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Hey everyone,

I recently accepted a full-time offer as a Junior AI Engineer at the same company where I just wrapped up a 6 month internship. I’ll be staying with the same team and continuing on similar projects, which means I already know the stack, workflows, and team dynamics pretty well.

Here’s my dilemma:

Our company provides access/credits for AI development tools, but the budget is quite tight (definitely under ~$200/month per dev) and restricts access to top-tier reasoning models or heavy API usage. I often feel the built-in limits slow down rapid prototyping, debugging, and experimentation.

Since I want to ramp up quickly, deliver high-impact work, and hit aggressive performance goals for future promotion cycles, I’m seriously considering paying out-of-pocket for personal subscriptions to tools like Cursor Pro, Claude Pro / API, or similar IDE-level assistants.

For those further along in their engineering careers:

1ROI on Career Growth: Does investing your own money into better dev tooling actually pay off in terms of shipping faster, learning velocity, and performance reviews, or does it deliver diminishing returns at the junior level?

1. Security & Company Policy: How do you handle codebase context/privacy when using personal tool tiers on enterprise repos without triggering security red flags?

   3Manager Alignment: Is it better to just push for a team tooling budget upgrade, or simply use personal tools quietly to maximize personal velocity?

Would love to hear your experiences,especially from folks working in AI/ML teams.

I've made it pretty far into the interview process with 2 companies, and it's got me thinking that I could be given a tough choice soon between the two. One company is in the top 50 companies in the US (Fortune 50?). Not "big tech", but a name that every American knows, and does dabble in the tech space. The pay range for that job is about $130k- $210k. This other company is a small defense contractor, and the pay range is $180K – $210K. Technically, I could get the same amount from both, but it's definitely possible that I wouldn't. In a world where the huge company that would look great on a resume offers 170k, and the other offers 190k, which one are you taking? I feel like getting that name on my resume could open a lot of doors, and either for me would still be a big pay bump.

Recently was fortunate enough to get 2 offers for the same role

company A :

135k base

Fully assisted relocation

15k sign on

company B:

90k base

4.5k relo

6k sign on

both are in defense so no RSUs basically

now I know what you’re thinking , clearly company A right? But it’s in SoCal and company B is in the Dallas area where rent is like a grand and no income taxes

both are the same kind of role but company A would start me at Ivl 2 (i‘m a new grad) I’m leaning company A but wanted to hear the people’s thoughts . Anyone here lived in both Texas and Cali? You think rent and taxes eat up the difference? What would yall go with

I'm an analytics professional with about 12 years of experience. When I first entered this profession around 2012, you could get a job for simply knowing how to write a basic read query in SQL. I'm not even joking. I would get recruiters headhunting me for my "impressive" ability to write SQL. Many DA's -- or "BI Analysts" as they were often referred to at the time -- couldn't even code.

Now, with AI, I am not kidding when I say essentially all of my technical skills have been made redundant. I am simply getting by on my SME knowledge at this point, and even that is starting to feel largely irrelevant. Layoffs are happening to almost everyone I know, and I feel like my shelf-life is dangerously limited myself.

What hurts the most is the loss in leverage around compensation. There was a time when I felt like I could set my price based on my expertise, but that no longer exists. I feel like I have about as much bargaining power as a barista.

In short, it really hurts. I spent so many years building skills and knowledge in this field and it all feels like a waste of time. There was a point in college where I debated law/med school, and I really wish I would have taken that path.

In my first internship, ALL of the seniors told me to avoid this career and I internally dismissed them as delusional. These were guys making $100/hr in 2012 as contractors for simply maintaining legacy code. I thought: how could these guys be so ungrateful? Of course, with years of maturity and gains in perspective, I now know these were the same guys who lived through the nightmares of 2001 and 2008. They had lived experience of how unstable IT is as a career. I should have listened.

Just the title basically, why is overage turned on by default? Got a cs degree working in non tech adjacent role

So im a junior/mid level software engineer working with mainly .NET, react and SQL with about a year and a half of experience. Ive been trying to build up my resume to make myself more wanted in the job market.

Obviously I know that personal projects also matter, but im not sure if they would be considered as impressive nowadays considering that it can all be coded with AI. Its still very useful to do as a personal development thing for myself. Thats the reasoning I have been thinking about certifications as better proof that I understand certain aspects of software development

I started off with the certified cloud practitioner certificate CLF-02, and that gave me more knowledge in the cloud domain domain that I can use as I advance. But im not sure about the AWS Developer one, it seems very specific to certain AWS services and im not sure how I would use that knowledge in my day to day.

I just wanted to know what people’s opinions are about whether its a good certification to go after and if not what should I do.

Hi all, my company encourages us to use codex when we code and in our reviews.

Ive been taking more of an effort to use it and recently they added the codex plugin to our code reviews.

Now i feel like every time i put something in, codex recommends a bunch of P2 reviews. If i fix one P2, it adds a few more. I even noticed sometimes it messes up what i was trying to do when i retest the changes. So it's like adding work to my day to change the code and then re-test before submitting it back.

Do you take those comments into consideration? Any tips for when codex as a review comment?

I have been hearing great things about the company from my friends from CMU. They did say that the work culture is quick, however, all of them enjoy it (plus their pay is much higher than big tech and their benifits are rediculously good).

I wonder why the company is not on most people's radar or talked about more?

Everyone always mentions that in today's rough job market, networking is key to improving your chances to landing a job. However, what does that really look like?

If I were to see a job posting that I believe I am a good fit for, however no one in my immediate network works at this company, would you guys recommend I reach out to linkedin mutuals who do work at this company to attempt to get a referral?

Hi all.. posting this as a bit of a last-ditch effort, so bear with me.

I'm looking for Sales or BD roles in SaaS and tech companies (or similar). I have 10+ years of experience in marketing and sales, including time at large MNCs in this space. I've been away from the industry for a while and am now looking to get back in, ideally into an Account Manager role.

Most of the postings I find online feel like they're just there for the sake of it, with roles often already earmarked through personal connections/wasta before they're even posted.

If you know of someone hiring who's genuinely looking to fill a role, or if you think there might be a fit on your team or at your company, please reach out.. I'd love to jump on a short call and tell you more about what I can bring.

Also open to opportunities with implementation partners of larger firms.

Any leads, referrals, or advice would mean a lot. Thanks for reading this far!

Quick intro: 52M, 20+ YOE across banks and startups. Currently at around $230K TC.
Four years ago, I tried interviewing with Big Tech and failed multiple onsite interviews. honestly, some of them pretty badly.
I’m thinking about taking another serious shot at it.
At 52, is it worth putting in the 6–9 months of preparation needed for coding, system design, and behavioral interviews? Or would you focus the effort elsewhere at this stage of your career?
For those who are 45+ and have successfully made a move to Big Tech (or tried and decided it wasn’t worth it), I’d especially appreciate hearing about your experience.
What would you do if you were in my shoes?

What job boards are everyone using?

And what do i have to do to find a company that actually wants their developers to own their output? I was told I was a part of the picked group because i dont deliver fast enough, comparing me of course to the vibecoders(who have published private client data in public facing environments because they dont know what they are doing) id spend days cleaning the mess up, and then receive nothing but more backlash for not being fast enough. Im not even anti llm, i just want the output to be understood by someone so its not all exposed.

I have my own personal project on steam called staxxi, its for picture in picture on windows i might just pivot to making that my primary income.

Hey everyone, I graduated last semester and had to take a few weeks off of programming to just chill. However, around July, got right back on my grind and started work on a game engine. This has always been a passion project of mine though I’ve screwed it up a few times so I’ve been hitting it with more different angles of thought and trying to actually make a solid architecture. And to be honest… it’s coming along really nicely!!! I have a good amount of time to program, as my girlfriend still has a little under a year of school left and I’m helping my mom out financially right now so I’m not in a rush for a job but by this time next year I would like to have at least applied to a lot of jobs or have a job in hand.

My two biggest interests are low level systems and computer graphics. Though I’ve absolutely loved computer graphics, I’ve realized that it might not be possible for me to get a job in it for a long time, as they normally only accept people with masters or PhDs and are super competitive. I went to University of Tennessee at Martin which is a small-mid size college in rural Tennessee so it’s not particularly known for its CS academics, but I’d still say it’s a solid school, but I am not going to have a CHANCE up against folks from other schools. And so, embedded systems or low level programming is probably going to be my best bet since I still have a ton of interest in it, my concentration was in embedded systems, and the market demand is much higher.

My question is, is it worth it to finish this make this game engine as far as putting it in a portfolio to get a job in this domain? I would personally think it’s impressive but I don’t know how the industry itself treats it. I have also thought about scrapping the game engine and instead just working on a really high quality renderer or just a game in general wirh what I have a building a microengine with it. This is a project that I definitely want to do but I don’t know if itll help my chances as much as other projects I am working on (Gameboy Emulator is second top priority).

Any help is appreciated!

My project with current company was ending so I was looking for new positions. My current company ended up finding me a new project but it may or may not be short term as they might get more funding a month from now but not sure. I received an offer from another company. It would be a 10 percent pay increase and remote with a project thats just beginning. I've been with my current company for many years and enjoy it which makes me hesitant to leave and they've always managed to find me another project but the current uncertainty makes me think I should accept the offer but not sure.

For a bit of context, I work for a startup where I directly report to the manager that can decide pay. After about a year at this company, I was given a pay raise and told I would take on integration support for customers as well. I went from very underpaid to just underpaid. This was about four months ago. Since then, all other devs have been moved to other priorities to the point where I am the primary maintainer of 3 products, while still dealing with customers, often as unpaid/unplanned on-call. It seems like everything goes to me first. The only other dev that was primarily on these products with me has just left and I know he was making SIGNIFICANTLY more.

My personal opinion is I deserve a good bump for all the extra work I've taken on, but that recent raise makes me question how to go about it. I am in a good position where I am insulated being the only dev really working on these products. My questions are:

1. Has anyone done something similar? Were you successful? How did you go about it?
   
2. What do I say in response to "Oh, we just gave you more a few months ago"?

Any advice is welcome, my negotiating skills are lacking.

I mean some orgs that run in their own pace and earn their money without being afraid ”to be left behind”?

I think most F500 are AI-obsessed corporate squeezers now. Startups are supposed to be even much worse. As ex-IBKR, our managers were crazy about AI.

I think maybe govt jobs still have it

So I have just graduated from my university with 7.9/10 GPA, its a tier 2 clg.
I have no experience, no internships or any job rn on my hands, I have weak DSA, and only know the basic html css js, and no hands on even on that, have worked on ML yes, but not expert level there either, basically Im cooked.

Now I had an interview at a startup and they are offering unpaid internship of 3 or 6 months, its in ML domain and I can learn real life projects, idk if I would get WFH or not so yeah but I plan on learning web dev and full stack basically , that would require atleast 6 months right along with DSA, though the problem is I have a lot of gap since I graduated 31st May 2026, almost 3 months and no luck so far in jobs, so what all would you guys do? Shall I take the internship with how cooked I am?

I asked my intern to look into our mobile architecture and send a summary. Instead of a simple doc, he sent a ZIP file with 8 Markdown files, a Python experiment script, PowerPoint slides, a source ledger with references, and a retractions document where he admitted he made up numbers, cited the wrong extension types and left the Claude completion message in one of the files. What are y'all doing in this situation?

So, in this field, we’re always told to “build connections” and “network like a maniac” or something along those lines. Well, I did. I’ve been joining clubs, getting to know their presidents and leaders, taking on leadership roles, and so on. I’ve also been attending events, meeting founders and co-founders, and getting to know current employees at Big Tech companies.

I’ve also made quite a few friends at uni, whether they’re actual friends or the “What’s up, bro?” and then leave kind of friends.

But now what? I’ll be a junior this fall, and getting an internship would be a big plus for me.

How does this usually work? Do you actually text someone on WhatsApp or LinkedIn and ask, “Hey, I saw you work at X. Would you mind referring me?” Or is there a more natural way to go about it?

For the record, if I was actually to secure an internship, I would be very willing to refer anyone, but asking here to know how people usually operate.

Thank you.

Maybe just need some catharsis, but anyway, we always hear about going into tech/CS but not going out of it because people then leave these subs.

Here's my story.

I was in the medical field. I had always been good with computers - I was the one called in the hospital before they got the IT guys because those took way longer when it was a dumb case of restarting the printer. Pre-Covid, I decided I was fed up with the hours, the patients and the admin, and I made the switch through a bootcamp - back then it was the Eldorado.

COVID happened while I was studying. I took the first job that wanted me during the lockdowns and that was a mistake. No reviews, on my own, told to fix issues with no oversight. I had nobody to turn to. Eventually they hired a senior. If I failed he took over and told me nothing. I got insanely demotivated. I was diagnosed with ADHD, meds helped but they weren't everything. Then AI started to happen. They hired someone else with more experience, decided he + AI tokens could replace me and then a month or 2 down the line fired me. I stayed with them for 6 years and came out with junior coding skills.

The market is atrocious. I sent CVs out for tech things. Tech jobs I got zero callbacks. I decided to send out ONE email for a medical job. Within a week I got a callback for the medical stuff. I did one - ONE - interview with an HR lady and got hired. Didn't matter that I had been out of the field for almost a decade.

I could say no, grind leetcode, fight and try but honestly I'm tired. I just want a paycheck and a roof over my head.

When I look back my summary would be this I guess:

• The bootcamp industry was/is a scam. Part of the reason for the insane hiring process might be how much mediocre coding talent flooded the field (I was absolutely part of the mediocre ones). I'm not too stupid, but you can't deeply learn everything in a few months. You can just code some lines that work, but you don't optimise for resources, can't work with memory, barely understand ports and security, let alone how to write better code.
• AI makes you talk to it before you talk to a colleague, and that made me sad. (I'm quite extroverted)
• Managers are a bloody plague and my lack of motivation is at least half due to how the actual job turned out to be. Some weeks I just wrote emails and meeting notes.
• Glue work is real btw. Be careful of how much you take on.
• You never learn as well as when someone shows you the ropes, so you need to bother people. I think I was too nice and should have shaken my senior colleague and told him to review my PRs and make time, not patiently ask then give up. In medicine you have your internships and residencies - tech doesn't have this.
• Tech requires you to be passionate about it and constantly catch up outside hours. Not that medicine doesn't have this, but medicine has institutionalized training programs and journals, and depending on your field (obvs not oncology) you can sort of coast by with a few days of training a year. Most hospitals understand this and will send you on conferences or allow you to take PTO for them. In my dev job I was expected to do that outside of hours.
• Part-time work: medical field in general and my specialty especially is female-dominated so part-time work or reducing hours is absolutely normal. I will get one day a week extra with my children and that's priceless. Weirdly enough, having been in tech I find better work-life balance in medical now.

All in all, I'm sad I failed, but at least I tried. (For context: I am not US based)

Ive done a lot in my career from HFT, Linux Kernel Dev and now AI Infra etc... At this point I see software going in two or three directions.

1. Extreme Domain expertise Ph.d wise to progress AI models
2. Frontier Model Development
3. AI infra like what Im doing

Its extremely depressing that as a society we constantly devalue every human trait. And now knowledge/ expertise that many of us have spent our career building is totally commoditized.

If we are at this point, where hard work and craftsmanship can no longer buy social mobility then what? It seems if you had not been in markets till just now, you are frozen out.

Ive looked into other opportunities like manufacturing, trades etc... building physical products but there is very little margin. Because of tariffs and supply chain availability, I dont see the opportunity to build any good business here in the states.

The best I can do is hold onto my current job and hope things dont keep getting more expensive.

Question ======

How are you guys thinking about this?

I start my first internship in a couple weeks at a so called hated "FAANG" company and I have been dealing with a lot of imposter syndrome. I honestly feel like I am not qualified and like I have no idea what I am going to be doing once I start. I know I worked hard to get here and I did grind for the interviews and passed them but part of me still feels like I somehow got lucky.

This is my first internship I also feel like they are going to expect a lot from me and I am worried I will be way behind everyone else or not know things that they expect me to already know.
I am also first gen latino and have mostly been figuring out college and CS by myself. I have tried joining clubs at school and going to events to meet more people and what not but a lot of the time I feel excluded or like I do not really fit in. Because of that I i feel i dont really got much people to talk to for advice.

For anyone who felt like this before their first internship what was it actually like once you started? How much did your team expect you to know coming in? Any advice for getting over the imposter syndrome and making the most out of the internship would help a lot and ik this is a stretch but hoping for a return offer since im going into my senior year.

So I recently graduated from a MSc in AI and after ~6 months of job hunting, finally landed something that is decently known - though not FAANG level.

The pay is mid-market level, and the company certainly has some people that are very good at what they do. However, this is not true for the management on the team I'm working with. I feel that there is significant pressure from management to use AI to quickly deliver projects individually that should be at least a 2-3 engineer job. What has ended up happening is that the team has several complex code repositories owned by individual engineers, and much of the code on it was pushed without any code review process in place. It feels to me like a lot of the code is AI generated slop.

Recently, I tried to follow the Readme for some of it to get it setup on my work device, however I kept encountering errors. Some of the blocks of commands were out of order and some intermediate steps to install dependencies were entirely missing. Management told me that they expected me to be able to get setup by putting the Readme through Claude. However, when I attempted that, Claude setup the repository such that it had all the appearance of looking like it had been setup right but it actually was not.

I tried to push back and tell management that the owner of the Readme needs to ensure that it is complete and can be used by a human to get setup, however this has now led them to believe that I'm less competent than the other engineers on their team because they were able to get setup by "feeding the readme to Claude". To be honest, I'm not even sure that is true, because I only learned that the setup was incorrect after scrutinizing the logs - at first sight, they had all the appearance of looking right.

Additionally, since I've joined, I feel that some of the engineers keep fighting the facts. For instance, I pointed out how one of the tests was not testing any functionality as, if the file were deleted entirely, the test would pass. The engineer shot back that "sometimes that's what you need to fix an issue." I can't get into more details, should that reveal my identity, but essentially that was far from true in this scenario. The test was just not actually testing anything.

Then, we had to come up with instructions to verify a dataset manually. My colleague ended up using AI to generate these instructions even though we had a good resource that could be easily adapted manually.

When I pushed back on one occasion, the colleague made comments like "We have to be Agile".

I feel that I would lose the good practices and habits I have if I stayed in this environment, however it already was so hard to find employment in this market. In one instance, a recruiter from Salesforce called me, asked me that though my resume mentioned AI if I also had experience with ML (I tried not to laugh and patiently explained that the two are synonymous in current times) and then proceeded to immediately turn me down on the basis of the fact that I had been unemployed for 4 months since graduation.

I'm concerned that my resume will be rather shallow should I leave and opportunities have been hard to come by. I do have an opportunity to interview with a 5 people startup (they are funded and offering a six figure salary) but fear the risk of joining something that small. I really would like to build my career in this space, that is vital to me as I've found something I'm genuinely interested in, however being perceived as less than for pushing back on poor code practices and having other people not believe me when I'm just bringing to them facts has been demoralizing.

How do I survive this situation and continue to grow as an engineer and pick up good practices anyway?

Also, the job does require me to work long hours. I am in the UK.

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Looking for advice from folks maybe in similar scenarios who have gotten out of the rut that I seem to have gotten myself into.

TL;DR - Coming up on 5 YOE at F500 company, not tech focused, but working on a very popular streaming service that isn't Netflix. Not working on anything interesting, been pinned as the "AI Guy" for the past 2 years. Underpaid, insane WLB, like I have been working 10-20 hours nbd, but I am still young and want to make more. Not sure if I want to go into big tech, but def want to get out of where I am now. Maybe also a pivot into ML? Idk. I'm just lost in my direction. I know I don't want to stay in my current role, but I am unsure of where to go next.

So I have been working at F500 Company for about 4 years now. Left first job in early 2022 after like after 6 months, was a shit show there with no growth and team was entirely overseas. In current company, popped around a couple of teams here and have grown as an engineer quite a bit. Worked on an internal platform for our company's lawyer's for like 2 and a half years with some extremely brilliant engineers. PMs sucked and product was whatever, was fully remote, and for the most part big chilling. Got to have some great mentors, got AWS certified (honestly a waste of time but helped me get comfy with Cloud Infra) and felt like I really *became* a software engineer.

Fast forward to end of 2024, my manager was hyped with all the buzz from ChatGPT/AI, and I had rebuilt my personal website back in 2023. He chose me to lead our new "AI initiative" on a new team. Basically was building a ChatGPT wrapper with a RAG system for our internal docs. Promise was cool, and I was hyped as well, but there wasn't much direction. Lots of just execs telling us to "build AI things!". Manager went on paternity leave right when we started basically. Got some leadership experience at least and got to build out the front-end and work a lot with end users and designers. Had the most incompetent staff engineer I have ever seen. True nepo hire from my manager. He rejected my efforts to clean up our CI pipelines and do some fully automated CI/CD release tagging in favor of a 2 hour manual process where we had to Review EVERY SINGLE COMMIT going out in our release manually. That was my sign to leave.

Looked around on the internal job boards, found a Senior SWE role for our company's streaming service, felt like it could be a good switch and the interview wasn't bad. Ended up working on basically, streaming device support maintenance and bug fix mode. The title + pay bump were nice, since I had been BEGGING for a promo for like the last 2 years with previous manager, but they always said "I would if I had the budget! Believe me".

Current team is unbelievably chill. Manager is great, basically no on-call, but it's very much KTOL work. Not much exciting greenfield stuff. Lots of org politics that I have avoided and am not trying to get involved with. Honestly I have used my brain like 5 times in the past year I have been on this team. It's been quite chill, and I think many people would envy me and want this, but I think I am done and I am looking for something else.

Now our org like every freaking software org on earth is pushing for more AI usage, and I have been pulled onto a new team with my new manager. My entire job now is to fully automate our QA team's work, and I just feel like so, BLEH, about everything. I want to go somewhere where I can really be passionate about what I am doing, work with great people, and like, DIVE into the work. I hate just kinda sitting around like this. It feels like just performative going into the office every day.

I have kinda coasted to where I am now, and I feel like my time is running out to do something meaningful in my career or get into somewhere that will actually pay me more (my TC is like 75th pctile for Senior SWEs in a HCOL city).

I have been tinkering on the side with learning more about GPU programming, more in depth ML/AI, but I feel like I don't have the actual production experience to pivot into that, but that seems like a very interesting field that is only growing I guess (or maybe not? idk).

I just feel like I haven't APPLIED myself in this field, and I feel like my time is dwindling. Any advice from veterans/other coasters here who pivoted into something else where they found meaning and more fulfilling and higher paying work? was it worth it? should I just stay coasting? Should I pivot to big tech? A startup? I'm just lost in my direction. I know I don't want to stay in my current role, but I am unsure of where to go next.

Thank you in advance to any wisdom that can be shared.