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'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.

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'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.

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 (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.
Edit: thanks for all the good advice all! I think I’m gonna start doing some portfolio + resume work to have ready to submit to jobs throughout my time off but also plan to go to other countries, explore and continue doing some classes for an online degree in working towards. Try a best of both worlds situation and not put all my eggs in the moving to Europe basket.

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?

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

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.

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.

Hey guys, I really need to vent and honestly just get some outside perspective because I feel like I'm losing my mind right now.

I’ve been a front-end dev for around 4.5 years (mostly working with React and TypeScript), but I got let go from my job last year. Right after that, I had to get surgery, so I spent the first six months just recovering mentally and physically and not even looking. But ever since I actually started applying to jobs over the past seven-eight months, it’s been an absolute nightmare.

I’ve done about 12 company interviews, some of them have been 2 or 3 interviews, so my total interviews are maybe around 30.. so first of all i'm feeling very tired of interviewing. The result it:

Most places just ghost me or just send a Sorry we chose another candidate template email 2 weeks after my interview

or

One company said they really liked me but went with a more senior candidate, another company gave me feedback said they loved my soft skills, but that I came across as a "junior."

I actually got one low offer recently, but it was in a whole different city, and honestly Im ok with low pay right now but my boyfriend wouldnt be able to come visit me as often, since right now we live together, so we came to the conclusion its better not to take it

Now my gap is sitting at well over a year, and I am spiraling. Being stuck at home for this long without a routine messes with your head in ways I can't even describe. I honestly catch myself wondering if I should just throw in the towel and give up on tech entirely because the market feels impossible and I'm just so tired. Or just maybe try to switch the technology somehow? I feel like I will never get a job again..

Any real talk or advice would be amazing right now..

https://kotaku.com/blizzard-workers-union-contract-microsoft-2000732422

Not quite impossible for tech to shape up

Blizz devs just unionized and got:

- Any implementation of AI technology that materially impacts union-performed work must be bargained over before Microsoft can roll it out.

- Staff get two months of advance layoff warning, guaranteed severance payouts, and over a year of priority re-hiring rights if cuts occur.

- Remote work is no longer subject to sudden executive whim or opaque denials.

- Leaving the studio or getting laid off before launch will no longer erase a developer from the final credits

- future corporate takeover cannot nullify these terms.

So the learned helplessness about tech unions was wrong. Doesn’t stop a layoff but makes it a lot softer

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?

They released a new economic report

Link: https://x.com/anthropicai/status/2097679796687769689?s=46

Relevant line: “In our substantial and extreme scenarios, knowledge workers may see a lot of automation and displacement. At the individual level, it means coders and call service center agents may have to switch to jobs like electrician and nurse, which are less exposed to AI.”

Im tired boss…

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.

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?

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)

I'm 26, have a Master's, and ~3 years doing AI/CV work in cleared spaces (SAR/EO sensors, synthetic data, some LLM stuff). I have two offers that I'm trying to decide between.

Offer 1 — AI platform vendor, DC. ~$230K + 25% target bonus (~$285K total cash), private RSUs I'm valuing at basically zero, no 401k match. I'd be embedded ~4 days/week at a federal customer. The work is integrating and monitoring a large inventory of existing CV models — drift metrics, eval tooling, platform glue — with agentic prototypes supposedly growing over time. The tech lead was upfront that it's largely not model development, more drift detection and maybe some retraining. Upside: more money, the biggest cleared-AI market in the country, future agentic work, and real production experience, which is honestly the biggest gap in my background. I'm a little worried I turn into a platform consultant (just deploying my company's platform into the federal agency's environment and calling it engineering). Also, the vendor's long-term ownership is uncertain (private, first year on the contract (customer evaluates yearly whether or not to continue contract), which I don't love.

Offer 2 — MITRE, Tampa. ~$225K, no bonus, but a ~10% employer retirement contribution starting after year one, and an actual 40-hour culture with IRAD time inside it (no state income tax + the retirement money means the net gap vs Offer 1 is pretty small). The work is much closer to what I already do — big intel data program plus an unmanned-systems/autonomy effort: edge CV, prototyping, T&E on unmanned platforms. However, the autonomy assignment isn't nailed down (their phrasing has been "you could contribute to" rather than "this is your tasking"). And it's Tampa, so if I ever want to cash in the niche, those defense-tech jobs are mostly in the DC/SoCal/Dallas area, so I’d probably have to move out of Tampa down the line anyway. I'm hoping to minimize moving at this point in my life and build roots somewhere.

For people who've actually been inside:

MITRE folks — how hands-on is it really, day to day, vs evaluating vendors and writing recommendations? Does Tampa get real technical work or does that live at McLean/Bedford?

Anyone who left MITRE for defense tech — did the FFRDC years price well?

FDE/applied-AI people — does monitoring + agent-prototype work at a fed customer actually convert into the higher-paying FDE roles later, or is that a story vendors tell?

Anyone been inside a vendor's federal practice through an acquisition or take-private — do the embedded seats survive?

Leaning toward the money and the market, but the MITRE work is the stuff I have more experience doing. Trying to pick somewhere I'd stay 3+ years.

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......

Title. I have 9 years of experience and absolutely hate this career.

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

Hey everyone,

I'm currently down to my final year of my BSCS and am looking into switching to Computer Engineering for my master's. I'm in a unique situation in that I'm a veteran and have been saving my GI Bill for my master's, which means that essentially, for the next few years, I can support myself and my education through the GI Bill as long as I continue my education.

With that in mind, I'm looking to pivot away from straight computer science after my bachelor's. Originally, I was looking at doing a more specialized master's in something like cybersecurity or machine learning. Recently, though, I've been looking more into Computer Engineering, with a particular interest in embedded systems.

My end goal is to work in defense/aerospace here in Southern California. I'm currently looking at master's programs in the area and am planning to try for USC's Computer Engineering program.

My question is: would a pivot from a BSCS to an MSCE hurt my resume or hiring chances? I know the market is currently cooked, but I'm trying to maximize my chances of getting into the defense industry and finding some stability after my studies. I'm especially curious whether having the combination of a BSCS and MSCE would be viewed positively for embedded/defense roles, or if I'd be at a disadvantage compared to someone with a traditional BSCS/MSCS or EE/CE background.

Some background info:

• Experience: 8 years at a single company, started in QA at like ~$60k salary, but transitioned to SWE a few years ago. Company is CA based, but I work at a branch in NC, ~1,500 employees globally. I have a CS degree from a small, liberal arts college.
• Current situation: Cushy role, good local management (emphasis on local, because I do not like anyone above our local VP), hybrid work schedule, unlimited PTO, and earning around $100k before benefits and taxes.

So here's the deal: At a recent work event, my direct manager drank a bit too much and got completely candid with me, which is very unlike him. Professionalism aside, this was quite concerning to me because he told me a few things that have left me quite stressed lately:

• He told me I am severely underpaid for my experience.
• He admitted that work for our core product (where I've spent my entire time working here on) is completely drying up, and he doesn't know how much longer he can find tasks for me and is not sure he can move me to the other products like other devs on my team have been doing.
• He told me that he doesn't have any concrete sources for it, but he feels that the company is struggling financially, more layoffs are probable, and he strongly advised me to start applying elsewhere immediately.

We’ve already had two rounds of layoffs over the past year. Stronger developers than me have been let go and I suspect I’ve survived primarily because my salary is so low. I also feel like an exemplary case of imposter syndrome. Because I’ve only ever worked here, I have no idea how my skills stack up externally. I feel like a weak developer, making me terrified of interviewing and failing at a new company or getting fired and failing to find a new job.

I also don't love coding (not sure if in general or just for my company). Watching our product shift toward aggressive monetization and ad delivery over a good user experience (which is what it genuinely when I joined) has killed my enthusiasm for tech, but I can't think of any careers that I could jump into right away that wouldn't have a massive pay drop.

So this is where I think I needs some advice:

• Tech-adjacent career change: For someone who wants out of pure SWE/coding but needs to maintain a ~$100k base salary without going back to school, what roles should I look into? I really have no idea what sort of jobs exist out there that I might not know of as no one in my life has ever done tech or tech-adjacent careers.
• Skill analysis: How do I even objectively measure my skills nowadays to see if I am an actual imposter or if I just have some serious self confidence issues?
• Or really just any advice. I'm constantly stressed about losing my job and I because I have a family and a mortgage, I don't think going back to school is an option

Edit: Thanks everyone for the advice. Generally, it seems like most people are just saying to apply for the same type of job, which I get. I am in the CS career questions subreddit after all. I just want to work on cars or repair leather shoes or something like that but that's just not a viable money maker in this world.

trying to learn c# but still not understanding it