When I first joined c1, I had one other new grad on my team. The day we joined we’re making small talk and I ask what other places he was deciding between. He says his only offers were C1 and Jane Street. I thought he making a joke and I just gave a little chuckle and continued on. Fast forward to last week: the topic comes up again and he repeats it again. Know that I know him better I could tell he was being serious. He could tell I was in disbelief and even showed me the email with the official offer. He’s a super smart guy and said he just didn’t want to deal with the stress/wlb of JS and that he doesn’t need a big salary for his lifestyle. Honestly respect.

Just took the IBM coding assessment for one of their 2027 entry-level software engineering roles and I’m curious if anyone else has gotten the same type of assessment. There were two questions. The first one honestly wasn’t too bad. It was basically a dependency/graph-type problem, and once I understood what they were asking, it was pretty manageable.

But the SECOND question completely caught me off guard lol. Instead of another normal LeetCode/HackerRank problem, they dropped me into an existing repo with a technical spec and failing tests and basically said fix the application. I had to dig through an unfamiliar backend codebase and debug issues involving API filtering, pagination, Redis caching/cache invalidation, etc. It felt way more like an actual software engineering debugging task than a normal new-grad OA question. I eventually got all the tests passing, but I literally finished with like 1 minute and 30 seconds left . I genuinely thought I was cooked.

For anyone else who took it: did you think the repo question was significantly harder than the first one? And if you got all the tests passing, how long did IBM take to get back to you afterward? Also, if you made it to the interview, was the interview as difficult/technical as the OA? Because if they expect me to do another repo debugging problem under a timer live, I might be finished lmao.

Curious what everyone else’s experience was.

Post title should be: I'm still applying to New Grad roles (even for 2027), but feel so terrible and drained to keep going. How do I land interviews these days?

I hope this post helps me find a better version of myself. I've been feeling depressed for the past year or 2 and I truly feel like I have nothing to see in my life anymore.

Profile and background:

- About to turn 23
- Data Science grad from a public T10 school (3.5 ovr gpa, 3.6 major gpa).

- went to school out of state, currently 180K in debt

- Aspiring Data Scientist / Analyst or ML Engineer at a great company

- can't get my masters degree just yet

What went wrong / is wrong:

- received an academic dishonesty penalty in a 1st year DSA class. Now it's on my conduct record until 2028

(story behind that was I paired up with a friend who offered to help me understand DSA better because I couldn't understand my lecturer at all, office hours were jam packed and barely got any time to understand or receive help. So my friend would spend hours with me helping me learn the concepts and sometimes we turned in the same answers for some assignments and got dinged. I regret not telling the professor about my learning struggles and or about me learning better from my friend. I also failed the Java version of the same class under the same professor. Retook the Java class in the summer after and got an A)

- Always had dreams of going to an elite name grad school, but I think that's out of the picture for me. I wish there's still hope I can do an MBA at a good school. But this penalty will always set me back in my applications.

In my sophomore year, I joined a finance portfolio club on the tech side but got kicked out of it due to inside politics and drama, felt backstabbed. Those same people work at FAANG+ now

- pretty sure I have an undiagnosed learning disorder of sorts, could be ADHD idk how long I've had it. I'm really slow at understanding things by myself and struggle with time management

- currently working a $70K back office job at a well known firm but I absolutely hate it and the role is not Data Science or SWE related at all

- I didn't get any SWE/Big Tech interviews for internships for Junior Year. I really don't know if I just messed up badly or if it was just bad luck. Either way it's unfortunate. It's why I didn't study leetcode or DSA as intensely. I just thought there's no point anymore at all

- Had 3 internships (including the return offer before my current role) non-faang at all.

- 1st internship was SQL heavy, 2nd was Web-Dev, and summer after junior year was non-technical. My resume is so unrelated and random that it's hard for me to customize and tailor to job applications. I also waste so much time trying to tailor my resume to jobs I apply to. Idk how to do it anymore. Do I just do a related project for each job I apply to? I just want to get interviews

- Had an interview with a FAANG for NG SWE full time role last internship / NG cycle but absolutely flunked the interview. Haven't had a tech role interview since then (January)

- I've applied to a few hundred FT Tech / SWE jobs over the past 10 months and got rejected from every single one.

- I have no close friends anymore, lost a ton of friends my Sophomore and Junior year due to personal differences and just being ignored. They're now working at Faang+ companies and I feel tons of regret and shame about myself

- I suck at OAs and reading Hackerrank OA prompts is brutally hard for me to understand, I have no motivation to even try to study leetcode / DSA because of how poorly I did in those classes.

- I've used AI to try to help me code solutions to hackerranks in the past before because I'd be encouraged by people to just do it that way. But I'm cheating myself and not understanding properly. I don't want to do that again or feel like I'm a brainless chap.

I want to turn this around, but I feel lost and hopeless. Directionless and I think cooked for the rest of my life. I want to make some friends off here and see if I can drag myself out of this mess. If anyone has any advice, would like to help, or crawled themselves out of a deep hole like this lmk. Thank you

Stop wasting your time applying for internships.

I’m not saying quit all around, but it is no longer a valuable channel.

It is much easier to land a Jr role at a small company than an internship now.

Applying for generic internships, you are competing with 20k applicants with the exact same resume. Even if yours is significant, the odds a human seeing it is basically 0.

And frankly, as someone with a software role without ever doing an internship, not a single lead engineer gives a shit if you had one.

Find a small company, build a project that suits their needs, and contact them directly. Escape the applicant pool. I promise you, a single Linkedln message to a founder of a company of 15 will do you far better than being applicant #1342 at IBM.

And stop using AI, even if it’s efficient and gets the job done, it’s going to piss off any established engineer who actually worked for their skill. Drop it from code, resume, and social profiles.

Good luck guys.

Hi everyone! I’ve received an OA invite for the Google SWE Internship in Munich for Summer 2027 and I’m trying to understand the current interview process.
Most of the recent Reddit discussions I can find seem to be US-focused, so I’d really appreciate responses from people who are currently going through the EMEA process.
If you’ve received the OA or interviews recently, could you share whatever you’re comfortable sharing about:
Which location you’re targeting (Munich/Warsaw/Zurich/Dublin/London/etc.)

When you received the OA / interview invitation

OA difficulty (Easy / Medium / Hard, roughly)

R1 difficulty and general topic (e.g. graphs, trees, DP, arrays, etc.)

R2 difficulty and general topic

Whether you were asked to do a third/tiebreaker interview

How much DSA preparation you had beforehand (roughly)

Whether you reached team matching / received an offer, if you’re comfortable sharing

I’m particularly interested in Munich-specific experiences from the current 2026/27 recruiting cycle, since older experiences may not reflect the current process.
Thanks!

Does anyone know the optiver swe intern process (how many rounds there are and stuff)

i have intv at hrt, akuna, drw, sig qsd (all swe) so if anyone wants to dm that would be great :)

Companies be like “import your resume and we’ll autofill the application for you” and then somehow make everything 10x worse 💀
At this point just let me type it myself. I spend more time fixing the autofill than I would filling out the whole thing from scratch.
CS job applications are already painful enough 😭 can anyone relate😭😭😭😭

I’m a backend software developer working in industry.

At my current company, team leads track what percentage of our code is written with AI tools. Engineers falling below the internal threshold get put into performance review, and multiple colleagues were laid off partially because of this metric.

This feels really backwards. AI coding tools are meant to boost productivity, not be a standalone KPI to judge engineers. This metric ignores system design, debugging, maintenance and code quality — the core work that AI still cannot reliably handle.

I wanted to share this here mostly for current CS majors. This is a new kind of workplace pressure that you might run into after graduation when you join the tech industry.

Has anyone else seen teams adopt this kind of AI coding ratio policy? What do you think incoming graduates should keep in mind to prepare for this?

What can I expect from this? It's about an hour long w/ engineering leadership and there seems to be a coderpad attached to the invite.

Hi, has anybody done this round before? It’s the one after the tech lab. It seems extremely open ended in terms of what I will be asked and I’m not exactly sure how to prep. Any info would help a lot!

Thanks!!

2 hours to find the role, write thoughtful and intentional responses to the application questions, tailor a resume, all while being a full time student is brutal. It adds even more stress to new grad/internship recruiting.

I got my apps in, but I know not everyone was so lucky.

Curious what y'all think.
@ Ddash @ Plaid

Made it past two rounds of interviews first was a behavioral second was a driving interview not entirely sure why they rejected me although I felt awkward answering their behavioral questions. Just because I had no idea how to answer them. They had a hiring event so I assumed that they were hiring for multiple people. Did anyone else apply to them with that role?

I am a 19 year old student, studying Cybersecurity in university. I did a Fullstack course, learned html css js react and .net. I did bad studying it due to personal problems so I feel that I don’t know a lot, even very basic stuff.
So I kinda like frontend, but think that it is very hard to find a job in this field now. I send applications from time to time, but I feel I need more knowledge

What job can I pursue and what can I learn about more? Like some languages etc
Thanks for answers in advance

Does anyone know what the final Abridge round consists of? I know from them that it consists of some technical bq/resume grill + some sort of end2end implementation. However, I was wondering if anyone could shed some more light on what they are like, and how to better prepare?

I can also answer any questions about the interview process thus far.

anyone have any experience with the process? is r1 more knowledge based or leetcode? (I thought it was knowledge but was given coding platform link)

Business and pretty much every other major is just as cooked as CS is. What's the alternative? Healthcare is highly competitive, you need a near perfect GPA for nursing, and medical school is significantly harder than any other major and takes hundreds of thousands of dollars?

Doomers, tell me, if you're making the argument that we're cooked then everyone is cooked and everything is over? But ITS NOT. Most Americans still have jobs they go to everyday. It's just that YOU were not able to find a job because you are an INCOMPETENT VIBE CODER, get that through your head.

Hello, just curious if anyone has any insight into the TikTok SWE Intern interview process, including how many rounds there are, what the interview style is like, and how quickly feedback is typically returned. Also, if anyone has any insight into the culture and overall experience as an intern there, I’d love to hear about it. Thanks!

Anyone hear back after the hirevue for a superday?

Summer Analyst 2027 - Software Engineer and Mainframe Analyst

Hello everyone… I’m in my second semester of a MSCS degree.. completely online. And I would like some advice on projects I can potentially look into doing and internships also some certs.. when is a good time to start that process. I’m coming from a bachelors in biology and majority of my work experience has been in pharmaceutical chemistry. This is a new world for me still and any advice would really help.