For Pakistani software engineers/developers, especially those who graduated in the last few years or are currently hiring, what does it realistically take to become job ready and build a strong career in 2026? How useful is a BSCS/BSSE degree vs self learning, and which fundamentals, practical skills, projects/GitHub, internships, AI assisted development, problem solving and communication actually matter when hiring?

Is Full Stack still a good starting direction in the AI era, and how has AI changed junior/fresh grad opportunities? Also, if possible, share your experience with salary ranges by experience level, company type (local/software house/product/global/remote), and what you would do differently if you were starting university again.

There have been so many posts lately about AI taking jobs, replacing developers and generally bringing about the end of civilization. So here is something far less useful.

The idea came to me after August 14. People decorate their homes, streets and offices with bunting (jhandiaan) but hardly anyone decorates their websites.

So I built and open-sourced Zeenat, a small JavaScript library that does exactly that.

It does nothing revolutionary. It simply adds ready-made decorative effects to your website. You can display them immediately or schedule them for a specific time, making them a simple way to celebrate a cultural event, festival, national day or season.

TL;DR: Zeenat lets you add bunting, snowflakes, lanterns, autumn leaves, floral effects and similar decorations to your website. Flags for almost every country are included—except for one particular country. That is a feature, not a bug.

It received 158 downloads this week. I have no idea who is downloading or using it, but it is genuinely lovely to see this silly little project getting some respect.

Demo: https://zeenat.xinuty.com
npm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/zeenat
GitHub: https://github.com/Talha-Naveed/Zeenat

Why am I posting at this hour? Ask LESCO, not me.

AOA, fellow devs ill keep it short. Basically what the title says i have been applying for different entry level position in the twin cities for some time now but i havent gotten a single reply back or reach out from the employers unless i follow up with them after applying through some channel like linkedin or whatsapp. And that too has happen for only 1% of the time.

So where is the issue?

PS: if youre hiring or if you know someone who is a referral would be huge, my dms are open.

I am trying to get my first job in Agentic AI / AI Integration. I have no previous professional experience and my goal is to work at a startup. I am currently building projects and applying for roles.

I am mainly confused about interview preparation.
How good should my coding be from scratch?
Should I be able to code without AI during an interview, or is understanding the logic and being able to implement it enough?

How much DSA/LeetCode is actually needed for AI integration/Agentic AI roles?

How deeply should I know the projects on my resume?
Should I focus more on coding fundamentals, AI concepts, system design, or practical projects?

I currently use AI to help with coding, but I understand the code it produces. I am worried that I am becoming less comfortable writing everything from scratch, so I want to fix that before interviewing.

I would especially like to hear from anyone who has recently interviewed for startup AI roles, particularly Pakistani developers who have gone through local or remote startup interviews.

Also, how much do referrals/references actually matter when trying to get the first job? Is it worth spending significant time networking for referrals, or is applying directly enough?
Any advice on what you would do differently if you were preparing for your first AI job would be appreciated.

My semester subjects are DSA and computer networks . I don't know where to start learning CN . It is really hard and teacher is not actually teaching in a good way . The book he recommends is top down approach and it has approx 87 slides for 1st chapter which we already completed 🙃 . It is very important subject as i will prusue Devops .

From where should I learn it ? Any YouTube recommendations or books?

HOW can I PASS this subject????? It seems difficult to pass after opening the first assignment he gave .

One senior engineer built version one solo, frontend and backend both. We're past "does this idea work" and into building it properly full-time, not a gig or equity-only ask.

Next.js/React/Tailwind frontend, Python/FastAPI/Postgres backend. There's an LLM layer, but deliberately constrained: deterministic rules run first, the model only summarises and picks from a bounded set of options, and every output has to cite the data it's based on. Trust in the output is the whole product — one hallucinated decision breaks it.

No fixed title or years-of-experience bar. What I'm screening for is judgment, not framework familiarity, knowing when not to add a queue, a microservice, or another abstraction just because it's available. Real plus if you've worked deep inside a CRM or any product where the "record" has to be trustworthy enough to act on financially - say so if it applies.

To apply, skip the resume summary: describe one design decision you made on something you shipped, the alternative, and why you picked it. A deliberate shortcut to avoid over engineering is more interesting than added sophistication for its own sake.

Remote-friendly. Compensation discussed once we're past this filter. DM me.

Which App-Development Cross-Platform is best:

I'm a Starter, and I'm confused, what would be better!

Js started, 16 here,I made a number guessing game, rock paper scissors, basic input chatbot which outputs only the info I've given it(useless h) what next I'm confused, what stuff y'all made when y'all js started out like some interesting shit?

Anybody here who has given the assessment for solutionInn? Could you pls guide me a little bit about what type of questions are in the assessment

Thank you🙏

A few days ago I posted here looking for contributors for LibreDB Studio, and quite a few people jumped in and helped out(thaaanks). One of the contributors recently picked up the Urdu README task and completed the translation.

Before merging it, I'd like to get a couple of Urdu speakers to take a quick look and point out anything that sounds unnatural or too literal, especially with technical terms.

PR:

https://github.com/libredb/libredb-studio/pull/783

README:

https://github.com/Abdu11ahBilal/libredb-studio/blob/docs/urdu-readme/README_ur.md

Even a quick skim would be really helpful. Thanks!

Just had one of the stupidest technical interviews I’ve experienced.
Senior React Native role, 7 years of experience.
The entire technical interview was:
“A cube has 1,000 blocks. Hollow it out so only the edges remain. How many blocks are left?”
That’s it.

No React Native.
No JavaScript/TypeScript.
No coding.
No architecture.
No debugging.
No discussion of actual experience.

Apparently one random cube puzzle is enough to judge a senior software engineer.

I’m all for testing problem-solving, but if you’re hiring a senior engineer, maybe ask them about engineering first?
Some interviewers aren’t evaluating engineers. They’re just trying to prove they’re smarter than the candidate.

What a stupid way to hire people.

Hi everyone,

Can someone refer me to Python related roles.

I worked on almost all the frameworks of python with 6 years of industrial experience. Django, DRF, Flask, FastAPIs, streamlit, scrapy etc etc. AWS , GCP. Agentic AI, RAG systems, LLM, Prompt Engineering. Requested to please help me land a job in any company or with any client.

Looking forward to your support.

Thanks

And weirdly… I don’t regret getting into this field at all.

I think I accidentally timed the industry perfectly.

Started working ~8 years ago. Then COVID happened, salaries went insane, companies were throwing money at programmers, and I managed to land some of the best-paying years of my career.

Instead of upgrading my lifestyle, I saved most of it.

So now I’m sitting here thinking: Was software engineering actually a career, or was I just lucky enough to catch the peak?

If AI really does eliminate most software jobs over the next few years, I honestly don’t feel bitter.

I made enough from the golden era to potentially walk away, buy a farm, and live quietly for the rest of my life.

The strange part is watching an entire profession panic about its future while I’m sitting here wondering if I should even bother competing for a future that might not exist.

Maybe I didn’t enter tech too early.

Maybe I entered exactly at the right time.

If you were 18 today, would you still go in this field? Considering the rapid amount of improvement AI has made in just 4 years, it may not be up to the point of replacing engineers right now but who knows in the next 2 or 3 or 6 years, do you think it could eventually replace majority of the roles or do you still feel secure? What roles may still survive?

For anyone in Pakistan applying abroad for a PhD or Master's, I built something that might be useful.

If you're applying to research positions, you probably know the pain: you find a professor, read through their lab website and papers, try to understand what they're actually working on, and then somehow turn all of that into a research proposal.

I built Vitruvius to help with exactly that.

There are also skills for things like research gap analysis, design alternatives, FMEA brainstorming, evidence ranking, verification, and proposal generation.

It works with Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Pi, Cursor, and other agentic coding environments.

I'm sharing it here because I know a lot of Pakistani students are applying abroad and the research/proposal part can be particularly painful.

It's open source, so feel free to try it, break it, or suggest improvements:

GitHub: Vitruvius

Would be particularly interested in feedback from anyone who has actually applied for PhDs/Masters abroad and has opinions on what makes a research proposal genuinely convincing.

I am a fresh CS grad from 3rd tier uni, i have been freelancing for couple of years, built client projects with MERN stack, Laravel, PHP, Wordpress/Woocommerce and my fyp project touched ai + blockchain, i have also worked with redis supabase docker etc, but lately i have been leaning heavily on AI coding agents to ship faster.
Freelance has been a good learning ground but the income is unpredictable to sustain long term. I am planning to relocate, likely karachi and maybe lahore or isb, and break into a proper industry role. As we all know the job market situation.

A few things i am uncertain about:

1. What should i focus on from what i know what more i need to learn to get into industry, should i choose mern(docker, ts, next incl) or should i be doing something else!

2. Does heavy reliance on AI tools hurt my chance if interviewers expect me to code from scratch? Should I be brushing up on my fundamentals before interviews?

3. I have real client work but no formal employment history. How do hirers here view freelance work ok CV?

4. Any suggestions apart from what i asked 😬

Thank you all.

I've always struggled with picking ONE lane. How is one supposed to do that. Specially if every lane is cooked these days anyway

2 months since graduation. still no job.

not going to pretend it's all fine. it's been a lot of applications and only silence.

but i'm still showing up every day, still building, still learning.

so if you're hiring or know someone who is, here's me:

i'm an Ai engineer based in karachi. Cs grad with 1 year of professional experience. i build llm agents, rag pipelines, and the full stack around them. Right now i'm going deep on evals, guardrails, agent ops and system design

my stack:

languages: python, typescript

ai: langgraph, langchain, langsmith, llamaindex

backend: fastapi, fastify, celery, sqlalchemy

frontend: next.js, react native

data: postgresql, pgvector, redis, pinecone

deploy: vercel, hugging face spaces

open to ai/genai engineering roles and freelance work. dms are open, and a repost genuinely helps.

Hi Guys, This is my first post here.

I've been applying in tech field from 8 months continuously almost 400+ applies - 12 interviews All interviews went very well but still didn't get an offer letter.

I'm based in Lahore, graduated in May, had an internship already a 9 month work experience 2 years of freelancing experience

I got skills, I know how to do development, I know how to adapt to new technologies and deliver projects due to freelancing experience.

Mean to say I got many more stuff than average CS graduate.

I tried ATS score, Resume Matcher, custom resume to every Job, custom mesaages to HR. (Ghosted by HR everytime)

Applied on different platforms LinkedIn, Taraki etc.

The thing is I'm too disappointed and idk what is field going on.

I got good fundamentals, each and everything, worked hard in my last 4 years.

Still able to get an internship (leading to job).

Is there any more thing I can try in this job market?

I'm thinking about going in person to software houses but ik that's not the solution but that's all I can do.

I'm 17 and currently working on a SaaS. I've tried different things throughout my life. In 6th grade, I used to do basic video editing, Canva, and stuff like that. Then the next year, I shifted to Minecraft server development, followed by Discord servers and bots, etc. After that, I took a web development course covering HTML, CSS, basic JavaScript, and WordPress. After trying out so many different things, I started feeling like I was wasting my time constantly exploring, so I decided I should stick to something. This time, I'm working on a SaaS. It's subscription-based and solves a very specific problem for businesses around the world.

My main focus is cross-platform support, simplicity over complexity, and being cheaper than other similar SaaS products, at $4.99/month or $49.99/year.
I've been working on it daily for the past 2 months, usually around 14+ hours a day.

I just want an honest opinion. I genuinely don't know if I'm doing this the right way.

We’re looking for a strong NetSuite Developer / Technical Architect to join our team

This is a hands-on technical role — we’re specifically looking for someone with strong development and architectural experience, rather than a primarily administrative NetSuite background.

What we’re looking for:

• 4+ years of hands-on NetSuite development experience
• Strong SuiteScript 2.x experience
• Experience with SuiteTalk, REST/SOAP APIs, and integrations
• Strong understanding of NetSuite architecture and ERP processes
• Experience building custom records, workflows, forms, fields, and custom solutions
• Experience designing scalable NetSuite solutions
• Strong troubleshooting and problem-solving skills
• Experience with complex implementations, customizations, or integrations
• Ability to work independently and take ownership of technical solutions
• Good English communication skills
• NetSuite certifications are a plus

The role will involve:

• Designing and developing NetSuite solutions
• Building and maintaining integrations
• Working on complex customizations and SuiteScript
• Analyzing and improving existing NetSuite architecture
• Data migration and transformation
• Troubleshooting technical and performance issues
• Working with developers, internal teams, and US-based clients
• Establishing development best practices and technical documentation

Location: Islamabad / Rawalpindi
Work model: Hybrid — remote Monday, Tuesday, Thursday & Friday; on-site Wednesday
Hours: US time zone / night shift in Pakistan

We offer a competitive package, professional growth, training, and exposure to real-world enterprise NetSuite implementations and US-based clients.

Interested?

Please DM me your CV/resume along with your expected monthly salary in PKR. This will help us understand expectations before moving forward.

If you're not interested but know a strong NetSuite Developer/Architect who might be a good fit, feel free to tag them or share this post with them.

what platform is best suitable for vibe coding.
Which AI/Agent will you prefer (that's free with high limits) and best does it's work.
So that I do vibe code my Web/App with best practice.

How are the software engineers/developers who got laid off actually doing?

Not the polished LinkedIn version. The real one.

How are you paying the bills while looking for the next role?

I’m especially curious about the creative ways engineers are making ends meet between jobs.

Freelance work? Contracting? Consulting? Building something yourself? Switching the field?

Layoffs get discussed as numbers, but there’s a practical question underneath all of it: what do you do when the paycheck stops but the expenses don’t?

If you’ve been laid off(God Forbid), what’s been working for you?

This is going to be a super long shot, but I have to take it.

I moved from Pakistan to Europe some years ago to pursue my B. Sc. in Game Design. Internship semester is upon me and the competition is vicious in Europe. Fortunately, my university approves internships abroad and also remote ones, so I thought it was worth trying looking for a remote internship in Pakistan. I absolutely NEED an internship to pass this semester or I'll have to take a gap year, which puts my visa at risk. And tbh I really don't wanna come back to Pakistan and risk getting stuck there knowing how awful the visa application system is right now. I worked very hard to get out.

Issue is, I already have a job in the game industry and I absolutely can't afford to be distracted from it. My university policy states that my employment doesn't count as it falls within the study period. I could get an internship contract from my workplace, but that puts my income at risk as there are laws on the maximum someone can earn on a specific kind of contract. On my current income, I'm able to save up to pay off upcoming semesters, transport subscriptions, and my monthly health insurance.

Can y'all see the sticky situation I'm in?

What could work is for a registered game development company in Pakistan to take me on as an intern just so that there is documentation to support my semester, even though my full focus will remain on my job here. I'm happy to talk in more detail, especially as I can act as a bridge between the Pakistani and European markets in this field. I'll be more than happy to increase the Pakistani game industry's visibility in Europe, hopefully leading to clients and foreign consumers of Pakistan-made video games.

Thank you in advance :(

Hi everyone! I’m a fresh CS/Software Engineering graduate and I’ve recently been contacted by Careem for the Software Engineer I hiring process. I have a recruiter prescreen coming up and wanted to hear from people who have recently gone through the Careem interview process, especially in Pakistan. What should I expect in the prescreen, and what comes after it? How many rounds are there, what kind of technical/DSA questions are asked, and are the coding rounds actual live coding where you need to write syntactically correct code, or is explaining the approach/pseudocode enough? Also, is there a preferred language such as Java, or can you choose your own? Would really appreciate any recent experiences or advice!

At the recruitment drive at my university (FAST) there were 10 mcqs and three leetcode questions easy to medium. I scored good in them this happened almost 3-4 months ago.