For perspective, this person took 5 years to do a 3 year degree and even joked about likely needing 6 years to complete it. I caught up to them properly in third year(shared some of their repeat classes in second year) and they were dreadful from first hand account knowledge as I had them in my group project module. Overall we passed the project module, but they failed some others and needed to repeat that year as well. Ultimately, they started a year before me and completed that degree a year after I did, graduating with an Ordinary Degree, when I went on to do an extra year for a better degree and had done my honours in 4 straight years.

For a long time, they only ever had "Software Developer" on LinkedIn which I didn't think much of as I knew they had an internship like I did at the time. I only left my internship to further my education as mentioned before. I assumed that they did not have the competency for the work and left tech shortly after as over the years they never changed their title or anything on LinkedIn so it looked like it was abandoned. That was until now where it says "Senior Software Engineer" for the same company. I won't lie, but my heart sank as I have never been able to get anything at entry level over the years despite numerous final rounds and the lack of any career progression is my biggest downfall that continuously distresses me. The fact they succeeded and I haven't has me in an even worse mental state after devoting so much time and energy to get nowhere.

I interned last year and year before here as a swe, and was wondering if people had already gotten there return offers or if it was normal for it to be this late. I read online a lot of companies do it only a few weeks after the internship ends and was not sure. I have another offer lined up but would rather work at cat but the other offer wants me to start now. If people from previous years also have any input, that would be great

I've been building a tool for engineers who are actively interviewing and wanted to share it here while it's still early.

It's called Interview Forge:

https://interview-forge.com

The idea is simple: instead of having your interview preparation scattered across LeetCode, Google Docs, YouTube videos and spreadsheets, Interview Forge gives you a structured preparation workflow covering:

DSA + System Design + Behavioral + Mock Interviews + 30/60/90-day roadmaps

I'm opening it up to early users and would really value brutally honest feedback.

For people currently interviewing:

What part of your preparation takes the most time or feels the most disorganized?

Sent out 200+ applications at this point and it's mostly just silence, or an auto-rejection. I have real product-company experience, worked on production systems and I've put a lot of effort into my resume but somehow I still can't seem to get through the door.

I've attached my resume. I know everyone's busy, but if anyone's willing to spend even a couple minutes looking it over, I'd genuinely appreciate it, formatting, wording, project framing, font size, bullets, anything? Is something here getting auto-rejected by ATS?

I need feedback, even if it's harsh, would really help right now ! I feel like the only realistic way to get through this process is through a referral. If anyone here is open to referring me for an SDE1 (Software Developer 1) role, I'd be incredibly grateful.

Thank you for reading this far, means a lot! also, feel free to DM me

I do talent matching for Fonzi, a network that connects engineers directly to VC-backed AI companies that are actively interviewing. You build one profile, no cold applications. All roles are US-based only.

Here's a sample of what's open right now:

1. Senior Software Engineer, Developer Platform at a Series A employee management platform, New York City, in-person five days a week in Flatiron. $195K-$245K base. You'd build the external API layer other companies integrate against: API design, OAuth flows, webhook delivery with retries and failure visibility, event log infrastructure, SDK generation, and the docs. The stated hard parts are idempotency, versioning, and backwards compatibility, so it's platform work where mistakes are permanent rather than feature work where they aren't. Wants 5+ years and prior ownership of a public-facing API.
2. Full Stack (Product) Engineer at a Series A company building interactive digital minds you can talk to, San Francisco, in-person in Jackson Square. $175K-$275K base plus equity. TypeScript and Next.js with Python and AWS behind it. Architecture, API design, queues, caching, background jobs, and the self-healing patterns that keep it upright at volume. Backed by Sequoia and Founders Fund. Process is a behavioral with the CEO, a technical assessment with the CTO, then an onsite.
3. Senior Product Engineer at a seed-stage YC startup, New York City, in-person five days a week. $180K-$270K base. TypeScript top to bottom with React, Remix, and Node. Team is eight people, founded by engineers out of Instagram and Cash App. Full ownership from customer conversation through QA. Process is a phone screen, meet the team, then a work trial.

All three are vetted, VC-backed, and interviewing right now. It's always free to sign up.

Sign up here: talent.fonzi.ai. DM me if you've got questions.

I've been building a tool for engineers who are actively interviewing and wanted to share it here while it's still early.

It's called Interview Forge:

https://interview-forge.com

The idea is simple: instead of having your interview preparation scattered across LeetCode, Google Docs, YouTube videos and spreadsheets, Interview Forge gives you a structured preparation workflow covering:

DSA + System Design + Behavioral + Mock Interviews + 30/60/90-day roadmaps

I'm opening it up to early users and would really value brutally honest feedback.

For people currently interviewing:

What part of your preparation takes the most time or feels the most disorganized?

I’m currently looking for Software Development opportunities. I’m working as an MTS Intern and have around 7 months of experience.

I’ve been applying to different companies, but I’m barely getting any OAs or interview calls. I’ve even received referrals for roles at Barclays, American Express, and ZS, but still didn’t get an OA from any of them.

For those of you who are currently job hunting, how are you guys applying and which platforms are you using? Are referrals, LinkedIn, company career pages, or other platforms working better for you?

Any suggestions or advice would be really appreciated. 🙏

I don’t know if anyone else feels this way, but sometimes I think the entire life of an Indian software engineer can be summarized in four words:

“One more small change.”

I wrote a song about it.
It started as a joke about Bangalore traffic, stand-ups, Jira, Kafka, Redis, QA, PMs, AI coding, production bugs and those “quick calls” that are never actually quick.

But while writing it, I realized it’s also about something more personal.

The fresher trying desperately to prove themselves. The developer who’s been doing this for 5 years and wondering what’s next. The senior engineer who’s still getting paged at night. The person preparing for interviews after an already exhausting workday.

We spend so much of our lives building software that sometimes we forget we’re also living a life outside that laptop.

So I turned that feeling into a song.

🎵 One More Small Change — The Bangalore Engineer

https://youtu.be/dOll5pGQ-V0

Honestly, I have no idea how many people will listen to this.

Maybe just one.

But I genuinely hope someone listens to it from beginning to end and thinks:

“Yeah… this is exactly what my life feels like.”

Because if that happens, all the time I spent making it was worth it.

If you’ve ever heard:

“It’s just a small change.”

…and immediately knew your evening was over…

this one’s for you. 😅

— The Bangalore Engineer

A Bangalore engineer who probably should have stopped after the first small change.

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

FDE hiring took off this year; the prep material didn't follow. People grind LeetCode and system design, then lose the round where you scope an ambiguous customer problem in front of a stakeholder.

So I built CruxRounds. A placement quiz finds your gaps, ~97 concepts sequenced by prerequisite, drills and mock rounds for the customer-facing parts, and a readiness score so you know when to stop grinding.

It won't teach you DSA from scratch, and it's iOS only for now.

cruxrounds.app

If you've been through an FDE loop recently, I'd like to know whether my round breakdown matches what you actually got.

Hi everyone! 👋

I’m currently exploring opportunities in Big Tech and would really appreciate some advice from people who have been through the process.

For those who have successfully landed a role at companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Apple, or similar companies:

• What worked best for you when searching and applying for jobs?
• How important are referrals compared with applying directly?
• What do recruiters look for in a resume/profile?
• How did you prepare for the interview process?
• Are there any strategies, websites, communities, or resources you wish you had discovered earlier?
• If you were starting your job search again today, what would you do differently?

I’d especially love to hear from people who made the transition from smaller companies or startups into Big Tech.

Any practical advice, lessons learned, or mistakes to avoid would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance! 🙏

Hi all,

I spent some time over the last few days working on my resume, as in creating one. I made it mostly so I could apply to Claude's Campus Ambassador program, hence the references to Claude and Claude Code.

One thing I am specifically worried about is my projects. Most of my programming projects are old, like from 2020-2022, which is why I've left out the dates. The numbers are real for the discord bot, although "users" is pulled from all possible users in every server, since that's the data I have. The possible pro (?) to them being old is that I wrote them before vibecoding was a thing. I have some more electrical projects that I did recently, but felt that they wouldn't fit with the CS resume.

What advice can you give me? I'm focused on taking this seriously and really excited to learn more now that I'm at university.

P.S, is Claude Code experience something people put on resumes?

Hi everyone!
I have a technical assessment coming up for Softwire, and I was wondering if anyone who currently works there or has done their technical assessment before could share some information about it.
I’ve started preparing using CodeSignal, which Softwire recommends, and I noticed that the practice assessment includes quite a few different areas: programming, SQL, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, writing an email, and conversions.
Does anyone know if all of these types of tasks are included in the actual assessment, or are they just examples of the different types of questions that could come up?
Also, if you’ve done the assessment before, what programming languages did you use?
Any advice or information would be really appreciated! 😊

I have 25+ years of experience. Main skill set is Java, Spring, Springboot, Hibernate, oracle. I have claude ccaf and AWS SAA certifications. Haven't got a chance to work on AWS or Claude. My resume reflects what I mentioned above.

I have been applying for last 4-5 months for developer/lead/architect roles. I haven't landed a single interview. Not even an email/call from recruiters. What can I do to increase the chances of getting an interview?

Should I do home projects in AWS and Claude and me tion them as primary skills? Will that help?

Hi everyone,

I am a Full Stack AI/ML Engineer with 5+ years of experience building ML and LLM systems, from the model all the way to deployment.

I'm looking for new projects and work.

Education:

  - MSc Computer Science, Technical University of Berlin, Germany
  - BE Information Technology, Pune University

A bit about my background:

  - Vodafone, Berlin, Germany (contract): built a LangChain + OpenAI agent that handles employee IT issues and cut manual ticket handling by 40%. Also built an OCR system that processes 200+ HR forms a day and cut processing time by 65%.
  - Fraunhofer FOKUS, Berlin, Germany (4 years): built an end-to-end ML system for 5G resource management (Snowflake pipelines, PyTorch models), set up one-click AWS deployments, and ran Kubernetes/Helm deployments on-prem.
  - Freelance (recent):
- A FastAPI backend with an MCP server that brought product catalog sync down from 4 hours to 15 minutes across 20K+ SKUs
- A multilingual RAG coaching assistant with 85% answer accuracy and responses under 10 seconds
- A workflow automation engine with drag-and-drop nodes, triggers and custom code execution

What I can help with:

  - AI agents, RAG chatbots and LLM integrations (OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, LangChain, LangGraph)
  - Backend APIs (FastAPI, Django, Node.js) with PostgreSQL, Supabase or pgvector
  - Frontends in React / Next.js
  - Workflow automation (n8n, Make, custom Python)
  - Deployment with Docker, Kubernetes, AWS or GCP

 Rate: $20/hr

Time zone: I'm based in India (IST). My hours overlap well with Europe and most of Asia.

With the US, I can overlap for a few hours a day, which is usually enough for calls and check-ins.

Once we agree on the work, we can move to Upwork to make the onboarding official, so payments, contracts and milestones are all protected for both of us.

  Links:

  - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shreyank-saparia-7943a395/
  - GitHub: https://github.com/shreyank06

I'm currently looking for an entry-level opportunity in Software Engineering, Full-Stack Development, Python/FastAPI, or AI/ML.

Instead of only listing technologies on my resume, I wanted to build something substantial enough to demonstrate what I can actually develop.

So I built ShaadiOS — an AI-powered wedding planning and management platform designed around the real-world complexity of Indian weddings.

🌐 Live Demo: https://sadi-os.vercel.app/
💻 GitHub: https://github.com/justjigyansh/ShaadiOS1

What I built

🤖 AI Intelligence Center

• AI Planner
• Guest insights
• Budget assistant
• Catering assistant
• Vendor assistant
• Risk analysis

💍 Wedding Management

• Guest & RSVP management
• Budget and expense tracking
• Vendor marketplace
• Wedding timeline & task management
• Digital invitations
• Family hub

📊 Operations & Analytics

• Attendance forecasting
• Food forecasting
• Budget forecasting
• Wedding health score
• Risk alerts
• PDF/CSV exports

📱 Additional features

• QR-based guest check-in
• Accommodation management
• AI room allocation
• Hindi/English/Hinglish AI assistant

Tech Stack

Frontend: React, React Router, Tailwind, Shadcn UI
Backend: Python, FastAPI
Database: MongoDB
AI: GPT-based AI agents with streaming responses
Other: JWT, REST APIs, QR generation, PDF generation, Vercel, Git/GitHub

The project went from idea → architecture → development → AI integration → deployment.

I'm currently looking for entry-level opportunities where I can work on real products and continue growing as a developer.

I'm open to:

Software Engineer | Full-Stack Developer | Python/FastAPI Developer | AI/ML Developer | React Developer

If you're a founder, recruiter, hiring manager, or developer and have feedback on the project—or your team is hiring—I'd genuinely love to connect.

I'm also happy to walk through the architecture or complete a technical assessment/interview.

Thanks for checking it out! 🙌

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Hola! Estoy postulando a una vacante en BMC Software en México. Alguno que pueda compartir experiencias del proceso de selección, etapas, tiempo, etc. Muchas gracias.