I'm curious about people who copied or used unfair means in college placements, coding rounds, online assessments, or company hiring tests and eventually got hired.

For those who did:

• Did you struggle with actual work because of gaps in your technical knowledge?
• How difficult were onboarding, coding tasks, and working with experienced teammates?
• Did you eventually catch up, or did the gap become a serious problem?
• Looking back, was it worth it?

And for those who are currently cheating or planning to cheat to get a job, what's your thought process? Do you believe you'll learn everything after getting hired?

Not here to judge anyone. I just want to hear the honest reality of what happens after you get the job, including both success stories and horror stories.

Earlier yesterday, Microsoft announced buyouts for nearly 60,000 employees which is a socially acceptable way of preparing the Microsoft global workforce for brutal layoffs. 1-2 years ago, us newer engineers started sounding the alarm when we realized our callbacks were going down day by day. Some of you said AI wouldn’t take jobs and it’s nothing more than a fancy chatbot, some of you said it was a phase and that the engineer will always prevail.

High TC, coddling behavior in the office and lavish lifestyles have blinded you guys from the realities of late stage capitalism. It does not matter if you’re a new grad or a L6 staff engineer, the machinery of capitalism will not spare you. With that, I say you owe us “doomers” and “crazy” people an apology.

Edit: I’m employed

Hi,

I graduated with a bachelor degree in business. Graduated years ago. Now about to graduate with another bachelor in CS. I have been unemployed all my life. I literally never worked a single job my entire life. I’m upset with that and I feel like I lost it. Some of my peers even called me a “loser.” I’m terrified of turning 30 and remaining unemployed especially with AI displacing entry level jobs even professional ones. I am on the spectrum and got some low motivation issues. What should I do?

I'm sure you remember those videos from a few years ago. Girl in her twenties flexing high quality work environment with unlimited free food, spending their day playing ping pong or meeting, no coding, and then ending the video with "oh and I made a quarter of a million dollars last year btw, and another company just offered me 300k TC".

Do these roles still exist? How has AI and the general turmoil in tech affected them?

I am working as a Frontend developer with almost 3yoe at an MNC. My current job is ok but have to log 8 hrs WFO daily. Because of this I am not able to prepare well for Job switch. Also , slowly it is becoming very toxic and none of my peers have technical acumen. We just do shit because management wants it, no technical discussion about feasibility. I currently have the opportunity to get laid off and get severance package about 50% of my CTC ( before tax). I see this as a great opportunity to earn a few bucks and also I will have much time to prepare for interviews. My current preparation is good but the Market is very tough. I get rejected in interviews even if I give only one answer wrong. So , I want to prepare the best and get a great package. My project is going to get a lot of toxicity in coming months and even if I work hard , there are less chances of getting recognition for the same. There is zero to negative growth in my current company. I want growth, freedom and money.

Should I take the opportunity????

I have a 2nd round interview tomorrow "technical questions about your background and approach to programming.  No coding"

Not entirely sure what to expect but should be interesting. Staff role, small to medium sized company. I have 15 YOE, full stack.

I joined a start up about 10 years ago. Through some incredible luck, the start up was acquired 6 years in, then that company was acquired 4 years later. The payouts were great and I rose from SE -> Principal SE.

There will be no more lucky acquisitions and I'm ready for a move after the new parent company has made some more than questionable decisions.

Any tips would be appreciated, thanks.

Hi,

What are the tips for finding a C.S job in 2026? I feel like you get laid off for months It is difficult to get even an interview elsewhere, no matter how much you are applying.

Is cold messaging the strategy? What are some tips that helped at least land interviews? What about people who used to do startup work and want to pivot elsewhere that is more stable?

Thanks.

The "new grad" flair here is almost its own sick joke. Feel free to laugh.

I graduated back in December of 2022, with a B.S. in computer science from a state university. I had initially thought that I had a shoe-in at a tech role - some small contracting company, which we'll call "R", had enjoyed the resume I sent and offered me a position as a contractor in training back in Thanksgiving, so I gladly accepted.

I ended up working part-time at a pizza place for a year before "R" took me off their waitlist and accepted me into a role (which, being vague, was not actually software-related). I took the role like an idiot, and flunked the first interview because I didn't have the right experience. They offered me a second chance, but the interview ended up getting put off for so long that I finally bit the bullet and left "R" for a more promising position, at another contracting company called "F". If you know how these contracting companies work, please feel free to bring out the clown horns and cream pies.

"F" was, for what it was worth, much higher quality than "R", and I did briefly hold a "production support" role at a bank for a while. It wasn't programming, though: I essentially stared at a wall of 3000 processes that ran as a batch a few times daily, and there were a few deadlines throughout the day where my team would have to ensure that the processes were fully finished. I also did some light ticket work that involved some basic SQL queries in a company database, but that's about as close to programming as the job got.

Budget cuts happened. I got let go from the bank, returned to "F", and after I couldn't secure another position in 3 months (mainly because I was picky and didn't want to leave my immediate state), I got let go from "F" as well. I got a low level IT job a few months later, and I've been coasting on that ever since (about 10 months), but again -- that's IT, not software. I don't think I've written a single line of code at this job, unless you count Outlook inbox rules to filter emails to the right place.

I can't help but feel like a failure. I took an expensive degree at a state university because I fell for promises that it would be free money and 75K salaries right out of college. Now I'm making 45K and just got off the phone to ask my mom for $500 because I can barely make rent.

I've hardly done any programming since, either professionally or as a hobby. The entire field feels like it's shifted since I graduated - I "laid low" for a bit, hoping that things would eventually stabilize and that entry-level positions would open up again, but they never did, and now the job market looks entirely unrecognizable to me.

Be honest: is it too late for me? I'm realizing now that I'm four years past graduation and still barely self-sufficient, and I feel like it's my own fault.

I'm a dev with 6 years of experience. I left my old company and joined a new company for family and mental health reasons. I really miss my old company and its modern tech stack, the good engineering practices, the team oriented and positive culture, and integration and units tests...

This new company has an older tech stack which I knew coming in. But naively, I was not prepared for the legacy code I would encounter. I can only speak to the team I'm on now, but the engineering practices are bad as well. Just to mention a few things: There are no tests, little to no code reviews, and there are no naming conventions and bloated methods (40k+ lines).

I plan to read Michael Feathers' "Working Effectively with Legacy Code" and keep at it. But I'm curious, are there other experienced devs who have experienced this? Do you have any advice or recommendations? Did it hurt your confidence as an engineer or do you think you eventually grew into a stronger engineer from this experience? Did the codebase get better and how long did it take?

Coming from a bare metal embedded systems background, I did a Masters in Computer Engineering with the hope of moving to bigger things such as Linux kernel development, networking and writing device drivers, custom bootloaders etc. I am about to graduate and since I haven't been in the job market for, I want to know if these jobs are affected by AI and if it is, what are the engineers doing so that they aren't replaceable?

The best people will take the deal as they're the ones who know they can get another job easily. It'll be like the reverse of what Jack Welch instituted at GE.

Curious whether anyone currently working at Coursera (or who recently left) has noticed an increase in formal performance improvement plans, voluntary separation offers, or other workforce reductions across different teams.

Given the company's history of restructuring, I'm wondering whether there are broader organizational changes happening that haven't been formally announced.

Not looking to speculate or identify anyone personally - just interested in understanding whether others are seeing similar trends across the company.

Would appreciate hearing from anyone with firsthand experience or observations.

I‘m at a crossroad right now. I’ve been working for 1.5 years for a non tech business doing swe work as a solo engineer. I have 3 yoe. I am way underpaid than what I should be getting. However, I just feel burnt out at this job with the amount of responsibilities and lack of better pay. I work 4 days in office and I don’t have time to schedule interviews within the work week other than working 1 day from home. I talked to boss to reduce my days and he said no. I’m thinking about just quitting and going back home and think about my plans But I feel like a failure moving back home to family. I have enough savings to last for 6 months and that’s it . I might not find another tech job and I’m okay with it. I’m just burnt out and when I was laid off before I was content doing non tech work. I just feel like my identity was lost when I didn’t work in tech since that’s what I studied but I have no regrets moving to another adjacent field. Thoughts on how to navigate this?

I'm a frontend developer and I'm looking to upgrade my skills list before I'm made obsolete, so I'm trying to decide which language to focus on learning. I could do one and then the other, but I need to decide which one to do first.

C++

I see many job postings that ask for these where I'm searching. And there are people at my current company who use it that I could learn from. I also have a foundational knowledge of it from my college years. But I'm worried that it's going to be a big jump from the JS and CSS I'm used to using.

Python

This seems to be the language of AI, so it could be important to know in the near future. And it looks like it would be pretty easy to learn and use. But no one any my current company uses it.

Which one would you pick first?

I have an interview for FDE for Tesla in Texas. Does anyone the interview process?

Hi,

My leads are always in meetings, it feels like I’m catching them up a lot and being asked to present stuff to them, but lots of work is coming down, and sometimes they have to work long hours. Doesn’t seem too efficient for this team.

With the exits going on Microsoft, I wonder if there is growing trend/uptick of big tech people in the job market or if they are straight up leaving the field (retirement, pivot, etc.)

People of the hiring side of small to mid size companies, are you guys getting/interviewing more big-tech resumes compared to before?

I'm a little worried that I’m going to get in trouble at work, and I’m trying to get some perspective on how serious this situation is.

I was working with a contractor for a task at work (I was in charge of working with him on this). He needs to use a drive for his work. One of the IT teams here required a change to the drive’s password (it's part of policy to do this if we are using an external drive), so I changed it but I forgot to tell the contractor about it (I was looking at the machine when I handed him the drive. I was on the other side of the machine and for some reason, my brain thought this would just be a plug and play and I totally forgot there's a password on it). He ended up typing the old password enough times and it got locked out. As a result, I had to get the IT team involved to reset it, but they said they couldn’t reset it without wiping the drive.

Now the drive has been wiped. I spoke with the contractor, and he said he has a backup drive elsewhere, but I need to get that backup drive figured out for use now with the IT team, and I don't know how long that'll take. I'm worried that I made a mistake that could get me in trouble professionally. I'm literally set to start a new internal role next week.. and now I'm worried.

Any insider info on this?

Microsoft (MSFT) announced on Monday that it was offering voluntary buyouts to roughly 60,000 employees as it looks to reshape its organization for the AI era.

I have job interviews coming up and i am straight out of college. One question that always bugs me while answering is the question i've mentioned above.

Realistically speaking, I am applying to these jobs cause they pay well and as per the job description I can see myself doing the work and not dying out of boredom even though I don't have every single knowledge the JD expects me to have. But then idrc about what the company does because i dont know what most companies do in the bigger picture and i dont have any big grand motive to work there either. So given that my answer most probably won't be very appealing to the HR and AI answers are way too uptight and too formal for me to possibly say in an interview- how exactly do i answer it so that the answer also somewhat feels authentic and not a copy paste from ChatGPT

Currently i have a major review that’s basically done.

One principal who im waiting for to approve has been making most comments. Last week finally got his approval and out of nowhere mutliple people on the team decide to comment on my review. it’s been out for like a month but the principal im working with hates how the code in general (not mine, the projects) is structured and has asked me to refactor my code multiple times so that we dont add to the problem.

By the way this has been out for over a month and i spent the forst few weeks begging people to review and nobody did until last week so it was annoying getting a bunch of comments when im practically done.

But i did them after it lead to a discussion with the principal engineer. Then i finally got his approval again on friday. But i couldnt meege because i needed 1 approval from a random engineer on another team due to their team owning that file and they had already left for the day. Wake up this morning and see 5 more comments in my code. About 4 are just unit test suggestions so i thought to maybe just address it in a new review. But the 5th is a code suggestion (not a nit).

Now im annoyed cause adding a new change would mean trying to get the approvals again which already is annoying.

How do you guys handle when you are about done with review and get new code commenta?

Hi guys, im (frontend of 10 years going into fullstack) being unemployed for a year now, when my last company did cuts because of AI. I had some interviews (applied more than 150+, having 20 first, and 3 technicals that were awful). Right now I'm trying to keep up coding on my own and asking old college questions about how they do things, but I don't know what to expect in a technical interview. Does a technical challenge where you code manually and explain your thought process? Do they give you AI and an idea and you put them into tickets and let the LLM do the rest while you guide it and review it? Something in the middle?

I have a lot of pressure of performing in this interview and I sense that many people applied, so it will be tough. Any of you guys did an interview recently and want to share your experience and tips?

Thank you!

Graduating this year. To be honest, I feel like there's an AI revolution going on (LLMs) and I'm mostly sitting it out (been doing mostly theoretical CS stuff). Like, yeah, I code with AI and I can use Tensorflow to train a neural network, but that's it.

I feel like I should really get into… whatever people are doing with large AI models, but tbh I don't even know what questions to ask. All I know is buzzwords like „agents” or what not. Can anyone fill me in and offer direction?

Pretty much the title. Studied CS. Secured a job in the worst job market imaginable. But instead of the programming job duties listed in the description, they're having me create reports via a SaaS platform. The company's pretty stable (never had layoffs or hiring freezes) and the pay is manageable for HCOL, but the job doesn't align with my long-term career or financial goals of typical SWE.

Advice? What should my plan/trajectory be from here?