Hey everyone, I'm a principal software engineer with 15 years of experience. I've worked at FAANG companies and startups, both remote and on-site. There is a lot of negativity on this subreddit, and for years I've talked to people who say "I've applied to hundreds of jobs and can't find anything!"

I've gotten pretty good at finding jobs over the years, and I think some of you might find this useful.

(I dictated this and had AI format it, but it's not AI-gen, hand to god lol. Frankly the formatting still looks weird but I can't be bothered)

1. Don't apply through company websites

Submitting your resume directly through a company website is useless. If it wasn't useless 10 years ago, it certainly is now with the flood of AI-generated applications.

It can actually be worse than useless. Once you're in a company's system, recruiters may not be able to get a referral bonus for you, because you're technically already a lead. You may be removing someone's incentive to place you.

2. Build a big list of target companies

Aggressively list companies that interest you. Narrow by salary, location, remote-friendliness, etc. if you want, but cast as wide a net as possible. More offers mean more negotiating leverage. Use AI to help you build your list. Build a daily AI job that finds and compiles relevant jobs from those companies and similar for you, then take those job listing and shove them under the nose of some recruiters on linkedin with your resume in hand.

3. Work LinkedIn systematically

• Maintain a LinkedIn account. You don't have to post, but add all your professional and school contacts. Connections are what let you message recruiters and employees for referrals.
• Referrals and recruiters are how your resume actually gets seen.
• Use AI to find a couple of recruiters at each target company, plus a couple of 1st-, 2nd-, or 3rd-degree connections who work there.
• Add and message all of them. Ask for referrals or opportunities. Every one of them now has a financial incentive to help you land a role. If that doesn't work, ask on Blind (I know, it's a depressing cesspool).

4. Check out Wellfound (startups)

Startups are booming in 2026. AI gives them a real shot at competing with big players, who are mostly rent-seeking, not innovating, and laying people off. Startups are also how you stay current with the fast-changing AI landscape, since big companies move slowly.

• Aim for a solid salary: roughly $100K–$300K depending on your level.
• Ask for some equity as a lottery ticket. Try to negotiate up to 1%.
• Many startups are remote-friendly, so you can cast a wide net.

That's how I found my latest role.

5. Interviewing

Honestly, I don't know what interviewing looks like in 2026 with all the AI craziness. Do your best.

6. If you can't find a job, especially as a new grad, etc., apply to contracting companies

Contracting companies are in every major city and hire people like crazy - anyone they think they can place at a temporary contract at another company, because they scrape some of your money off the top. But it is a job, money, security, and frankly you will get exposed to and learn all sorts of technologies, make tons of professional contacts, and often get a full-time offer from the company you're placed at.

7. If you STILL can't find a job, especially as a pre-grad, new grad, etc., apply to internships

Some of you haven't even considered applying for internships. Guess, what, internships are for SOMEONE, and that someone is people with no experience like you. Swallow your pride, work a summer internship for 3 months, get paid, get better at working, and you may literally be handed a full-time job after that. If not, you will at least have professional references, contacts, and experience, which will give you a significantly higher chance of getting a full-time job.

8. Always negotiate

No matter what offer you get, negotiate upward. It costs you nothing and could be the easiest money you ever make.

• Don't commit to anything on the phone. Say you need to discuss it with your family.
• Then go ask Claude how to negotiate your way up.
• I prefer to do all my negotiating over email.

Good luck!

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?

A little question that I've had for years.

Let's say that you're Google and employ 60k software engineers. Every one of those engineers has access to your monorepo with all of its code, and little to no guardrails on copying whatever code they may want to. You have employees from dozens of countries and backgrounds, each with varied motivations. Any of them could bring their work laptop home on a random tuesday, download the code for any million/ billion dollar product and copy/ move it to another device, if they really wanted to.

Why don't we ever see this happen? Obviously, it's illegal, but people have broken the law for less. It wouldn't be hard for an individual to copy/ paste an entire million/ billion dollar product and sell it to an undercover buyer secretly for personal gain. It also would not be hard for a foreign government to insert an employee from their country to steal IP and copy those products in its own for economic/ political gain.

I there something that I'm missing here? It seems way too easy to steal literal million/ billion dollar products and also difficult/ impossible to trace if someone had done so smartly. I would expect companies to silo and lock down their products more to prevent things like this from happening.

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

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 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.

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?

Been working in corporate America for over 10 years and I may have had maybe 1 or 2 good managers.

Quite honestly some of the things people stress over is too trivial like everyone on their team coming in by 8am even tho rest of office arrives between 9-9.30.

But I have this managers who has a reputation of being a bad manager. Being overly Imposing on the team and that shit just weighs the team down.

He has a tendency towards favoritism. He took this senior under his arm and dude trusts him with everything and pushed the senior towards a lead role in another team.

While he has his favorite the rest he just cuts from the clique. And we are just wondering like what the fuck. We just have no one to complain too.

And it's a repeating pattern where he keeps forming a circle of trust and basically leaves the others out in the cold.

I just cant forsee any consequences he faces cause he doesn't change his behavior and why would he, it's openly known how much everyone on the team don't like him. People on other teams openly tell us yeah he's bad. im pretty sure senior managers know as well. I dont feel like anything can be done

One of my friends, in the same company different department, who had a new manager who just wanted to get rid of him put him on a PIP.

He tried to dispute the PIP with paper trail of evidence showing his performance is not worthy of a PIP including consistent performance reviews that shows hes exceeded expectations and meeting notes and recording

HR didnt care. He still went through the PIP and got let go. Fortunately he found a new gig with 2 months.

Like this shit just sucks man. My old manager was solid and was the one who hired me and wanted me to grow as a developer and wanted to push me towards senior roles. Loved that manager. I hate that that manager had to relocate countries. This new guy just sucks. I wish I had my old manager

Previous company had a director who failed upwards to becoming a VP.

It just feels like becoming a manager is a timing issue and not a skill at times.

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've been employed at a publicly traded tech company in Ontario for approximately 13 months in a non-technical role. I'm in my late 20s, earning a six-figure base salary. Location: Ontario, Canada

This week, HR presented me with two options: enter a 30-day Performance Improvement Plan (PIP) or accept a mutual separation package.

Separation offer:

• 7 weeks of base salary
• No bonus (annual bonus scheduled for early next year)
• No unvested equity (next vesting date is approaching)
• No benefits continuation
• No additional vacation payout mentioned

HR has also stated that they will not provide a written separation agreement until I explicitly choose the separation option over the PIP. If I don't choose separation, the PIP begins automatically.

Additional context:

• My role has changed significantly since I was hired, including the introduction of sales targets that were not originally part of my responsibilities.
• I have documentation of shifting performance expectations during my coaching plan, unequal portfolio distribution compared to peers, and positive performance reviews throughout my employment.
• The company conducted layoffs earlier this year, and I've heard that affected employees received more generous packages, although this is unverified.

Employment agreement:

My contract contains a termination clause limiting my entitlements to the minimum requirements under Ontario's Employment Standards Act (ESA), including a waiver of common-law reasonable notice.

My questions:

1. Is 7 weeks a reasonable separation package for someone with 13 months of service, or is there a basis to negotiate more?
2. How enforceable are ESA-only termination clauses in Ontario, particularly those explicitly waiving common-law reasonable notice?
3. Does HR's characterization of this as a "mutual separation" affect my legal rights or potential EI eligibility?
4. Is it standard practice for HR to require me to choose separation before providing the written agreement?
5. Would the documented changes to my role and performance expectations have any relevance to negotiating a better package?

I plan to consult an employment lawyer before signing anything, but would appreciate any perspectives from this community.

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!

For context, I'm in my senior year working towards a bachelor's in CS. I attend a T10 school and have a SWE FAANG internship on my resume. I have a great network as well. I will not receive a return offer from any internships.

Like many others, I've been struggling to land a new grad role for SWE or anything else related to tech. The application process is grueling and is taking a toll on me. Despite this, I’m trying to stay optimistic that I’ll land something.

I don't believe that the tech industry is doomed, even despite AI sentiment, layoffs, and the job market not improving. However, that doesn't mean that I think the industry is good. I'm becoming increasingly uneasy about firing all cylinders for tech. I don't know if I want to play this game anymore. Even if I do land a role, will it even be worth it? Even if the future is uncertain, with all the risks and red flags that I keep seeing, I don't know if I want to put myself through that.

I like shipping features and owning technical systems. But a good part of the fun was writing and organizing clean code by hand. Now that's gone. My attempts to write a portion of code by hand at my internship was discouraged. Babysitting AI is not really fun.

At first, I felt trapped, but now I'm starting to consider pivoting into dentistry. Why? It requires a high level of trust and tactile skills. It's also medicine adjacent. I wanted to become a neurosurgeon growing up and often watched surgery videos when I was little. Owning my own practice sounds more appealing than working long shifts at a hospital. Dentistry gives me little-no exposure to death and life-threatening situations. I'm also incredibly lucky enough to earn my bachelor's with virtually no debt to pay.

There are also reasons for me to be hesitant. I've had little exposure to owning a business or working in a role that requires great interpersonal skills. I've never shadowed a dentist and still have lots to learn about what it's like to become and be one. I also do not meet most pre-med requirements. Of course, dental school is a massive investment in time and money.

I've also considered looking into getting a master's in CS. However, I'm beginning to realize that the CS courses I've been taking haven't been as interesting as I hoped. My favorite topics were computer graphics and to a lesser extent, operating systems, but I can't say I cared about the rest of the courses I took. It also would be doubling down on an investment in a field that I'm nervous about.

I want to know if anyone else here is considering this exact career change. If not, what other fields are you guys considering pivoting to? I'd also like to know if you agree with my sentiments or if I should hold it out on tech just for a little longer. Please feel free to tell me if you think I'm overreacting.

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?

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

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’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.

Does anyone here work on one dedicated large scale project in their SWE role? I juggle a few projects and it’s cool to see different aspects of the business, but I wish that I could “lock in” entirely on one project and learn it in and out.

I have one guy on my team who has one dedicated project that he works on, but i’m curious to see what the norm is.

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 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.

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?

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 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.

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 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?

Hey everyone, looking for some outside perspective on an issue I'm facing with work.

I’ve been at my company for about 5 years, working in C# .NET and Angular, with some Azure sprinkled in mostly for logging purposes.

A few months ago, management informed us that our product will be rebuilt in Power Platforms with a target go live date this time of year in 2027. We will all be starting training in the next few months.

I’m pretty stressed about my marketability. From what I gather, Power Platform is heavily low-code/no-code, and with AI already shifting how software is built, I’m worried that spending the next couple of years in a drag and drop system is going to tank my resume. Sure, having a CS background helps build cleaner and more scalable solutions within the tool, but does anyone actually respect Power Platform experience for a traditional software engineering role?

Is this a massive career detour, or am I overreacting? Angular is already dated and I've heard nothing but complaints and annoyances about Power BI, so that doesn't instill confidence in this announcement.

I would love to hear from anyone who has made a similar shift or hires devs with this background.