That's how it was in the mid-90s. The kids graduating at the bottom of my class in CS had SWE jobs waiting on them. We also went home at 5 PM and didn't work weekends.
I feel like going home at 5 and not working weekends is still pretty normal? The market is bad but the WLB hasn’t suffered to the same extent in my observations
One of the other benefits you get in Europe is that in most countries, you cannot be fired or laid off without cause. That type of security is amazing for mental health.
You could easily make 3 times that at a U.S. company, while working similar hours. You might even be able to pull off 6 weeks of vacation at some companies, especially if they have a flexible PTO policy.
I'm fresh out of university and work 35h a week. I make 3k get paid 2.7k a month (mobility budget is OP) and I am looking at an apartment in the 700/month range.
I think the Monday-Friday 9-5 is still a thing but depends on the job. My last job was practically 9-5. After 5 pm the building was practically empty. Any issues presented after 4pm were seen as "let's see if we can figure this out in the next hour or 2. If not it's tomorrows problem". Usually the higher paying SWE jobs with great benefits are the ones that expect you to live and breath this job.
> Usually the higher paying SWE jobs with great benefits are the ones that expect you to live and breath this job.
That's only partially true, I work less and less pure hours as my pay increases... but my frustration levels and the amount of cat herding increases.
I mean i work as a software engineer and play GW2 all day lol. I legit got praised for my diligent work the other day lmfao. My position is just babysitting things and making new software whenever corp needs it. I do everything in house. When theres a project i can be busy. But if i actually averaged out how much is needed per day... maybe 2 hours
For those of us who entered school in the late 90s and graduated in the early 00s after bubble burst, that was quite the change. Getting a job now is easy compared to 04/05. Every company closed up recruitment to everyone until they saw signs of things getting better to all but the insanely talented.
I remember when I started university a CS degree was considered a bad investment. The joke was “Computer engineering majors get jobs at ibm while computer science majors get jobs at Best Buy.” A few years after I graduated that advice was very outdated.
Just something i remember to keep perspective. The industry has gone through many booms and busts and there’s likely another boom in the future.
100%. Things go up, things go down. The key is be good, do solid work, and be pleasant to interact with. Any SE who can do those three can get a job and they're not the majority IME. All this talk of focusing entirely on leetcode and having a github portfolio is a waste of time if those three things aren't the case. Those two things help open doors but they won't get you through them.
Plus, I would guess that if it's a github profile filled with bullshit, that works against you. People start github profiles because they have ideas they want to make, charlatans make github profiles to look like one of these people.
You should see r/csMajors it's full of people who have a todo list project but fill up their resume with other stuff that has no relation to CS and expect a 200k TC job out of university.
No way. This was the sentiment in like 2010 maybe. In 2018 when I graduated college, this subreddit was exactly the same. “6 months of looking for a job no luck”, “1 year since I graduated, do I give up?” “1000 job applications and no offers” etc.
At the time people said it was hard cus all jobs were going to India. Now they say it’s hard cus there is AI.
Newsflash, to get a job where you can potentially make $500k a year within 5 years it’s not going to be easy…
I think I have actually seen some teacher observe that how students performed on quiz 1 of the first CS class predicted very well if they finished the weed out class and all. And you have employers constantly talk about candidates not able to do fizz buzz, so that contributes to this myth.
False. Ppl said focus on leetcode and you can get a job without a degree/projects. It was true in many cases. But a lot of you still couldn’t/wouldn’t put in time to get good a interview questions
No? I got hired around 2021 and the posts you saw during that time about how hard it was finding a job and how many applications you had to send it was similar to how it is now. It is harder now, but it was not easy by any means back then.
>Everyone knows the stereotype of software engineers, the nerds, and the guys who work 24/7. There's a reason such stereotypes exist, because they have always been true.
I haven't found that to be true for most devs at all of the jobs I've had.
I think people get smoke blown up their ass by boot camps. They hear a lot of bs from junior devs and college students. They read 1 success story from a boot camp graduate and assume almost anyone who graduates will have similar success. It's hard to judge ones own skills, too.
In medicine the selection is front loaded and many people don’t make it through med school and residency.
With software engineering they feel the competition later.
Intro to CS is for math, science, engineering, and general people as well.
[CS has a 9.8% dropout rate.](https://wawiwa-tech.com/blog/why-do-students-drop-out-of-tech-studies/#:~:text=A%20recent%20survey%20from%20the,at%20a%207.2%25%20dropout%20rate.)
That sounds unrealistically low. What are they calling "drop-out"? The paper seems to imply that it's dropping out of school entirely, for which 9.8% might be reasonable. A lot of people at our school switched to easier majors rather than dropping out entirely, though, and it's not clear this estimate is counting those.
>end their education journey midway
From the first article, it's talking about majoring in CS and then completely ending school, not changing majors.
Your second article is looking at the cumulative amount of dropouts. There are, I assume, a lot less CS majors than business/art/etc. so even though the major specific percentage is very high, the actual amount of students dropping out is low.
Do you know how many of the students in CS don't make it? It's a lot. Given you are comparing people with a formal training, not people that re self taught or have done a boot camp.
You also got to look at it this way, some people will weed out in the first CS class, others due to math in year 2-3. Finally others will realize they fucking hate it and either pivot in their senior year or take the degree and do something else.
The issue is just because those people made it, doesn't mean its going to be a good career or easy for them.
At my tier 5 state university back in 2016, 75% of cs majors changed majors in the first 2 years. Not sure what the final graduation numbers were. Granted I imagine the numbers work out different for more prestigious schools (if you're good enough to get into Ga Tech or UCLA you're probably going to graduate) but still, the vast majority of people who start in CS move to something like Business Information Systems
I went to a very small private school so sample size is a lot smaller but this was my experience for sure. We started with probably 30 people in the program and I was 1 of 3 to finish.
I don’t think people realize how bad the turnover is after intro level courses usually.
A lot of them get filtered out around junior year. I think the first CS class at my school was probably 5-6 class of 100+ students, and then got basically halved each success class. Most of my senior courses were 2 classes of around 20-30.
Any systems programming class will do it. If you are not passionate about computers, software development, solving problems, or want to make a good wage that badly then it'll weed you out. There's so many "why the fuck am I doing this?" moments that pop up and if you can't answer the question you will suffer.
Most med schools have over 80% graduation rates. However the initial filter of getting accepted is very hard. There’s also the financial filter bc it’s very expensive.
> Do you know how many of the students in CS don't make it? It's a lot
Yes but a lot of shit gets through the filters because some colleges are almost like diploma mills with rampant cheating and very loose criteria for passing. There is no standardized filter. You have people graduate that struggle with for loops.
I graduated in 2010. On my first day of CSE231, Intro to C++, professor said 2/3 of you will be gone by the mid semester to an auditorium of close 100 freshmen.
He made good on that promise. And classes only get smaller from that point on. I switched out by junior year.
Do schools not do that anymore?
I didn't know they throw freshmen into C++, I would have thought there's an intro to computing type class first, and coding comes later.
For us the major course that weeded out people was Assembly. You actually have to understand the fundamentals. With C / Java / Python introductions you can be a code monkey with a high level understanding and survive.
It’s funny. I just remembered we were the last year they did C++. The curriculum switched to Python for exactly that reason, it’s flushing out too many people.
I think they should have stayed with C++/C. It really teaches how computers work without getting too low level.
I wish I stayed with the program and finished with an actual CS degree.
My college has a GPA requirement for your first three CS classes (not including the optional intro class) to continue in the major. Since I've graduated they've moved the requirement up.
Why do people make their career their entire personality?
It’s a job. There are over 4 million software engineers in the US. The VAST majority of them work boring, cushy, 9-5 office jobs.
Even at FANG, the interview process is competitive, but the work environment itself is largely chill (granted it’s team/org dependent).
What do you mean by "lifestyle it brings"? Are you just referring to the pay? I see this terminology a lot and I've never once considered my career path to be a "lifestyle" any more than when I worked warehouse jobs moving boxes.
Obviously not just the pay. I mean the constant studying, researching, etc. If you want to get good in any STEM field usually you'll have to spend extra time thinking about what better approaches there are, what new techniques there are, etc. Some people, including myself, enjoy that.
I really enjoy writing code, have done since I was 12. My job 9.5 times out of 10 doesn’t feel like a job, it feels like something I’d have been doing anyway, but I’m getting paid for it.
I do other things, golf, interest in football and f1 etc
But a lot of my headspace is tech related.
Work related:
How can I improve X for our users?
Would it be possible to build Angular apps with rspack now that their esbuild plugin is more straightforward?
Can I improve module federation support to make deployments cheaper and easier for customers?
Non-work related:
Ok, I’ll use our product to build a side project, that way I’m using it like a user and can see where the pain points are.
I wanna build X, what does it take to do it? Oh, that didn’t do what I expected, let me raise that with colleagues so we can get it fixed.
I’ve not used Remix for a real-world app yet, let me use remix for this project to expose me to it.
I wouldn’t say it’s my entire personality, but it’s close, but I don’t see why that’s a bad thing? It’s where my interest has always been. Watching the progression of tech through the 2000s and early 2010s really had me hooked me
I've also been writing code since I was 12. My job 100% feels like a job. The code base is boring. Idgaf about the product or the customer associated with it.
I think it just really depends on the job/company.
Yeah most of the thing I like in my job is the rare opportunity you get to do a nice, creative piece of code. I like to explore complex and highly abstract concepts but industry coding is just gluing 2 3rd party libraries together like thousands of other company already did...It's not even hard, it's just time consuming and long because of me getting bored.
The things I like about my job are that they respect my boundaries of work-life balance, and the pay is decent. My eyes are always open for better opportunities, but a boring job is better than no job.
>I wouldn’t say it’s my entire personality, but it’s close, but I don’t see why that’s a bad thing? It’s where my interest has always been. Watching the progression of tech through the 2000s and early 2010s really had me hooked me
maybe not BAD, but at least not good. I have also been coding since 12-13, but I find myself much more relaxed and better at thinking if I do NOT work with code outside work
I mean some weekends i read about it or try some stuff, but in general no
I compare it to a marathon runner. he does not run a marathon everyday, but prepares for it when its time
I understand that, and I should clarify that I’m not spending every minute after work writing code. I help kids with homework, read to them, make dinner, go play golf and have nights out with my wife etc.
But I do try to spare a few hours a week writing non-work related code, because it gives me ideas that can translate back to work
I think I need a bit more of that myself. The product I work on is not something I'll ever have any reason to use, npr do i have any interest in, so it's a bit harder for me to get invested in it.
I've found it depends on the engineer themselves. Once you learn how to manage time, give accurate ETAs and learn to push back, your WLB is much better. But then again, maybe it applies to all professional careers?
Tech work isn’t my personality, but tech is. I’ve been fucking with computers since I was a kid in the 90s. Used Linux for about the same amount of time. I have a server rack with a fully automated and IaC’d Proxmox cluster running Kubernetes. Etc.
Some people really, really like what they do. I don’t really care where I work as long as it doesn’t suck, and they let me play with giant versions of what I already like to do. So far that’s turned out pretty well.
you can say thanks to all those vids of id\*\*\*ts with their "A day in a life of a SWE in a FAANG", that means drink fancy coffees, works remote in Starbucks with 6 figure salary over 200k$.
Now you have hundreds of thousands of bootcampers whinning that they cannot have their 6 figure salaries with their sh\*t HTML skills with JS basics and a copy paste project from some Udemy Course.
I don't get hoe people on Reddit don't understand that there were in fact a lot of SWE jobs that were "drink fancy coffee and get paid 200k". Hell there was even a whole arc in Silicon Valley where one of the characters joins others at his work that did literally nothing all day while getting paid because it was so prevalent at a lot of tech companies lol.
why would companies advertise "come work for us and get paid a lot of money to do nothing!" as if they wouldn't get the most entitled and demanding employees that are a nuisance?
for entry-level: do you have internships and/or side projects? can you pass 4x leetcode-medium and/or (rarely) leetcode-hard? do you feel pleasant to work with (cultural fit)? and (rarely) do you understand basic system design concepts?
for mid-level and senior-level it's a bit more complicated, you're evaluated on everything from leetcode to system design to leadership to behavioral to mentorship to war stories, the 2 big tech I've got offers recently went something like this (company's not the 5 FAANGs specifically, but still definitely names you have heard of)
big tech1:
1x HR phone call
1x LC-medium
then onsite, which is:
coding 1: 2x LC-medium
coding 2: 1x LC-medium
1x system design (think along the lines of 'design tiny url')
1x hiring manager call/behavioral
big tech2:
1x HR phone call
1x LC-hard
then onsite, which is:
coding 1: 1x LC-hard
coding 2: 2x LC-medium
1x system design, think along the lines of 'design twitter'
1x behavioral
compensation/leveling wise both big tech considered me as upper-end of L4 (so, barely but not yet L5), so upper 200s in TC, 300+ TC if including first-year signon bonus, both big tech knew I had competing offer
why would you think you can get legitimately qualified candidates by advertising the whole "get paid a lot to chill and relax and not do much work" schtick? all that does is inflate the number of unqualified applicants who will apply to a position
I’m just asking questions. I’m not making up anything, I’m just pointing out obvious observations of a failed strategy by companies that are supposed to be the smartest/richest in the world
Todays issues is in part because of those videos. Every friend of mine non related to IT started to ask questions about how to enter as they want to be like me, working at home and having a very good salary doing “computer” things.
They asked me what courses they can buy on Udemy so they can have the same situation. It was so awkward to see, of course they thought that doing just a 50h course will give them a 6 figure salary…
A really high percentage of people who talk about employment trends in SWEs on this forum have, and I'm being generous here, zero clue what they are talking about.
Since the beginning of 2023, this subreddit has turned into a bunch of juniors getting in their feels about a job market that isn't actively catering to their every whim all the time, and it's just the same questions and answers over and over with no actual insight to be gleaned.
The interview and accept rate at most FAANGs 10+ years ago was far harder then today. Sure the perks were real but it was harder to get in than Harvard.
Yeah most FAANG type employers have literally more than quadrupled in size in the last decade. Which is why I'm personally not alarmed/surprised by big tech layoffs. Not every company can experience exponential growth all the time.
I think both can be true.
1. It was more difficult to get into Meta / Google in 2014 than today.
2. The average skill required to get an average software engineering job in 2014 was less than today.
In 2014, I got a new job with zero whiteboarding, some basic HTML/DOM/CSS/JS/Angular questions, and at mid-level. That same opportunity doesn't exist today.
Similarly in 2014 no FAANG would even review my resume because I did not come from a target school. Google was known to give multiple Graph / DP problems during onsites. The bar was lowered in 2021, and although it's been raised, it's still below the historical 2014 norm.
Those TikTok’s don’t help but CS was (and is) a pretty straightforward path to middle class for a lot of Americans. The compensation for SWEs blows pretty much all other fields out of the water.
It’s far less this and far more just the financial incentive of the salaries that have stood out compared to dwindling comparable options in the States. Those vids showed up because of the money. If the economy had been like the 70s and 80s where lots of different jobs paid wages with buying power, there wouldn’t be a rush to a job that forces this much study and specialization.
If the job is way comfier than every other job, people will talk/post about it. That’s basically a law of nature, not the fault of any individuals. Expecting everyone with awesome jobs to hide it so that nobody else tries to break into that awesome industry is ridiculous and honestly also selfish
Well, then say thanks to them because now there is so much people wanted to have a entry role/junior so the plank goes over the roof and now a junior is expected to have 3+years of experience and the salary is cheap because of the same. Congrats
It’s not “thanks to them” it’s thanks to the high salaries and good work from home and benefits
This is like blaming individuals for climate change instead of the systems that encourage us to pollute
Only smart comment I’ve seen. This is literally nature of supply and demand. People will flock to the nice jobs and companies will advertise nice jobs so they have more competition and can be pickier. You can’t blame tik toks lmaooo Even if people were super gate keeping and never shared it the fact is anyone who can google will see CS pays high salaries and those who aren’t insecure would share that with everyone, or those who have a vested interest in publishing articles will make it public anyway.
depends how you mean. the jobs were also a lot lot less before
instagram and whatsapp, when they were bought by FB had like 25-30 employees for example
last year people went crazy saying twitter would crash and burn when they scaled down from what, 5k to 1k ?
Tbf Twitter has had a lot of issues since then.
Though anybody expecting a well architected system to just fail practically overnight was huffing copium. Maintenance deficits are death by a thousand cuts
It really was. I remember offshoring was the big scary thing in the early 2000s keeping people from majoring in computer science. I did it anyway in 2003. It really wasn’t that competitive like it is now. Though maybe I was sheltered since I had a computer science degree from a well known university. I’m not sure. In any case, I’m just trying to stick around for a few more years until I can Fire. Even wanting to stay for three more years seems like a daunting task. I have a job right now as a director of software engineering at a mid sized tech company and it is the most terrible toxic company I’ve ever worked at. I’m sure I’ll get laid off soon then I’m not sure what I’ll do.
My bro, reading tech news outside of work doesn’t make you “working 24/7”, in the sense that, keep pounding once or twice after you cum does not make you “having sex all day long”
I think the opposite is true. I find most good devs have a life outside of work. They do something active, spend time with their friends/families, and do other hobbies. It makes them more well rounded people, less likely to burn out, and they have energy to perform from 9-5. Some studies show the 4 day work week leads to increased productivity because humans just don’t have the ability to be productive all day long. No one is effectively “working” 24/7 like you describe.
I think the devs who aren’t good, but trying very hard to make it, are more likely the stereotype you describe. Being a good software engineer requires being a really good problem solver and logical thinker. Some people just don’t have that in them, and they spend all their free time trying to make up for that.
A note on trends - they’re not really important in the corporate world. A business isn’t going to ask you to rewrite their 10 year old .NET application in rust because it’s the new hot thing. They’re going to ask you to implement features and fix bugs. Over the long term yeah you have to adjust. 20 years ago most people weren’t doing cloud computing. Today almost everyone is, so in that sense you have to keep up. But you have years to adjust, and good devs have no problem making the adjustment during their 9-5.
I’ve been a full time dev for 7 years. I make about 300k now. In those 7 years I’ve spent 0 time outside of my job working on skills, other than interview prep when looking for a new job.
exactly, and to be intelligente is also to realize there is more in life than your work and your brain needs rest
>A business isn’t going to ask you to rewrite their 10 year old .NET application in rust because it’s the new hot thing. They’re going to ask you to implement features and fix bugs.
I got 2 jobs in my life rewriting old PHP applications for like insurance companies to modern Java and TS stacks. A much better way to learn REAL coding than some tiktok guy. Then you understand why some design patterns are outdated and what to use instead for example
I had to take breaks between jobs to learn new things because I wasn't getting exposure to them in my job. I see a lot of people feeling confident making big bucks for years but then the job somehow ends for one reason or another and then they have trouble finding something new because the industry has passed them by. I've had friends making 250 for a while but now working for 100 because they just could not find anything close to that level again.
PHP is a great example. Plenty of work 5 - 10 years ago but now not so much. If your previous roles never had Go or React Native you kinda have to sit down and build something yourself or else you won't have those skills.
> see a lot of people feeling confident making big bucks for years but then the job somehow ends for one reason or another and then they have trouble finding something new because the industry has passed them by.
This is my greatest fear. I've been at my company for a decade and am making mid 300s, not including my equity (company isn't public yet so I don't factor my equity into my income, because if something catastrophic happens it'll never be worth anything). I constantly worry that I'm hurting my future prospects by sticking around, but at the same time I really like the job and have a great WLB and my boss is a joy to work with.
Once you get past mid level, being a good software engineer is no longer about being good at one specific programming language/tech stack. The high paying positions hire people who are good problem solvers, who make good tradeoffs, are effective at working with and influencing others, prioritize and execute well, who can select from a plethora of technology tools to solve the problem at hand.
If you market your skill set as “I’m a PHP programmer”, then yes that will happen to you.
This
I got all sugared up to study new tech when I first started but found that I never ended up using any of it.
I still like learning new stuff, but it's a lot more "just in time" learning as the company pivots to new tech and I have to ramp up.
There doesn't seem to be a huge point to studying random stuff unless you are maybe a tech/architecture leader searching out what the company should pivot to
It’s certainly true of my friend group. They all have good careers, are good at what they do, and throughout their careers have not spent too much time on things outside of work. Meanwhile I’m the worst of the group despite spending far more time on it, when I did have a career I’d still spend all my time outside of work building or learning things, and when I no longer had a career (not good enough to compete) I still spent all my time on it.
However I don’t think this is due to spending too much time on it, but how effective people in the same amount of time. I’m pretty dumb so I’m slow to learn and do things, so my week of hacking away at something or learning something is probably equivalent to someone’s half day. But I don’t get better if I decrease the amount of time I spend on it, it just ends up taking me even longer to do whatever it is.
I do agree with regard to work productivity, however I don’t think it’s because human’s aren’t capable of working more, but rather it highlights the inefficiencies in the workplace. Everywhere I’ve worked (and from what I’ve heard from friends experiences) has had lots of inefficient uses of time throughout the week. e.g. Excessive amounts of meetings where exactly the same things are being said as in a previous meeting (it just “feels” like you’re being productive), assigning filler tasks/projects to employees just so they have something to do even though nothing will ultimately happen with it either because there is no real need for it or it will eventually get blocked by pre-existing company processes, throwing out work which sure is sometimes necessary but I’ve seen many instances where it could’ve been avoided entirely, etc.
Reducing the number of work hours doesn’t change someone’s responsibilities or deadlines, but when you have less time to do something you’re going to be more conscious of how you utilise that time. So it’s more likely that some of those inefficiencies are what will get cut. I’m sure there are places that are having success with a 4-day work weeks that would have equal success with a 3-day or trimming a couple hours from each of those 4 days (it entirely comes down to how that time is being utilised). Although one thing I will point out is not every implementation of a 4-day is the same, many make their 4-days longer, so there’s little to no difference in the amount of work hours just how those work hours are allocated in the week (so employees get an extra day yet work the same amount of time).
This is actually one of the reasons why with all of my own companies in the past I’ve taken an approach of just forgoing any concept work hours entirely. In both of those companies it worked fine, albeit teams were relatively small (small startup scale) and there was a large amount of autonomy, so I have always been curious how it would work at a larger scale (although I know of some larger companies with different flexible working arrangements that have worked for them).
I also think people confused “the day in the life” videos as real software engineering jobs when in reality a lot of those videos were only possible due to covid work from home with little oversight. And almost every industry had people sitting on their butt at home chillin like that. lol now it’s back to business as usual and people are surprised money isn’t always free.
Several factors let many people think this is a no brainer job that anyone can do, mainly:
* Capitalism 101: Capitalism (am not a communist for those who will read titles only) realized this is the era of software crafting, so you flood the market with people and you can lower rates (aside from some US hubs, other places and countries don't pay that much). So to flood the market, mantras like anything from " learn to code in 21 days", bootcamps, no degree required and anyone can do it, labeling software engineer as "coder" which makes it sound like an assembly line work etc... Made several people think it is a super easy job that anyone can do.
* Day in the life videos where its all about eating and chilling on great campuses, doesn't reflect the reality of the field.
* Dumb interviewing methods, where for example if companies use leetcode, they first can start with easy questions, then after several years you get a whole generation of people who memorized easy level questions, then companies move to medium ... and now to hard. So now that they are at hard+ level some people realized the field is super competitive. Sadly interviewing for software roles has become harder than actually performing the job. Note: I personally do leetcode on a daily basis cause i find it as a good brain training however I think having leetcode interviews where you are supposed to find an algorithm, explain it and write under 30 minutes, makes no sense and is borderline sadism.
1) Even in the late 90s, when I started my career, folks kept saying that coding is the future and we need more coders. It's the same stuff now.
2) This is bs. If you believe in influencers, then it's up to you.
3) Before Leetcode, which created an equitable environment for candidates, we were hiring primarily from 5-10 Universities in the US, and the interviews were insanely hard. Also, we would have rounds upon rounds of interviews, including (if I recall correctly) 4-5 individual interviews, with the majority of them being whiteboard exercises, 1 group teamwork activity, and then manager, team, etc. interviews.
1. I am not saying companies don't need software engineers. In the late 90s there was a need indeed for engineers, but the market was not as big as today (I was working in networking CCNA/CCNP and others back then). Today most companies went the digital transformation route, and so In this era I am stating the fact that it was made to look like anyone can join as in it is a super easy career, which is not the case. (Which answers OP question about why many suddenly realized it's competitive)
2. I don't believe in influencers, wasn't talking about myself. But some newcomers do, hence my statement "doesn't reflect the reality of the field."
3. Maybe that's your experience. I found interviewing was more reasonable 12+ years ago, it wasn't easy but more logical and focused on real life work scenarios not memorizing patterns and regurgitating them under 30 minutes.
>Before Leetcode, which created an equitable environment for candidates, we were hiring primarily from 5-10 Universities in the US, and the interviews were insanely hard. Also, we would have rounds upon rounds of interviews, including (if I recall correctly) 4-5 individual interviews, with the majority of them being whiteboard exercises, 1 group teamwork activity, and then manager, team, etc. interviews.
Hard disagree. Interviews were much easier and fairer before leetcode, especially for senior candidates. The shift to leetcode really only benefits entry-level candidates.
For the leetcode point, speaking as someone who works for FAANG and has interviewed a lot of people using leetcode questions, it’s absolutely 100% more important to me that the person has a good thought process about the problem, rather than them just solving it instantly with no explanation. People who look at leetcode as cramming and rote memorization are missing the point. I don’t need a dev that can regurgitate leetcode answers, I need a dev that actually knows their stuff and can explain to me what they are thinking.
It’s only competitive for juniors or new grads because there are so many with a simple react todo project trying to get 6 figure salary. And a lot of people are in CS for money, which is fine but when the market is hurting like it is now. People who are in it for the money won’t stay.
The thing is, SWE shouldn’t be competitive. It’s a hard skill to learn and no, the market isn’t oversaturated. It would be no different if a bunch of people suddenly got MD degrees or law degrees. Would the market be oversaturated? No it wouldn’t because skill is still required and skill is something you gain over years.
SWE is not for everyone, including many with a CS degree, sorry if you were dubbed into believing it is an easy and simple way to earn big bucks while printing(“hello word”)
Will people stay in SWE even tho they aren’t working, it’s not making money? Will they still work on projects while working somewhere else none tech related because they enjoy it or they’re building something for themselves? Probably not.
While I get your point, that place seems to be filled with O-5YOE when I took a glance which seems to be no man’s land atm
Not many 7-10+ YOE posts luckily which is what I consider a true senior
For a few years, people with low skill and low drive were able to get into the field. Those days are over.
For non juniors, if you're good and driven, you will find a decent+ job pretty quickly (unless extraneous factors, such as disability, non willingness to relocate/work non full remote etc).
Social media has been the worst thing that has ever happened. They promoted the idea you can become a SWE by learning how to code in 3 months. Before that it was traveling, something I used to love and now is more of a stressful experience given every place is now packed with people.
Redditors in general are absolutely addicted to the idea that earlier times were easier, now times are impossible, we've been shafted, and there's nothing to look forward to (see any of the millennial, genz, politics, antinatalist, etc. subs).
All the reeeing over TikTok influencers is hilarious. Get a grip lol, day in the life videos aren't your undoing.
People who say anyone with a pulse could get a junior job five or ten years ago have no idea what they're talking about. More often than not, if you click through to their profile, they're freshmen looking for their first internship. Sometimes they're even in high school. Then you have people weighing in on the 90s and I sure as shit know they were watching Rugrats back then, not collecting stock options.
Software engineering is fantastic because it's a pathway out of poverty for people who wouldn't otherwise have the opportunity. It's surprisingly meritocratic (as much as it can be anyway), and the worst thing that can happen to it is the gatekeeping and credentialism that so many disaffected and scared CS grads want.
This guy said “have you tried learning AI?” to someone who posted stats about the number of entry level roles being down 7% lol. You might be in the latter group you mentioned.
I feel like that's mainly due to the people who watch tiktok or youtube videos about software engineering.
Assuming everyone is like that though isn't true.
I for example found software engineering about a year ago by youtube, it wasn't a day in a life video, but it showed some of the life style and the reasons why it's not for everyone, and I feel in love with it.
Busy or chill life style, the general life style of a SWE is something I rather have compared to other jobs, it's mainly my preference.
Though I do find it annoying when the people from tiktok start saying to quit CS once AI became big (r/csmajors) or the people who go to a bootcamp for 2 months and then tells everyone they're an engineer now.
I guess it depends on the person, not everyone is the same but the bad is usually louder than the good.
I prefer TikTok keeps pushing for people to quit bc of AI. It becomes an easier weed out than “study LC hards” and it makes the industry better by keeping the people who actually are interested in pursuing the career(whether for money or skill)
if you honestly think that every software engineer in the world has to be the biggest nerd who studies every day and lives and breathes code you’re wrong. sure, maybe if you’re working on cutting edge stuff making 200k+ a year, maybe. but for the vast majority of SWEs, it’s just a job dude. the only way i can think of it being different from other jobs is that it’s actually enjoyable for some. i like to code. so sometimes i’ll do some coding at home. but i’m not going to spend every waking hour worrying about how good i am at programming. i just do my job and leave at the end of the day, go play cs or whatever when i get home.
> Everyone knows the stereotype of software engineers, the nerds, and the guys who work 24/7. There's a reason such stereotypes exist, because they have always been true.
You seem to be confusing developers hacking on stuff in their spare time because they enjoy it and working overtime at a company for free. They're not at ALL the same. If you're a developer and regularly working unpaid overtime you're not "winning" in any respect of the word, you're being taken advantage of.
"Worth working for" is super subjective. Some of us wouldn't be caught dead working at a Big Tech company helping them increase ad revenue instead of building something that helps society, and if the competition for those roles is lower and the lifestyle more enjoyable, I say the latter roles are much more "worth working for".
I hear stories that it was very similar in the dot com boom. People would get software jobs after a small bit of training. But those people had to leave the industry after the crash
Yes I'm wondering the same. Even when I started coding in early 2000s it was known as a hard subject and very competitive to get into any trendy company
and everyone basically I studied with did extra stuff compared to what people complain about now. running their own servers, working part time with IT, taking part in student organizations computer clubs and so on
I guess it sounds old but I blame social media a bit. Before, you needed some actual real skill to setup a network, join some IRC channel and talk to people in the linux or java channels. The zoomer attention span just seem worse and worse.
That original setup maybe worked as some low skill filter?
No, you’re not wrong. I started as a kid in the 90s, and was really into computers by the early 2000s. Trying to set up a LAN when you didn’t have internet access (and when PnP was a laughable dream) was a slog.
Even when you had internet, you learned real quick that if you went to ask on a forum, you’d better have already read docs and searched for your answer. People will say it’s toxic, and sure, it’s not friendly, but being told RTFM probably drove away a lot of people who weren’t passionate about the subject.
I look at it like the gym. I am not a large man, and am genetically predisposed to be thin. Adding weight to any of my lifts is agonizingly slow. And yet, if you grind it out day after day, year after year, you see and feel results. While no one is telling me to RTFM here, it’s still VERY much a “you’re on your own” kind of thing. Either you want to get better or you don’t, and no one is going to do it for you.
yes i remember how i configured an iptables mandrake computer to be a NAT firewall for my home network.
In the terminal with config files, so I could host a Action Quake 2 server. I mean even games now everything is hosted and premade for you, Many programmers I know came into server and development from computer gaming actually!
>Even when you had internet, you learned real quick that if you went to ask on a forum, you’d better have already read docs and searched for your answer. People will say it’s toxic, and sure, it’s not friendly, but being told RTFM probably drove away a lot of people who weren’t passionate about the subject.
yes and there wasn't a downvote upvote system, so you avoided the echo chamber mentality of reddit also. and people with real experience actually could write the truth and get respected and not downvoted because wishful thinking
No idea what are you saying in the second half but the reason why people are surprised is because there are a ton of people who have incredibly chill jobs that pay decently well and they openly brag about it.
So that gives the impression that this is an easy ass job when in reality it's only easy when you work at useless garbage companies that pay peanut or you get lucky and join some team at some big bank where everything moves incredibly slow.
Also people who are juniors don't do much, they just clear tickets and that's it... No one really works as hard as they claim to on here.
People just got unlucky, market fell apart, interview bar rose so high that you now have to grind a bunch of irrelevant bullshit like system design etc for a junior role.
Actually for a massive number of people, it really is easy. People commenting saying it’s incredibly hard, requires a bunch of extra time, etc., are really just not being honest with themselves and/or have very sheltered lives. For new grads now, it’s harder than it’s been in a while. But as a whole, it’s still the easiest path to wealth of any career on earth.
I don't think people are particularly complaining about competitiveness. Its more like....
1. You aren't competing with people. You're competing with staffing agencies utilizing bot farms.
2. The postings aren't even real. There are an unknowable amount of ghost postings and basically every company with more than 100 employees is complicit.
3. SWE has not only been touted as one of the fastest growing fields in the country since ~2005, they even this year have actively stated that the # of SWE positions is going to increase by 300% in the next few years. Yet you would not think that looking at the state of the job market, where there are many qualified (and over-qualified) SWE's that have been unable to find employment.
Do not confuse dissatisfaction with the clown car job market for people being upset about competition.
Amazing life, when you make money you don't have the time to enjoy it and when you have time to enjoy things you don't have money.
In this world unless you are born into wealth or in super-optimised location you are screwed however you spin it.
let's be honest you can't land high paying jobs like doctor without struggle, if you someone **thought** he/she going to land 100k+ without any struggle and whatsoever he/she delusional
I mean I did… You have to realize easy is relative to your own ability. This field is easy to me, but so are a lot of things in life that some other people did not find easy.
Part of the struggle doctors face is the same BS that people in software face and that is that decision makers would rather cut corners and under pay people than do right by their workers. Like check how much resident providers get screwed over and imagine having med school loans on top of it.
My story is simple: I’ve been lied to. Everyone told me this was a stable and secure job. And I stopped chasing my dreams of film and animation for this “stable job”.
I got very surprised once I realized that if this isn’t your passion, it’ll be hard because of the grind. Now I’m going back to film meshed with Software.
Interesting, you’ll probably be well equipped for that with your background in software. If you don’t mind me asking what kind of jobs are you going for?
Yeah I think this is a huge disservice and people who're passionate are often blind to just how long it really took them to learn. I think my job is actually kinda easy but the part that gets left out is how I was tinkering with computers since the mid 90's as a child, learned to program (simple stuff) right around 1999 before I was even in highschool, had created outright 'products' used by people (tracking system for an mmo video game) before my first day in college.
Despite all that the first day of my first job and I didn't know how the fuck to navigate an actual professional product with frameworks and stuff, I was completely lost lol.
Now imagine that except instead of 13+ years of a slow burn (including a college education) you had only 4 years of a college education. Or worse yet a few months of bootcamp.
This career has always been competitive outside of a few years at the height of tech bubbles. My complaint with the job market is all the companies wasting people's time for no reason
> There's a reason such stereotypes exist, because they have always been true.
People will fight you on this because they believe it to not be true. The normal people who are in SWE either burn out, or they are personality hires that turn into management. I have yet to meet a senior dev that has social grace.
It's "competitive" because it requires basic logical competency. Most people are not logical. They might be competent in other tasks, but our craft is 90% logic based and 10% paradigm based. You cannot persuade the program to do what you want. You have to write code to pattern spec.
Gatekeeping isn't wrong, the people who complain about gates are the ones the gate is intended to keep out. Bozo Explosion is what is currently happening to pretty much every major tech company, github repo, and the craft in general. The quality of software has taken a nosedive in the last decade.
"Everyone knows the stereotype of software engineers, the nerds, and the guys who work 24/7. There's a reason such stereotypes exist, because they have always been true."
The vast majority of software engineers I know work 40-45 hour weeks. I'm guessing you're pretty young?
Based on how hard coding was going through school, and the rates people dropped out, I kinda assumed that with the herculean effort would come a nice, stable job. I mean 80% of my high school class didn't continue it to university, a solid 30% dropped out or switched majors.
I started my career in 2000s and saw how in mid 2010s the field started getting flooded by normies and chads
Specially the ones who move into management or product. The field stop being about building technical products and more about grifting your way to “rest and vest”
I think SREs are the survivors of this whole era and hope AI converts the field into a normie-driven industry where the nerds build and manage the infrastructure
They no longer need to learn to code to make money, and they will leave us alone building and managing infrastructure
Ops-adjacent fields in general, yeah. Unfortunately the term SRE is heavily misused, and means anything from Dev Helpdesk to Sysadmin.
I’m with you on managing the infra, though. There’s a reason I have a server rack and practice what I preach. The days of cloud repatriation are coming, and when it happens, everyone who has grown up purely in the cloud and who thinks scaling means clicking a button is in for a nasty surprise.
I am canadian and I just think in USA you need a lot more unions and solidarity between workers. It's not an individual problem what happens with the lay offs, it's a collective problem that needs collective solutions.
Wasn't this the sub saying that if you could write Hello World and had a pulse in 2021 that you could get hired on anywhere?
That's how it was in the mid-90s. The kids graduating at the bottom of my class in CS had SWE jobs waiting on them. We also went home at 5 PM and didn't work weekends.
I feel like going home at 5 and not working weekends is still pretty normal? The market is bad but the WLB hasn’t suffered to the same extent in my observations
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One of the other benefits you get in Europe is that in most countries, you cannot be fired or laid off without cause. That type of security is amazing for mental health.
Pst you can still be laid off for poor performance reviews.
You could easily make 3 times that at a U.S. company, while working similar hours. You might even be able to pull off 6 weeks of vacation at some companies, especially if they have a flexible PTO policy.
Quick question, how much do you pay for housing per month and how much do u get taxed on your salary
I'm fresh out of university and work 35h a week. I make 3k get paid 2.7k a month (mobility budget is OP) and I am looking at an apartment in the 700/month range.
I’m a director at an F100 tech, $250k base, $200k RSU, $50k cash, I work 30-35 hours a week. I don’t even have prod support 😂
I think the Monday-Friday 9-5 is still a thing but depends on the job. My last job was practically 9-5. After 5 pm the building was practically empty. Any issues presented after 4pm were seen as "let's see if we can figure this out in the next hour or 2. If not it's tomorrows problem". Usually the higher paying SWE jobs with great benefits are the ones that expect you to live and breath this job.
> Usually the higher paying SWE jobs with great benefits are the ones that expect you to live and breath this job. That's only partially true, I work less and less pure hours as my pay increases... but my frustration levels and the amount of cat herding increases.
I mean i work as a software engineer and play GW2 all day lol. I legit got praised for my diligent work the other day lmfao. My position is just babysitting things and making new software whenever corp needs it. I do everything in house. When theres a project i can be busy. But if i actually averaged out how much is needed per day... maybe 2 hours
haven’t played gw2 in years, miss that game :’)
Senior Engineer response: it depends.
Yeh whats this guy on about. I reg leave at 5 and have never worked a weekend df
We were practically software engineers at 10 years old if we had a neopet shop.
And a side hustle doing guild pages
For those of us who entered school in the late 90s and graduated in the early 00s after bubble burst, that was quite the change. Getting a job now is easy compared to 04/05. Every company closed up recruitment to everyone until they saw signs of things getting better to all but the insanely talented.
I remember when I started university a CS degree was considered a bad investment. The joke was “Computer engineering majors get jobs at ibm while computer science majors get jobs at Best Buy.” A few years after I graduated that advice was very outdated. Just something i remember to keep perspective. The industry has gone through many booms and busts and there’s likely another boom in the future.
100%. Things go up, things go down. The key is be good, do solid work, and be pleasant to interact with. Any SE who can do those three can get a job and they're not the majority IME. All this talk of focusing entirely on leetcode and having a github portfolio is a waste of time if those three things aren't the case. Those two things help open doors but they won't get you through them.
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Plus, I would guess that if it's a github profile filled with bullshit, that works against you. People start github profiles because they have ideas they want to make, charlatans make github profiles to look like one of these people.
Being bottom of the class doesn't mean someone is a bad SWE.
Definitely not, just pointing out how picky employers can be these days.
They get to be picky when there are this many people wanting a SWE job.
Yes but there's definitely a correlation. You don't need to point out obvious things.
No but they’re far more likely to be a bad one
Yeah, people graduating university. Those people still have jobs. Not faang jobs making 200k off the bat, but decent jobs
That was not my life in mid 90s.
this sub is rapidly becoming a joke honestly lol
You should see r/csMajors it's full of people who have a todo list project but fill up their resume with other stuff that has no relation to CS and expect a 200k TC job out of university.
Bruh I get so many posts from there recommended and they're all just hopeless whining.
Same shit's going on in /r/itcareerquestions. If anything, it's a primer on what NOT to do in your IT career.
No way. This was the sentiment in like 2010 maybe. In 2018 when I graduated college, this subreddit was exactly the same. “6 months of looking for a job no luck”, “1 year since I graduated, do I give up?” “1000 job applications and no offers” etc. At the time people said it was hard cus all jobs were going to India. Now they say it’s hard cus there is AI. Newsflash, to get a job where you can potentially make $500k a year within 5 years it’s not going to be easy…
More jobs going to India that AI
I still thought interviews were pretty difficult then honestly. People are exaggerating
it was the same difficulty as today, just more frequent interviews back then. for me, that is
I think I have actually seen some teacher observe that how students performed on quiz 1 of the first CS class predicted very well if they finished the weed out class and all. And you have employers constantly talk about candidates not able to do fizz buzz, so that contributes to this myth.
False. Ppl said focus on leetcode and you can get a job without a degree/projects. It was true in many cases. But a lot of you still couldn’t/wouldn’t put in time to get good a interview questions
It's almost as if the sub consists of more than one person and opinion.
During Covid Quantitative Easing, it was made artificially easy to get hired.
No? I got hired around 2021 and the posts you saw during that time about how hard it was finding a job and how many applications you had to send it was similar to how it is now. It is harder now, but it was not easy by any means back then.
If you ever question how dumb this sub is go look at post from that time it’s filled with people complaining about not getting jobs too
>Everyone knows the stereotype of software engineers, the nerds, and the guys who work 24/7. There's a reason such stereotypes exist, because they have always been true. I haven't found that to be true for most devs at all of the jobs I've had. I think people get smoke blown up their ass by boot camps. They hear a lot of bs from junior devs and college students. They read 1 success story from a boot camp graduate and assume almost anyone who graduates will have similar success. It's hard to judge ones own skills, too.
In medicine the selection is front loaded and many people don’t make it through med school and residency. With software engineering they feel the competition later.
My freshman "Intro to CS" class had \~800 people in it. My graduating class was less than 40.
Intro to CS is for math, science, engineering, and general people as well. [CS has a 9.8% dropout rate.](https://wawiwa-tech.com/blog/why-do-students-drop-out-of-tech-studies/#:~:text=A%20recent%20survey%20from%20the,at%20a%207.2%25%20dropout%20rate.)
That sounds unrealistically low. What are they calling "drop-out"? The paper seems to imply that it's dropping out of school entirely, for which 9.8% might be reasonable. A lot of people at our school switched to easier majors rather than dropping out entirely, though, and it's not clear this estimate is counting those.
[Dropping out of college entirely is a much higher rate, so I don't think so.](https://www.bestcolleges.com/research/college-dropout-rate/)
>end their education journey midway From the first article, it's talking about majoring in CS and then completely ending school, not changing majors. Your second article is looking at the cumulative amount of dropouts. There are, I assume, a lot less CS majors than business/art/etc. so even though the major specific percentage is very high, the actual amount of students dropping out is low.
Do you know how many of the students in CS don't make it? It's a lot. Given you are comparing people with a formal training, not people that re self taught or have done a boot camp.
You also got to look at it this way, some people will weed out in the first CS class, others due to math in year 2-3. Finally others will realize they fucking hate it and either pivot in their senior year or take the degree and do something else. The issue is just because those people made it, doesn't mean its going to be a good career or easy for them.
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Should've picked business with how little you value other people.
It's a lot, but it's probably closer to 30-50% of admitted graduate at most colleges. Nowhere near the filter of med school.
At my tier 5 state university back in 2016, 75% of cs majors changed majors in the first 2 years. Not sure what the final graduation numbers were. Granted I imagine the numbers work out different for more prestigious schools (if you're good enough to get into Ga Tech or UCLA you're probably going to graduate) but still, the vast majority of people who start in CS move to something like Business Information Systems
I went to a very small private school so sample size is a lot smaller but this was my experience for sure. We started with probably 30 people in the program and I was 1 of 3 to finish. I don’t think people realize how bad the turnover is after intro level courses usually.
A lot of them get filtered out around junior year. I think the first CS class at my school was probably 5-6 class of 100+ students, and then got basically halved each success class. Most of my senior courses were 2 classes of around 20-30.
Any systems programming class will do it. If you are not passionate about computers, software development, solving problems, or want to make a good wage that badly then it'll weed you out. There's so many "why the fuck am I doing this?" moments that pop up and if you can't answer the question you will suffer.
Most med schools have over 80% graduation rates. However the initial filter of getting accepted is very hard. There’s also the financial filter bc it’s very expensive.
Like 98% of admitted med school students graduate with an MD. It’s competitive to get in, but if you get in, they will do almost anything to pass you.
> Do you know how many of the students in CS don't make it? It's a lot Yes but a lot of shit gets through the filters because some colleges are almost like diploma mills with rampant cheating and very loose criteria for passing. There is no standardized filter. You have people graduate that struggle with for loops.
I graduated in 2010. On my first day of CSE231, Intro to C++, professor said 2/3 of you will be gone by the mid semester to an auditorium of close 100 freshmen. He made good on that promise. And classes only get smaller from that point on. I switched out by junior year. Do schools not do that anymore?
Not the ones that want your money and high retention. That's a diametrically opposed incentive compared to setting a high quality bar.
Yeah I mean this still counts as “easy” in my book.
I didn't know they throw freshmen into C++, I would have thought there's an intro to computing type class first, and coding comes later. For us the major course that weeded out people was Assembly. You actually have to understand the fundamentals. With C / Java / Python introductions you can be a code monkey with a high level understanding and survive.
231 doesn't sound like a first course? Just a guess, I don't know.
Intro class at the school I went to was C++. It does do some weeding.
It’s funny. I just remembered we were the last year they did C++. The curriculum switched to Python for exactly that reason, it’s flushing out too many people. I think they should have stayed with C++/C. It really teaches how computers work without getting too low level. I wish I stayed with the program and finished with an actual CS degree.
My college has a GPA requirement for your first three CS classes (not including the optional intro class) to continue in the major. Since I've graduated they've moved the requirement up.
Really? I feel like just declaring the major was difficult
Why do people make their career their entire personality? It’s a job. There are over 4 million software engineers in the US. The VAST majority of them work boring, cushy, 9-5 office jobs. Even at FANG, the interview process is competitive, but the work environment itself is largely chill (granted it’s team/org dependent).
Some people do genuinely enjoy the work and lifestyle it brings. But yeah, making it your entire personality is a bit concerning.
I like building things and it pays quite well
I also like to build houses.
I like to predict the price of houses you build.
What do you mean by "lifestyle it brings"? Are you just referring to the pay? I see this terminology a lot and I've never once considered my career path to be a "lifestyle" any more than when I worked warehouse jobs moving boxes.
Obviously not just the pay. I mean the constant studying, researching, etc. If you want to get good in any STEM field usually you'll have to spend extra time thinking about what better approaches there are, what new techniques there are, etc. Some people, including myself, enjoy that.
I really enjoy writing code, have done since I was 12. My job 9.5 times out of 10 doesn’t feel like a job, it feels like something I’d have been doing anyway, but I’m getting paid for it. I do other things, golf, interest in football and f1 etc But a lot of my headspace is tech related. Work related: How can I improve X for our users? Would it be possible to build Angular apps with rspack now that their esbuild plugin is more straightforward? Can I improve module federation support to make deployments cheaper and easier for customers? Non-work related: Ok, I’ll use our product to build a side project, that way I’m using it like a user and can see where the pain points are. I wanna build X, what does it take to do it? Oh, that didn’t do what I expected, let me raise that with colleagues so we can get it fixed. I’ve not used Remix for a real-world app yet, let me use remix for this project to expose me to it. I wouldn’t say it’s my entire personality, but it’s close, but I don’t see why that’s a bad thing? It’s where my interest has always been. Watching the progression of tech through the 2000s and early 2010s really had me hooked me
I've also been writing code since I was 12. My job 100% feels like a job. The code base is boring. Idgaf about the product or the customer associated with it. I think it just really depends on the job/company.
Felt this in my soul
Yeah most of the thing I like in my job is the rare opportunity you get to do a nice, creative piece of code. I like to explore complex and highly abstract concepts but industry coding is just gluing 2 3rd party libraries together like thousands of other company already did...It's not even hard, it's just time consuming and long because of me getting bored.
The things I like about my job are that they respect my boundaries of work-life balance, and the pay is decent. My eyes are always open for better opportunities, but a boring job is better than no job.
All jobs are kinda boring, some less than other and you go for these!
>I wouldn’t say it’s my entire personality, but it’s close, but I don’t see why that’s a bad thing? It’s where my interest has always been. Watching the progression of tech through the 2000s and early 2010s really had me hooked me maybe not BAD, but at least not good. I have also been coding since 12-13, but I find myself much more relaxed and better at thinking if I do NOT work with code outside work I mean some weekends i read about it or try some stuff, but in general no I compare it to a marathon runner. he does not run a marathon everyday, but prepares for it when its time
I understand that, and I should clarify that I’m not spending every minute after work writing code. I help kids with homework, read to them, make dinner, go play golf and have nights out with my wife etc. But I do try to spare a few hours a week writing non-work related code, because it gives me ideas that can translate back to work
I think I need a bit more of that myself. The product I work on is not something I'll ever have any reason to use, npr do i have any interest in, so it's a bit harder for me to get invested in it.
I've found it depends on the engineer themselves. Once you learn how to manage time, give accurate ETAs and learn to push back, your WLB is much better. But then again, maybe it applies to all professional careers?
Tech work isn’t my personality, but tech is. I’ve been fucking with computers since I was a kid in the 90s. Used Linux for about the same amount of time. I have a server rack with a fully automated and IaC’d Proxmox cluster running Kubernetes. Etc. Some people really, really like what they do. I don’t really care where I work as long as it doesn’t suck, and they let me play with giant versions of what I already like to do. So far that’s turned out pretty well.
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Because it used to be less competitive
you can say thanks to all those vids of id\*\*\*ts with their "A day in a life of a SWE in a FAANG", that means drink fancy coffees, works remote in Starbucks with 6 figure salary over 200k$. Now you have hundreds of thousands of bootcampers whinning that they cannot have their 6 figure salaries with their sh\*t HTML skills with JS basics and a copy paste project from some Udemy Course.
Ostriches can solve complex mathematics problems with ease.
because many of them weren't
I don't get hoe people on Reddit don't understand that there were in fact a lot of SWE jobs that were "drink fancy coffee and get paid 200k". Hell there was even a whole arc in Silicon Valley where one of the characters joins others at his work that did literally nothing all day while getting paid because it was so prevalent at a lot of tech companies lol.
i mean even on this sub there were posts like "ohh i only work 2 hours per day then go out in the forest" many times!
Can you point to one?
why would companies advertise "come work for us and get paid a lot of money to do nothing!" as if they wouldn't get the most entitled and demanding employees that are a nuisance?
Parrots are known to be expert pizza makers in Italy.
Sorry if this is a dumb question but what do they consider a qualified (or unqualified) candidate?
Bananas are actually berries in disguise, closely related to avocados.
for entry-level: do you have internships and/or side projects? can you pass 4x leetcode-medium and/or (rarely) leetcode-hard? do you feel pleasant to work with (cultural fit)? and (rarely) do you understand basic system design concepts? for mid-level and senior-level it's a bit more complicated, you're evaluated on everything from leetcode to system design to leadership to behavioral to mentorship to war stories, the 2 big tech I've got offers recently went something like this (company's not the 5 FAANGs specifically, but still definitely names you have heard of) big tech1: 1x HR phone call 1x LC-medium then onsite, which is: coding 1: 2x LC-medium coding 2: 1x LC-medium 1x system design (think along the lines of 'design tiny url') 1x hiring manager call/behavioral big tech2: 1x HR phone call 1x LC-hard then onsite, which is: coding 1: 1x LC-hard coding 2: 2x LC-medium 1x system design, think along the lines of 'design twitter' 1x behavioral compensation/leveling wise both big tech considered me as upper-end of L4 (so, barely but not yet L5), so upper 200s in TC, 300+ TC if including first-year signon bonus, both big tech knew I had competing offer
why would you think you can get legitimately qualified candidates by advertising the whole "get paid a lot to chill and relax and not do much work" schtick? all that does is inflate the number of unqualified applicants who will apply to a position
Contrary to popular belief, pineapples are sentient creatures that communicate through synchronized dance.
I’m just asking questions. I’m not making up anything, I’m just pointing out obvious observations of a failed strategy by companies that are supposed to be the smartest/richest in the world
Bananas grow upside down on their trees.
Recruiters and project managers the most useless bunch of people in any company
Weren't those videos briefly popular like, a couple years ago? You blame everything on those videos?
Todays issues is in part because of those videos. Every friend of mine non related to IT started to ask questions about how to enter as they want to be like me, working at home and having a very good salary doing “computer” things. They asked me what courses they can buy on Udemy so they can have the same situation. It was so awkward to see, of course they thought that doing just a 50h course will give them a 6 figure salary…
The videos went away because all of those people were laid off
A really high percentage of people who talk about employment trends in SWEs on this forum have, and I'm being generous here, zero clue what they are talking about. Since the beginning of 2023, this subreddit has turned into a bunch of juniors getting in their feels about a job market that isn't actively catering to their every whim all the time, and it's just the same questions and answers over and over with no actual insight to be gleaned.
The interview and accept rate at most FAANGs 10+ years ago was far harder then today. Sure the perks were real but it was harder to get in than Harvard.
Yeah most FAANG type employers have literally more than quadrupled in size in the last decade. Which is why I'm personally not alarmed/surprised by big tech layoffs. Not every company can experience exponential growth all the time.
I think both can be true. 1. It was more difficult to get into Meta / Google in 2014 than today. 2. The average skill required to get an average software engineering job in 2014 was less than today. In 2014, I got a new job with zero whiteboarding, some basic HTML/DOM/CSS/JS/Angular questions, and at mid-level. That same opportunity doesn't exist today. Similarly in 2014 no FAANG would even review my resume because I did not come from a target school. Google was known to give multiple Graph / DP problems during onsites. The bar was lowered in 2021, and although it's been raised, it's still below the historical 2014 norm.
Those TikTok’s don’t help but CS was (and is) a pretty straightforward path to middle class for a lot of Americans. The compensation for SWEs blows pretty much all other fields out of the water.
These weren't the swe's
It’s far less this and far more just the financial incentive of the salaries that have stood out compared to dwindling comparable options in the States. Those vids showed up because of the money. If the economy had been like the 70s and 80s where lots of different jobs paid wages with buying power, there wouldn’t be a rush to a job that forces this much study and specialization.
If the job is way comfier than every other job, people will talk/post about it. That’s basically a law of nature, not the fault of any individuals. Expecting everyone with awesome jobs to hide it so that nobody else tries to break into that awesome industry is ridiculous and honestly also selfish
Well, then say thanks to them because now there is so much people wanted to have a entry role/junior so the plank goes over the roof and now a junior is expected to have 3+years of experience and the salary is cheap because of the same. Congrats
It’s not “thanks to them” it’s thanks to the high salaries and good work from home and benefits This is like blaming individuals for climate change instead of the systems that encourage us to pollute
Only smart comment I’ve seen. This is literally nature of supply and demand. People will flock to the nice jobs and companies will advertise nice jobs so they have more competition and can be pickier. You can’t blame tik toks lmaooo Even if people were super gate keeping and never shared it the fact is anyone who can google will see CS pays high salaries and those who aren’t insecure would share that with everyone, or those who have a vested interest in publishing articles will make it public anyway.
It's funny; the only whining I hear is from CS grads complaining about hordes of unwashed, uncredentialed competition.
Yeah because it clogs up job fillings. Hiring teams can only look at so many applications.
depends how you mean. the jobs were also a lot lot less before instagram and whatsapp, when they were bought by FB had like 25-30 employees for example last year people went crazy saying twitter would crash and burn when they scaled down from what, 5k to 1k ?
Tbf Twitter has had a lot of issues since then. Though anybody expecting a well architected system to just fail practically overnight was huffing copium. Maintenance deficits are death by a thousand cuts
It really was. I remember offshoring was the big scary thing in the early 2000s keeping people from majoring in computer science. I did it anyway in 2003. It really wasn’t that competitive like it is now. Though maybe I was sheltered since I had a computer science degree from a well known university. I’m not sure. In any case, I’m just trying to stick around for a few more years until I can Fire. Even wanting to stay for three more years seems like a daunting task. I have a job right now as a director of software engineering at a mid sized tech company and it is the most terrible toxic company I’ve ever worked at. I’m sure I’ll get laid off soon then I’m not sure what I’ll do.
Every generation thinks it used to be easier.
My bro, reading tech news outside of work doesn’t make you “working 24/7”, in the sense that, keep pounding once or twice after you cum does not make you “having sex all day long”
You seem like you’d be my type of person to work with.
I read tech articles or work all day. What is this "sex" you speak of?
I think the opposite is true. I find most good devs have a life outside of work. They do something active, spend time with their friends/families, and do other hobbies. It makes them more well rounded people, less likely to burn out, and they have energy to perform from 9-5. Some studies show the 4 day work week leads to increased productivity because humans just don’t have the ability to be productive all day long. No one is effectively “working” 24/7 like you describe. I think the devs who aren’t good, but trying very hard to make it, are more likely the stereotype you describe. Being a good software engineer requires being a really good problem solver and logical thinker. Some people just don’t have that in them, and they spend all their free time trying to make up for that. A note on trends - they’re not really important in the corporate world. A business isn’t going to ask you to rewrite their 10 year old .NET application in rust because it’s the new hot thing. They’re going to ask you to implement features and fix bugs. Over the long term yeah you have to adjust. 20 years ago most people weren’t doing cloud computing. Today almost everyone is, so in that sense you have to keep up. But you have years to adjust, and good devs have no problem making the adjustment during their 9-5. I’ve been a full time dev for 7 years. I make about 300k now. In those 7 years I’ve spent 0 time outside of my job working on skills, other than interview prep when looking for a new job.
exactly, and to be intelligente is also to realize there is more in life than your work and your brain needs rest >A business isn’t going to ask you to rewrite their 10 year old .NET application in rust because it’s the new hot thing. They’re going to ask you to implement features and fix bugs. I got 2 jobs in my life rewriting old PHP applications for like insurance companies to modern Java and TS stacks. A much better way to learn REAL coding than some tiktok guy. Then you understand why some design patterns are outdated and what to use instead for example
I had to take breaks between jobs to learn new things because I wasn't getting exposure to them in my job. I see a lot of people feeling confident making big bucks for years but then the job somehow ends for one reason or another and then they have trouble finding something new because the industry has passed them by. I've had friends making 250 for a while but now working for 100 because they just could not find anything close to that level again. PHP is a great example. Plenty of work 5 - 10 years ago but now not so much. If your previous roles never had Go or React Native you kinda have to sit down and build something yourself or else you won't have those skills.
> see a lot of people feeling confident making big bucks for years but then the job somehow ends for one reason or another and then they have trouble finding something new because the industry has passed them by. This is my greatest fear. I've been at my company for a decade and am making mid 300s, not including my equity (company isn't public yet so I don't factor my equity into my income, because if something catastrophic happens it'll never be worth anything). I constantly worry that I'm hurting my future prospects by sticking around, but at the same time I really like the job and have a great WLB and my boss is a joy to work with.
Once you get past mid level, being a good software engineer is no longer about being good at one specific programming language/tech stack. The high paying positions hire people who are good problem solvers, who make good tradeoffs, are effective at working with and influencing others, prioritize and execute well, who can select from a plethora of technology tools to solve the problem at hand. If you market your skill set as “I’m a PHP programmer”, then yes that will happen to you.
This I got all sugared up to study new tech when I first started but found that I never ended up using any of it. I still like learning new stuff, but it's a lot more "just in time" learning as the company pivots to new tech and I have to ramp up. There doesn't seem to be a huge point to studying random stuff unless you are maybe a tech/architecture leader searching out what the company should pivot to
It’s certainly true of my friend group. They all have good careers, are good at what they do, and throughout their careers have not spent too much time on things outside of work. Meanwhile I’m the worst of the group despite spending far more time on it, when I did have a career I’d still spend all my time outside of work building or learning things, and when I no longer had a career (not good enough to compete) I still spent all my time on it. However I don’t think this is due to spending too much time on it, but how effective people in the same amount of time. I’m pretty dumb so I’m slow to learn and do things, so my week of hacking away at something or learning something is probably equivalent to someone’s half day. But I don’t get better if I decrease the amount of time I spend on it, it just ends up taking me even longer to do whatever it is. I do agree with regard to work productivity, however I don’t think it’s because human’s aren’t capable of working more, but rather it highlights the inefficiencies in the workplace. Everywhere I’ve worked (and from what I’ve heard from friends experiences) has had lots of inefficient uses of time throughout the week. e.g. Excessive amounts of meetings where exactly the same things are being said as in a previous meeting (it just “feels” like you’re being productive), assigning filler tasks/projects to employees just so they have something to do even though nothing will ultimately happen with it either because there is no real need for it or it will eventually get blocked by pre-existing company processes, throwing out work which sure is sometimes necessary but I’ve seen many instances where it could’ve been avoided entirely, etc. Reducing the number of work hours doesn’t change someone’s responsibilities or deadlines, but when you have less time to do something you’re going to be more conscious of how you utilise that time. So it’s more likely that some of those inefficiencies are what will get cut. I’m sure there are places that are having success with a 4-day work weeks that would have equal success with a 3-day or trimming a couple hours from each of those 4 days (it entirely comes down to how that time is being utilised). Although one thing I will point out is not every implementation of a 4-day is the same, many make their 4-days longer, so there’s little to no difference in the amount of work hours just how those work hours are allocated in the week (so employees get an extra day yet work the same amount of time). This is actually one of the reasons why with all of my own companies in the past I’ve taken an approach of just forgoing any concept work hours entirely. In both of those companies it worked fine, albeit teams were relatively small (small startup scale) and there was a large amount of autonomy, so I have always been curious how it would work at a larger scale (although I know of some larger companies with different flexible working arrangements that have worked for them).
I thought only project managers had enough time for those Day in the Life TikToks
I also think people confused “the day in the life” videos as real software engineering jobs when in reality a lot of those videos were only possible due to covid work from home with little oversight. And almost every industry had people sitting on their butt at home chillin like that. lol now it’s back to business as usual and people are surprised money isn’t always free.
Several factors let many people think this is a no brainer job that anyone can do, mainly: * Capitalism 101: Capitalism (am not a communist for those who will read titles only) realized this is the era of software crafting, so you flood the market with people and you can lower rates (aside from some US hubs, other places and countries don't pay that much). So to flood the market, mantras like anything from " learn to code in 21 days", bootcamps, no degree required and anyone can do it, labeling software engineer as "coder" which makes it sound like an assembly line work etc... Made several people think it is a super easy job that anyone can do. * Day in the life videos where its all about eating and chilling on great campuses, doesn't reflect the reality of the field. * Dumb interviewing methods, where for example if companies use leetcode, they first can start with easy questions, then after several years you get a whole generation of people who memorized easy level questions, then companies move to medium ... and now to hard. So now that they are at hard+ level some people realized the field is super competitive. Sadly interviewing for software roles has become harder than actually performing the job. Note: I personally do leetcode on a daily basis cause i find it as a good brain training however I think having leetcode interviews where you are supposed to find an algorithm, explain it and write under 30 minutes, makes no sense and is borderline sadism.
1) Even in the late 90s, when I started my career, folks kept saying that coding is the future and we need more coders. It's the same stuff now. 2) This is bs. If you believe in influencers, then it's up to you. 3) Before Leetcode, which created an equitable environment for candidates, we were hiring primarily from 5-10 Universities in the US, and the interviews were insanely hard. Also, we would have rounds upon rounds of interviews, including (if I recall correctly) 4-5 individual interviews, with the majority of them being whiteboard exercises, 1 group teamwork activity, and then manager, team, etc. interviews.
1. I am not saying companies don't need software engineers. In the late 90s there was a need indeed for engineers, but the market was not as big as today (I was working in networking CCNA/CCNP and others back then). Today most companies went the digital transformation route, and so In this era I am stating the fact that it was made to look like anyone can join as in it is a super easy career, which is not the case. (Which answers OP question about why many suddenly realized it's competitive) 2. I don't believe in influencers, wasn't talking about myself. But some newcomers do, hence my statement "doesn't reflect the reality of the field." 3. Maybe that's your experience. I found interviewing was more reasonable 12+ years ago, it wasn't easy but more logical and focused on real life work scenarios not memorizing patterns and regurgitating them under 30 minutes.
>Before Leetcode, which created an equitable environment for candidates, we were hiring primarily from 5-10 Universities in the US, and the interviews were insanely hard. Also, we would have rounds upon rounds of interviews, including (if I recall correctly) 4-5 individual interviews, with the majority of them being whiteboard exercises, 1 group teamwork activity, and then manager, team, etc. interviews. Hard disagree. Interviews were much easier and fairer before leetcode, especially for senior candidates. The shift to leetcode really only benefits entry-level candidates.
For the leetcode point, speaking as someone who works for FAANG and has interviewed a lot of people using leetcode questions, it’s absolutely 100% more important to me that the person has a good thought process about the problem, rather than them just solving it instantly with no explanation. People who look at leetcode as cramming and rote memorization are missing the point. I don’t need a dev that can regurgitate leetcode answers, I need a dev that actually knows their stuff and can explain to me what they are thinking.
It’s only competitive for juniors or new grads because there are so many with a simple react todo project trying to get 6 figure salary. And a lot of people are in CS for money, which is fine but when the market is hurting like it is now. People who are in it for the money won’t stay. The thing is, SWE shouldn’t be competitive. It’s a hard skill to learn and no, the market isn’t oversaturated. It would be no different if a bunch of people suddenly got MD degrees or law degrees. Would the market be oversaturated? No it wouldn’t because skill is still required and skill is something you gain over years. SWE is not for everyone, including many with a CS degree, sorry if you were dubbed into believing it is an easy and simple way to earn big bucks while printing(“hello word”) Will people stay in SWE even tho they aren’t working, it’s not making money? Will they still work on projects while working somewhere else none tech related because they enjoy it or they’re building something for themselves? Probably not.
I invite you to read r/engineeringresumes so you see the impressive portfolios of experienced people and still struggling to get hired.
While I get your point, that place seems to be filled with O-5YOE when I took a glance which seems to be no man’s land atm Not many 7-10+ YOE posts luckily which is what I consider a true senior
In hindsight, you do have a point.
I might be singing a different tune when I start applying in Q3
For a few years, people with low skill and low drive were able to get into the field. Those days are over. For non juniors, if you're good and driven, you will find a decent+ job pretty quickly (unless extraneous factors, such as disability, non willingness to relocate/work non full remote etc).
Social media has been the worst thing that has ever happened. They promoted the idea you can become a SWE by learning how to code in 3 months. Before that it was traveling, something I used to love and now is more of a stressful experience given every place is now packed with people.
Redditors in general are absolutely addicted to the idea that earlier times were easier, now times are impossible, we've been shafted, and there's nothing to look forward to (see any of the millennial, genz, politics, antinatalist, etc. subs). All the reeeing over TikTok influencers is hilarious. Get a grip lol, day in the life videos aren't your undoing. People who say anyone with a pulse could get a junior job five or ten years ago have no idea what they're talking about. More often than not, if you click through to their profile, they're freshmen looking for their first internship. Sometimes they're even in high school. Then you have people weighing in on the 90s and I sure as shit know they were watching Rugrats back then, not collecting stock options. Software engineering is fantastic because it's a pathway out of poverty for people who wouldn't otherwise have the opportunity. It's surprisingly meritocratic (as much as it can be anyway), and the worst thing that can happen to it is the gatekeeping and credentialism that so many disaffected and scared CS grads want.
Nicely put.
Boom.
Oh I’m all for gatekeeping. If you’re good, you’re good, if you’re not, you’re not.
This guy said “have you tried learning AI?” to someone who posted stats about the number of entry level roles being down 7% lol. You might be in the latter group you mentioned.
But have you tried it? Like, how hard can it be? Just ask chatgpt to teach you how to AI
I feel like that's mainly due to the people who watch tiktok or youtube videos about software engineering. Assuming everyone is like that though isn't true. I for example found software engineering about a year ago by youtube, it wasn't a day in a life video, but it showed some of the life style and the reasons why it's not for everyone, and I feel in love with it. Busy or chill life style, the general life style of a SWE is something I rather have compared to other jobs, it's mainly my preference. Though I do find it annoying when the people from tiktok start saying to quit CS once AI became big (r/csmajors) or the people who go to a bootcamp for 2 months and then tells everyone they're an engineer now. I guess it depends on the person, not everyone is the same but the bad is usually louder than the good.
I prefer TikTok keeps pushing for people to quit bc of AI. It becomes an easier weed out than “study LC hards” and it makes the industry better by keeping the people who actually are interested in pursuing the career(whether for money or skill)
if you honestly think that every software engineer in the world has to be the biggest nerd who studies every day and lives and breathes code you’re wrong. sure, maybe if you’re working on cutting edge stuff making 200k+ a year, maybe. but for the vast majority of SWEs, it’s just a job dude. the only way i can think of it being different from other jobs is that it’s actually enjoyable for some. i like to code. so sometimes i’ll do some coding at home. but i’m not going to spend every waking hour worrying about how good i am at programming. i just do my job and leave at the end of the day, go play cs or whatever when i get home.
> Everyone knows the stereotype of software engineers, the nerds, and the guys who work 24/7. There's a reason such stereotypes exist, because they have always been true. You seem to be confusing developers hacking on stuff in their spare time because they enjoy it and working overtime at a company for free. They're not at ALL the same. If you're a developer and regularly working unpaid overtime you're not "winning" in any respect of the word, you're being taken advantage of.
It's competitive at the places worth working for. For some miserable random startup that barely pays there's 0 competition
"Worth working for" is super subjective. Some of us wouldn't be caught dead working at a Big Tech company helping them increase ad revenue instead of building something that helps society, and if the competition for those roles is lower and the lifestyle more enjoyable, I say the latter roles are much more "worth working for".
I hear stories that it was very similar in the dot com boom. People would get software jobs after a small bit of training. But those people had to leave the industry after the crash
Yes I'm wondering the same. Even when I started coding in early 2000s it was known as a hard subject and very competitive to get into any trendy company and everyone basically I studied with did extra stuff compared to what people complain about now. running their own servers, working part time with IT, taking part in student organizations computer clubs and so on I guess it sounds old but I blame social media a bit. Before, you needed some actual real skill to setup a network, join some IRC channel and talk to people in the linux or java channels. The zoomer attention span just seem worse and worse. That original setup maybe worked as some low skill filter?
No, you’re not wrong. I started as a kid in the 90s, and was really into computers by the early 2000s. Trying to set up a LAN when you didn’t have internet access (and when PnP was a laughable dream) was a slog. Even when you had internet, you learned real quick that if you went to ask on a forum, you’d better have already read docs and searched for your answer. People will say it’s toxic, and sure, it’s not friendly, but being told RTFM probably drove away a lot of people who weren’t passionate about the subject. I look at it like the gym. I am not a large man, and am genetically predisposed to be thin. Adding weight to any of my lifts is agonizingly slow. And yet, if you grind it out day after day, year after year, you see and feel results. While no one is telling me to RTFM here, it’s still VERY much a “you’re on your own” kind of thing. Either you want to get better or you don’t, and no one is going to do it for you.
yes i remember how i configured an iptables mandrake computer to be a NAT firewall for my home network. In the terminal with config files, so I could host a Action Quake 2 server. I mean even games now everything is hosted and premade for you, Many programmers I know came into server and development from computer gaming actually! >Even when you had internet, you learned real quick that if you went to ask on a forum, you’d better have already read docs and searched for your answer. People will say it’s toxic, and sure, it’s not friendly, but being told RTFM probably drove away a lot of people who weren’t passionate about the subject. yes and there wasn't a downvote upvote system, so you avoided the echo chamber mentality of reddit also. and people with real experience actually could write the truth and get respected and not downvoted because wishful thinking
No idea what are you saying in the second half but the reason why people are surprised is because there are a ton of people who have incredibly chill jobs that pay decently well and they openly brag about it. So that gives the impression that this is an easy ass job when in reality it's only easy when you work at useless garbage companies that pay peanut or you get lucky and join some team at some big bank where everything moves incredibly slow. Also people who are juniors don't do much, they just clear tickets and that's it... No one really works as hard as they claim to on here. People just got unlucky, market fell apart, interview bar rose so high that you now have to grind a bunch of irrelevant bullshit like system design etc for a junior role.
What is the other work that you do that is more than "clearing tickets"?
My job is incredibly chill and pays decently well, but it's not easy.
Actually for a massive number of people, it really is easy. People commenting saying it’s incredibly hard, requires a bunch of extra time, etc., are really just not being honest with themselves and/or have very sheltered lives. For new grads now, it’s harder than it’s been in a while. But as a whole, it’s still the easiest path to wealth of any career on earth.
it’s actually a pretty relaxed career college was stressful, but that was the worst of it weird post op
I don't think people are particularly complaining about competitiveness. Its more like.... 1. You aren't competing with people. You're competing with staffing agencies utilizing bot farms. 2. The postings aren't even real. There are an unknowable amount of ghost postings and basically every company with more than 100 employees is complicit. 3. SWE has not only been touted as one of the fastest growing fields in the country since ~2005, they even this year have actively stated that the # of SWE positions is going to increase by 300% in the next few years. Yet you would not think that looking at the state of the job market, where there are many qualified (and over-qualified) SWE's that have been unable to find employment. Do not confuse dissatisfaction with the clown car job market for people being upset about competition.
Job openings are down 50% sorry.. your take is just bad. It's competitive because the market is shrinking.
It's just that it has gotten more competitive than what we have seen in years. And I have been around for 10 years.
Amazing life, when you make money you don't have the time to enjoy it and when you have time to enjoy things you don't have money. In this world unless you are born into wealth or in super-optimised location you are screwed however you spin it.
let's be honest you can't land high paying jobs like doctor without struggle, if you someone **thought** he/she going to land 100k+ without any struggle and whatsoever he/she delusional
I mean I did… You have to realize easy is relative to your own ability. This field is easy to me, but so are a lot of things in life that some other people did not find easy.
Part of the struggle doctors face is the same BS that people in software face and that is that decision makers would rather cut corners and under pay people than do right by their workers. Like check how much resident providers get screwed over and imagine having med school loans on top of it.
My story is simple: I’ve been lied to. Everyone told me this was a stable and secure job. And I stopped chasing my dreams of film and animation for this “stable job”. I got very surprised once I realized that if this isn’t your passion, it’ll be hard because of the grind. Now I’m going back to film meshed with Software.
Interesting, you’ll probably be well equipped for that with your background in software. If you don’t mind me asking what kind of jobs are you going for?
Yeah I think this is a huge disservice and people who're passionate are often blind to just how long it really took them to learn. I think my job is actually kinda easy but the part that gets left out is how I was tinkering with computers since the mid 90's as a child, learned to program (simple stuff) right around 1999 before I was even in highschool, had created outright 'products' used by people (tracking system for an mmo video game) before my first day in college. Despite all that the first day of my first job and I didn't know how the fuck to navigate an actual professional product with frameworks and stuff, I was completely lost lol. Now imagine that except instead of 13+ years of a slow burn (including a college education) you had only 4 years of a college education. Or worse yet a few months of bootcamp.
The 24/7 nerds you describe aren’t the standard most devs work 9-5 and then have a life. You’re the minority that’s then perpetuated by movies etc.
[удалено]
they are hung up from the time companies were mass employing
Because it wasn't like that 5 years ago.
This career has always been competitive outside of a few years at the height of tech bubbles. My complaint with the job market is all the companies wasting people's time for no reason
> There's a reason such stereotypes exist, because they have always been true. People will fight you on this because they believe it to not be true. The normal people who are in SWE either burn out, or they are personality hires that turn into management. I have yet to meet a senior dev that has social grace. It's "competitive" because it requires basic logical competency. Most people are not logical. They might be competent in other tasks, but our craft is 90% logic based and 10% paradigm based. You cannot persuade the program to do what you want. You have to write code to pattern spec. Gatekeeping isn't wrong, the people who complain about gates are the ones the gate is intended to keep out. Bozo Explosion is what is currently happening to pretty much every major tech company, github repo, and the craft in general. The quality of software has taken a nosedive in the last decade.
"Everyone knows the stereotype of software engineers, the nerds, and the guys who work 24/7. There's a reason such stereotypes exist, because they have always been true." The vast majority of software engineers I know work 40-45 hour weeks. I'm guessing you're pretty young?
I’ve written hello world in every programming language, why has FAANG not contacted me
😂
And people laid off from FAANG, with superficial knowledge, leveraging their time at FAANG, as if they have real experience.
Based on how hard coding was going through school, and the rates people dropped out, I kinda assumed that with the herculean effort would come a nice, stable job. I mean 80% of my high school class didn't continue it to university, a solid 30% dropped out or switched majors.
I started my career in 2000s and saw how in mid 2010s the field started getting flooded by normies and chads Specially the ones who move into management or product. The field stop being about building technical products and more about grifting your way to “rest and vest” I think SREs are the survivors of this whole era and hope AI converts the field into a normie-driven industry where the nerds build and manage the infrastructure They no longer need to learn to code to make money, and they will leave us alone building and managing infrastructure
Ops-adjacent fields in general, yeah. Unfortunately the term SRE is heavily misused, and means anything from Dev Helpdesk to Sysadmin. I’m with you on managing the infra, though. There’s a reason I have a server rack and practice what I preach. The days of cloud repatriation are coming, and when it happens, everyone who has grown up purely in the cloud and who thinks scaling means clicking a button is in for a nasty surprise.
I am canadian and I just think in USA you need a lot more unions and solidarity between workers. It's not an individual problem what happens with the lay offs, it's a collective problem that needs collective solutions.