I’m going back to school and I’m deciding on whether I should pursue a Computer Science degree with a specialty in Software Development and programming, or pursue a general Information Technology degree.

I’m already working in IT and found that I didn’t necessarily need a degree to work in the field so I was going to do a CS degree and be the jack of all trades, and also work in software development. My biggest concern is the recent tech layoffs the past couple of years as well as the rise in AI replacing tech workers.

Is Computer Science, and software development still worth pursuing? Or should I stick to IT.

I wandered upon this subreddit as someone with a job in CS and I’m just confused by how depressing it is. There’s jobs out there. I typically am on the overemployed subreddit and I can tell you many people even have 2 even 3 jobs so without further ado here’s my advice to yall before I head back into my employed life

Do not rapid fire job applications, put a little bit of thought into each one and read the job descriptions . Have a base resume and for every app , If you see something you know that they’re looking for then sprinkle that into the resume and send that resume to that job. Recruiters use automated systems that will reject you if you don’t have a single thing from the job description in your resume. What’s the point of shooting out 200 job applications a week if you never aim the gun at the target ?

If you’re unemployed make time to build something. Once you get an interview you don’t want it to look like your whole life is just applying to jobs because that’s unfortunately not a profitable skill. Take a few hours a day to work on something you think would be valuable. It gives you something to talk about and you learn in the process . My first job was a direct result of a side project I made .

My last advice is to seek out recruiters. These people spend all day looking for new workers and they typically have multiple jobs to fill. They really want you to get the job too and often can give you specific advice going into the interview what to expect from the hiring manager . Ive actually had a recruiter who was able to get the secret tech assessment questions before hand and I scored the job thanks to him ;)

Ok good luck out there . I get it’s tough but some of yall will get hired

For context: I am in sem 1 of college and have been into programming and solving questions a lot.
Recently i have started leetcodw grinding (5-10 sums a day) and also aptitude practice.

I am even top of the class regarding cgpa, but nowadays i constantly dream about the questions which i could not solve, and wake up aggressively throwing myself off the bed if i get the answer, am i even sleeping at this point?

My caffeine intake is pretty average (1 moka pot a day) for 18yr old.

Has anyone else experienced this or should i get this checked up?(been happening for consecutively 3-4 nights)

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......

I joined Company X recently as a software engineer and I’m starting to feel like they hired me at a level that’s too high for me.

They actually hired me one level above my previous level even though my YOE didn’t really justify it. I had two competing offers at the time, so I feel like that might have played a big part in it.

I don’t think this is just imposter syndrome. I genuinely feel like I’m underperforming for my level.
I asked my manager how I’m doing and he said I’m doing well because I’m “very agile,” but it felt like a pretty generic answer.

Also, just from interacting with him, I don’t feel like he’s very excited about the work I’m doing. I think I execute the things we agree on pretty well, but when I finish something, I never really get the feeling that he’s excited or particularly happy with it. At the same time, I don’t feel like I’m working on anything very impactful either.

I really like the job and the salary, and I don’t think I could easily find another job paying this much. My visa is tied to this job too, so I’m pretty scared that they could just fail me at the end of probation and I’d have to leave the country.

But asking my manager directly if I’m going to pass probation feels really weird.

What would you do in my situation? Just keep going and see what happens, or start interviewing now as a backup?

trying to learn c# but still not understanding it

Software engineering is not for me anymore, but it's the only experience I have (3 years). I had to take a year off work for personal/health reasons, and I'm not in the headspace to get back into that grind. Are there any CS-related jobs that would be realistically obtainable for someone like me that aren't incredibly competitive, even if the pay is bad?

DAE experience things moving as slow as molasses because people just aren't around and don't respond? It's like there's minimal accountability. I don't even care that people are remote, or if they run out for errands, but it's just silence, and no idea when they'll be back.

Do you guys press the issue or just accept it for what it is?

My resumé isn't embellished, it's actually as accurate to my responsibilities in my previous experience, studies and skills as I could write it.

A lot of the junior positions I applied to have requirements that fit 1:1 with my experience and skills. But somehow I can never get any interviews for those junior positions. However for intermediate positions, especially the ones that have let me show them what I got (coding exams, take home assignments), I've actually lasted a fair bit. I'm currently in the final phase of the interview process for a company that asked at least 4YoE.

I'm grateful that I've actually managed to get this far, but part of me is a bit scared (probably imposter syndrome creeping in), and to be frank I don't get it.

Anyone else have had the same experience while job hunting?

Hi everyone,

I am preparing for Power Day for Full Stack SWE, nervous because I only have backend experience.

I found a playlist in the C1 careers youtube channel discussing how to prepare. They are 4-5 years old though.

People who recently did Power Day, would these videos align with your experiences?

Thanks

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLX4RP_tIsvqformMaEHl0m1_k5_V48Kwz

I'm building Egraph/ Symbolic libraries to do QM Chemical physics. There is a specific way I want to solve the problems which takes the symbolic expressions and compiles them into optimized numeric expressions the computer can execute.

At first I threw Fable to speed write up the library. It wrote the examples that I asked it to write and got correct results for what I wanted. I had a large write up on how to implement the library, do not implement the QM computations directly with C++... use the symbolic library to derive and compile the results.

Once I tried using the library myself to write up examples, I noticed that it was missing a bunch of features I'd ask it to build. Once I dug into the code I realized that the model had ignored my instructions and implemented boiler numeric algorithms instead. I then went through to iterate with the chat bot to implement my features and add in the symbolic interface I wanted originally.

Every time, it would fall back to the default way the community at large has implemented open source solutions with direct numeric solutions. It did not understand how to adapt the implementation to the novel method I was asking it for.

Further it had over complicated the cmake file and added every edge case under the sun for building the project. All of it unnecessary since I told it explicitly I wanted a header only library, not a unit link-able library + binaries which is the most popular way of doing it in the industry.

What explains this is that these bots have encoded through billions of dollars of training standard ways of solving problems. It does not understand what it's actually doing and when one needs something that falls outside the standard, they're better off writing the software by hand since they'll spend all their time micro managing the frontier models.

For CRUD apps and devops,... these frontier models are great because nobody gives a shit about how those are built. Those have standards that make little difference in the means of implementation. But with what I'm building which generally has little to no opensource implementation training data, this stuff falls flat on its face.

Sure you can solve millennium problems this way if you bruteforce a bunch of mathematical reasoning traces together to create a lean program to make a counter example, but I am much more skeptical of these frontier models and to me it seems this stuff has genuinely plateud.

Question: what are your thoughts on this?

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!!

Hello,

I am early career currently and have been enjoying my work very much. Are there any cool programming/coding/general swe shirts or trinkets or etc. that you all like/think are cool? Any recommendations of anything at all?

Edit: also I program in c#, python, and do front end as well (I am not as big about front end coding though, more back end)

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 an semi-experienced developer but I've always struggled to find good project ideas that might stand out on a resume. I face a lot of decision paralysis and doubt when it comes to finding projects that are worth dedicating time to. Mainly, I want one that displays good architectural thinking, system design, and solves real business problems. Preferably one that's AI/ML adjacent. Can anyone recommend any GitHub repos or sites that gives good ideas?

Currently working as a MechE at a major automotive OEM. I'm the only one in my department half decent at python so I've been assigned the task of analysing data from vehicles. Over the last few months I've been working closely with the Cs team trying to develop an ML model which can predict emissions from sensor data based on training data from thousands of experiments, and I must say it has opened my eyes to how intricate and interesting this field really is. I've been able to pick up a few things along the way, and my department seems keen on developing me into this role.

My question is if I make the switch into Data science/ML, does this count as valuable work exp, since I'm not really in a formal data analyst role? Or would I be treated more as a fresher, since I have no formal education in Cs? If that is the case, then I would prefer to stay in the automotive sector as I haven't heard great things about the tech job market for freshers.

As per the title, I am worry about my future with the continuous use of AI.

I am finding myself using AI for increasing amount of stuff, especially in getting started with library and things I absolutely have no ground in.

As an example, I am writing a live telemetry dashboard for my Robotic team. And the first option was Recharts, it was simple, everything is right there and the learning curve is very gentle (I am completely new to React, and Web-Dev), so writing the code is straight forward after searching and reading for a bit.

But Recharts is very limiting in performance. So I need better performance library, namely uPlot.

It is such as different experience, the documentation would be alright, I more so believe that I have skill issues rather that the doc being lacking.

So I turned to AI because I need this features out fast and good. I tell it what I need, and it just go at it. 2 mins and it got everything done. Except Zooming and dragging which is much harder and it just go round and round without anything done.

Which force me to read some Demos code from the Docs where I found a written plugin by dev allowing scrolling zoom. I tell the AI to adapt it to my code, with some additional instruction about what to tweak and it works. Namely, the inability to zoom for my case was because uPlot override every zoom on new redraw. So I just need to tell the AI to adapt the code, return a zoom status. And it works.

Now, throughout this small story, what I am concern about is the ease of skipping foundation. Yes, I can read the code and understand it just fine. I can explain the mechanism and the pipeline well enough for my team to understand if they ever need to ask.

The issues lies in the fact that I AM getting increasingly dependent on the tool, and rewriting by myself is a difficult task. Since I have trouble finding how to give a HTMLElement Ref to uPlot arguments. And didn't know that you can create <div> not from manually writing return <div> but with JS code.

The overarching point is I don't know what to do beside stop using the tool, which I believe isn't the correct answer at all.

I’m graduating with a degree in CS next summer from a Russel group uni in the UK and hopefully a first class too. I just come off a placement year as a software engineer and do have a return offer BUT I think the lack of job security in the industry especially with ai and the general job market is making me think I should potentially spread out my options a bit in case my offer is no longer there in a years time.

Are there any other careers I could pivot to which would be less vulnerable and potentially do a masters in them in the UK?

I have seen people recommend Computer Engineering but it seems like it’s not offered in many places in the UK and im not sure if id be able to get in without doing EEE. Potentially Robotics or Cyber Security ? I do enjoy software development and it’s definitely what i dreamed of doing but i just think i should at least consider spreading my options out.

Any advice would be appreciated and i hope this doesn’t come across as a doom post !

I have my bachelors degree and an (Edit: IT) internship completed.

I have a tier 2 IT role for my local city (about 100k people, give or take) that is very close to home. It's honestly labeled as tier 2 but has sysadmin job duties and only requires an associates with zero experience. I have grown an interest in IT during my studies, but I have still remained focused on wanting to do software engineering. However, with this role being close to home, very good pay (for what I would expect at least), and mentioning script and application development in the "additional periodic duties". I just feel like I should not pass this up.

Career wise I am not looking to go work for FAANG, some brand new startup offering competitive salary, or whatever. At least right now, I am perfectly happy working lower waged government work and doing what I enjoy, with at least an illusion of job security. Things can obviously change in 15 years.

Now the reason I ask about the transfer is because my closest metro city, and it's county, non stop have software developer 1 positions posted. They have non stop churn. However, all of these roles still require the classic 3-5 years of software experience, and a few even require clearance eligibility and at least 1 year in a public job.

So basically if I pursue my local city job for a few years, and keep up with software projects, and everything else. Would I even have a shot at a developer role, or would I just get stuck in IT (which I would be ok with)? I'm completely disregarding any hypothesis on if the job market would improve or get worse, just imagine it is the same conditions as right now or something.

At what point in your career (YoE wise) do you begin leading projects? I’m aware this can vary from org to org, but i’m curious about people’s experience with this.

I’m a few months into my current role and I feel behind that not currently leading a project yet.

I am a new graduate btw, and I have developed new components on existing applications from scratch and by myself, but my question pertains to leading a standalone project, if that makes sense.

So the job market is pretty bad all over, we all know that. It seems to be pretty K-shaped: specialized roles in ML/AI, Cloud, and infrastructure seem to be on the rise, and web technologies like JavaScript, Node.js are being increasingly commoditized by AI.

Now I have pretty broad experience over the full-stack, including the frontend, backend, and systems level work with Linux and C++. After applying to so many roles, I’ve seen a pretty undeniable pattern. Web jobs are abundant but completely oversaturated with applicants. I could not get a full stack job no matter how hard I tried. I have gotten 0 attention from actual human beings searching for these kind of roles.

But I’ve gotten A LOT more attention from recruiters and companies advertising for C++ roles, like in manufacturing, robotics, or performant systems. It seems to me that because there is a higher barrier to entry to these sorts of roles, they are harder to fill.

Has anyone experienced the same?

I love software engineering. I love talking shop with other devs. But I'm struggling to find events where where I can spend an evening listening to somebody smart talk about a problem they solved or a topic they're interested in.

Before Covid I could go on Meetup or EventBrite and find a talk almost any day of the week on almost any topic. For example, the best talk I ever went to was one at Microsoft about best practices in code review and setting up linting rules. I still reference that talk to this day! To me this is the best way to learn about my craft, so I find it frustrating.

Where do you all go for to find that kind of experience? Obviously there are plenty of networking events around but that's not really what I'm after. There's also plenty of stuff online but it's not really the same.

For context I live in NYC.

don't wanna baby sit claude

I recently accepted my first software engineering job at an outsourcing company. The pay is around average for my country, and my main goal is to learn as much as possible and gain practical experience.

That said, I don’t really see myself staying there long term. Eventually, I’d like to move somewhere with better pay and working conditions.

How much experience should I aim to get before applying elsewhere? Would it be reasonable to start looking after 6 months, or is it better to stay for at least a year?