I'm 35. I just finished my bachelor in january. I've been teaching python, java, springboot and devops in a small college for the past 4 years. I thought that would give me an edge on an allrr3ady strained junior market at the time. But the junior roles have all but dried up now. I've been looking for almost 6 months now and I've had several good talks. All are enthousiastic about me, but none are currently hiring juniors.

Now I've gotten an offer for a Test Engineer Training. Its similar pay to what I get now as teacher, which is not a lot, but it has better secondary conditions. I might be able to negotiate better pay because of my experience and that would make the offer a lot better.

I do still love progammming though. My dream was to start in a larfe enterprise organistion, work with springboot and grow into lead or rachitect. I woory that if I choose for testing, that I will not be able to grow into a fun and challe ging role. On the other side, I do think that testing and data have better prospects in the current AI turbulence.

How do yous feel about testing as a career? Willl that be the end of my non-existing SWE career? or are all tgese roles maybe more relevant and related in a more fundamental way than I can imagine?

Hi! I'm currently hunting for a new job and a really really good sounding place came along, but I'm having a hard time deciding whether it's actually a good idea because my existing job is already pretty cushy, so a switch might not be worth it. Would love to collect a few more perspectives on this!

My current situation:
I live in Germany. The company I currently work at is my first workplace ever. I started there in late 2021, did my apprenticeship in 1.5 years and was taken as a Junior in early 2023. The economy wasn't great at the time, so I had no wiggle room with the initial salary and started a bit low. I was promoted to regular exactly a year later in early 2024, and now that I've hit the internal requirements for senior that promotion is scheduled for sometime this year (the talks to find a senior project for me are ongoing, but my manager is visibly dragging his feet).

The pay raise system for my current company isn't great, so my low starting salary hasn't really grown at a pace that is acceptable considering my current duties and expertise. In hard numbers, I earn about 50k€ p.a. plus about 1.5k in performance bonuses (those aren't promised, but I've consistently gotten them every year) plus I own some company stocks that make like 300€ a year. Further bonuses are that the company pays a part of my D-Ticket (Universal Bus/Train ticket for the entirety of Germany, it's usually around 60€ a month but the company co-pays like 20€) plus they offer an Urban Sports Club membership with wich I can access all the gyms I'd ever want for 20€ a month.

The work is 100% remote, hours are completely flexible and overtime is compensated very fairly. Plus since I'm out of my trial period, it's basically impossible to fire me (which is normal for Germany).

The cons of my current workplace are that it's rapidly enshittifying. There's a strong push towards using AI everywhere, even if it makes no sense. It's also getting increasingly bureaucratic and annoying - many decisions can't be made by regular developers and need to be pushed through random stupid committees, and many features we need to build are just stupid random requirements that management came up with without actually knowing shit about fuck.
I also hate the new hires, especially my team's new architect who has a background in working for advertising and retail systems and now wants to do dumb shit like enforce customer tracking and aggressive data collection (we're B2B, all customers are paying customers so collecting their data is a stupid and illegal idea).
Another frustration is that I was appointed as the dedicated person that needs to keep watch on our security and compliance. That has never been an especially thankful role - no matter how large of a security flaw I bring up, I get met with an eyeroll and a "we don't have the time to fix that" from the side of the programmers and a very annoyed "why the fuck are you not doing anything about this??" from the side of the head security officer. Which ends in all security fixes being kind of my own problem. I'm extremely burnt out from that.

My stats:
In broad terms, my current skillset (which decides my market value) is the following:

• 3 years of extremely solid hands-on experience in React and Typescript (not the kind of experience that code-bootcamp people have, actual experience)
• 3 years of solid experience in everything AWS
• Security Engineering knowledge
• I'm extremely flexible, so I adapt to new tech very very fast
• Outstanding soft skills and mentoring abilities, I basically lead all of my teams meetings and onboard all the new colleagues

--> basically, I have all the capabilities of setting up, building and maintaining a state of the art web/cloud based project all by myself.

My job search so far:
Generally, I haven't been super active in searching and only applied to the occasional very interesting seeming position. I got more interviews than you'd expect for someone who refuses to use AI to write their CV and does not write motivation letters. Those have led to two serious leads so far: one role for an extremely large company that loans out programmers (so it's kind of a forward-deployed engineer role) for 65k which I declined because the role would entail pushing out AI slop all day. And another where my second interview is still upcoming, but it's for an ISP who is known to pull customers into predatory contracts. The pay range is 62-75k but I'm on the verge of canceling the second interview because I disagree with their business practices.

In addition to that, I always have the option of nepotism and going to work at the small company my dad works at as an SPS/Delphi Programmer (the pay wouldn't be the best but it's always a fallback option).
Or I could take a shot and apply for the company my husband works at. He says he could put in a good word for me and get me a good chance at a role, but that would probably be embedded programming with like C, which I don't find very fun or rewarding. And it would be for the military, I'm kinda iffy on that. But the pay and job security is great since it's a place that follows IG-Metall Union rules.

The current offer I'm considering:

I randomly came across a very small (like 20 people) company who used to be an SAP consulting firm but hard-pivoted towards developing tools in a small niche where they compete with the current american monopoly for those tools (sorry, I can't be more specific than that, it really is a tiny niche).
They're extremely vocal about european data sovereignty (hell yes, no more working with AWS or Atlassian) and politically engaged in Open source, environmental projects and anti-nazi stuff.

They've been successful in their hard pivot so far and now they can't keep up with customer demand and need to be rapidly expanding, but they still haven't proven that it will work out long term so that expansion is risky for them. Coincidentally they're looking for exactly what I bring to the table (deep expertise in React/Typescript with DevOps experience and a lot of autonomy) in a role where I basically solo-drive a small project from start to finish. They got those red flags where they say they're "basically a family" and "like a startup", so you know the workload will be extremely high and stressful, working on weekends will be normal and being on-call 24/7 will be expected.

But: I'm really interested in their niche. It's a super cool ecosystem and even though I'd be getting a lot more architectural responsibilities than I should, that would be mitigated by the ecosystem being very opinionated on architecture so I can't go too wrong. And from the people I've met so far, it seems like a genuinely nice, open working environment with basically no bureaucracy. It's remote-first, but other than that the benefits are negligible. No more stocks, gyms or train ticket support for me.
But working at a place I I morally align with is a big factor for me. I have never talked to a company where data sovereignty is even considered, much less actually promoted like with them. And between all my interviews, AI has not been mentioned even a single time. All I know about their stance on it is how many of the people I met keep liking "AI is a dumb waste of money" posts on Linkedin. Which is a good sign.

I've had three interviews with them within the last week - first with their two "Face of the company/ people communication" guys (not HR, there is no dedicated HR person) then I got a small coding task which I absolutely aced so they wanted me for a technical interview the next day. They said they'd be thinking about it for at least the next week since they need to consider the other candidates, but the owner of the company was in my inbox the very next day asking to talk asap. The owner guy is the only one responsible for money allocation so he's the one I had to talk to when it came to salary stuff.

He let me know that I absolutely aced all the interviews and literally every single person in the company unanimously wants me on board (I actually believe it, considering how many of them have checked out my Linkedin profile).
BUT while talking to him was extremely nice, our salary expectations were very far apart. My opinion on the role was that demand-wise it's a Senior Software Engineer position with some aspects of Dev-Ops Engineer sprinkled in. The normal market rate for someone with 3-5 years of experience for that would be around 63-83k as far as I've seen, but the "startup workstyle", broad responsibility, high amount of project ownership and high amount of technical autonomy, plus the fact they want someone who can contribute right from day 1 makes me think the upper half of that range would be appropriate. So my number is 73k.

He was.. quite shocked. He said the absolute maximum amount of budget he has is 50k, because their current pivot is still quite a large risk. Basically, they can't afford to spend more money than that if they aren't 100% that they can make it back. And I do believe him on that, that number did not seem like a tactic to lowball me. I've done very, very deep research on the company and have found out trough the grapevine that their annual revenue is only in the ballpark of 800-1100k. I can see that a programmer asking for almost 10% of your annual revenue can be a bit offensive, haha.

Still, we ended the interview on a very good note and I still like the guy as a person. In my research I also came across the fact that he'd been considering turning the company into a Worker Cooperative when he retires (only like 3 years until then I believe) so I drilled him on his concrete plans for that. The plan apparently still stands and he explained the logistics of it to me - it sounded super solid, and I'm just way too on board with that kind of communist shit. He was also pretty flattered with how deeply I researched everything and how prepared I am, that's definitely not the norm for applicants 🥹

Anyways, we didn't come to an agreement on salary in that interview, none of us could even name a second number since we were literally 23k apart. So we decided to both crunch our numbers again, see what can be done and what compromises and risks we're willing to take. We're talking again on friday morning, and I'm pretty sure that where the final decision will be made.

I have talked it trough with my husband about a dozen times now, and the offer I will be bringing to that talk is 60k€ but for 35h/week. Our current rental apartment contract is limited to 3 years, at the end of which we will be buying a house. The next market collapse is coming, and we're sure that having our own property will be the best way to weather it, so it's a big goal that we both need to financially contribute to. That means that I can't really afford to sell myself for much less than market value (AND much less than my current job! Which is 50k for 36h/week at the moment, but the yearly pay raises are next month).

I also know I'm way too enarmoured with this offer. There's a heavy sunk cost fallacy going on and hating my current job is definitely pushing me to rash decisions. I totally see that I'm being a fucking vegan and letting my morals overshadow my financial self-preservation. But I also have enough savings to cushion a total catastrophe, and leaving my current company wouldn't actually burn any bridges, so there's a high chance they'd take me back if things don't work out. Honestly... I don't know. There's plenty of ways to argue that I should stay at my current job, or that I should keep looking, or that I should take that new job. When I weigh the pros and cons, all the options end up at kind of an equal place.

Soo.. does anyone have opinions on this? What would you do in my place..?

Basically Title.
I love CS, I love designing systems, programming, some cyber and math.
The problem is, I am due to admit into CS this year (4 year program). My Parent's will be funding a majority of it (~2 years, + RESP). And one of my parents, thinks CS won't have many jobs come 7 years?
Why? Because AI will take them all (or is more likely to take them all). That AI is expanding at a rapid pace, and they will slowly but surely take the hardware designing jobs, the programming jobs, and pretty much all the jobs except the administration ones. I have a poor time putting into words what I would like to do in the future (cause I love lots of things related to CS) but I say thing a bit on the technical side, and this parent says that if I cant explain it to them than I don't understand it and that they understand (more to me) what will happen to the market due to their age

I am not saying they're wrong to any of this by the way, I'm just looking for advice on if they're right, and if not, why?

I don't think I'll ever give up doing CS because its something I love with all my heart.
But if I'm not able to convince them, they want me to take a gap and get a different degree (in a less likely to be taken job).
I might be rambling here, but I am genuinely soooo lost.

I feel like most of my work has been wasted throughout my career.

In my 10 years, I can look back and I think maybe 3 years of my work still exists today. A couple companies are not defunct. A couple projects were literally cut from under me.

Is this normal? Do most software engineers end up having a ton of their work wasted?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/43052387

While the talking heads feign excitement over the "unexpected 130,000" new (healthcare) jobs last month, the reality quietly deepens.

Hi, I'm 27 years old and I'm a software developer at a particularly toxic family-run software company, and I absolutely want to make a change.

I'm also trying to graduate. I'm halfway through and I think it'll take me several more years.

My goals, which are mutually exclusive, are to earn enough to move out on my own, graduate, and travel the world since I've barely left my hometown and I'm almost 30. My past life choices have led me to not being the person I wish I was

My concerns are:

• Should I look for a part-time job so I can have more time to study even though I'm close to being 30?

• Should I look for a remote job so I can travel in the meantime?

• Should I join a consulting firm (e.g. Accenture) to expand my skills since they're very demanding, or should I join a firm focused on a single product to continue on the knowledge I have (.Net) even if it's not very specialized?

I'd be very grateful to anyone who can guide me...

So I'm looking for an area of computers to do. I have always had an interests in networking, security, and servers so hopefully I get to deal with this stuff.

I'm also interested in something with good work life balance and nothing too stressful. Having good mobility would be great so I can travel the world.

Any ideas?

To preface, I know this is a community is for computer science careers, but I could really use your help here Lemmy! There isn't an active IT career questions community.

Background: I believe I'm making the highest for my department. I'm known as the go-to person for troubleshooting T1 and T2 issues and assist other IT technical teams when needed. Additionally, I have experience in programming and basic networking. It's hell here... I'm growing more and more insane day by day.

Living: The expenses are very high in my area VHCOL, but I'm a position where I don't rent and don't have to drive since I work remotely, which both save a ton of money. Money isn't a problem, given my current position, but it will be impactful in terms of future savings, retirement, and relationships if I had to spend on driving and eating out. Yes, I know I can make food and bring it to work.

Intentions: I wanted to transition as on-site IT Technician to gain the experience with working hands-on as opposed to working remotely. With this experience, I'm thinking this would help me a bit when trying to transition onto a Systems Admin/Engineering role in the future.

Me Venting: I know I shouldn't compare, but man I've seen so many folks who come work at helpdesk move onto System Admin roles when they have no idea how to use Active Directory or even know how to do basic network troubleshooting. Will those companies be okay?

Situation: I've got an offer at my current organization for on-site IT Technician but it would come with a pay cut and of course I would be spending more money and time out of my day driving. I definitely want the experience because I think it will further my growth, but I'm being told by everyone to not accept and I should never take a pay cut.

My Thoughts: Yes, I can stay working remotely, gather a billion IT certs, build some home labs at home, but will certs really get me to where I want to go? Wouldn't managers just hear that I don't have IT enterprise experience and shove me off for the next guy who has experience at an MSP? I'm a bit lost here. I am grateful for any advice you have to offer. Thank you

I have been laid off from my job for a couple of months now. (CS degree/ 4 years experience)

Please don’t just tell me to stick with iOS dev because I just cannot see myself doing it anymore. I literally only sticked with iOS dev because I thought that apps were going to be the future and that all companies needed apps, but it was the other way around, all companies need backend. Looking back a lot of my career decisions were driven by ignorance and Fomo

We view internships as a vital pipeline for talent and a source of new energy and ideas. The number of our intern goal, a nod to our 1.1.1.1 public DNS resolver, is intentional. It represents our deep technical roots and our focus on building foundational infrastructure for the Internet. Now, we stand at the cusp of a new technological revolution: the age of AI.

I'm trying to join some... not entirely sure what they're called. Like those projects where a group of people all work on a single community project. I hear discord is a good place for stuff like that. And beginner hackathons too. Any advice would be super helpful. Edit: Open Source Projects is what I meant 😅

I know the market is ass rn, I've been looking for a job since I graduated in November of last year with no luck. Every application I get a response like "you are great, your skills are great, you meet every criteria but we found someone better". I recently decided to start replying to emails to ask why I wasn't picked (I reply only to emails that aren't from no-reply or if the say I can ask for feedback). So far I have not even received one reply. Am I wasting my time??? I feel like it's just from automated systems and they don't even look at it. Is everything literally a ghost job?? If you have ever asked for feedback have you gotten anything useful from it?

I got rejected a gazillion times in my career and I still get rejected left and right.

However the moment I express my lack of interest advanced in the position, I get bombarded by emails and requests for meeting..

This happened to me twice:

1. A few years ago. I passed all the stages, the position included relocation, I missed one thing in my negotiation: the taxes in the new place are really high. I emailed them explaining my position, not interested anymore because of taxes.. Then I start getting requests to set up meetings, and attempt to get me to explain to answer a long list of questions.. I tried to be nice and helpful but it seems people lost their temper already (started getting "unprofessional" emails)

2. More recently, I passed the first few stages, the last stage seemed too frustrating and slow so I gave up. All of the sudden, things changed again and everyone is trying to understand more in detail...

Why are we expected to eat rejections and not take it personally but they can't take their own advice?

My current job is ok but it's not exaclty wwhat I want to do long term. I'm not good at programming, but I do want to work on it. In the mean time I'd like to go into cybersecurity, however I'm not sure where to start and if it would be a waste of my bachelros in C.S.

Improving work-life balance

My situation is: I've started working for the current employer in 2022 and they pay more than decent money. I was moved to a new project at the end of 2024, it combines every negative stereotype of an inefficient government/corporate system under the sun that just barely ships and I disliked it from the start. The change happened unexpectedly and coincided with exhausting events in my personal life. I really feel worn down. At the same time there's current market situation combined with my skill gaps. Many years of my Java career was in strange and niche stuff, only recently I've moved to web development with some limited frontend experience. There's only so much I can learn in the space of microservices, Kubernetes etc. on my own, but, again, poor work-life balance leaves me with little time and energy for self-development. The decent pay is also a strong factor as I plan to build a house. Chicken and egg kind of problem

Summary: landed in a bad project -> it contributes to poor work-life balance -> limited time and energy for learning stuff to find a better project.

I've came up with an idea to propose reducing my hours to work 4-day weeks and asked for a rise at the same time. both were rejected due to the business arrangement with the client, as I expected. They really don't want me to leave, which I know as it takes 2-3 months of paperwork to even join the project and then about 6 months to reach some kind of productive level. At the same they don't have much to offer me but encouragement to stay and some good words.

I never even hinted at wanting to change a job, but I am actively applying. At this time I have one pending application waiting to schedule a technical interview. I don't rate my chances to be accepted too high, but if that happened I would feel bad about leaving after this discussion.

Summary:

• if I stay:
  • I keep the decent pay
  • decent job security, replacing anyone here is costly and there are literally years of work already contracted
  • still have to figure out work-life balance
  • still lagging behind in skills
• if I leave:
  • possibly only for lower pay, but my initial offer was actually higher
  • almost guaranteed lower job security
  • unpredictable working conditions and work-life balance
  • typical transition stress no matter what happens
  • opportunity to reduce the skill gap
  • just plain guilt in relation to the people at my current project, I'm not a cold-hearted businessman

I'll be thankful for any advice or ideas to improve my situation at the lowest cost.

I got laid off in March as a software engineer 2 and since then I've hardly applied to many jobs, of the few I've applied to I got a handful of interviews which I couldn't even clear the first round of Leetcode test. I can barely solve 1 or 2 LC questions a day, and I've tried to read system design for a while but can't find any interest in it. Even if I solve the interview questions we'll I've been rejected, everything feels so pointless. I just want to play video games and watch movies till these darks days pass and there's another boon in tech hiring. But with AI it feels like many jobs won't ever come back. Should I consider changing careers or moving to another country. I don't think I have any real passion or talent for programming, but it's the only skill I have right now. I don't know what level of panic I should be feeling right now. I don't have any close friends or supportive family to talk to about any of this.

I'm curious if it's just me or not. I'm an SE with 10+ years of experience, mostly in full-stack with a wide variety of languages and stacks, and my last title was at the "staff" level. I'm almost 40 years old; not sure if age discrimination is much of a thing (my interviewers have been mostly around my age or younger). I've been looking for a job for months. I've been applying to just about every job posting where my skills match on LinkedIn, Indeed, and ZipRecruiter (mostly just the Easy Apply option lately, so I can send more applications out). I've even been applying to positions that just require 2+ years of experience; I'd take any job (except defense or big tech). I've probably sent something like 400 applications out at this point. I've gotten a few interviews, and think I did OK, but I guess not good enough since I was still rejected. Is this normal?

The last time I was looking for a job (2021), I only sent 20 applications out, and landed a job on my first interview. I also tried Upwork for a couple weeks, but wasn't able to land any contracts. I think everyone there is either looking for very cheap devs in the developing world or rockstars with tons of contracting experience and large portfolios.

I'm a 25 yo British guy. I landed my first job as a dev in 2022 for a consultancy with a 1 year international placement, it was good but a few months after returning, the whole cohort was laid off due to corporate politics between the offices in the two countries. After 7 months of searching, I got my second job working for a small pensions fintech startup, it was fine but I didn't find it all that fulfilling. After 9 months of working there, the CEO pulled me into a meeting and said they'd made a mistake hiring me and they needed a more senior developer who could help steer the company from a business perspective too, so I was once again laid off.

That was in January, since then I've had 2 interviews, both of which have gone nowhere. The vibe of every position that's matched my CV has basically been the same sort of work- pretty mundane web dev roles and I can see myself being pulled into a cycle of mundane work then being laid off. I've wanted to be a developer for as long as I can remember, I started writing code when I was 12, studied CS throughout school so I could go to uni and do it for my degree - but now, I feel so disillusioned with the whole industry, where do I go from here? Does it get better? How do I find a job that actually feels fulfilling?

Sorry for the ramble, it's 4am and I just happened to stumble across this community while scrolling. Thought it might be worth an ask.

TLDR; been laid off twice in about 2 and a half years, feeling pretty disillusioned with everything, where do I go from here?

I know this seems like a very obvious question. But I mean with regards to job searches. Even internships seem to require a variety of skills these days. I'm interested in both web development and just recently have considered data analysis. Should I work on tutorials and personal projects for a single skill or framework at a time? Or make small projects across a wide variety of things so I can put those skills on my resume?

Hi, I recently got laid off from my current role, and I don't have a lot of time left to find another job. Find jobs that fit my work experience and applying to them takes a lot of time away from prepping for interviews. So I was thinking of hiring some 3rd party company that applies for jobs on your behalf based on the criteria you provide them. However, I am not familiar with these types of company and don't know which ones are legit and which are just taking your money and wasting it and giving back nothing in return. If anyone knows of a company that they think is legit and doesn't cost way too much, that would be helpful. I've read about some that also customize your resume to fit the role before applying, although I am not sure if this is a good or a bad thing. I live in the US and would prefer US based company but if there's a legit non US company, I am open to looking into them as well.

Does being in Hawaii automatically disqualify me from 95% of tech jobs?

Has anyone successfully found a job using LinkedIn's 'Easy Apply' options?

applied internally to a role thatd be a nice pay pump. its a data role with a strong emphasis on python and sql skills. i studied my ass off on data concepts anticipating questions like "how would you start solving xyz problem" or "how would you find business insights on zyx" and the first question is "whats the difference between a dict and a list in python?" or hell, even a leetcode-like question. i like to think im decent at USING python and sql, but not having used them in a current role in ~2 years, these google-search-esque questions threw me off guard. i fumbled making up answers for a few but some i straight up had to say i have no fkn clue. so todays been a bit of a demeaning experience! has anyone else ever had an interview where they asked questions like that?

edit: thanks to yall for being supportive, this is the kindest comment section ive had. im still recovering from the embarrassment of these guys thinking I probably lied about having these skills lol. part of my difficulty is that ive been on a rotation program at work and have spent almost the last year on a cyber analyst position and it didnt hit me how much I forgot to code! so now I'm applying to some cyber roles too, wish me luck!!

Hello all! I've been a Software Developer for almost 15 years now, and after staying at my last few companies for only 2 years each, I'm starting to think about the possibility of becoming a freelancer/contractor. I'm looking for more flexibility in my work and getting out of parts of the corporate culture that I have grown to dislike.

I'm in a good place financially, and so I'm looking to see if it's a possibility. I speak English and German fluently, and have primarily a background in webservice and FE development, though I can also do quite a bit of Rust and have dabbled in Android apps a bit. I also have some experience with medical software. I think my biggest issues right now are business model development / pricing and finding customers.

Does anyone know of any good resources? I find quite a bit online, but a lot seems geared towards being self-employed generally, and not to the software industry itself. I'd be looking for either good websites or books, or general starting points for research.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions or advice!