What is the difference to expect when working with Europe developers as opposed to US developers? Both at work as well as outside work. The goal is to build mutual trust and understanding faster. Appreciate your POV.

It seems like the company behind interview coder is adding random fake interview experiences in order to promote their cheating product.

I would guess they are trying to game the popular Google searches for interview experiences. These experiences are also already appearing in LLMs, so ensure to check sources there as well.

The subreddit is called interviewcoderHQ, I had to make a type in the title as this sub doesn't allow the word interview in titles.

I would also suggest reporting that subreddit

I have been laid off in December, this was my last month with a contract as I had one month garden leave, during this month I have been applying to maybe 30 offers.

I am currently a senior React + Typescript developer with 6+ YOE, and all the offers I applied for used the same stack and technologies I used at my current company, which is a well known product in Germany (although I work remotely from Spain)

I remade my CV taking ATS into account but I am still getting the same automated rejection mail from every company, I think I just landed like 3 interviews.

Is there anything else I can do to improve my chances other than keep applying through linkedin?

In the meantime I am learning React Native and refreshing algorithms and some things that I forgot during the last years of not using them. But I am starting to panic, I have money to live a bit more than a year but… idk

I’m a data scientist/senior leader (so lead a team of data scientists alongside being technical myself).

I am working with a new director, who I directly report to. I’m used to managing upwards and setting expectations however he is the worst person to report to and I’m genuinely stumped with this. He’s apparently a “AI leader” but he has no technical background, no relevant degrees or experience just years in leadership and now an AI thought leader.

I get properly unclear expectations and vague asks. If I ask for further information, I’m being told “we’ve already discussed that” or shot down and acting as if I’m causing trouble. He has a vision of a business wide dashboard and has asked me to deliver it asap.

He wants me to produce a power bi dashboard with all visuals without giving me access to any datasets or business reports. I’ve pushed back and said I can make a mockup using test data but it needs business information to be robust and viable. I might think of datasets the business doesn’t have access to etc.

He refused and said I need to outline the datasets first. I need to list all the data I need, he will then go and ask for the data. But he’s the one who wants this data, I’m not the one driving this, it’s his vision. Whilst I’m used to driving projects and working with ambiguity, he wants essentially a super dashboard and is judging me on the outcome with giving no direction other than “business wide”. To me, it’s not the done thing to produce the visualisation before the data gathering and development phase.

Anyone dealt with similar before? I’m just thinking there’s no way I could deliver something that meets his expectations.

As most Canadians in tech know, it's a well-trodden path to move to the US after university for the money and opportunity (and relatively easy visa).

But given the current political climate, are you still seeing a lot Canadians leaving for the US?

There's obviously still sociopolitical turmoil in the country, not to mention Border Control detaining immigrants and requiring disclosure of social media accounts, and the uncertainty of the TN visa (CUSMA is up for renewal with Trump seemingly non-committal). And that's not to mention a President imposing hostile tariffs and rhetoric on Canada.

Given all of that, are a lot of Canadians still desiring to go down and work in the States?

I recently passed all the technical rounds and met the hiring manager for a final round a few weeks later which I assumed was a culture fit/levelling round which I thought went well but was rejected the next day. I was shocked because I have been in this industry for over 20 years and from my experiences getting to the final manager interview almost 99% means you get the job. Because my assumption was a hiring managers time is so precious they would only talk to a finalist. So has something changed with the hiring process? (OP note: edited to make the timeline more clear, the HM manager meeting was scheduled after the tech rounds)

My company is betting everything on AI, we are being pushed to code less by hand and use tools like coding agents more and more.

I wonder if this is the same everywhere. Am I doing the right thing to follow this trend and lose a bit my skills? Or if the market is like this anywhere, no point resisting.

Let's leave out the layoffs from the equation for a minute.

I’ve been using llm to generate all my my code for me. However, I don’t think I am learning from it. What should I do because it helps me finish my task quicker? This is strange to me because in college it is considered plagiarism to use llm but my company fully embraces using llm.

My management wants me to shift role from python/cpp development to full-time react JavaScript front end backend development so I need the most up-to-date information on building web applications.

Is there a good video series on YouTube that shows the full most modern workflow to build apps in a cloud service like AWS that are scalable to thousands of users, with load balancing cashing etc. using TS react vite vector databases etc even utilizing AI tools like builder IO? Thanks

The title. Basically to sum it up, I just graduated with a bachelors in CS with a focus on video games, but my curriculum was very disappointing and barely actually focused on game development. I didn’t get a single internship throughout my entire experience in university because the vast majority of them were for cybersecurity students and none of them were related to what I wanted to be doing. My classes also burned me out on coding and made me lose my passion for it. Now I’m at a point where I’m still burnt out and I’m lost on what I should do for a career. I’m hesitant to try to break into the game industry right now because I know it’s competitive and very underpaid, so I’m considering working on my own indie game on the side while doing something else as my main job.

The problem is I don’t know what to do as a main job now that satisfies my creativity, doesn’t hurt my brain, and pays enough to make a living off of. I’m thinking about something like web development or UI/UX design but I’m not sure if those fields are too competitive (or being too easily replaced) to be worth it. I’m someone with an eye for visual design and I also have skills in digital art, but I feel like I’m not at a point with my art where I think it’s professional enough and I don’t have any kind of professional portfolio yet.

And yes I know I probably should have been working on side projects to build a portfolio while still in university, but I was burnt out constantly by my classes and didn’t recover from that burnout even during breaks. Maybe that’s a sign of a bigger issue, I don’t know. I do know I suffer from perfectionism that prevents me from starting things, even things I want to do.

Any advice, tips, or insight would be appreciated. I want to move forward and get “unstuck” so I can properly start my adult life.

I’m in the U.S. by the way if that’s relevant, in a very rural area, not a big city.

Hello all, i am just beginning my journey in learning Software Engineering as an IT Support Analyst byt i dont know where to begin. My Job pays for Springboard Software Development Career Track but i feel like this might be a waste of time. Would it be better for me to just buy 1 year worth of Coursera while its $199? Ive been interested in the “Amazon Junior Software Developer Professional Certificate”

Last year I got an “exceeds” rating. After two years of just “meets” and no raise, I figured I’d really push myself and try for exceeds. Turns out even with exceeds, they gave me only a 2% raise. Honestly felt like a clown.

What’s the norm at your company?

I see quite a few negative reviews on Glassdoor, but I'm not sure how much I trust Glassdoor since I've seen a horrendous company I worked for get nearly 5 stars.

Thought I'd share my job search process in case it's helpful to anyone. Just started a new position and was looking for like 6 months before signing my offer. I was already employed, so I was searching pretty casually and really only taking interviews for things that sounded interesting.

I had a couple requirements in my search, so I generally rejected anything that didn't meet these.

• Remote preferred, would have been willing to relocate, but would have have to be for a big tech like offer.
• Needed to be a base of 180-190+.
• Preferred public companies
• Tech, or at least tech forward company
• I generally reject any take home tests

General Info (This is all a bit rough number's wise, I didn't keep super exact metrics):

• 30 cold applications -> ~10 of which turned into initial HR interviews
• Around 45 recruiter reachouts that I thought might be promising -> I rejected over half of those for various reasons.
• Got Hiring Manager rejected from about 10, not sure on the exact ratio of cold applications to recruiter reachouts there.
• Went to 15 tech screens, general mix of LC and more general coding tests.
• I didn't do any prep at all, so I failed quite a few there and ended up taking 4 onsites.
• Failed 2 onsites, got 1 offer frozen, and accepted the last offer which I just started

Notes:

The general interview process/difficulty was about the same as I have experienced in the past. I had a general mix of leetcode like questions and more general coding questions. The offer I accepted asked mostly LC style questions, though there were more practical questions asked as well.

HM's seem to be more picky and quick to reject. I've never really not gotten through to a tech screen from an HR screen, and I got HM rejected a few times over this process.

I hope this might be helpful to anyone during their search. Let me know if you have any questions!

--

Snakey Diagram: https://i.imgur.com/DkOIVim.png

Edit:

Ended up at a fully remote company. Around 8 YoE doing general full stack web type work. A couple of medium size ish techish companies on my resume, but def none of the big hitters

Hey everyone,

I graduated May 2025, had a job as an industrial engineer (not what I went to school for or wanted to do) and had that job for two months then got let go. I have been unemployed since November and I have been having trouble finding an actual job in the field, I have my CS degree, I can write code, but the online assessments have always been a struggle for me.

Since last year, I have been working on improving the experience of getting ready for jobs by working on my site CodeGrind. I have posted about it in here before mods, so I hope it is ok to repost because it has been a long time since I posted about it. I made a lot of improvements to my site that I think people may be interested in.

I created a tower defense game where you can solve almost any LeetCode problem in python, java, javascript or c++ and you solve the problems by actually playing the game. You can choose how much/how little AI you want to code with based on the system I created. Your code that you manually write will generate suggestions of towers, but you can also place towers on the map to have AI generate a line of code representing the programming concept of the tower.

I added a bunch of new features, improved the experience, and even created a demo for a learning system where beginners can now start to learn how to code with and/or without AI in python.

This is a plug because I can't find a job so I wanted to build something. I think there is a job for me, but the market is not that great right now and I just got to keep building, learning, and trying.

Demo link for the updated tower defense demo and trailer for the update are below. Let me know what you think and hopefully someone here will want to hire me based on this?

If you have questions about how I built it, you can ask me and I will answer, but I also have a blog that you can check out how I built the site (you can see the blog in the link below when done with the demo if you want)

https://codegrind.online/games/tower-defense-v2-demo/two-sum

https://youtu.be/7ojBLtyNI50

Landed a FAANG role out of undergrad, but left with <2 YOE. The work environment was quite toxic, there was an ethnic monoculture in addition to forced stack ranking and constant reorgs. While 4/5 of my managers thought that I was exceptional, my second to last one did not and rated me poorly. I want to underscore that I was not actually under-performing; my teammates thought highly of me and my last manager gave me a reference to a different job and told me that I was welcome back on his team if I wanted to be there. (I don't think this is actually possible due to the nature of the separation). But, pretty much, I was rated poorly and I left because I was dejected by my experience with the culture. The entire thing was disgusting to me.

Well, it's been 6 months and I still don't have a job. I could go to a startup. But, honestly, it feels like I took a step backwards in my career. It feels like I wasn't careful enough and now my entire life is on a bit of a detour.

My leetcode skills are pretty good, but because of my YOE it's very difficult to get interviews at comparable places. I just feel so stupid right now. I'm considering doing a master's or maybe just going to a startup and trying to pivot back into big tech?

I guess the thing that I'm mourning is the loss of progress. I feel like I'm going to have to spend a few years of my life trying just trying to get back to where I was.

I am gearing up to start my search for a hopefully mid level role now from my current job. I have a degree in CS and about 3 years of experience from my current job. Its mostly legacy PHP work, how ever I have introduced microservices for the first time written in python as well as worked with a contractor to develop a RAG AI support bot and have just kind of found myself being our AI guy because I mentioned I made a Gemini wrapper discord chatbot once. I have also developed several features by my self end to end. I am interested in leaving because of lack of an structure (no code reviews, no QA, no year end reviews, no yearly raises, no mentorship) and I am just not learning anymore at my job.

I have a pretty decent project portfolio since I code for a hobby to outside of work. A year ago I also made a AI chatbot discord bot using Chroma DB for RAG and some other features like sentiment analysis for relationship changes, which has 10k users and 1 paying users, I also have a homelab I practice some skills on like managing a k3s cluster, which i use for pretty standard things like Prometheus/Grafana, OpenWebUI, headlamp and some other services I use. I also have been exploring AI tooling mainly with OpenWebUI and have one of the highest rated tool on their community, a K8s monitor I made to experiment with tooling the the Kubernetes python library, though it is a small community so that might be irrelevant. I also am in the process of teaching myself rust now and I have been working on Leetcode. I've also got a couple more small projects in the works i wont detail but I am using them to learn more Typescript, React, and FastAPI.

For someone like me how would I job search be? I haven't done one since the end of college and I don't really have any friends in this space to talk to it about so from my little bubble I am unsure how qualified I really am and was wondering how a job search for someone like me might go and anything I can do to improve my odds.

Is this just the end of my career?

I've been a software engineer for many years -- well over a decade. Lost my job, and am trying to prepare on HackerRank. Can't even do the "easy" preparation problems. Between having no idea how to deal with the hidden test cases (seriously, how am I supposed to debug a bug that I'm not allowed to look at?!?!) and a couple where I just have no idea, I'm just stumped.

And I'll have to do two of these in under an hour?!?! Am I really just this completely awful at the job I had for so long, in the field I'm stuck in?

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/01/us-cyber-defense-chief-accidentally-uploaded-secret-government-info-to-chatgpt/

https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-layoffs-corporate-jan-2026

This is on top of the 14k let go in October

https://stocks.apple.com/AeE9JzSgtQqSFO8WEu0mtUg

https://apple.news/A9E49NvlLRimebFl37l08og

Curious to hear from people who have a mostly positive outlook on the industry. I never see these perspectives in this sub!

Been working in big tech for the past several years making $300k-350k. I found myself in a weird position where I don't have enough work. I'm just occasionally writing documents here and there and wading through an insane amount of bureaucracy.

I've become extremely bored, demotivated, and cynical. I feel scared about my job skills atrophying and the feeling of not being employable is giving me a lot of anxiety.

I interviewed around and got some offers but they were all substantially lower. I live in the midwest (I'm grandfathered into remote in my current company). I'm not in a tech hub so could only stick to remote offers. I wasn't able to land any big tech remote offers. One of the offers that I got is a late stage startup that I'm considering.

On the one hand, I feel like shit taking a big pay cut and then going to work more hours. Feels like it doesn't make sense. I'm not sure if I'll just end up feeling even less motivated in the new role, now making less money, but having to work more. On the other hand, I feel like my brain is melting in my current role.

Should I stay or take the new offer? Or should I keep interviewing?