Take a breath and relax. The panic sweeping this sub right now is just the latest lap in a cycle that has been playing out in tech for decades.

I know because I lived this crazy stuff, back in the 90's, almost the exact same shit.

Started in tech working on MVS before most of you were born (not saying to patronize, but I am a real gray haired dinosaur.

Back then the economy was in a deep recession following the 1987/S&L bust. Jobs were incredibly scarce. Everyone swore the tech industry was dead and the golden era was permanently over.

Same shit, different day and a few years later, the job market was roaring again.

Then came this new tool called Visual Basic. I remember being in a meeting (no Teams back then) with business end-users where they told me they wouldn't need dev's soon because they could just build it all themselves in VB.

Five years later, guess what? We were all still maintaining the legacy COBOL systems, but now there were thousands of new jobs dedicated to VB, too.

You might think this is just one old farts experience.

But when I was the junior dev, the veterans who survived the post-punch-card transition told me the exact same stories about end-users thinking technologists were suddenly obsolete and they could type their programs themselves.

Every era the tools get smarter, but the fundamental need for engineers to build something never goes away.

I don't usually post here, but it breaks my heart to see young kids who paid college bills and are working hard thinking like this due to the BS nonsense by a few to pump up their agenda.

An old-timer in this biz of ours (who is likely long dead) told me this nearly 30 years ago:

“Everything that needs to be said in tech has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.”

Meta:
2019 - 45,000
2022 - 86,000
2025 - 79,000

Google:
2019 - 118,000
2022 - 190,000
2025 - 191,000

Microsoft:
2019 - 144,000
2022 - 221,000
2025 - 228,000

Oracle:
2019 - 136,000
2022 - 143,000
2025 - 162,000

Salesforce:
2019 - 35,000
2022 - 73,000
2025 - 76,000

Many of these companies doubled over the course of 3 years. That is simply unprecedented and obviously unsustainable.

But according to you all, these headcount’s are absolutely fucked and the whole world is collapsing even though the layoffs over the last few years hardly register as a blip relative to the explosion in growth pre-2019.

And since you this sub absolutely shits on anyone with the slightest bit of optimism, what’s your prediction for the year all of these companies have a headcount that is equal to their 2019 headcount?

This should be documented for future reference.

bruh not doompost but every morning I wake up thinking about how hopeless my situation is (even just beyond finding a job)

I only have a few more months before I am no longer eligible for new grad jobs and then it is really over

It's a true irony. AI is definitely useful. I use it a lot. But somehow, bugs aren't getting fixed in actual products we use. Instagram is riddled with bugs. FireFox browser video playing is buggy as hell and frustrates me. and so on. I can't understand why. AI is both useful and used all the time and we rely on it more and more but somehow important bugs are not being solved. If any, it seems like there's more bugs than ever.

And I am not sure if new, truly profitable features or products are being developed with AI. It might be just me but AI made development faster but didn't really solve core bugs or made actually profitable products. Except some reports about security fixes end users can't really feel.

Edit : I think I worded it poorly about profitable products developed with AI. What I wanted to say was that pc/internet/smartphones etc not only automated some jobs but created massive opportunities and new markets. Seems like current focus of AI is replacing existing job mostly like software dev, voice actors, actors, artists, musicians etc instead of opening a new market previously unimaginable. Well, some might argue automation will usher in new market but unless AI gets much more reliable than what we have now, I am doubtful.

~11 YOE, prior FAANG + Team Lead experience, have I misunderstood when I should be targeting Staff?

I’m trying to recalibrate my career trajectory and would value perspectives from people who’ve gone through the Senior → Staff transition.

I have ~11 YOE, including ~2 years at Amazon, followed by ~7 years at a smaller FinTech in NYC where I progressed to Team Lead level. I led engineers, owned system/design decisions and delivery, and did significant cross-team work.

For the past ~2 years, I focused heavily on Staff SWE interviews. My thinking was:

Senior SWE at FAANG ≈ Staff SWE at a lower-tier company

Given my Amazon experience, YOE, leadership, and architecture background, I felt Staff was a reasonable target. Truthfully, Compensation was also a major motivation.

I eventually got comfortable with technical/system design interviews, but Staff behavioral rounds exposed a gap: I had plenty of architecture, leadership, delivery, and cross-functional experience, but less experience with truly organization-level, multi-year impact.

I eventually landed a Staff role, but was laid off after ~8 months during a significant company wide reduction. 5 of 9 members including me and manager were let go. As the newest engineer and only Staff on a relatively new team (~1 year old), I also don’t feel I had enough time to establish myself at that level. After ~2 years of interviewing, I’m also pretty burned out.

Now I’m questioning my original premise.

Maybe I should have targeted Senior at stronger companies, built more Staff-level scope, and then made the jump. But with ~11 YOE, prior FAANG experience, and my background, would targeting Senior now mean unnecessarily selling myself short?

Was targeting Staff reasonable given my background, or have I overestimated how close I am to being Staff-ready?

Help me understand:

• How much does company tier change the Staff bar?
• Senior at a stronger company vs. Staff at a FAANG adjacent?
• At ~11 YOE, how do I view title vs. actual scope/trajectory?
• If compensation is a major motivation, is continuing to target Staff rational?
• In my position, would you keep pushing Staff or reset to Senior?

My recent company does stack ranking, which I know for sure but I also was only Staff in my team. Am I taking this too personally, given that 5 out of 9 members of my team were let go? Note: This wasn’t the same layoff ratio across the company.

I’m also trying to separate career calibration from FOMO. I don’t want to chase a title because I feel I “should” have reached it, but I also don’t want to unnecessarily step backward.

Would especially appreciate candid perspectives from Staff+ engineers and hiring managers.

Senior engineer with 10 years of experience.

I grew up poor, never had money growing up dad was a janitor and mom worked odd jobs

I put myself through school, studied CS, and then became the first college grad in my family. I got a job as a software engineer out of college. Eventually job hopped a few times, met my wife, got a house now I have a boy and a girl, a 3 year old and a 1 year old

I never made FAANG level salary but I’ve been content with what I have because it puts a roof over my family’s head and I can also help out my parents financially (no they never ask for it, they actually refuse it but I hate seeing them struggle and try to do little things here and there).

Lately for the past year I’ve been super depressed knowing that the end is near for the industry. It will all come crashing down. Not a single day goes by where I wake up depressed and anxious and go to sleep depressed and anxious

I don’t have generational wealth to look forward to after AI displaces me and most of the middle class jobs

I don’t know how everyone here can stay positive.

First you lose your job, then you drain your savings. Once you drain your savings, you will liquidate your investments which will be close to worthless because everyone else will also be pulling out. Then you default on your mortgage and any other loans you have and lose your house.

Finally you get kicked to the curb and either starve or commit suicide.

I was honestly proud of how far I’ve come given the cards I was dealt

But it stings to know all that hard work was for nothing and the people who will be affected the most will be my children

I was dreaming of them going off to college, getting married , eventually having kids of their own, and me living happily ever after in retirement spending time with my wife, my kids, and my grandchildren.

It hurts to know that none of that is going to happen once AI displaces me

New Grad here and been at the job for about 3 months. Its a hybrid job with a couple days in office per month. Now almost everyday I finish my work earlier than 8 hours and don't know what to do with that. I have work but i try space things out a bit so I am not sitting workless for days. What do you guys do when you have down time daily? I am scared inactivity or something might cost me the job even when i am working on 2 projects + assessment reviews etc

It’s so obvious how many posts on this sub are just propaganda designed to look like "negative" AI posts, yet are all somehow worded to be as positive as possible, avoiding any real human language. All from months old accounts.
Guess what, AI is fucking dogshit, useless slop that makes all software worse, and is also ruining our internet AND our planet, stop falling for this shit

Which tech fields do you think are likely to remain valuable in the AI era, and which ones do you think will be affected the most? and why?

Thanks in advance :)

For those who used to work at a pre-IPO tech company and decided to walk away leaving all your stock options on the table - how did it turn out?

Context: I’ve been at a late-stage pre-IPO company for the better part of a decade. They've been around for ~15 years and I've heard "IPO next year" every year I've been here.

I’m leaving soon, but I can’t exercise all my options. Honestly, I’m leaning towards just leaving everything and walking away completely since the private markets have the stock below my lowest strike rate options.

I'm feeling a ton of FOMO right now. There's this nagging "what if" playing in my head - what if they finally go public and I just walked away from a literal fortune?

To be clear, I’m not leaving for a massive TC bump. I'm not doing this for the money (although it's a bit more), but I had to make this move because my growth stagnated and I need this for my career progression.

Has anyone else walked away from a massive chunk of paper money? Did you end up regretting it, or was the career growth worth it? Would love to hear your experiences.

What does it mean to be an engineer? Wait. Before you go any further. That answer you were thinking of, is that what it means to be an engineer in the context of a corporate structure?

I feel like there should be more love for computers and computation and the philosophy and theory that surrounds it. Those are the bedrock, and everything you can and cannot build depends on those things. I think there is something kind of obscene about letting organizations define what it means to be an engineer according to their own needs, given that their needs are not our needs. We our suffocating our own intellects.

Okay. Please tell me why I'm wrong.

I am a software engineer at a consulting company with about 4 YOE. I first broke into the industry after attending a coding bootcamp in 2021. A lot of the work I did started by doing FE web app development mainly with React and eventually moving on to some BE systems like FastAPI and Django.

Over the past year there has been a huge shift in my company (which I’m sure many other have experienced) of diving deep into AI development. The type of projects I’ve been working on have drastically changed as well. I went from making internal tools for companies like a central reports ingestion and review app to making AI assistants curated for the clients specific industry. (E.g. an AI assistant for accountants) I’ve gone from creating responsive front end UIs and standard CRUD API endpoints to optimizing compaction logic and modifying the AI harness, and other development features I have no experience with. We are also expected to develop all of this in a fast paced environment with tight deadlines that span weeks for work that may take over a year in a pre-AI world. Because of this, I struggle with balancing learning and being productive. This has caused me major stress and even further imposter syndrome on a daily basis.

We are provided the top AI models with virtually unlimited tokens and expected to be able to build whatever the client or leadership asks for. My question is, how are you able to learn and implement the best design patterns or engineering decisions on features or work you have never done before in a fast paced environment like this? I’d love to get advice from experienced developers and understand a workflow that has worked for you specifically with AI. Thank you all in advanced.

TLDR: Software dev with 4 YOE coming from a coding bootcamp trying to understand how to properly develop features with correct design patterns and engineering practices for work I have no experience doing in a fast paced environment.

Case in point, threads like this are popping up frequently nowadays

As LLM capabilities have been improving at breaking paces this whole year, the anti-AI rhetoric went from the somewhat reasonable “AI makes a ton of mistakes and human will always be better” to the new take of “AI is all fake, nobody uses AI in the industry and it’s all just people lying, and companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are faking users and revenue”.

Of course nobody who works in the actual industry would take people like that seriously, but for the people on this sub who are not in the industry yet (either unemployed or still in school), posts like that are just downright poisonous.

For the anxious juniors and students who lurk on this sub, just remember that no matter what you wish for, there is only one objective reality. Just because someone is saying something that makes you feel better doesn’t mean it’s true.

No, I don’t know where the industry is going for sure (and anyone who says otherwise is either lying or just stupid), but AI is everywhere and their capabilities and usages are only expanding everywhere.

Maybe AI will cause mass unemployment or maybe it will usher in a new era of high demand for software engineers, again, I don’t know for sure.

And yes, AI is in a bubble, but it’s not going away. Just like the Internet grew bigger than ever after the dotcom crash.

Edit: When I say some people here are “unhinged”, I do mean that: https://imgur.com/a/ElKWw2d

near Toronto. finished a 2 year computer programming diploma recently. worked a helpdesk internship with local govt, left with great references, tried to get my hands dirty wherever i could. been applying for jobs the whole time hoping i could have something lined up for when the internship ended, but no luck. i've had 3 interviews total, and done well, had good feedback, but ultimately they just go with someone else. no hard feelings, but it sucks.

seems like almost every new grad i know is in the same position. not much they can do, there just aren't enough internships for all of us. even seniors with 20 years of experience seem to be fighting for jobs.

should i just get my bachelors and wait for the job market to be less shit? i don't even hear back from entry level jobs, customer service, MSPs, nothing. 3 interviews in 5 months is just not sustainable. i'm currently couch surfing but i'm gonna need to find somewhere to live very soon.

i spend a lot of time studying, aiming to get my security+ in the near future and CCNA sometime next year, but it seems like there isn't much else i can do to put myself ahead. everyone is competing for the same entry level experience.

I got my BS in CS in 2021 and have been working at the same company ever since. I’ve worked with WPF, MAUI, Outlook, and a little bit of C++/P/Invoke. Over the last four years, I’ve also done a lot of Upwork work in parallel, mostly focusing on ASP.NET, .NET MAUI, Avalonia, and WPF; in other words, pretty much everything in the C#/.NET ecosystem. I have around 5,000 hours of experience on Upwork.

My freelance work seems stable for now, but my main job makes me a little nervous because the company keeps talking about possible layoffs. There’s a good chance they may let me go by the end of this year.

Over the years, I’ve become very skilled in the stack and frameworks I’ve worked with, but I’ve never had enough free time to learn more advanced or fundamental topics. Basically, I feel like I’ve been stuck in a swamp. So I was thinking that if I do get laid off, I could enroll in a two-year master’s program and use those two years to learn as much as possible and increase my marketability.

Do you think this makes sense, or would it be a waste of time? Would a master’s degree combined with a lot of new fundamental knowledge help me stay relevant in the field?

I’ll continue working through Upwork, so financially, I can afford two years of studying. Or would it make more sense to simply keep applying to as many jobs as possible until someone hires me?

I had to relocate to Central Europe for work when I joined a Big Tech, recently.

The work is great and the company as well, however I don’t see myself in this country and want to go back to London (they have an office there, actually bigger).

Has anyone tried something similar? What advices would you give? Any pushbacks?

Thank you!

I sometimes see some comments of people saying that since AI is killing CS, then it be better to get into something like accounting or normal engineering, but why wouldnt AI be able to kill off these other jobs too? Maybe Im just dumb ( I am) but it just seems like no jobs are safe.

I need some outside perspective because I'm genuinely trying to figure out whether I'm being unreasonable or whether my boss is seriously fucking me over.

I was originally hired to work for Company A. Over time, I was moved onto work for Company B, with the understanding that I would eventually transition over and have a new contract.

The problem is that the transition never actually happened.

I'm still being paid by Company A under my original arrangement, while I'm being asked to do substantial work for Company B. I've never received a clear new contract establishing my role, responsibilities, salary, or employment relationship with Company B.

Despite that, I'm increasingly being treated as though I'm responsible for Company B's work.

Here's where I have a problem.

I've repeatedly asked my boss for the things I need to actually do the job:

• access to relevant Slack channels
• access to team meetings
• access to project management boards
• access to the relevant accounts/tools
• clarification about priorities
• clarification about what needs to be completed and by when

At one point, I explicitly asked to join the daily standups because I said I was having trouble keeping track of what was happening with the product.

I was not consistently included in those meetings.

I've also explicitly asked my boss for meetings to clarify what I should be working on because there were periods where I genuinely didn't have assigned work.

Then, weeks/months later, my boss asks me things like:

"what have you been working on?"

and questions why there hasn't been more progress.

That's what pisses me off.

How am I supposed to independently own something when I'm not being given the information necessary to know what the fuck is happening?

And this isn't just about me wanting someone to hold my hand.

I'm a developer. If you tell me what the objective is, give me access to the relevant systems, and give me the necessary context, I can figure out the technical implementation myself.

But there's a difference between technical autonomy and being completely disconnected from the people making the decisions while still being held responsible for the outcome.

There have also been situations where priorities have apparently changed or work has happened without me being informed, despite me being responsible for related areas.

Then when I question why I didn't work on something, the response is essentially:

"I assumed you would naturally work on something useful."

That's incredibly frustrating when I've literally been asking what I should be working on.

But what I'm trying to understand is the larger pattern.

It feels like my boss wants the benefits of having someone operate independently, without actually giving them the communication, authority, context, or formal arrangement necessary to operate independently.

Then, when something doesn't happen, the responsibility can be pushed back onto the developer:

"Why didn't you do this?"

"Why weren't you working on that?"

"Why didn't you figure this out yourself?"

And that's the part that makes me feel like I'm being played.

I'm not claiming my boss is intentionally running some elaborate scheme. Maybe he's just extremely disorganized.

But from my perspective, the outcome is the same: management decisions and communication failures are being turned into a developer-performance problem.

I've kept the conversations/messages because I don't want this to become a situation where six months from now someone tells me:

"You were given all the opportunities. You just weren't capable."

Because I have messages showing that I repeatedly asked for access, meetings, priorities, and clarification.

So I'm asking people who have worked in startups:

Is this normal startup chaos, or is this genuinely bad management?

I just want an honest outside perspective on whether I'm being paranoid, or whether the situation really is as fucked as it looks from my side.

I'm a part-time Data Analyst at a midsize company, and I'm trying to figure out whether I should continue pursuing data/analytics or consider pivoting into something else entirely. Over the past six months, I've helped build out a lot of our data/reporting infrastructure that didn't really exist before I joined. My work has gone beyond simply creating dashboards and has started influencing sales, marketing, product, and operational decisions.

Some of the work I've completed includes:

- Assisted with migrating company-wide operational and financial data from paper documents into automated Zoho/QuickBooks data schemas, and helped redefine how the sales team collects and structures information around those systems.

- Built a sales dashboard tracking onboarding, account/license usage, retention/churn, and forecasting.

- Replaced an Excel-based account-health tracker with a real-time BI system that tracks customer engagement and product usage and helps identify accounts at risk of churn.

- Created user-activity reporting that showed which product features were actually being used. This helped prioritize updates, bug fixes, and new features around the top three features, while two essentially unused features were ultimately sunsetted.

- Built a marketing workflow dashboard analyzing interactions across our website, advertising, and other marketing channels.

- Automated lead generation for the sales team, reducing some of the manual work involved in identifying and routing leads.

- I've also modified workflows in our existing tools to reduce credit/API usage, which has allowed the company to operate without having to worry nearly as much about hitting API or usage limits.

The common thread is that I'm not just producing reports after the fact. I'm increasingly building systems and workflows that other departments rely on to operate and make decisions.

The company has now started assigning me projects that are considerably broader than what I was originally brought on to do:

- expanding the marketing-side systems I've already built, including improving how we track and analyze marketing interactions and turning more of that information into useful workflows for the sales/marketing teams.

- automating additional operational processes that currently require manual work.

- developing new features for the company's product. The interesting part is that this would require me to work in a software stack I'm not familiar with, including Java/.NET, rather than the Python/SQL/data tools I normally work with. I'm willing to learn it, but it's a pretty significant expansion of my responsibilities for someone who is still technically a part-time data analyst.

These aren't really "make a dashboard" projects anymore. They involve data architecture, automation, business processes, and potentially software development. The company has a very small tech/data department: two software engineers, a systems administrator, a senior analyst (my manager), and the CTO. My manager is also a relatively recent hire.

Despite being part-time, I've been given a significant amount of ownership. The problem is that I'm still part-time after six months and I have not worked more than 25 hrs / week despite requesting it and having multiple conversations with the CEO + my manager. My manager has been very supportive and has told me that my data/analytics knowledge is a valuable resource for the company. He's also aware that I've been struggling financially and has asked the company to extend my position because he needs the help. So this isn't really a situation where my manager doesn't want me around.

The problem is that I don't know whether there is actually a path to full-time employment. And I'm starting to feel like the scope of the role is outgrowing the hours. The aforemantioned projects have slowed down, but these newer projects are considerably more involved and require more of my technical input. I'm starting to reach a point where I don't think I can realistically meet some of the expectations and deadlines within a part-time schedule.

This is particularly frustrating because I've been through something similar before. At my previous job, I spent six months as an intern and then another year working part-time, with repeated conversations about potentially being extended to full-time. That never materialized. So I'm admittedly pretty jaded about being told there may eventually be a full-time opportunity without anything concrete actually happening.

I also have to be honest about the fact that I'm burned out. I spent roughly nine months unemployed before getting this job, and the job market has been brutal. Of the people I know personally, none of my friends and only about five of my classmates managed to land jobs in this market. But despite all of that, I'm still struggling financially because I'm working part-time. That's what's making me question whether I should keep pursuing data/analytics at all.

Part of me thinks I should stay the course. I'm finally getting legitimate experience again, I've been given significant ownership, and I have concrete examples of using data to influence actual business decisions. Maybe leaving now would be throwing away the hardest part of getting my foot in the door. But another part of me is thinking:

Why am I spending years trying to break into an extremely difficult junior market if the end result is being unemployed for nine months and then working part-time while still struggling financially?

Maybe I should prioritize financial stability and peace of mind instead. I'm not necessarily looking for a huge salary or some dream tech job. At this point, I'd be pretty happy with a stable full-time position, decent benefits, and enough income to actually start making progress toward my financial goals. That could mean staying in data and continuing to apply for full-time roles while keeping this job. It could mean taking a full-time job outside of data and potentially coming back to analytics later. Or it could mean actually pivoting careers altogether.

All in all, am I being shortsighted by considering leaving data after finally getting my foot in the door, or is it reasonable to decide that financial stability and quality of life are more important than staying in a field I've invested so much into?

To anyone who’s worked as a SWE in both a tech company and a non-tech company, how different is the culture, and which do you prefer?

From my experience, a lot of non-tech companies group their developers with “IT” and end up lacking the engineering culture that many tech companies have.

Mid level at big tech. My manager sees me as a high performer and he's said a senior promo is on the table for next cycle. But it isn't his decision alone, our org has a budget for promotions and bonuses that other managers will fight for. Part of my manager's suggestion is to create visibility for myself with upper management.

I don't know how to do that. My current projects are either driven by me but mostly silo'd to our team, or working with other teams but with someone else as the lead. If I were to have a 1:1 with my skip, I'm not sure what I'd even talk about.

My thoughts right now are to keep jumping on high impact projects or to be seen helping resolve a big incident. Neither of these seem really active; any suggestions on what to do?

The bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that the Software Engineering career with grow by 10%-18% over the next decade which comes out to something like 300,000-400,000 jobs and is 3ish times more than the overall job market.

Software development is definitely easier now, but that means that everyone and their mom is going to be wanting to do software development. But they’ll all quickly realize that you actually need SWEs once it gets even slightly more complex than a React SPA.

Somewhere around 80,000-90,000 people retire, switch careers, or go into some other area like management every year.

Sure there are 120,000 new grads every year right now, but this seems to be peaking with the current environment of our field, but even then, a solid 25% of those people simply can’t hack it as an actual SWE. Especially in this environment, many of them can’t find jobs and will give up. Not to mention the ones who simply cheated their way through their classes. Better yet, remember those fellow students from your classes who could hardly even have a conversation or talk to someone? No way they’re going to actually get a job.

Given all that, there will be plenty of jobs to go around if you’re even a moderately good SWE and can hold a conversation for more than 2 min.

Hey all!

I dont really know where to ask I thought this might be the place.

I am an electrical engineer by trade, but I worked with FPGAs. What I learned there I was easy to adapt to work in CUDA. My FPGA work also allowed me to understand CPU architectures on a deep level, with perf and vtune in my toolbelt I am able to perf profile everything.

But!

This is the 3rd time that on an interview I got grilled on BigO. I understand the concept but I lack formal education/practice. Is there any reputable site I can use to learn at least C++ standard container operations BigO complexity and some common algos?

How should I go about this?