u/modernsamurai-ma

I had an interview today for a SWE position.

I showed up a few minutes early and checked in. I was told the hiring manager would be with me shortly. After waiting about 9 minutes with no updates or apology, I got up and left.

The office also seemed pretty disorganized, which didn't exactly give me confidence. Also, the salary didn't exactly fit my expectations. Part of me feels like I should've waited longer. But another part thinks if a company can't respect my time during the interview, that's probably a bad sign and won’t be a valuable job anyway.

For context, I’m 24 and I've been unemployed for the past 3 months. Am I crazy for this?

i wanted to upgrade my pc this year. same parts i'd priced out not long ago, so i figured i basically knew what i'd pay. then i checked memory prices and it had nearly doubled.

turns out it's the AI buildout eating the supply, funneled through maybe three companies who have zero reason to keep it cheap for someone just building a gaming rig.

has this happened to anyone else, the AI boom hitting your wallet through something completely unrelated?

Childcare cost is through the roof & here's what we get. I'm paying £1,750 a month for 4 days in South London, which drops to about £950 once the 30 funded hours get spread across the year. That same thing in Scotland is about £1,800 a month for 3 days, & in Glasgow, the same £1,800 for the youngest on 3 days.

Ask your nursery exactly how they apply the funded hours, because term-time only versus stretched over 51/52 weeks changes the monthly figure a lot and they don't always volunteer it. And if either of you earns over £100k you lose the funded hours completely, so with two kids in full-time care, at around £150k you're better off salary sacrificing into a pension to get back under £100k than keeping the money.

The funded hours also don't kick in until the term after they turn 3, so before that it's just tax free childcare and you're paying the full whack for months.

Anyone currently going through it, ask your nursery to let you switch between term time and stretched hours partway through the year.

My Claude has been thinking for 2 hours and 46 minutes.

I asked it to review my 12,000 line codebase and make whatever changes it thought were necessary to improve the overall quality of the code.

I'm scared to stop it because I don't want to lose all of its progress but I'm also wondering if it crashed like an hour ago and has just been doing nothing ever since then. Is it normal for Claude to be thinking this long ?

Makes me realize I need a better QA workflow lmao.

I've experimented with having an AI QA agent review every commit before Claude Code continues, but the results have been pretty underwhelming so far. Curious if anyone has had better luck with tools like Pond, Greptile, or BugBot, or if AI QA just isn't there yet.

Would love to hear what's actually working for people.

I've been seeing so many AI agents launch on iMessage lately.

So far I've only really tried Folk, but I'm curious to know what else is out there.

What would you recommend, and what do you use it for?

2 YOE, Senior Software Engineer in Big Tech (FAANG). Received a Senior SWE offer after completing the Meta loop.

Preparation ~250 LeetCode problems completed over ~5 months, alongside full-time work

Recruiter Screen LinkedIn contact. Background and role discussion, no technical content. Mostly a short back-and-forth over text messages to exchange information.

Phone Screen (45 mins): Merge Intervals problem Longest Palindromic Substring, plus a hard-difficulty follow-up answered verbally

Onsite, Round 1 (1 hour): Binary Tree Level Order Traversal Kth Largest Element in an Array

Onsite, Round 2 (1 hour): Second Lowest Common Ancestor problem Merge K Sorted Lists, using arrays instead of linked lists

System Design (45 min): Scaled-down Ticketmaster-style prompt. Prepared using a structured design framework.

Behavioral: Standard Meta question set. Prepared using structured sample answers.

Outcome: Received the full offer about a week after the last interview.

Compensation: $230k base + possible bonus.

Happy to answer any questions.

Went through the full Visa New Graduate SWE process on campus in the US in 2026. Four stages, GPA cutoff applied at resume screening.

Online Assessment (70 mins) Four DSA problems: peak element indices, repeated peak removal, grid cell counting, and pair sum queries across two arrays with 10,000 queries total.

Round 1 (1 hour): Easy DSA, SQL, and core CS. Find max element, reverse an array, find duplicate entries in a table, explain Group By. Core CS covered OOP, and JavaScript execution sequence. Project walkthrough included.

Round 2 (1 hour 10 mins): DSA: print employees grouped by hierarchical level from a manager-employee map, no cycles. Hard SQL: identify customers who spent over $1,000 in the past month across six e-commerce tables.

Round 3 (40 mins): Project walkthrough, deeper than the previous two rounds. System design: REST security, scaling a single database under 1ms response time, and load balancing. Not a single HR question was asked.

Result: Offer received after Round 3.