From what I’ve researched online, entry-level software engineering salaries around Richmond seem to start at roughly $80k, with many estimates in the $80k–$95k range.

For those working in software engineering in Richmond, VA, does that seem accurate?

For a first year software engineer making under $70k, would you consider that underpaid?

I graduated in Spring 2026 with a CS degree from a well-regarded Canadian university. I didn't land any internships during undergrad, but I did complete about a year of research work with a professor.

In Fall 2025, I applied to several U.S. master's programs to explore my options and ended up getting accepted into an MS in CS program at a top UC school. The program takes approximately a year to complete, and I'm currently enrolled, paying out-of-state tuition.

Here's my situation:

My family is financially comfortable, and our family business is covering the cost of my degree. I'm extremely grateful for that, but I've questioned whether this master's is actually worth the investment.

I'm a Canadian citizen, so I already have the potential to work in the U.S. through TN status for qualifying positions. My argument to my parents before enrolling was that I could focus on finding a job, gaining experience, and earning money rather than spending another year in school paying expensive tuition.

They insisted that I pursue the master's, explaining that the business could cover the expense and that the money would otherwise go toward taxes or other business expenses.

My biggest concern is the difference in our expectations.

My parents seem to believe that graduating with a master's from a prestigious U.S. university will lead to an offer from a company like OpenAI, Anthropic, or Palantir.

I see things differently. Given the current CS job market, I'd be happy landing a solid entry/mid-level position in software engineering, QA, product management, or another field related to my degree. I'm not expecting a six-figure offer from a top tech company simply because I have a master's.

There's also the immigration aspect. My parents are now asking how I plan to remain in the U.S. after graduating. I've explained that F-1 status is temporary, that OPT provides a limited period of post-graduation work authorization, and that longer-term employment requires additional planning. I also pointed out that TN status could potentially have allowed me to work in the U.S. without pursuing this degree, provided I secured a qualifying job.

At this point, I'm also experiencing academic burnout. I worked hard throughout undergrad, graduated with strong grades, and honestly don't have the same motivation to push for perfect grades in graduate school. I'm focusing on completing my degree while preparing for the job market.

I'm concerned that even if I land a perfectly respectable job after graduating, my parents may be disappointed because they expect a much bigger outcome from their investment. I raised these concerns before enrolling, but they still wanted to pay for the degree.

My questions:

1. Is a one-year MS in CS from a top UC school worth it for someone in my position, especially without traditional internship experience?
2. As a Canadian citizen with potential TN eligibility, would it have made more sense to focus on finding employment directly?
3. Should I prioritize recruiting, projects, and interview preparation over maintaining perfect grades at this point?
4. Has anyone dealt with family members who financially support their education but have unrealistic expectations about the jobs it will lead to?

I'd appreciate perspectives from people who have gone through something similar, especially Canadian graduates working in the U.S. or people who completed an MS in CS.

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 .

Hey, just recently got an interview for a data analyst role at a biotech company. It's one of them video interviews and one of the questions is "What interests you in working at [Company]".

So I have 2 approaches. Either I say something really technical and lose out on acknowledging their company's accomplishment. Otherwise, I talk about some of the therapies they do, which are interesting to me, but I end up sabotaging myself talking about a field I'm not very deep in. Which approach do I take here?

Also do I take this as an opportunity to talk about my experience or do I just keep it concise and to the point?

Hey everyone, curious what you’re seeing in the job market lately. What skills, tools, or areas of experience are actually helping people get hired?

I thought mobile development would be more in demand, but I keep hearing it’s too niche. A QA/AI engineer I know also just got laid off, and roles focused purely on frontend seem to be taking a hit too.

What are you seeing at your workplace or around the industry? As teams get smaller and roles shift, what skills seem to be staying in demand?

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'm currently working as a contractor and I'm a "young" SWE compared to the peeps in here. But damn... majority of the people who works here look down on younger people and they always have to brag about they've been working here for more than I'm alive out of nowhere while I was just showing how to use our tech stack since they asked...

It feels weird here because I didn't know ageism is one of the things I'd have issue with. All I'm doing is staying on my own lane and I'm trying to learn from these people, but the constant energy of them looking down on you because you look way too young is unbearable. Just wondering if other people have this issue?

I need some advice here, got interview for swe 2027 very soon, but am honestly not prepared. I don’t want to waste the recruiters time and would rather apply early next year than take the L and be forced to wait till November of next year, provided I get a 1 year cool down. Any advice? I am coming from non-cs background, which is why I haven’t done more than like 30 leetcodes, so please be kind lol.

Hello everyone, I was recently invited for an intro call at a startup in my area. It’s for a FDE role, and all I know is that it’s a buzzword and is about working with customers. I’m wondering what a FDE might do at a startup or what the interview process would be like for this type of role. I have my call next week so I will ask many questions but was hoping for guidance on how I can prepare for an interview in the meantime. Thanks in advance!

I'm a senior ML engineer at an R&D lab. I've been trying to make a transition from research lab to production house. I've been invited to several interviews now (for senior ai engineer positions) and a first round screener question I keep hearing is "Tell me how you go about doing evaluations on a project." To me, evaluations is an extremely overloaded term. It could mean people evaluations, model evaluations, cost evaluations, risk...etc. So I typically ask if there is a type of evaluation they'd like me to describe before making assumptions and jumping into an answer. They look at me like I have 3 heads and say something like, "just tell us how you would do a normal evaluation." So I just kinda go into how I might eval a model (performance, cost, risks, etc.). I have yet to get any call backs for a second round lol. There could be another reason why, but this seems to be common between interviews and this is just one vector I'm trying to debug.

Just curious to know if anyone has any experience being asked or asking this question in an interview. Do you have any advice on a general framework on how to answer this question?

I'm also wondering if evaluation has a very specific meaning for the ai engineer position that I'm just unaware of.

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?

I graduated from a decent-to-good university for CS in Spring 2025 and have not yet been graced with a job offer. I did not have any internships during my 3 years of studying, but I did have some decent projects, like partially writing a kernel for my capstone and working on a promising but then-unfinished game. I spent 3-4 months applying to SWE positions out of college, and after a string of failures, I figured it would be best to wrap up and publish my game commercially to strengthen my resume.

A year of development passed, the game came out, and nothing changed much. My resume is definitely more attractive now since it has no loose ends, but it's still a far cry from being good: it has no trust signals in the form of formal work experience. I've had minimal interviews this whole time, though I've been flown out for two companies: one was a random NYC startup, the other was Amazon. Neither panned out.

I think I'm in a pretty classic bind of needing experience to get experience, and the state of the market for the foreseeable future is such that no one, at any level, has a reason to run the risk of hiring me. It's not even a question of exposure or volume: my dad is a now-retired software engineer who hit up his entire network to give me referrals, most of whom work in FAANG, but none of it panned out. I don't have any personal contacts in the industry, either. My resume is just unappealing, and my "new-gradness" is already on its way out.

I don't really know what else to do: I feel like my standards are already as low as they can be within the field. Maybe I should pivot to something completely unrelated, like a trade or something? It just feels like I missed the boat big time, and it's not coming back. Is that the case?

I've been seeing people talking bout how QA is dead now and basically companies just have SWEs do all the testing. Is this true? Should I just change career paths out of QA, or is it just because of the market right now?

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

Hey everyone,
I recently got laid off from a Senior Frontend role here in London (6 YOE) . Tbh, I’m completely burnt out on the SWE interviewing process, job hunting and the saturated dev market.

I want out of pure engineering but I need to protect my income and land a job ASAP (minimum £65k/$90k baseline to live in London). I also hate technical coding interviews, whiteboard loops and live LeetCode tasks. I want a role with high AI resistance and near-zero daily coding volume.

My research narrowed down my top 3 options to:
- Cloud Security Governance / Assurance Analyst
- AI Security Governance Specialist
- Technical GRC / Security Assurance Engineer

I am heavily leaning toward Cloud Security Governance / Assurance because of job availability in London, it requires near-zero daily coding and skips live coding for conversational, scenario-based interviews.
My plan is a full-time study sprint (35+ hours/week) to secure the AWS Certified Security - Specialty and the CCSK badges to trigger recruiter keywords.

Am I over-simplifying how realistic it is to leverage my software background to jump straight into a mid-level Technical Cloud Governance role at £65k+/$90k within 2–3 months? Has anyone else made a similar jump to escape interview anxiety?
Brutal honesty welcome. Cheers.

Software dev postings are still near the bottom right now, and the traditional tech hubs, Seattle, SF, have some of the lowest posting levels in the country. Felt like this was worth breaking out on its own since the overall headline number doesn’t really tell you anything if you’re specifically trying to get hired in software.

Overall postings index is up to 103.8, about 4% above pre-pandemic and almost 3% higher than a year ago. On paper that reads like a recovery... but.

Then you look at hires rate (3.3%) and quits rate (1.9%), both still flat. Openings per unemployed worker are sitting at 1.0, versus around 1.2 back in 2019. That’s not a hiring surge, more like companies are just posting jobs and then taking their sweet time filling them.

68% of sectors now have more postings than last year, up from under half in September, so the recovery is broadening outside tech even while tech itself lags. Meanwhile AI related postings are over double their 2022 peak, which feels like it’s eating into some of the roles that used to be straight SWE postings.

If you're interested in the article, just let me know and I can pass it on to you :)

Is this consistent with what people are really seeing in tech hiring right now, or does it feel even worse than these numbers suggest??

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.

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?

I've had limited work experience, but it seems like writing code manually vs having LLM code is now what writing in a high level language vs writing assembly was. If it's not something that is trivial to change, it seems like the LLM can do a faster and better generally. Especially when working with tools/frameworks I'm not familiar in.

edit: Would appreciate more context if you reply, interested in how different areas use it

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!

What are the usual tasks of mid level and VP level developers these days? I’m hearing from the news that these people are vulnerable right now to AI. I thought the problem was just with the juniors?

I’m looking for a free ai mock interview tool for me to practice speaking and gives detailed feedback. Asks interview questions, analyse speech with pace, pauses, filler words, gives a report with scores. Most tools I found have free trial limits, websites, GitHub projects, self-hosted tools are all fine.

I got laid off May 2025 and haven’t worked as a SWE since. I have taken a long hiatus due to mental health reasons (won’t get into it, but I was really bad), financial problems, relationship issues, all just one after another. I did a little job search back in late 2025 and got to a couple final rounds but never got offers. Then more things went down, but now I am back. Is it possible for me to get a job? I worked at 2 F500 companies primarily as backend or full stack. I got my hands dirty on a lot of different tech. React, Angular, Java Spring, AWS, SQL/NoSql, Docker/K8, IaaC. Unsure if I will be able to get a job or not given the market and my career gap.

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