CS feels cooked, junior jobs are insanely competitive, and getting hired feels like a lottery. Why not switch to another field where you actually have a decent chance of getting in and still making good money? Why cling to CS?
2025 CS grad here, I couldn't get a SWE job after graduation so I took a manufacturing engineering role instead where I work with PLCs. I do not like this job and do not want to spend my life doing this.
Should I just quit and grind for SWE? I can job hunt for 6 months without running out of money.
When will amazon after finishing the interviews get back to me with an update?
I gave the interview on Monday the 17th all 4 rounds and one of my frineds heard back in a day that he was selected.
When will they usually come back with an update? And will they recruiter call? Or will it be updated in the portal? Or an email?
Any information would be lovely now
Hi guys
I have been coding proffesionally nearly 4 years and have degree which I got 92% in. I am mid level in my company which is quite big
This year I faced so many rejections like never before…
I just did an interview where I was told I do not have programming fundamentals.
They gave me a problem to solve with no ai and no code and I really struggled to remember the syntax and typing it out by hand…
At work as in many companies , I have been pushed and told to use as much ai as possible and some of the details have lost, I can’t code from scratch classes and objects like I could back in uni.
I have been doing lots of prep this year, DSA mainly because I have never done it before. I have been working on all the studying for the whole year every weekend and a lot of the mornings before work.
But today after this rejection I feel my mental health really on the decline.
I love code and I have put so much passion and love and I really really wanted to be good at it and I’ve just been told I don’t have the basics… I feel so crazy I am considering calling emergency mental health services, tears are rolling down my face and I feel really lost…
Is there any point in doing Leetcode hards (other than standard ones like trapping rainwater) ? The range of difficulty in the hards itself is pretty large, making some questions not appropriate for an interview at all. Is grinding LC hards purely a waste of time for interview prep ?
I’ve had interviews with Google and Amazon (two companies I used to dream of working for). They still use the traditional process of LeetCode, algorithms, and so on, without any AI assistance. Back in the golden age (before AI), I used to practice and solve a lot of questions. It was fun because you knew you needed that knowledge to build things successfully in your own projects. Nowadays, all the code in companies is generated by Claude Code, and software engineers just review the output to make sure it's correct, and that's it.
To be honest, during those interviews, I didn’t care about practicing. I didn’t want to waste my time when I knew I wasn't going to solve a LeetCode Hard anyway, since I'm not that good at those types of questions. I guess I didn't care about getting into Google or Amazon anymore because I knew how high their bar is, and I just didn't have the energy to grind algorithms while having a stable job.
I don't know, this AI era has made me want to do something else. The job has become boring; I just use prompts now, because there’s no reason to do something by hand when AI does it better and faster than you. I feel like I've lost that passion for coding. Has anyone else gone through this? What roles can you transition into that aren’t about coding and are more fun?
I find it sad that people in tech are cheating in every OA, screening and algorithm assignment and getting high paying jobs meanwhile I read news of Jason Arday who resigned from Cambridge after plagiarism investigation and later found dead.
Whats the difference between what happend at Cambridge vs tech workers landing faang jobs after cheating?. He may not even be making 500k salary at cambridge and every cheater going to faang is making so much money. People should be ashamed of themselves.
I applied for an Amazon SDE role on August 11, and about 3 days later I received the OA.
The first coding challenge was about bags represented by a list of intervals. Each entry was basically "[left, right, money]", meaning every bag from "left" to "right" contained that amount of money. Bags outside those intervals contained 0. The goal was to choose exactly "k" consecutive bags and maximize the total amount of money collected.
My approach worked for some test cases, but when I submitted it, several of the hidden cases failed with Time Limit Exceeded, and I ended up passing around 4–5/15 test cases.
The second part was an AI-assisted Java Spring Boot repository task focused on RBAC/security, where I only passed 1/6 tests.
I genuinely did my best and prepared a lot for this opportunity, so seeing those results really hurt. I still completed the full assessment, including the work simulation/work style section, but I’m feeling pretty disappointed right now.
Has anyone here had results this low and still moved forward in the Amazon process? Do I realistically still have a chance, or is it basically over?
Its been 5 days, i havent heard anything from recruiter post my onsite interview last week, should i consider its a No Hire from their end?
Anyone had this experience or anyone in the loop currently?
I’d been preparing for this for a while since I knew my initial round was today, and then it got cancelled without any explanation. I’ve emailed my recruiter, but I’m honestly a little worried.
Lowkey scared that the headcount got filled and they’ve just moved on. 😭 Has anyone been in a similar situation? What happened in your case?
Can u guys suggest some good youtuber or good resources for accenture coding round
Hot take: I think software engineering interviews are measuring the wrong thing.
For years, the path has been pretty predictable:
Learn DSA → grind LeetCode → solve 500 problems → prepare for interviews.
And honestly, DSA is valuable. It teaches problem-solving and builds strong fundamentals.
But something has changed.
AI can now write a lot of the code.
It can implement algorithms, optimize functions, explain solutions, and get you surprisingly close to a working implementation in seconds.
So what becomes more valuable?
Knowing what to build, why to build it, and how to build it efficiently.
That's where I think System Design deserves much more attention.
Give two engineers the same AI coding assistant and ask them to build a URL shortener.
One might immediately start asking AI to write the code.
The other might first ask:
How much traffic are we expecting?
Do we need caching?
What database makes sense?
What happens if a service goes down?
How do we scale this from 10K to 10M users.
Both might eventually write working code.
But the second engineer is thinking beyond the code.
That's engineering thinking.
And yet, when we talk about practicing engineering skills, the names that immediately come up are:
LeetCode. GFG. Codeforces.
But what about System Design?
Where do you actually go to practice it consistently?
Where can you solve real-world architecture problems, understand trade-offs, get better over time, and maybe even build a System Design streak?
Imagine going from designing a URL shortener today to a chat system next week, a food delivery platform after that, and eventually tackling genuinely complex distributed systems.
Not memorizing architectures for an interview.
Actually learning how to think like an engineer.
I genuinely feel there is a gap here.
DSA shouldn't disappear. It's still important.
But maybe it's time we stop treating it as the ultimate proxy for engineering ability—especially for engineers who already have a few years of experience.
Code can increasingly be generated.
Engineering decisions can't be outsourced that easily.
So I'm curious:
If you wanted to seriously practice System Design today, what platform would you use?
And if there isn't an obvious answer, what do you think that platform should look like?
#SystemDesign #SoftwareEngineering #TechHiring #ArtificialIntelligence #FutureOfWork
So guys, I need to know which LeetCode questions are displayed on LeetCode for Fidelity Investments. I'm desperate guys; please help me out TT
Its been such a long since I am doing dsa , but I still stuck a lot . I know its all about practice and practice. But I genuinely want to train my mind .
I need advice how to solve I am losing opportunity bcz of this issue.
Basically, the title says it all.
I’m curious about how your day-to-day work changed after you joined a FAANG company. How difficult and complex were your tasks compared to your previous non-FAANG jobs?
Did your responsibilities change significantly? How did you feel working there?
I have my Amazon interview in 10 days. Honestly I need help with people who have interview and who’s experienced this loop.
I rusty on the coding part as I only have 10% knowledge/confidence in me about that. I can tale care or Leadership principles but recruiter told me 3/4 rounds will include technical part. I honestly don’t know what to solve what to practice. If someone can guide me it would be helpful
Hello, I work for a full time witch company last 5 years as lead engineer(senior, architect, staff level positions in different projects in fortune 100 companies) in US. I was work for a startup 2 years before the current one and 3 years in mid size companies in different countries. I lead team for 3 years, after that I worked as only architect, and recently I was piped from biggest telecom companies multi agent ai project as staff ai engineer. So I am pretty much handy at coding and system design. My team management skills are not good imo.
What is my level if I want to apply google, meta, netflix etc? I know my chance to get interview is very low, by any luck, if I got one. L3? L4? L5?
I want to prepare for google and microsoft. I failed at google, meta and amazon before.
Thanks advance
This was my first interview in awhile so it felt even more brutal than I remember. I probably need more reps but it went way worse than expected.
It started off a little abrasive as the interviewer questioned why my current product at my current job was even needed after explaining the use cases. I tried to explain how important the work was but they seemed dismissive to my responses. I tried to take that in stride but it just felt off from there.
After getting the question (deviation of a leetcode medium), I asked some clarifying questions, and explained my intuition. My intuition was right but the interviewer pushed back so hard it made me doubt myself, like I was dumb for using the wrong pattern, that's how hard. I looked it up after the interview and it was the right pattern and solved it. Maybe it was some sort of test to see how I work with my thoughts being challenged, but their responses seemed agitated when I pointed out what I was doing.
I started coding and explaining each line and they start micro managing the code through the coderpad. They were asking so many questions I couldn't possibly explain the code, type, and answer them, so I keep breaking thought and pausing. I end up getting about 75% of the code, using the intuition I originally identified, they stop me with 20 minutes to go and tell me I'm not going to finish.
I stop coding, I ask them some questions, and we end the call 15 minutes early.
I don't know if they were planning to reject me from the start, didn't like my experience, or thought I was an idiot but I've never been pushed that far off track in an interview. I read into it being collaborative type interview but I felt like they were fighting me the entire time. Even if I would have done better I would never have wanted to work with them.
Has anyone ever been challenged that hard during an interview?
So I finally decided to start taking leetcode seriously these past couple of months since there’s no way around it and with how bad my luck in the job hunt has been this year I have no choice but to learn the secret handshake.
I have my technical interview scheduled for a coding assessment and the recruiter during our initial call mentioned that it would be leetcode based(still waiting for more details). It’s a very small local startup/not even faang adjacent, with no interview feedback on Glassdoor due to the nda they make you sign.
I’m hoping to get some insight on how to go about asking clarifying questions. I know I’m not going to get much out of trying to cram Neetcode 150 so I just want to tap into what I’ve learned the last couple of months as I mentioned earlier to arrive at a somewhat decent answer.
Please & thanks in advanced!
About a week ago, a Google recruiter reached out asking for my availability for the next interview rounds. I sent my availability, but haven’t heard back since. I also followed up after three business days but didn’t get a response.
Has anyone experienced this ?
Is it normal for scheduling to take this long.
Trying to figure out whether I should just wait or take any other action. Thanks!