Hi Folks!

I am seeing news about job displacement at Big tech organizations and also the recent voluntary exit offer at Microsoft.

My guess is that a lot of the jobs affected are the front end and back-end type of positions.

Does anybody have any insight into how secure are the MLE and Research scientist roles at big tech, specially in USA?

The guess would be they are secure since the AI/ML is what these companies are pivoting to but not entirely sure and wanted to get your inputs.

Thanks!

I work on the claims system at an insurance company, the kind of code where a rounding mistake means someone gets paid the wrong amount.

We estimated a change to how partial payouts get calculated at 4 days. That includes testing against two years of old claims, because that's how we caught the last bug before it hit customers.

My manager said in front of the team that he "built a whole app over the weekend with Claude" and doesn't understand why anything takes more than an hour anymore. He wants every estimate cut by 75% starting next sprint.

Before AI this would have been a 2 week job. 4 days already is the fast version.

How do you push back on this without sounding like you're anti AI? Or is this just how it is now?

Hi everyone,

I'm a senior software engineer with 8 years of experience, sole founding engineer at a successful startup. My track is strong but I still do not feel confident in my skills. I often fake the confidence because I feel everyone does it.

I've been trying to get more into devops, terraform ... My main problem is that pre-AI, I would suffer through the nitty gritty and eventually really have a strong knowledge of what is right and wrong. Now AI develops it, reviews it.... I still have to own this code, but I haven't been "baptized by fire" to really be a good judge of this code. I can read and learn about it but it's not the same. If something goes wrong I'm going to look like an absolute idiot because I can't properly articular what happened.

Any strategies to properly learn things that you haven't learned pre-AI ? There is always the option of practicing on my own time with 0 AI, but I'm wondering if others have figured out a different strategy

Hello fellow redditors,

I’m currently working as an L1 SOC Analyst in India, earning ₹3 LPA. My goal is to reach ₹12 LPA by October 2027, and I’m looking for honest advice from people who have made a similar career jump.

Here’s my profile:

Experience: 2+ years in SOC operations

SIEM: Wazuh, ELK Stack

EDR/XDR: CrowdStrike Falcon, Bitdefender, Blumira

Other technologies: Sophos, Fortinet, SonicWall, Microsoft 365, Active Directory, Cloudflare WAF

SOC responsibilities: Alert triage, initial investigation, IOC analysis, incident documentation, escalation, shift handovers, SLA/KPI management, SOPs and playbooks

Achievement: Tuned Wazuh rules and reduced false positives by approximately 30%

Certifications: CrowdStrike Certified Falcon Administrator, Falcon Threat Hunter and Falcon Incident Responder

I have hands-on experience in 24/7 SOC environments, but I know I still need to improve my technical depth to qualify for better-paying roles.

My target is to reach ₹12 LPA within the next 12 months.I don't know I'm gonna achieve this but at any cost i have to do this like I know it's very hard but I can work . I need some advice how I can achieve this should I do certificates or should I do something else just comment below it means a lot to me if you can help me achieve my goal .

I have been working as a backend developer for almost 2 years and I am now finishing my bachelor degree and tbh i hate how the career changed in the past year due to ai. Everyday I am exhausted, angry and I feel like i haven't learned anything new and I am getting dumber and dumber.

I am honestly lost, because I know that I cannot keep doing this. The worst thing is that I do not know if it's the company, the position or I really hate the career as a whole. The thing is that I am still young and I have time for career change.

For my whole bachelor degree I wanted to persue masters in software engineering, but I have lost all my passion and motivation for it.

Since programming was always something creative for me, and I also enjoy art etc., I am thinking about UI/UX design or graphic design but I am afraid it will be dead end as well. I don't know I never expected I will be so lost.

Does anybody have similar experience, tips and tricks, or maybe a way to enjoy by job again.

Context: US Citizen, California-based role

"Holy cow", is all I can say.

I have never really interviewed at a big tech company in the past. Usually I do not apply to these because the rigorous interview loop is hard to justify a 150k salary and 40+ hours of work a week. But I am tired of my current job. It is fully remote and really chill, but I feel like I am not learning enough. I would consider myself a solid engineer in practice, so I felt like it was going to be easier than I thought. I also get paid less than I would like to at 3 YOE.

I decided to apply to a big tech SWE role asking for 4 years of experience. I do not understand how I even got interviewed in the first place, but the recruiter asked about my experience and I answered honestly. He emailed back an hour later mentioning that the hiring team would consider my candidacy.

So knowing full-well that I basically was underqualified, was probably going to get grilled at a level higher than my expertise, and was probably going to fail most of the interview, I decided to prep for everything.

I spend two weeks preparing for LeetCode interviews. I solved about 10 problems a day, and revisited problems that I have done in the past. I personally despise LeetCode, but I gave it a shot anyways. My brain was fried by the end of the day, and I felt sick sometimes. Kudos to those who can actually do this grind. I also prepared for system design heavily, and this was the one I was least worried about. I practiced behavioral problems so that I would know how to answer them properly.

The Interviews:

Technical Screen - LeetCode and Theoretical Questions

For the first technical screen, I was asked technical questions for about 20 minutes then given a LC problem that I have not seen before (not surprised). However, I was able to implement a brute force solution very quickly in about 5 minutes after discussing my approach. After I was asked to optimize, I actually recognized the optimal pattern through my practicing. I implemented the optimal approach in about 10 minutes. I discussed time complexity, tradeoffs, etc. The guy was young around my age and we chatted up a bit after. This is probably the best I have ever done in a LC round (and under 20 minutes, too). One hour after this interview, the recruiter emails me to state that I am moving up to a full panel.

First Round - LeetCode

The interviewer was a few minutes late, and introductions ate up about 10 mins of the time. I was again asked a problem that I have never seen before, but I quickly recognized the brute force approach. However, the interviewer's connection was laggy and was a little hard to understand, and I feel I heard her say that the approach is inefficient (which it was). So I was like, okay, well I am not sure how to optimize this approach, but after thinking it through, I was actually able to provide a sub-optimal approach. Zero hints so far. This one was good enough to implement and she gave me the go-ahead. I wrote the solution in about 5 minutes using binary search. She mentioned that this approach was better than brute forcing, but asked if there were a better way to optimize this. I told her that I couldn't really think of anything right now, but I kept dry running test cases to see if I can find a pattern - I couldn't. She gave hints but after a while, she mentioned the optimal approach but asked me not to implement it. I guess that was probably it for her. I give this round a Lean Hire with a best case Hire rating. Not too bad, but I am not the best at Leetcode puzzles.

Second Round - System Design

The interviewer was very nice. Cracked a few jokes and laughed. I could not really understand him too well, but he seemed genuinely interested in my experience for a few minutes. We then go to the whiteboard and he gives me a prompt that literally describes to architect my current position's system architecture. Needless to say, I felt this round went amazing. We also chatted a little bit after the round. I would give this round a Strong Hire. I have never done better than this in a SD round.

Third Round - Engineering Manager

This interviewer was also very nice. We did not do introductions but she basically grilled me to the core on my database and architecture concepts - when to handle things like replication, caching, running migrations on production data, etc. We also discussed my previous projects and work experiences. I was asked how I used AI, and I answered in a very good way. But then she got deeper, and I was starting to fear that my lack of experience was starting to show. Either way, I think I answered correctly, but I might've missed more higher level concepts that I have not necessarily touched in my SWE career. I give this round a Hire rating, maybe small chance of a Strong Hire.

Fourth Round - HLD/LLD??

My recruiter mentioned that this round would consist of "application architecture". I immediately jumped to thinking that this round would be more OOP and LLD, so when I went into the interview, I had my assumptions all wrong. This was just another System Design round, and I did not realize that until he asked "How do we scale this?" and I felt like I was thrown a curveball 15 minutes in. I thought this was LLD since I was asked to design a parking lot system - one of the examples ubiquitously asked when doing LLD interviews. The good news was that when I do LLD I always break down the problem into Functional and Nonfunctional requirements, come up with entities, data structure, and algorithm before I start coding. I was SOMEHOW already half of the way there to design this system without even knowing I was needing to design a high level system. The problem was that I already spent a long time going into the low levels of the system that it made it sound like I was going too deep into low level by that point. I immediately abstracted my details from things like algorithms, low-level dependencies, and data structure to mentioning things like horizontal scaling, API endpoints, and components. I then decided to draw up my HLD and by this point I did not have much time left but the system was super easy, so I talked through my design decisions etc. I think this one was a Lean Hire just because of how much time was burnt going through LLD halfway. Probably the worst out of the 4 interviews.

Retrospective

I have not heard back yet as I have just finished my panel yesterday, but I do not anticipate an offer. I do not think I did good enough overall, especially on that last round. I did feel like I did exceptionally well in the technical screen/system design/EM round, but hey, negative marks drag you down much more than positive marks.

Needless to say that I think I am going to stay at my company a little longer. I never realized how bad you would have to go through the gauntlet to get into these positions, and hopefully have someone to not critique you massively on your negative marks. I will probably only target regular tech roles without the prestige or rigor of joining a big tech company. The experience was great nonethless, and I learned a lot

I've been doing this for a little more than a decade, mostly on average, slightly above the average companies. Since a few weeks, I've been aggressively looking for job, which usually means going to three saved searches I have on Linkedin, check the first three pages from each search, and apply away to those who seem to be a match. (Which, as you are well aware, usually require a full match on the position and most of the technologies in the stack).

So, I open one "LANGUAGE Backend Developer" offer.

• One paragraph describing the very generic history of the company.

• Another one describing in a very generic way why they are not very generic and a super duper cool place to work.

• Requirements for employees copied from one of the big companies in the sector because most of them don't know what they are doing.

• The stack description and the whishlist of technical requirements that no one really covers fully.

• A generic list of benefits, which usually don't include the salary ranges.

Special points for "BACKEND DEVELOPER" offers that have buried in a wall of text their actual stack (which is never mine) and those companies that repost the same offer every. single. day.

This times 30 or 40.

I'm honestly baffled for the amount of bullshit every company writes, and I can't believe any single human being has read those texts fully while applying for different positions. I mean, even companies that seem to know what they are doing and/or have an interesting product are filled with corporate bullshit no one will ever read.

Am I the only one here?

You hear about the job market being awful since 3 years, when would we have some normality back?

I (24M) was hired by a friend (also 24M) to be a developer at his new startup. I was recently fired from my last job in a layoff and took the opportunity. We started the start up with 3 devs only with a minimum wage salary and they told us it was because it’s an internship and the responsibilities are low.

I was the only front end developer and now i’m a fullstack. I deliver everything they ask me even if sometimes i take a little bit longer and sometimes im not that proactive in terms of going after more work and tasks, documenting problems in the backlog and etc.

Today we had a meeting and i argued that my salary is too low and my responsibilities are above what is expected from an intern. They denied and told me that i had the “technical support” that an intern requires, that my responsibilities are not that great and im not being proactive enough.

What is truly expected from an intern? I started to doubt my self and don’t even know what i am right now. I deliver everything, i have autonomy to work on my own even if sometimes i need some info on the issue or to search and learn something new.

I’m a computer science student and trying to build a strong resume for applying to roles. But I’m not sure to what extent I should be using AI in the development of my resume projects. Should I not use it at all? Should I use it for the frontend but not the business logic? Should I have it generate everything but review it all?

I’m so lost. I have no idea what skills, or level of AI literacy these people are looking for.

I graduated with a computer science degree about a year ago and I took on a role as a data analyst for a claims processing company. Right now there's a huge push for AI and integrating it into the workflow. I feel like it makes me question. What am I really doing if the entirety of my job is trying to be transitioned into AI? I feel a bit lost because I want something with substance and I want to actually be skilled at my job and not just rely on AI. Am I in the wrong field?

How can I distinguish myself, how can I become good at my job and not just someone constantly relying on AI for help?

I worked at a single firm for a decade as a software engineer and was recently laid off about a month ago. Started off working at the firm as a frontend engineer straight out of college on a team using ember.js, and got moved around in the firm over the decade learning new skills and frameworks (mainly React.js, Spring Boot and API/backend, and AWS), and taking up more responsibilities (deployments, training new hires, etc).

By the time I was laid off, I primarily worked across the stack building APIs (from SQL -> UI presentation) and doing cross team collaboration, and I had been doing that for the later half of the decade.

I've been applying for senior software engineer positions with more rejections emails than I count, but I have gotten some interviews (some of which I was told I got the job, all of which lead to no offers).

I'm curious if I should take the leap and apply for staff/principal engineer positions, and looking for guidance from the community. To be honest, I read the job descriptions for some of these positions and think there's no way I'm cut out for them. They tend to ask for leading infrastructure design, meeting and organizing changes across the whole org, and making decisions that I quite frankly haven't had the opportunity to gain experience in my YOE.

On one hand, I think I'm just suffering from imposter syndrome, because I know I can learn and do just about anything (if I can't do it today, given enough time I will be able to). On the other hand, I think there's real legitimacy to my concern, and that I'd actually be making a fool out of myself applying for these roles.

I've been getting spammed by LinkedIn recruiters on the daily, most of them reaching out about founding engineer roles at AI startups in NYC.

I have 4YOE, at a no-name startup, and had joined as eng #3. I've worked across the platform, having joined as a frontend eng but eventually transitioning to being a full stack engineer. My profile is not remarkable.

I get inMail like:

• "first engineer at a pre-seed NYC startup building an AI back-office (bookkeeping, AP/AR, payroll) for SMBs. $150-200K + up to 2% equity, in person in Manhattan. Fancy hearing more?"
• "The role: AI Product Engineer on a 7-person pod. Full stack, features owned end to end, on customer calls yourself. Unlimited AI tooling budget, meals in office, monthly team dinners at Michelin-starred spots. $200K to $300K base, top-of-market equity, Hudson Yards 4x/week"
• "Not only will you get to work with some of the brightest minds in the space (ex Ramp, Google, Clay, Poolside), but you’ll have the opportunity to own features end-to-end, bring structure to ambiguous problems, work directly with customers and iterate on their feedback, make strong technical decisions, and ship high-quality code. Cash up to 300k + significantly above market equity".

Most of these sound interesting but as someone with limited experience, how do I spot a good one from the rest, and why am I suddenly receiving so many of these when my experience is not really commensurate with the roles they're trying to fill? What skills should I have in order to be a good fit for these, and how do you generally interview prep at one of these places?

Thanks!