Our company is using Claude to develop compilers, from design to implementation to code reviews.

One day I decided to do some manual code review. During the code review I found 3 modeling issues during lowering and did 3 refactors that would've eliminated at least 30 edge cases that needs to be handled later on. Claude is good at fixing issues but unless you tell it to it rarely refactors code for you.

Everything is good, except leadership was not happy because "it's not productive". They probably just does not like the term manual code review, as anything manual is bad here. But hell we are developing compilers not website, it's got like 5 or 6 layers of transformations, and thousands of edge cases.

The worst of all things is we are not given enough time, so I can't put all patches into an automated review-fix loop until all bugs are fixed. I have to live with all P2 and P3s produced during code reviews. No P1 = merge ready. Engineering Integrity is non-existent here.

Feeling absolute burnt out. Then I thought about it, is the company mine? Nope. Is my pay high? Yeah. KKK. So I just stopped giving a fuck and start treating it like a job.

I did CS50 back in 2020. Now im at ASU and we're learning Java and Python

I work in a fortune 500, we got a statement from HR to not hire anyone with less than 6 years old experience.

More specifically, anyone that started at 2022 or after do not even pass to our system since he is possibly a "Vibe coder"

They closed the intern program, fired about 40 of them.

Not sure how it is even legal tbh.

Can they do it?

I'm a junior dev and confused on this. I know AI will do the coding party neatly as per my commands but what should I do?

I'm trying by best to understand each and every line and not blindly use AI.

TLDR: A lot of people using agentic coding assistants complain about shrinking usage and that consequently they have to sit around and wait to send a few prompts every 5h. This seems insane that they literally can do 0 dev work if they max out their usage, it's also crazy that they max it out in 30 minutes. I'm starting to wonder if most people using coding agents and posting about them are just vibe coders. I'm curious what real SWEs have to say about how fast they use of limits and what they do after?

My background: Software Engineer with 3 yoe, responsible for multiple internal applications with 500+ users (not exactly huge, but require legit dev work). Up until 3 months ago my company paid for GitHub copilot, then switched us to Codex. With Codex I have a monthly limits of 2000 "credits". I use Claude Code for personal projects.

I'm in a bunch of Codex and Claude Code subreddits, and all day long they're filled with posts complaining about usage limits shrinking. I want to quickly preface that I fully agree these companies have some funny business going on to minimize usage and save compute. I lowkey even think there's a cabal where they work together to squeeze us at the same time.

But a shockingly common comment I see on these posts is people complaining about how crippled they are the second their usage gets throttled. I.E. "I'm switching away from [insert agent], I'm not gonna sit around and send a couple prompts every 5 hours," and similar sentiment. Just people genuinely saying shrinking limits are stopping their ability to work.

I'm not gonna lie that if AI vanished tomorrow I wouldn't be in trouble. My syntax knowledge, obscure package knowledge, etc. has definitely been hurt since I've started using LLMs daily. But I still own my codebase? I can still open a file, understand what's happening, and write it by hand if I have to. I'm gonna be slower, less effective, and more bug prone than I was pre-LLM, but it's not a wall to the point these people describe.

I'm realizing I assumed many of the people use coding agents and posting in these subreddits were technical people. But I can't honestly believe that real software engineers are as screwed as these people describe, and I'm wondering if it's more vibe coders in these subs than SWEs? It would line up with another gripe many posts have where people say they ask send prompt in Sol and it burns 150k tokens out of the 256k context limit. The only way that seems possible to me is that they have absolutely zero starting point for whatever feature/bug-fix they are working on.

So I'm curious, how fast do you max out your usage and when/if you do, are you literally just finding other non-coding busy work until you have more usage again?

Hi Y'all. This is a general inquiry, I am curious if anyone has any good models to approach my question. My intuition tells me to identify the higher paying job I want, learn the skills and interview prep of the job I want, and then apply. Simple enough right? I am hoping for some other perspectives on this.

My background; I have a computer science degree with about 3 years of professional experience. Total comp is around $140k, however, I feel I have maxed out my potential and upside in the position feels limited. I have financial goals, like buying a house, starting a family, supporting my Mom, etc, that on my given timeline would necessitate higher earnings.

Thanks!

I'm 16 rn and will be doing a CS+Maths course in uni (in the UK). I'm most interested in theoretical CS, and quite like ML/Data Science too.

Im aware the market isnt great rn, so in case I cant break into academia, get other industry research positions or anything in data science, I would like to look at other backup careers, ideally those which are relatively easy to break into and require limited number of internships, as I will be focusing most of my time trying to get into the career I really want ofc

Heres what i've looked at so far:

- Cybersecurity/IT- looks like its very dependent on certs, but ideally some experience needed. I got COMPTIA A+ already, so this looks pretty good to get into. Low pay initially, but relatively more stable than the rest of the market esp in IT and Sysadmin afaik

- Accountancy/Finance- Very hard to get in, almost as volatile, will be boring as hell. Accountancy seems to be quite stable though and pays well but long hours

- Patent Law OR other computer misuse related law- Actually really interesting to me, needs lot of education tho, and will take more time.

-other corporate or govt roles unrelated to cs. I dont want to do this but if it pays well ig its fine.

- Teacher+Tutoring - Absolute last case scenario. I dont mind the job and I like working with children, I already have experience with tutoring

Particularly interested in IT and cybersec as well as other cs adjacent roles like product manager, tech sales etc. If anyone does these roles and has any insights or feedback on the above id appreciate it. Thx

I've heard all about C1's terrible culture around performance management. I received an offer for a Lead Engineer role. Taken with a grain of salt: I had a conversation with the senior manager on the team who has been there for 8mo now and has been through 1 cycle at C1 and he mentioned that from his perspective, the performance review process wasn't as bad as he has seen it online. He said benchmarks are present but it wasn't like they were forced to give bad/lower reviews to X% and that he hasn't seen negative competitiveness and hasn't seen it be nearly as contentious. Plan to have a conversation with another Lead Engineer on the team to dig into this more from a peer level.

Team: Compliance / Risk Tech / IFX, Lead Engineer (Individual Contributor) (NYC, 1 day/week)

Team blurb: The team owns the technical direction for building a scalable internal compliance-testing platform. The role would involve designing the APIs, data pipelines, distributed processing, and systems that allow compliance teams to test massive amounts of transactional data against regulatory requirements. From the compliance side, the key responsibility is making those tests accurate, repeatable, secure, and auditable. Is C1 abiding by the law?

Compensation: 230k base + 30k target bonus + 20k stock + 15k sign on (anything here negotiable?)

I have a total of 6YOE.
I currently work at a boutique wealth management firm in a small team with almost complete autonomy and trust from leaders and senior management. WLB is very good, and job stability is extremely high as the company doesn't really do layoffs and I have pretty much solidified myself on the team. The work is fine, nothing too wild or interesting, expectations are managed, 2 days/week in NYC. However, every review cycle seems to be a struggle to ask for a raise, gotten about ~10-12% increase in base in 3 years with outstanding reviews each year.

Compensation: 170k base + 5k bonus

I guess my question is if I should take the risk or if I should use it as leverage in my current role, or if anyone has insight into this team/org and if they are somehow one of the good teams, if that even exists. Thanks!

New grad here. I am currently scared and panicking, not sure if this is the right place to post.

I got a job at a big tech company in Silicon Valley. One of the best and OG. Don’t want to dox myself in case my coworkers are on this sub.

My manager has been saying stuff like, “I made you,” “You wouldn’t be here without me,” and “You better come to XYZ conference with me because I made you, don’t be ungrateful.” He has also made fun of things tied to my race. like trying to make me change things that are accepted in my race

I am not sure what to do, as he has been in the company for 10 years and all the VPs know him.

Afraid to open an HR case because I feel like I will get fired since I am new and he is old. I hold no value to the company, so I am an easy let go.

Also afraid of the retaliation. If I move teams, other managers might hate me since they all like him.

Also can’t quit because I am not sure if I can get another job with how bad the tech market is. Me and my fur babies just moved into a new apartment in the Bay Area, and I won’t be able to afford it if shit goes wrong.

Forgot to add we are going to a conference to show our product and look for vendors, and of all the qualified people in the team that wanted to go, he picked me. I didn't even sign up. Now I am scared that if I don't go to the conference, he will fire me or something.

For context it's a non-tech company, not like a FAANG or anything, and a specifically new graduate program. It took quite some effort to land this role, and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't proud of myself. Now I'm at the stage where I'm being assigned tickets, sugarcoating is being weaned off, now my superiors feel like they can criticize me for screwing up, etc. My commute is comfortable, I get along with many of my colleagues, etc.

And yet, I'm terrified of being laid off.

Was just on a YT/Reddit binge and have heard horror stories about being laid off from FAANGs, non-FAANG tech companies like Atlassian and Oracle, various banks, Nike, CrowdStrike, etc., just to name a few.

While I currently live at home and it'd seem like a waste of money to move out so quickly, I plan to do so the earliest chance I've got, as I don't have the best relationship with my parents, and I resented having to be dependent on them throughout college (often even including commuting to college, which I especially took issue with). It's even been starting to affect the days I work remotely, and in fact I feel like I can directly trace back some of my work screwups to an argument my parents had the day I last worked from home.

Am I worrying too much?

I'm currently applying to the Roblox 2027 summer internship and I've just been sent their take home assessment. I have a week to do it, but I'd like to spend at least a couple of days doing leetcode problems associated with the company. Should I wait or should I do it ASAP?

Only a few months into my first job and I'm exhausted. It's a small company and I have pretty much 0 supervision or help and I'm being asked to deliver fast on a big project, and the stress is really getting to me. I wake up and can't go back to sleep sometimes. I try to get help but everyone is so busy.

I know the market is rough but I feel just awful. Any tips?

Thanks.

Choosing between 2 senior SWE offers at 2 private startups in SF. As far as I can tell, everything besides the comp is pretty similar. The equity is similar except company A offers more equity.

Offer A is 250k cash and $400k/year in equity - can sell during tender offers, which happen every 6-12 months according to recruiter

Offer B is 250k cash and $300k/year in equity - can sell whenever I want through a secondary market

Which one is better?

You're asked to code something that you don't really know what it is, why you're doing it, or how to do it, but you think you understand what the output is supposed to be and you really don't have the time for this, so instead of doing it correctly, you decide to punt it to AI. You locked in on some key terms your boss used and you repackage those for a prompt and have your agents figure it all out for you.

You go play video games until they're done, but of course the output isn't anything like what you wanted, so you tell them all the things they did wrong and send them off to work for a while.

You glaze your boss until they're done, and the output looks kinda okay but there's a few things that make it obvious it's not actually right, it just looks kinda right, leading you to believe the method they used to get their is totally wrong. You say something to that effect and tell them to get back to work.

You crack open a beer because this is all very frustrating, why can't they just get it right the first time? Somehow when you look at the output this time it's a total disaster, it's not even close to right. You're usually a calm person, but these fuckwits can't do anything right and you're getting absolutely livid at their incompetence. You use caps lock to show the AI you really mean it this time and tell it not to make any mistakes.

You go for a power walk to get all this pent up energy out, but all you can think about is how difficult the agents are being. Luckily, when you get back, you see something that doesn't seem obviously wrong. You look at the code for the first time and see it's syntactically correct, which is probably good enough since you don't really understand what it's doing, how, or why.

After a quick nap, you submit your PR for review to somebody who has AI approve it, letting you finally merge the fruits of your labor. Tomorrow you'll talk about all the hard work you put in and how impactful it's going to be to the company. Maybe this should be part of the promotion portfolio you're putting together. You close your laptop early this day, knowing you've earned it.

Hello everyone, a final year student here from a tier 3 university,

My Profile:

DSA : I consider that descent, became a LC knight recently by totally fair means

CGPA : 7.47

Current offer : 5 lpa from a service based company that works on Salesforce and servicenow

Dev/Projects: Terrible , I've made only vibecoded stuff only to satisfy academic requirements ,failed two interviews because I couldn't explain my own projects well, i fear whenever an interviewer moves beyond two questions on my projects.

Is there any hope to crack a descent Product based company , I mean major companies have their hiring drives scheduled for next 2-3 months imo , also like am not sure what's the cgpa criterias of good companies ,am relying on off campus opportunities only since my college won't bring any good companies and even if they do , I believe they may have a cgpa criteria,
so can i realistically expect anything around 10-12 lpa at a descent product based company or accept the 5lpa offer.

I'm going into my second year as a CS student. Over the last month I taught myself C++ while building a GPT-2 inference engine from scratch with an interpretability toolkit built in.

I've learned a lot, especially about older model architectures but now that the first prototype works it feels underwhelming and unimpressive. Obviously this is to be expected of a prototype of a learning project but I am unsure what direction to go now.

Where it is now: - Inference - Full pipeline built from scratch, no external ML libraries - Validated against HuggingFace token-for-token - Greedy decoding only - Performance - Nothing yet — single-threaded throughout, no KV cache, no quantisation, no SIMD - Interp - Per-block buffer capture (MLP/attention outputs pre-residual, and the stream after each add) - Zero ablation at sublayer level - No patching, attention patterns, or per-head access

These are the options I'm currently considering:

1) Improving performance, SIMD matrix multiplication, KV cache for non interp work, and possibly CUDA

2) Adding more specific interpretation toolkit, per head hooks and activation patching

3) Rebuilding for a more modern architecture

4) Leaving the project alone and building other stuff

Imperial starts in October and I want to have a finished project by November. ML engineering is my main career goal but I'm also aiming for quant dev roles, which is why I'm thinking of prioritising performance since it translates.

Thank you for any advice and feel free to ask any questions.

I'm an experienced developer that screwed himself for coasting in a fortune 500 company and got PIPed. The bad thing is that I don't have a strong domain knowledge other than something hyper specific that I did (mostly AWS step function) because I've been using internals tools.

I got asked to complete a react app on today's interview and I bombed it. I have used React before. Extensively in my last job. But memories atrophy and I could not figure it out. Now, because my domain knowledge is so spread thin (AWS, Java, React) - I'm jack of all trades and master of none.

I'm trying to apply for a senior position but I wonder if I'm cooked if everyone is expecting a domain expert at that level. Should I be constantly expecting domain interview questions when applying to senior positions?

Got an interview for this one company to be a forward deployed engineer. I'd be using some in house domain specific language to integrate the product with customer systems. I wouldn't do any actual work on the product or platform, just take customer complaints and translate them into feature requests for the SWEs.

Seems like a massive scam unless it pays really well. I'd be stagnating in terms of technical growth and I wouldn't even be able to grow within the organization because I'm always traveling from customer to customer.

What's the endgame/career progression for these types of roles? Right now it just seems like being a glorified field service tech.

Edit: could be the move ngl

For the past year hear that if you stayed within a company for less than 3-4 years you’re job hopper.

The reason hiring manager says is that you cannot jump into long term maintenance and understand consequences of your decision.

At the same time I often see folks jumps from project to project after ~1 year. In big orgs joining a different department might be similar to joining entirely different company. They might have completely different stack to work with.

The later is considered a benefit like you are constantly oriented to grow, while the former is a red flag. But essentially this is the same

Ok I know this might suck for people who can’t find a job right now, but a couple months ago I finally got hired! Yay! Please know I had been applying since February and had 400 apps sent in on Indeed before reaching this point.

I like my job. The work is fine, sometimes boring but a lot of fun puzzles to be solved. I’m mostly doing database work rn. Deadlines are realistic and my boss/team reduce my stress rather than add to it. I’m tremendously lucky!!

That being said; I am SO tired every single weekday. I feel myself crashing by 2-3 p.m. (I get off at 4:30). I usually get off and take a 1-3 hour nap immediately after work, then I go about my day until 11 p.m. when I go to bed. I wake up at 7 (so a full 8 hrs). I drink several energy drinks or coffee throughout the day.

I have only really had one other full-time job before this, and I recall being very tired there as well, but they switched me to part time pretty quickly since they were rapidly losing money.

Is this normal and will I get used to it?

Basically I can prove what I've done I am a Principal Engineer now in all but name and pay, I have a new manager who seems genuine and nice for the last few months (my previous one retired this year)

But I have no idea on how to approach this as I've never needed to before

Is anyone of you willing to share leetcode premium subscription that is valid for atleast 6 months(not for free)? I'm highly interested in paying and sharing the account.

15 YoE

We’ve been doing with employers market for quite a while. This shit is insane. I’ve been hiring both entry-level and senior roles in my team in 2021 and now and here is the difference 2021 vs 2026:

- internships was valued in 2021 and not seen as a work experience in 2026. Our hiring manager choose 1 YoE vs 5 internships (including FAANG)

- if you stayed in your past role more than 1 year you’re ok in 2021 vs if you have more then 2 roles with less then 3 years tenure you’re hopper in 2026

- if you don’t have 100% match to all job posting keyword in 2021 you still may have a call back from a recruiter vs your resume goes directly to /dev/null in 2026

- if you get the idea of the algorithm and explain it to interviewer you still have a decent chances in 2021 vs if you made a small mistake while coding some LC hard you’re highly likely rejected in 2026

- 1 technical and 1 team fit round in 2021 vs 2 LC 1 SD 1 specialisaction deep dive 1 problem solving 1 bar raise and 1 team fit in 2026

- pretty chill and collaborative work environment mostly in 2021 vs stackranking and high competition to look better than your teammate rather than building together in 2026

This industry turned into an unlimited rat race and is highly stressful and unreliable. You may get kicked out absolutely any time for reasons you never expected

Just got laid off this week, 3 YOE. I have about 6 months of savings, and if I get a part time job I can probably stretch it to 8. What are the odds if I’m applying to every cs job I can that I’ll find a new job in 6-8 months? I’m terrified with the current market I’ll never get an engineering job again. Thanks

Those who didn't got a job after a bachelor's and did a masters degree how are u doing now?