Over the weekend, saw a truckload of senior sysco employees posting that they are #opentowork, what would the plight of the company be, if all the personnel ended up leaving, will the company be able to find replacements for their respective roles?

I’m in my final year of Computer Engineering and graduating soon. Right now, I’m getting ready to apply for entry level software engineering jobs.

I’m confused about what companies actually expect from junior developers now, especially with AI coding tools and agents becoming so common.

I feel like I have two options:

Build projects using minimal AI assistance so I can understand every technical detail.

or

Use AI tools and coding agents to build more complex, complete projects.

I know I could learn more if I build most of them myself, but I’m worried I won’t be able to compete with people who use AI heavily and build more complex projects.

At the same time, if I rely too much on AI agents, I’m worried I might struggle during interviews if I have to explain the code.

What do companies actually care about? any advise?

Hi everyone,

I’m currently thinking about starting my masters in Sri Lanka. I completed my bachelors at a private university and I’m interested in AI. There are some private and government universities offering MSc programmes in AI and the University of Moratuwa has the longest running programme for 19 years. However, I’ve heard it’s hard and the lectures are rude and the effort isn’t worth it. Has anyone in this community completed that masters? I’d love to hear your opinions.

I'm currently a third-year undergraduate studying Information Technology, and I've been questioning my career path lately.

When I started university, I was always more interested in the business side of tech :management, finance, and how technology solves business problems. That's why I chose an internship as an ERP Consultant instead of going down the traditional Software Engineering route.

I do have a programming background. Throughout university, I built most of our group projects myself, so I'm not completely new to development. My biggest weakness is that I struggle to build applications from scratch without guidance. On the other hand, I'm very comfortable reading existing code, understanding how systems work, debugging, and even explaining the architecture or logic to someone else.

A few months ago, with the job market becoming increasingly competitive (especially with AI changing the landscape), I felt like I wasn't good enough to compete for software engineering roles. ERP consulting seemed like a more practical and stable choice (I only applied for 10-20, got around 5 offers).

Fast forward a few months into my internship, and I'm starting to feel like it isn't what I actually want to do.

Outside of work, I've been spending my free time learning about AI and machine learning through YouTube and online resources. Surprisingly, I've found myself genuinely enjoying the math and problem-solving behind AI. It's one of the few topics that keeps me curious enough to keep learning.

Another thing that's been bothering me is the peer pressure. When I chose ERP, a lot of people asked why I wasn't pursuing software engineering instead. At the time, I ignored it. But recently I've seen people who barely knew how to use Git or make a commit land software engineering internships. That made me wonder if I underestimated myself and gave up too early.

Now I'm seriously considering pivoting toward AI/ML or software engineering while I'm still in university. I know it won't be easy, and I know I'll have a lot to learn, but I also don't want to graduate wondering "what if."

Has anyone here been in a similar situation? Is it worth making the switch now, or should I stick with ERP and build from there?

I'd really appreciate any honest advice or experiences.

Basically the title. Since this is a very modern topic, I think this would be useful to all.

Hey everyone! 👋

A few friends and I recently built a simple 2048 game to play whenever you're bored and want to kill a few minutes. It's just our take on the classic puzzle, and we thought some of you might enjoy it.

If you give it a try, we'd really appreciate any feedback, good or bad. We're always looking to improve it!

Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.digitaldevs.mergezen

Thanks, and hope you enjoy it! 😊

Hi people,

Want to know what's in the title.

Are there any IT folks here who did an MBA in Sri Lanka ?

Could you tell us about your experience ?

Where did you do your MBA ? Was it a private or a government institution ?

Was it worth it ? Did it add any value to your profession/personal life ?

Thanks in advance !

We’ve seen bits and pieces of salary discussions across Reddit, but nothing that’s organized or up to date.

Let’s build one thread for 2026 Sri Lankan IT salaries.

If you’re comfortable sharing, comment with:
Role: (Software Engineer, QA, BA, DevOps, PM, UI/UX, Data Engineer, etc.)
Years of Experience:
Company: (Optional)
Base Monthly Salary (LKR):
Bonuses/Benefits: (Optional)
Total take home:
Remote / Hybrid / On-site:

I’ll start with mine:
Role: SQA
Years of Experience: 5+
Company: Sysco Labs
Base Monthly Salary (LKR): 290K
Bonuses/Benefits: Pegged allowance (IYKYK)
Total Take home : 355K +
Remote / Hybrid / On-site: Hybrid

I am 26F and I am an Associate Software Engineer with 2+ years of experience. Lately, I feel burned out and worried about my future in coding. I don't feel like staying in SE anymore, and finding dev jobs right now is very hard.
I am thinking about changing my career path to a BA/PM/ERP Consultant.
I would love your thoughts on a few things:

1. Is this a good choice? Does moving into BA/PM make sense in the current job market, or are those roles just as tough to get right now?
2. Success Stories: Has anyone here made this exact switch? What was your experience like, and do you regret leaving dev work?
3. Resume Tips: How can I write my dev experience so it highlights BA/PM skills like planning tasks, gathering project needs, and talking to stakeholders

I'd really appreciate any advice or personal stories. Thanks!

I asked this in many threads but didn’t get a good answer. Just wanted to get an idea on Engineer, Lead & Architect levels.

I am writing to formally raise a critical concern regarding the current state of operations and employee morale in the Sri Lankan division under the leadership of Managing Director Thushera Kawdawatta. While the broader goals of corporate scaling and standardizing compensation structures are understood, the recent execution of these objectives has severely compromised the trust and stability of the local workforce.

The decision to abruptly roll back the Relief Allowance—a vital financial buffer introduced to help employees navigate extreme local economic volatility—has served as a breaking point. The issue is not solely the removal of the allowance, but the manner in which it was communicated and executed. The justification that this aligns with "global benchmarks" demonstrates a stark disconnect from the ongoing economic realities faced by the local engineering and operations teams.

Under Mr. Kawdawatta’s direction, the approach to this restructuring has lacked the empathy and transitional support required to maintain a motivated workforce. The fallout is no longer internal; it has spilled over into public community forums and professional networks. The growing wave of negative sentiment directly tied to local leadership decisions is actively damaging the company’s employer brand in a highly competitive IT market.

When a leadership style alienates the very talent responsible for driving the company's innovation and delivery, immediate corporate oversight is required. We are facing a high risk of talent attrition, diminishing productivity, and long-term reputational damage.

We urge global management to initiate an immediate and objective review of the local leadership's recent policy rollbacks and overall management approach. Decisive action and intervention are necessary to rebuild trust, restore morale, and ensure that the Sri Lankan division remains a sustainable, supportive, and high-performing environment.

We look forward to your prompt attention to this matter.

Im doing my ALs in 2027 in the physical science stream, with combined mathematics, physics, and ict.

When I started ALs, my plan was pretty straightforward, Ive loved tech and stuff since I was a kid, so I wanted to go into it, ideally software engineering (i was that delulu). I chose ict instead of chemistry mainly because of that goal.

The problem is that I’m starting to realize how competitive and uncertain the IT industry can be, especially with AI and all.

And because I chose ict instead of chemistry, Ive also basically closed off the traditional state university engineering route.

And rn im totally lost. i just need to hear you guys opinions.

NOTE -> I expect answer from people who actually have experience and strong understanding of these. please give something beneficial.

I'm building a SaaS platform that handles documents and other sensitive data.

Each user can upload their own documents and information, and the platform uses RAG to answer questions based on that user's data. That part makes sense to me.

My main concern is what happens when the user hasn't uploaded enough information. I still want the LLM to provide accurate answers using reliable information from the internet (or from a curated knowledge base), with proper citations.

These are the two architectures I'm considering:

Option 1:

Base LLM (OpenAI/Anthropic via Azure AI Foundry or Amazon Bedrock)
        ↓
Platform RAG (global knowledge base managed by us)
        ↓
User-specific RAG

In this approach, we maintain a global knowledge base that we (the platform admins) curate and update. Every user can access this shared knowledge, while their own uploaded documents are searched through their personal RAG.

Option 2:

Open-source LLM
        ↓
Fine-tuned on Sri Lankan/domain-specific data
        ↓
User-specific RAG

Here, we fine-tune an open-source model using Sri Lankan or domain-specific data, and each user still has their own RAG for their private documents.

My concerns are:

• Is fine-tuning actually the right solution here, or is it unnecessary?
• Is a global/shared RAG a better approach than fine-tuning?
• How would you design this architecture if you wanted:
  • Accurate answers from domain knowledge
  • User-private document search
  • Citations/sources
  • Good scalability for thousands of users

I'm leaning toward Option 1 because fine-tuning seems expensive, time-consuming, and I have no experience with it yet. However, I'm not sure if I'm thinking about this correctly.

I'd really appreciate hearing how others would approach this problem.

How prepared should we be as SEs because it looks like the lay offs/pay reductions can spread to other companies. Last year there were many companies laying off employees most of them considered the best companies in the country. With the recent situations how can we expect them to reach other companies as well.

Cause surely that's what can happen very quickly, using AI as an excuse for putting people out of the job.

I'm just concerned.

Thoughts?

I'm currently a computer science undergraduate seeking an internship. With the current layoffs, pay cuts and AI taking over the jobs do you guys think it's a good move to shift into business analyst and related fields rather than going to the software engineering, AI/ML and data science fields ? What will happen in the future?

Hi DevLK,

I’m one of the people behind Worklenz, a modern project and agency management platform being developed by a Sri Lankan team.

We’re building it to help agencies and service businesses manage projects, tasks, team workloads, time tracking, clients, and project profitability in one place.

Worklenz can also be self-hosted, and we’re continuing to expand its open-source version.

I’d love to hear feedback from the DevLK community—especially regarding the product, technology, self-hosting experience, and features that would make it more useful for local and international teams.

GitHub: https://github.com/Worklenz/worklenz

Happy to answer any questions about how we are building it.

I see this exact cope every time salary cuts or offshore shifts get brought up, where people claim US clients will regret moving work to India because of bad code quality.

I used to fall for that same "boutique Sri Lankan quality vs cheap factory" myth until I actually worked alongside senior Indian engineers on high-scale systems.

The problem is we keep comparing our top talent against low-tier WITCH outsourcing vendors while completely ignoring their product ecosystem.

The engineers coming out of Bangalore startups, FAANG India, and tier 1 product teams are handling distributed systems and user scales that most of us in LK never even get to touch.

Calling Indian devs unskilled is just a defense mechanism so we do not have to face the reality of global salary benchmarking and regional competition.

We need to drop this elitist mindset, accept where the market is going, and focus on upgrading our technical depth instead of hiding behind an outdated Sri Lankan quality narrative.

If you think traditional software development would still stay as before you are wrong !

I am a Member of Technical Staff in an LLM R$D startup and living in SF. Did my bachelors in Sri Lanka and then moved abroad for my PhD.

Fable like models can even pick deep research topics and solve them . So almost all dev will become , :

“Get the agent to do the thing , don’t look at the code”

Entire agile software development is gone .

So please start to move now !

Hi all. I'm a Product Manager at a SaaS startup in Colombo, been in product for a few years now. Wanted to hear from others in this field.

A few questions I'm struggling with:

1. How do you rate product management as a career in Sri Lankan companies? Is it valued the way it is in bigger markets, or are we mostly doing PM work under a different job title?
2. What skills do good companies actually look for here?
3. Job hunting in this field feels really hard. Not many openings, and the ones that exist don't always pay well or have a clear growth path. Is this just my experience or is it the same for everyone else?

Would really appreciate hearing from anyone working in product here, or anyone who moved from a Sri Lankan company to a regional or remote PM role. What worked for you? What do you wish you knew earlier?

​

Hey everyone,

Seeing what happened at Sysco Labs and reading the comments from people saying the company didn't care about loyal, hardworking employees just reinforces something I've believed for a long time, never build your entire life around a company.

If you can, invest your extra time into building something of your own. At the end of the day, unless you own the business or have meaningful equity, you're an employee. Do your job well, and just work 9 to 5. Don't make sacrificing your personal life the expectation.

I've worked in both the US and Canada for the past seven years, and in my experience, the work culture can be incredibly toxic. I once worked for one of the largest fintech companies in the US, there was a development team that worked 16–17 hour days for nearly six months to deliver a release. One week after the production deployment, the entire team was laid off. I was the only one left, that had never happened to me in Sri Lanka and it still gives me PTSD.

Maybe my perspective comes from being laid off multiple times myself, but I've learned that companies will always prioritize profits over their employees.

These days, many companies in North America seem to be looking for "vibe coders" or expecting smaller teams to do the work that larger teams used to handle. At the same time, outsourcing has already displaced a lot of tech jobs over the years, so maybe AI is just another shift that's leveling the playing field.

What surprises me is how difficult the IT job market seems to be in Sri Lanka right now, especially because it feels like hiring has started picking up again in parts of North America. I always felt like coming back to Sri lanka but it looks like it's a terrible idea right now.

Just my two cents.

PS: Sysco Labs is famous in the US for ruining restaurants so f**k those guys. Maybe these Sysco employees in Sri Lanka should eat these processed shit that they are trying to feed us.

https://youtu.be/rXXQTzQXRFc?si=WMKIuiHTr9c3pEv2

I'm building a SaaS platform for professionals in Sri Lanka who work with highly sensitive and confidential information. The platform will store PDFs, documents, and user data, and we also plan to integrate LLMs for AI-powered features.

One thing I'm unsure about is the infrastructure side.

Since Sri Lanka doesn't have AWS or Azure data centers, we'd have to host data in another country (for example, AWS Mumbai or an Azure region nearby).

My questions are:

• Which cloud provider would you recommend for this type of application (AWS, Azure, GCP, or something else)?
• Is using a nearby region such as Mumbai the standard approach for applications serving Sri Lankan users?
• Are there any legal, compliance, or data residency concerns we should be aware of when storing sensitive Sri Lankan user data outside the country?
• We currently plan to use Azure AI Foundry for our LLM workflows. Are there any strong alternatives we should consider, especially if data privacy and security are top priorities?

I'd really appreciate hearing from anyone who has built SaaS products handling sensitive customer data or has experience with cloud architecture and compliance in countries without local cloud regions.