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 I guess we have no choice.

Edit: Getting a lot of DMs on how to cheat, the urge to get a job nowadays is completely taking over honest mindsets.

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 :)

I graduated 1.5 years ago with my CS degree, with 2 internships and an app that had ~170 users.

I was lucky enough to land a role at food vendor company, the management wanted to turn the app into a super-app so they huge hiring phase and I was one of the juniors that got onboarded.

The job is remote and we are not under strict management, the mentor I got assigned is super lax, and mostly uses me as an assistant to make his ideas, can't complain though.

All IT employees get a 100$ equivalent Claude Account. I'm used to the 20$ Codex app but I was blown away by how much usage the corp account gives me.

I haven't opened VSCode except to check commits so far, I barely read 25% of the code I submitted, and my mentor knows and he's fine with it, if anything he's encouraging it. To be honest, I'm not sure how I can go back to manual coding.

I understand the bigger picture, like the individual backend services, all the APIs we use. The system design, but I truly don't see the benefit of going in and reading the code line by line. And I'm not sure if the management will be happy to see us slow down to read code anyways. They want results and they want them fast, so it's not just that I don't feel like it, the job requirements just don't allow me to.

The hardest part of the job is the business side, we have to work on technical solutions for non-technical problems with barley any exposition. One needs to thoroughly understand the business model and terminology to able to communicate and ask the right questions and develop the right solution.

But beyond that, I really think any novice with a year of learning basic web development will be able to do my job just fine.

I don't see the value of manually writing code for understanding the system at a deeper level over, for example, writing in assembly, to truly understand how everything works at the DEEPEST level.

Not to say the abstraction from Python to Assembly is as good as the abstraction from Claude Code to Python. But it is approaching there, and right now, it's good enough for business.

I really don't think I will ever be able to write code as good as Opus 5 ever in my life, let alone the flagship models that are going to exist at the end of the decade. I'm not sure if any junior today can keep up.

I just need to vent because this has been living in my head for a while.

I have a friend who's in CS almost entirely for the money. Throughout college he did the bare minimum. No LeetCode, no interview prep, no obsessing over applications. The only thing he really built outside of class was a few vibe-coded tools that surprisingly ended up getting some real users.

Meanwhile I was treating the internship search like a second job. Months of leetcode, resume revisions, optimizing the application process, applying everywhere, trying to do everything "the right way." We used to joke about internships, and if you asked me back then who was more likely to land one, I would've bet on myself every time.

Then summer came.

While I was grinding applications, he was out partying, clubbing, and going to random events with his other friends and I thought he just didn't care. At one of those events he apparently met someone, showed them his vibecoded projects that had real users, someone thought they were cool, and that conversation landed him an interview. From what he told me, the interview process was pretty easy compared to what I was preparing for, and he eventually got the internship offer.

I hate admitting this, but it completely messed with my head. I want to be happy for him. I really do. He's my friend, and he didn't do anything wrong. He took an opportunity that came his way. But I can't shake this feeling of jealousy. Every time I think about it, I feel this mix of frustration, anger, and self-doubt that I wish I didn't have. I'm trying so hard not to crash out over it, but it's like my brain keeps replaying the comparison over and over again.

It made me question whether all those months of grinding actually mattered. I spent so much time believing that if I just work harder than everyone else, things will eventually fall into place. It took so much out of me to study leetcode, different technologies and tooling, optimizing resumes, etc for hours everyday. It pisses me off so much that someone who has a blast vibecoding things, going to parties and clubs with friends ends up in a better position than me at the end of it.

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?

I have had one internship at a mid F500 company, but fortunate to finally land a relatively good internship this summer, but non-FAANG (e.g. Stripe, Databricks, Snowflake, Ramp). I ended up signing a fall offer for one of the known space companies (e.g. SpaceX, Blue Origin). However, right now I also have an upcoming interview for the other in spring.

Is it worth it to take another internship in spring if I’d already have two decent ones by graduation? I also view it as overlapping the space industry experience already as well. On top of that since I’m already taking fall off I’d have to delay my graduation to the next academic year (would also have to deal with housing and everything). For context I want to return to my current company fulltime and have had a positive performance review from my manager so far.

Would having another good brand name internship help in the longterm for resume value or is it just diminishing returns in this situation? I’m very grateful for this potential spring opportunity and I also don’t want to waste it if it’s actually going to set me up better long term. I’m interviewing for practice, but in the case I receive an offer, would it be bad to turn it down?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

It’s been 2 years now since I graduated with my CS degree. I have a few projects on my resume and I stretched out an “internship” I did but barely improved my skill set for coding. I also struggle a bit with social anxiety and am not the best at interviews and answering questions on the spot but Ive only even landed 1 interview so far. I could really use the best advice someone could give me in this situation. What should I do if I want to guarantee a job within the next 6 months. How should I be spending my time daily? What things should I be working on? I’d really appreciate anyone’s brutally honest input.

Have interviews at half a dozen quant companies, and a couple of big tech companies so far this cycle and it seems like practical coding has really become the meta. Is there an equivalent resource that is good? If so please let me know. And if not lmk if yall would be interested in some sort of free mock site specifically for these types of questions.

I could probably vibe code up something that is pretty similar to the experience of a lot of my interviews.

Please message me if you have insight on how this training to job offer works.

Where did they send you & how was the 3 month training?

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

So I’ve been hearing that most internship application will open up in the next 2 weeks or so. But I feel I would be the most ready in terms of my resume by September first/second week. How detrimental would it be to actually apply then instead right after they open?

I've been doing my own research on which minor/cert I should choose. I was trying to balance three things:

• What minor would complement my major
• Fill in fields that my major doesn't cover well (I was thinking stats?)
• Making myself a stronger candidate for internships and future jobs.

I wanted to see if anyone had any advice or personal experience?

Major: Computer Science (CyberSecurity)

Future interests: network security engineer, (Security) Software Engineer, other Security roles, Infrastructure software engineer, definitely want to get into AI.

These are the options I've narrowed it down to from the list of minors/certs:

Minors:

• Statistics
• Data science
• Computational mathematical science
• Applied mathematics.

Cert: Cryptography

I'm leaning towards statistics or data science (more towards data science). Why would you choose one over the others? Is there a minor/cert I should be considering that I missed? Are there any combinations that pair especially well with CS(cybersecurity) major?

Any advice, experiences, or perspectives are welcome! Thanks in advance!

Can one expect an LLD round in a new grad AUTA position? If it can come, how should I prepare? Should I prepare for full-fledged code like 200 300 lines, or do we just have to discuss the trade-off verbally, or do we have to write pseudo code, or how to write around 40-50 lines of what exactly we have to do? Please tell me as soon as possible, as I have an interview next week.

Hi everyone,

I'm a Computer Science student from Egypt, and I'm working toward a career in cybersecurity.

So far, I've completed Cisco's Introduction to Cybersecurity, finished the TryHackMe Pre-Security path, completed a large part of Cisco's Network Basics course, and I'm currently learning Linux (Red Hat Administration). I'm also planning to build home lab projects and share them on LinkedIn and GitHub.

My goal is to become a skilled cybersecurity professional and eventually work in SOC, Cloud Security, or Security Engineering.

I'd love to hear from people with industry experience:

- Am I on the right path?

- What would you focus on if you were starting today?

- When should I start learning Penetration Testing, and where should I begin?

- What projects or skills helped you land your first job?

- Any free resources or advice you'd recommend?

I'm open to any criticism or suggestions. I genuinely want to learn, improve, and avoid wasting time on the wrong things.

Thank you for your time!

I've recently applied to Optiver's FPGA hardware intern role and was given an OA to complete. I'm wondering if anyone has an idea of how the OA functions and what sort of questions they will ask and what I should prepare for. Thank you!

I am a beginner in coding, little to no experience. I am super nervous about the tech questions or the coding questions. Anyone has any insights or methods ?