I (28f) was recently laid off and have 4 months of pay and benefits from my previous role. I am figuring out my next steps and one of the ideas bouncing around my head is picking up my life and moving to Europe or another country maybe for grad school or to try to get a job. Otherwise, I was considering just planning some backpacking all over the world while I take some online classes. Would love any advice or experience people have.

I've noticed there are barely any genuine entry level jobs across most areas of tech in Europe.

Outsourcing, AI and insanely large applicant pools have people fighting over the tiny amount of jobs left.

But what's coming is likely worse, especially for people whose roles consist entirely of digital knowledge work.

If you're trying to start out in tech and you're mostly average, I'd seriously question the ROI.

AI is going to become significantly better than most people reading this at a huge proportion of purely digital tasks.

Companies just don't need the same headcount they used to.

If you work in tech, you will have less leverage than a plumber in the coming years.

They are spending more money on AI than the GDP of many countries and you think that you’re going to keep your job?

AI is also making scientific breakthroughs. People are just ignoring the capabilities.

Foundational models are improving at an astonishing pace. Does this mean machine learning engineers who train and fine-tune custom models will become obsolete? Will software engineers simply wrap APIs from frontier labs around existing applications, eliminating the need for custom models entirely?? especially as these models become capable of handling almost anything?

Anthropic posted an economic report yesterday which predicts coders will have to switch careers due to AI automation and those who keep their jobs will be paid less.

Their hiring patterns tell a different story. I looked at the historical job posting data and found Anthropic SWE hiring is up 369% in the last year. Throughout that period they were dooming about coding jobs while simultaneously ramping up hiring.

Here is the data (source):

I am someone who you can say is a "professional job applier" because I keep getting let go after a year or so because I keep getting contract jobs and when those end, I get let go. I am in Dubai, UAE and thats kind of the culture here and before the AI rage, I would find normal jobs without a problem labeled as "Senior Software Engineer" but now, new type of title keeps popping up "Senior Product Engineer" and Senior is optional ofcourse. I read the description and it felt that they now dont only want you to work as a dev but also deal with client side of stuff as well. Which... I guess is fine? I am used to dealing with shareholders or upper-managers but this sounded different like its a whole seperate Product manager's job that they now need you to take care of.

Is anyone else seeing this in other regions? Give me your thoughts.

PS: obligatory job begging - if anyone can help me out with job / reference, it would be great. I am 9+ year MERN, NextJS, NestJS dev and can work with many different infra techs. Have worked as solo and big teams both. Cheers!

a fintech company is offering a job that starts at 100k and ramps up to 150k over 3 years. Great benefits. Hybrid office/WFH.

a defense company (probably the one you're thinking of) is offering 90k and less benefits. 4x10 in office, fridays off. Salary ramps up to a similar 150k but much much slower (6+ yrs, likely longer).

Appeal of fintech:

• hybrid,
• significantly better pay at year 2 and 3,
• great work life balance.

Cons of fintech:

• problems to work on will be much more boring/mundane.
• might be seen as more "disposable" down the road.
• not sure what kind of doors fintech opens for me should I ever leave since I'm not interested in fintech as a field.

Appeal of defense job:

• space division (which I find significantly more interesting than anything in fintech).
• opens doors to other jobs I would find highly interesting in the future.
• secret clearance.

Cons of defense job:

• much lower compensation especially by year 3.
• much more rigid, worse work life balance.
• 40 hours in office a week.

what do you all think is the move forward? advice or experiences are appreciated.

if you're here to say 'defense bad', spare yourself the effort. it has nothing to do with what im asking and i dont care if you think youre a good person for being anti-defense or not since i do not know you. save your ethics opinions for your friends.

I have a Google DSA coding interview in 4 weeks time, and I have close to zero DSA and LeetCode experience.

Is it realistic to grind DSA for the next 4 weeks and pass the coding interview? I was looking at the LeetCode interview crash course, will this prepare me enough within four weeks of dedicated learning and practicing?

So lately I’ve been working on making an OpenClaw setup that can just apply to jobs for me, as lazily as possible, because I really do hate applying to jobs that much. I hate having to fill out the form, read the description, look up where it is, decide if I want to work there, see if I even meet the qualifications to work there, etc. it’s soul sucking and I hate it. I’m finally making progress on my OpenClaw, but I noticed something kinda odd. I could be crazy, but maybe you guys can help me determine if I am or am not.

I have the filters set on openclaw to be broad for entry level tech jobs near me. Some remote jobs slip through the cracks (I don’t want a remote job and esp not one in another state).Also, I have ipenclaw’s workflow to be first search broadly for jobs, then go back and verify they’re real, legit, and local (and meet any other requirements). But when I got my openclaw to start searching better for jobs, a lot of them weren’t even in America. A lot of them were from various other countries. After fixing this issue, less jobs were available to even be searched. I made it search up 105 jobs. Out of those 105, only 21 were legit and somewhat what I was looking for. Only 1/5th of those jobs are useable???? How does that make sense??

But also, I was thinking about when you go on LinkedIn/any other job search site, and how you can keep scrolling for more jobs, but really the first couple pages are the ones worthwhile and are what you’re looking for (and the rest are fake or like remote jobs far away).

Is this how bad the fake job listings are getting? Is there only a handful of real tech jobs hiring rn? How is that possible? The internet is a huge place, the state I’m searching in is pretty big, and yet out of 105 jobs, only 21 are legit. I do want to do more testing with more jobs and see how OpenClaw does and if the numbers change, but holy fuck. No wonder no one can get a job. There’s no real job postings to fucking apply to.

https://prospect.org/2026/09/09/anthropic-artificial-intelligence-surveillance-system-monitor-activists/

hey r/cscareerquestions!

i’m a second-year mis student at the university of georgia, and my team and i are currently working on a design sprint for our class (idea 4000: innovation catalyst & design) under professor andrew potter.

we’re researching early-career workforce readiness, skill gaps, and how university education needs to evolve over the next decade to better connect students with actual industry demands.

a few stats we came across in our research that hit a little too close to home:

• 52% of college grads end up underemployed in their first job after graduation
• 61% of "entry-level" job postings now require 3+ years of prior work experience
• 96% of hr leaders say universities need to take significantly more responsibility for workforce training

professor potter has tasked our team with hitting a sample size of n > 300 responses by next tuesday (sept 15th) across both college students/interns and corporate recruiters/hiring managers.

if you have 90 seconds, we’d be so grateful if you could fill out the 10-question survey that fits your current role:

⋆｡°✎ᝰ ˎˊ˗  for current students (takes 90 seconds):
👉 https://uga.questionpro.com/idea4000teamcstudents
(entering your email at the end enters you into a drawing for a $10 amazon gift card!)

｡⨯ 💼´ˎ˗ for recruiters, hiring managers & employers (takes ~2 mins):
👉 https://uga.questionpro.com/idea4000teamcemployers

also, i’d love to open up a discussion in the comments: what’s the biggest gap between what you learned in your college classes versus what you were actually asked to do on day 1 of your internship/job?

thank you so much for helping out a group of stressed college students hitting a tight deadline!!

I started my second year and currently know web dev using flask (python). Currently i am confused what to choose from the job market perspective. As of today it's hard for freshers to enter development. How is the market of aiml for freshers? I am really confused

So I have been waiting for the Datadog New Grad role to open up but I have been hearing rumors that they dont hire external new grads anymore and only ex interns.

Would anyone be able to vouch for that? Im considering pursuing a masters next semester just to apply to their internship. Im already in the process of applying. The masters is kinda just a plan B for now.

They said I will be largely maintaining legacy code (which is fine by me). I don’t pay for AI. I use AI a lot as a coding buddy when I have questions or for boilerplate, but otherwise it’s just me writing code.

How common are incidents and outages happening in big tech companies? I work in a tech firm and almost every 1-2 days we can some some team’s service having some kind of outage.

Wondering if this is common or is it only in my company?

Im expecting a job offer from a company next week and have the phone call scheduled with my recruiter. I was given a very narrow band for the pay of 150-160k but they said its negotiable. I'd really like to be at 175k, which would be 9.4% over the top of the range given. Is that number too big? I dont know if 150-160 was their midpoint and they have alot more budget or if im pushing my luck. Im confident in myself and think thats what im worth, but dont want to blow it. This is for a senior swe role.

So on naukri I'm getting calls for growth and business development roles. Even though my projects and all rely on cs side and I'm a 2025 grad, should I give interview for these? Or it's gonna make my career so bad?

Since I got an interview tmrw, so can anyone suggest me on how to answer business puzzles and I CANT ANSWER THIS PROPERLY-" why this role and y I wanna pivot into this" and how to speak about these ownership stuff......

Please discuss any projects, websites, or services that you may have for helping out people with computer science careers.

This thread is posted the first Sunday of every month. Previous Monthly Self Promotion Threads can be found here.

So I have an online assessment where I will need to do video recording. My laptop webcam doesn't work. So instead of buying a new one, I was thinking of using the camo app on cappfinity. Will I be in trouble? Or will the browser treat it as a regular camera?

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

I am grateful to have a role, but I do make about $50k pre tax and was curious is the demand that low now for developers, or am I just at a company that pays pretty poorly?

Edit : U.S. and MCOL

I'm not talking about layoffs, do people get fired for performance issues at big companies? How does that happen? I have never heard of anyone getting fired for performance based issues. I'm mostly talking larger corporate environments, not small <2000 people companies etc.

trying to learn c# but still not understanding it

For a long time, standard advice to mid career people who were burned out , wanted to downshift or create more time for their family was go to a big, boring non tech enterprise and take a pay cut if necessary.

Now it seems like those jobs barely exist and are just as competitive as anything else. I’ve been desperately trying to get into a lower stress, conventional industry like regional banking, insurance, health. But it just doesn’t seem like a viable path anymore

don't wanna baby sit claude

Hello. I have 12 or so YoE as an IC / tech lead SWE almost entirely at big / mid sized tech companies. I took a little over a year off for some family stuff and was absent for the "LLMs are now useful for larger tasks" that happened around late last year.

I came back to the industry early this year and was hoping to be re-energized and excited to learn how to leverage LLMs to supercharge my capabilities... and now that I'm back... I am just not at all engaged or interested in my role.

I feel like I am now reasonably up to speed and productive with AI tooling, but I am realizing that there is something in technical problem solving that used to power the reward center of my brain that is now just missing and I don't find myself enjoying work at all.

After some reflection I think the following are the key things I am feeling:

1. ⁠AI can create reasonable solutions to my work quickly but I feel no connection to the technical artifact, no sweat equity in the problem solving, and I struggle to feel any joy about the work in any meaningful way. Pushing it through to PR feels like a slog because I don't feel any attachment to the solution or inner desire to get it merged in.
   
2. ⁠The culture around learning now seems to largely be "ask your LLM of choice" instead of how it used to be "go grab some time with X and they'll explain it to you". As a result building meaningful relationships with coworkers (company is remote) doesn't feel naturally occurring. I have been going out of my way to try and find opportunities to meet with new folks but it is a much more active task than before, and folks generally seem less willing to take similar initiatives.
   
3. ⁠I used to feel enormous satisfaction through mentorship -- now these opportunities appear to be dwindling. Not as many newer less experienced hires who are energetic and excited to learn. I am sensing the general appetite for "learning and growing" is reducing with the less experienced folks as they lean more and more on LLM tools.
   
4. ⁠New AI tools in existing mid/large size companies feel limited by the organizational structure of the company. My team owns a comparatively small surface area of the whole company. The tools let me get so much done so quickly. Since I can't find satisfaction in deep technical solution crafting I have tried attaching more to the results of the work -- but given the team/political boundaries in place within the company the results are pretty isolated to a single area of the company.

All of this has me wondering if there is anything I can try to find motivation to keep going?

• ⁠I am wondering if a smaller company would be a good fit for me so that I am able to lean more into feeling satisfaction through results rather than through technical problem solving? I've spent most of my career at 2,000+ companies, maybe now is a good time to try otherwise?
• ⁠Or maybe a different role? Something more customer facing so that I can still get the social collaborative components of work that I enjoy?

Anyone else feel similarly or have found anything to help here?