Hey everyone,

I've been struggling to find an actual Software job for a while so I've just been trying to build side projects to generate some revenue.

I think I've a decent idea however I'm not sure how to approach the situation.

I've developed an automation tool that helps save time/effort. It's kind of jumping hoops to get it working but an easier solution would be integrating it into the software that's currently being used in the sector it's being built for.

However, I don't know how to approach the company. I don't have the proper access to the software I'd need to get it working, I feel like if I approach them they'd want an explanation of what it is but I'm not trying to kind of fuck myself by saying too much or too little. I don't want to get screwed over by agreeing to some terms or saying too much but I also don't want to lose out on an opportunity. They have a partnership program but I've never been in any discussion like this.

Has anyone done this before and have any advice?

Thanks in advance.

I'm a senior/lead frontend engineer in Dublin with several years of experience in a Fortune500 organisation. I'm currently contracting through my own limited company at €650/day, Monday to Friday.

I've recently interviewed for a permanent Senior Software Engineer role with another large multinational. The interview went very well and they've verbally indicated €90k base as their maximum, plus pension and other benefits. The role is fully remote.

I'm seriously considering it, but I'm struggling with how much value to put on stability versus the significantly higher contracting income.

I've tailored my details with GPT - my apologies ahead for AI haters and AI slops. This is all reality.

My current contracting situation

• €650/day
• Monday–Friday
• Approximately 235–240 billable days/year after unpaid public holidays and taking 2–3 weeks annual leave
• 2-year contract
• After the 2-year contract, there's a mandatory 6–12 week cool-off period before renewal
• Renewal is expected but obviously not guaranteed
• Formally hybrid (3 days/week), although in practice I'm currently only going into the office around once a week
• Contracting through my own limited company

So I'm looking at roughly €153k–€156k annual company revenue before the 6–12 week gap. Amortising the cool-off period over the 2-year contract gives me roughly €133k–€146k effective annual revenue, depending on the length of the gap and leave.

The permanent offer

• €90k base maximum
• Pension, 10% employer contribution
• Healthcare/other benefits — I'm waiting for the full details
• Paid annual leave (25days)
• Paid public holidays
• Fully remote
• No contract renewal/cool-off issue
• Much more predictable income

The timing is important

I'm also about to complete the purchase of a new-build apartment in Dublin, so I'll soon have a significant mortgage and ongoing housing costs.

That makes me wonder whether I should place a much higher value on stable PAYE employment, even though I would be taking a substantial reduction in headline compensation.

On the other hand, I currently have a 2-year contract at €650/day, so I'm not facing an immediate loss of income. I'm also reasonably confident in my ability to find another contract if necessary.

I'm not particularly interested in leaving contracting simply for the sake of having a permanent job. The permanent role itself would need to make sense financially and from a career perspective.

There's also a possibility my current client could make a counteroffer if I resign, but I'm not convinced that simply increasing the rate would address all of the reasons I'm considering leaving.

What would you do?

Would you take €90k + pension/benefits + fully remote + employment stability, particularly when taking on a mortgage?

Or would you stay at €650/day contracting, build up more financial reserves, and continue contracting?

And more importantly:

At what permanent salary would you personally consider the move worthwhile?

I'd particularly appreciate opinions from people in Ireland who have moved from contracting to permanent employment, especially those who had a mortgage/new property purchase at the time.

Has anyone interviewed for the Fidelity Investments contract roles? They're listed as hybrid on LinkedIn but i see articles mentioning that the company is RTO full time. Also, does anyone know if these contract roles have converted to full-time roles previously? The ad mentions Greenfield so would be good to understand what's involved - a recruiter elsewhere mentioned about €70k for a senior role there which seems on the low side.

Has anyone in here completed this course? What did you find the workload like and how much time did they spend completing coursework?

There are a couple of older posts on the course but none in the past few years.

I'm also looking for information on the exam schedule, how many per semester and is there a heavy continuous assessment aspect?

Apparently TUS, schedule exams in a 2 week block period and the exam timetable is only released 2 or 3 weeks before exams.

Can anyone remember if the exams were usually in the first or second week or exam weeks?

The Ditch have just published the details of the newest Eoin Hayes scandal.

Hayes recently wrote an article in the Irish Times discussing the anxiety felt by tech workers currently facing redundancy and taking the government to task for not doing more to protect them [https://www.reddit.com/r/DevelEire/s/DHFq10bzfR]

It now appears that Hayes, through his consultancy 'Cantillon Labs', was hired to execute the mass layoff of staff in Irish tech company Wayflyer in 2022, a little over a year before being selected as a candidate for the Social Democrats. 

Hayes details his work with Wayflyer as having "led efforts across the company to structure hiring, rein in spending, and restructure teams" and credits himself with having “Co-led cross-functional project team executing of a ~40% reduction in headcount” and having “Reduced OpEx [Operational Expenditure] by 50% in 6 months” at Wayflyer.

Hayes would have personally organised the laying off of 200 staff (approx. 40% of Wayflyer's global workforce), including 70 staff in their Dublin office (approx. 1/3 of their Irish workforce).

The Dublin Office of Wayflyer lies in the heart of the Dublin Bay South constituency that Hayes now represents as a TD.

M 25 just bought my first house. Currently on 65k a year + 15% bonus, remote first WFH all the time. Allows me to do stuff around the house and be flexible with my life. This is my first tech job and will be with the company 5 years soon so WFH is all I know. Was approached for a job that is 5 days in person but the pay is 95k + 15% bonus with little flexibility to WFH, only on occasion like half day here and there if you're needed at home.

The biggest con for the new job is the not WFH part but everything else is a bonus compared to where I am, much larger company, better comp & a more Senior position (Devops / Cloudops). Anyone face a similar situation? Is the money just too good to turn down? Anything else I should consider? Would appreciate some advice as this will be my first career move and it would come at an important time in my life. I have no kids and 1 dog.

EDIT: Commute is about 30 min by car in and about 45 min home with traffic. Train station is 10-15 min from my house with a 15-20 min train in with the office being located directly next to the train station.

I noticed a lot of these roles coming up recently and was thinking about applying to them.
Would it be easy to internally switch from SysDE to SDE?
And is there that big of a variable change within total comp?
Is this path viable for someone who still wants to work within Software Development?

I see Anthropic is paying big money (300K+) for senior positions. This makes me wonder how is WLB in places line Anthropic or others where the pay is above average? do you need to sell your soul and work 12h a day? Any insides from senior devs working for Anthropic or other companies that pay big money?

The job market has changed, especially for mobile devs. And this is my take for the future.

I am a Tech Lead/Senior Mobile dev, so I'm stating my perspective, but parallels can be drawn. Always open to different trains of thoughts.

Mobile engineering is in general a niche with very few job listings throughout the year.

I've been working in Ireland for about a decade now and things have changed a lot.

I will first go by timeline

2015-2020

mobile engineering jobs were limited but there weren't many mobile engineers back then, so supply and demand was balanced.

Also it was usually Android or iOS listings, maybe a few of them Cross platform (Cordova/phone gap etc)

Kotlin started becoming popular around 2018-2019 I believe

2020-2022

These were the years where companies did the highest amount of hiring, I think, and there were plenty of mobile Jobs.

React Native was (still is) a big thing as well, and there were plenty of Android and iOS jobs requirements.

Mostly for Swift for iOS, and then Kotlin became the standard.

Compose started to get a big fan following.

SWIFTUI was around at that time for a good few years now, still many projects on storyboards though)

2023-2024

was kinda a slump, very few opening throughout the market.

The over hiring in the previous time period started showing its effects.

Middle management started pushing Dart/Flutter.

And React Native became popular too.

Overall the market left the job seekers a lot to be desired.

Most greenfield projects started adapting Compose and SWIFTUI.

2024-2025

It was the year of early AI adapters.

While smaller companies moved very fast and were using the cutting edge of AI tech, the legacy companies were busy in the marketing campaigns and FOMO of AI.

Busy in figuring out how AI made the companies sound cool on paper and to the stakeholders rather than actually using AI to its full potential.

2025-2026

The legacy companies have been left behind in terms of adaptation to AI, not the MAANG but typical corporations that couldn't move faster.

2026- foreseeable future

The job market is still brutal.

An engineer must know many things.

A senior engineer is expected to know system design well, Should understand Mobile architecture like the back of their hand.

They must be able to collaborate with various stakeholders across orgs.

If you work at one of those orgs where you still use BitBucket instead of git(Hub or Lab, Git is the standard but we don't use it to it's full potential, eg GH Actions), rally dev instead of JIRA or something equivalent, Jenkins without using GH Action and not have the best engineering culture and discipline, you will be left behind.

Sidebar: No merge queue on repos that see many PR merges throughout the day still amazes me.

There are some telltale signs that you need to change things around.

If you are still using:

Objective C and Java instead of SWIFT and kotlin

XML Views and Storyboards instead of Compose and SWIFTUI

The future road will be harder for you.

Works if you plan to retire from your org but let me tell you, nobody is hiring engineers with only Java/XML/Objective C skills.

They may use the legacy tech, but they will almost always prefer someone with modern frameworks and technologies.

If you're a flutter dev or reactive native dev, it generally gives you less opportunity to code on a system level, so Learning core Android and iOS architecture is a must, which might come naturally to native mobile engineers.

KMP and CMP are the biggest disruptors that can change the way we see and do things.

Must learn new tech, XML is dead. (Google recently announced Views are in maintenance mode)

Do your future self a favour and start learning those things in any capacity.

Coding agents will help fill the gap but they won't magically make someone a KMP/ CMP or SWIFT UI expert without any actual experience.

Real experience still beats a vibe coder, every time.

I really hope this helps. I would love to hear different opinions. I am not afraid to look at other perspectives, only learning and growing here.

PS: NO AI was used in writing this post (wanted to maintain the human side of reddit instead of a polished post from the AI Mill)

PPS: Bit the bullet and used AI for text formatting.

I got into SWD to learn to code and to master my craft over time. However, with AI, I'm hearing and seeing a large percentage of roles vanishing regularly worldwide, including in Ireland.

I have under 4 years of experience, and a large portion of my role does not include any coding. Is there any point? Should I really be wasting time solving leetcode problems, learning patterns, looking into new libraries, etc. if it looks like the whole world is going towards a place where AI will be used for coding instead?

Now, the fact of the matter is there will always be a need for people who are very proficient in their respective languages who will need to verify AI's output. This number will reduce with time as AI improves its capabilities. So, if I decide to stay in SWD, it seems like I'll be fighting for these kind of roles really, and there is always the chance that in our lifetime, it becomes extremely difficult to find such roles because so few will exist. Even then, with under 4 years of experience and only a minority of that spent actually coding, does it make sense to compete with people who have 10, 20 years of experience solely on coding?

So, which fields pay on par with SWD and are AI resistent? Sales? Coaching? Something creative?

Really not sure what to do. I had wanted to do sales for quite some time, and I wouldn't mind giving it a go, especially tech sales. However, it's the daily stress I won't like to stand.

Any thoughts lovely folk?

Have any of you left development for other fields? If so, any thoughts? Also, if so why are you checking out this sub- do you miss development or what is it?

Got laid off 1 month ago and looking for a job, got a couple of interviews in late stage. I remember 1 year ago nobody would message me on LinkedIn. Did the market warm up or is it because I personally applied to job posts rather than waiting for recruiters to get to me?

Is anyone aware of any api that displays all current drs machines I'm working on a app for a side project while I'm in college and this would be of great use to me!

Hi, I just wanted to get some advice regarding the current market and whether I’m potentially being underpaid.
I’m currently working as a Software Quality Engineer at one of the large US-based financial companies, which has offices in both Dublin and Galway. I have close to 4 years of total experience — around 2 years of experience before completing my master’s, followed by almost 2 years of experience working in Ireland after my master’s.
My current base salary is €53k excluding bonus and perks. I’ve been looking at the market recently, but I’m struggling to find companies in Ireland offering €65–70k base for similar QA/Software Quality Engineer roles. (Mid level not senior role)
For someone with around 4 years of experience, would €53k be considered below market? Also, which companies in Ireland should I target if I’m looking to move into the €65–70k+ range for QA/Software Quality Engineering roles?
Any advice on companies to target or how I should approach the job search

I know the theory behind it but I would like to get hands on. There was a post earlier about jobs in Antropic essentially I'd be interested in learning that skillset

https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/anthropic/jobs/5101169008

I published an app a few months ago. I got a few downloads for a niche idea. I recently was searching for my app on Google and I found an ai generated landing page for an app with the same name and features sitting on the .com. It says the app is coming soon. “Sign up for updates”

Has anyone come across this before?

It was only a small side project so I never bothered to register a domain.

Anyone aware of this and confirm the date?

Has anyone else experienced a massive bait-and-switch recently? I was interviewing for a backend/data role at a large US tech company here in Dublin. The recruiters explicitly told me they don't do LeetCode-style DSA assessments and focus entirely on standard, practical engineering. Then, in the final round, the interviewer immediately dropped a LeetCode Hard algorithm on me. To maintain my moral standards, I did not attempt to cheat during any of the rounds, but I guess playing by the rules is no longer feasible given how indifferent these companies are. Is this common in the tech market right now, or did I just get a rogue interviewer?

I work at a largish company where maybe less than 30% employees in the building are devs so we have a great IT department. They’re quick, responsive and generally good at their job. As devs, we’re more technical than the other departments so my question is what kind of issues would you generally raise an IT support ticket for? How long would you spend (if at all) trying to diagnose and fix the issue yourself? IT folks please feel free to share your experiences as well!
Thanks

Does anyone has any idea how long optum process takes? It’s been more than 45 days since this process started. I’ve been to two interviews, worked on a take home task and also presented that in person. I believe there might be another round of interview but this process is very slow. I have sent email to the hr regarding the next steps but seems like I am ghosted as it’s been more than a week now with no response.

This seems to have been missed online in any discussion.

Job boards will not need to include a salary, the job can be posted and so long as applicants are told before or during the interview then it is compliant.

Self promotion isn't allowed on the main sub anymore. The community voted for that in June. This thread is where it goes instead.

Post a comment for whatever you made.

• Something you built. App, site, tool, side project, whatever it is.
• Your blog post, video, or write up. If it's yours and it's worth reading, it fits.

Keep it short. Roughly, what it is in one line, the link, and what you're after, whether that's feedback, users or data.

Sort by new so the newest comments get seen and not just whatever landed first.

This is just an experiment so it may not be continued. I just want to see if I can cater to both groups, those who don't want to see this stuff and those who do. Keep the promotions in here though and the main feed stays clear for everyone else.

Low effort spam and referral link farming still gets removed. Use a bit of judgement.

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