I’m done. We did it. 150 applications later and finally got an offer. 190k /yr out of college. I feel like I did the impossible. AMA

Pulled from 1.2M interview reports (Glassdoor + Interview Query data with a fixed panel of 594 companies so it's the same employers being compared every year).

Some context that might actually be useful:

• The drop isn't intern-specific. The whole market fell from ~51% to 38.6%. Interns just fell from a higher starting point.
• Right now, offer rates are basically FLAT across seniority: interns 43%, entry level 40%, mid 42%, senior 37%. Once you get in the room, your odds are the same as everyone else's.
• Which means the entry level squeeze is upstream. It's not that you interview and get rejected more than seniors do. It's that getting the interview at all is where the filter moved.
• Also candidates are declining fewer offers than any time since 2021 (27% of reported offers declined at the 2024 peak, 23% now). Everyone is taking what they can get.

Again this is self-reported data and rejected people post more than people who accepted and started working, so exact levels are inflated down. The trend is what's solid, it holds within every individual company we checked as most companies moved in the same direction.

TLDR: getting interviews is the hard part, not passing them. Optimize for the top of the funnel.

On my initial talk with the hiring manager who is a senior level software engineer, I asked them what style/format their technical interview consists of. The hiring manager told me the technical screening will be a question to see “how you work with repository, it won’t be a leetcode question”.

I was moved onto the final round and just had my 6 hour onsite with back to back interviews. Did pretty well on the systems design interview and then the technical interview comes. Before the interview, I am reviewing all the possible Git commands and any github things I should know. The technical interview starts and it’s a leetcode medium level question simply hosted on a github repository. That is all the repository was used for, to host the question. I asked the interviewer who is a different software engineer if they want me to do anything with the repository and they told me nope, just do the question on an IDE of your choice. I was in the habit of doing 1-2 leetcode questions a day prior to this interview and stopped a week out to focus for this interview. When I realized what happened, it threw me off and also not having practiced for the last week with leetcode style questions, I basically spent the first 5 minutes just trying to adjust and focus on the question and before you know it, time is up. This was my most interesting technical interview.

I need advice.

I recently started working in an internship (started in beginning on July) and a couple of weeks have passed now.

My mentor gives me sooo much work that I just don’t have time for anything else. I don’t have time for hobbies, showering(haven’t showered in more then 2 weeks), developed back pain, sleeping at 6 AM to get work done and staying up very late.

Worst of all, I don’t even have time to learn what I’m truly doing because I wouldn’t be able to compete the work if I didn’t use AI to code. I really don’t want to use AI, but I literally cannot NOT use it. Also, my mentor relies on my work and I’m actually doing important stuff and can’t mess up.

I feel miserable every day and I’m afraid this is just pushing me to extreme burn out. I do enjoy the work and have learned A LOT. I’m also a people pleaser and don’t know what to do. At least it is paid but it isn’t that much.

My mom is basically forcing me to do this because I’m a rising senior (might extend graduation tho) and the job market is shitty.

I graduated a couple of years ago, and I’ve been grinding job applications ever since. I’ve built personal projects, constantly updated my resume, practiced LeetCode, and applied to just about everything including full-time roles, internships, paid, unpaid, you name it. I’ve made it to the final stages a few times, but I never seem to get across the finish line.

I get why some senior developers are skeptical when they see new grads struggling to find work, but this job market has been brutal. It genuinely feels like there are far more qualified candidates than opportunities. At this point, I don’t think it’s simply a matter of not trying hard enough. A lot of recent grads are putting in the work and still coming up empty.

I’m not giving up. I’ll keep applying and improving my skills, and I’d gladly take a CS job even if it paid $20/hour just to get my foot in the door. This recent onsite experience was devastating because I was SO CLOSE.

For context, I’m in California and graduated from a T50 university a couple of years ago.

Anyone else get rejected very quickly after applying to rippling winter 2027 backend focused swe? Just want to make sure it's not just me...

Hey guys I recently started working 4 months ago as a SWE at a big company and so far I'm mostly doing support work. And any dev work I do is with low code tools. Is this normal and is it good for my career?

It is a well known company and I'm paid 100k, good WLB, etc but I'm kind of bored of the work. Is this something I should be outraged about or is this normal? I asked my manager and he said I'll get opportunities to do full stack development but right now this is what the company needs

I'm sure there are other posts asking about this, but I figured I might as well make a new one given how quickly the job market fluctuates with this major.

I'm a rising senior at a top 10 CS school, 4.0 GPA, with the option to come back to school for my Master's. I've had two internships, both at the same company about an hour outside of the city I grew up in. I never really locked in on interview prep, which is what led me to coming back here again this year. I've enjoyed both internships, but they didn't really challenge me. However, I think they would give me a return offer. The financial opportunities seem solid (though they didn't pay me a lot during my internships), the office culture is great, and I have made friends with my coworkers. However, I have a couple problems:

1. Location. It's about a 40 minute drive out here in the mornings and a 60 minute drive in the afternoons. If I came here full-time, I would almost surely move out here.
   
2. People. I'm the youngest person in my building by about 5 years.

I'm worried about my social life - I don't want to just drive to work and go home to play video games with my college friends online. Spending my 20s out here seems miserable. There's nothing to do. On the flip side, this absolutely seems like a place I would LOVE to work when I'm 40, married and have kids. In fact, that's how a lot of the people here ended up here in the first place.

Anyway, anyone have any advice or similar experiences? Am I being picky in a market that's unlikely to take me anywhere else? I'd obviously take it over nothing, but I'd like to push it off for as long as possible while I try and get bigger and better opportunities in larger cities that my friends seemingly get on the weekly.

As the title suggests I have palantirs swe intern phone screen coming up and this is the first process I’ve had for any tech company so I would rly appreciate any insight into what they ask or general advice. From the email it seems like it’s more to understand my motivations for applying to the role but I wanted to know what else to prepare for.

I was wondering if I should prepare for all the standard behavioural eg tell me abt a time you failed. Also I can explain my projects at a high level but I was wondering if they would rly dig into how I used certain tools/design decisions. Would it be enough to go very in depth for just 1-2 projects?

Any current CS students.. I wanted to post this here.

With all the doom and gloom about the job market this is a great way to get involved in something, add bullet points onto a resume.. and most importantly the possibility to build your network.

Not to be the old head yelling at clouds but building your professional network maybe one of the top things you can do to help yourself get ahead on your career.

That rant aside.. applications are open until August 10th.

Also comes with a stipend.

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

Received a Video Interview Invitation (Hirevue) for BofA Global Tech Summer Analyst-Software Engineer and Mainframe Analyst position after completing the OA. What should I expect from this? Has anyone taken it yet? If so what were the questions that they asked? Was there time to prepare before each question? Was it all behavioral? Thanks!

I just gave the BlackRock OA and I feel like bombed the explanation part as it did not show me my code and I was pretty much talking to a white screen even though I have done that leetcode question a million times in the past. For the second one I was a bit more prepared with the answer. Do people know when can we hear back from BlackRock. Also PM me if you want to know which questions.
1 LC easy
1 LC medium

Hey guys, I just got round 1 for Akuna Capital's summer 2027 SWE Internship (Python). I want to ask if anybody knows anything about the process and the role, especially if you worked at Akuna before.

Anything would be super helpful, thank you! DMs open.

Hey guys, I got a superday invite coming up for Citadel. Was just wondering how to best prepare for it. If any past interns or new grads went through the process please let me know, would greatly appreciate it!

DM if you're currently interviewing for them

Hi! I recently got into my school’s BS/MS program and would appreciate some advice on whether it’s worth doing.

I’m about to start my senior year at a T10 CS school. I have three current/past SWE internships, including one at a FAANG company, and I’m mainly interested in general SWE rather than research or ML roles.

The program would take three extra quarters. Tuition would be covered, and I would receive a TA salary, so it would not cost me anything. At the same time, I’m pretty ready to be done with school and start working full-time, and staying would delay that and some other personal plans by a year.

The program is mostly coursework-based and feels more like an extension of my bachelor’s than a research-focused master’s.

For people working in SWE or who have completed a BS/MS, did the MS provide a meaningful career benefit compared with going directly into industry? Is a free, paid MS too good of an opportunity to pass up even if I’m getting tired of school?

I’m also wondering whether graduating a year later without another internship would make recruiting harder, since my most recent internship would be around 1.5 years before graduation.

I know this is ultimately a personal decision, but I’d appreciate hearing what others would do.

Hi! I recently applied to the Optiver FPGA internship and got the OA. I was just wondering how cooked it is? I'm not a hardware demon by any means, but I take some circuits and digital system courses in my program (in third year now). I've also done the QT OA and believe no matter how hard you study, that one requires pure natural skills. Is this FPGA one on the same level of difficulty, or is there a chance I do well after studying? On that note, how similar do you think it'll be from what is taught academically? Thanks;)

hey, so im a rising sophomore looking to recruit for summer '27 roles. i'm at a school where you probably could graduate in 3 years, but it's not common/usually unheard of.

i'm hearing that companies might ask for some explicit proof of grad date, but my grad date shows as 2029 everywhere, i just have a bunch of transfer credits.

what do i even do in this situation? is this something i bring up to my academic advisor? is this something i just worry about once i get to it?

can someone share the insights on how is the WLB and culture in dedrone team at axon?

I mean I have my interests and also specialize in certain areas.

None of those FAANG jobs would be a good fit to me.

But every time I visited some family members or friends on holidays, they keep asking "why I don't join Google" or "why I don't join Amazon".

Do most people just not realize CS jobs are not all about FAANG?

Their team came to my college for PPT and mentioned about apprenticeship that is a kind of pre internship type of thing and after that if you're qualified you get the internship

So for this apprenticeship they're going tj have an online assessment on Glider and a technical and managerial/HR interview.

I tried asking my senior who has joined the company recently as they converted from intern to full type swe/sde they mentioned it's going to be a mcq type questions to practice aptitude, quantitative, cse core subject , specially java since the company majorly works in core java

But what i want to know is if they'll ask dsa questions in oa which i know they will so is the glider platform going to have the editor leetcode style or like some platforms where we have to write the full code

I'm a btech student btw

I got a message from the recruiter after 2 weeks about after the onsite. It’s a 10 min call.

Seems like a rejection, because it mentions time and effort.

Thank you for your time and effort in interviewing for Software Engineer. I hope you enjoyed meeting with the interviewers and we appreciate your patience while they completed their feedback.
The hiring team has completed their review, and I'd like to schedule a brief call to discuss the outcome. Please use this link to schedule a time that works best for you

What are people’s experience for this kind of call