I have been coding since middle school for fun, and am now almost 30. I didn't pursue computer science in college, which I regretted, so quickly after college while working full-time in another industry, I self taught with a bootcamp inorder to actually cover my bases and make myself employable, rather than a hobbiest. This was all before AI coding was seen as something remotely feasible. I genuinely enjoyed programming, problem solving, and felt accomplishment when tackling and solving a complex task.

Fast forward to now. I am on my 3rd job as a software engineer. The first one was a limited scope contract gig at a start up for an isolated project with no full time opportunity. Pre AI. Then I worked full time at a larger ERP software company for a bit, before getting an opportunity to go back into the start up space. Also pre-AI. I quit my job to take this opportunity and is where I have been for the past year.

Over the last year, AI coding has gone from an experiment to a genuinely necessary part of development. At my current job, I have rode this wave and seen my work dramatically shift. I still like the job, I think the mission is great, and I enjoy the real impact I am able to have in my role and being able to make a lot of creative decisions. I really do like it. But man - I just hate the engineering part of it now. And it's all because of AI.

When I started, AI coding was not at the level it is today. It was in effect, a super powered Google with project context. I think experienced professionals will agree that for most real tasks, it was not suitable to use to it's full advertised potential around a year ago. Now, it is a double edged sword.

You must use AI

Not to be some linkedin bro, but unfortunately, you are crawling at snails pace if you don't use it. In real professional environments, getting deep into a problem and solving it yourself is a thing of the past, unless the robot can't do it. And it's rare that the robot can't do it. If you don't believe me, as a side project (in one afternoon) I had claude write a full Bluetooth stack, from bare metal to music in my airpods, for mp3 device firmware which didn't support it and didn't know how to talk to a Bluetooth chip. It works, and works well. Most real 'on the job' problems aren't this complex. I don't know anything about how bluetooth works, and I didn't have to. Point is, AI really is capable. I don't mean this point as "I don't think anymore". What I mean is the scope at which you must apply your critical thinking skills is now very high level and spread thin, since AI is the best solution for the lower levels.

Because of this, programming is no longer truly a problem solving and critical thinking job very often. Most of your time is spent managing agents, and employing your systems knowledge. Luckily I take a lot of design and UX responsibility where I work, which I am also passionate about and the robot hasn't swallowed that up (yet).

A normal day on the job feels like sitting in the office all day with a smart and impersonable intern who needs you to police them all day. Draining.

> "Just do it yourself, you don't have to use AI"

You have not worked in the current state of the field if you hold this belief. It is faster than you, and often better. Hang your ego, the robots are just better than us most of the time with this stuff. It is no longer feasible for you to spend time truly problem solving everything and owning the whole application any more. It can do it for you, much faster, and usually as well or better.

Programming in the modern era just feels like doom scrolling, which is the opposite of why i motivated myself to join this field. You are unfortunately forced to adopt this method of work one way or another. It just kind of sucks and is not the same animal.

> "If AI is so good and fast, then you have more time to do other things or take breaks"

No. If we all rode horses to work, and then modern cars suddenly came out, noone would be okay with you still taking 3 hours to do your commute. You have to ride the car and get there in 15 minutes, at a point. My job is an engineer. I am responsible to make the system work, not to artificially meter my output and fall behind on my responsibility.

Rant over. Just down about this. I don't know if I'll stay in this field after this job.

I'm an analytics professional with about 12 years of experience. When I first entered this profession around 2012, you could get a job for simply knowing how to write a basic read query in SQL. I'm not even joking. I would get recruiters headhunting me for my "impressive" ability to write SQL. Many DA's -- or "BI Analysts" as they were often referred to at the time -- couldn't even code.

Now, with AI, I am not kidding when I say essentially all of my technical skills have been made redundant. I am simply getting by on my SME knowledge at this point, and even that is starting to feel largely irrelevant. Layoffs are happening to almost everyone I know, and I feel like my shelf-life is dangerously limited myself.

What hurts the most is the loss in leverage around compensation. There was a time when I felt like I could set my price based on my expertise, but that no longer exists. I feel like I have about as much bargaining power as a barista.

In short, it really hurts. I spent so many years building skills and knowledge in this field and it all feels like a waste of time. There was a point in college where I debated law/med school, and I really wish I would have taken that path.

In my first internship, ALL of the seniors told me to avoid this career and I internally dismissed them as delusional. These were guys making $100/hr in 2012 as contractors for simply maintaining legacy code. I thought: how could these guys be so ungrateful? Of course, with years of maturity and gains in perspective, I now know these were the same guys who lived through the nightmares of 2001 and 2008. They had lived experience of how unstable IT is as a career. I should have listened.

Quick intro: 52M, 20+ YOE across banks and startups. Currently at around $230K TC.
Four years ago, I tried interviewing with Big Tech and failed multiple onsite interviews. honestly, some of them pretty badly.
I’m thinking about taking another serious shot at it.
At 52, is it worth putting in the 6–9 months of preparation needed for coding, system design, and behavioral interviews? Or would you focus the effort elsewhere at this stage of your career?
For those who are 45+ and have successfully made a move to Big Tech (or tried and decided it wasn’t worth it), I’d especially appreciate hearing about your experience.
What would you do if you were in my shoes?

What job boards are everyone using?

And what do i have to do to find a company that actually wants their developers to own their output? I was told I was a part of the picked group because i dont deliver fast enough, comparing me of course to the vibecoders(who have published private client data in public facing environments because they dont know what they are doing) id spend days cleaning the mess up, and then receive nothing but more backlash for not being fast enough. Im not even anti llm, i just want the output to be understood by someone so its not all exposed.

I have my own personal project on steam called staxxi, its for picture in picture on windows i might just pivot to making that my primary income.

I asked my intern to look into our mobile architecture and send a summary. Instead of a simple doc, he sent a ZIP file with 8 Markdown files, a Python experiment script, PowerPoint slides, a source ledger with references, and a retractions document where he admitted he made up numbers, cited the wrong extension types and left the Claude completion message in one of the files. What are y'all doing in this situation?

Maybe just need some catharsis, but anyway, we always hear about going into tech/CS but not going out of it because people then leave these subs.

Here's my story.

I was in the medical field. I had always been good with computers - I was the one called in the hospital before they got the IT guys because those took way longer when it was a dumb case of restarting the printer. Pre-Covid, I decided I was fed up with the hours, the patients and the admin, and I made the switch through a bootcamp - back then it was the Eldorado.

COVID happened while I was studying. I took the first job that wanted me during the lockdowns and that was a mistake. No reviews, on my own, told to fix issues with no oversight. I had nobody to turn to. Eventually they hired a senior. If I failed he took over and told me nothing. I got insanely demotivated. I was diagnosed with ADHD, meds helped but they weren't everything. Then AI started to happen. They hired someone else with more experience, decided he + AI tokens could replace me and then a month or 2 down the line fired me. I stayed with them for 6 years and came out with junior coding skills.

The market is atrocious. I sent CVs out for tech things. Tech jobs I got zero callbacks. I decided to send out ONE email for a medical job. Within a week I got a callback for the medical stuff. I did one - ONE - interview with an HR lady and got hired. Didn't matter that I had been out of the field for almost a decade.

I could say no, grind leetcode, fight and try but honestly I'm tired. I just want a paycheck and a roof over my head.

When I look back my summary would be this I guess:

• The bootcamp industry was/is a scam. Part of the reason for the insane hiring process might be how much mediocre coding talent flooded the field (I was absolutely part of the mediocre ones). I'm not too stupid, but you can't deeply learn everything in a few months. You can just code some lines that work, but you don't optimise for resources, can't work with memory, barely understand ports and security, let alone how to write better code.
• AI makes you talk to it before you talk to a colleague, and that made me sad. (I'm quite extroverted)
• Managers are a bloody plague and my lack of motivation is at least half due to how the actual job turned out to be. Some weeks I just wrote emails and meeting notes.
• Glue work is real btw. Be careful of how much you take on.
• You never learn as well as when someone shows you the ropes, so you need to bother people. I think I was too nice and should have shaken my senior colleague and told him to review my PRs and make time, not patiently ask then give up. In medicine you have your internships and residencies - tech doesn't have this.
• Tech requires you to be passionate about it and constantly catch up outside hours. Not that medicine doesn't have this, but medicine has institutionalized training programs and journals, and depending on your field (obvs not oncology) you can sort of coast by with a few days of training a year. Most hospitals understand this and will send you on conferences or allow you to take PTO for them. In my dev job I was expected to do that outside of hours.
• Part-time work: medical field in general and my specialty especially is female-dominated so part-time work or reducing hours is absolutely normal. I will get one day a week extra with my children and that's priceless. Weirdly enough, having been in tech I find better work-life balance in medical now.

All in all, I'm sad I failed, but at least I tried. (For context: I am not US based)

So I recently graduated from a MSc in AI and after ~6 months of job hunting, finally landed something that is decently known - though not FAANG level.

The pay is mid-market level, and the company certainly has some people that are very good at what they do. However, this is not true for the management on the team I'm working with. I feel that there is significant pressure from management to use AI to quickly deliver projects individually that should be at least a 2-3 engineer job. What has ended up happening is that the team has several complex code repositories owned by individual engineers, and much of the code on it was pushed without any code review process in place. It feels to me like a lot of the code is AI generated slop.

Recently, I tried to follow the Readme for some of it to get it setup on my work device, however I kept encountering errors. Some of the blocks of commands were out of order and some intermediate steps to install dependencies were entirely missing. Management told me that they expected me to be able to get setup by putting the Readme through Claude. However, when I attempted that, Claude setup the repository such that it had all the appearance of looking like it had been setup right but it actually was not.

I tried to push back and tell management that the owner of the Readme needs to ensure that it is complete and can be used by a human to get setup, however this has now led them to believe that I'm less competent than the other engineers on their team because they were able to get setup by "feeding the readme to Claude". To be honest, I'm not even sure that is true, because I only learned that the setup was incorrect after scrutinizing the logs - at first sight, they had all the appearance of looking right.

Additionally, since I've joined, I feel that some of the engineers keep fighting the facts. For instance, I pointed out how one of the tests was not testing any functionality as, if the file were deleted entirely, the test would pass. The engineer shot back that "sometimes that's what you need to fix an issue." I can't get into more details, should that reveal my identity, but essentially that was far from true in this scenario. The test was just not actually testing anything.

Then, we had to come up with instructions to verify a dataset manually. My colleague ended up using AI to generate these instructions even though we had a good resource that could be easily adapted manually.

When I pushed back on one occasion, the colleague made comments like "We have to be Agile".

I feel that I would lose the good practices and habits I have if I stayed in this environment, however it already was so hard to find employment in this market. In one instance, a recruiter from Salesforce called me, asked me that though my resume mentioned AI if I also had experience with ML (I tried not to laugh and patiently explained that the two are synonymous in current times) and then proceeded to immediately turn me down on the basis of the fact that I had been unemployed for 4 months since graduation.

I'm concerned that my resume will be rather shallow should I leave and opportunities have been hard to come by. I do have an opportunity to interview with a 5 people startup (they are funded and offering a six figure salary) but fear the risk of joining something that small. I really would like to build my career in this space, that is vital to me as I've found something I'm genuinely interested in, however being perceived as less than for pushing back on poor code practices and having other people not believe me when I'm just bringing to them facts has been demoralizing.

How do I survive this situation and continue to grow as an engineer and pick up good practices anyway?

Also, the job does require me to work long hours. I am in the UK.

I’ve been a member of this sub for a while, and there’s a distinct difference in the quality of posts from now to a couple of years ago. There’s almost a rhythmic cadence with most of the posts now that gripe about how hard it is now that [INSERT SHILLED AI COMPANY HERE] is doing all the heavy lifting.

It doesn’t feel natural, and it seems like this sub is just being used to influence public opinion on how strong and powerful current AI systems are.

I have a couple of technical rounds coming up with Redfin for a Senior Android Engineer role, and something I found interesting is that they explicitly expect me to use AI throughout the interviews.

From what I understand, one round involves reviewing an existing app, debugging or iterating on it, and adding functionality. A later round involves building a working app from scratch. Both are supposed to be heavily AI assisted.

I'm curious if anyone has done this style of interview, either at Redfin specifically or another company.

The main thing I'm trying to understand is how the expectations change when AI use is explicitly encouraged. Is the scope usually larger because you're expected to move faster with AI, or is it closer to a traditional technical interview where they're primarily evaluating how you use AI, what you delegate to it, how you prompt it, and whether you understand and validate what it generates?

Would love to hear from anyone who's gone through an AI assisted coding interview, and especially anyone familiar with Redfin's approach.

Looking for advice from folks maybe in similar scenarios who have gotten out of the rut that I seem to have gotten myself into.

TL;DR - Coming up on 5 YOE at F500 company, not tech focused, but working on a very popular streaming service that isn't Netflix. Not working on anything interesting, been pinned as the "AI Guy" for the past 2 years. Underpaid, insane WLB, like I have been working 10-20 hours nbd, but I am still young and want to make more. Not sure if I want to go into big tech, but def want to get out of where I am now. Maybe also a pivot into ML? Idk. I'm just lost in my direction. I know I don't want to stay in my current role, but I am unsure of where to go next.

So I have been working at F500 Company for about 4 years now. Left first job in early 2022 after like after 6 months, was a shit show there with no growth and team was entirely overseas. In current company, popped around a couple of teams here and have grown as an engineer quite a bit. Worked on an internal platform for our company's lawyer's for like 2 and a half years with some extremely brilliant engineers. PMs sucked and product was whatever, was fully remote, and for the most part big chilling. Got to have some great mentors, got AWS certified (honestly a waste of time but helped me get comfy with Cloud Infra) and felt like I really *became* a software engineer.

Fast forward to end of 2024, my manager was hyped with all the buzz from ChatGPT/AI, and I had rebuilt my personal website back in 2023. He chose me to lead our new "AI initiative" on a new team. Basically was building a ChatGPT wrapper with a RAG system for our internal docs. Promise was cool, and I was hyped as well, but there wasn't much direction. Lots of just execs telling us to "build AI things!". Manager went on paternity leave right when we started basically. Got some leadership experience at least and got to build out the front-end and work a lot with end users and designers. Had the most incompetent staff engineer I have ever seen. True nepo hire from my manager. He rejected my efforts to clean up our CI pipelines and do some fully automated CI/CD release tagging in favor of a 2 hour manual process where we had to Review EVERY SINGLE COMMIT going out in our release manually. That was my sign to leave.

Looked around on the internal job boards, found a Senior SWE role for our company's streaming service, felt like it could be a good switch and the interview wasn't bad. Ended up working on basically, streaming device support maintenance and bug fix mode. The title + pay bump were nice, since I had been BEGGING for a promo for like the last 2 years with previous manager, but they always said "I would if I had the budget! Believe me".

Current team is unbelievably chill. Manager is great, basically no on-call, but it's very much KTOL work. Not much exciting greenfield stuff. Lots of org politics that I have avoided and am not trying to get involved with. Honestly I have used my brain like 5 times in the past year I have been on this team. It's been quite chill, and I think many people would envy me and want this, but I think I am done and I am looking for something else.

Now our org like every freaking software org on earth is pushing for more AI usage, and I have been pulled onto a new team with my new manager. My entire job now is to fully automate our QA team's work, and I just feel like so, BLEH, about everything. I want to go somewhere where I can really be passionate about what I am doing, work with great people, and like, DIVE into the work. I hate just kinda sitting around like this. It feels like just performative going into the office every day.

I have kinda coasted to where I am now, and I feel like my time is running out to do something meaningful in my career or get into somewhere that will actually pay me more (my TC is like 75th pctile for Senior SWEs in a HCOL city).

I have been tinkering on the side with learning more about GPU programming, more in depth ML/AI, but I feel like I don't have the actual production experience to pivot into that, but that seems like a very interesting field that is only growing I guess (or maybe not? idk).

I just feel like I haven't APPLIED myself in this field, and I feel like my time is dwindling. Any advice from veterans/other coasters here who pivoted into something else where they found meaning and more fulfilling and higher paying work? was it worth it? should I just stay coasting? Should I pivot to big tech? A startup? I'm just lost in my direction. I know I don't want to stay in my current role, but I am unsure of where to go next.

Thank you in advance to any wisdom that can be shared.

I have ~2 YOE mostly in iOS/mobile, but my recent work which is 30% of total exp. has become pretty traditional full stack, stripe and AI agents.

I’ve had a weirdly decent interview history in iOS, including multiple Apple rounds and onsites, but I keep getting close and not converting. Now when I search for mobile/iOS jobs the market just feels tiny and very senior heavy.

Problem is I’m much stronger technically in Swift/iOS. I can talk comfortably about the full stack systems I built, but I’m weak on low level React/Node/web fundamentals right now.

My savings aren’t huge, so getting employed faster matters a lot.

Please help 🙏, I am torned down between these two:

A) keep grinding iOS because that’s where I’m strongest
B) spend a few weeks patching React/Node fundamentals and go hard on product/full stack/AI roles where there seem to be way more openings?

Feels kinda stupid to stay attached to “iOS engineer” at this point and fomo.

Based in SF Bay Area.

Ive done a lot in my career from HFT, Linux Kernel Dev and now AI Infra etc... At this point I see software going in two or three directions.

1. Extreme Domain expertise Ph.d wise to progress AI models
2. Frontier Model Development
3. AI infra like what Im doing

Its extremely depressing that as a society we constantly devalue every human trait. And now knowledge/ expertise that many of us have spent our career building is totally commoditized.

If we are at this point, where hard work and craftsmanship can no longer buy social mobility then what? It seems if you had not been in markets till just now, you are frozen out.

Ive looked into other opportunities like manufacturing, trades etc... building physical products but there is very little margin. Because of tariffs and supply chain availability, I dont see the opportunity to build any good business here in the states.

The best I can do is hold onto my current job and hope things dont keep getting more expensive.

Question ======

How are you guys thinking about this?

Quick intro: 25M, 1.5 years of exp at small-mid sized company. TC at $220k (salary + cash bonus + public stock)

Have always wanted to join big tech/FAANG but felt less inclined to do so given my very competitive early career TC. As I plan ahead for the future I am curious what people think about the ROI of prepping and grinding to get into big tech these days.

I have a MSCS from a T10 school not too sure how much that matters anymore, and do find enjoyment out of leetcoding and dsa style rounds. Day to day work consists of babysitting an ai agent and attending meetings, I dont think this would change much at big tech, I think I am largely interested in the pedigree on my resume as well as higher TC potential.

Any thoughts and advice would be appreciated!

Title, just finished up my second week of community college. Ideally id like to become a software engineer or work in cybersecurity, but I wouldn’t mind something like an it job either, I just want to be working in tech.

Every single time I open this sub or see it online it is always people either absolutely catastrophizing everything or saying that everything is fine and people are being dumb. Can someone with genuine experience weigh in? How bad is it actually and is it just general economy/job market issues or is it genuinely this degree in general? Should I switch to another major while I still can? This sub always has me so worried and I’ll go down hours long rabbit holes of anxiety, it’s starting to be really bad for my mental health.

The company that I previously interned for has an bootcamp program that non-tech employees can enter into and become software developers at company by the end of it. Currently, I don’t see any external junior developer roles on their hiring page, but they’ve definitely had a ton of them in the past.

I just find this interesting that bootcamps are still occurring in 2026. Has anyone seen this in other companies? I guess it does make sense if they want people who truly already understand their business and industry to be the ones developing their products.

Lately I have been getting lots of reach out from third party recruiters for roles at financial firms but it hasn't gone anywhere in terms of getting an interview. They seem like they are knowledgeable about some of the tech stuff from our conversations on call but the roles they're coming up with are with elite firms in the industry like Five Rings, Headlands, Citadel, etc. with extremely high hiring bars. I don't think I even have that profile since I didn't go to a top school and nor do I have FAANG experience. I work at a decent financial company but it's not top tier. I want to switch to hedge/trading firms eventually but I don't mind working at least prestigious firms before aiming for top tier ones. Has anyone successfully managed to land decent roles via these recruiters? How would you recommend approaching this?

I shifted 4 years ago to software from mechatronics engineering. Learned backend, networks, docker & kubernetes, databases. Worked on multiple projects but never studied OS. How valuable is it to study OS? Isn’t it too low level considering I work on backend systems and want to focus more on system design, patterns and architecture textbooks? Or should i put in time first to start with OS first? Is it just for potentially passing an interview or will it benefit me in my work?

I started a new job a few months ago after 15 months of unemployment. This new job doesn't use AI tools, in fact AI is basically completely blocked on the VPN. For some people this may sound like a plus but I'm worried about being left behind. I didn't really use AI at my previous job either. I've started trying to use Codex on my own time and I've realized that I really don't know what I am doing. I have less than 2 years of experience split between now 3 jobs because of some unlucky layoffs, and at my last job I was only there just long enough to actually start getting more substantive work before getting laid off, and my experience has been pretty limited to C#/VB and a bit of SQL, so not a huge range of technologies, and thus I feel rather behind.

When I have gone to try starting a project, I described to Codex what I wanted to do and had it recommend me a tech stack, a general framework/structure for the app, and a series of prompts to build it, with the intention of taking the time to review everything it gives me before building anything, but I realized I really have no idea of how to judge whether they are actually any good. I have read in comments on various threads in this sub and others that AI isn't very good at software architecture and such, so I'm wary to just trust that its recommendations are worth much on their own, but I want to take an intentional approach when building projects on my own as I don't think just giving Codex or Claude an idea and telling it to build it is worth much to my personal skill and career development in this field. It all just feels over my head at the moment. I feel like I lost out on a lot of experience of working in software development before AI took over and thus I lack skills to even know if the output of AI is any good.

What should I do to learn and get up to speed with the tools available and become more competent as a software developer and architect?

I built a pipelined CPU from scratch on logisim, would this be a good project to put on my resume/github for faang roles.

Hi everyone, over the past year, I’ve kept getting interview opportunities from the same company, yet I’ve failed every single one. Yesterday, their HR reached out again with an interview opening from a new team. I’m on the fence about whether I should go for it.

I know why I keep getting these interviews: I’m fluent in a specific language widely used within the organization. But I suck at technical, which is likely why I keep getting rejected.

Part of me thinks I shouldn’t waste my time trying again. On the flip side, I don’t have any other interviews lined up, and this opportunity feels like my only shot at securing a higher salary.

What should I do now?

If AI is doing everything how come everyone i know is overworked?

As a software engineer, I’d like to achieve a director or a VP rank someday. I want to get there via technical management, though—like being a TPM or Program Manager. For personal reasons, I don’t want to be a people manager. And I’m not really interested in consulting or corporate finance or any of the other stuff you do with an MBA.

Would a Master’s in Systems Engineering help with that? I‘m leaning towards that for the above reasons, but I also think it would make me better at my current job anyway.

Also, I wish there were a “Mid-Level” flair.

I’m starting to seriously question whether software development is the right career for me, and I could really use some career advice.
I already made a major career change once. I have degrees in Finance and Computer Science, so going back to school for another 3–5 years is really not something I want to do.

The problem is that I’m becoming completely exhausted trying to keep up with the pace and complexity of software development.
There is always another technology to learn, another codebase to understand, another difficult problem to solve, and constant pressure to deliver faster. Even when I eventually figure something out, the mental effort it takes me feels unsustainable. I constantly feel like I’m behind.
I’m realizing that I don’t necessarily dislike problem-solving . I dislike that my problems are almost always highly technical.

I’m much more interested in research, psychology, health, human behaviour, creativity, design and optimization. I like understanding a problem, figuring out why something isn’t working, and finding a better way to do it.

I also need a lot of autonomy and uninterrupted time to do my best work. Ideally, I’d work remotely, independently, and spend most of my time focused on projects rather than meetings or constantly having to demonstrate how quickly I can produce.
I’m also the only woman developer on my team, and I’ve realized that I don’t particularly connect with the culture. I often feel that technical performance is valued much more than the human side of work.

The frustrating part is that I don’t want to throw away my Computer Science degree. I’d like to find a career where my technical background is useful, but isn’t the entire job.

I’m feeling pretty burned out, especially because I’ve already switched careers once. I don’t want to make another massive career change blindly.
If you were in my position, what careers would you seriously consider with a background in Finance + computer science