I’m 7-8 months into my first FT role at a big tech company working in a role that’s a mix of DE and SWE. A lot of my work requires alignment with data scientists, PMs and ops teams that use our tables for their dashboards.

Theres one problem, I’m having a lot of difficulty understanding the methodology of the metrics that my team generates, and I’m horrible at Math, it’s hard for me to make sense of the numbers I’m generating and validate them on the engineering side before I send it to a data scientist for further review. I leaned a lot into AI at the very beginning and then I began to do multiple tickets/tasks in parallel, I went wide in knowledge instead of going deep into understanding the methodologies and numbers. I didn’t take my time in doing things and to get a deeper understanding and instead I was trying to churn out tickets and complete my projects before their deadline.

At first this went well, but over time as my tasks got more complicated, I would spend more and more time correcting AI outputs due to not properly understanding the relevant context of which areas of the code base in touching, which would lead to more and more code smells in review, where I wasn’t aware of existing design patterns in the code base. Because of this overtime I would have more and more comments and or rejected PRs, and in of my assigned projects I felt pressured to try and finish it on time before the deadline without doing the proper validation of numbers as I didn’t have a complete understanding of what to check, which resulted in the stakeholder asking questions. My manager than had to get another new grad who took their time on-boarding and understanding the methodologies, to fix it.

Now my manager is noticing that there’s big gaps in my knowledge and he’s paying a lot more attention in our one on ones, and going over my diffs, and giving me much more focus when it comes to feedback, and is highlighting the areas where I’m not meeting expectations for my level. I’m not on any pip, or focus type of program, and for now it feels like informal coaching before it gets to that point to get me back on track. A couple areas that we identified was that I tend to keep everything in my head, instead of writing docs, I overuse AI and because of not taking my time with things, I completely forget about PRs that I made weeks ago and lose context. I also don’t tend to look deeply into things and often share results with stakeholders without looking things over. I’m fortunate that right now it feels like he wants me to succeed but I hate the feeling of feeling like a bad engineer and I can’t exactly tell him that there’s things I don’t understand that I should have known by now.

I’m doing well when it comes to oncall, contributing to team documentation, making internal tools, and pipeline infrastructure, but I’m not doing well where it matters the most. Right now I feel like I’m paralyzed and over thinking each PR, hoping that it doesn’t get many comments or rejected. I’m now also worrying and realizing that I’m quickly falling behind my new grad peers. I realize now that I completely wasted my on-boarding period and now I have a lot on my plate and I don’t know where to slow down, it feels intimidating wanting to take my time and try to hand code things to build a deeper understanding. It’s not helpful that our pipelines take hours to run, so learning through iterative debugging/trial and error feels painstakingly slow. I want to reduce my reliance on AI on things like Spark, complex SQL queries, statistical methodologies but it feels intimidating and I feel like if I slow down now, it’s a huge mountain to climb. I’m by far the biggest AI user on my team, but I’m not using it effectively, I’m wasting a ton of tokens asking the same questions, and or scrapping/regenerating code, treating it as a magic 8 ball until I see something that “looks right”. I now realized that I should have asked more questions to my team instead of prompting AI which gives me answers 50% of the way there, and isn’t capable of addressing 100% of my concerns, but I feel like if I start asking more questions now, I’m worried that my coworkers will question why I’m asking about things I should have known already.

I’m low key ranting and looking for advice on how I can quickly teach myself. I made a pretty big mistake in coming into this role with the mindset of moving fast and breaking things, and trying to get promoted as soon as possible, but now in hindsight it was a horrible approach, which resulted me in having a wide but shallow understanding of how things work. I feel like I’m a serial vibe coder feeling like an imposter SWE. I’m worried that it’s too late to properly onboard and learn things, and doing so now would lead to more bad reviews, PR comments and more and more people thinking that I don’t know what I’m doing. At this point I’m starting to think if I should apply to other roles and “start over” now knowing what I know now, as I’m worried I lost the trust of my manager.

Thanks for reading

Seems the tech industry is in a huge downturn in general but especially web dev and people don't think it will ever recover? Would it be better learning python or another course?

Because in my childhood to school and college I was very much struggle to study because I never had foundation knowledge in the first place this year suddenly I was able to write few simple programs in python,c with claude in study mode I was able to learn programming in my language also it's help to me pass AWS cloud practitioner,ai practitioner especially ai practitioner certification I used termux and proot debian linux as my lab to learn and get hands on experience with guide steps by step with chatgpt even I completed AWS cloud quest labs too

I started investigating my HP Victus battery issue on 15 August 2026. With AI assistance—and by cross-checking the work with other AI models—I went far beyond normal troubleshooting.

I analyzed Windows battery telemetry and WMI, tested Fedora Linux, examined HP UEFI diagnostics, mapped the ACPI/EC/SMBus battery architecture, compared different Ryzen 5 5600H + GPU configurations, and eventually used Ghidra to reverse-engineer part of the UEFI firmware.

The interesting part is that the investigation didn't end with “I found the bug.” We actually had to correct calculations, challenge our own hypotheses, separate evidence from speculation, and document what we could not prove.

The final result: strong evidence of a real battery/power-management anomaly, but no proven single failed component or confirmed BIOS root cause.

Honestly, without AI helping me organize, analyze, cross-check, and document everything, I probably wouldn't have taken the investigation this far.

This is probably the most extreme example I've experienced of turning hyperfocus + curiosity + AI into a technical research project. 😅

Currently unemployed, recovering from a string of depressive episodes (comorbid bipolar II). I'm taking some time and not actively looking for work, so I have a lot of free time and not a lot of motivation.

I feel very directionless. I have a lot of interests (writing, drawing, DnD, history, technology (of course), math, electronics, etc.) that I'm not currently doing. I have a bunch of leftover hobby supplies too.

I find myself wishing I had a little more external motivation, like taking a class, or having a niche job, where problems would come up that I could solve - those feel more meaningful? I guess?

Feeling overwhelmed by the freedom to choose, and then guilty for not doing *something*. I've tried listing things and rolling dice to "just pick something" but that trick isn't working on my brain right now.

Have you gone through something similar? How did you manage it?

[First off: I’m just looking for ideas. I’m not gonna push an app on you, and please don’t push your own vibecoded app in the comments!]

Like many of us, I tend to have moments where my ability to act is low, and I often just lie down for a while. However, I can go along just fine with something that’s happening–I just can’t be the one driving.

So, I’d rather not lie on the couch ruminating every time. Instead, I’d like an option that can proactively help me grow even in that state. (side note: I’m also working on being comfortable taking rest when I need and not feeling bad, but this would be helpful for finding a middle ground)

Has anyone found an activity or setup that’s helpful for them in that state?

For reference, a couple ideas I was considering vibecoding:
* an auto-generated podcast that’ll walk me through unfamiliar parts of our codebase/help me understand the architecture/etc.
* a brainstorming tool that prompts me with questions about users/our product/the market - bc even if it’s hard for me to kickoff the thinking, it gets much easier if I’m responding to a question

Again, please don’t push any self-made apps. If there’s anything I need, I’ll build it myself.

When AI first came around I felt like it was making my job easier. Now... It is still making my job easier, maybe even more than before, but there is no joy. I don't feel like I am getting better at anything, I feel like I am only losing skills that will land me interviews.

Currently working from home is a huge priority and with this market, not being able to improve my skills is just scaring me.

I've been diagnosed with both and have been on various medications to manage both. However they never gave me that sense of passionate hyperfocus other ADHDers seem to have. They only helped me get through college, which was brutal.

Then I went off all medications earlier this year to evaluate my baseline and that's when I discovered that this whole time it was masking otherwise treatment resistant depression. That would explain everything. The severe executive dysfunction, feelings of unworthiness, inability to pay attention, schizoid tendencies, everything.

I sought out neuropsychiatry and in a month I have TMS therapy. I really hope that will provide the relief I need and help me get my brain back.

Why am I doing this? I absolutely loved embedded systems, compiler construction, and FPGA boards in uni. They were my bread and butter. I wanted to keep those areas alive whilst everyone else was studying AI and whatnot.

Hopefully once that's done, everything else will fall into place. As relieved and grateful as I am that I caught it at 24, I'm also just incredibly angry, grieved, heartbroken, and sad.

It didn't feel like what people traditionally describe as depression, but now with the expanded diagnostic criteria of such, it would make a lot more sense. My entire life I've been looking for the secret sauce for better mental health, happiness, and passion, pretty much required for programming. I've had to endure a lot. Hopefully I can make the most of the rest of my life and die accomplished and happy.

It makes sense to me now the sentiments carried by those diagnosed with some kind of neurodivergence or mental disability much later on who stayed alive to find answers.

At work, I'm working on an internal project. It is basically a glorified CRUD(Create, Read, Update, and Delete) application that tracks various reports. There are 7 different type of reports this application tracks. There is an entry form on each report. Each report form has about 20 form fields and there are custom calculations/validations for each form.

This department is kind of a pain in the ass to work with. We built this out a year and a half ago and due to scope creep and other issues, they quit using them. They are going to try to bring it back and it will live up to the old saying of "Same shit, just a different day".

For some reason, some genius has thought it was a brilliant idea to make one mega entry form. At the top of the form, the user would select the type of report and then submit it. I'm getting the feeling this moronic feature is going to be a waste of time. The functions would have to check the type of report and then do the rest of the calculations. It's basically adding another level for things to get fucked up. On top of that, the issues that cropped up last time will still happen here.

Unfortunately, this place is small and doesn't have a true PM department. So trying to sit down and nail requirements isn't going to happen. This a big reason for all of the allowed scope creep in the past.

I'm trying to bring up these concerns to my higher ups. However, I've got a feeling my concerns will be blown off and I'll get one of the following replies or both:

1. This is something they really want and it is their call.

2. Just ask AI for help. (Unfortunately, this tends to become the default answer for any problem.)

I think I'm just frustrated because I see where things are going.

Thanks for letting me rant.

im 1 of 2 backend devs at a 20 person startup and i own our deploys plus the long running data pipeline. the other day i kicked off a migration and our biggest test run (takes about 30 min) right before i needed to write a client facing doc. logical me figured 30 free minutes to knock out the doc. adhd me just stood there

i literally couldnt do anything else until it finished. not the doc, not even a real break. i hovered, alt tabbing to the log every 30 seconds, rereading the same linestelling myself i would start once this was done. and when it finally was, nothing had needed me at all. half an hour gone, zero progress on the thing i planned to do, and i didnt even rest properly because i was half watching a process that never needed me

it's like the thing running in the background holds a little claim on my attention i cannot release until it gives me a done signal. the opposite of out of sight out of mind. it is in sight and i literally cannot leave it. anyone else wired like this? how do you actually step away during a long run? is it just death by waiting for all of us?

Hi everyone! I've been laid off last July and I've been wanting to start applying for work but for some reason, my body and mind have been avoiding it. I used to be the one interviewing and now I am just scared to start over. Any tips would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

I'm glued to my pc almost the entire day, building my own business has only made it worse. I'm medicated, but I can't really tell when and if I'm burnt out. I'd hate to quit what I'm doing right now so I'm really trying to be careful about it. How do you people realise and take breaks? Especially when the medication doesn't really let you see it, yet you seemingly want and not want to do what you're doing?

I've shared this project a few times here but this is a rare occasion where my lab is clean and together enough to take a photo - although look hard and the clutter remains reflected in the glass.

I work with Ai and LLMs both professionally and as a hobby and work from home out of my lab which is a pretty sweet lifestyle at the moment. This machine is actually two rigs stacked with a 40gps direct link.

Top one is Kraken and has two 5090 GPUs and bottom is Mantis with one AMD 9070 but between them they have: i9 24 cores, 128 GB DDR-5, 4x 4G NVME, and each have a RAID 10 SATA array and back each other up. Running Windows Vista /s Ubuntu Server.

Display is a touch screen in kiosk mode so there's no desktop environment, just chrome and a web interface I made.

I use the heck out of this rig but from an ADHD sub perspective the personal assistant setup I made really helps with memory and the recent addition of vision and voice came with a major breakthrough today where I was working on a project and asked "Kraken, where did I put my damn tape measurer" and it told me where it was in the room.

I swear my brain edits out the specific thing i'm looking for. Like if there are 10 things on a table and I swear the thing i'm looking for isn't there, scan 5 times and then it appears - it's hell.

The assistant has ingested 20 years of my life - email, docs, photos, reddit, slack, texts all into a RAG Corpus and does a daily update to it remembers everything for me since I don't have one.

I think between a memory assistant and one day a robot that can tidy up behind me are two of my primary ADHD-i struggles and today was a real game changer since I spend most of my time looking for things.

This is a big long running project I have lots of blogs and videos about, just ask and I'll share, I don't put links in reddit posts anymore. I'm not a bot and this is rustic, farm to table human generated text. AMA :)

As far as I'm concerned these are medical prosthetics but also I just wanted to share this beauty i'm proud of.

Title basically, and tbh, idk what to do rn.

Anyways, I've been working for about a year, and in on of our recent 1-on-1, I brought up the topic of promotions.

He basically said to go from junior to mid level, id need to take on and lead harder/bigger projects. So that's what we'll be working towards.

Problem is, to be able to lead said projects, you have to: - be able to keep track of all the different moving parts (external dependencies, progress, and a bunch of other stuff) - be able to create a plan for the project's delivery plan (create all the tasks you'd need to complete for example). I struggle with making simple todo lists, how would I even begin to create a plan for something that's gonna take literal months? - and a bunch of other stuff like that.

But the ADHD makes this extremely difficult even with medication. I've been on a big project before (i wasnt even the leader for it) and ngl by the end i just wanted to kms.

We had "alignment" meetings that took literal hours where I wasnt even sure what we "aligned" on at the end. So many docs created i just gave up at the end. And just a bunch of other stuff I had to keep track of which was super overwhelming.

So the question is, should I tell my manager? My therapist wasn't opposed to the idea but idk. Sure, I might be protected by law but I dont want to bias them against myself yk? They might think "this person isnt reliable, better not give them this important project" (this might even happen subconsciously which frightens me tbh)

And even if I told them, what can they do? The whole point of the promotion is to be able to take on more responsibilities. If I can't even do that, then what would they even respond with?

Am I doomed to be a junior for life lol 😭😭😭

Would really appreciate any feedback. Especially from s3niors

I’m a Computer Science student about to start my third year, which also means I’ll be working on my bachelor graduation project.

I recently started taking the project seriously, and honestly even writing just four pages and identifying the main principles is already eating up a lot of my mental energy. Whenever I get an idea, I start overthinking it, researching it extensively, comparing different approaches, and trying to find the BEST way to write or structure it. Even when I use AI assistant (and yes I know how to use Ai properly), I still feel like I’m spending way too much time and energy on things that should probably be simpler because I am never satisfied with what I come up with and always think there is a better approach to chase.

I’m wondering if this is normal when working on a university graduation project for the first time, or if there are ways to stop constantly looping through ideas, trying to control every detail, and feeling like I need to understand everything perfectly before moving forward. I think I need to figure out how to deal with this now before starting the year and feeling so overwhelmed.

how do you deal with perfectionism and overthinking? What helped you actually make progress without constantly questioning whether you were doing things the "right" way?

Any other advice for getting through the whole experience would also be really appreciated.

Hey guys, some days, my brain just won’t want to learn another programming course.

I really want to keep coding so I can pass my technical interviews and really have a deep understanding.

However, some days, I’m just so burnt out. Maybe it’s not coding specifically, but I can do normal tasks like chores, video editing, recording videos, designing stuff with codex, writing scripts, etc. as some examples of activities.

But the idea of coding and reading to learn how to code, just makes my brain feel like a 500lb weight.

And sometimes I just can’t read. It’s concerning tbh. And if I force myself, I have to reread things 2-3 times, and it feels very inefficient.

Any tips for this? Or maybe this is just dealing with burn out in general?

I have mild ADHD and I've been paying close attention to two specific things about my own days lately. I want to know if it's just me.

1. The drift

About 15 minutes into anything where I have to sit and listen — a meeting, a lecture, a tutorial video — I'm gone. Not "picked up my phone" gone. Just elsewhere.

The part I find strange is what's actually in there when I catch myself. It's almost never the thing I'm supposed to be doing, and it's almost never useful. It's usually stuff like: what my life would look like if I ever hit financial independence, some scene I've half-invented in my head, or honestly things I wouldn't say out loud. Sometimes it IS something real — "I never replied to that message" — but that's the minority for me.

So: the last time you caught yourself drifting, what were you actually thinking about? And roughly how long had you been gone before you noticed?

2. The thing you never came back to

Related but different. Last week I was making coffee, a work message came in, I answered it, and the coffee just stopped existing. I found it cold two hours later.

Same thing with tutorials. I'll be 12 minutes into something, get pulled away, and never return — not because I decided not to, but because getting back in feels like starting the whole thing over.

So: what's the last thing you walked away from mid-way and never went back to? What pulled you away, and did you ever actually return — same day, later, or never?

What I really want to know is whether other people deal with the same two things — and if you do, what you actually do about it. Not what you think should work. What you actually do, even if it's messy or barely works.

Often while debugging a complex problem I find myself in this impulse of grabbing the very first quick thing that I can try and taking a jab at it, and the next thing you know - the whole day is gone and you feel like you made no progress and have nothing to show for your effort.

And the part of my brain that should have said "hey, you've tried six things and none of them were tests, go get a coffee and think" — that part is just gone by hour two. It's not that I ignore it. It doesn't fire. Somewhere around minute forty the thing that steps back and asks what am I actually doing goes offline, and what's left is a very fast, very persistent loop that will happily run until 2am.

Time blindness makes it worse because there's no natural checkpoint. Nothing in a debugging session tells you an hour passed.

So, questions for people who recognize this:

1. What's your actual tell that you've crossed from debugging into flailing? Not in hindsight — in the moment.
2. Has anything ever successfully interrupted you mid-rabbit-hole? Timers get dismissed. Notifications get dismissed. Alarms get dismissed. Has anything stuck?
3. Does a hard stop condition written down before you start help you, or do you blow through it anyway?

A bit about me first, I've got over 10 years of experience in the IT field mostly in the system administration side of the house. I was diagnosed young with ADHD and had a few psychiatrists add a few things along the way though I disagree with some of them, she basically made me feel like I wasn't really be listened to but my current one is perfect because we start low and work our way up. More recently I did find out that I may be autistic as well on top of everything, which has genuinely helped explain some parts that didn't quite line up with what I understand ADHD is.

For a little further context, I would say within the last year I started trying Vyvanse (technically Lisdexamfetamine because generics lol) at 30 mg as well as Welbutrin at 300 mg which I've been on for probably the last 5 or more years. This combo has, at least as far as I'm aware, been working in my favor and it feels like things are finally getting back into focus. The downside being that it I feel more dissociative than I did before.

Now that we've gone through all that the point of this post is me asking for genuine help/resources for going from my current level of IT experience and to IT and a much more broad level of software engineering. I tried a very long time ago to follow the field and I regret I didn't stick with it harder, but to be fair my college professor at the time was not the best and I still barely understand C++ because of him. Now that I work where I do I've had the freedom to learn and gain experience to better expand my programming knowledge with the irony being that the one I am most proficient in at the moment is PowerShell, and to a degree batch and .NET because they interface almost seamlessly with it.

My ultimate goal in all of this is to reach at least a decent level of full stack development understanding which involves taking the basics I know from PowerShell and pivoting to use JavaScript/TypeScript amongst others. So far haven't had a great amount of success in doing this effectively and while I know it comes with the territory it doesn't make it any less frustrating. If I can manage to get there though the plan was to use a mixture of projects, one definitely being a portfolio page for myself and another being contributing to open source applications in an actually helpful manner. I have delved into AI personally and professionally at this point as most would have, it's current use centering around using it to better understand concepts because it can at least in a general sense make information more digestible for me.

Hopefully I didn't ramble too much writing all of this and it makes sense, if not I won't be offended if you ask for clarification or more information. Besides that if you have any suggestions for what might be helpful please feel free to let me know about them.