u/Chaderrall

Hi all,

I’m a recent CS grad from Whitman College, a few hours away in Walla Walla. I’m wondering if there’s local companies in Spokane/CDA area that are hiring tech talent? Any leads/insights appreciated :)

Hey all,

I’m a Dec 2025 grad, international on OPT, looking for any roles that will take my OPT (I have no intentions of staying or getting an H1-B, want to go to grad school after some work experience).
I did one summer of research, pretty basic nothing fancy. One summer as a curriculum strategy intern, helping a professor redesign 2 CS course curriculums from classes I’d already taken. And finally, one internship at a no name startup that has since gone defunct, but I worked across their entire product that summer. The work was doing user interviews, gathering requirements, writing user stories, prototypes in Figma, and presenting product demos to clients/customers. I really enjoyed this sort of ‘technical bridge’ work that wasn’t pure coding and programming, and really enjoyed the people-facing aspect of it.
I also have my minor in creative writing, and extensive writing experience, working as an editor at my college paper and even receiving a prestigious journalism award at my school.
I mostly see people talking about SWE/DS/SD roles here and grinding LC, but rarely other tech roles. What sort of roles should I be targeting with my profile? What strengths should I be showing and how should I angle my job search right now? And how should I be tailoring my resume? I’m not focused on money or location either, happy to work with a lower salary and relocate anywhere.
If anyone has any advice or insights, I’d be very grateful. Thank you.

Hey all,

I’m a Dec 2025 grad, international on OPT, looking for any roles that will take my OPT (I have no intentions of staying or getting an H1-B, want to go to grad school after some work experience).
I did one summer of research, pretty basic nothing fancy. One summer as a curriculum strategy intern, helping a professor redesign 2 CS course curriculums from classes I’d already taken. And finally, one internship at a no name startup that has since gone defunct, but I worked across their entire product that summer. The work was doing user interviews, gathering requirements, writing user stories, prototypes in Figma, and presenting product demos to clients/customers. I really enjoyed this sort of ‘technical bridge’ work that wasn’t pure coding and programming, and really enjoyed the people-facing aspect of it.
I also have my minor in creative writing, and extensive writing experience, working as an editor at my college paper and even receiving a prestigious journalism award at my school.
I mostly see people talking about SWE/DS/SD roles here and grinding LC, but rarely other tech roles. What sort of roles should I be targeting with my profile? What strengths should I be showing and how should I angle my job search right now? I’m not focused on money or location either, happy to work with a lower salary and relocate anywhere.
If anyone has any advice or insights, I’d be very grateful. Thank you.

Hey all,

Im posting this on behalf of a friend that’s asked me for advice on the situation, and I’m trying to help her figure out the best way out.

As the post title says, my friend ‘Jane’ and I have been best friends since college. We both graduated recently and she moved to work at a seasonal resort, where she met her current boyfriend ‘Ken’. They’ve been together for 3 months or so now.

Ken is incredibly insecure, egotistical, and controlling. He has had outbursts towards her before, berates how she dresses and interacts with people and his friends, and is just super insecure. She’s tried to break up in the past, but he’s always had a meltdown and convinced her to stay, sometimes threatening self harm and bringing up his abusive childhood. He is also very insecure about our friendship, and believes that guys and girls cannot be friends.

Today, she reached out to tell me that he has a violent meltdown yesterday while they were drunk, and ended up punching a wall. The fight was over something incredibly menial and small, non-consequential. She has finally had enough and is planning on booking it out of there tomorrow. She already made arrangement for a friend to drive over and pick her up, and has been acting like everything is fine around him in order to not let him know. It’s a scary situation for her, and she isn’t sure how to approach this. Some options we discussed:

A) She tells him she’s leaving once her ride arrives tomorrow, and then drives home. However, I’m not a fan of the idea because there’s a high chance he’ll have a meltdown right there and then, and cause a huge scene.

B) she packs up and leaves tomorrow without telling him. We’re still unsure of how to approach the ‘after’ of that because he seems unpredictable, but at least she’ll be out of there by then.

Would love to hear from you guys and how this should be approached. Thank you.

Hi all,

As the title says, I’m an international student (South Asian but not Indian), recent December grad with a CS degree from a small, sorta prestigious liberal arts college. I’m super happy with my education, it taught me to refine a lot of people skills + technical skills and fueled my passion for journalistic and creative writing. However, since it’s such a small school with a small CS department, there’s very not a lot employer connections available in tech.

I’m not inching closer to my unemployment period end date, and desperate to get my foot in the door and gain some experience. Ideally, I’d love to work in a role that bridges both technical and non-technical work since I love my people skills and communication (product, solutions, support etc) but will literally take anything at this point.

Applying via LinkedIn and Handshake has been the equivalent of throwing my resume into a black hole, and I’ve even been calling local staffing agencies to see if there’s any roles I fit (actual staffing agencies not the WITCH style body shop consultancies).

I’m also not looking for long-term sponsorship or H1-B, just employment to cover my OPT and STEM OPT period, as I plan on pursuing a graduate degree in Europe afterwards.

I’m wondering what has worked for folks here? Any recent grads that could share their experience on getting hired or what sort of networking/outreach they did to get interviews?

I’m also pretty lost on projects and prep. I have a pretty decent and robust capstone project, but would like to have some more unique impressive ones as well; the difficult part is figuring out what to build. If anyone is comfortable sharing details of the sort of the projects they built that got noticed, I would highly appreciate that as well.

As for prep, what sort of prep should I be doing to make myself as ready for interviews as possible? Should I be brushing up on basics and programming fundamentals, DSA, hardcore LeetCode practice, sys design?

Sorry if this is a ramble, just looking for any help, advice or insights.