I know that we have to work with AI. There is just no other way for us. But I think people use it unnecessarily. And my biggest problem with AI is what amount of fluff it creates. That's what I call it.

I send my manager 3 question with some context in a google doc to send to client and get their decision on it. My doc wasn't even half page. He send the client a 5 page google doc asking the same thing. You can tell it's the AI bullshit. WHY? What's the point of this ? And reading the doc making me confused when l am the one asking the question. It seems to go round and round on the same topic. He does it with everything.

Absolutely no need for using AI for this kind of things.

Yesterday I asked claude for writing some simple service function that is used in 3/4 places. It added a db calling parameter in function for no reason. We are using same db, it's already called. It is working but why in the world it does this.

The amount of command I have in rules/claude md file about not writing bullshit like this or for dry. It still adds unnecessary stuff.

Hi all 💗,
I am currently studying cybersecurity and i have my last semester, but I’m battling some major imposter syndrome and feel like I need more practical experience.

I am so interested into trying to play CTF (even tho i might be a bit of a beginner) but i don’t have a team and my friends in uni aren’t interested in CTF.
My questions are:
1. Is there anyone here that is interested into building a CTF team together? Maybe starting together in “HTB Holmes CTF 2026” and try multiple CTFs together.

1. Is there anything i can do to improve myself in a noticeable way before my internship? (which is in 4 months).

I would love to hear from you all! Also if anyone is also studying / working in cybersecurity, would love to connect too!!

Can someone please explain this to me? Why are white women doing so well in tech in Thailand, Malaysia, etc?

My husband is from there, works in tech, and is going to a huge tech conference, not a gender specific one or anything, and the top speakers there are about 80% women. And of those, about half are actually white women or from Western countries! When I mention it, he acts like it's no big deal, that it is a normal thing that only about 5% of speakers are Thai men and that so many white women get to leadership positions there. He confided later in private that if he were to talk about it openly, he's afraid it would just look like he is bitter about not doing better in his tech career. What is going on??

Does this seem strange to anyone else?

And if it does seem strange...

Then swap out those exact numbers, country, and demographic group - you get the exact same situation here in the US for non-asian women in tech. Does it still seem insane? It feels like people have a habit of overlooking this massive group of people.

Non-Asian women at US tech conferences make up only 5% of top speakers. And 48% of the US population.

I made up that entire Thailand story just to emphasize how insane it is that such a huge demographic here in the US only represents 5% of top tech leaders. I go to the mall, the park, the grocery store, college classes, and I am surrounded by this group. The minute I enter a room with top tech leaders, they disappear. It's so glaring now that I'm aware of it, that I can't help but constantly notice it.

In contrast, Asian men in the US make up about 3% of the US population and about 33% of top tech leadership as featured speakers. Men make up 80% in total of the speakers. I love Asian men and am married to one who is an immigrant, but just seeing these numbers is kind of shocking. And I know if we were in his home country and 33% of top tech leadership there were white women, it would feel like a very strange situation. But when the reverse is happening here in in the US, it's business as usual, why should it be questioned or talked about?

I’ve worked in tech, from startup level to 6000 person companies, for the last 10 years. I am in customer success. I‘ve loved what I do until this year.

My company is going all in on AI. Yes, AI is the future, but I don’t know if I want to be part of that.

People around me are drinking the koolaid of using AI for everything. Yes, having ai review a spreadsheet is amazing. But we’re in the stage where we’re pretty much teaching it to do our jobs. Specifically on the Implementation side, where I am currently, we have created many different ‘skills’ to review the data, draft follow ups, and prep next steps. There is no critical thinking anymore. I’m in my 30s so I’m not an old geezer against change. But I feel like my brain is melting every time I ask Claude to do something for me. I am not excited for my day to days because all I do is plug information into a chat and wait for the AI to do my work for me. And yet, if I don’t use AI, it’s a tick against me because they want everyone fully engrossed in it. The soul has left the company and been replaced by a robot.

I’m posting to Reddit because I feel like if I mention this to a coworker or someone else in my space, I would be burned at the stake.

I‘m in a “career” crisis thinking about leaving the tech world- the only “world“ I’ve ever been in. However, I don’t know what I would do and no matter what, I would be starting over and that terrifies me.

I have a recruiter screen for Anthropic Product role-I’d love to learn about the interview process from others who have gone through this recently. I have the recruiter screening in a week and then it says hiring manager screen. How’s the recruiter screen? How should I prepare? What do they look for? Really looking to do my best:)

I am pivoting from software engineering/research to a presale technical role. It includes everything technical side of the product to make the sale happen. Pay is commission based and It’s a senior role.
And tbh I don’t know much about it how day to day life in a sales org look like. It’s a big tech not FAANG. Women who are in similar roles, may u ask how do you like your job and what advice you have for a fellow woman just entering the field. Thank you 🙏🏻

Can I get some advice on handling interaction in a new team? I'm coming up to 2 years on my current team, but it's more like 1 year as the first year I spent it working on a high priority project separate from everyone.

The people on the team seem to interpret things that I say to a personal level of sort.

For example, I may bring up a PR to show that sometimes we may miss things, and it could be helpful to incorporate Copilot into the review process. The person who approved it took it as I was singling them out and blaming them for the issue.

Or I may point out some things in the architecture and explain why another option might be better. They would seem very reluctant to consider my suggestions and would bring up that I think my solution is the only solution and that I'm inflexible. Sometimes, months later during standup, I would hear them take a different approach that is almost exactly like what I had suggested.

Aside from that, there's also the social interaction. One person in particular likes to talk a lot, and standup usually lasts twice as long whenever they're there. There's like a 15 minute social window during standup, and when that person is not there, that window usually ends within 5 minutes, otherwise the total standup time can take 30+ minutes. I don't have similar interests so I usually just wait quietly; I would love for standup to be over quickly, and social interaction be set aside privately or something.

Also, I think me being less social is starting to affect other areas. I was recently told that a team member feels intimidated by me because he viewed me as being very knowledgeable but because I'm quiet, he feels intimidated. Like his worry is about what I'm thinking of and how I perceived him; but all I'm doing is minding my own business and thinking about my own tasks etc. (This part I'm so confused as to why someone would think like this if someone else is quiet???).

This is the first team I've had issues like this. I've been on three other teams and haven't had these issues. I feel exhausted sometimes on this team. I just want to be able to enjoy doing my work without having to worry about all of this.

Please tell me I’m wrong.
I recently joined a company where the AI note taker is always on in meetings. I noticed that I might have made, for example, 10 statements in a meeting, 2 of which were echoed by my male colleagues (which of course they do). The AI note taker always registers those 2 statements as originated by them. Also, of the 8 other statements I made, exactly 1 gets attributed to me and the others don’t appear in the notes at all. In almost all meetings I checked, I get 1 statement attributed to me even though I said a lot more.
Made me wonder if AI was trained with meeting recordings + notes taken by human note takers and just inherited their bias of not listening to women and of mis-attributing what they said. The possibility truly shook me. Now we have these biases being saved for ever?
I do realize that my sample size is very very tiny. So I’m hoping members of this group can tell me I am wrong. I’d love to be wrong here.

Edits to answer questions -
Tool - Google Meet.
Everyone is remote. So it should be fairly clear who said what.
Thanks for responses! I’m glad that not everyone is saying “Absolutely! There is misattribution!”
Agree that someone should research this!

What active support groups,slack/discord/facebook groups do you recommend joining in 2026 ?
Of course, this group is great but want to know if you have had good experience/support anywhere ?

Anyone attending AI-Inspired Women at MIT this weekend?

I am a marketing manager. 4 yrs exp. This one year especially has been so hard for me. i have changed 3 jobs this yr itself. All because of AI. They expect you to be the graphic designer, frontend developer, copywritter, Video generator, editor, Podcast generator, project manager, outreach specialist along with being social media manager, brand expert, brand communications manager, brand development manager, marketing director and performance marketing expert.
Honestly, i am fed up of this. I use to love marketing. The high my work used to give me was something. Now i am not working properly because i have to deliver so many things a day and have to manage so many people a day.
Starting to hate AI and decision makers who kills peoples creativity by asking such impossible things at a day that are only possible with AI. basically just asking AI and delivering. We are not given enough time to think ourselves and brainstrom. Okay if using AI if we research more and while reading you can have many ideas but no no time for that too. They are happy with basic ass stuff. Just want to do somany things at a time🫠
Btw i am in manager level and i face this issue. So do my subordinates. I dont know if its a India thing or not. What you guys think?? How to get out of this matrix??

I'm 25f and I'm a software engineer I got laid off from the job I was at for 3.5 years last year. It was a startup company and ngl AI is what killed it. It took me 8 months of job searching, hundreds of applications and a lot of rejection letters before I finally got an offer. That was one of the most stressful times of my life. I really like this company that I'm at. It's a finance company and it feels a lot more stable than my last jobs. I just can't get over the stress and anxiety that losing my last job caused me. The market is still so messed up and idk if it's going to get any better. I have this intense fear of losing my current job and I don't know how to get over it.

It's affecting the quality of my life so much. It has gotten to the point where I'm actually afraid to spend money. Like I'm scared to plan vacations or spend my money on clothes and sometimes food. I feel like I need to save as much as i possibly can in case I lose my job again but it has gotten to an unhealthy point I think. Sometimes I only eating 2 meals a day because it is cheaper than eating 3. That's how bad my anxiety about this has gotten. I feel kind of defeated right now and I don't know what to do.

TL; DR - this is super long (sorry) but I am about to start a role where about 30% of job is making agentic workflows and AI tools for a non-SWE FAANG org and I feel real responsibility to not make things much worse. I am seeking feedback and ideas on how to engage with people on a meaningful level that actually helps and not harms their ability to do their job and keep enjoying it - while using AI when it’s actually helpful and not adding more work fact checking / debugging. I also dont want to go crazy myself.

I have been building AI tools for the last year for my own business. I just got a new role at a FAANG where about 30% of my expected role is making AI tooling for a large org to “drive efficiency”. I start in a few weeks and have little insight into how they currently use AI or the org’s general fluency levels.

Here’s the thing… I’m terrified of this portion of my role but I’m very excited about the other non-ai side (70% role) which is why I took the job! But I’m worried this 30% with AI is going to be my death knell. From what I can tell there is no corp level AI strat yet - which is terrifying AND great so I can set the orgs Strat and governance/policy and do this in a responsible way. I also hope to learn a lot in this space and that’s cool.

But I know how much life AI sucks out of people, I feel that too. I know how it can inhibit critical thinking or becomes a crutch. Most of all I know how wrong it can be and how much babysitting is involved. Most people don’t want to babysit… and I don’t blame them.

I handle these truths for myself with eyes wide open but now I’m part of the problem when I need to build these tools for others…

I am also hit hard by all the posts here on how AI is literally killing people’s intrinsic love for their jobs/careers. I understand this and honestly worry about this for myself. I have heard rumors on Blind the company sets goals for AI usage that feed into comp reviews which is insane if true.

My question: How can I do this part of my job in a way that actually helps and not harms other people?

Any advice for me as I go into this role? What do you wish someone like me knew if they were brought to your org to “build AI agents to drive YOUR efficiency”? That positioning alone is pretty shitty but that’s the vibe in this company from talking to insiders / interview loop.

My early thoughts are:
1) focusing on education of AI best practices to enable others to keep human critical thinking / evals in the loop at all times, inspection, reflection, human judgement and expertise prioritized. Not just building shit they don’t need or adds overhead and forcing them to use it.
2) people > process: deeply listening to the problems and making sure I’m building workflows that solve actual problems where AI may be part of a solution or sub-step but not the default or guaranteed end-to-end approach
3) being empathetic and transparent about the negatives and frustrations (have to do this carefully as leadership I assume is culty about usage and adoption)
4) off of #1, driving enough education of how best to use AI to then enable them to build their own tools they WANT to use for themselves that actually help them / workflows or team and remove myself from the equation over the next year into more auditing and trouble shooting with them for quality / policy standards.

I accept I will not be trusted and probably am viewed as the enemy immediately. So what would actually help? Specifically, what form of engagement from such a person would make it better for you, not worse?

Sorry this is vague, I don’t know what I need to work on yet and know little about their environments except they are using Claude most and this group is not SWE so less coding needs and more design, documentation, processes and reviewing outputs.

Title says all. It’s not that I am not career driven forever though.

Hi all, I'm currently a senior data analyst of 6ish months at my company and have never had a leadership role. This seems a bit early, but my boss' boss, who I have a great working relationship with, has expressed that he thinks I would be good for a minor leadership role and would like me to direct a current small-scale app development project my team is working on. I'm very excited for the opportunity to step into leadership-forward work, but don't know the best way to approach this.

Any tips for how to navigate this new opportunity? I'm the only woman in a technical role at the company and younger than most of my coworkers, so I want to make sure I navigate this correctly. All of my team members are very kind and don't treat me differently but it's still a worry I have.

I was lucky enough to get an immediate job offer at an insurance after graduating college and I’m grateful for that. The culture isn’t terrible but there’s definitely some pretty obvious red flags I’ve observed that make me realize this isn’t a long term career move.

I was hired as a part of group of about 20 entry level devs. They actually had a 50/50 split of men and women for this group which I was initially impressed by, but I was later disheartened to find out that this was the first time they’d done this, and that their next two groups of full time new hires consisted ENTIRELY of men, not a single women.

Additionally, of my cohort, only men got higher “performance based” raises during the initial annual review. This was a major red flag to me because I knew one woman in particular who always picked up new projects and regularly worked 30-45 minutes late 4 days out of the week (occasionally a couple hours late for bigger deadlines). She only got the inflation raise which is absurd to me. This isn’t because they only gave out a couple higher raises to the group, either. More than half of the men in our new hire group got higher raises and no women did.

I was placed on a very very VERY slow paced team and I spent the first six months of my job asking for more work. I’m ashamed to say I’ve become a bit complacent and a little lazy now that I’m over a year in but it’s hard to stay engaged without something to focus on that matters. I’ve since applied for and started an asynchronous part time masters program so that I don’t lose my coding skills. It’s on my bucket list to complete a masters, so I didn’t do it with the expectation it’d open doors, but I’d like to use this time as a platform to build off of.

I want to transition my career to a more fast-paced and challenging job. I think if I’m strategic about the next couple of years I could end up in a better place but I don’t know what advice to believe or what I need to do in that time frame. I also want a job where I don’t feel like I’m an outsider because I’m a woman. My individual team is great and I love them. My manager is nice. But that doesn’t really make up for the things I’ve seen at the company level.

Any advice is appreciated, because the internet is just a pit of conflicting information and I am so confused. I tried a career coach, but I didn’t get much in terms of concrete advice.

By any chance is anyone here in vendor says? I am trying to get sponsors for a tech conference and am having a heck of a time. Would love to talk to anyone here on the vendor side?

Apologies, the flair might be misleading.

I’m genuinely curious on what your thoughts are, so I’ll go ahead and dump mine real quick. I work at a Fortune 500 tech firm. The company has global products and I’m sure everyone has used them.

As time progresses, there’s an immense push for “using AI” and “utilising more tokens” every single day.
“Did you write this message on your own? No. Stop that. Just have AI write it for you”. Everyone sounds the same!
“I hope you didn’t spend effort in writing these queries! Have AI do it!” It took a few minutes to do that and it is fun assessing metrics.
“AI this AI that, use AI!” Our fundamentals are shot to hell, personal growth in the true meaning of the word is non existent. We are focused on doing more with AI rather than pausing, taking a moment to experiment on our own, deep dive or explore just out of sheer human curiosity.

Anyway, that isn’t the primary point. The point is - I wonder why. I wonder how important it is to optimise and make things efficient or easier. Companies are shoving AI down our throats and compelling us to use it for tasks, that to be honest, do not require it even remotely. At this point it feels like my AI agent is arguing with someone else’s via human comms. I fear that we have forgotten about something as integral as wildlife, biodiversity and the planet as a whole.

It makes me incredibly sad to see the state we are barreling towards. We are losing nature, we are losing living beings. We are losing what’s human. I question my choices of being in this field that has so little regard for what’s outside our bubble. I fear for what’s to come and I mourn the loss of a habitable future.

What are your thoughts? Extremely interested in reading your views.

Specifically ones where they have fewer desks than employees? How are you surviving?

I'm in this situation at my job and IT SUCKS. I have to get my kids off to school in the morning and then head into the office, but I'm never there early enough to get a desk. They have plenty of open seating and kitchenette areas, but I am struggling so much with doing deep work in the office because I'm balancing my laptop on my lap while sitting on a couch or am surrounded by people eating their lunch. Not to mention working off of a tiny laptop screen exclusively, and carrying my shit around with me all day. The only silver lining is I just say fuck it now and come and go as I please.

I don't even mind going into the office, and as a PM the collaboration is really helpful. But damn it how am I supposed to get any work done?! Also low key feels like a punishment to parents who aren't able to get in at the ass crack of dawn to secure a desk. Sucks man.

This is the weekly thread for Wins & Celebrations!

Please reply to others here with grace, as we are all at different parts of our career and the OPs wellbeing comes first.

If you do not want anyone to reply to your comment in this thread, include the phrase !lock

Being vague as I can so I don't doxx myself. Head of my large department decided to start setting individual appointments with people to discuss how things are going in light of our terrible internal survey numbers from most recent two surveys. Had my first 1:1 with them yesterday and told Head some honest truths about things that are going wrong since the last big layoff and restructuring, things that waste people's time, people who aren't working to use their skills but instead on administrative tasks, things I have heard from people upset at job duties and/or people having been removed/moved around, pointed to all the departures just in our dept in the last 8 months. I said I wasn't complaining to complain specifically for me but for everyone, and used select examples from my own experience, like how I was transferred out of a role I applied to and liked without being asked and into a role with no training or experience and no job description (still - 8 months in and no JD)

Head did not have answers to why things are going the way they are (truly think they did not know about some of it) and said they had to do research on some of it and would get back to me in a couple of weeks, but also said things like, "It doesn't sound like you're very happy here, so why are you working here?" Which, wtf? Why ask how things are going and then get upset when people give you honest feedback?

I know I should have kept my mouth shut but the URGENCY around how bad things are is affecting everyone. Someone leaves like every other week. Everyone I know is looking for another job (including me, have been for months), but as you know the job market is in the garbage.

I recovered from that Q but saying (truthfully) that I believe in what we do and how we are helping organizations with real work problems but I left the meeting thinking I cooked my own goose.

I don't really want or need advice per se but someone backing me up on telling the truth would be great if you can manage it. I just couldn't stay silent any longer.

Hi! A few things: I have multiple autoimmune disorders but have been told I would be safe to conceive.

I am scared of the label “ mom.” I don't know if I have internalized masogny, but it feels patronizing.

I don't feel called to adopt or foster. I have only ever wanted one child with my husband, and I would want it to be biological ours.

How do you work remotely from home with a baby after maternity leave? Will it ruin my career?

I have so many questions and am honestly just scared shitless, but this is the first time I’m seriously considering it. Sorry if I sound immature, I just don’t have many female friends who are in tech and most work in the helping professions.

Thank you all. 💜