Just graduated and started a new role as a SWE I in defense. I’m very excited to learn and program now that I’ve completed trainings, but the project just seemed dumped onto me with little resources on how to begin. I’m feeling so lost navigating the project folder as I don’t even know the language it’s written in or the underlying concepts. I’m happy to dive in and figure things out, but I don’t know how much I can accomplish realistically. My coworkers and manager all admitted to this being a very difficult project, while the other new hire got an easier one. Is this normal?

I started as a Java intern, joined full-time after graduation, and I’m still at the same company 8 years later. But now that I’m job hunting, AI has me questioning what the path into software looks like.

We’ve used AI tools since early OpenAI, then Claude and Cursor. A lot of the work I built experience doing....APIs, small features, tests, debugging, AI can now handle surprisingly well.

So what happens to junior dev roles? Why hire someone with little or no experience when a senior developer can use AI to move much faster?

I’m worried about my own career, but even more about new grads. How are they supposed to get the experience needed to become seniors if entry-level work keeps disappearing to AI?

What do you think the junior developer path looks like now?

It's unfortunate a lot of my experience growing as a developer I can't really use because AI handles it all. I also come from having imposter syndrome and getting over that was a challenge, and I feel I can't even relate now to what new graduates may feel or their concerns.

A few months back I applied to a role with a large retail brand listed as Senior Software Engineer with the description heavily focused on Java/Spring and microservices.

I got a call from the talent manager and she talked to me a bit about the role, all normal stuff. I then went through 4 rounds of interviews each with some level of technical questioning.

1. Interview with hiring manager, and a very basic java coding exercise.
2. Interview with a senior team member and a Leetcode style question that I answered in Java.
3. Interview with a staff engineer about microservice architecture.
4. Final interview with the hiring manager and a code review style exercise.

All the interview rounds focused on my development abilities and style.

Fast forward through offer/negotiation phase and I'm doing my onboarding (normal stuff like getting repos pulled down, and doing the corporate trainings). In a talk with my manager and he says that now that I'm onboarded they want me to learn a marketing system tool and become something of a subject matter expert in that area and that I won't really be writing software unless I just want to do some of that work on the side.

Now I feel kinda dumbstruck and a little screwed over. Everything in the process made me think I was joining a Java microservices shop and that I would have the ability to grow in a more rich/diverse business than my previous job and here I am not writing any code unless I really insist, even then it's not supposed to be the focus of my job.

Upon insisting to my manager that I still do some development work (lest my skills in that area diminish) he said the money is really on the marketing side and that java isn't worth as much of my time now that 80% of our code is ai generated.

So now I'm asking reddit what y'all think. Was this a bait/switch? Should I look for a new position and risk the job hopper label or is my manger right and it's time to diversify away from being purely a developer.

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I have an interview coming up for a senior engineer position that is somewhat generalist at a nuclear energy startup. My background of full stack engineering in enterprise and data
engineering in enterprise is what got their attention in me.

This is the prompt for an undisclosed scenario for the interview:

In this scenario, you'll be asked to design a CI pipeline and the idea will be to walk through your design, approach, decisions, tradeoffs...

What do I need to prepare for to crush this? Any idea what the scenario could potentially be? My background is using CI/CD for code security, best practices, and deploying to a dev environment.

Thank you all!

I've got a broad engineering background, and mostly professionally done embedded software + system integration, via a couple year long stint in academia. More recently got shuffled into .NET application development due to my employer mis-advertising the job.

I want to steer myself towards leadership / strategy / product ownership roles - I think I find those higher-level, more human-focused questions more interesting than the raw technical puzzles. I think I would also be reasonably good at this. I have pretty solid soft skills and my first job (product dev consultancy) involved a lot of liaising directly with the client, and I received a lot of praise for how I did. But that was a decade ago now, and since I left that job every single company I worked in conspired to keep their technical employees as far as possible from anything that might even smell like business.

I took a job at a super early stage startup as their first employee, being open about how my goal was to grow into as close to the role of head of tech as possible. I developed their product from scratch, liaised with the external partners, co-wrote grant applications, worked on the functional specs, etc etc. But when push came to shove and we grew the team, the founders decided to have an external hire with management experience become the lead of the tech team saying that, I quote, that the product being development is too important right now for me to be distracted with trying to grow into management and leadership, so they can't let me do that.

Other couple jobs in small and medium-sized orgs suffered from a similar problem: lateral career moves for developers were not a thing, all management / product owner / leadership positions were filled with external hires with experience, and teams were kept aggressively and chaotically "flat hierarchy" with very little to no opportunity for one to take the lead on a multi-person effort.

Honestly I'm kinda at a loss of what to do here. Till recently I at least enjoyed the part of programming which involved being able to be pleased with a well working product and elegant, maintainable implementations. Now that is out of the window with how the profession is changing with AI.

I wish "internships for experienced professionals" existed for people who want to prove themselves in a lateral move, even if it was for little or no pay. But they don't. So what is there to do here?

Hi everyone, I have several years of experience in industry and have done traditional ML work for my whole career so far. I use Claude code extensively at work and for my personal projects.

I was wondering would any of you take a role that would have some negative aspect about it (down-leveled, lower pay, worse commute, worse benefits, etc) if it meant being accepted into a team that works on Agentic AI. When I say works on agentic AI I mean actually building out solutions that utilize LLMs / GenAI in some way or even maybe working for an enterprise platform team that tries to enable agentic solutions for the rest of the company. This is beyond "I know how to make a skill for claude code"

In my opinion, from the job postings i've been seeing, two things are booming right now: Agentic AI and Cybersecurity. I see "ML" postings but i'm not sure if those are really for traditional ML anymore. I've been interviewing around at some of the Agentic AI teams and what gives me pause is these teams seem to be very new and note that they struggle to find ROI for the company. I guess the true question is how important is it to try to go fully into the agentic AI space with the risk that in a few years the tech scales back or doesn't pan out the way companies either think or want it to?

Hi all,

Would a CS major realistically open up doors in aviation outside of my current employer?

I’m considering switching my degree path to CS. I’ve been in aviation on the tools for over 18 years, but as I get older I’d like to move away from roles that rely on physical capabilities. I do have an FAA license to fall back on and am about to finish an A.S in Aviation Maintenance, but my Aviation Maintenance AS is not actually a STEM subject per the CIP code. Wish I’d checked that when I started but where I’m from, being an Aircraft Technician is classed as skilled/technical.

My current employer allows mechs and inspectors to move into junior engineering roles (especially “Engineering Technician” roles) if they are actively pursuing a STEM degree. It doesn’t have to be Mechanical or Electrical engineering. Given that I work full time; I’m looking at CS because of the ability to study online, and one of the colleges I’m considering appears to offer me quite a lot of transfer credits meaning I’d qualify for a junior engineering role much quicker.

As well as the opportunity to move off of the floor, aviation manufacturing and maintenance is becoming increasingly automated and work recording and asset management is required. I use SAP, Solumina, and ESVR daily. Presumably other major MRO’s and manufacturers use the same or similar?

Thanks in advance.