u/skidmark_zuckerberg

Hey all, I recently started this course and to my surprise it is a beast. I have quite a few years as an SWE but this was always an area I was lacking in and it doesn't come up much on the job!

Does anyone have recommendations on what to focus on for the PA/OA? For anyone who has taken the updated course (I believe V5) would you say that passing the PA is a good indication of being able to pass the OA? I am a bit overwhelmed on where to focus my attention with this class, and don't want to spend weeks trying to cover every inch of the course work. Not that it's invaluable, but if I don't focus on things that will be related to what is on the OA, I will have a tough time on the test. This is probably the one course that I won't be able to accelerate as quickly as all the others thus far.

I searched and found Christian Youngblood's cohort videos, so I will be watching those this weekend. But aside from that, what areas specifically should I spend most of my study effort in? ZyBooks seems like it's got a lot of information, but that's just it, each chapter has a lot of information, and it's hard to hone in on what matters and what doesn't (in the context of the OA).

I am writing a paper and am using Grammarly as suggested by the WGU course. I will write out an entire paragraph and Grammarly will suggest complete rewrites to sentences in the paragraph. The suggested changes sound and feel like it's AI written, because obviously it is.

My question is now; how does a paper written with Grammarly as an aid using these suggestions even pass any AI checks? The suggestions Grammarly provide even have the typical em dashes that is usually a dead giveaway for AI, and they sound more robotic than what you'd expect from a person. They are void of my personal voice and writing style.

Also, even Grammarly states that AI detection is not reliable and it is hard to detect AI usage. So, how can this even be something they enforce? It cannot be 100% verified, so therefore it cannot be enforced. You can't say something is AI when the tool checking for it cannot prove it with 100% certainty.

Edit:

PA submitted, graded and passed. I pretty much ignored Grammarly and just fixed things that Microsoft Office suggested. Similarity score ended up being15%, with 12% of that being 'paraphrased', whatever that means in the context of the evaluation.

Just curious if anyone has taken this course rather recently that could share the experience with the OA? I have quite a few years of professional programming under my belt, but I have never used Python enough to memorize the syntax and methods/libraries available.

I am going through the zyBooks Practice Final Exam now, and while the actual concepts/problem sets are not difficult, I am having to look up a lot of syntax and how to solve these problems the Python way. Just wanting to get an idea of what to focus on language wise for the OA.

My office is my work office and hobby space. I have 2 desks in there, one is my work desk with a laptop and monitor. The other desk has a monitor, laptop and 3D printer. I have various clear bins stored under this desk.

To the right of my main work desk, I have a pegboard setup with a bunch of fishing lures and fly tying materials. I have a shelf that is also loaded with random shit for my hobbies. There is no TV in the office, but I do have a tiny shelf with a few personal things on it. I also have a big whiteboard above my hobby desk. I can completely clear my work desk and cover my external monitors, but the room isn’t going to be empty by any means

I’m stressing my office setup for these OA’s. It’s organized but it’s not an empty room with nothing on the walls by any means. Don’t really have any other space in my house that’s empty. Does my current office sound like it’ll be a problem? I could possibly setup up a folding table in my bedroom and do it there but I’d have to cover the TV and maybe take some stuff off the walls.

No matter how hard I try to keep my algorithm free of these creators, they always pop up and it's so annoying to see the video titles and the stupid ass thumbnails to accompany them. It's always some doomer video about the economy, AI, housing market, car market, etc. Even outside of economy related things, there's a downfall for literally any hobby or topic. Everything is 'cooked' and in a spiraling downfall apparently.

Some of these content creators have been making the same videos predicting the same outcomes for the last 6 years now on top of it, especially the real estate, stock market and car market channels. I'm tired of seeing some dumbass guy 'walk and talk' with their product or app being plugged in every video. These people are clearly cashing in on topics that get views to market you something.

No matter how many times I click 'Not interested' or 'Don't recommend channel', this shit is force fed into my algorithm. I'm just ranting, and figured this would be the only place on Reddit that would feel my frustration. Shit is annoying and I'm tired of being bombarded with doomer content 24/7. I'd like to use the internet and not be involuntarily opted in to these shitty algorithms that know fear and doom gets engagement. Which you can definitely verify works, because a lot of these videos get a lot of views, and any dumbass with a mic can make commentary style doom channel and get hundreds of thousands of followers in the span of a couple years.

I go through days of feeling grateful for the career I have, feeling motivated and looking forward to the work, and then I go through long spells where I just can’t stand it and feel trapped. Days where I truly don’t give a shit about any of it and would have no problem rubber stamping PR’s and just “getting it done”.

This isn’t about AI or anything (if anything AI has made it easier to just mentally check out), it’s just more about the job in general. The corporate feeling at most companies, building meaningless products, sitting behind a computer for 40 hours a week, the fight for recognition, the job search/interview process, really most of it.

I have a few hobbies outside of work that I enjoy, and spend time when I can with friends. My wife and I also try to make the most of the weekends. So it’s not really due to a lack of having a life outside of work, there’s just something depressing about SWE that I can’t put my finger on. It was truly fun for the first few years, but now after 8 years, it’s kinda just not fun anymore. As I mentioned there are days when I feel good about it and fulfilled at the end of the day, but those days are fleeting. Started feeling this at my last job after 4 years there, and it’s carried over into my new job. Both these jobs were/are what I consider to be good environments, so I don’t really blame them for this feeling. So idk, just confused about the feelings I have.

Does anyone else feel this way sometimes? Is it possible to overcome at all?

Our department was told by upper management that they do not value code quality over delivering fast. They still want things to work as expected, but they don't care what the code looks like. The expectation now is that coding time should be near nothing. We have top executives asking why the engineering teams coding times have not yet to dropped to less than 1 day now. Mind you, these times have reduced significantly over the last 6 months with heavy AI adoption. Now they are not low enough anymore.

I am not an AI doomer, I think LLMs have helped a lot when it comes to coding, but I also have never been anti human in the loop. I think small AI iterations with human reviews are more important now than ever.

How are you guys handling quality vs output speed at your jobs where AI use is mandatory/heavily integrated? This new company that I have been at for 6 months is unlike my last company where we were much more cautious and hesitant to give up quality for speed of delivery, and I am having a hard time adjusting to this culture. I can start interviewing again for sure, but also, it seems like regardless, a lot more companies are going to be this way moving forward. Is it even worth fighting anymore? The job is so easy now but also kinda lame at the same time.

The orientation course is pretty easy and is really just common sense. But I have been bombarded with emails and needing to schedule talks with my program mentor. I have 8 YOE as an SWE and I am doing the B.S. SWE degree. Do they ever just leave you to it? Or is this just part of how they do orientation?

This interview was for a Senior full stack role, but the role was heavily frontend focused. During the technical I was asked to create a Sudoku grid, and then a solver for it. I had 30 minutes and only completed creating the grid itself. I then had 10 minutes to work on the solver. The remaining 15 minutes of this 45min interview were for questions and discussions about the code.

I've got 8 YOE and this cooked me. I was thinking Sudoku can't be this difficult but then looked it up and a Sudoku solver is a Leet Code hard. So I don't feel that bad about it, but I am pretty annoyed a small company that is hiring developers to work on a React UI and Node.js backend thinks someone being able to solve a Leet Code hard in 30 minutes is acceptable way to interview Senior level developers. Seriously, could the people interviewing me even do this in 30 minutes? Could anyone do this in 30 minutes without having ever seen or attempted the problem? My inability to write a Sudoku solver doesn't translate to not being able to work on some stupid CRUD web app.

They never once asked about system design, no deep questions about JavaScript/TS, React or Node. Just a 45 minute discussion on my experiences and some generic 'what would you do in X scenario', followed by a 45 minute live coding round. This type of interview is the bane of my existence, and with ADHD, while I can definitely solve this problem with enough time and research, I will forget it all within a day or two anyway.

The hoops we jump through, especially as you gain more experience, are bullshit. Interviews have only gotten exponentially harder as I've gained experience. The more experience I get, the less I actually spend coding. And on top of it, LLMs replace the coding in what little time I do get to code at work. In my current job, we use AI and I spend more time being a product engineer than being a programmer. I am not gaining experience in what I equate to as competitive coding challenges.

Anyway, just ranting. I'm sure non-ADHD people have the same problems, but with ADHD, it makes these interviews pure hell most of the time.

Something I've noticed while prepping for interviews, even while employed, is that I'm much better at building products than I am at solving random coding challenges. Need me to build and deploy a full stack app from a set of requirements? No problem. I can put the pieces together, hit the requirements, and deploy it.

Ask me to implement a sliding window, BFS, or DFS from memory though, and my brain just goes apeshit. I understand the concepts, but translating them into code without Googling or referencing something else is almost impossible.

I have 8 years of experience across three companies, and when I struggle when prepping with mock coding interviews it honestly makes me feel like a bad software engineer. Then I think back on my career, and almost none of my day to day work has looked anything like those challenges. I've worked with product stakeholders, built features, delivered projects, fixed production issues, collaborated across teams, basically everything you'd expect to do on the job.

The biggest difference is that real product development is rarely about reinventing the wheel. You use libraries, frameworks, and existing solutions to solve problems. I can build a tower with Legos, but I don't need to manufacture the bricks. When something is complex, I research it, look at existing implementations, choose the right tool or solution, and move on. That's just how products are built.

To me, a typical product engineering job teaches you how to build products, not how to memorize algorithms. Yet some interviews optimize for one and hire you for the other. The interviews I've done best in are the practical ones, where you're given a feature, work through the requirements with the interviewer, implement it, and make the tests pass. And since that's much closer to the job, those are the easiest for me.

I'm not just throwing code together either. I still care about maintainability, performance, and reusability. But I don't spend my days implementing algorithms from scratch, so I'm not great at doing them on the spot.

Does anyone else struggle with this and end up feeling like they're a bad software engineer? It's pretty shitty and it's even harder with ADHD because if I don't like doing something, or there isn't something to show for it at the end, it's almost impossible to force myself to sit down and struggle through something. I can struggle through building something because the reward is seeing it completed and being able to use it. Sitting down and grinding DSA is pointless to my mind. I just hate it.

Started a new job this week and I learned developers have no local admin access. Every single thing has to be requested, and it’s slowing me down considerably. Onboarding is already a huge PITA and the cherry on top is needing to create a ticket for every little thing I need.

It took 2 days to get Homebrew installed on my Macbook, but come to find out I have to raise a ticket to install any package. Every ticket goes to India and they remote in and install with admin access. And I have not even scratched the surface for things I need installed. Every standup update this week was “waiting for IT ticket to be resolved” and at first I was thinking it was just me until a few people on my team told me they were not up and running for nearly 3 weeks when they started. What the hell!

In my 8 YOE I’ve never worked for a company like this. It’s insanely frustrating. How is this a reasonable process for developers? Is this what bigger companies are like now?

I just signed an offer a week ago after a 2 month job search, but all of my interviews came from recruiters in this 2 month span. I have 8 YOE of full stack experience for context. I’m mainly asking because it still sorta bothers me. I have no clue what I was doing wrong.

During this job search I gave up after the 130th application and just fully relied on my LinkedIn and recruiters inbound messaging me. I had my resume rewritten by a technical resume writer, I rewrote it to match job descriptions, I applied to job postings early and I only applied to jobs I was a match for in experience. I did just about everything I saw people advising online. I did not shotgun applications and just apply for any and everything. They were very targeted applications. I’m a U.S. citizen and applied for U.S. based remote, and hybrid roles.

I tracked my cold applications and none of them resulted in a phone screen. All I got was rejection emails, and still they are coming in as of this week for jobs I long forgot I even applied for. Like I mentioned, this still sorta bothers me. I know I have a job now, and it did not take as long as I’ve seen other people spend looking, but if it weren’t for LinkedIn, I’d still be searching to this day. I guess it sucks because there are some pretty cool places I’d like to work, but if I have to cold apply, the answer is basically no at this point. That and if I want another job, my recent experience suggests that I have to basically 100% rely on a recruiter now. In the past I’ve gotten jobs via recruiters, but the difference was that I also got interviews from simply applying.

Anyone else seeing this? Or were you seeing the same thing and maybe changed something and you saw success with it?

I've been working as an SWE without a degree for 8 years. I am not worried about the coursework difficulty, more so I want to get it done in one term while working full time. My job is remote, but I have limited time during my 9-5 schedule to focus on doing school work. So I will be spending mornings, evenings, days off, and weekends working on course work. Basically any free time I will have outside of work.

I am preparing to sacrifice a lot of my free time, and my wife is prepared to support me while I am doing this. I know it's going to be exhausting, but then again, I am familiar with a lot of the course material as I've worked in full stack development for so long now and opted for the Java track since I have worked with Java. Really just looking for the piece of paper at this point to strengthen my resume; although I am hoping to still learn a few things.

My start date is 8/1. I transferred in enough Sophia credits to be at a 28% course competition, so I have a bit of a jumpstart in that regard. If you are someone who was experienced and working full time while attending WGU - how did you find it? I realize doing it in one time might be a bit of a stretch, but even if I have a couple classes left, WGU can prorate a term with < 12 credits left.

Just took a W2 contractor gig through a U.S. based recruiting agency, and I will be subcontracted out to a well known online based financial company. The pay is decent, and the contract is long term, 1 year stints with very high chances of being extended for 1 year intervals. I have done some searching on LinkedIn and the developers working with this agency have worked with this client for 2+ years in every case I've come across. There is also a chance to convert, 2 of the people who interviewed me at this company started as contractors with the agency I am employed by, so I know it is possible.

The only real concerns I have about it are time off is completely unpaid. The agency offers benefits, and with the exception of having PTO, it's no different than being FTE. The main reasons behind accepting this offer were twofold; I am currently finishing my degree over the next 6 months and it's allowing me to work in a tech stack that I have been wanting to get back into after 4 years at my last role doing something else.

The pay upfront comes out to be a little more than I made in my last FTE role, but considering I take 12-14 days of PTO a year on average, the pay comes out to a little less. I've also never worked a W2 contract role like this in my 8 YOE, so it feels a bit weird to be working daily within a company but not being a true part of the team. During this time, I plan to keep my eyes out for FTE roles, but won't really lean into that fully until I can finish my degree due to the workload I am going to have. It took me ~2 months to find this role after a layoff and going through about 7 interviews (failed some, ghosted on others, and 1 verbal offer cancelled after reorg). I possibly could've held out a little longer and found something else, but with my school work, I just didn't have the energy to keep interviewing.

Is this a decent stop gap considering my situation? I've read contracting is a bit of a 'stain' on the resume, but I am W2 employee through this agency and the company I am working for is well known. Plus if I like it enough, I could shoot for converting with the company, but that is not a given what so ever.

Just tried to login to Cloudflare with my Github as usual, and the service does not work. It's been like this for a week.

Github UI has been weird as well, noticing small bugs here and there. Namely, I was setting up branch protection status checks, and when adding the status checks, the search kept returning nothing even though I had actions setup. I had to log out, and refresh my cache before they showed back up.

Yesterday I was on the Google Docs mobile app trying to login and the Sign In with Google Account feature did not work, when you clicked sign in, it just looped back to the sign in page. Never hit the service for social auth.

YouTube Mobile comments are buggy, and when responding to a comment or editing it, it collides the text body against the username @, rendering the username un-linkable.

LinkedIn tab in Chrome is consuming on average 1-1.2GB of RAM.

I've also noticed more bugs here on Reddit, both in browser and the mobile app. Namely sometimes opening up a comment text area, it disappears and you cannot get it back up unless you navigate away from the post and come back to it.

And finally, VSCode has been doing this strange thing lately where 'go to path' completely quits working for Python or TS, and I have to disable all extensions and reenable them after a full restart. I've also observed the Typescript server 'freezing up' on occasion which requires a restart.

My guess is that companies' reliance on AI, combined with reduced headcount and the MBA's focus on velocity, is driving this weird trend I'm seeing across the web. Surely that's not sustainable long term? At some point these companies have to realize they can't keep laying people off, forcing the remaining employees to rely on AI, and still expect the quality of their products and services to remain the same. We are fully in the era of slop software and it's going to take heroics to fix it all eventually.

Hi all, I'm sure this has been answered a bunch, but looking for current suggestions. I live near Tampa, and I have been considering a career switch. I've been a software engineer for about 8 years, and I am totally burnt out and tired of sitting at a desk all day. Prior to working in tech, I did mechanic work in the automotive world for ~8 years, and worked at a motorsports facility for some of those years, so I am mechanically inclined and get the gist of the work environment. I also have a friend who works in aviation recovery, and was a hired hand to help him a few times in the past recovering aircraft and dismantling wings so the airframe would fit on a trailer to be towed back to a hangar. I enjoyed the work.

I'm really looking to do something that is highly skilled, and with an interest in aviation, the first thing that came to mind was an A&P license. Being in Tampa, it seems like one school I see often is National Aviation Academy. I have read some good things, and not so good things about this place. Primarily around 'lazy' instructors who are just collecting a check. I take learning pretty seriously and want to get out as much as I can when doing some sort of school. I already spend a lot of time self learning, so that is also something I feel would benefit me.

With that said; is there a school in my area that anyone would vouch for or simply recommend? Also, with an A&P license, is that enough to say, get into avionics? Does an A&P limit you in any capacity to say just doing maintenance work? I know there are other industries that an A&P can get you involved with, but I'd like to stick to aviation. I have done a bit of research on job postings for jobs which require an A&P license, and some are pretty specific and require some years of experience. Is this something a hands on school would prepare me for? I also want to stay in Florida, so I hope this is not limiting in anyway (other than likely slightly lower pay as most jobs here go).

I have almost 8 YOE experience working in B2B SaaS doing full stack. I broke into the industry in early 2018 without a degree and being completely self taught. Note, I have no degree at all. I did go to college and almost completed my AA, but found work that paid pretty well at the time (not tech related) and off I went.

I have been on the market for ~2 months now, and I have noticed I am getting zero traction, unlike before 2022. My last role lasted 4 years and moved to a Senior position. I had been removed from the market this whole time, woefully unaware of what has been going on. Have sent ~150 targeted applications and always an auto reject. Granted it's only been 2 months, but to have a 0/150 interview rate from cold apps is unlike anything I have experienced in the past. I am not spraying and praying, I apply to positions that match my experience. I have also had a technical resume writer rewrite my resume entirely. Right now, I am solely relying on LinkedIn recruiters at this point. I have exhausted my personal network; the few people I can hit up have all said their companies unfortunately are not hiring. Targeting remote, AND in person / hybrid.

I am seeing more and more listings asking for CS or equivalent degree. They do mention, "or relevant experience," but the thing is, when a job has 300 applicants, the first filter likely is the degree. I have spoken to many recruiters via LinkedIn and they have all gone nowhere. I get past the initial phone screen no problem, and the recruiter will submit me to the hiring manager of the job, and I hear nothing back after. I was wondering what was happening, and finally a recruiter called me to tell me that a job she submitted me for told her that they are prioritizing candidates with a degree. I have also interviewed about 5 times, passed first rounds and also second round technicals, to only be ghosted.

I am currently getting my B.S. as we speak, and should be done in ~7 months. Luckily I was already working on it prior to my layoff. But with all this being said; I hate to discourage or make anyone feel like the self taught route is dead, but I am pretty sure a degree is the great filter these days. There is no other way to cut down on the amount of applicants. Does anyone else think this is what is happening out on the market right now?

I've been working as an SWE for 8 years. Stack is irrelevant. I work in web, so all the usual modern technologies you'd expect. The thing I've slowly realized is that while I don't think I hate dev, I think I might just hate web development.

I can't stand the corporate bullshit and I definitely don't enjoy the endless stream of new things to keep up with in web. The reality is that the main thing keeping me in web is the money and the fact that all of my experience is in web.

I've worked with plenty of developers who genuinely love it. They spend their free time building side projects, experimenting with new technologies, and staying on top of everything happening in the ecosystem. It shows in their skills too. I've never had trouble performing well at my jobs, getting good reviews, or earning the respect of my coworkers, but I've never been that person.

I'm still very interested in tech though. Recently I've been building a CAN bus sniffer using an ESP32 to read vehicle telemetry and stream it over MQTT (there is a web component for a database and data logging UI). I've also done other IoT projects in the past. Generally I spend time watching videos about totally unrelated things like ultra low latency trading systems, networking, and embedded development. The common theme is that none of it has much to do with web development.

Doing web all day and then going home to consume more web content is something I simply can't bring myself to do. It just doesn't interest me.

Looking back, I've realized two things. First, I mostly do web because it pays well. Second, if I could start over today, I'd probably be working in embedded systems, IoT, or something closer to hardware. Unfortunately, switching fields after 8 years means taking a pretty significant step backward, and the market isn't exactly friendly to career switchers right now.

So I'm curious. How many of you genuinely enjoy working in web, and how many are here because it's where the jobs and money are? Reddit seems to skew towards, "if you don't like it, you will never be good." Surely I can't be the only almost 10 years in, and uninterested in their day to day work. It feels taboo to say I just do it because it pays me. I feel there is a lot of truth in that for a lot of developers out there.

I have been thinking that transitioning to Cybersecurity might be a better fit for me after 8+ years as an SWE working in enterprise SaaS companies working across the stack, handling Cloud services, and a few DevOps related things along the way relating to Soc 2 compliance. It seems like AppSec might be the most natural path considering my background.

Not really asking about what certs or projects I need to do the job; there is plenty of info out there for it, but if you want to make suggestions, I am all ears. I am aware of SAST, DAST, and SCA. I am asking this because I am mostly concerned with how tight entry level positions are for those without experience. Maybe that is not the case in this industry, but I am just going based on what it's like for the SWE entry level roles currently.

Does my years of SWE experience strengthen my appeal at all for prospective AppSec jobs?