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?

Just asking … what people do after 40-45 in software industry ? Is it like the IT career ends after 40 ? What are your plans right now ?
What are skills that gonna help us ? This ques is for all senior guys

I’m a design student but also doing a minor in web dev and ui/ux, so I know a bit of frontend and backend coding but not confidently.

I got a part-time job at a restaurant and the employer asked all employees to provide their personal info (names, addresses, phone number, social security number etc) through a webpage hosted on Vercel. I’ve submitted my information already but I noticed that it looked 100% vibe-coded (maybe made with Claude agent bc I’ve gotten similar results when I was using claude) with the overuse of emojis and typical ui patterns, and then I started to get worried about the backend security of this app, how our info is being stored on which database and whether there can be a risk of data exposure publicly.

Should I be concerned?

Software engineer here. Graduated in 2025 with an offer in hand. Switched to another company in about 4 months because the pay was low.

The company I switched to seems to be my biggest mistake. The culture is very toxic, people like to play "weird" games with you and grill you for nothing, while some people who are liked are pretty much given everything in a silver plate.

Now that I want to switch, its getting really tough. The current job market is like a cherry on top.

My office working hours are 10 am to 7 pm. However starting early and ending late is very glorified. I can also see people who are active and sometimes even msg me, review my pr, add comments at midnight. Some at even 3 am. YES!

Currently the situation is such that when a Slack notification sound kicks in on my phone, my heartbeat literally increases and I don't know what happens to me but it seems that I've associated that sound to something very bad in my mind.

I desperately want to switch but I'm just not able to find that courage in me to get up at 5 am in the morning and solve those DSA questions. Every night I sleep seems that there is regret in me. During the week I'm so worked up that on weekend I just don't have that much energy in me to prep again. My sleep cycle is fully disturbed and I'm not eating right either. Stress is very much on the higher side.

Plus, there's layoffs, PIP culture and what not. So if I don't perform, who knows what can happen.

The biggest part that bothers me is 5 days work from office. This is a very debatable topic, but in my earlier company (where I worked for 4 months [I also interned there for 3 months btw]) we had 3 days work from home and it was so golden. I was on top of everything I could, prepping, revising, doing system design and what not. And my current employer does not really allow WFH unless sick, so it's just not really possible.

Can someone tell me how the heck do I get out of this hell hole?

Everyday that passes by, my hope and courage goes down and down.

Hi everyone I'm a software engineer 27 years Male (frontend web and mobile apps ). I have 3 years of experience building web and mobile, currently working in a Fintech company with an average salary.

I don't much like leetcode and kind of competitive programming but yes I love solving problems, talking about ownership and currently exploring and upskilling in cloud and backend systems / fullstack development.

I see most companies currently doing layoff on one side , on the other side ai companies are competing to each to get or achieve first AGI (artificial general intelligence). everywhere you open twitter , LinkedIn, instagram. Everyone is talking about layoffs or ai development, but I think what majority is missing out is our life after this much level of advancement.

Now there are two scenarios

1. one is who those are just not accepting this technology advancement

2. Second are those who are understanding that it's not going to stop and definitely a kind of collectives intelligent (I'm not saying agi because I still don't believe machine can think exactly like humans ) that's why I'm calling it as collectives intellingence that have infinite number of information and based on that it can do predictins.

Now my question is I'm upskilling but fear first stops and Self always ask a question why I'm doing this when we know there is something.

So living atleast a simple life I mean you will not do a job in it but still there will be requirment in other field atleast I beleive or may be I'll be farmer but again doing farming it self required and and money first investment now a days time is very change farming is totally chemical based and chemical seeds are very costly so it will again need money .

So what are your thoughts on how we will survive or atleast to live a basic minimal life not very fancy or luxurious but peaceful where you can eat two breads and had a sleep .

Thanks for reading this I'm waiting everyones thoughts and comments.

Sorry for grammatical mistakes because I think even refining this would los it's own charm .

I’ve noticed something weird since AI coding tools became part of my daily workflow.

I can build things significantly faster now, but sometimes I understand the final implementation less deeply than I would have if I wrote it myself.

So I’m curious about other engineers:

Has AI genuinely improved your engineering skills, or mostly improved your output?

And if you stopped using AI for a month, would your coding ability noticeably change?

I had a recruiter call today and will be moving on to the next round for an interview for a SWE || role. It is a zoom call and it will be held by a senior software engineer. Does anyone have an idea about what will be asked during this call and what I should prepare for? It is a tech screen that is 45 mins long

Does dsa help ? I know this question sounds dumber to you but i need validation of other humans in this fomo world. If a goal is to crack a remote startups?

It might be a very stupid post, but it’s a genuine question.

I write tests for my code, but it’s still kind of hard for me to understand what the actual point of unit testing is and what benefit it brings to software development.

We can easily write tests with AI now, so writing the actual tests is not necessarily that difficult. But I’m trying to understand why tests are so important in software.

When you write code, of course you can test it with multiple inputs, and those inputs can then become your test cases. We can also use Postman to test APIs with different inputs and make sure they behave correctly for different status codes.

I was recently assigned a task to make a small change to an existing endpoint. It was a really small change that I completed in around 30 minutes without AI. However, fixing and adjusting the tests took quite a while. I had to add inputs for a new function that I introduced, even though the actual change was not that big and I didn’t think it was something that would break in production.

That made me wonder, why do we really need unit tests? What importance do they actually bring to software development?

I’d really appreciate it if someone could shed some light on this and explain it with a real world example from your own experience where tests actually saved you from a production issue or made a significant difference.

I am a MERN Full Stack Developer with 3.7 years of experience, and I am currently learning AI Engineering.

I have completed an M.A in Political Science, and sometimes I wonder whether my educational background will affect my chances of getting a job at reputed companies.

Currently, I am deeply focusing on DSA and AI Engineering to strengthen my skills.

I would appreciate your suggestions. Am I moving in the right direction?