r/softwareengineer

Back in 2022 i started a CS degree in hope to find a good job and get my family out of our financial struggles. I graduated in August this year, with general degree,(skipped an academic year). Now here I am without a job. Applied to several hundred job offers and only got 2 interviews & in both I was interviewed by an AI. Idk what they are expecting, i have plenty of real world experience for an entry level job, I have built & deployed in-production software before AI.

And the other thing is AI. I'm writing this post at 11pm, right after a full work day (freelance) using AI tools, I am tired of talking to AI & reading it's output all day. I'm tired of telling it what not to do. im tired of it pretending me as a dumb fk.

When I was in university I did some labor jobs to earn some money, the work was hard but at the end of the day it felt good. Building software by hand used to feel the same, but things are completely opposite now. I feel miserable & don't want to work tomorrow.

I know AI is here to stay & the this is the new normal. Today I understood that, this new normal is not for me. Im gonna leave the industry & find a blue collar job. Wish me luck. (English is my second language, I'm not very good at it, but i typed this rant by hand, so kindly ignore grammar mistakes)

It is the Wild West out there, and nobody knows what they are doing or what the best way to do it is. It is the future, and if used correctly, it can do marvellous things. We will hopefully learn from your mistakes.

My experience is that it is great for brand new projects but not so great for 10-year-old codebases written by dozens of developers.

so its not a secret that each and every company nowadays just trying to be 'better and faster' with 0 care about the people, so they just keep on pushing the ai stuff. it all went up to the absurd, that regardless who you are - you will be working on both - frontend and backend, basically a fullstack (with zero knowledge about the opposite to ur usual stack).

and I'm okay if there is a possibility of learning things etc, but when you are in rush and under huge deadlines, it's simply impossible to properly learn.

and here is the most annoying thing for me - i have different colleagues with different knowledge base, middles to seniors (juniors dont exists anymore rip), and everyone tries to contribute and learn (me included), but there is one person who has a level of critical thinking lower than the bottom of the ocean, this person will run huge amount of commits on a simple task (even in person's basic stack), the claude itself will push all the commits and there will be 0 reviews on that, and then there are merge requests created by claude which are not even operated by that person. if u comment, the person will just copy-paste the claude response. the whole docs are just generated ai-slop with ZERO filtering on what has been written. and whenever i see it, i just can't - i feel so fcking disappointed by the company, values and such - like why the hell did i study and work, learned things, if now a potatohead will just come in, copy-paste the whole ai slop shit and put it into the repo?

i don't know how to overcome this, the management doesn't seem to be helpful here, maybe they just don't care, and i'm tired of running and talking to people about - how in this stoopid reality we shouldn't rely on ai and we should have rules. it feels like im alone and noone hears and understands me.

consider it to be a scream into the void, i doubt it will be accepted positively even here. cheers to whoever read till this point.

at 19yo during pandemic I broke up with my gf, I was lonely, then I learned to code on my old pc, without a mouse, not even internet (if i needed something from the internet I had to buy data and search it on my phone), a really poor house (technically speaking), I built my first game using c++ without ides, linters or AI, I was discovering stackoverflow but I built most things from scratch just to find out a long time later that there was a library for that.

I have never been somebody with special abilities, i dont know how to play an instrument, how to play soccer or any sport, Im not even an extrovert. I grew up in a house where everyone used to cheer for my sister because of her artistic skills, it was something... tangible that people could appreciate, most of the things I used to do were things that... nobody in my family understood and I dont blame them, I was the first professional in that house, they are really good people but I was mostly known as "the brother that keeps playing on his computer"

I never learned about clean code, never read a book about how to write code, It was just something that i could do naturally and I improved my code by myself. When I joined university I thought I was gonna find a challenge, It never happened, not even when I left with 1 year to go. I never found any of that really hard, I preferred to invest myself in personal projects, learning something new, a new tech, a new language, a new pattern, a new way to build a library, doing reverse engineering. I left university one year after finding my first job, I joined with my friend, both as junior devs, she was always stressed, never understood anything in the codebase, I was... happy, a lot of code, most of the things I did were refactors and really big things. I loved to code, there was always something to improve.

Now Im 25yo, tech lead at a big company, cant write code (because of the role), So I use to spend my time on personal projects, coding really hard, I use copilot because it is just a code completion tool, I really like it , but at the start of this year I discovered Claude and my projects turned into a frenzy, everything was going super fast, but I didnt understand most of what was being written. Im starting to rethink why Im here, I enjoy the process, not the result, I dont really like to build products, I just like to write good code and admire it...

---

Obviously there is no pay for writing good code, or even looking at it, stakeholders dont stare at your code like art, they dont care about it, they just want things shipped fast, I dont like it. I hate what AI is pushing me to do.

Im tired of pretending this is were I belong, this is not anymore the world I wanted to be part of. Maybe I just wanna be an artist

I’m a software engineer (SDE 1) in my first full-time job after college, and I’m about 6 months in. I’m also working remotely, which I think makes some of this harder.
I worked *really* hard to get here, and on paper I’m in a company/job that I’m genuinely happy to have. But I’m slowly realizing that there seems to be a whole set of unwritten rules about how you’re supposed to operate in a corporate engineering environment that nobody actually teaches you.
And honestly, I feel like I’m currently the person who doesn’t know the rules.
I’m very willing to work hard. I don’t mind putting in extra hours occasionally, especially while I’m learning. I want to learn quickly and become good at what I do. My problem is that I’m not always sure **what I’m supposed to figure out myself versus when I should ask someone for help.**
My team has several different areas/services, and ideally I’m supposed to develop deeper knowledge in my primary area and then gradually pick up a couple of others. But because of team bandwidth and work distribution, I’ve ended up getting work across a lot of different areas. A lot of it is work that needs to get picked up because someone else doesn’t have bandwidth.
So instead of getting a few things and becoming really strong at them, I’m constantly context-switching and learning new things.
Sometimes I can figure things out myself. Sometimes I genuinely get stuck because I don’t have enough context or don’t know how that particular part of the system works.
I usually do try things before asking. I’ll look through the code, search around, investigate, try possible solutions, ask batchmates if they’ve encountered something similar, etc. But eventually I have to ask a senior or someone from another area.
And I can tell that there are times when my seniors probably feel like I’m more dependent on them than they’d like.
I’ve actually been told during 1:1s that I need to **take more ownership and pick things up faster**, and I completely understand that feedback. I’m trying to work on it.
But I’ve run into a weird catch-22:
If I take ownership and try to solve everything myself, I sometimes spend too long on something, miss the expected timeline, and then get asked why it wasn’t completed earlier.
If I ask for help earlier, I worry that I’m being too dependent and that people will lose confidence in me.
And I *have* missed deadlines fairly often. There are also things I finish quickly and on time, but new/problem-heavy tasks can take me much longer because I’m still learning.
My manager has also told me that my communication needs to improve, both verbally and through things like tickets/updates. So I’m realizing that maybe the problem isn’t just technical ability. It might be **how I’m managing work and communicating about it.**
This is where I feel completely inexperienced.
I genuinely don’t know the corporate “game.”
For example:
How long should I struggle with something before asking for help?
How do you ask for help without making it look like you haven’t taken ownership?
How do you communicate that you’re blocked without sounding like you’re making excuses?
How do you estimate work when you’ve never done something similar before?
When should you push back on a deadline versus just work harder?
How do you make your work visible without constantly announcing everything you do?
How do you make sure people know you’re reliable?
How do you avoid becoming the person everyone gives leftover work to just because you’re willing to take it?
How do you avoid overperforming to the point where that becomes the new expectation?
How do you build a good relationship with seniors and teammates without feeling like you’re constantly trying to “network”?
And how much of this is actually about technical skill versus simply learning how to operate in a corporate environment?
I also think being a woman and working remotely adds another layer to this. My teammates are mostly from different parts of the country, and sometimes there are already little social/communication circles that I’m not naturally part of. A lot of casual bonding happens through conversations I’m not always involved in, so I sometimes feel like I’m missing that informal context too.
My current workday has also become pretty unhealthy. I’ll start working in the morning, work through a lot of the day, take breaks around meetings, then continue in the evening and sometimes end up closing my laptop around 10 PM.
I don’t mind working hard, but I **don’t want my definition of being a good engineer to become “the person who works the longest.”**
What I actually want is pretty simple:
I want to be the person on my team who is **reliable, thorough, communicates well, takes ownership, asks for help intelligently, and gets work done within a reasonable amount of time.**
I want to be able to finish my work, close my laptop, have hobbies and a life outside work, and not spend the entire evening worrying about whether I’m falling behind or whether people think I’m incompetent.
I also don’t want to go to the opposite extreme and start doing the bare minimum. I care about my career and I want to grow quickly. I just don’t want to burn myself out trying to prove that I deserve the job I already worked incredibly hard to get.
So I’m hoping people who have been working in corporate engineering for a few years can give me some **very practical advice**.
Especially:
**What are the unwritten rules you wish someone had taught you when you were an SDE 1?**
And if you were in my position, what would you change about the way you’re currently working?
I’m open to criticism too. If something in the way I’m approaching work is clearly wrong, I’d rather hear it now and fix it than continue doing it for another year.

I’m ~6 months into my first full-time job as an SDE 1, after interning at the same company. I’m genuinely grateful for the opportunity and I want to do well, but I’m realizing I have basically zero idea how to navigate the unwritten parts of corporate life.
My main issue is that I’m still learning the codebase, but my work is spread across a lot of different areas. I often get stuck because I don’t have enough context, and I’m not sure where the line is between “I should figure this out myself” and “I should ask someone who knows this.”
I do try things before asking, but I’ve been told in 1:1s that I need to pick things up faster, take more ownership, and communicate better. I’ve also missed deadlines because I sometimes spend too long trying to solve things independently.
The frustrating part is that if I ask early, I worry I look dependent. If I don’t ask, I can waste hours and miss timelines.
I also have absolutely no idea about things like:
- How do you make your work visible without looking like you’re constantly trying to prove yourself?
- How long should you be stuck before asking for help?
- How do you push back on unrealistic timelines?
- How do you communicate blockers properly?
- How do you avoid becoming the person who gets all the leftover work because you’re willing to take it?
- How do you build trust with seniors and teammates?
What are the basic corporate “rules” you wish someone had told you as a junior?
I’m also WFH, so building relationships with the team is harder, and I sometimes feel like I’m missing the informal communication/bonding. Also a language barrier I face is that I don’t know to speak in hindi.
I’m currently working way too long some days (sometimes until 10 PM), and I don’t want “being a good engineer” to become synonymous with working the longest. I want to be a reliable engineer for my paycheck.
For experienced engineers/managers: what would you tell your 6-months-in SDE 1 self? What am I probably doing wrong, and what should I start doing differently?
I’m genuinely looking for practical advice, including criticism. I’d rather fix things now than develop bad habits.

I see a lot of devs got laid off this year, and most of them do the same thing. They go even deeper in one stack, polish the CV and apply to companies that are cutting people too.

I think the cuts happen for a simple reason. A few years ago a client asked their IT partner something and waited a couple of days for the answer. Now AI gives that answer in a minute, so the company needs fewer people in the middle.

From what I see with my clients, they don't care if the code was written by hand or by AI, as long as it solves their problem and it's secure. And that part still needs a developer who understands the business.

So I don't get why people keep doing exactly what worked 2-3 years ago. I'd stop sending CVs, go sell the solution to businesses directly and use AI to the max for everything it can do now.

If you got laid off, what stops you from going to clients directly?

Hello,

I've worked for 8 months now as a SWE and throughout this time ive found my self most often with 4-8 pr's open for review as a feature usually comes with a backend and frontend fix. It works fine sometimes but sometimes I can get really overwhelmed jumping from one to another always having to remember what I did, how I did it and why I did it. Especially when a pr somewhat falls under the radar and kinda of gets forgotten.

Do you guys have some kind of limit to how many you have active at once or is this a normal part of the job. I would really love pivoting to having only one pr pair (backend/frontend) active and simply pinging my coworkers to look at it more.

I am very new to being in this field (I just finished my internship and started a full time job) and I have heard a lot of things about working on client facing applications or internal tools
I am working on a Cloud Solution application using Agentic AI and IaC tools and honestly I like this work but I keep seeing reels about how working on internal tools is useless and no growth and people just making fun of people who do.
For more context I am earning the same as my peers who are working on client facing apps in the same company so pay is not the problem here.