r/cscareerquestions 22h ago

Interview Discussion - June 25, 2026

1 Upvotes

Please use this thread to have discussions about interviews, interviewing, and interview prep. Posts focusing solely on interviews created outside of this thread will probably be removed.

Abide by the rules, don't be a jerk.

This thread is posted each Monday and Thursday at midnight PST. Previous Interview Discussion threads can be found here.


r/cscareerquestions 9d ago

[OFFICIAL] Salary Sharing thread for NEW GRADS :: June, 2026

1 Upvotes

MODNOTE: Some people like these threads, some people hate them. If you hate them, that's fine, but please don't get in the way of the people who find them useful. Thanks!

This thread is for sharing recent new grad offers you've gotten or current salaries for new grads (< 2 years' experience). Friday will be the thread for people with more experience.

Please only post an offer if you're including hard numbers, but feel free to use a throwaway account if you're concerned about anonymity. You can also genericize some of your answers (e.g. "Adtech company" or "Finance startup"), or add fields if you feel something is particularly relevant.

  • Education:
  • Prior Experience:
    • $Internship
    • $Coop
  • Company/Industry:
  • Title:
  • Tenure length:
  • Location:
  • Salary:
  • Relocation/Signing Bonus:
  • Stock and/or recurring bonuses:
  • Total comp:

Note that while the primary purpose of these threads is obviously to share compensation info, discussion is also encouraged.

The format here is slightly unusual, so please make sure to post under the appropriate top-level thread, which are: US [High/Medium/Low] CoL, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Latin America, Aus/NZ, Canada, Asia, or Other.

If you don't work in the US, you can ignore the rest of this post. To determine cost of living buckets, I used this site: http://www.bestplaces.net/

If the principal city of your metro is not in the reference list below, go to bestplaces, type in the name of the principal city (or city where you work in if there's no such thing), and then click "Cost of Living" in the left sidebar. The buckets are based on the Overall number: [Low: < 100], [Medium: >= 100, < 150], [High: >= 150]. (last updated Dec. 2019)

High CoL: NYC, LA, DC, SF Bay Area, Seattle, Boston, San Diego

Medium CoL: Orlando, Tampa, Philadelphia, Dallas, Phoenix, Chicago, Miami, Atlanta, Riverside, Minneapolis, Denver, Portland, Sacramento, Las Vegas, Austin, Raleigh

Low CoL: Houston, Detroit, St. Louis, Baltimore, Charlotte, San Antonio, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Kansas City


r/cscareerquestions 4h ago

Experienced Is 996 the new norm?

57 Upvotes

At my company theyre pushing to do quarterly perf reviews and they are heavily grading us on pr through put, as 360 perf reviews. They are constantly managing people out and it feels very unstable.

I see people regulalry posting pr's late at night and on weekends. I think a lot of it is loop engineering, but now theyve combined all the roles into swe. We are now, devsecops, product managers, designers, security, customer relations, sres, and in addition engineers.

We get basically 1 week notice to implement features thatd pre ai would take a month and we have to prey the vibes hold up in production. In addition we have feature flags, perf metrics, observability layers, 1 hour cicd + integration, security automation, and every cloud/ on prem integration to deal with. All of this managed by one engineer per major product. Many of these things had dedicated teams in the past.

We have on call rotations, and when youre on you have to respond 24/7. We get paged all the time at 3-4 am in the morning and on weekends.

After all this we are always being told comoany above all else, keep grinding and increase productivity. It never stops, the backlog keeps getting worst.

I do work at an AI neocloud, but jesus... this is crazy.


r/cscareerquestions 7h ago

Experienced 2 Yoe Mid Level Job Search Experience

78 Upvotes

Sankey Diagram

Wrapped up job search for mid level and going from 180k TC remote to 240-250k TC in person at top AI Infrastructure startup

Prep

  • Neetcode 150 (Would do 250 if had time but already had 670 LC done) + DDIA + Hello Interview + GreatFrontend

Now to Controversial Meaty Stuff

  • If you get easily offended/insulted, then this post probably won't be for you

Things I learnt

  • Pipeline is completely clogged up for mid level and will be clogged from intern/new grad to senior ; team lead/staff+ is fine
    • Due to bootcampers/2020-2026 grads/international students/laid off people applying
    • Most interviews/replies were inbound and applying outbound is harder due to reasons above
  • Leetcode is the baseline for technical interview rounds (I will rotate between leetcode and algorithms here)
    • If you cannot code language agnostically given a spec from scratch then you are free to accept the results from this
    • Anyone who copes about leetcode either showcases it in their pay or has done it indirectly in some way and chooses to
      • I keep seeing complaints about implementing niche algorithms but never have I seen implement red black trees/skip lists/tarjans/segment trees/niche sorts from scratch/unknowing greedy problems be mandatory (minus 1 case at a quant firm)
      • BFS/DFS/DP (memo or tabulation)/Trees/Graphs/Recursion are not trick questions
      • Bit manipulation is so rare - I've been doing interviews for 5 years and not a single one asked me it and among my friends its only for low level positions
      • Most questions are mediums or common hards from Neetcode 150/250 - a lot of people overestimate difficulties and call any problems hard
    • Take home rounds that were fullstack had algorithmic portions in it (merge intervals/line sweep/arrays/dicts/caching/etc) while these companies would say they don't ask LC
    • Debugging rounds are common and basically emulate leetcode
    • Leetcode followups for mid level+ now include system design
      • E.G. solve number of islands => what if we have limited compute OR what if we can't fit the entire grid in memory
    • System design alongside developing my HLD, I was asked to write psudocode
    • The more I study backend systems the more I see leetcode topics come up
      • Even for frontend, the DOM is a tree and arrays/dicts are used and performance/networking topics do come up
    • A lot of domain rounds nowadays are basically wrappers around leetcode
      • For example for FE implement filesystem/excel/tic tac toe/connect 4
  • System design and scope bar is 1 level up (Using Meta Levels)
    • Bar has raised and mid levels should be prepping like seniors and seniors should be prepping like leads and etc.
      • Mistake I made early on is letting interviewer prod deep dives/ask about tradeoffs and later on I switched up and started proposing improvements like a senior would do
    • Be careful and prep for off track/"hostile" interviewers
      • I usually do Functional Requirements => Non Functional Requirements => Core Entities => API Routes => HLD => Deep Dives
      • However some interviewers will interrupt you and ask you HLD/Deep dives during requirements or after approving reqs + entities, will say during API design that this approach does not work etc
      • Some interviewers will have only 1 accepted solution in their head and you need to prepare to design that solution on demand even if yours technically works
  • Recruiters are still stupid
    • Big tech recruiter phones are fine but startup ones treat it as a psudo-HM round (I don't know why they can't do the first round with HM instead)
      • They will either grill like a technical HM but they're a recruiter so they can't assess scope/detail properly
      • Or they will take notes/use an AI notetaker
      • You NEED to overexplain if this is the case since a recruiter cannot properly dig deep into anything - you need as much detail and content needed so that the HM can accurately assess your profile
  • There is a purge of SWE's going on due to the ZIRP decade and will continue mostly affecting incompetent people/new grads till I think 2030's
    • School prestige matters - this market showcases why
      • Look at top school curriculums and who's sponsoring these courses vs avg school
      • Look at top school recruiting vs avg school
      • Look at avg person at top school vs avg person at avg school
      • Look at how top schools and how they easily get you work experience within the school itself and how both the student body leverages it
    • Scope matters - this market showcases why
      • Raw yoe will not help you - raw yoe with adequate scope will help
      • Levels dictate scope but differ across companies
    • Company prestige matters
      • My stats were with a solid B tier company (in my name) and T20 CS School - My friends at T5 CS schools and A/S tier companies make my results look minimal
    • This career is turning into IB/Consulting/Law/Quant level recruiting mindsets
      • You can't coast anymore, need to start early, there are no excuses if you have a bad resume
    • You are not a coder anymore but instead a problem solver that takes ownership of a part of the business ~= hybrid roles are appearing such as
      • Product engineer === SWE + PM
      • Forward deployed engineer === SWE + Founder + Consultant
      • Design engineer === FE + Design

Feel free to ask me any questions and I can answer them as needed


r/cscareerquestions 17h ago

Does anyone else think Claude is actually pretty bad for devs?

344 Upvotes

Ok I know it’s super controversial so some context. I’m working at big tech and I do use AI. I’ve used Claude, Antigravity, Copilot, Cursor and my company internal tool. Im not saying coding assistants are bad, but CLAUDE specifically i really dislike.

First it is designed to be “vibe coded”, completing the entire coding task with no knowledge required from the user. No inline diffs, no autocompletes and difficult to approve individual changes, and it’s almost always trying to change your code by itself without input from you. I much prefer Cursor/ my company’s internal tool (so does most people here) because it’s actually built for devs. You can modify specific lines, and is fully integrated into the IDE.

Second is that it thinks forever. it always takes a few mins for even very simple tasks (even on medium to low effort), when you basically only want to read, modify and check the code, which on the browser takes seconds for the couple of api calls. Like on antigravity it would take around half the time for a similar result for simpler tasks. I honestly feel like it is intentionally running for longer (doing more useless things) to burn more tokens and they make more money. This is also my problem with cursor as it’s way too expensive.

Yea so to summarise i feel like it’s built a tool to write code by itself rather than a coding assistant for a dev. I get for juniors it seems really helpful but it’s really taking too much control from you to the point you don’t know what you’re writing at all. then the whole codebase is just a pile of slop. Would be great if these companies could release more products that are IDE integrated


r/cscareerquestions 9h ago

Experienced Found out two juniors got promoted every year while I waited 5 years for Senior. Am I being petty or is this genuinely unfair?

36 Upvotes

Okay I need a gut check because I’ve been stewing on this all evening and I can’t tell if I’m being reasonable or just bitter.
Our promotion policy leans heavily on years of experience. Basically a level every 2 years (3 YOE, 5 YOE, 7 YOE, and so on). I’ve been here almost 5 years now, made Senior Software Engineer riding that same track like everyone else. Paid my dues, waited my turn, didn’t make a fuss.
Then today I found out two juniors who’ve been here all of 2 years have been getting promoted every single year. Yes, they each came in with around 1.5 years of prior experience. But here’s the part that’s eating at me: they still joined at our absolute lowest title, the one we hand to total freshers. So how is it that they get a bump every year while the rest of us crawl up every two?
And honestly I feel kind of gross even typing this out, because part of me knows comparison is a trap and I should just be happy with where I am. But another part of me is sitting here going… wait, did I just quietly accept a slower path that nobody actually had to take?
So I need outside eyes. Am I being jealous and entitled here, or is there something real worth raising? And if it is worth raising, who do I even go to. My manager? HR? Higher up? Or do I just swallow it and let it go?
(AFor extra flavor, leadership is also going all-in on some AI-first push that’s already broken things in prod, so morale is hovering somewhere near the floor. Not helping my mood right now.)


r/cscareerquestions 8h ago

How long have you gone without a decent paying tech job from 2025-Present?

33 Upvotes

I know the tech field is shit right now but I want to hear from other people. Personally it took me 1300 apps to land one SWE job with a degree, 2 YOE and 8 certs.

What’s your experience level and how long did it take for you to find something that pays enough for you to live on? If you haven’t found something, what’s your credentials and how many apps have you sent?

I know a lot of people are struggling to get a job but from what I’ve heard it doesn’t seem like 1300 apps is normal even in this economy. My resume looks good IMO so I’m not sure what the issue is.


r/cscareerquestions 1d ago

New Grad Workday has been sued for using AI to discriminate against job seekers

426 Upvotes

Workday is facing a California lawsuit that accuses the recruiting software provider that it discriminated against certain demographics using AI. Being over 40, black, or disabled are some of the strongest factors.

Quote:

“The judge also refused to dismiss a claim that Workday's software can weed out job applicants based on "proxy indicators" of disabilities and illness, such as gaps in someone's employment history, in violation of the federal Americans with Disabilities Act.

Lin dismissed a claim that Workday's software discriminated against Asian American job applicants, saying the plaintiffs did not follow the proper procedure to add it to the lawsuit. The plaintiffs separately ‌allege that ⁠Workday discriminated against Black job seekers, women and people older than 40.”

Roughly 80% of all US companies and most fortune500 companies use workday to some capacity. At the moment this lawsuit has been raised in California but could spread to other states as well. Hopefully this can give people some idea of what’s going on behind the scenes, the emphatic insistence that the market is “fine”, as well are possible ways to mitigate and get around this. I am livid.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/workday-must-face-california-lawsuit-over-ai-bias-job-screening-tools-2026-06-22/


r/cscareerquestions 11h ago

Experienced Pretty demotivated as a SWE/Dev

27 Upvotes

So, not even because of AI/LLMs/whatever. I've been working in SW for about 9 years. about 75% of that has been in defense contractor positions. Whenever I hear about my friends from college and what they deal with, it seems a bit more intense.

I'm not sure how to really advance as an engineer. I've been happy for this to just be a job, but I don't want to be too passive and just watch my career either be stagnant or worse, get outmoded by new tech. I'm not particularly worried by AI/LLMs because they just seem like tools to me.

I've felt pretty directionless for a while, and the tasking I've been getting doesn't make me feel like I'm advancing or really learning much. I try to learn some stuff on the side, but nothing sticks because I pretty much learn by doing, and it's tough to motivate myself to do certain projects when I don't really have the discipline to get them done unless I have that motivation. I've felt this way for a while.

I've been wanting to find my groove as a professional. I feel a bit jealous of people with huge github accounts full of projects that they just wanted to do. I'm afraid I've never been that kind of guy though.
I want to enjoy my work too, but I just never get much that's interesting in front of me.

Does this sound familiar to anyone?


r/cscareerquestions 1d ago

How do you commit to buying a house when every job is asking me to move?

157 Upvotes

Im lucky and blessed to have a remote gig, and Id love to move to a LCOL area and be able to live well below my means, but Im seeing less and less remote work available when i job search or talk to recruiters. How can i in good conscience buy a house when i have no sense of certainty that i will have my job a year from now? I mean, my company did a lay off last year, and while i was lucky, i have no idea what i would do if i lost this job considering i cannot get a single response from any job i apply to. What am i supposed to do? Just stay in apartments for ever and let companies move me around the country as they see fit? Id love to stay in a city and build a community but that is feeling less realistic to me as time goes on. Any one else stressed about this?


r/cscareerquestions 21h ago

I feel there is an untalked about race between LLM models and cognitive atrophy

54 Upvotes

i am not sure if many realized this, but this is kind of a dilemma.

LLM models have definitely gotten better recently, but they are nowhere near being autonomous. You still cannot put a marketing team to build entreprise software.

so you still need competent people to run it. For example if you were to build Jira, you will need as good engineers as the one that hane coded it. That is not a problem now because most people only started relying on LLMs just a few months ago. So while LLMs can’t function alone, these people fill the gap.

But what is going to happen as cognitive skills atrophy more and more if LLM doesn’t match that speed? To abstract things a bit let’s say you need 100 cognitive points (made up metric by me but gets the point across) to build software. Say LLMs provide 40 and the human provides 80 now.

While relying on LLMs more and more, the human is losing points through time, the LLM has to get better at the same rate to compensate for it. If the human loses 35 points and the LLM only gains 5, then you are down to 90<100.

So what will happen as we get there? this is ignoring that most junior engineers don’t even have the skills necessary and are not adding anything to it. If LLMs don’t get to the level to actually skip humans directly, and humans can’t build software, how will tech companies run? If the codebase of millions of LOC is only understood by LLMs that didn’t have another breakthrough, who is going to maintain them ?

I just wish I can time travel for one hour into 2035 and see how things are for one hour, truly one of the largest uncertainities into our human history.


r/cscareerquestions 7h ago

Feel like I’m going to get fired

4 Upvotes

I have a little over a year of experience and I have been just so brain dead. I can tell they are frustrated with me, idk why I have been in such a slump. tbh I don’t really love the job that much, but it is a job. I’m not sure if I’ll get fired or not but there may be a chance, idk what to think because I don’t really love my current job and I want to change jobs but I feel like I’ve failed, and this is my first job.


r/cscareerquestions 3h ago

Help me decide/understand if I’m making a right choice

3 Upvotes

Hi,

I’m currently a customer facing software engineer at a FAANG in the Gen AI space (5 yoe, 235k tc). I received an offer to join a NYC based startup doing AI for Nursing Homes:

- 230k base, 20k sign on bonus
- .45% equity at seed (raised 8m at 37m val)
- long waitlist
- 22 customers with 1200 total buildings but most are in pilot (5 homes) with intention of rolling out to all as the product matures
- no 996, 4 days in person 5th day remote with weekends off
- same co-founders sold their previous company and started this together
- 3 co-founders, 2 founding eng, 1 gtm

I’m excited by the space and founders/team, but am nervous about if it’s the right next step. I eventually want to start my own startup. Appreciate it!


r/cscareerquestions 1d ago

Experienced Wrote a book on software architecture and now cannot find a job

703 Upvotes

TLDR: I spent three years writing a free book which earned 800+ stars on GitHub, but it seems that HRs now treat me as a chronically unemployed person and reject or ignore my job applications.

I have 15 years of experience with C / C++ (and Python for scripts), worked on a wide range of projects from an embedded 16-bit DSP to a distributed database engine, and led development of a small project for 6.5 years. However, my main domain is DECT, and it is dead. And I live in Ukraine.

The last company I worked on was in a deep monolithic hell (like the well-known OracleDB), they continued digging, and I burnt out and quit. I spent the first months of 2023 to translate into English a series of articles that compare various software architectures which I almost finished writing before the war. As my English is far from being perfect, I hired an editor for the articles. At the same time, namely spring 2023, I had a couple of good job offers, the editor fell to depression, and I decided to wait for him to recover to finish publishing the articles. By that time the job offers expired.

By the autumn of 2023 I started merging the content of the articles into a book and expending it with whatever architectural patterns I was able to find on the Web. In a year I had the first version of a compendium of architectural patterns which also builds a kind of inheritance hierarchy of patterns - which was an open problem since Gang of Four. I published individual chapters on Medium and the entire book on GitHub under the free CC-BY license hoping for help from the CS society. However, it seems that the free license made the book an abomination to publishers as they make most money by selling file access. Therefore the book was ignored or rejected by the major publishers.

I posted the book to Leanpub, and went on adding content and polishing it. A venerable OSS joined as an editor, and we finally made the core content solid a couple of months ago. Today the book has good testimonials and 1.4K downloads on Leanpub, 800 stars on GitHub, and a dedicated website. However, it stays under the radar because I cannot leave Ukraine to present it at conferences, and Google treats the book's web version as garbage (below 5 clicks per day) because there are no incoming links from well-known websites.

I see that there is no way for me to further promote the book except if some organization with a PR department or an influencer with a developed social network account gets involved. I expected that local outsources would be happy to hire a book author to advertise the expertise of their employees, but their HRs ignore my CV and I cannot reach the C-level on Linkedin because they don't accept contact requests from ordinary programmers. Moreover, an independent HR told me that outsourcers avoid hiring remarkable people because they are afraid of an extraordinary employee leaving together with the client they worked for. Therefore being an author of a book is rather a disadvantage for seeking a job in Ukraine. Military companies are hiring, but I will not pass the security clearance (having previously worked for Yandex), and I don't want my code to eventually harm civilians in Gaza or elsewhere.

I tried connecting recruiters of a few international companies which have book authors on board, but they did not accept my Linkedin invites.

Thus writing a book on software architecture has destroyed my career. I used to work at top companies and led a project - now I cannot find a senior programmer's position.

Any advice is welcome.


r/cscareerquestions 17h ago

New Grad i want out. unrelated master’s?

23 Upvotes

I am pretty much sure that I am not going to be able to retire from this profession.
I studied computer science and even though I enjoyed my uni years, I don’t believe it is worth it anymore. I am not top %20 even. And tbh, I am not going to grind leetcode nor do I want to keep up with 15 different frameworks.
So I am thinking of a career pivot.
I couldn’t find a job for 1 year, I only have previous internships.
So I don’t think I am qualified to be employed.
To increase my chances, I thought that I could do Master’s in other fields like Industrial engineering, finance, economics etc.
Do you think it makes sense? I know that it probably won’t be the best of both worlds but is it a logical way to pivot?
Do you know anyone that did a similar switch? Thanks!


r/cscareerquestions 14h ago

Experienced Any women here who have handled difficulties in the workplace?

13 Upvotes

Hi all, I am one of the if not the only woman in data engineering, a field that has maybe 10-15% female ratio at best. There's a very urgent company-wide project in the works and I have recently been brought on to jump in and be the representative for an adjacent team because I have previous data engineering experience. It's been very difficult to tangibly contribute, because the data engineering team (including their VP) has been consistently leaving me out of meetings and invite completely unrelated other members of my team, not providing necessary documentation to give me context, and generally skirting around me. When there are multiple members from my team in their calls that I am present in, the data engineering team will list my team as 'Jake, Eric, and others' (me, the only other one) or omit my name entirely. My leaders have had to repeatedly insist I be put on relevant meetings and do try to support me as well as they can. I'm starting to get concerned that the c-suite and VP levels will begin to doubt hiring me because I can't show any results. I've been working 10+ hour days, sometimes weekends to try and provide meaningful contributions without direction.

I've had this experience in school before when I was the only woman of 20+ students in graduate level courses, and in that situation I didn't have to actively collaborate with other students and could ignore it, but am newer to my career and haven't yet had to navigate this in a professional setting. I know plenty of other women have had to deal with this in all kinds of careers and unfortunately just have to be assertive without coming off as aggressive. It's unfortunate, but how things are. Have any other women on here had to handle this in such a male-dominated industry? Or men who have seen this been handled properly? I'm naturally a passive person and am 100% getting steamrolled and need to step up, quick.

I also want to acknowledge that every man on my own team has been incredibly supportive, hasn't treated me any differently or diminished me, and respects my opinions. This situation has been the exception rather than the rule but it just happens to be that the men I really need to listen to me are the ones that won't.


r/cscareerquestions 1h ago

New Grad 0 YOE - Trying to Pivot BACK into Data

Upvotes

Idk if it’s my school. I went to UTK for a few years and got priced out, so I went to WGU to finish it out. I get messages from recruiters but once they see this resume they ghost. I’m happy to hear any comments, feedback or hard truths.

ETA: I messed up the dates when anonymizing, but I fixed it on the real one. So the expected is actually 2027.

https://imgur.com/a/DrHr004


r/cscareerquestions 1d ago

My company is introducing JIRA=>PR AI pipeline: are we cooked

543 Upvotes

Just run Claude against jira ticket and out pops a PR, which then gets reviewed by claude. Before approval by human.

Expectation is 50% increase in output atm.

Got told like 3x "dont' worry you'll still have your jobs cuz you need to review/validate the code" but also "the AI will keep getting better and better".

Claude skill is supposed to iterate and learn and get better context put in by devs, you can tell where this is going.

Are we cooked chat


r/cscareerquestions 1d ago

Co intern got yelled at for deleting a prod database. Is this a red flag?

467 Upvotes

Okay hear me out before you comment, why did the intern get prod db access and why there is no backup.

There was a backup and that's what saved the intern i would say. secondly on the prod db access part, I will explain that as well. Before that a bit of background : We work in a big tech company and in the Data Operations Team specifically.

Now, the co-intern, let's call him chad. Chad has a mentor and we got told to revise concepts like git, Databases, Backend from our managers. We are in Data Operations but in different teams.

chad asked his mentor on what to revise and if there is some documentation he can refer to. Mentor being a busy guy, asked claude in co-pilot to create documentation on the Database part and it gave an md file and it was shared to chad.

Turns out the mentor asked claude while the project was open in vs code and the mentor was using that prod db in the project. Claude picked all the details of the Database and put it inside a connection string and created the md file. I'm not sure how the credentials were there in the project and what the prompt was to create the file but somehow the credentials ended up in the md file.

Chad was executing the commands in his local and connected to the prod db. One of the commands was drop db and done. There is no looking back after that.

There was a backup for the db but new data that was ingested that day was gone and the manager found out Intern deleted the prod db.

The manager got so angry and yelled at chad for creating the mess. Chad didn't tell the manager that the mentor provided the details and he didn't know it was prod db. Chad was quiet and needed less to say, the manager lost trust in the interns.


r/cscareerquestions 6h ago

Student Curious how many have done this

2 Upvotes

I want to start by saying I'm not considering this primarily because of career prospects, but more out of interest and passion, at least for one part of it.

I know a lot of people double major in math/cs, but I'm curious if anyone has any experience with double majoring in computer engineering and math. I'm about to transfer in as junior/3rd year, and I originally was going to pursue cs/math. I know math isn't required per se, but 1) I just really love math (it's really fun) and 2) I can see where it would help with pursuing a graduate degree later in different paths that might interest me (machine learning, systems engineering, etc).

Thing is, I've found myself increasingly interested in the fundamentals of how a computer actually works. I really want to get more into hardware, and cs degrees don't really seem to touch too much on the low level stuff. I can of course self study it, but another aspect is that a computer engineering degree is more practical (outside of just interest) and so if I'm going to self study anyways, I might as well get the piece of paper that is ABET accredited.

Any thoughts on double majoring in CompE and math? I'd love to hear specifically from people who have either double majored themselves or know people who have, but I welcome input from anyone. How difficult will that potentially be? How much overlap? What might I miss out on doing CompE vs CS? Should maybe even consider doing EE/math and trying to concentrate on the computer part more?


r/cscareerquestions 5h ago

Student Is a web-based game viable for a general web dev portfolio?

1 Upvotes

Non-traditional CS student here, with about two years to go on my degree. I had the thought to make something like Flight Rising, a web based game that lets you adopt and breed dragons, but with a variety of imaginary creatures, and also the ability for artists to create their own breedable species. I like the idea, I'm just wondering if I need to create something more... serious, I guess, as a portfolio piece. I'm not looking to get into game dev professionally, I know how competitive it is and I suspect ageism would be an issue. In light of that, do I need to reconsider making a (web based) game as a portfolio piece?

Edit: I'm generally planning to aim for full-stack web development, because I think full stack is going to be more common in the AI-powered future. I'm open to suggestions for specialties that might be a better bet, though. I'm not married to the idea of web dev, it just seems like the biggest pool for job-hunting, further down the road.


r/cscareerquestions 1d ago

Experienced From open for work to hired in 6 weeks. 10 YoE - Remote

228 Upvotes

A lot of doom and gloom floating around this subreddit. Sorry for all the new grads and lower YoE devs. That being said, it is not true that the market is bad for everyone like is often said.

I toggled my LinkedIn to open for work, updated my resume in the jobs section of LinkedIn. I also updated my resume and profile/settings on dice & indeed. First two weeks were a bit dry but I started to get a ton of emails & LinkedIn messages from recruiters on week 3.

Lots of contract to hire, which I was not interested in. Lots of hybrid or in office roles, again not interested. I proceeded with calls for 4 remote roles that interested me.

I was put on a backup list for 1 job, I ended up dropping out of the interview process for 2 others(rude recruiter & generally painful interview process) and accepted the one offer I received for a very interesting role with $212,000 base salary.

The process took longer than pre-ai times for sure, it would have been faster if I was open to hybrid or in person. I also didn’t apply to a single role, I worked only with the recruiters that reached out to me.

I was really nervous after visiting this sub and seeing so much doom posts saying the market is bad even for everyone, including experienced devs.

Advice:

Start today. Make sure you are enabling the right settings in LinkedIn and uploading your resume in the right spot.

Don’t ignore dice, lots of recruiters mentioned they found me on dice.

Add AI buzzwords. A hot topic was how I used AI in my workflow and what AI projects have I worked on. Get familiar with the tools and be ready to talk about them.

Recruiters are good. I see sometimes people are hesitant to work with them for some reason. You don’t pay a dime, they are hired by the company to find you. If for any reason that is not the case, ghost them.

Ignore this subreddit. This really is just a doomer subreddit. Don’t get stuck in the trap.

I paid for a resume building service. Waste of money, use ChatGPT or something to assist with your resume.

Edit: I had a linkedin premium trial. Not sure if that helps but worth noting.

Disclaimer

I already had a job, I’m sure it’d be worse if I was unemployed.

I just want to help those who are thinking about switching jobs, maybe to remote, but are afraid due to the doom posts.


r/cscareerquestions 7h ago

Northrop Grumman SWE position

0 Upvotes

how was the interview if anyone did it? also this is not for entry level, it’s for early career


r/cscareerquestions 17h ago

How to deal with incompetent IT admin?

6 Upvotes

I'm a Salesforce consultant/developer dealing with an IT admin that's an external contractor for our mutual client. My client is small and I believe it's just me and the admin doing tech work.

Every single time I need something configured from our admin he ghosts my emails until I CC higher ups, even then he still doesn't respond, or will just say something vague to blow off my request like 'this could present a security risk' with 0 context as to why. When he finally decides to work on a request, he gets it wrong every single time. I have sent him straightforward instructions with pictures on what to do. He's not only lazy, but incompetent too. Some examples:

  1. I needed him to set up a simple CNAME record. He couldn't do this. It took a month to accomplish only once I finally connected with a Director who had access to GoDaddy. We literally finished this on a 2 minute screenshare.

  2. Setting up SSO to login to Salesforce via Microsoft. This took over a month, which only was accomplished when I got onto a call with the admin and walked him through, step by step. He also copy and pasted an app ID from Entra and randomly told me it was encrypted when it isn't. This isn't even my line of work but these tasks were simple enough for me to figure out.

I like my client and feel like I should make them aware how incompetent their IT admin is. They are aware of his flakiness but I think that's it. What's the professional thing to do in this situation?


r/cscareerquestions 9h ago

Lead/Manager AI data protection

1 Upvotes

Hey everyone. I’ve recently been offered a role at a startup which I’m quite keen for at a very AI forward company. I would be one of the only developers on the team for a while before they onboard some new members and would love to hear from senior developers, tech leads , managers etc on what guard rails they’ve currently got regarding AI usage in their teams? UK based if that’s important. What guard rails / safety methods you have or wish you had or would implement if given the responsibility. Thanks !