r/cscareerquestions

Just saw that other post asking about the worst, so I was inspired to ask the opposite.

Is the job market just cooked or am I doing something wrong? I need to get out of my job cause it causes me so much stress I started having panic attacks and insomnia and I had to see a mental health professional…at my job people are constantly laid off and disappearing.

Due to a combination of toxic politics with my product owner throwing me under the bus and getting stuck with bad projects I feel like I’m on the chopping block. I got a ‘meets’ at mid year but my boss told me verbally he was not happy.

I have applied to hundreds of jobs got very few callbacks and zero offers. I went so far as to apply for jobs in lower paying industries like government and healthcare where the pay is less than half what I make and still nothing. Am I blacklisted or something? 4 years ago I got two offers in a month. I feel like I’m going crazy at this point…

I’m beyond burnt out. I’m depressed, I cannot take my current job anymore. I want to put my efforts and abilities towards something that is meaningful. Working for a company that does objective good, but I’m super concerned about the money as right now I’m doing pretty damn well and I’m 10 minutes from my house and seconds from my kids school. Does anyone have recommendations for avenues to find these jobs? Im not looking for actual jobs, just good places to look. I know it seems like this topic is short and scattered, but honestly that’s how I feel. Thanks in advance.

So im planning to study a cs degree but the more research i do, the more i see people complaining how difficult the job market is right now and how AI is taking over. Cs is like the only topic im passionate about but choosing a career that has a bad job market just for 'passion' is not wise. I dont wanna end up with a good-for-nothing degree working at mcdonalds for the rest of my life. I thought cs was at least more stable than creative/artistic careers but at this rate who knows. Lowkey might be better if i switch to something stable, even if i hate it at least I will have enough money to survive. Im pretty decent at maths so finance could be a option.

I work for a large Corp and PIPs have gotten more and more common as managers have to meet a quota every performance cycle. I feel like the culture has turned very toxic. People are not nice and it brings out the worst in some people who specialize in throwing coworkers under the bus and kissing up to management. It makes people very individualistic and you don’t feel like a team at all.

Also I feel mentally exhausted all the time like it doesn’t really motivate me to work and it’s quite the opposite. I’m stressed and anxious coming in every day and I don’t feel any desire to put effort into a company that can fire me at any time.

We all know the best, most coveted companies to work for. But I want to know the dumpster fires of the tech world. For those who are not afraid to name and shame.

Am I the only one exhausted by all the ai slop around. Why are people not thinking critically? I just got a PR and it's so overkill. There isn't anything wrong with it, it works and gets the job done, but I can't but ask the question "why". It could've been done in a few lines but here I'm reviewing 10 files, new functions, touching files that have no business being touched, and 1000 line changes.

Am I getting old? Is this how everyone is working now?

I've been working in this field for 7+ years now. My wife now works at a university and I get tuition reimbursement. I could get a masters in Computer Science or Cybersecurity for free. All online, as well.

The consensus online is that it's not worth it in this industry unless it's free/heavily comped and you simply want to. With my current WFH job that's pretty chill most of the time, I could likely do my course work during work hours. But even then, I feel like I could work on my creative hobbies instead like I usually do. Or just chill lol. Idk if that sounds lazy or just realistic. I'm not necessarily dying to have homework again nor do I feel there's much to learn in the current era of "throw Claude at it". Maybe that's pessimistic.

I'm really considering the offer but I also don't feel confident my company will care. I mean maybe a little if it's Cybersecurity cause Fable has made leadership care a lot about security. But I strongly doubt any company would say wow you got a masters? Here's a promotion/raise.

Any advice? Am I being silly/lazy/pessimistic?

I graduated with a CS degree back in May (3 months ago), have zero student debt, and landed a Data Engineer role making $70k/year. The job is a 20-minute commute from my parents' place, stable, and honestly the exact setup I want right now since I’m trying to stay close to home for a bit.

Here’s the issue: I am beyond lost.

Throughout college, I had great grades and did three SWE internships at Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon, all focused on standard backend development. Because of that, I thought I had a solid foundation. But Data Engineering feels like an entirely different universe.

Every single meeting sounds like an alien language. My team is small and everyone else has 2 to 4+ years of dedicated DE experience. I’m the only fresh grad, and I don't even know what I don't know. When they talk about pipeline architectures, orchestration, data modeling, and specific tooling, I don't even know what to search on Google after the call to catch up.

When they hired me, management explicitly said they didn't expect me to know DE tooling out of the gate and that I’d learn on the job. But sitting here lost in every meeting, bringing basically zero value while everyone else moves fast, is giving me insane anxiety. I don't want to get fired, and I actually want to keep this job.

Any advice on navigating these first few months without burning out or losing my job would mean a lot. I'm considering doing a masters in data science/engineering but I feel like that wouldn't change much... school didn't prepare me for anything in the corporate engineering environments I've been in.

My previous place did yearly refresher RSUs to try to keep people topped off and avoid a big vesting cliff. I just found out that my current place doesn't do refreshers outside of promotions and rare cases. One of my teammates is coming up on his cliff and promotion this year is likely not going to happen so he either has to take a pay cut for a year or leave. I guess the strategy is to only keep around the gunners who are always busting for the next level? What is the norm, regular refreshers or none? Current industry - fintech, previous industry - healthcare.

I just feel behind in my career compared to my peers. I’m in mid 20s and making less than my first job out of college. I was laid off from my first job due to performance and threw a wrench in my self confidence in my capability in continuing as swe. after being unemployed for 8 months I found a job due to a connection working for a startup. the pay is low and making less than what I use to make at first job but I’ve been at this role for almost 1.5 years now. I look at my peers and they are advancing through their careers with promotions and high salary raises meanwhile I feel like I’ve set back due the layoff but I’m slowly working myself up. I’ve learned a lot and done more impactful work at current startup which helped me regain my self confidence as a swe. although when I check on LinkedIn and seeing my peers I use to go to school with getting promotions and advancing through their careers I feel behind due to being stuck working at a small shop with low pay. I hope others reading this also find some resemblance you are not alone feeling this way.

At one point during a multi-year project, my team’s daily scrum meetings were 7:30am ET, slightly worse for those on CT (6:30am). They eventually moved to 8:00am ET, but even this still feels early.

Our dev asks heavy, complex questions and it’s been a hassle giving quality answers due to the earliness and promptness of the calls for the past several years :(

Is this a normal time?

Senior SDE at Microsoft working on a Cybersecurity product. 10 yoe; 32; ex Amazon/Salesforce/John Deere.

To fight the dread of the future, I am taking one course at a time from ASU Online in EE. Really not sure when I will be done or how the future will turn out but I am taking whatever action I can.

I have an interest in EE and I am thinking maybe having both CS and EE degrees will continue to keep me employed in the future.

Should I go for masters in AI or continue with EE? It's just one course at a time that I am taking which will take forever for me to graduate anyway despite getting credits for all gen eds--if I don't get laid off which is not a surety.

I’m a .net dev working at a small manufacturing company 10 min from home. I spent college years working for a massive fortune 50 oil company with a shiny office, cool travel experiences paid for, free lunches, other fancy things like that. It was a large company that did scrum agile and that whole thing. After graduating this company didn’t have open positions because they contracted out a lot of dev positions. This made me really sad and i always wanted to go back cause the salaries and benefits were huge.

So i took the 75k dev job at my current company. My current company is fun, creative work, and im kind of my own boss. My actual boss is fun and cool and the company has a serious emphasis towards family life and treats us well (free health insurance, 15% retirement bonus).

I got a call from an old employee at the oil company saying his position is open so i applied and went through 4 rounds of interviewing and finally got an offer. 98k base salary, 15% cash bonus, 7% pension and 7% 401k match (these are all guarenteed btw). I was pumped and scared at same time to go back to a more strict dev style and working with a lot of contractors from India, and having a boss from a different state remotely. It’s a longer drive by 30 min, but i do have a work from home day which is cool.

My current employer countered with 95k base and extra week of vacation to match new offer.

I’m very stuck on what i should do, how many of you went from small to large corporate and was it worth the fancy office and salary and perks and all of that?

Any advice would help

Have an interview coming up and am curious if anyone here has interviewed with them before and what the interview process is. As far as I've read, it's phone screening, coding round, system design, behavioral.

Is the coding round leetcode? what specific problems do they usually focus on in their system design round?

Also curious about company's culture in general, any advice/info is appreciated!

Basically title.
I’m thinking of giving up my 220+200(equity) job for a 165K job.

The 420job has insanely high standards and is very stressful and if you don’t perform a month you’ll be laid off.

The 165K job is much less stressful and much lower workload and much better worklife balance.

I am a Machine Leaning Engineer.
Both jobs have me building production AI Agents.

I'm a CS major in my final year, I've programming knowledge and theoratical base but no real internship or experience. Seeing the situation and AI overlap around me makes me think twice of everything. As it's my final year so it's really the time for me to get a job and be financially independent, but I don't know where to start and how

I've made my resume roughly, and done some projects but mostly with AI or following yt tutorials and I know myself that I'm not confident with them because honestly I can't do them from scratch on my own

I want advice from the people with successful career in CS or related fields that how do I start preparing for my job from today?

I'm aiming for a software engineering role.

What programming languages I should learn properly, books I should read, courses I should take, path guidance resources that would help me, things I should keep in mind, **any** resources? All the DO and DON'T.

I appreciate your advice!

Made it to the the 5th round of interview for a job.I answered almost everything the recruiter asked and when I asked for feedback,recruiter replied "feedback was good from my side".But still got rejected.

Back then I have never been rejected about my recruiter screens. I researched about every company’s products and connect to the products they are building. I shared about the projects I’ve done and the impact I’ve made (e.g., ownerships, app I ran the entire cycle from collecting reqs system design to implementation to testing, performance improvement in %, developers I mentored, etc.) I don’t even stand a chance on technical rounds and I failed in more than 50% of the recruiter screenings out of 10 I applied, quite streaky now as well. I never stuttered at all and I communicate well. I never lied about my experience as well.

I am mainly targeting intermediate-senior dev roles, 5-6 years of experience. Is this the norm? Unless the candidates I’m against are all public speakers and drilled recruiter screens rigorously. Back then I didn’t get rejected close to that many times… in non-technical recruiter screening rounds…