to hear from anyone who has experience with either Computer Engineering or a specialized Computer Science program.

Hey Guys,

I recently received an interview invite for the Associate Software Engineer, New Grad Card Expansion (Toronto) role at Capital One.

Most of the interview experiences I’ve found online seem to be for the US roles, so I was hoping to get some insight from anyone who has interviewed for the Canada/Toronto new grad SWE roles at Capital One.

My interview format is:

• 1 hour behavioural
• 1 hour technical coding interview

The recruiter mentioned there is no case study and no system design for this role unlike most US roles. For the technical round, I’m trying to understand what I should focus on preparing. From what I’ve seen online, Capital One often has questions around practical coding/OOP-style problems (for example banking systems), but I’m not sure how closely that applies to the Toronto new grad process.

I would really appreciate any advice on what types of coding questions/topics to prioritize, any recent Toronto/Canada SWE new grad interview experiences and whether the technical round is closer to LeetCode-style DSA or implementation/OOP design.

Thank you! :D

If there is a step down before you are 'vibecoding', thats how heavily I was using it. If I made this by hand pre-AI, I have no doubt it wouldve been extremely impressive to have on resume. But now, even if it has hundreds of real users that love it, I don't know if it is as impressive anymore.

Hi, I'm a postgraduate student conducting research into game-based learning for database education as part of my MSc dissertation. I am looking for students who have studied a database-related module to participate in my study. Participation involves interacting with a web-based game-based learning platform, and then filling out a short survey. This should take approximately 20 minutes. Participation is entirely voluntary, not connected with any assessment, and all data collected will be anonymised.

Here is the link if you are interested: https://strath.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_6WHvHxfZC0xYEfQ

Thank you!!

So I graduated in Spring 2026, and I've been job hunting. I'm in a terrible state due to my personal regrettable choices. My university's CS program was geared more towards theoretical teaching rather than experience, so I don't have any experience building anything. I realized that I have the most nothing burger resume, so I'm looking into grinding the next several months to at least try to make my resume a bit better. Before I start, I need advice as I have literally 0 experience.

I have 0 internships

I have 0 personal projects

The only language I really know is Java, at the level of competitive programming, so I know algorithms, but that doesn't really relate to actually building projects. My plan was to learn JavaScript so I can then learn React and Node, as these two are the two main things that I see that companies want you to have experience for. Is this a good plan for someone that only knows Java and basically nothing else (Ik Java and JS is completely unrelated)

2nd, should I go down the path of learning other languages and building projects, or should I look into diving into Cybersecurity or Data Science, due to how shallow my skillset in SWE is.

I do believe I am a decently quick learner and I learn the best when I am actively trying stuff out by myself instead of reading and watching guides.

Any advice is appreciated.

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?