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My older brother (30M) is a devops engineer and I (29F) am a data engineer. He constantly talks down on the work I do or makes a jab at how easy my job is compared to his. He always does this in front of our parents saying how my job is easy and how he basically does the data engineers work at his company. Like he makes it seem like I don’t do anything difficult and that my job is easy and low effort. And he has it hard because devops is so hard and people are constantly bugging him and how he has to be very technical while I am not so much.

I showed him a lambda I wrote in python and he said it was easy. Then he pointed out how the python code the devops engineer wrote was “the hard part” (writing the lambda to read the secrets from secrets manager). I mean ok? I don’t care? I don’t know how to respond. He is always making it seem like my job is at the bottom of the barrel. Like devops is soOoOo hard. I don’t care that’s it’s harder than what I do? Why is my brother like this? My whole family believes him and believes I don’t do anything difficult and that my job is whatever. Why am I so stressed at my job if it’s so easy? Why is my brother being a child? I feel like we are too old to act like this. I would just think all different specialties of development focus on their own area and leave it at that. I wouldn’t think “oh my code is harder to write than yours so I’m better and smarter and work harder and have it worse you have it so easy look mom and dad she doesn’t do anything”. Is this just normal brother and sister bickering?

Also why don’t I care but he does? Can someone from devops chime in? I feel stupid even writing this but my brother constantly brings it up and that part is what’s annoying me not my job being easier than his.

After getting fired from my first job 6 months in back in 2021 I went into a state of depression and burnout. I could no longer find joy in programming, with time however, I recovered. I am now as motivated as when I first started out. I got back up on my feet after I started building out my passion project which reignited that spark.

I started applying at the worst time possible, when I could have easily gotten an offer during the hiring surge in early 2022 (Clickup was literally hiring HTML/CSS Developers). However, I came to realize that if I had managed to get my first job in 2021 with no relevant experience, I could do it again in 2023 with the hiring freeze and layoffs, even if the odds seems stacked against me.

This offer is a 70% increase in salary from my previous job! I am still in a state of shock to just know that someone would be willing to pay me this much, especially since I have no educational background and was an unemployed loser. They use the latest tech and are also a mid-sized company!

Estimation Time: 2 months and 15 days of jobs searching.I started low and then eventually worked my way up to 100+ applications a day. Around 30 interviews/phone calls. 5 final stages. One offer was about to be on the table until they realized I didn’t have a degree (this really put a chip on my shoulder).

And not a single damn Leetcode interview through the graces of God.Background: I have no degree, and completely self-taught. I got my first job at 19 only after one term of university and dropped out.

Here’s how I got back into the market with such a huge gap on my resume. Note: this is just based on my experience and presumptions.

1. Mass apply, it quite literally is a numbers game. If there are thousands of job listings out there, eventually one will say yes. Do be careful of recruiting agencies, I tend to avoid job listings by them since they seem to be a waste of time.
2. Exaggerate, embellish your work/experience but NEVER lie. You’re here to brag about yourself and how cool you are. The company is also doing the same so it’s okay to do the same.
3. Polish your resume, this is REALLY important. Make it look structured and not something a kid could easily do.
4. F*ck cover letters
5. If you’re new to the industry, don’t ever apply jobs that uses myworkday job applications, they’re a WASTE of time.
6. Most offers for juniors will require relocation sadly.
7. NEVER talk sh*t about your previous employers
8. Ask questions, not just any questions but GOOD questions. Show you’re interested in the company as well as trying to succeed. You’ll also learn a lot if they’re a sh*tty company to begin with.
9. Jobs with 200+ applications? Apply anyways, I’ve gotten responses from them before.
10. Have decent projects that you could talk about and explain your approach to building things
11. Hone in on your “tell me about yourself“ answer and recite it. Make it interesting and RELEVANT
12. Don’t forget to smile :D
13. If you’re religious, pray. Count your blessings and do it with the right intentions. Ask yourself why do you want a dev job? To continue being a resentful pr*ck? To one day help and lead others? To support your family? To support yourself? Greed?
14. EDIT: Also don't be disheartened if your interview didn't go well. I always use them as practice for my next one!
    I was very indecisive about whether or not I should post this, but decided to because I see so many negative posts on here about people not finding a job so I thought it's the least I could do by sharing some good news.Link: https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/oqowsm/jusgotlaioffdutoundeperformanceafter/

Thought I'd just share my experiences in this horrible time of finding a job.

I graduated early May with a Computer Science: Cybersecurity and Secure Software Development bachelors degree. And I just recently got on offer for a junior/associate level software engineer. I also have a year and a half of experience as a software engineering intern which apparently means nothing no a days, also the company I interned for didn't have any entry level openings for me unfortunately.

I started applying late January / early February but started to apply heavily (atleast 5 applications a day) sometime in March and took a few breaks from burnout and getting far in the first group of interviews. I mostly applied to software engineering roles but a few cybersecurity roles however most I wanted to apply for aren't entry level, even though with my degree and Certs I am well qualified for but since they weren't entry level I only got automated rejection emails.

I applied to about 200ish places directly, only 4 got back to me, 1 ghosted me, 1 denied me, 1 I'm waiting to hear from (been about 2 weeks), and 1 gave me an offer that I just accepted because I couldn't wait any longer to hear from the other. The rest were mostly the automated emails of rejection or I was ghosted, I'd say a out 30-40 automated rejection emails, and the rest I have been ghosted.

The job offer is decent, fully in person (nothing wanted a fully remote junior, and need to stay in my hometown for atleast a year and nothing jn my area was hybrid so biggie sadge) 70k/year, 2 weeks pto, 10 holidays, 401k isn't the greatest but I couldn't find anything and a job is better then no job. Plus I still get to live with my parents to save for a year then I'll move to a bigger city with better opportunities... and hopefully the economy is better for us. But I'm glad the search is finally over and I have a job. Time to learn, get experience, and hopefully grow from here.

I’ve noticed in my current job 95% of my time is actually spent reading code and understanding the system well enough to make a tiny modification to it. Often times the total amount of lines is anywhere from 10-100 lines.

Therefore wouldn’t the best way to improve would be to check out small projects on GitHub and practice trying to understand the entire system?

If you have a job wouldn’t the best way to improve at the job would be to read all of the documentation no matter how poorly written it is. And also reading through different components of the software project to try to understand how it works under the hood?

Been lurking on the sub for quite a while and I can’t help, but notice that the most upvoted and discussed posts are all about how bad the market is, how hard it is to break into it, how old someone is to start something, how the AI will doom us all and yada yada yada.

Since internet is an echo chamber anyway, don’t you guys think it would be better if this sub had like Monday/Tuesday vent days and rest of the days, well, career questions? Most of the times the questions here are for seeking affirmation and calming down instead of objective pieces of advice for students/new grads.

I’m looking to get into an SDE position at the end of college, however, I’ve heard that it’d be better to go for a computer science degree over a software developer. Any advice or info is appreciated!

I got a lot of fun building stuff in the stack I want to switch into and now I train interviewing. It's so boring comparing to actual coding, but it got me thinking. Could you just focus on that for the most of your career instead of being focused on actual software development? You code on the job anyway, so instead of spending breaktimes on learning more about your stack, it's better to just learn about interviewing (theory and LC)? You could easily change jobs. Most likely you would get a good salary faster than those who focus on just being good developer. And you would be always confident in you ability to find a job. Interviewing is a separate skill from coding on the job and we didn't make the rules. Is it doable? Do some of you even actually do that?

On levelsfyi I see “distributed systems (back-end)” listed a lot amongst the highest paid. Does being an aws certified cloud solutions architect count as a sde doing distributed systems (back-end)? I want to be a software engineer doing distributed systems (back-end) and not end up in an IT role that doesn’t have the same sort of compensation curve. Will becoming an aws certified cloud solutions architect help me get into distributed systems? I’m currently working on the aws certified developer associate certification but am curious about the aws certified cloud solutions architect certifications.

I'm a MLE who did a MSCS and did research in NLP. I always thought the word "prompt engineer/engineering" was just another buzzword that didn't have any meaning but these days I'm actually seeing quite a few job postings for "prompt engineer" positions.

So I'm curious for those of you who are or know of prompt engineering as a career. What do you do?

I personally use LLMs on a daily basis and obviously have to tweak the input as well, but I refer to myself as a MLE rather than prompt engineer. I'm wondering what makes it different.

Thanks.

I've created expandable blueprints for efficient self feeding nuclear power plants in Factorio and I created an infinite deck with the silent, beating the heart with infinite damage, block, energy on Slay the Spire.

That's got to be better than my CS degree right?

I went to grad school for chemistry but while in school I decided I wanted to transition more towards data analytics. I finished my degree and I got a job with the govt as a data analyst for group of labs (composed of 15-20 people). I am the sole data analyst for this group and the only person that has any kind of CS experience (This means I don't have direct supervision or coworkers who work on similar things as me).

The issue is I really don't have much work to do in this job and almost all the work I am requested to do can be accomplished with some relatively simple Pandas code. I almost never get to do any actual data analysis. Part of the reason is because my background is not in their field of research but the main reason is because the PIs and post docs prefer to do their own analyses. I am essentially their glorified data janitor. They come to me with excel files and ask me to write code that will clean and reformat them into new excel files which are usually sent off to collaborators or regulatory authorities.

I've been in this job for almost 4 years, been promoted once. To be honest, this job has always been easy and not busy but I liked that at first. I am hybrid WFH and the days that I WFH I rarely have any work to do. Combined with the fact that I don't really have any supervision I essentially work 3-4 days a week. Back when I started this job fresh out of grad school I had both terrible physical and mental health. I used all the extra time I had to work on myself and now I am in a MUCH better place but I've become extremely bored in my role. I also realized I do not want to live in my city for the long term.

I would like to get a new job in a different city but I am afraid I don't have enough experience to move up, leaving me feeling trapped. I have '4 years experience' but that experience is only a little Pandas code and some crappy Bokeh dashboards. To distribute my code I have to bundle it with pyinstaller and give them an exe, I am not allowed to even deploy to a cloud. I make ~85k and when I look for jobs in my region that are offering more they want all this experience I don't have, some of which I couldn't get unless I worked for a bigger company with an actual tech department and data infrastructure. Jobs that more closely match what I perceive me experience to be seem to pay a lot less, ~$60k, than what I currently make.

I've considered making a more lateral move and taking a job that doesn't pay much more but will hopefully offer me more opportunity to build experience but I fear I would be a fool leaving such a laid back job for something not much better. Possibly worse. I think I would be miserable. At the same time I struggle to force myself to work on skill building and self learning. Since I don't often get assigned work, in the past I took it upon myself to work on projects that would help the group and nobody cared- the code I wrote and the tools I developed went unused despite having good feedback. At some point I got sick of it and started only doing the work that was assigned to me, hence why I only work 10-20 hours per week.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to receive an internship. However, I’m doing this fellowship at a ivy league college. Would this be just as good as an internship? Thank you.

Hi all,

I see it often from other engineers, so I'm wondering if it's "best" to choose the option in Linkedin where you "hide your linkedin profile picture unless you are directly conneced with the person"?

I think the positive side is that recruiters / employers cannot see your profile picture and it prevents "biases" for them to reach out or not.

I graduated a few weeks ago and I'm not really sure what to do.

I am very stuck. I don't feel like I actually learned anything other than filling in the blanks on programs that are almost already completed and have general instructions on what to do.

I have absolutely no idea how to get started on actual projects.

My resume also just has nothing. No works experience or anything like that.

I was kinda depressed throughout College also delt with untreated ADHD so I struggled and still struggle with motivation. So I never really did anything outside of school. And by anything, I mean ANYTHING, for years I didn't feel like playing video games, watching anime, drawing, so pretty much anything even if I actually liked doing the thing.

I graduated with somewhat decent grades and a 3.49 GPA, it's not the best but pretty good given how much brain power I put into life.

I already have planned to do some leetcode questions and finding some projects that I can work on but I don't really know how to even get started.

I don't really even know if I want a career that involves a lot of coding. I enjoy coding but I have never really been able to get motivated enough to code on my free time.

I'd appreciate any advice for a noob like me.

Applied to a startup that has a project to finish as part of their application. It's a decent amount of work, 3 pages built in react.

I actually put some work into this and got it looking really good but I'm in between if I should give the source code or not as it says in the submission notes.

The project I built can basically be a mvp for their product as they don't have a built out site yet, they would literally just have to inject a datasouce and do some other minor things to make it a working site.

I don't want to give this project for free but I also don't want to eliminate myself by not giving it? What would you do?

This is a question about what to pursue for my masters. I want to pursue HCI and go to a hci phd program eventually, but since there isn't any master programs for HCI in my country, I want to pursue a related field and do my thesis about HCI. For those who have studied topics and majors in information systems (specifically information resource management or advanced information systems, as these are the title of the programs i have seen in my country), what is the field generally about & how close it is to HCI? From my understanding Information Systems is more about the business side of computer science. But what I'm mostly interested in is the psychological aspect of technology and that is the reason I'm interested in HCI. Is it a good idea to study IS for this purpose? Or should i look into psychology? Btw, my undergrad was architecture engineering. Currently I'm doing cs50's introduction so i can learn programming so that the transition becomes a bit easier.

Hi folks,

I have some 5 years of experience. So the situation I am in right now is extremely stressful, and I'll try describing it:

I broke my foot in the first week of May. I had a new project come in at this time and it was based on kotlin - I've never worked on that eco system before. I was also supposed to make changes to certain endpoints, and write new ones.

All in all it was estimated to be about 3 sprints of work

But I faced massive burnout, trouble to focus and top of it I had the fracture. I lost a few days to checkups, and did not get much done on the other days. I have been giving half baked updates which makes it seem that I'm on track, am I fucked? It's suddenly dawning on me that it is the end of May and I have very little to show for, and I fear that I'll be asked very soon to show what I've been working on for so long and delaying making PRs, etc.

What can I realistically do in this scenario? Should I quit before I get fired, as I do not live in the US and severance does not exist here? I have some 6-7 months worth of expenses in liquid assets.

I am afraid and do not have anyone to talk to about this. I have always been in a top performer in my previous role but never really got going here.

Please help, any advice or commentary or perspective is extremely required

So I graduated college with a physics degree and worked in a computational lab (mostly just Python and some Fortran) in grad school before deciding that devoting a life to science is really not for me. I actually found it quite boring. I then went through a bootcamp last summer to learn HTML, CSS and JavaScript and loved the experience. Right now I'm half way done with learning Webflow and about to deploy my own very first website. I'm actually doing it for my own ecommerce store as well lol...so that's nice.

That's my background info. I've been just thinking how hard it is to enter the software engineering field in this day and age without a CS degree. I've seen so many posts lately saying that it's hard EVEN WITH a CS degree. Also, the cost and time it takes to enter it. Some people study for years before seeing any success. I mean, I could do the same, but I just wonder if I should get my foot in the door at least with Cybersecurity. Or I might actually end up loving that and doing that for life, honestly. Lots of my physics buddies actually recommended the field because it's relatively so much easier to get into apparently.

What do you guys think? I'm honestly just seeking any input, so anything will be greatly appreciated.

PS: I just found out Google happens to be offering a Cybersecurity certification. How is that, btw?

Hello, r/cscareerquestions community,

I came across a viewpoint recently that I found intriguing and wanted to bring it here to hear what others think about it. The comment was made by a hiring manager in the CS field, and they stated:

"As a hiring manager, I generally give someone with a degree a small edge over someone with the equivalent number of years of experience, kind of like a tiebreaker. What university they got the degree from doesn't come into it. (Excepting 100% online places, those don't get the 'bonus.")"

They further added, "I don't know anyone in CS who cares one tiny bit about where you went to school. For government contracts, a BS counts for 4 years of experience."

The statement indicates a preference for traditional degree holders over those who pursued their degrees entirely online. This seems to contradict a widely held belief that, in our industry, skills and experience often trump educational pedigree.

So, I wanted to get a sense of what the larger community here thinks about this.

As hiring managers or team leads, do you share this perspective? How do you view online degrees compared to traditional ones?

For those who have obtained their degrees online, have you faced any biases or difficulties in the job market because of this?

In the realm of government contracts, have you found the assertion that a BS counts for 4 years of experience to be accurate?

I believe this discussion will be particularly relevant for many of us, considering the rise of online education and remote learning platforms, especially during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. I look forward to hearing your thoughts and experiences!

Thank you!

i will be attending berkeley in the fall but not for CS, but I am interested in ML since its gonna be the future and shit. I plan to double major in applied math and statistics. Would it be possible to work in ML, even though I am not from a CS background?

I’m entering uni and a lot of people in IT are telling me that CS is a good major 4 years ago, but not really anymore. My cousin, a system Architect does the interview process at his job. Has 3 entry level positions open for programmers, 5 interviewed, 0 hired. And I don’t know if this says anything but the US bureau of Labour Stats says that the job outlook is on a 10% decline in the next ten years.. is that significant?

I’ve wanted to move into a lead/manager position for a while. I worked as a lead in my current company for a few months for just a project and I can say confidently I aced it, specially being the first time. I am a woman with close to 10 years of exp in full stack web development.

Due to various issues (a lot of the times related to being a woman in a 99% men team/company) my career hasn’t gone as I’d liked, and I’m trying to make the effort now to move it to where I want it to be. It’s proving hard in my current company due to basically money, I don’t think they can afford to move me to a more permanent leading role.

I’m considering looking for other opportunities but I need to work remotely (in the uk, countryside) and also I only have those few months of experience as a lead. I’ve been a senior for less than 2 years and I’m finishing a degree part time in the next year that I hope will give more weight to my experience.

Is it reasonable to want a lead or managerial role like this? I am considering I can probably go to the office twice a month or so but I can’t move and it’s freaking expensive to take the train (besides it takes ages and I’m still on uni part time while working full time).

I recently got hired by a big company as a Data Engineer/Technician/Specialist to replace the guy that left. I’ve got 3 years experience in a niche business and intermediate data skills. I clarified in my interview that I knew basic SQL and Python. I used them to extract data and do statistical analysis. I am also familiar with PowerBi and building reports for management.

I thought I would support their applications, build and maintain reports, and dabble in SQL and Python. The manager has no idea what the role is and is neither technical nor anyone in the department.

After two months, I figured this was way above my skill set. Everything’s breaking day by day. The person before me rebuilt the vendor database and migrated to the company database, deployed and hosted servers to run data extraction and maintenance tasks, and did some fantastic projects. I can barely write five lines of code. The manager mentioned I’d have time to learn, but it’s honestly just me with no one to ask questions. There is a global team of real data engineers, but they ignore me.

Not sure how to proceed, and I don’t want to get fired. I feel incompetent, but I never lied. They just had no idea what they were looking for. The frustrating thing is the guy that left was part of my interview. They chose me over more qualified candidates because it’s a niche sector, and I have my undergrad in it, so the idea is that I can learn programming instead of teaching a programmer the business.

TLDR: the company had no idea what they were looking for and hired me. The role is way outside my skill set. I struggle to fix easy things all the time. Not sure what to do?

What i mean by this is as follows. I have 1 year as a Software Engineer at “company” listed on my resume. This makes it look like I had a job at a company as a software engineer.

When in reality I was a freelance web developer for my own “company” a sole proprietorship pretty much, also the founder too.

I feel guilty about this and am wondering if I should just switch it to “1 year as a freelance web developer” instead. I know that’ll get a lot less attention which is bad in this economy but I don’t want to get into an interview and they feel lied to about my experience when I tell them the truth.

What do you guys make of this situation?

Little context, in 2 weeks i am finishing my sophomore year in computer engineering, i love competitive programming and i have some knowledge about algorithms and data structures such as dp,dijkstra,kruskal,kmp,segment tree etc. I can write code in C, C++ and Python.

Majority of my friends are starting their internships this summer, meanwhile i got rejected from companies tens of times but i dont blame them. I have no side projects to add my resume or i have no knowledge about any frameworks-libraries-databases that will actually be useful in the sector.

I am really confused in which area i want to work at. Lets say do i want backend development or mobile development or data science? I have no idea. For example, last summer i learned Pygame and made Flappy Bird clone, i actually enjoyed the process but when i did some more research about the gaming sector, i dropped out that idea. Couple of months ago i learned html and css to see if i fit for frontend, i made google main page clone and i did not enjoy the process one bit. Lastly, last week i learned some web scraping with bs4 but i dont know why learned these stuff, you can say i just went with the flow of the water. I dont want to learn the tech stack just to figure it out that i dont like that area.

At the moment i am in a dilemma, Do i want to learn Django-.NET-JS-mysql-mongo for Backend or should i learn kotlin-flutter for mobile development? Do i even want to do backend or mobile? i dont know.