As a senior undergrad I don’t really have the a professional perspective on any of this but it seems AI is just dominating SWE. Along side that it also seems tons of security problems are now cropping up. AI can do most general SWE tasks quite easily. It really feels like eventually all SWE functionality will just become AI generated (which honestly i think is fine imo) but I keep questioning the security of AI generated software.

Do you guys think the future SWE will heavily lean towards security instead of just simple programming? I mean it seems everyday there is some new major vulnerability discovered by AI or humans. I know architecture is also super important as you need to tell the AI how to create the project but if AI gets smart enough maybe it can infer most of those things itself.

Idk AI just seems so powerful, i’d like to hear people’s thoughts especially those who are working professional jobs.

I've been PIP'ed twice in my career.

The first time my skip-level manager (boss's boss) was adamant that she didn't want to fire me and wanted me to abide by the PIP. It was a technical sales role, and the PIP basically said I had to stop clapping back at sales reps that were disrespectful to me -- it was a tough habit to break! But I did it, and everything was fine. I transitioned back to engineering a few months later, and the VP of sales would always ask me when I was coming back to sales.

The second time, same company, was in engineering, and I had more or less declared war on my tech lead. Was that a smart move? No. Would I do it again? Absolutely. The guy was not just an asshole, he was a really lousy engineer. (He was a good talker, though, I'll give him that.) By the time I got PIP'ed it was obvious they wanted to get rid of me. They re-tooled the PIP halfway through because I was doing everything they asked. I guess they felt they had to move the goal posts to justify firing me. I quit before it ran out, which was a mistake. Always make them fire you!!

Needless to say, that company was not a good fit for me.

My question is, what's your experience? Have you ever survived a PIP? If so, how did things turn out in the end?

Hello, I am currently deciding between umich vs uiuc cs as a transfer. I do get cheaper instate value for uiuc, more transferablle credits but i heard umich network is really strong. I am curious in today's job market how is that helpful and how much of a difference it would make. How to mkae the ebst out fo it?

I have an interview for FDE for Tesla in Texas. Does anyone the interview process?

how do people navigate referrals? hiring is done on a rolling basis and you want to apply as soon as apps open but it takes time to get referrals no? I didn't attend the greatest of universities and I want to give myself the best shot, should i farm engineers now to get referrals when apps open or try to get a referral once the application opens?

I have job interviews coming up and i am straight out of college. One question that always bugs me while answering is the question i've mentioned above.

Realistically speaking, I am applying to these jobs cause they pay well and as per the job description I can see myself doing the work and not dying out of boredom even though I don't have every single knowledge the JD expects me to have. But then idrc about what the company does because i dont know what most companies do in the bigger picture and i dont have any big grand motive to work there either. So given that my answer most probably won't be very appealing to the HR and AI answers are way too uptight and too formal for me to possibly say in an interview- how exactly do i answer it so that the answer also somewhat feels authentic and not a copy paste from ChatGPT

I keep getting asked the following questions and its seems like they arnt satisfied with my answers Im a 3.5 yoe dev btw.

Question: Explain your day to day work/ Walk me through a day in your work day.

Answer: So I usually start off my day by going to our daily stand up with my team to discuss updates and any blockers. Afterwards, Ill look through my messages to see if there is anything super urgent that came up and that i should be working on. After that, Ill work on my assigned user stories for the sprint. And throughout the day, Ill usually meet up to support QA in their testing, answering questions, helping unblock or clarify things for other developers, mentor new developers in pair programming sessions, and meet with Business Analysts and or project managers to discuss existing and future projects. (So far, no one has really like this answer.)

Question: How do you specifically use Sql Server/ C# or {insert x skill} skill.

Answer: Yea so C# is the programming language we use to create our apps and systems. Ans Sql Server is the database engine we use to handle our data. So I used SQL and C# to build this automatic application intake system that resulted in XYZ.

Then the recruiter says, yea but how do you actual use SQL? At this point, i reiterate how SQL is used for data handling, and sometimes Ill do a bit of query optimization if i find something is running a bit too slow. Recruiter didnt like this answer.

Pretty much the title. Studied CS. Secured a job in the worst job market imaginable. But instead of the programming job duties listed in the description, they're having me create reports via a SaaS platform. The company's pretty stable (never had layoffs or hiring freezes) and the pay is manageable for HCOL, but the job doesn't align with my long-term career or financial goals of typical SWE.

Advice? What should my plan/trajectory be from here?

Graduating this year. To be honest, I feel like there's an AI revolution going on (LLMs) and I'm mostly sitting it out (been doing mostly theoretical CS stuff). Like, yeah, I code with AI and I can use Tensorflow to train a neural network, but that's it.

I feel like I should really get into… whatever people are doing with large AI models, but tbh I don't even know what questions to ask. All I know is buzzwords like „agents” or what not. Can anyone fill me in and offer direction?

For someone aiming to become an MLE, which entry level roles provide the most relevant experience?

Currently i have a major review that’s basically done.

One principal who im waiting for to approve has been making most comments. Last week finally got his approval and out of nowhere mutliple people on the team decide to comment on my review. it’s been out for like a month but the principal im working with hates how the code in general (not mine, the projects) is structured and has asked me to refactor my code multiple times so that we dont add to the problem.

By the way this has been out for over a month and i spent the forst few weeks begging people to review and nobody did until last week so it was annoying getting a bunch of comments when im practically done.

But i did them after it lead to a discussion with the principal engineer. Then i finally got his approval again on friday. But i couldnt meege because i needed 1 approval from a random engineer on another team due to their team owning that file and they had already left for the day. Wake up this morning and see 5 more comments in my code. About 4 are just unit test suggestions so i thought to maybe just address it in a new review. But the 5th is a code suggestion (not a nit).

Now im annoyed cause adding a new change would mean trying to get the approvals again which already is annoying.

How do you guys handle when you are about done with review and get new code commenta?

With the exits going on Microsoft, I wonder if there is growing trend/uptick of big tech people in the job market or if they are straight up leaving the field (retirement, pivot, etc.)

People of the hiring side of small to mid size companies, are you guys getting/interviewing more big-tech resumes compared to before?

The best people will take the deal as they're the ones who know they can get another job easily. It'll be like the reverse of what Jack Welch instituted at GE.

Hi, I'm torn between committing fully to SWE or MLE.

SWE is competitive, and I worry personal projects won't make up for my lack of professional engineering experience. MLE is also equally challenging but I believe topics like inference engineering seem niche so maybe that could be something that I could focus on? Almost every tech guy is building AI agents these days so that alone won't make me stand out.

Which path holds greater long-term value and offers a more practical return on effort?

My background:

I work at a non-tech, finance company as a data analyst. For the last couple of years I was mainly working with SQL and PowerBI.
Since the past 6 months I have been working on building AI agents at my job. While that is fun and interesting, I don't think that alone is good enough to build a solid career. Pretty much every tech guy is doing this rn but probably in a better setting, more complicated problems and team. My company is outdated in terms of AI for eg - team members are still learning how to use AI agents like GHCP

Also, I'm a CS grad (BS + MS), studied ML, Deep learning in school and worked on few projects. I have some background of ML (including maths but kinda rusty)

For MLE, I was planning to follow this: https://inferquest.org/
For SWE, I was planning to use Hello Interview system design + DSA

Hi guys, im (frontend of 10 years going into fullstack) being unemployed for a year now, when my last company did cuts because of AI. I had some interviews (applied more than 150+, having 20 first, and 3 technicals that were awful). Right now I'm trying to keep up coding on my own and asking old college questions about how they do things, but I don't know what to expect in a technical interview. Does a technical challenge where you code manually and explain your thought process? Do they give you AI and an idea and you put them into tickets and let the LLM do the rest while you guide it and review it? Something in the middle?

I have a lot of pressure of performing in this interview and I sense that many people applied, so it will be tough. Any of you guys did an interview recently and want to share your experience and tips?

Thank you!

Hey all, thanks for checking out my post.

I recently graduated from undergrad comp sci and was lucky enough to get a job. For context, I'm a Malaysian but I did my degree and am now working in Singapore as part of a 3 year bond.

Officially, I'm a computer vision engineer but in reality I'd say I'm closer to a research assistant in that I'm helping out with miscellaneous tasks for a research project (that has like 4 people working on it).

Since I'm sorta less pressured now, I'm taking the opportunity to think about my future career pathways. I worked on a surgical processing app/workflow/algorithm with a hospital for my final year project and I think I quite liked the idea of working in healthtech. My experience in it was quite basic(aside from the medical info dump), but medical imaging seemed like a good and very interesting niche to me. Again, only surface level experience from me messing around with DICOMs and segmentation during our project so feel free to deflate my enthusiasm with some harsh realities.

I've been going around connecting with people working in these fields on linkedin. Mixed success but I do get the idea it's a academic focused field? I might be favoured if I commit to a Masters for example. At the end of the day I do not want to be stuck in academia though, and would hope to actually have enough experience to come up with my own solutions if I can get an idea of what's missing from working in industry.

Another big thing from the title of my post is that I do want to eventually leave Singapore sooner rather than later. I think the country is great but I value different things and would like to get the experience of working abroad. When I did my exchange in Sweden for example I could see myself spending a few years working there (and yes I know exchange isn't exactly a good predictor for whether you'd want to work in a country but still. Some things you feel). Any advice in that regard as well would be super helpful. I might be willing to learn a language if it helps in Europe, and seeing as I already have to know 3 I might as well add another to the repertoire lol.

Don't want to make this post too long, I hope it gives you an idea of what I'm hoping to figure out over the coming months. Thanks if you've read this far and are willing to impart any advice!

Curious whether anyone currently working at Coursera (or who recently left) has noticed an increase in formal performance improvement plans, voluntary separation offers, or other workforce reductions across different teams.

Given the company's history of restructuring, I'm wondering whether there are broader organizational changes happening that haven't been formally announced.

Not looking to speculate or identify anyone personally - just interested in understanding whether others are seeing similar trends across the company.

Would appreciate hearing from anyone with firsthand experience or observations.

I'm a little worried that I’m going to get in trouble at work, and I’m trying to get some perspective on how serious this situation is.

I was working with a contractor for a task at work (I was in charge of working with him on this). He needs to use a drive for his work. One of the IT teams here required a change to the drive’s password (it's part of policy to do this if we are using an external drive), so I changed it but I forgot to tell the contractor about it (I was looking at the machine when I handed him the drive. I was on the other side of the machine and for some reason, my brain thought this would just be a plug and play and I totally forgot there's a password on it). He ended up typing the old password enough times and it got locked out. As a result, I had to get the IT team involved to reset it, but they said they couldn’t reset it without wiping the drive.

Now the drive has been wiped. I spoke with the contractor, and he said he has a backup drive elsewhere, but I need to get that backup drive figured out for use now with the IT team, and I don't know how long that'll take. I'm worried that I made a mistake that could get me in trouble professionally. I'm literally set to start a new internal role next week.. and now I'm worried.

I'm a frontend developer and I'm looking to upgrade my skills list before I'm made obsolete, so I'm trying to decide which language to focus on learning. I could do one and then the other, but I need to decide which one to do first.

C++

I see many job postings that ask for these where I'm searching. And there are people at my current company who use it that I could learn from. I also have a foundational knowledge of it from my college years. But I'm worried that it's going to be a big jump from the JS and CSS I'm used to using.

Python

This seems to be the language of AI, so it could be important to know in the near future. And it looks like it would be pretty easy to learn and use. But no one any my current company uses it.

Which one would you pick first?

I‘m at a crossroad right now. I’ve been working for 1.5 years for a non tech business doing swe work as a solo engineer. I have 3 yoe. I am way underpaid than what I should be getting. However, I just feel burnt out at this job with the amount of responsibilities and lack of better pay. I work 4 days in office and I don’t have time to schedule interviews within the work week other than working 1 day from home. I talked to boss to reduce my days and he said no. I’m thinking about just quitting and going back home and think about my plans But I feel like a failure moving back home to family. I have enough savings to last for 6 months and that’s it . I might not find another tech job and I’m okay with it. I’m just burnt out and when I was laid off before I was content doing non tech work. I just feel like my identity was lost when I didn’t work in tech since that’s what I studied but I have no regrets moving to another adjacent field. Thoughts on how to navigate this?

Hi,

My current lead dev, my previous lead dev, and another lead dev on a closely related team are always in meetings.

I genuinely don’t know what they’re working on and I don’t see PRs from the lead often, but they do mention they are trying to finish something they’re working on while also having to catch these meetings. I’ve also heard of this lead working after hours so they can actually work on their assignments.

They also don’t have a good sense of what I’m working on, what the other devs working on, what’s on our PRs (all PRs are approved without so much as a glance I’m pretty sure for 95% of them)

My current lead has been @ this company less time than me but has more exp hence they got the role, but I don’t mind id hate the idea of all those meetings.

But its just very annoying that, I have to give my lead the catch up on everything, clarify on how things work because I worked on it, along with them giving me constant assignments, or new priority tasks coming from above, then next standup I’m hearing how we have to “lock-in” for the actual deliverables.

Except, I cannot deliver to you because I keep getting side track assignments, and when I include my lead dev in the happenings of these side track assignments they always want me to just “present” to them what I’ve found.

I always thought a lead dev should be embedded in the team and that, sure they’ll have more meetings as the liaison to higher ups, but also help the devs they lead by being there and keeping things moving.

Just feels like the lead is more interested in not upsetting stakeholders and other teams but allows all
crunch, out of scope work, dumb deadlines, and rushed work to flow into the team.

Microsoft (MSFT) announced on Monday that it was offering voluntary buyouts to roughly 60,000 employees as it looks to reshape its organization for the AI era.

Any insider info on this?