r/cscareerquestions

I see way too many people saying CS grads just didn’t do enough projects or didn’t grind hard enough on internships like that’s the main reason they can’t get jobs.

But look at the bigger picture:

1. There are 100k–200k CS grads every year all trying to land similar roles

2. Entry-level openings are nowhere near that number

3. Tons of roles want mid/senior experience even when labeled “entry”

At some point it stops being an individual problem and starts being a numbers problem.

I work at a mid-size tech company and have been on hiring committees continuously since 2021. We interview about 40 junior and new grad candidates per quarter. Something shifted clearly in the last 18 months.

The resumes look better than ever. GitHub profiles are full of projects. The take-home assignments come back clean and working. But then we get to the technical interview and the wheels come off.

The specific pattern: candidates can produce code but cannot talk about it. I ask "why did you use a hash map here instead of a list" and I get a blank stare. I ask "what happens if this input is null" and they freeze. I ask "walk me through what this function does" about code they submitted two days earlier and they read it like it is the first time they have seen it.

Because it is. They did not write it. They described what they wanted to a model, accepted what came back, maybe tweaked it until the tests passed, and submitted.

We have adapted our process. We now do more live coding with narration required. We ask candidates to modify code on the spot and explain each change. We ask deliberately vague questions to see if they ask clarifying questions or just start producing output.

The pass rate on technical screens dropped about 30% from 2023 to 2024 despite candidates looking stronger on paper. The gap between presentation and actual understanding has never been wider.

I want to be clear about something: I do not think these candidates are lazy or dishonest. They learned to code in an environment where AI tools were the default from day one. They optimized for the feedback they got, which was working code. Nobody told them the point was also to build intuition.

The uncomfortable question for anyone currently learning to code: if you cannot explain your code in an interview, can you actually maintain it in production when something breaks at 2am and the AI gives you a wrong answer?

Solving more problems or learning more patterns or talking in from a camera are not bad, but I’ve done all of this before and bombed. I bombed Stripe, I bombed Google, bombed Bloomberg what’s to say I’m not going to shit the bed at Amazon?

There’s no weight to see go up like in a gym or something, not even saying this in a negative way, just realizing how much of this process runs on assumed progress.

we have a new manager who recently hired 3 new people secretly and now he is trying to get me and other colleague who have been at the company for 3 years to quit. is this common? what can we do about it?

I've been working in web development as a fullstack developer for over 3 years and with the exponential progress of AI, bad job market, stagnant pay, and hearing about lay offs left and right I think it's time to switch to something else.

I went into this career thinking it'll be very creative and fullfilling with lots of money to be made and the ability to work remote, but it feels more like I'm the coding version of a construction worker, just doing what the business wants in terms of tasks, following their designs to the T. Dealing with scrum and bad project managers and people out to get you aren't great as well, although I assume every job might have that.

With AI taking our jobs in the future or employers using it as an excuse to lay people off, I was wondering what could be something that could survive into the future. I've considered cybersecurity, but I heard it's saturated as well and very repetitive. Any good options out there? I'm still hoping it's possible to work remotely

I graduated in December and I've been interviewing since January. Got a take-home last week, build a small REST API with filtering and pagination. Used Claude for most of it, passed, got invited to the second round which is a live pair programming session. And now I'm sitting here realizing I couldn't rewrite half the stuff I submitted without AI helping me.

It's not that I don't understand the code. I can read through every line and explain what it does, why the middleware is structured that way, how the query parameters get validated. But if you put me in front of a blank editor and said "write the pagination logic" I'd be sitting there trying to remember if it's Math.ceil or Math.floor for total pages and wether the offset is (page - 1) * limit or page * limit. Stuff that I've written dozens of times during my degree but never actually from memory because there was always an AI assistant or a previous project to copy from.

In fear and anticipation for the 2nd interview I started practicing syntax with a free app I found and honestly two weeks of that has helped more than I expected. but the bigger question is does this even matter anymore? Half the devs I know use AI for everything at work. Are interviews going to keep testing something nobody actually does on the job, or is this just hazing at this point.

Edit: People are getting hung up on the ceil vs floor and I think I just provided a really bad example. I know the mathematical difference. I couldn't come up with anything else on the spot. A proper example would be that I forget the structure of callbacks for functions. Not that I don't understand what the function itself would do.

Edit 2: Man, this sub is ripping me a new one and I have to say I feel very bad about it. This is not the tough love I expected. I've already been practicing since my interview with freecodecamp/codefluent but there's only so much time in a day. If anything, I guess this is fuel for my anxiety to start working on this a lot harder.

Given the state of the market, I want to know what the community’s experience is right now.

What is your current role/title, and how do you feel about its security moving forward?

With all the talk about AI either being doom or hype, it can be difficult to get an objective assessment for how much AI is actually doing for us at the current moment.

I work in low-level (embedded-ish) programming in C: lots of Linux Kernel work, device modeling in QEMU, etc.

In terms of AI tools I only use GitHub Copilot, so I’m basically still coding by hand but with some code completions which are helpful, but still full of mistakes. I’ve heard through the grapevine that some developers have tools like Claude Code or Codex write literally all of their code for them, but I can’t even imagine such a thing myself. Based on what Copilot outputs right now, I get the impression that AI would probably struggle to “agentically” develop something of huge significance fully on its own. I could be wrong though, I’ve heard Claude Code is pretty powerful (but my company hasn’t bought us licenses yet so I haven’t had the chance to try it out). Overall I’d say that I’m still doing like 90% of the heavy lifting, with AI sort of just acting as an accelerator/assistant for me. Really I’d say that the best thing it does for me is save time looking up stuff that I’d otherwise have had to search for on Google or something.

I’m also curious if it depends on the type of programming (maybe somebody working on front end may have a different experience than people like me working on kernel and hardware stuff). Additionally, it also seems intuitive to me that something like Claude Code would be super helpful for starting a small to medium scale application from scratch (hence all of the headlines about vibe-coded projects that people complete in a weekend), but perhaps not as much for working within or maintaining a pre-existing, large codebase.

Perhaps this question gets asked a lot, I‘m not sure. I’m just curious what it’s like for other people out there since quite honestly I have a hard time determining what’s true in the world these days (though, yes, I realize I’m still just asking random people on the internet). Also sorry for my English.

I kinda just started making a game in 1st year and was hoping to ship it by 2nd year. The studio is technically registered and I do have other systems level/fullstack side projects. It’s just idk how it would look if I’m applying for software roles in enterprise or big tech, esp since it might come off as “childish”.

I’ve only really been doing it cause it’s the reason why I even got into cs and don’t want to lose the motivation.

Hello everyone,

I'm a Backend Engineer with ~6 YoE across three different jobs. Throughout my working years so far, I have had some small exposure to cloud/infra management and have found that it's a lot more enjoyable to me than typical backend work. I'm currently looking to switch jobs and I'm wondering if a transition into SRE/DevOps is worth it. I'm mostly looking for your opinion on these things:

1. Would a transition like this hurt me in the short term in terms of salary?

2. In the long term, would you say either of those tracks is "better" or are they more or less comparable? "better" here could mean better in terms of pay, job security, or growth potential.

I know that lots of the skills I already have as a backend engineer would be transferrable but I'm trying to decide whether that's a good career move before I actually commit to studying and getting certs and so on to be able to properly make the switch.

Any opinions welcome. Thanks.

As the title states, I did lots of lc grinding and got a big tech internship. I start middle of June. The issue is I know DSA and nothing else really (Ik some system design). I’m working on a full stack team I was told. What are my next steps? Do I just start making full stack projects in my free time? Thank you! My goal is to get RO!!

spent 2.5 years doing react typescript stuff then ended up in a devops support role working with azure, terraform, openshift, ci/cd and honestly i enjoy it way more than i expected. been researching sre lately and it feels like the right direction for me, google has a lot of good free material to start with

curious how the day to day actually looks for people in the role, whether a dev background helps when hiring, and where sre is heading with all the platform engineering and ai stuff happening. also open to any advice on what to focus on coming from an azure background

what do you wish you knew before going this route

Anybody been through the ropes in this developmental program @ WF? What was interview process like? Thanks for the help

So I'm still a year 1 CIS(heavily CS coded) and was thinking of Devops and cloud architecture as a career path. For self study, interviews, and cv projects, what should I already do and be aware of?

For context, I graduated in May of 2025 with a B.S. in CS. I spent 2025 doing....not much other than working teaching math or fixing laptops (and nearly joining the Navy, but that's another story). In January, I got accepted to a training program and finally accepted an offer at Cognizant.

The thing is, I've been doing a lot of research online and I hear a mixed bag with a lot of leaning towards negative. Apparently, people look at it with disdain on a resume. Working there, you might get put on a role that does not align with what you want to do. It could cripple your career - so on and so forth. The thing is, this - to me - is the one and only opportunity I have to make it.

I guess what I'm asking is this - if anyone else has worked here, or knows people who worked here, what should I expect? What can I do to make the most of this? How do I plan for the future?

this is killing me

i work at a series b startup making $225k + 0.55%

their growth has been slowing. engineering culture has biggo problems, everyone but another guy has quit from since i got hired about 9mo ago.

why? boss mismanages others. or sometimes pisses them off. she doesn’t mean to, but the passive aggressive game is on a daily basis and work is not handed off correctly. not good at training. communication is like pulling teeth. toxic stuff like pushing on the weekends alone and then making juniors clean up the mess later. can be mean or stark suddenly from day to day.

we can’t hire, they’ve also said this. last senior eng left after 1mo. another left a week ago. still haven’t backfilled. no interviews for 2 months

they had layoffs last month. no one on engineering got touched but it wasn’t very good, bad vibes :(

now I found this nice seed startup. they’re in the embedded infrastructure space with robotics with some ai spin. young team but such a joy to work with. i did a work trial and it was a blast. they’re so respectful and functional and it really hit home that my current gig is lacking in many different ways. i heard them take customer calls. they literally have so many customers only after 9 months that every engineer is taking calls and they’re rushing to hire hire hire

but they’re offering $180k and 1%

their revenue is pretty good, they already hit 1.2mm and they will raise another round as well. but im pretty sure they’re in the red. my guess is that they need to double to break even. they probably have at least 18 mon of runway.

the crazy part is that i believe they’re can do it. they already had multiple fortune 500 companies partner with them.

my current company has at least three years of runway. but i did see them get distracted a lot and miss the goal, especially last year. our team is small and got smaller.

am i dumb for being tempted to leave? current co just upgraded me to principal once I said the idea of leaving. but they’re still treating me like the janitor now. “let him do the ops stuff while we do the other work”

meanwhile i am listening to my juniors vent about boss and bad eng practices and being lost. i do my best to help. but whenever boss is being a hardass it’s hard not to be sympathetic

i really don’t know what to do

this is driving me insane. i need to make a decision by monday!!

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Fortunate enough to get into both Georgia Tech and Duke for CS. I also got into UIUC for CS + Math, USC for CS, and UCLA for CS, but have kind of ruled out these schools because:

• UIUC CS + Math is not as good for CS opportunities compared to UIUC CS (Grainger) and the weather is super cold. Plus, GT seems to do better overall for CS prestige and opportunities.
• USC and UCLA CS are both in-state for me. While I've lived in San Diego, California for the past 7 years, and love the life here, I do think it's good to explore a new place entirely. Plus, the CS programs aren't as good at USC and UCLA compared to GT or UIUC, despite having a stronger brand name or overall ranking.

Please do let me know if you'd like to encourage me to go to any of these instead, though! I am still open to it, but just wanted to whittle it down to two to make it easier to decide :)

Cost is not a factor at all, fortunately, since I secured a few large aid/scholarships, and my family is willing to pay the rest at any college I attend without financial burdens. My primary academic and career goals are to pursue SWE/AI/ML internships and jobs after graduation. Which option might provide me with more CS prestige and opportunities, and is overall the best choice? Though unlikely, I'm also potentially open to pivoting to a new major or field (Computer/Electrical Engineering, Data Science, or Finance), given the difficulty in the current market and the unpredictability of AI in the future! Thanks so much :)

Have a final round director interview coming up next week after completing the onsite. The role is technically exciting and I’d learn a lot, but I’m having second thoughts about the company’s mission.

For those who don’t know, Flock Safety makes license plate readers and surveillance cameras used by law enforcement. The technology works, but the ethical implications are real, mass surveillance, privacy concerns, potential for misuse.

Has anyone here worked there or turned down an offer for ethical reasons? How do you weigh personal career growth against the broader impact of what the company builds?

Not looking to be talked into or out of it, just want to hear from people who’ve genuinely wrestled with this.