I worked in Edinburgh for 4 years until I was recently made redundant and got an offer in London. I decided to give it a go until I realized a 45k London wage made me less disposable income than a barista job in Edinburgh. Each month, I spend £1100 rent to be a lodger and £200 for commute. I spend 1hr one way, on the busiest peak hour public transportation. The London job is 10x busier than my previous job in Edinburgh. I feel burnt out after the first 3 months. I own a flat in Edinburgh, should I move back? But a lot of my friends in Edinburgh are experiencing redundancies now.

I've been at a large tech company for 5+ years, the last few as a Senior SWE. Started on ~60k, now on just over 100k, fully remote.

For the past couple of years I've hit points where I think I'm done and want to move on. Then I look around, see the lower salaries and decide to put up with it a bit longer. I think I've reached a point where I'm actually ready to go now though, I can't keep doing that forever.

The bigger issue is that working remotely and living alone for 4-5 years has left me feeling pretty isolated. I have friends outside of work but don't feel part of a team any more. I'd like to go back to an office 2-3 days a week, ideally with a team actually working on the same project rather than a half-empty office of people on calls. I've dabbled in co-working spaces but it always feels like the latter.

I live in the south west, and local hybrid roles seem to be more like 70-80k, 90 if lucky.

It could be that a change of scenery and working culture is enough, even if it's still remote, but it's hard to tell.

Also worth noting I've been in software for over a decade but only worked at 3 companies. I want to get some broader experience and be more aggressive moving on if I'm not actively happy/learning after 2 years. Is it much harder to go back up once you've gone down, pay wise?

Has anyone outside of London gone from remote back to hybrid and taken a cut for it? Was it worth it? Am I crazy for considering it?

Just wondering if anyone here works or has worked for SSE? Curious what they’re like as an employer in general.

What’s the work culture like? Are they decent for flexibility, pay rises and career progression?
Would be good to hear any experiences good or bad

I have a job offer for SWE at Trade Republic in London. I’ve seen all the poor reviews on Glassdoor and Reddit that mention toxic work culture and bad WLB but irritatingly it is exactly what I’m after from a tech perspective: low latency Java for trading and Kotlin for the rest.

I am willing to grind but I think I might struggle with the lack of both job security and camaraderie between colleagues.

This post is a last ditch attempt looking for some more recent takes as to whether the reviews are justified, would appreciate any responses 🙏

And why

How possible would it be to go from a degree apprenticeship in Software engineering to a quant dev job? What steps would i have to take?

Anyone have experience interviewing for gresearch cyber roles? What’s it like?

As an experienced dev who has worked on many different legacy code bases across industries, I have seen a fair share of terrible code. All of the worst, most fragile, unmaintainable and error prone code I’ve ever seen is human written, often by highly experienced devs.

A lot of the discussion on here seems to assume that ai generated code will eventually cause some big collapse as too much rapidly deployed ‘slop’ code will fail and cascade errors everywhere.

But this seems to rely entirely on a false conceit: that the average human developer actually writes good code, that human maintained code is less likely to spiral out of control. Any experienced dev can tell you that so many of their colleagues are essentially ‘stealing a living’, putting lazy changes in to close jira tickets, then jumping ship to another company leaving new developers to have to understand their mess. Successively iterations of this is the main driver of awful and fragile code. The reality is that frontier AI models are simply no worse, or often better, at producing code than your lazy coasting colleague - not because it’s necessarily amazing, but because so many of us are just bad. It’s partially our fault that someone can churn out changes rapidly with genAI that ends up being less unstable or buggy than human written code. We don’t have the credibility to claim genAI code is all worthless slop when half of us have been creating worthless slop for the last 30 years.

Essentially, do not just assume everything will ‘go back to normal’ because of some inherent flaw in genAI code will cause companies to abandon it - if you’re betting your future on this, it’s a bad bet.

My company has gone full agentic. The managers are forcing us to quickly pass everything because we are the human in the loop needed for regulatory reason. All the paid ide are removed by IT and they want us to just use GitHub to check things if necessary

I used to look at what code AI generated, but we’ve had instructions since Opus 5.5 that it's not needed anymore. Apparently someone from the team deployed straight to a client environment and delivered six months of work in three days without bugs by looping managers and client for a release. I am still in a hunt for that person.

Now they don't want us to waste our time on code reviews or testing anymore as they have a harness for everything, and some big clients have been using the deployed code for months now without bugs.

I am losing my sanity. I am applying for jobs that are different, but I just feel lost after 15 years of experience in the tech industry as a person who loved every aspect of technology to bring change to our lives. I feel I have lost all my battles

Just trying to get the feeling of developers here, as I have heard many saying we are still reviewing and that AI produces trash. How is the situation in your firm?

Hi all, I’ve been working at the same company for around 4 years since graduating, but things seem to be going downhill, so I’ve started looking for new opportunities.
I’ve been applying for jobs but haven’t had much luck getting interviews, so I’d really appreciate it if anyone could take a look at my CV and give me some honest feedback. I’m particularly interested in knowing what I could improve or whether anything is putting employers off.
Thanks in advance!

https://docs.google.com/document/d/18Jsj7I5LF4q3q42EXFBOuw4bGjpyLYmJ/edit?usp=drivesdk&ouid=113635896603911955604&rtpof=true&sd=true

Currently in the process of interviewing for SWE role in QRT. Has anyone gone through this. What was the process like. I don’t see any proper information on practice question or interview process so I am finding it difficult to prepare.
If you have gone through their process please let me know what it was like for you. Was it DSA, Technical Q/A, SQL, numpy or pandas question?

Thanks

Bit of a long one, sorry.

I've been at a big consultancy by for about 5 years doing data science and AI engineering. Most of my work has been on client sites building LLM (no RAG or Agentic - jut pipeline where LLM were used for field value extraction) and MLOps stuff (Azure ML), currently at an insurer. I've literally just been promoted to Manager and total comp is around £85k with bonus.

My old boss has moved in-house to a health insurer and is building out an applied AI team. It's small and mostly data scientists, and he wants someone to bring the engineering side: agentic work and getting their MLOps into better shape.

I've had a first interview and it went fine. Pay would probably be around £80k.The money isn't really the dilemma. A few grand either way is easy enough to weigh up.

What I'm stuck on is whether leaving consulting is the right move in general. What keeps me where I am:

- I've built up a decent amount of political capital and people seem to value me. The promotion kind of proves that

- I can move around industries if I get bored.

- Honestly it's not that bad. Typically hasnt been super stressful. I'd give it a 7/10.

- My partner lost her job recently (although just got a new one) , so stability matters more to me right now than it normally would.

- If a project goes badly I can just move onto another one.

What I don’t like:

- The competition between consultants.

- Feeling like I have to do internal work just to get ahead.

- Some managers I don't get on with (not all of them, to be fair).

- Some teams just want the revenue and sell people into roles without much thought about whether they can actually do them.

- I sometimes end up on projects that don't really fit my skills.

The in-house role appeals because I think I'd actually get to own things long term rather than building something and moving on, and I'd be working for someone who already rates me. But being their first AI/ML hire brings pressure to perform - especially proving to wider team that old boss was right to rate me.

Also I'd be giving up the safety net. If it doesn't work out there's no next project to hop onto.

The progression is much clearer in consulting.

For anyone who's gone from consulting to in-house, did you regret it? And is leaving straight after a promotion a daft idea, or does it not really matter once you're out?

Is it a case of grass is always greener?

Edit: forgot to say - UK, London based

I have two offers and I’m trying to decide which one is the better stepping stone toward an infrastructure/systems role at a US tech company.

Offer 1 is with a consulting company that builds infrastructure for clients. The work is very hands-on and systems-heavy, but it’s project-based, so I rarely own a system long-term or stay around for its operations. Clients mostly hire us for expertise they don’t have in-house, meaning little scale etc.

Offer 2 is with a well-known fintech with about 2,000 developers. The team owns the tooling and the underlying clusters that devs use to ship code to infra that devs own themself. It's mainly about improvements and providing reusable abstractions. However I would work in a critical area and have long-term ownership at scale. Salary is also significantly higher.

My worry is that Offer 2 reads too much like DevOps/pipeline work for US tech recruiters to consider me for roles. I’m fairly sure I can highlight infra work on my CV, and opportunities to do more of it will come up. Or will owning CI/CD tooling pigeonhole me no matter what, making the consulting route the safer bet for staying in the infra bucket?

Hey everyone, I'm 28, based in the UK, and trying to move into my first proper software engineering job. I'd appreciate some advice from developers, especially anyone who has hired junior engineers and knows what they're looking for, or people who have made a similar career change. (apologies for a long post but I think its worth being thorough).

My background:

• Education: Non-STEM bachelor's degree from a decent university (BSc in Management and Politics - (2:1)). Started a part-time, online Computer Science conversion MSc at a different well-regarded university in May. Currently doing pretty well, but the degree won't be completed until 2028.
• Technical experience: Python, Java, SQL/SQLite, pytest and Git. I've done some projects during the course as well, like a bit of Java programming and software engineering/design assessments.
• Projects: I've built some Python tools, one being a tabletop rules simulator (that's currently still WIP) that answers rules queries by retrieving evidence from versioned PDF documents, evaluating retrieval results against expected sources, and processing data from APIs into SQLite. I've also worked on a climbing-weather project that focusses on evaluating historical weather data at popular climbing crags, which mainly involved data validation and automated testing.
• Previous employment: Primarily data and compliance work. Truth be told it was relatively simple database admin, but I did end up semi-managing a couple of more junior employees and developing an internal compliance audit processes. It most definitely wasn't anything particularly technical, but it was 2 years of QA work where I did learn a few skills.
• Job search: Around 3-4 months of applying for entry-level technical positions. I have had a few interviews and I got to a few final rounds. I think I come across well in face-to-face interviews and I'm very passionate about AI and automation, which I think is what has gotten me that far. But I feel like I am quite uncompetitive against more traditional-pathway engineers or anyone with a STEM degree. I want to make sure that I am targeting the right jobs and not shooting beyond my capabilities. I'm open to relocating basically anywhere, including outside of the UK.

Since all of my projects are solo endeavors and my experience is very limited, my immediate priority is getting into a job where I can get some proper commercial technical experience. Longer term, I'm interested in AI/ML engineering and model evaluation and post-training, but I'm obviously not expecting to enter that field directly.

I'm trying to work out whether my biggest problem is the roles I'm going for or my lack of commercial programming experience, or even how I'm presenting my existing experience.

What I'm really looking for is some advice on how to proceed, what should I be focussing on? I'm trying to really jump in with two feet to all of my courses opportunities like participating in academic research, programming societies, hackathons etc.

With that in mind:
- Based on this background, which entry-level roles would you consider realistic? Junior developer, software tester, QA automation, Python automation, data-related roles, or something else. And if you were hiring, what would you need to see from someone in my position to justify an interview?

- Would you prioritise improving Python/SQL fundamentals, building a substantial project, contributing to open source, or gaining collaborative development experience?

- How much of a disadvantage is an in-progress conversion MSc compared with a completed CS degree?

- For those who like me who have switched into software from another field recently, what actually helped you get your first role?

I'm interested in honest feedback, including if you think I'm approaching this incorrectly or am just straight up deluded.

Getting some interest from FDE / FDSE roles.

The ones coming in look quite fun. Basically on site with customers, being a builder and also a bit of a consultant. They seem quite AI-native roles and seem rather future proof.

Anyone have experience with them? Particularly the more technical ones that have you coding?

Yesterday someone asked how to prepare for a Windows on Snapdragon interview in the UK. The question is about topics and preparation. It never says whether they want you to talk about the board.

I would not guess that from the job title. If you have sat that kind of interview, did the board come up at all?

I’m doing computer science and I want to know which field has better to branch out into in terms of employment rates career progression and money and how can I find out more and pls don’t give me the “do whats best suited for you” crap

.anecdotal
.statistics
.and how can I research more into this stuff

Basically my team “inherited” a project mid way which was initially started by external contractors. They are no longer with the team and only a few of the ones who worked on it are in the wider team.
They did not document anything related to the project, setup, code etc.

We’re basically working on some new features and are facing some issues with getting things running on this project but we don’t have any idea about the require configuration and setup and have essentially been blocked for the last 2 weeks.

Anytime I or someone from my team reaches out to one of these contractors, they just redirect us to someone else. “Oh talk to X as they worked on this bit. Talk to Y as they worked on this part” and that’s the end of it.

If we escalate this to my manager or their supposed managers, they give vague answers which are completely unrelated to the problem and go radio silent for the next 3 days till we escalate again.

It’s really annoying as we have tight deadlines on this project.

How do I deal with this situation?

Hi everyone!

I'm 34 and currently living in Bristol, UK. I'm studying a Level 5 Diploma in Web Application Development with Code Institute and City of Bristol College.

So far, I've learned HTML, CSS, Git, GitHub, responsive web design, and Bootstrap. I'm still learning and working on my first projects.

I'm trying to move into software development, but I'm not completely new to tech. Back in my home country, I worked as a Junior Product Manager for around two years. I also have some experience with WordPress, customer support, and operations.

However, all my previous tech-related experience was outside the UK, so I'm now trying to break into the UK tech industry for the first time.

My goal is to land my first job as a Junior Web Developer or Junior Software Developer.

I know the junior job market in the UK is pretty tough right now, especially without professional coding experience.

What would you recommend I do to give myself the best chance of landing my first junior developer job?

I'd especially love to hear from experienced developers and people working in tech, as well as anyone who has been in a similar situation and successfully found a job.

Thanks in advance!

Has anyone interviewed for a Windows on Snapdragon role at Qualcomm in the UK? If so, could you please share what areas the interview focused on and what preparation strategy you would recommend?

I am a software engineer with over two decades of experience in Java and most recently Python. Accidentally bumped into platform engineering for a year before being made redundant. I have fully embraced GenAI from the very beginning and was eager to try new things and sharing. I use Claude code and Gemini/antigravity daily and integrate ollama cloud completely into my GitHub action flow and some personal poc. I thought I could easily transitioned into a genai enabler role and share my experience to benefit more developers and business. But the last 4 months proved me wrong: I was hit hard by the lack of any cloud based experience which seems essential for fde roles involving model serving. Also my iac and container experience are limited due to only one year experience in devops. I have tried to upskill in these weak spots by following online tutorials (using ai to plan) without much progress and worn myself out along the journey. At age 46 I am currently lost what I can do to make myself employable in this new field in the next 6 months - being a hands on person in my whole life I always learn faster while building, is there any place I can find real projects to build while learning, I don’t mind volunteering for free just to give my learning a purpose? Or any suggestion on good GitHub project to study? Or any other constructive suggestions? I am increasingly depressed by the idea of being driven out of the industry due to a redundancy but the harsh reality increasingly depress me day-by-day unless I can find a way to upskill to match the role recruiters throw at me…

Has anyone who applied for the 2027 Graduate Software engineer program heard back from JPMC? I applied as soon as applications opened which was over a month ago and my application is still “Under Consideration”.

I want to first clarify that I acknowledge that I have been fortunate in my prospects because of hardwork and some luck. I have gotten a SWE role at a notable company (fully remote). It is my first role out of uni and is 48k salary with 5k bonus. Any advice from seniors or mid level engineers regarding how to perform and retain my job whilst also making sure I can get raises and promotions, etc. I know diff companies have diff processes for progression. My goal is 6 figures within 3-5 years which I want to know how to do in a traditional SWE career (not entrepreneurship). Any advice please, generic or specific helps.

Hi everyone,

I've been invited to the Softwire Graduate Consultant Software Engineer process and was wondering if anyone has completed it recently. The process includes online tests, technical and non-technical interviews, and a final assessment day.

What should I expect from:

The online tests?

The technical interview?

The final group assessment day?

Thanks! 😊

Hello, my previous post was deleted for some reason.

I am looking for a new job and Wise seems to be interesting. They have a number of positions open at both senior and staff engineer level.

A question to those who work there: what's your experience like there? Would you recommend it as a good place to work, or is the culture toxic?

Regarding the salary, they advertise £87-111k for IC3, £111-145k for IC4. Is that the base salary or the total compensation package?

Thank you in advance