I got piped at my job and I think I am too dumb for corporate life.

Context : I am a tier 1 IIT graduate, have worked across 2 FAANG and 2 tier 1 companies. Except one I have faced performance issues at all others. Consequence : i switched 4 companies in 5 years now. Recruiters and hiring managers look at me in disdain despite having all top brand names on my resume. I am super introvert and have a habit of doing my work in silence. Hence I get skipped over for any important project and no one really knows what I am doing. I try hard but I end up getting disliked by my leadership everytime.

At this point of time I don't even feel like interviewing anymore because I know I'll mess up again and this time I'll get completely unemployable being labelled job hopper.

Should I leave corporate for good ? Am I too stupid to understand how workplace dynamics works ?

I've been working at this place for several months now (my first real cs job) and i started very motivated and with great expectations.

Just for context, I work in a small company with roughly 15 developers where the team lead pretty much runs the entire dev team. The man is in his 50s with decades of experience. He is also the only person who can merge code to the main branch and he is the only one who does code reviews for the entire team.

The situation is so bad that doesn't even read the code anymore. I send him a PR for review, he lets his ai agent review the code, it comes up with whatever it comes up, sometimes actual bugs and findings, but the vast majority of the time it's just nitpicks so minor that are basically a huge waste of time and money. If I just fix the comments the ai comes up with, he will automatically approve it, no questions asked.

Sometimes the ai is wrong and it simply does not accept my arguments. Then i have to ask him to step in, and when he does, he actually reads the code for the first time and starts questioning decisions that were made 2-3 weeks beforehand that he, supposedly, approved himself. Then he asks me to explain to him why his ai gave me the comments it gave me and it all really just spirals from there.

Sometimes the easiest thing to do is to just accept the ai proposal, even though it's wrong and just let code break, just so it gets merged and then fix it silently in another unrelated pr.

Bottom line is, my team lead's brain is completely rotten to the core. Every question i bring up to him, he asks his ai and forwards it to me. He has no idea what goes on in his code and trying to involve him in the decision making process becomes nearly impossible because he has no context. It all feels really shitty and a lot of the team members feel the same.

edit: Forgot to mention that the team lead is also my manager and i report directly to him. Above him is only the CTO.

I've worked at Senior level roles for four years of my career, with eight years of total experience. I had to turn down multiple offers for other Senior level roles at the time.

For the past year I built a startup as an independent founder. The company really never saw any real metrics and I had to abandon it due to financial reasons and major life changes.

During the past month I've been applying to Senior level roles. I have about a 92% rejection rate over 160 applications. I still have not landed any offers, and multiple times have been told I could be considered for mid level roles.

What's going on in the industry? Has the bar for Senior level really jumped that high?

I’ve been a dev at a Fortune 50 company for 5 years (first job out of college)
Over the years the following has happened:

1. ⁠I’ve had multiple managers due to reorgs/managers leaving for other positions. As a consequence of this, a lot of stuff i did got forgotten during these manager transitions . My new 4th manager is using the excuse of “sorry i wasn’t there when you did that/those things” when i ask if i have a shot at getting promoted to Senior this year.

2. ⁠Multiple waves of layoffs since early 2023. Somehow i’ve survived until now. Sucks seeing people who I bonded with over the years lose their jobs out of nowhere.

3. ⁠Balance of devs is shifting more towards offshoring. There used to be 9 people on-shore and 0 offshore when i started in 2021. Now its 3 people onshore and 8 people offshore. Half the time my offshore scrum master doesn’t attend the DSU. Easy to get overwhelmed during crunch times now, especially when my company expects on-shore to drive business decisions.

4. ⁠Management is starting to track Copilot usage + Story output + AI Proof-of-concept side-projects into our performance rating. I’m gonna have to start making copilot do useless tasks just to make sure i don’t get flagged.

Kinda wanna screw off and maybe go back to school for a different field. I love software engineering, but i’m losing that passion for it because of all this Jira/Copilot tokenmaxxing nonsense that is being forced upon us now.

Is it like this in other companies right now?

Tldr at the bottom..

I'm with my original company out of college, been here for 5 years. I like to think I'm a decent worker, maybe above average for figuring out how to do something but below average on retaining the vast business knowledge my company has. I get good reviews and good raises, but through some weird scenarios I have never gotten an actual promotion.

I would go into the whole promotion thing, but it would detract from my actual question. That is, I see jobs all the time that I would like to apply to, but don't want my boss to think I want out. However, lately work has gotten somewhat slow.. we hired 1.5 devs (someone who splits time between us and another team). They picked up all the easy beginner work, doing bug fixes, etc. Which is fine, though it did push me into sprocs development. Which honestly doesn't bother me too much either.

Then my manager told me that I would eventually be picking up all our team's work that another team has to help with. Basically instead of doing a bunch of hand-offs to some mainframe devs, I'd develop our stored procs, and then make sure they're implemented correctly in the mainframe. Again, fine with that as well..

However, now my team is getting another 1.5 devs. Cause a team got blown up and we're absorbing 1 of their devs, a SWE II. As well as the dev that was splitting his time, will be full-time. Now its getting a little obvious that I might just get shifted to the other team..

Which again is fine as well, but they seem to have a lot of devs and I'm not confident that I would be able to get enough to work on over there and it'd be the same problem.

So, would it be crazy to tell my manager, "hey, it looks like there's enough devs here to handle everything coming up and then some and maybe there isn't enough work. Would it be okay if I applied to other positions I see on our internal job board?" I feel like that type of wording would be bad, cause they'd look at it as, oh he doesn't even do anything maybe we just lay him off. Or idk how to approach/word this to them, or if I even should. Cause I do enjoy the work I do, the pay, and the WLB, it'd be a bummer for any of those to go down the drain cause I joined a hectic team or something.

TLDR;
Doesn't seem like there's enough work for all the devs, plus I've been pushed into a spot between teams. Should I/how can I tell my boss that I'd like to apply to other internal jobs without making it sound like I've become redundant?

Sankey: https://imgur.com/a/EpUYS3c

I wanted to share a positive experience to counter the flood of doomer posts coming through lately.

Background: I graduated from Waterloo in 2022 with 6 internships (1 non-CS-related, 1 bank, 4 CV/robotics). My first full-time role was at a robotics start-up in San Francisco, which was awesome... until I got laid off due to lack of funding in 2023. Applying for jobs at that time was PAINFUL because I hardly had any full-time experience, and layoffs were happening everywhere. Luckily, I managed to land a new role in the Bay Area after a few months of applying.

Now, I'm looking to leave SF. I only applied to a handful of roles because I wanted to be picky about salary/location in my first round of apps. And I was very fortunate!

The best advice I can give is to SPECIALIZE. Find something you're interested in and focus on it. For me, that was robotics C++ roles (and there are a ton of sub-fields within that, including mapping, localization, perception, path planning, object tracking, etc.) These areas require specific domain knowledge beyond just programming. If you can build up your skillset in a specific area, it'll make you a very attractive candidate. As LLMs become more popular, the appeal of a generalist dev goes down. Companies want specialists who have enough depth to perform better than Claude.

Tl;dr: when applying, I only applied to roles that were an extremely close match to my specific experience. I think that's why my success rate was fairly high.

Best of luck!

I received a job offer following an interview I had two weeks ago, and I’m very pleased to have received it. However, I have four other interviews scheduled this week, and I’m particularly interested in the interview on Wednesday. Ideally, I’d like to see how those opportunities develop before making a final decision. At the same time, I don’t want to risk jeopardizing the offer I already have.

And what are your experiences? To me, it seems that the tech job market here is just not that good for a city of its size, compared to SF, NYC, Seattle, etc. There’s a lot more job postings and diversity of jobs in the aforementioned cities. A lot of manufacturing-adjacent software companies too in Boston that are looking for a very specific skill set. It’s not exactly my niche and I’m looking to expand my search to the West Coast.

TLDR; Got fired thrice in the last 3 years working for 2 seed stage startups and one small enterprise company. My latest company fired me saying they can't trust me to own the product while I had difficulties understanding the product since it has like 3 different versions of it being used by different teams with 3 different debugging environments to access when on call and I wasn't known across the floor in the company which was a fireable offense by skip level. I interacted with 3 teams but that didn't seem enough. I'm sorry for the bad english this is from my phone.

Hey guys, I didn't work for any name brand companies and my experience was pretty much at 2 remote startups and an enterprise company but my career trajectory is very bad right now with significant paycuts just to stay in the game and I'm looking for advice since I'm losing my mind and I'm a junior engineer who is a 2023 grad and a AI Engineer working mainly with RAG. My salary was above market as well despite these small companies.

First let me explain the reasons for firing in each company,

1st company : It was a 60 person startup which only has about 20 employees now that took me in as an intern and converted me full time. The company has been periodically laying off due to whatever reason and when my number came up, my boss told me I am being let go despite earning a top performance rating 6 months ago saying he wanted a much more senior employee for the remaining job responsibilities.

I went into depression (I didn't even realise it) after losing this job and landed another job at a small company with about 6 employees which is my second company after a grueling 5 months job search

2nd company : The CTO told me my technical skills need a lot more improvement and they fired me within 2 months saying this feature would have taken him like 1 week to implement but I spent a month on it. I barely understood the codebase and kept winging it tbh he wouldn't even give me a proper KT and wanted me to read his mind. I kept him in the loop of what I'm doing and where I'm stuck as well a lot of times.

3rd company: 3k employees, It happened a few weeks ago. The company was going through losses from April so I kind of expected this. The boss and super boss were behind me all the time in this company where they gave me an AI based codebase Which I couldn't just wrap my head around considering how it had 3 different versions each version different between each other and being used actively with 3 different debugging environments which I had trouble keeping up despite taking notes.

In this role my skip level went ham on me and told me you can't be an introvert in this role despite me going for every single after party in the company along with interacting with my teammates constantly going to the office when not required (it was hybrid but I went regularly) the skip level pretty much told me it would be better if almost all of the floor knew me while I was drowning in work and I kept struggling to build relationships while working on this codebase fully individually since my manager built the codebase and none of my teammates had any idea and my manager was a new manager under constant stress so he was pretty much inapproachable.

Should I quit tech after this I had to solve 800 leetcode problems when I was in uni until about 2023 and grinded it last year as well but being fired from startups or a small enterprise company feels like the end of my career. I am still getting interviews and I'm actively interviewing but I'm worried about my career since I'm 3 years out of school and still stuck as a junior jumping between 3 companies with 2 4 months gap in between. My latest gig just ended 15 days ago but I've been interviewing since June hopefully something sticks since I'm in the final rounds of a few consulting companies like BCG etc

I am currently a senior graduating this fall. I do not currently have a post-grad job lined up but on my resume I have three technical engineering positions: one contract job, one internship, and one research position.

I currently am working another contract job, however it’s not a technical engineering position and is instead grading AI content based on whether or not it’s AI generated. There’s no actual technical work to it. I could make it sound extremely fancy with technobabble on my resume, but the point stands at the end of the day that it has barely to no engineering related content.

The employer is being very flippant, giving short notice assignments with strict deadlines and it’s making me needlessly stressed and I really don’t need the money from the position. In terms of enhancing my resume, is it worth keeping, or should I simply quit because it won’t noticeably make me look better?

For transparency, I'm not a programmer, I'm just in the tech career space , business analyst / operations analyst / project coordinator.

Not sure what to do at this point tbh. I was laid off from my first job out of college and I only had 1 year and 10 months of experience.

I wasn't managed well and was even being managed out by a manager who got fired after I gave HR documentation on her behavior. Great, but now I'm left not really having an easy to sell career profile to find my next step. I've been looking for 10 months and even with highlighting transferrable skills, Im not selling myself to people enough apparently. I get some interviews but nothing has gone through yet as far as getting offers.

I loose to people with more or different experience is what I'm told when I can get feedback.. With Fall coming I am looking for and applying to all of the career development / rotational programs I qualify for (So if they don't ask that I graduated this year) cause I feel like my best bet is getting in somewhere where I can learn a skillset and maybe be competitive in someone's eyes because of my experience and not too experienced. Would really appreciate any help / advice.

Lately, I have struggled with properly explaining what I am doing in technical terms. I do just fine with general explanations and have no problem with actually implementing these systems, but I forget what word you are supposed to use or just assumed it would be the same as another industry.

I work as an ML engineer, and I worry it is costing me job opportunities when I forget to use words like "inference", "invoke", "Token refresh," and all the other new words that are a thing now with AI development.

Went into a prestigious hackathon recently after a long time, excited to get some kind of hands-on experience and maybe learn some stuff. I get that manual programming isnt a thing anymore, but I still like to code semi-manually, not vibe coding but just using AI boilerplate and writing on top of that.

However, when I actually saw what everyone was doing I felt totally lost. It wasn’t about creativity or making a product, the competition is basically for who’s paying for a better AI subscription. People from non-technical backgrounds, who can’t explain what an API is, spinning up entire full stack applications with voice agents, chatbots and knowledge base RAGs.

I asked one of the guys to explain his RAG he barely stumbled the full form to me.

Within 6 hours the demo was finally ready to be shown, I manage to program a nice POC without a front-end because it was just a demo, and the others have literally spun up the ENTIRE application (this was a 4 day hackathon, they finished it on day one) Like wtf?

Is this state of hackathons now? who buys the best subscription wins it all?

Edit: Lmao @ the prompters being triggered in the comments below 💀

swe in ai/ml at faang for 1.5 years, quit bc of bad wlb/general dissatisfaction. was fortunate enough to land at T2 hedge fund after a brutal 10 month search.

wondering how the gap will affect my career.

thanks

This industry makes me feel sick. It kinda feels like it's like dealing with someone with serious addiction issues. No surprise there I guess, Elon Musk is an addict and sitting at the top.

Okay. DAE hate the amount of doublespeak that is present in the industry? It literally feels like, what the industry says that it is, versus what it actually is, is so different as to be stomach turning. They also don't understand engineering AT ALL. They equate knowing things with engineering skill, and as if the true know-how of engineering was owned by the businesses. And to be fair... Google DOES probably own a lot of engineering skill, in both employees and infrastructure.

But engineering is something that is so totally different and more creative than hiring pipelines account for. I am venting. I find it really hard to write a resume that I feel is maximum optimized without losing what is valuable about me as a member of an engineering / product making organization.

I also do find it funny, that so much of what modern organizational culture IS, is basically MBAs trying to engineer business, which of COURSE means that they will try to engineer engineering itself. lol

Thanks

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I'm a 16-year-old student from Switzerland and want to start an apprenticeship as a software engineer next year. But some people, like my dad or a random guy on Reddit who gave me an off-topic answer to a question about the application process for an apprenticeship, tell me that it isn't a smart move to start an apprenticeship as a software developer because in a few years, almost all of that work will get replaced by AI.

So, don't understand me wrong, I personally don't really think that. Sure, the job of a software developer will change because of AI, but I don't think it will replace it completely on such a huge scale.

But what they said made me still a bit unsure about it.

So, does the job of a software developer still have a future, or will it someday be replaced by AI, and would I have done that apprenticeship for nothing?

I've got a super easy, low stress job in the UK (paying £50k pa, outside London - average pay but considering I basically do nothing this isn't bad). The role itself is a data engineer, but it's not really a company as such, it's like a hybrid academic-industry research lab. So the stuff I'm working on isn't production systems, but single node prototype projects, often with absolutely zero real world benefit.

I do have plenty of time to learn and upskill though. Been learning C++ and IoT data stacks (TSDB etc) over the last year. Again, very little to actually show here outside of some low impact projects.

I got fed up with it and applied to a PhD programme in Japan, and got accepted on a scholarship (pays peanuts but enough to live on, I'd be dipping into my savings however, unless I can get work there, likely some tangential field like teaching English).

While I enjoy research (loved my masters thesis in computer vision), 4yrs is a long time on such a low salary and I'm realising I'm probably doing this more to get a stint overseas while working in tech still (as opposed to teaching English). As such, given I'm about to leave this job, I'm getting highly anxious now, worried I'll hate the PhD and it'll be a huge waste of time and I'll struggle to get a job when I come back

I'm keen to move into software engineering, or more specifically into CV. However my background (6-7yrs) has mainly been on enterprise data systems (warehousing, e.g. snowflake etc) which is quite different to core software engineering.

Am I better off sticking in this BS nothingness job while glossing up the resume to make it seem like we've actually been building stuff here, or just commit to this PhD and see how it goes? Main source of anxiety is getting work in SWE/CV, or even in DE/DBA in a year if it doesn't go to plan, market seems horrible right now!

Would you rather choose a long term job or a project that lasts less than 4 months but pays almost double the salary? The project might have a possible extension but that is very uncertain.

After 2 years of working for a place (and conveniently, recently asking for a promotion), I just got fired for misconduct. Allegedly conduct adjacent to mouse jiggling, essentially making it seem as if you are working when you aren't. I'm shell shocked right now, no idea what to do. Any advice?

I graduated 2 years ago with a cs degree from a non target school, and I have not been able to get a software engineering job yet.

I have been mostly been doing some freelancing gigs these past couple of years, and have been working in education. I’m wondering how does the gap between my graduation and not having a software engineering job is affecting my career, and should I go back to school for my masters to utilize getting an internship since I wasn’t able to get one during my bachelors degree.

Here is my resume: https://imgur.com/a/nDONM3L and I appreciate any feedback.

Hey guys! Graduated this year from a T50 university, got an offer today at a really big engineering firm for a junior software dev position at 82k comp (verbal, offer letter should be tomorrow)... Super excited about this gonna accept the role no matter what but I was just curious as to what you guys think in terms of this comp in todays day and age.

edit: Canada!

Hello everyone,

English is not my first language, so please be gentle !

I am a developer with about 4 years of work experience. I work mainly with aws/servicenow/azure. And i have gotten multiple certifications that are required for work. I work for a consulting company

I got a stomach disease around march, and from there i was out on a bland diet where i had almost to cut everything i eat: no red meat, no spices, no sweets, no coffee, no chocolate, no fried food, and no dairy, non citrus vegetables or fruits. My energy has tanked like crazy since then.

Work in consulting is slavery, i dont get paid at all less than a 100k, i have zero benefits, their retirement plan is barely legal, and here i am working as a dev, studying a night to level up my skills, explain to the QA how to do their testing, assisting the preprod testers/product owners how to test their things, work on incidents/bugs if there is any.

Due to my deterioring health, i asked for vacations asap because at my company we don’t have sick days. My manager tagged me and sent it basically to all directors of the company and now HR and all the directors are on me. My team lead also shamed me for asking for that and me being disrespectful to other people even though i mentioned that my health mental and physical were at their limits.

All of this is happening because the manager cc’ed the directors. A simple no/yes or an email would have been enough, why tag them all?

What should i do?

I just wanted a regular 9 to 5. I regret being even near cs. I work in a team of 9 people, I am the only developer and they are all asking every day what did i do. Im tired of clowns whose whole career depends on my performance. Im getting nothing out of it.

Please give me some guidance to deal with my manager.

Disclaimer: I used AI to help me translate the text, as English is not my native language

I’d like to hear some opinions about my current situation, especially from people who have been through something similar. I’m trying to understand if there’s a reasonable way to deal with this kind of work environment or if I should simply move on.

For context, I’m a developer with around 10 years of experience and I work in Italy.

I’m currently part of a startup that is actually controlled by a large corporation

About three years ago, the PM (who has very little IT knowledge) hired a Tech Lead to manage a team of external consultants. Eventually the relationship with the consultants deteriorated pretty badly and the company decided to get rid of them.

After they got rid of the consultants they started hiring internal developers, which is when I joined.

It became pretty obvious to me early on that the Tech Lead doesn’t have much technical experience. From what I can tell, most of his background is in C# and databases, and even there he sometimes comes up with things that leave me genuinely confused, like suggesting that we should put basically all of our business logic into stored procedures (because he did that before).

Anyway, since joining I’ve ended up taking responsibility for pretty much all of the actual development. The stack is mainly Spring Boot and Vue.

The technical side itself isn’t really the problem, though.

The problem is his attitude.

He’s very arrogant and condescending and constantly wants to have a say in every technical decision. Normally I wouldn’t have a problem with a Tech Lead challenging my decisions but he has barely looked at the codebase and, in my opinion, simply doesn’t have the experience needed to suggest better solutions. Lately he started using codex to suggest things I should and to add slop to jira tickets (he wants to show to the PM that he's working hard, when he actually just sits the entire day watching youtube and scrolling instagram)

At this stage I’m just getting tired of having to listen to someone above me confidently say things that make very little sense and then insist that he’s right.

The PM obviously sides with him, and I don’t really want to spend my working days arguing with them. At the same time, someone still has to actually build and maintain the software, so I usually end up just doing the work.

How would you handle this situation?

Is there any point in trying to make this kind of relationship work, or if you genuinely think your Tech Lead is incompetent and management fully supports him, is it simply time to start looking for another job?

i had a lot of anxiety my freshman year. can I still be competitive when I start learning the fundamentals my fall semester of sophomore year?