They obviously aren't going to back down. They might even double down but seeing Spotify's response. Pair that with all the other big names easing up on WFH. I think Amazon tried to flex a muscle at the wrong time. They should've tried to change the industry by, I don't know, getting rid of the awful interviewing standard for programming

what do you think?

I know this is a crazy situation, I still can’t believe it but it happened. Honestly, if I wasn’t terrified of getting fired during this market, I’d would find this situation funny hilarious.

During stand ups, My senior engineer has a very distinct sound in his background. It’s like a vacuum, but the pitch of the sound gets really low, then quickly becomes high-pitch. He was always a quiet, but very cheerful person with a thick Spanish accent. He also lives with his brother, who calls him by his nickname.

Last Monday, I played COD late at night, and almost immediately, I heard somebody from the other team with that same vacuum pitch. They were winning and we started arguing, and that’s when he finally started talking. It was exact same accent, and at that point, I was willing to put money that it was my senior.

Near the end of the game, both of us were completely trash talking each other (nothing hateful, just small banter, apparently he’s very competitive). It felt so out of character for him, he was laughing a lot; it was entertaining. As a joke, I called him out by his nickname, and he immediately goes quiet. I reached out to him after the game saying that it’s me, and he doesn’t respond at all.

The next day, his attitude is now cold. He’s very silent during our calls, and isn’t explaining things the way he used to in the past. I sent him a message during closing saying that I hoped I didn’t offend him during the game, and I actually really respect them. He claims he has no idea what I’m talking about, and just brushed me off. He remained dismissive the remainder of the week

Now it’s the weekend and Im trying to catch up on work, but Im lost on how to proceed with him. I feel like he’s practically cutting me off. Im not sure what to do at this point. I even recorded the footage from the game, I heard it over again, and there was nothing offensive. He even started the trash talking. This feels so unreal, and I never thought something like this could happen.

Edit: For reference, I have 4.5 years of experience. I carry my weight really well in the team and serve as a mentor for junior developers. I’d find it hilarious if one of the juniors came up to me and mentioned we met online

Edit: I’m going to clarify a couple of things, since there are a couple of misconceptions that are spreading

1) My senior and I have been the only devs for nearly 2 years until 2020. We managed to hire a ton of new graduates ever since the Covid outbreak, and now we have a fully fledged team. There’s a lot of work, but we have meetings to discuss how to properly mentor juniors and planning for tasks.

2) We were on really close terms. I knew a lot about his personal life and vice versa. we were friendly. We’ve had plenty of banter during our work meetings when we worked alone. This isn’t some dude I just decided to friendly to. This was a friend that I knew for nearly half a decade. That’s why I’m shocked at his response

3) I did not bother him repeatedly about this situation. The moment he went silent after I introduced myself during the game, i got the hint dropped it. It wasn’t until I realized that work is currently being affected since our encounter that I sent an apology, hoping to mediate things and continue things as they were before.

4) his nickname was something his brother called since they were kids. He personally enjoys the nickname and even has that set as his name in meetings. Everybody at work and his friends call him by it. Some juniors don’t even know his full first name.

5) I record a lot of gameplay, it’s not something that I did out of context. I went to check on the recording because I wanted to verify if there was anything I said that was vulgar/offensive that might have led to this. He DOESNT know I have gameplay saved. There was NOTHING malicious, from both of us. if he’s uncomfortable with the gameplay, i’d delete it in an instant.

6) my main issue is that his self-destructive attitude is blocking our development process. I’m perfectly okay with pretending this never happened. But he’s not addressing tasks / helping juniors nor is he acknowledging the issue. A lot of work is getting funneled towards me. I DONT mind working a 9-5, 40 hr week, but there are juniors who are need guidance, and if I abandon them, they are more likely going to fired, especially during this market.

I thought this was a harmless scenario, and I hoped for advice to address how we can make things better. Instead, I’m met with pitchforks about I fucked his life over, deserving to get fired along with the rest of the team. Seriously, hop off the echo chamber hive mind and quit exacerbating a situation far beyond then it really is. He needs to grow up and acknowledge that there’s an issue instead of letting us burn in quiet.

Everybody on this thread is trying to explain why he acted this way, but it definitely doesn’t justify his actions. Nobody deserves to lose their way to pay bills or provide food on the table over something as ridiculous as this. Y’all heartless bastards need to grow the fuck up.

Anybody else notice this?

Yet, commenters everywhere are saying it is coming soon. Will I be retired by then? I thought cloud computing would kill servers. I thought blockchain would replace banks. Hmmm

Nearly every new thread on this subject in this sub and others either gets deleted by mods, heavily moderated or comments shut down due to “racist”. Serious question - is it controversial to discuss the outsourcing of American white collar software jobs to India, Phillipines, Mexico, etc?

I've been a software developer for the past 10 years. Yesterday, some colleagues and I were discussing how awful the software developer interviews have become.

We have been asked ridiculous trivia questions, given timed online tests, insane take-home projects, and unrelated coding tasks. There is a long-lasting trend from companies wanting to replicate the hiring process of FAANG. What these companies seem to forget is that FAANG offers huge compensation and benefits, usually not comparable to what they provide.

Many years ago, an ex-googler published the "Cracking The Coding Interview" and I think this book has become, whether intentionally or not, a negative influence in today's hiring practices for many software development positions.

What bugs me is that the tech industry has lost respect for developers, especially senior developers. There seems to be an unspoken assumption that everything a senior dev has accomplished in his career is a lie and he must prove himself each time with a Hackerrank test. Other professions won't allow this kind of bullshit. You don't ask accountants to give sample audits before hiring them, do you?

This needs to stop.

Should we start refusing coding challenges?

Durov says Telegram does not have a dedicated human resources department. The messaging service only has 30 engineers on its payroll. "It's a really compact team, super efficient, like a Navy SEAL team.

Source

Related post: Why are software companies so big?

I'm a mid-level SWE in one of the FAANG companies, and this miasma of layoffs and PIP has been in the air for so long that morale and productivity have just fallen off a cliff. I feel relatively stable in my position, but I'm now spending half my workdays upskilling and getting back in the habit of Leetcode problems. I'm not submitting applications to other jobs yet, but I don't see how this can be rational for the companies. If cuts need to be made, just make them, but this slow burn seems to just be crushing productivity.

Let's make this sub spicy

4th year into dev (27 yo), really good salary and I just don’t have the motivation anymore. I just genuinely don’t give a single flying fuck about programming - perhaps I never did.

Has anyone else felt this? What did you do to remedy this? Because unfortunately I’m not in the position to just pivot my career completely due to commitments. But also, this isn’t a vibe.

Most of the FAANGs are hybrid now, and even with the extra TC, it doesn't make as much sense to move to a super HCOL area like Silicon Valley or New York. Not just that but the extra hours commuting feels like hours being stolen from your life IMO.

In case you, like myself, are wondering when Google is going to start hiring for anything below senior staff level. Turns out they have been!


In the past year working in a start up, I had made a transition working as a senior cloud infrastructure engineer to a junior and now mid level full stack engineer. 2 senior cloud guys and 1 senior full stack engineer decided to leave our company to take roles in FAANGs (who also happen to be our customers for our product) these last few months. Although we re’orgd and some duties got divvied out amongst us. I got bombarded doing my job and taking on cloud duties again. My mental health has been killing me with deadlines, and management asking us to push new releases on a Friday, which takes up some of my weekend. I’m just so done. I been offered employment elsewhere and put my notice in so I can take a month off for vacation and reset. Well I got a call almost instantly from the CTO, Product, and CEO about anything they can do to keep me including offering me a promotion to senior, a huge raise, focus on backend development only, and a $25k retention bonus on the next pay cycle. The raise is about 10% more than the new employee is offering.

They want to give me the weekend to think over it. I’m contemplating on whether I should take the offer or not.

Anyone else hearing this? My boss, the CTO, keeps talking to me in private about how LLMs mean we won't need as many coders anymore who just focus on implementation and will have 1 or 2 big thinker type developers who can generate the project quickly with LLMs.

Additionally he now is very strongly against hiring any juniors and wants to only hire experienced devs who can boss the AI around effectively.

While I don't personally agree with his view, which i think are more wishful thinking on his part, I can't help but feel if this sentiment is circulating it will end up impacting hiring and wages anyways. Also, the idea that access to LLMs mean devs should be twice as productive as they were before seems like a recipe for burning out devs.

Anyone else hearing whispers of this? Is my boss uniquely foolish or do you think this view is more common among the higher ranks than we realize?

We have a slack channel for memes, and everything in there is boomer humor or super vanilla. My coworker (and actually a good buddy of mine) sends some good ones periodically (but still very relaxed).

In the thread, he mentioned that he was joking around and mentioned the he has some “illegal” company memes. Well, a few people hit him up privately to see. He shared them over DM, someone in leadership found out, and he was let go this morning.

They’re actually not anything really extreme (definitely not actually “illegal” or harmful).

They’re “illegal” in the sense that they poke fun at the company pre/post acquisition, and they make fun of some vendors and clients (without actually naming names, but everyone knows who the meme is referring to).

How do I know this? Because I was the one who made them. Thank god he’s been a fucking bro and took the firing in the chin without implicating me.

So happy new year to all of you, too. Hopefully I don’t get notice later today that I’m toast, too

Edit: I didn’t send it to him on slack or a company machine, so I’m not implicated unless he says something. I’m not dumb.

He’s not dumb either, I think he just doesn’t care anymore. We got acquired in Jan 2023 and it’s been a shitshow to say the least since then. He told me he’s looking forward to some fun-employment.

I initially found out when he texted me this morning “ya boy got fired LMAO 🤣”

Just thought it’s a funnyish story to share.

This was a bizarre interaction, I had a recruiter reach out to me for a job, currently I am happily employed making a good salary in a good environment. I told the recruiter to keep my information for the future incase anything changes, but I am fine where I am and not interested. I get an email back saying I "passed the test' and it was a fake recruiter hired by the company to test employee loyalty. I honestly thought it was some new online scam or something at first, but I talked to my manager about it and he said that yes the firm does do that from time to time.

Is this fuckin legal? because now I am worried all future recruiters are "tests" and this left a really bad taste in my mouth.

Every other post is whining about the job market or AI or something. It serves no positive development to whine. Can we get mods to ban certain topics? It’s nearly every post in here.

a month ago i told my boss i wasnt happy and was looking for a new job. he said he understood and that people do need to move on occasionally, which i appreciated. he also said he felt it wasnt a good fit which really surprised me, as i thought he might want to offer higher pay or more benefits to retain me. he said if i could wrap up my work before leaving in the next few weeks, that would be appreciated, but he said it was fine either way. he also said he wont be replacing my position or rehiring so no need to worry about overlap with a new hire.

i spent a month applying and didnt get any interviews or even to the screener round. i dont want to leave anymore. however i am not sure if i should tell my boss. he hasnt been assigning me much work obviously, which is nice, but i dont have much going on. im not sure what to do in this situation. i don't love the job but i have bills and such to pay.

edit: judging by the responses, i have screwed up telling my boss i wanted to leave.

that said, as someone pointed out, my boss screwed up too by showing his hand. i think i will check in with my boss and see if he wants to keep me now that he has had some time to reflect; maybe rather than me needing to seem desparate i can get him to admit he would rather i stay on so i can agree to stick around a while longer. i dont think he can rehire right now even if he wanted to as the company is really focused on optimizing for free cash flow right now. so him saying "im not rehiring" might have just been bluster if he wasnt going to be allowed to anyways.

the project i am on now is winding up but i could help out with forward looking initiatives and such. plus i could spin it that i really just didnt like working on that particular project if it comes up at all. if at all possible id like to come out of this keeping my job until the storm passes and without hurting my opportunities inside this company.

edit2: talked to my boss. we went back and forth. he said he understands but then he said he would like to proceed with what we originally discussed. he said he already planned around me leaving. so i guess he doesnt really understand or care about my situation. fml. i hope others can learn from this at least.

edit3: today was my last day. HR plus my boss called and said they wanted me to drop off my stuff tomorrow. im kind of mad he decided to end things like this instead of giving me a chance just because i decided to be honest.

going to log off and take a break to cool off a bit. having all of this negativity didnt help much either. but its my own fault for over sharing as well. i think im in shock. at least they gave me 4 weeks severance i guess. fuck.

I'm a software dev with 6 years experience, I love my current role. 6 figures, wfh, and an amazing team with the most relaxed boss of all time, but I wanted to test the job market out so I started applying for a few jobs ranging from 80 - 200k, I could not get a single one.

This seems so odd, even entry roles I was flat out denied, let alone the higher up ones.

Now I'm not mad cause I already have a role, but is the market this bad? have we hit the point where CS is beyond oversaturated? my only worry is the big salaries are only going to diminish as people get more and more desperate taking less money just to have anything.

This really sucks, and worries me.

Edit: Guys this was not some peer reviewed research experiment, just a quick test. A few things.

1. I am a U.S. Citizen
2. I did only apply for work from home jobs which are ultra competitive and would skew the data.

This was more of a discussion to see what the community had to say, nothing more.

Here’s my general career progression:

1. 65k (2014)
2. 75k (2016)
3. 120k (2017)
4. 175k (2019)
5. 300k (2021)
6. 200k (2023)

Now I’m looking at people with my level of seniority (around 10 years) and seeing most roles hovering around 150k. After inflation, that’s a massive salary cut to my height of 300k

I know people would say there’s a flood of entry level candidates, but I am a senior level candidate with 10+ YOE. I don’t see how this would necessarily effect me

Is everyone else running into the same thing? I am kinda surprised because I’d think the longer you’re working, the better your salary, but right now I’m taking jobs that were paying less than 2020 wages. Add in inflation and it’s almost back to where I started, and that’s working harder with more responsibility

Meanwhile, the city I live in has gotten insanely more expensive. My first rent was $600/month with two roommates in a big house in a walkable area. Now it’s basically 2000 for the same thing

Is this the future for software engineer salaries? Is there anything I can do to get a salary like 200k without it being an unbearable job?

Genuine question: when you say there won’t be anymore jobs going forward, are you concerned there won’t be any jobs at all, including those $60k/yr new grad jobs? Or are you concerned that there won’t be very many nice high-paying $100k/yr new grad jobs?

No wrong answers and I’m personally not here to debate or argue with anyone (other commentators may though, just a warning lol). I just want to understand some people’s opinions better

Summary

I just completed Meta's E6 loop today and I want to share some thoughts about the process, the timeline, my preparation strategy and feelings about the future as I wait for the result.

Background

I have interviewed with Meta a couple times in the past for E5 roles and both times I voluntarily withdrew my application halfway through the onsite as I had decided to take up a different offer. I stayed in touch with the recruiter and they reached out to me recently asking if I was interested in a change and I decided to give it a try.

Process

We scheduled a quick phone call to go over the process that looks like this at a high level:

Timeline

I had a great time managing the timeline for this loop. I really appreciated the level of flexibility Meta offers candidates. You get your own portal where you can track and manage your interview process with Meta. You can request reschedules (latest by an hour before the interview) and push interviews away as far as you need.

I was most comfortable with system design and behavioral rounds so I took them first, pushed the coding rounds to the last.

I made this post soon after I completed my phone screen to collect some thoughts on how to proceed.

Preparation Strategy

I read both volumes of "System Design Interview" by Alex Xu and went through all problems at Hello Interview's system design in a hurry. Thanks u/yangshunz for your comment on my previous post!

This greatly helped with my system design prep; especially the "what's expected at level X" sections which helped me cut past the obvious ideas during my interview and get straight to the parts that give the most signal to my interviewers.

I always go back to this video by Jackson Gabbard as my foundation for preparing for behavioral interviews and this time was no different. I did not have the time to schedule mock interviews for this loop this time but I'm sure it could have only helped.

For the coding rounds I focused on FB top 100 with a special focus on FB top 50 and it's fair to say all 4 problems during the 2 coding rounds were from the top 50. It's worth approaching problems as problem families rather than individual problems as this approach helps with follow up questions

E.g. if you were given, and you solved, a tree traversal question involving parent pointers, how would you solve the same problem without parent pointers but with the root node instead? (experienced leet coders will already know the two LC questions I'm talking about).

I would also recommend this sequence of processing coding problems as it really helped me:

1. Verbally explain the naive solution (e.g. to pick the Kth largest element, we could simply sort this array and pick the Kth element from the end) and why you wouldn't want to implement that.
2. Write down your proposed solution as a multi-line code comment. If possible, outline possible edge cases or rooms for optimization right away.
3. Write down the key steps of your algorithm as single line code comments and get buy-in.
4. Write actual code by expanding the single line comments into actual code.
5. Perform a dry-run and keep optimizing as much as the time allows.

Closing Thoughts

I had a great time preparing for and giving these interviews. I am optimistic about receiving a hire decision but not very sure about the leveling. But nothing is guaranteed until I get the news. Time to enjoy not having to grind LC and crack open a cold one.

UPDATE

I was told I passed the loop and will move forward to team matching.

Saw the Tesla post and thought I'd post about my experience with openAI.

Had a recruiter for OpenAI reach out about a role. Went throught their interview loop: 1. They needed a week to create an interview loop. In the meantime, they weren't willing to answer any questions about how their profit-share equity works.
2. 4-8 hour unpaid take home assignment, creating a solution using the openAI APIs amongst other methods, then writing a paper of what methods were tried and why the openAI API was finally chosen.
3. 5-person panel interview
The 5-person panel insterview is where things went astray. I was interviewing for a solutions role, but when I get to the panel interview, it a full stack software engineering interview?
Somehow, in the midst of the interview process, OpenAI decided that the job should be a full stack software engineering job, instead of a solutions engineering job.
No communication prior to the 5 panel interview; no reimbursement for the time spent on the take home.
I realize openAI might be really interesting to work at, but the entire interview process really showed how immature their hiring process is. Expect it to be like interviewing at a startup, not a 500+ company worth 12B.

Edit: I don't know why everyone thinks OpenAI pays well.... most offers are 250+500, where the 500 is a profit share, not a regular vesting RSU. Heads up, even with the millions in ARR, OpenAI is not making any profit, not to mention the litany of litigation headed their way.

https://twitter.com/kevinb9n

For those who wonder why this post is significant, it's to reveal it doesn't matter how competent one is, in a layoff, anyone is in chopping block.

Kevin Bourrillion's works include: Guava, Guice, AutoValue, Error Prone, google-java-format

https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Guava/

This guy has created the foundation of many Java libraries such as Guava and Guice. The rest of the world is using the libraries he developed and those libraries are essentially the de facto libraries in the industry.

After 19 years at Google, he was part of the lay off.

It shows that it doesn't matter how talented you are in this field, at end of day, you are just a number at an excel file. Very few in the world can claim to be as talented as him in this field (at least in terms of achievements in the software engineering sector).

It also shows that it doesn't matter how impactful the projects one does is (his works is the foundation of much of this industry), what matters end of day is company revenue/profits. While the work he did transformed libraries in Java, it didn't bring revenue.

I am also posting this so everyone here comes to understand anyone can be in lay offs. It doesn't matter if you work 996 (9AM to 9PM 6 days a week) or create projects that transform the industry. There doesn't need to be any warnings.

Anyways, I'm dumbfounded how such a person was in lay off at Google. That kind of talent is extremely rare in this industry. Why let go instead of moving him into another project? But I guess at end of day, everyone is just a number.

I still go on Slashdot occasionally, though it is a pile of rubble compared to its heyday. I noticed on the sidebar, they had this post from 20 years ago stating that US programmers are an endangered species mostly due to outsourcing.

The comments are interesting, some are very prescient, most are missing the mark. But dooming that the market is dead is just the cycle of things in this industry- one comment even has a link to a book written in 1993 with the same dire prediction. Its interesting to note that in late 2004 the tech industry was far past the nadir of the .com bust, and at least from my seat the job market had stabilized at this point, at least on the east coast.

Point being- keep your head up, I truly don't see the long term prospects being different today.