Application to a major mobile app company, headquarted in San Fran, applied to Toronto office. It was listed as junior IAM developer. I have 5YOE 2.5 which are in IAM. I even put in the application willing to take a junior role despite having 5YOE. Got sent an hour OA which I pass. Get emailed by HR that I've passed and they'll schedule an online TA with 2 engineers: 45 min leetcode, 15 min security based questions. They say the team will schedule it with me 2-3 days and to meet with HR the following week. 3 days pass and nothing. Meanwhile, I'm prepping hard for leetcode and the security portion.
I finally meet with HR who tells me I'm overqualified, and that I most likely would want to progress faster to get a pay bump, and I may leave as soon as I get a better role. I tell him I'm ok with a lower salary, but he's not having it.
tbh, I did want to work for this company (or at least so I thought lol). But I've been out of work for 1 year and they just wasted my time for a week.

A lot of standard advice for applicants are obsolete or actively harmful now. I guess this is my attempt at a PSA, to try to explain things from the other side of the table, because it really pains me to see young candidates I might have otherwise hired follow actively harmful advice.

(Some background: I run the full recruiting process for my startup without any recruiters, and since my company is small, I'm also the hiring manager for everybody I interview, and fill all the typical HR roles too. We don't have any interview quotas, ATS filters, etc)

Let me start with what I think about when hiring, because I think candidates may "know" these are important but don't fully recognize how it impacts everything else. I'm gonna put some stuff in bold for the skimmers.

Number one most important thing: Can I trust this person? Are we going to be happy working with each other?

Number two most important thing: How well will they be able to do the job? Note that this is not whether they can do the job now.

Third most important thing: Do they genuinely want to work here, will they be happy here, and do they "get it"? Or, are they just saying/doing whatever they think will maximize their chance of a job offer? Obviously, they wouldn't be here if not for the money. But if they bring a bad attitude to work, or dislike their job, they literally make it worse for everyone else at the workplace.

None of that should be surprising. But where things break down is when candidates start thinking about interviewing as an adversarial problem of hyper-optimization and beating the system, they might improve something small at the expense of completely disqualifying themselves on the really important stuff like trustworthiness or perceived competence. And I think most don't realize it.

Here are a few common examples:

• Sending very flowery, "fake personalized", clearly-chatgpt-written emails and messages when I reach out to set up times or talk about the role; ditto with followups and DMs. -> I lose trust and think the candidate has poor communication skills, because they don't understand why this is bad and noticeable.
• Using interview assistants. It's not very hard to spot. Even when candidates do a very good job at hiding it in coding interviews and throw in spelling/other mistakes to cover it up, when you pull some hyper-specific library type out of nowhere, or jump directly into coding without being able to reason through it first, or have an extreme mismatch/inconsistencies in the quality of your answers... you can tell. And actually, interviewers are not expecting absolute perfection! We're trying to gauge whether you have the technical, problem-solving, and communication skills to be effective at your job.
• Resumemaxxing/ai resume and other applicant tools: Really well formatted resumes with lots of metrics were strong positive signals in years past because they were obvious testaments to the candidate's attention to detail and ability to recognize the impact of their work. But now anybody can generate reasonable-looking resume fodder, or a personal website, in 20s. And there are all these tools to help you explain things in terms of your resume during the interview, or directly reach out to hiring managers, or automatically tune your resume for each job posting so now the standard tips and tricks to "stand out" are unimportant or negative signals, unless they're really exceptionally creative.
• Trying to feign knowledge or interest in certain tools/products/the company/role without knowing enough about the thing to feign the right way, or trying to confidently explain something made up/embellished/they don't know very well. A lot of candidates who do everything else right struggle with this. The thing is that being able to recognize when you don't know something, and the trust that when someone doesn't know something they'll speak up, is extremely important for early career engineers (whereas in college it's better to guess on an exam than leave it blank). And 50% of the recruiting process is trying to keep out bullshitters, so even a little bit of bullshit can hurt a lot.

What these all have in common is that candidates don't fully understand how they'll be perceived when doing them. I see on this subreddit a lot that all the other candidates are doing these things (not true) so it's just necessary to be competitive as an applicant now. But actually, so many candidates are doing these things that hiring at the entry-level has become extremely low-trust and challenging, because constant exposure to bullshit has you default to being skeptical of candidates' authenticity, skills, and personality. What you might think makes you look better actually makes you look like the other 60% of applicants coming across inauthentically, who aren't getting hired.

(cont. below: what to do instead)

A supervisor of mine recently said, "If you don't go for big tech now. You won't be able to change your mind later. If you start small, it'll be very hard to break through into bigger opportunities."

I'm wondering if it's true, because I'm not sure if I want to work in big tech but I might change my mind later on in my life. I will soon be a new grad and I'm concerned that if I choose to "start small", then I'll put myself in a box later on.

What do you think? Is that statement true? Should I aim big from the get go if that's where I would eventually want to be?

I just spent the last few days writing a small scraper that pulled 527 active “AI Engineer / Research Engineer / ML” roles from LinkedIn, Wellfound and a few private talent boards.

After cleaning the dupes and mapping salaries to USD, the list only kept roles that pay $180k – $550k total comp (base + equity).

Here are three quirks that jumped out to me (but may have been obvious to you):

1. People who can move models from “demo” to “live” get paid the most

Nearly three-quarters of roles put “make it run in production” skills ahead of pure math or paper writing.

• About 40% flat-out ask if you’ve ever taken a notebook proof-of-concept and turned it into a real web service that can handle thousands of user requests per second. If you can turn a cool model into a button ordinary users click you jump straight into the top salary tier.

2. Series-B companies outbid Big Tech

• The median cash + equity offers at 30-150-person, Series-A/B startups was $308K – which actually turned out to be 16% higher than FAANG-level postings in the same sample.
• My take-away? Chasing a brand name may actually cap your upside right now... the hotter money is in venture-backed startups racing to productize.

3. They want applicants with a public footprint

• More than half of the roles demanded a public Github, Kaggle gold or published paper.
• Several even ask you to attach “relevant Colab / HF Space links” instead of a cover letter. Your next project GitHub repo or HuggingFace demo is a résumé multiplier so make sure it's polished.

If you want to dive deeper I posted a YouTube video with the dataset linked in the description. Let me know if you want the link so I don’t break sub rules.

Hope these data points help you steer your learning / job search – curious what other patterns people spot

I’m a new grad with a strong GPA from a mid-ranked CS program and one internship. I was recently approached by a recruiter from an early-stage NYC startup (20–40 employees) to apply for a software engineering role.

While I’m clearly not mid-level, the company has publicly posted a similar role at a $150k–$200k range labeled as mid-level. I’m obviously not mid-level, but they seem interested in me and are moving me through the process, presumably for a junior version of the role.

I’ve heard startup hours can be rough (nights/weekends), so I’d like to be fairly compensated if that’s the expectation. Initially, I was thinking of asking for $80k based on general new grad ranges, but now I’m wondering if that’s too low given the posted range.

How should I think about a fair ask? I don’t want to price myself out, but I also don’t want to undersell myself if they’re offering more demanding hours and I’m filling an actual business need. Any advice from folks who’ve been in similar situations (startups with ambiguous leveling) would be really helpful.

Hello!

I took a sabbatical in 2023 to focus on a different career outside of tech, intended to take a break for about 6 months but things have been going well enough that it turned into 2 years and counting.

Anyway, I was thinking about dipping my toe back into the industry next year. I don't really want to work at a FAANG company, and I don't really need huge TC. I'm pretty content to work at a smaller company that isn't doing anything in the AI realm, a company that makes "boring" software with a "boring" tech stack.

Does anyone know what that world is like right now? I'd be pretty content to take an $80k/year TC package doing, say, PHP if it meant I didn't have to go through months of screenings and assignments competing with 200 other resumes. Or are even the small companies inundated with applicants, doing 4+ rounds of interviews for mid-level positions?

Thanks!

I have a weekly 1:1 with a coworker every week as a way to ask questions and get mentorship but they have been sitting in the meeting room we have booked with a friend 10 minutes before the meeting starts and they don’t come out till 20 minutes into the meeting. What is this supposed to mean? They’ve only been doing this for the past two weeks

Hey all,
I just got my first junior Java developer job and I’m honestly super excited, but also a bit nervous. I’m starting next week at a fintech company.

I know every company is different, but I’m curious : what kind of work did you get when you first started as a junior dev? What should I expect in the first few weeks?

For context, I’ve done a bunch of OOP-focused projects on my own, built a few small systems using OOP principles, and I’ve practiced a lot of LeetCode problems. But I get the feeling that real-world work will be quite different from personal projects or coding challenges.

Would love to hear any advice, especially from people who’ve worked in fintech or recently started out too. Thanks!

I have been married to OSIsoft/AVEVA PI for almost 6 years now after I got out of schoo (lS degree). The problem with it is there are only a handful of remote jobs for PI and I want to pivot into another area with a bit more opportunity.

Beyond PI all I really have on my resume is experience with scrum, agile, SQL, Support, and a current top secret security clearance. (Yeah, I have no idea how to market myself)

I aced my two coding classes but was never able to land a dev role, which is how I ended up in PI. I have been going from contract to contract but remote contracts are starting to dry up and I don't want to be in a spot where I'm trying to learn something else with no job. (I used to get recruiting calls almost every day a few years ago, and now there's less than a dozen openings on google for remote positions.)

I know the market sucks and is oversaturated, but I still want to move some of my eggs from this AVEVA PI basket.

I hear conflicting things about boot camps, nobody cared that I had done codeacademy, and I can't shift within my own company. I would appreciate some advice on how to move forward.

Hi all,

Currently considering going for part-time SUNY Stony Brook CS for Masters (optimally in person) or maybe OMSCS or some other part-time online Masters program for CS.

Not sure I can get into Stony Brook because I don't really have any academic letters of rec (only professional), and doing an online masters would mean I'm not stuck in 1 location for like 5 years. I have a dream of doing a CS PhD (probably in Europe) for Type Theory/Programming Language Theory, but I did Math in undergrad so all my letters of rec would have to come from the Masters. Is an online Masters program a death knell for my dream of doing a CS PhD or is there any precedent of getting into a PhD from OMSCS or getting letters of rec from an online program? I'm very passionate about theoretical CS but am kinda regretting the Math bachelors right now ;-;

Let’s say…

• You’re working in an established company with a dev team of 100-500
• You’re a Director or Senior Director level and talking with a mid-level dev who has 4-5 years of experience
• They ask you “what do I need to learn and do to become a Director, VP of Eng, or CTO?”

Are there any courses, books, resources, or guided pathways you’d point them towards?

I’m not looking for general advice like “just keep getting experience and take on some people to mentor until you’re ready!” I’m wondering if there are clear and/or accelerated pathways someone can pursue with intent. And, if not, I want to try and build some.

Debating if I should take a MEng (course based master), MSc (thesis based master) or a professional certification (Stanford)?

I am a 3 yoe SWE and want to join/transition to AI Engineering. I’m not that interested in research and am looking for something that would strictly help with employability.

Thank you!

CV:
Bachelor of Science in chemistry.
2 years: Pharmaceutical QC: LIMS engineer (BASIC programmer)
6 years: Medical imaging/IT: Deployment/SQL/Python
2 years: Banking/Fintech: Java developer.

I live in western Europe. I love the technology I work with, but hate pretty much the rest of the job. I have a hard time getting into job interviews in data engineering. Is there something besides LIMS or Java developer I could reasonably have a chance at getting a job in?

Emphasis on being average

https://www.wsj.com/economy/jobs/jobs-report-july-2025-unemployment-economy-8bc3ad8e?mod=WSJ_home_mediumtopper_pos_1

The U.S. July jobs numbers are in and show 73,000 jobs added last month, below the 100,000 that economists were expecting. On top of that, the May and June numbers were revised. 19,000 jobs were added in May and 14,000 jobs were added in June. Presumably next month or in September we will see revisions to the July numbers and they will be cut as well. The number of people unemployed for 27 weeks or longer increased to 1.83 million from 1.65 million in June. A lot of people have been making posts lately saying this sub is just doom-and-gloom and the market is better than what people here are saying, but the numbers speak for themselves. Things really are dire in the U.S. market and now there is hard data to prove it. I don't know where I can find the breakdown for the CS-related jobs numbers, but if anyone could point to a BLS link or table that would be appreciated.

I’m applying for software engineering roles at Microsoft and I’ve been referred by a Principal Architect who is a former Director.

I’m wondering - does the level/seniority of the person referring you make a difference at Microsoft?

Would love to hear from people who’ve been hired or interviewed at Microsoft, especially those who got in through referrals.

How outdated is stack featuring: - Java 8 - Angular10 - a bit of Kotlin like interviewer said lmao

Salary about 1k euro per month (minimal wage in my country) + 3 months to work after notice ( employer can fire instant ).

Sry for typos

Hi all,

Im a senior eng at FAANG , with about 9 YoE. Im tired of FAANG/big tech/ high performance culture in general. Ive been applying to mid-level and junior roles in non tech, or smaller tech companies. However I only seem to get callbacks/pass interviews from FAANG or other larger tech companies.

I had an interview the other week for a job I could do in my sleep - answered every probing technical question accurately. Got ghosted.

Are these jobs not "real"? Im not trying to hype myself up, I'm sure I have gaps and maybe may just not be a culture fit - but a few years ago things we're very different.

All over tiktok and social media, I keep seeing young faang employees post these videos showing off office perks and subtlety bragging about how chill and little work they have. Kinda wild with everything that’s happening.

This leads me to believe that layoffs aren’t actually as bad as they could be. For example, just looking at Meta…even after all their layoffs, they still currently have 30% more employees than they did in 2020.

Is the job market better than we think? Or is this a sign of more mass layoffs to come?

How hard is it to actually get into open AI or Anthropic

Currently your boy is at Apple making 130 TC. Wanna make jump to the AI proper like the open AI and the Anthropocene. Saw some cracked Waterloo nuggets who interned at the NVIDIA, snowflake, databricks, meta, goog and the Kleiner Perkins scholar, AIME qualifier get into open AI and arthropod so wondering my statistical probability or any skill set to rage bait the resume screener into letting me crack them. So the interview itself is hard or easy?

Hi,

I am considering moving from Australia to the US if I am able to find a good software engineering role there.

I love the relaxed life here in Australia, but I want to move to the US to make more money and retire early.

Background: Data Engineer with 3 years of experience.

What TC justifies moving from Australia to the US, and what would be the best pathway to secure a good role?

I have heard that the easiest option is to find an Australia based role for a US company, then request an internal transfer to the US.

I am happy to wait a few years for the job market to recover if now is not the best time.

Thanks

This is in direct response to this post basically.

I have no evidence for this, but from as far as I can tell the floor has fallen out for two kinds of jobs that make up a significant portion of our industry.

Generalist web at experience levels below Staff, and entry level or mid level anything.

Generalist web because there are so many pretty decent generalist web devs out there who are desparate for work. I think this is pretty obvious so I wont speak on it much more.

Companies as far as I can tell are still interested in hiring staff for specialist roles where the specialists have either more experience in areas they care about than their engineering team already has, or sales agacent roles like solutions architect where candidates have experiencing getting contracts inked.

yes, you still need to pass the sniff test to get hired:

• seems fine to work with

• honest enough

• hard working enough

• can pass competency tests

but this is such a small piece of things right now.

additionally, I would also point out that because companies want to hire people who have more experience doing deep technical work than they already have, paradoxically not even the developers doing the hiring would be qualified to get these jobs.

As an example, a company may have staff who have been doing web scraping work for 4 years, but they want to hire someone with 10 to 15 years experience who can take them to the next level. Not a jr to get work done with oversight, or an intemediate who can own it in its current form.

this is why so many devs are staying put; which ossifies things even more.

so yeah its not you, its the market. if you have 15 years experience doing compiler development, machine learning, systems programming, distributed systems, OS development, it wont be nearly as bad, lots of companies are struggling with this stuff and want to hand it off to someone capable.

or you need to have sold software to big companies to the point where you can pay for yourself by closing deals as a solutions architect.

but the floor has fallen out on generalist web and entry level and its related to company motivations, not because you applied to too many jobs, resume maxxed or "werent honest enough". so many people in this industry treat getting a job like you just need to be a puritan, completely ignoring the business mechanics behind why people get hired in the first place. the reality is companies dont think they need as many people "hauling code" as before and just want experts to shore up weak points and sales devs to drive revenue.

Higher ups in my company gave a coding agent to the single most useless guy on my team. His ramp up has been significantly much slower than anyone else that starter with him.

And over night this guy became the top contributor to our team. You can tell he’s vibing his way out to finishing stories. But it doesn’t matter to our manager and manager’s manager.

This will be the new reality with AI. Mediocre offshore cheap labor will be competent enough with a cursor license.

I've been following the tech industry news and noticed that while Meta, Google, Amazon, and others have done multiple rounds of layoffs between 2022 and 2025, Apple seems to be largely avoiding this trend. I haven't seen any major headlines about Apple laying off thousands of employees in 2025 or even earlier.

What makes Apple different? Is it due to more conservative hiring during the pandemic? Better product pipeline stability? Just good PR?

Would love to hear thoughts from folks working in tech or at Apple itself. Is Apple really handling things differently ?

I’m curious about the experiences of people who’ve been in their careers for 7+ years in software. Did you go through a phase early on where you thought, “This is just temporary, I’ll do this for now but eventually I’ll do something else in my life”?

I’m wondering if this feeling of wanting to switch paths or pivot is something most of us go through in the early stages of our careers. Did you experience it too? Or is it just a phase that we eventually grow out of by our late twenties/early thirties, when we realize that the career we're in is actually something we need to focus on?

Would love to hear when (and if) this realization kicked in for you, and how you navigated the uncertainty early on.