r/cscareers

Its not worth it getting screwed over, passed over for promotions, and going through 7 rounds of technical interviews, and also worry about visa (if in the US on a visa), only to be replaced by AI that trained on common crawl and github codebases. I’m out, this looks like a dead end career, if you’re a fresher DO NOT step in, its a trap. A racoon could do a better job in a few years, we’ll all be sent to the meat grinder eventually. Only enter if you wanna get screwed over by people who’d bite rawhide the moment they smell it. Alex Larp’s nervous breakdown on cnbc is torally justified, the tokenmaxxers have gotten in, and they have leverage now, and they wanna keep it up. I’m ssly thinking of giving up H1b and going back home, the stress is too much to handle.

Worth switching to another major other than CS or finish and go into the gauntlet job search?

I'm a software developer with almost 5 years of experience.

Recently, during an interview, the interviewer told me something that has been stuck in my mind:

"If you want to have a long career in this field, don't think about today. Think about where the industry will be 4 years from now."

That sounds like good advice, but honestly, it's also making me anxious.

We're in the AI era. Every few months there's a new AI model, AI coding tool, AI agent, or framework. Things that seem cutting-edge today can become outdated very quickly.

Right now I'm learning Generative AI because it seems like the right direction, but I honestly don't know if it will still be valuable 4 years from now. Technology is moving so fast that it's hard to predict what skills will matter in the future.

Sometimes I compare software engineering with careers where people can work in the same role for 25–35 years and retire. In IT, it feels like every year you have to learn 2–3 new technologies, frameworks, or tools just to stay relevant.

I enjoy learning, but I also wonder: Will there ever be a point where I can slow down, or is continuous learning simply the reality of this career?

For developers with 10, 15, or 20+ years of experience:

- How do you decide what to learn and what to ignore?

- Do you actually plan your career 4–5 years ahead?

- Has the constant pace of change become easier over time?

- Do you believe software engineering is still a sustainable long-term career in the age of AI?

I'd really appreciate hearing your experiences and perspectives.

I would like to know more information about that. How is working in tech as a new immigrant having 6 years of experience in Gulf as AI Engineer. Is it easy to get a job in the US with a degree and experience abroad?

If anyone has information I would highly appreciate if you give me response

Thank you

I got hired by a tech company straight out of college (or right before I graduated with my cs degree really). I've been working at the company for about 5 years. I'm underpaid compared to my years of experience. I want to find a new job. But I'm running into a wall because I have to pass technical interviews. With AI, I haven't coded by hand for almost a year, and my job keeps me quite busy. How should I overcome this? Dedicate an hour or two a day to leetcode problems? Just wing it? Any advice is appreciated. Sometimes I feel like I'd have an easier time getting another job if I quit my first one. But I know that's a bad idea.

Current Meta employees — how are you feeling about the company in 2026?

Current Meta employees — how are you feeling about the company in 2026?

From the outside, it feels like it’s been a pretty intense year:

Massive AI restructuring and team reshuffles
Recent layoffs and role changes
Huge push toward AI-first across the company
More internal pressure to move faster
Leadership openly saying some AI plans haven’t gone as expected

For those still at Meta, what’s the atmosphere actually like?

Has morale changed? Are people optimistic about the AI direction, or is there more uncertainty than before? Has your day-to-day job changed significantly?

I’d especially love to hear from women and people who’ve been at Meta for a few years—has the culture shifted in any noticeable way?

Not trying to stir up drama. Just interested in hearing firsthand experiences rather than headlines.

Hello, I recently graduated around 6 months ago as a computer science grad and no internships, I know the combo is horrible especially in 2026 but so far, ~300 applications with 5 interviews, which I’ve fumbled due to first time tech interview experience (although 5th interview I don’t even wanna count cuz of how horrible the technical issues on their part were).

My options here are either go for another degree in computer engineering, find an internship in-between and accumulate about 30k more in loan debt, or just keep applying and hoping. I would say personally my resume is good enough considering no internships, I’ve built several impressive embedded hardware projects which is what’s probably getting me interviews.

Any thoughts?

I pulled every open Forward Deployed Engineer job I could find. 292 of them,

across 11 companies. Here's what the data says.

Who's hiring: Palantir leads with 95 openings (they coined the title), then

Databricks 85, OpenAI 70, then Cohere, Scale AI, Sierra, Writer, and more.

What it pays: a median band of $197K to $294K, topping out at $390K plus equity.

Senior-engineer money for a role most people have never heard of.

Three things that surprised me:

1. 98% are customer-facing. This is the whole job, not a backend role with

   occasional meetings.

2. The title is chaos. FDE, Deployment Strategist, AI Deployment Engineer,

   Forward Deployed Software Engineer. Same job, 5 names. Search one, miss most.

3. The job descriptions barely mention SQL or algorithms, but the interviews

   absolutely test them. The JD sells the breadth; the loop tests the depth.

62% of these roles are mid-level IC, so you don't need to be a staff engineer

to break in. Full breakdown with every number in the comments.

I've gotten to the point now where as soon as I hear the accent, I delete the voicemail, I don't even bother listening. It's always either an on-site position across the country, the wrong tech stack, or some other variety of not even close to a fit.

And even in the rare case it is a good fit, it never goes anywhere.

I hate that I have this bias now, because I know that there are probably some legit jobs in the mix that I'm going to miss out on, it's just become exhausting being at the end of "spray and pray"

hey ,I'm a third year Software Engineering student and I've been working on improving my skills for the last 3-4 years. I have a strong foundation and usually it only takes me a couple of weeks to get comfortable with a new programming language. I've built several personal projects on my own and I've worked with C++, Java, Spring, and C#.

I got into software engineering because I genuinely enjoy it and I always try to build things the way they're done in real companies with clean, organized, and maintainable code.

Right now I'm building a chat application where I'm using things like a workflow engine, caching, microservices, WebSockets, and other production-level concepts. I know it's overkill for a student project but the whole point is to learn how software is actually built in the industry.

I think my practical skills are comparable to a mid-level developer in some areas even though I don't have professional experience yet.

The only thing is I don't really want to continue university because I don't like the education system. I'm not someone who learns by memorizing things, I learn by building real projects and solving real problems.

Given my background, do you think I could find a software engineering job without too much difficulty or is not having a degree going to make it much harder?

Hello legends,

Senior Java Dev here planning to transition into AI engineer role within 2-3 months

Should I stick to plan that Claude created for me for gradual daily learnings like prompt template, chunking, langchain and langgraph, mcp etc

Or try any Udemy course ?

If anyone has gone through the similar journey and has any advice for me then please feel free to guide me on this.

Appreciate your input on this, Cheers

I'm confused if the job market is good or bad for cs, some of my friends have jobs and they dont have lots of cs experience, while some of my friends dont have jobs and have experience??? The job report says job market is cooked, but my people I know are getting entry level jobs in cs, gives me hope

Ok I want to start off by saying is that I enjoy writing code. I write code everyday for my personal projects, and I mostly refuse to use agentic AI at work. I'm saying this because I'm not coming at this from the perspective of a shill. And I'm not a dev who spends all days in meetings and sending emails, I write code. Even when I don't have to, I enjoy it and it helps me stay sharp.

But yes I think if AI gets any better, then software engineering will go away. And this statement isn't hyperbolic. I think its realism. I see a lot of people on forums, linkedin, reddit, and the accepted narrative is "software engineering evolves" or "we just spend more time on architecture" or "it just become about judgement". I'm convince these people aren't software engineers. Because as a software engineer I do architecture, design, and exercise judgement, and have done it for decades. People are acting like software engineering has never been like this. But let's accept that "the role changes" narrative. Let's follow the train of logic

So let's say you no longer need to write code. You are fully agentic, you no longer write code, and you may not even review it since you have verifying agents. What are they paying you for? Oh yeah that's right "figuring out what to build" and "judgement". Ok what does that look like day to day? These are nebulous terms that are hard to measure, quantify or justify. Remember a dev job is mostly technical not sociable. If your just is figuring out what to build, those are stakeholder meetings. Thats basically a product manager. So if you don't write code anymore (many devs said theyt haven't wrote code in 8+ months). And you don't review code because AI agents catches stuff. Then why couldn't we just give a product manager an agent? What value are you providing that they can't? I could set up an agent where they can just put the requirements in a spec. you can have a workflow that generates the new test and everything. So do we even need a software department anymore at all?

Now here is the reality. I don't think AI is that good at writing code. It does really good CRUD and SaaS stuff. I am a platform engineer and AI becomes a lot less useful for this sort of code (correctness is more important than just delivery speed). And even in my role, some CTO or VP will get the bright idea to use agentic AI to generate infrastructure. But the vast majority of dev jobs are product jobs just translating business requirements into software. The developer is the middle man here, not the PM. The PM job is already social, about leadership, and their metrics are based around coordination. A dev is just a friction point.

In conclusion. There almost zero reason for anyone to continue to pay a full time developer in most of these roles. To me the end game is obvious. No one is going to pay a agentic babysitter 6 figures. And even if they are now they won't continue to. The role future is tenous at best. But what the idea of the "agentic babysitter" role does is give people professional comfort and safety. Its just too hard to admit that the economics of keeping a dev team makes no actual sense. And dev aligning themselves desperately with AI narratives are just digging their own grave. But I think if we were honest I think we'd see the truth about the future of this position.

I also want to somewhat add some nuance. A lot of dev jobs will go away. AI generated code has to be applied to systems where failure is cheap and easily recovrable, and velocity is valued over quality. This applies to a lot of line of business development and enterprise software. The power of the software is the sales team moreso than the engineering org. I still think system programming, embedded systems, to some extent infrastructure kind of stay safe. Just because failure modes here is expensive or catestrophic. But this don't mean these categories won't be tested. I just don't think you can rely on AI in these domains without major fallout later.

So is there any optimism? Because I've painted a very bleak future. I do think there is room for independent development. I believe there is a market (albeit small) for artisan software. Differentiation will still be important. AI does make software very "samey" and lean towards averages. So polish may matter to a subset of users. Just think of the watch industry. Watches can mostly be mass produced and tell time way more accurately than mechanical watches. But people still pay tip dollar for hand crafted watches like Patek Phillipe. And people like tourbillions even if a digital watch that cost $10 tells time more accurately. Software may see the same metamorphisis. At least that is where I'm more hopeful than certain.

This is a long explanation and question. I’m looking for input from people with a non traditional path that are Software engineers with at least 4/5+ years of experience.

Especially with those with a non STEM degree since that’s what my bachelors is in.

Have you’ve decided to go back to school to get a Masters in CS and if yes has it provided any career advancement?

I have 6+ years of experience with a coupe name brand companies. I have a bachelors in arts and I’m applying and getting career guidance if I should get my Masters in CS. Still waiting to see if I need to take any bachelor courses that they might require.

I’m considering one or more of the following

1. Getting a Masters in CS
2. Getting a bachelors in CS or Software engineering or AI engineering.

If I get accepted into 1 I wanted to take 6 months taking courses for #2 before I start to get the rust off and learn what I don’t know.

My partner said the bachelors is not important if I get the masters. For myself I want to get the bachelors just to prove to myself that I can. The uni is self paced so I can knock out half the degree before I start my master and potentially do both in parallel so I can finish both around the same time.

If you can answer

1. How many YOE did you have before starting your masters

2. What’s your degree if any.

3. When did start your masters.

4. Did it lead to career advancement? What kind?

Hi everyone,
I’m a bit confused and was wondering if anyone has experienced something similar.
I applied for two research internship positions at the same research lab. Since the roles were very similar, I only had one technical interview, which counted for both positions. At the end of the interview, they told me that if everything went well, the next step would be an HR interview, and that they would let me know by the middle of the following week.
Last week I received a rejection email for one of the positions, and yesterday I received another rejection email for the second one. So I assumed the process was over.
However, today one of the researchers who interviewed me emailed me saying:
“We would like to schedule a quick call to update you on the status of your application. Would you be available any time tomorrow?”
The call is with the entire team, which makes it even more confusing.
I’m trying not to get my hopes up, but I don’t really understand why they would schedule a call after sending rejection emails for both positions. They also specifically said it’s to update me on the status of my application, not to provide feedback.
Has anyone experienced something similar? What would you think in this situation?

Hey everyone. I have a CS/SWE background and I'm trying to learn AI the right way instead of doing random tutorials that go nowhere.

Curious what skills actually got you hired or into interviews. Is a RAG/chatbot project still worth building or is it oversaturated now? What did your resume project actually look like if you landed a role recently? Any resources that actually helped you, not just the usual suggestions?

Would appreciate honest advice, even blunt ones like what to skip.

Excuse me for my ignorance I am not very knowledgeable and I just starting my career and I just finished my A-levels. I really dont understand what is the problem. Because the unemployment rate 9.7%

Is it there are too many undergraduates and too little jobs?
Is it the undergraduates have an awful CV?
Is it AI?
Are undergraduates just being couch potatoes and not applying for jobs?
Is it like this only for undergraduates but it is fine for seniors and that is where most of the vacancies are?
is it a mix of all?
When will this problem be solved?

I would love to hear from everyone especially employers and university professors, I guess you know what is the problem.