I work in company of 12 people and last 6 months we're been developing 100% with AI. What I notice is:

- Good developers have improved development speed for at least x5.

- Bad developers are still bad developers. They introduce a lot of bugs with AI, missed deadlines, bad code, bad functionalities and failed projects.

- Developers spend now their time with collecting requirements, making product, testing more, deploying, architecting, but they are still in need. This can not be replaced with AI at this point for mid size project.

What's your guys experience?

Edit: Seems like AI bots have taken over Reddit as downvoting real life situation and upvoting doom comments do not make sense at all.

So this is my first time being put on a PIP. I was on a what my boss called a Pre-PIP. I talked to my friends that have been put on PIP and sounded like it was basically not winnable and that I should just start looking for a new job. I've now been taking time off to take interviews. And now my boss is bugging me about attendance? I thought there was some kind of unwritten understanding that I would just take this time to get a new job? Did I misread this entire situation? I don't think my boss actually cares but maybe he has to cover his own ass?

Edit: In California

Title – with all the layoff news, if your company did a large wave of layoffs in light of "restructuring", would you begin applying elsewhere? Why or why not? What factors would influence your decision?

Example, with Netflix – great comp and perks, but is that reason to avoid preparing for the worst?

I want to get into software development and I have the opportunity to talk to the CTO of a tech company on Friday. What questions should I ask him and why should I ask those questions.

Long story short: rejected after a first round technical interview, got the problem right but it took me the entire interview time, felt like i explained my thought process, drawbacks and advantages each time i proposed a solution.

I live in a major city but one that definitely isn’t a tech hub. feeling pretty dejected as this was my only interview out of the 50 i applied to (to basically every company in my city).

this entire new grad process has really soiled my passion for cs, how do i get it back? how do i approach the job market?

Stats:
US citizen, T100 no name uni, 3.7 GPA, one prior F100 cybersecurity internship (no return offer due to budget)

I'm curious to hear from developers who are a few years into their careers.

When you're starting out, there are so many things to focus on — DSA, projects, system design, new frameworks, certifications, networking, and interview preparation.

Looking back, what actually made the biggest difference in your career growth?

• Getting better at DSA and problem-solving?
• Building real-world projects?
• Learning system design?
• Switching companies?
• Networking and referrals?
• Something else entirely?

I'd love to hear what genuinely helped you grow, what turned out to be a waste of time, and what you'd recommend to someone starting their career today.

Hello everyone,

I’m a young/early career 24yr old software engineer that’s been working professionally for about 2.5 years. I’ve been living in the Midwest my whole life , and recently started my new professional job this August.

I 100% want to leave the Midwest and hopefully move to San Diego ASAP but at least by the end of next year, but I’m having trouble figuring out what to do/when to bring up this conversation with my manager.

I was at my previous company for 2 years, and was trying to get a job in San Diego but wasn’t getting any luck. My last job was destroying my mental health, and along with me not enjoying life outside of work, I settled for getting a new job within my city. At my new job, I’m being paid well for my COL and I am enjoying my team and my manager, but my life outside of work sucks and I have never enjoyed life where I’m at now.

My current job requires 3 days in office so I can’t just up and leave to a new city, but there are lots of people that work fully remote around the US. I think many of these people were hired during COVID and are retaining their fully remote position. Going fully remote and moving to San Diego might be a possibility, but I’m worried about when to bring this up to my manager because I’m still new. My current manager also started a couple weeks after I did, so they’re new too.

If this was even a possibility, I most likely wouldn’t get any sort of relocation assistance or COL adjustment for my current role. I’m wondering what the best options are, and how/when I should bring up this conversation with my manager. I don’t want to lose my job but I really can’t stand living here any longer than I have to.

What should I do?

I’m currently a graduate student studying AI and data analytics and am unsure of what types of internships/jobs I should be considering applying to or what skills I should be looking into building.

For context, I finished my undergrad earlier this year in a loosely related computational neuroscience degree that included basic programming, DSA, and data science courses but didn’t go too in depth into any of these topics. I also have internship experience in both data science and ServiceNow, and both my last and current job have been basic IT jobs managing tech support requests and diagnosing network connectivity issues at a small business and at my university.

I feel like I have lots of interest and skills in multiple relevant fields, but am not skilled enough to actually enter any of them. Due of this, filling out applications for any internships is even more stressful and extremely time consuming because my resume seems long but rather unspecific when untailored, but feels weak when trying to apply it to any specific internships.

I was in BE team but recently there are more FE tasks that they want me to help with.

I know basic React like I can build simple ToDoList with React

But the FE tasks require more advanced FE knowledage which I don't have

I know that I don't have a big picture/knowaleadge of React.

Then I asked CTO to buy me a course on Udemy cause I'm not exceptional in React.

He said no, I prefer you to ask around other devs here.

Ngl I don't wanna bother other devs, they got their own tasks to do.

So I said ok and I just bought the course for like 50-60USD with my own money ;(

As the title says.

Ps. this is a small team with 6-8 devs. My CTO also sometimes do Customer Support's job since we are a small startup/scale up lol

I like programming but im gonna major in data science because it looks like employment will look good in the future.

Theres alot of similarity between computer science and data science, and data science just has shit more about stats and data. But you take programming and math classes in both majors.

I was just wondering, if there was any down sides of data science that led you away from the field.

TDLR: I just dont want to take the risk of going into a comp sci degree since its very hard for juniors right now, and data science has alot of programming that it uses so I just thought it could be more worth it.

(I have programming experience in c# from making games on unity)

Hi everyone.

I'm studying software engineering, doing my master's degree currently, and I feel like I don't really know what the future holds for me because of the market and my own abilities. I started university right around the boom of LLM's and while I actively avoided using them in my first year and a half, by the end of my third semester I was feeling incredibly insecure about my own skills and the fact that everyone seemed to be using these tools to get ahead so I bit the bullet. In the last 12 months I have become so reliant on AI for my programming tasks that I don't even want to call myself a software engineering student. I got into the field because I really wanted to go into tech but I've taken so many shortcuts at this point that I don't think I'm good enough to do much. I know some theory and I can understand code and how things work, generally, but I'm not good at writing code myself, even for somewhat basic things. I'm trying to stop using AI but it feels like I'd be outpaced if I don't. Seems like the field is going in that direction as a whole and I can't escape it.

I recently spoke to a potential employer and he said he doesn't care for anything students study in university, he believes that the era of AI has signalled the death of software engineering and he wants to focus fully on AI. I disagree with that on so many levels but this is not the only employer who has told me such things. Additionally, even in university we are encouraged to use AI by many lecturers, with the idea that knowing the principles would prevent us from becoming mindless prompters. But I, personally, don't feel like I can really do things well despite following that advice. Feels almost like you're damned if you do and damned if you don't.

So what does a student in my situation do? I was considering switching my master next year to something more niche that would force me to have to learn things myself but that comes with its own set of challenges, the major one being employability after completing the degree.

TLDR: AI has made me demotivated, complacent and unemployable, yet it feels inescapable.

i started coding around 2022-2023 and tbh i miss those days so much when i was just writing everything manually and crafting my own setups and environments from scratch, like building my little machine the way i wanted it felt so pure and golden, spending hours just figuring things out by myself and feeling that quiet satisfaction when something finally worked after struggling through it all, now i still love shipping things fast and getting stuff out there but idk that hands-on feeling of actually writing the code line by line and making everything myself is something i really miss and it hits different whenever i think about it, i know i can code things up manually nowadays too but you will be left behind and people doesn’t expect that anymore, everyone just wants speed and results and the old way of doing things almost feels outdated even if it still feels so good deep down.

what do you guys feel about this?

I often pre setup my work to be committed tactically at a later time when I want to goof off. Everyone blows about my work ethic and efficiency

I see this position listed more than ever these days.

Backstory: BA, MA (History), JD. 50 years old and wanted to learn about Python and AI. Being academically minded, I enrolled in a local community college for Applied Data Science Techniques. A 20-something adjunct is in charge; no biggie, nothing wrong with that.

She insists on APA format inside the Python code itself.

Citations (references & in-text) are to use APA 7th edition. It is the student’s responsibility to learn/research APA formatting details for anything produced, including code.

For example, we were directed to recreate the game Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock. Ok, so I coded the following

print("Paper disproves Spock, you lose.\n")

Flagged as plagiarism. Why? Because that was the 3 word phrase used in The Big Bang Theory, which she linked to the video of.

What she told me she expected was, if a direct quote, this

'# Goetsch, D., & Glickman, J. (Writers), & Cendrowski, M. (Director). (2008, November 17). The lizard-spock expansion (Season 2, Episode 8) [TV series episode]. In C. Lorre & B. Prady (Executive Producers), The big bang theory. Chuck Lorre Productions; Warner Bros. Television.

print("Paper disproves Spock, you lose.\n") # Goetsch et al. (2008)

or she offered this

print("Paper smothers Spock, you lose.\n")

which would have been OK since it is not a direct quote.

I am not kidding.

And her Turnitin report flagged the above as plagiarism, so I get a lecture and points deducted.

PLEASE tell me that this is not really how you code in Python? I'm all for sourcing, but come ON. Is this real?

Either way, I dropped the class. But am I really supposed to APA in the code?

Specifically downtown Toronto where the banks are. I currently work in cloud engineering in one of them. Went to a popular after work bar and sat at the bar. Seemed mostly finance people as they were in suits but a couple in polos.
Was tempted to start approaching random people like my college days lol. But didn’t know if it would come off cringe/unprofessional.
Any suggestions? There are a few events hosted jointly with aws and the like, might have to save my energy for those.

Recently, my company decided to go fully agentic with the guidance that devs should never have to open an IDE ever again. What this means is that the full software life cycle has become “agentic”.

We write a spec which makes an agent create tickets, which makes an agent implement, which makes an agent review and iterate until it finally shits something out for a human to review and either approve (which the AI can also approve) or reject to get processed more.

I am kinda at a loss and don’t know where the fuck to go from here. Like seriously, is this the future? Is anyone else experiencing something similar? All the while this was getting announced there were engineers fucking jumping with glee at the prospect of this becoming our life.

I am an engineer with 4 years of experience and jumped ship at my previous company due to similar AI concerns, and also better pay, only to have this place go even further into the AI kool-aid.

What the fuck has happened to this profession?

We were split off from a larger company to work on our own niche software. This was about 7-8 years after PE made the investment which I was told is when they want to start to see the return.

This is what I've seen over about a year since I've joined:

• company split, of course
• consolidation of teams
• change in management style
• switch to quarterly reviews
• more aggressive deadlines

On one hand, why would they be doing any of the above, letting everyone know, with the intent to later lay off some portion of those folks? Surely layoffs sooner would save them more than later.

On the other, there might be timing involved with layoffs, so all of this has to be done anyway? Does this sound like a playbook anyone has run into with PE owned companies?

Say you apply for a role with Company A, didn't pass their background screening for whatever reason (criminal record, drugs, etc). Have you seen anyone reapply and then get hired?

I'm currently in a meeting where we plan our next PI and I'm noticing a major issue that has been getting worse over the years, mostly the past few years: People cannot communicate anymore.

It is like Person A is communicating an issue, Person B responds with an answer that isn't related to Person A's communications though B believes it is resulting in A getting frustrated. A tries to articulate the issues in a different way, but it fails and people start talking past each other. It isn't just one or two people like this example, but entire departments of people.

Everyone seems to have completely different mental maps of systems and processes even though all of the parties involved work on these same systems on a daily basis; almost like they all have separate realities. I'd say it isn't really an issue with articulation, since even if A articulates the issue perfectly, there are too many people who are erroneously comprehending what is said and end up misinforming others.

The result is frustration across the entire department. It is kind of scary in a way and I really hope this isn't happening in more serious fields like medical, aviation, etc.

Anyone noticing anything similar where they work?

I have over nine years of experience in ML and have always worked hard to keep up with the industry, but for the past year and a half, I’ve been working to the point of burnout.

Over the last year or so i am and most of my friends and colleagues are working 10–12 hours a day, six days a week as companies have shifted to being "AI-first" or "AI-native," it is absolutely contrary to the claim that AI would make developers' lives easier and cut down on work time—the exact opposite is happening. 

This is happening partly because we constantly have to learn new AI-related development tools, and partly because management pressures us to speed things up. Of course, no one can say no; we’ve already been through one round of layoffs and are expecting another—and I don’t need to tell you how hard it is to find a job right now. So, people are desperately clinging to their jobs and grinding away late into the night, terrified of falling behind the market or underperforming and getting fired.

Ultimately I has a feeling this productivity boost has less to do with AI but more with a overtime. Is it like this for everyone, or did I just get unlucky?

I'm curious how much technical interviews have changed now that tools like Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor are part of many developers' daily workflows.

Most of the interviews I hear about still focus on algorithms, live coding, or system design.

Has anyone been through an interview where you were explicitly encouraged to use AI tools?

I'd be interested to know:

• What was the actual task?
• Could you use your own IDE and preferred AI tools?
• Did they observe how you worked, or just review the final code?
• Did it feel more representative of real engineering work than a traditional coding interview?

Especially interested in firsthand experiences, including bad ones.

I'm a backend engineer highly motivated to pivot out into something more technical and interesting like embedded/systems programming.

I've been spending my free time learning C++ and studying operating systems. I know that the best (and only, I guess) way to showcase my capabilities in these domains, since I don't get to do it at work, is to list personal projects on my resume.

This feels awkward though, having professional experience yet trying to highlight little personal projects I've done.

For anyone who has done this successfully, I'd really appreciate any advice you might have.

I know this market is hard on new grads, but would it be hard to re-enter this field with 2 years of experience? I know that isn’t mid level of course, but just curious. I live near a government contractor hub as well.