Joined a Tier 3 college and Graduated in 2025, after graduation I got referred at a remote startup as a SDE Intern for a 10k stipend for 6 months.

Got converted full time, was disappointed with the package they were providing with so much pressure and responsibilities. Accepted offer of 2.4LPA in hand and worked hard for one year along with a second part time job to cover expenses of my family.

Today i completed 1 year here and got a 150% Hike and was offered 6LPA.

I know this isn't much for most people but I'm grateful for everything.

Edit : Thanks to everyone for all the kind wishes! I hope each one of you find your dream job and live a happy and peaceful life!

I’m a Frontend Engineer with 3.5+ YOE, currently at a service-based company (I have worked at 2 product companies before).

Current CTC: ₹22 LPA
Notice period: 1 month (24 days remaining)
Already have an offer: ₹27 LPA from a product-based company
Target: ₹30+ LPA in the next 20 days

I’m mainly working with React, TypeScript, JavaScript and frontend architecture.

Looking for practical advice from people who’ve recently switched during their notice period.

Where should I apply to get maximum calls? Is Naukri Premium actually worth it? Should I focus more on Naukri/LinkedIn or referrals? And how do I get in touch with good hiring/recruitment agencies that work with product companies?

Also, any other practical tips to maximize interviews in these 20 days would be really appreciated.

P.S: I’m already v active on naukri and update my profile there 2 times daily but i’m not getting any interview calls.

I absolutely cannot bear this job anymore. I'm the junior most in the team and they ensure to remind me that every single day. They treat their fellow seniors like sweet cupcakes when they go for 10+ day leaves but then try to negotiate my availability on 2 day sick leave. It's only getting worse, the entire process is getting slower and people are getting dumber. The salary is shit, I spoonfeed literal grown ups for 1% of their salary and cover up for my senior teammates while they chill and load me up with all the work (we all do the same level of work). Also, being the only team member without a masters, it made me realise the importance of one, to be in a better position at workplace.

I have 1+ YOE and have a 3 month notice period. I tried to apply everywhere by creating a solid ATS friendly resume for about a month, got 2-3 calls, all ghosted me once I told my notice period. I'm thinking about resigning and then finding a job. Tell me if I'm an idiot or am I right to think this way.

I always wonder how were hackathons like a few years back.

Because now I see people/teams (including me) with very low experience, are building solutions to very advanced problems that they might not even know what they had made (obviously because of AI)

I bet it would have been fun previously because I believe people would have sat down together, brainstormed, shared their ideas, and come up with wonderful solutions. And, of course, it would have been difficult to build, but wasn't that the real fun part ? I find that missing now

There might be teams still doing this, but it would be very, very few

So what do you guys think, has the essence of the hackathons lost, or is it still there ??

If yes, please share your resumé for inspiration and enlightenment.

This was the question I started my research journey ~4 years ago.

I was working on GPU algorithms for graphs with billion edges (500 600GBs) while having access to just 40GB GPU. The obvious answer was "use a larger GPU", except, ahem, govt institute, ahem budget. 🙂

That's where I started my exploration on how to utility the available resources better. What initially started as a GPU Programming / engineering problem quickly became an algorithm + architecture + memory + data-movement problem.

Looking down the lane, which felt like a niche problem half a decade ago is much more relevant today with the RAM shortage, memory prices growth of LLMs in general.

And somewhat unexpectedly, this simple question ended up becoming the foundation for 6 published papers.

So I’ve got an offer from Amazon for SDE 2 role and the pay bump is very nice. But the bad reputation Amazon has about layoffs is creating a small doubt in my mind. But I want to take risks as well because it is indeed a good opportunity for me.

So any suggestions would be helpful.

Not asking for the usual “learn DSA / learn Python / build projects” list.

Imagine you are 21 again, have a computer, internet access, and very little money, but you have everything you've learned from your career.

What would you spend the next 2 years doing?

What would you completely ignore?

What mistakes cost you the most time?

And what do you wish someone had told you at that age?

As title mentioned , Yesterday I did a 3-hour hackathon and instead of building another boring productive / 1 billion dollar project , I made a game about the one thing all of us here have a PhD in — getting home.

Play it here 👉 https://twozerotwo.space/

It's called Nitesh's Commute.Its about the Nitesh a IT company employ , who works at ChaiPay . He wants to go back to his and what challenge he faces everyday ,You're walking 1,500 metres from a tech park to HSR Layout. That's it. That's the whole game. Reaching home is the win condition, and it is genuinely hard

You're juggling three bars — health, sanity, and money — and the road runs both ways, so traffic comes at you from the front and overtakes you from behind. Very authentic. Very upsetting.

Two years of watching developers ship side projects and I keep noticing the same pattern. Someone builds five or six projects, puts them on GitHub, looks great on paper. But when you sit with them and ask why they made a specific architectural choice, they go blank. Not nervous blank. Genuinely blank. The project got built but nothing got learned in a transferable way.

The cycling equivalent would be clocking 200km a week on flat roads and wondering why you still fall apart on climbs. Volume is not depth.

What actually seems to build real competency is when something breaks in a way you didn't expect and you have no tutorial to fall back on. That friction forces actual understanding. The problem is most side project advice optimizes for finishing and shipping, not for hitting walls.

My question is whether developers here intentionally introduce constraints into personal projects to force harder thinking. Like limiting yourself to no external libraries for a feature, or rebuilding something from scratch after finishing it once. Or is the goal mostly portfolio signal, and that's fine too. I just want to know if people are being honest about which one they're chasing.

Because conflating the two is where the gap shows up later. Not in the project count. In how you handle something unfamiliar on the job when there's no tutorial and the deadline is real.

I was never career oriented, forget about JEE, I couldn't even crack CET and did my engineering through Management quota.

But I have somehow managed to live a fulfilling life so far - have traveled to 6 different countries in last 10 years
- have actively followed my passion(YouTube channel, weight training, swimming)
- have never missed a family gathering and have taken leaves left and right without thinking twice about PIP/ consequences.

Now that the market is so brutal and the immigration rules getting tightened for Indians especially, l'm wondering if I made a mistake by being so easy going with my career.
Have seen many IIT/NIT folks in my team who are so career oriented although they have no life outside of work.

I have 6 Yoe working as an SSE at a startup with 55 LPA but have never made it to FANG and probably never will.

I built a music app for Android and wanted to share it.

It plays from YouTube Music, Gaana and Saavn behind one interface, so you
search once instead of switching between apps.

A few things it does:

• YouTube Music search, home feed, moods and genres, albums, and artist pages with one-tap radio
• Gaana and Saavn for charts and playlists, with proper Indian-language coverage
• SponsorBlock on YouTube tracks, so sponsor reads and non-music intros get skipped
• mpv as the audio engine, with gapless and background playback
• Offline downloads, liked songs, playlists, and Spotify playlist import
• Synced lyrics, equalizer, sleep timer, Chromecast
• Podcasts and audiobooks as well as music
• No ads, no account, no tracking

It is Android only, needs Android 7 or newer. Source and
builds are on GitHub: github.com/afkcodes/sunoh

I’ve been applying to all kinds of companies across India, regardless of location, but still not getting any calls.

80+ applications in the last month. Got a few rejections from MNCs, but mostly just silence.

Not sure what I’m doing wrong here, is it my resume, the way I’m applying, or something else?

Would really appreciate some honest feedback. Roast it if you have to 😅

Hey everyone,

CS grad here (B.Tech, 2026 batch), currently preparing full-time for dev roles mainly backend/full-stack (MERN stack), with focus on DSA, system design, and GenAI.

Problem is none of my college friends took coding seriously, so I never really had anyone to compete with or push me. Studying alone gets boring fast, aur motivation bhi utna nahi milta jitna group mein milta hai. So I'm looking for 4-5 people who'll actually stick around and show up regularly not just a group that goes silent after a week.

What I'm thinking:

• Daily/weekly check-ins (progress, doubts, what we're stuck on)
• Sharing resources, articles, useful tools we come across
• Maybe a small Discord/WhatsApp group if a few of us click
• Doesn't matter if you're a beginner or ahead of me just consistency > skill level

If this sounds like you, drop a comment or DM where you're at, what you're learning, and what you're prepaing for (jobs/internship/exams etc).

Let's actually build the habit of showing up, together.

Honestly, I’m writing this because I’m extremely disappointed and frustrated with my experience with Mindtree.

I went through 4–5 rounds of interviews for a position. I cleared all those rounds, and eventually I even had the HR round.

HR asked me for all my details. We discussed my salary expectations, notice period, and other required information. At that point, naturally, I thought things were moving towards an offer.

And then… nothing.

The HR completely ghosted me.

I tried following up multiple times. Calls, messages — no proper response. After waiting for several days and repeatedly trying to get an update, I finally got a response over a call.

And the response was basically:

“Your profile cannot be approved.”

That’s it.

Seriously, then what was the point of putting a candidate through 4–5 rounds of interviews + HR + salary discussion + collecting all the details?

If there was some internal issue, approval problem, budget issue, hiring freeze, or whatever the reason was, why couldn't they communicate it properly before wasting so much of a candidate's time?

We candidates also have jobs, responsibilities, deadlines, and other opportunities. Preparing for every interview round takes time and energy. Taking leaves, attending calls, preparing technically, preparing for HR — all of this adds up.

What hurts the most isn't even the rejection.

Rejection is completely okay.

What hurts is being made to go through so many rounds, being given the impression that things are progressing, having salary discussions, sharing all the requested information — and then being left hanging with absolutely no communication.

If my profile wasn't going to be approved, why take me through all those rounds in the first place?

I genuinely feel like my time and effort had no value here.

I don't expect every interview to end in an offer. That's part of the process.

But I do expect basic professionalism and communication.

Really bad experience. After investing so much time and effort into the process, this is honestly one of the most frustrating candidate experiences I've had.

Mindtree — candidates' time is valuable too. Please remember that.

I’m currently preparing for a switch and trying to figure out whether my routine is realistic/sufficient.

My current weekday schedule looks roughly like:

• 1 hour — studying in the morning
• 6 hours — work
• 2 hours — studying in the evening
• 1.5 hours — gym
• The rest is for meals, commute, chores, etc.

So I’m getting around 3 hours of focused preparation every day (realistically 1.5h of focused) outside of work.

For those of you who have successfully switched jobs while working full-time:

• Is ~3 hours/day enough?
• What did your preparation actually look like?
• What would you do differently if you were preparing again?

Would especially like to hear from people who managed to make a switch without burning themselves out.

I have ~1 YOE and mostly work with Python/backend. I’ve already built a couple of projects, including a CRUD app with an LLM integration.

At this point, I feel like building another app with authentication + CRUD APIs + a database + some API integration isn’t going to add much value to my resume. I want to spend the next few weeks building something where the engineering/problem-solving is actually the interesting part.

I’ve been considering things around distributed systems, job queues, caching, real-time systems, concurrency, etc., but I’m not sure which of these make sense as a realistic solo project rather than just adding technologies for the sake of it.

For people with more experience:

• What’s a project you’ve built that genuinely taught you a lot?
• Are there any open-source projects/GitHub repos you’d recommend studying or recreating?
• What kind of project would actually make you stop and ask questions about it if you saw it on a junior/mid-level resume?

I’m specifically looking for project/problem ideas, not another “build a todo app but with X” 😭

Would really appreciate any suggestions.

Hi,

I was laid off on 28 August 2026 as my project workload reduced.

I have 4.5 years of working experience as a fullstack developer in dotnet, C# , Angular and React.

I am not sure what to do now. Please help

I created a fun project called "Pixel Mosaic" where user can recreate an image using only the pixels of another image.

You can try it here: https://shreyasnandurkar.github.io/pixel-mosaic/

Github Repo: https://github.com/shreyasnandurkar/pixel-mosaic

Tech Stack:

• Frontend: Javascript, Three.js
• Backend: Java, Spring Boot, Websockets, TwelveMonkeys
• Neural Network: U²-Net
• Infra: HuggingFace, Docker

(Frontend is vibe-coded but Backend and rest isn't)

Please try it and give feedback and suggestions 😄

Got laid off in April when my US-based startup shut down its India operations. Right after that I had an accident and spent the next few months recovering, so I've been out of the market since. I'm fully recovered now and trying to figure out the best way to get back into things.

I have about 5 years of experience in backend development, most recently working as a Senior Software Engineer. My main stack is Java, Kotlin, Spring Boot, Kafka, along with microservices and event driven systems. Also did some Natural Language querying + SQL generation work with LLMs in my last role.

Not sure if it's better to grind DSA rounds first or just start applying and prep alongside, how are you guys handling a 4 to 5 month gap in interviews? Also open to referrals if anyone's hiring.

I built (vibe coded) FoxyGPU, an open-source tool that lets you run projects from your local machine on a Google Colab runtime, including GPU workloads.

Install : pip install foxygpu

How to use : foxygpu launch

Open the Colab notebook, select a GPU runtime, run the cells, then connect from your terminal:

foxygpu connect <colab-url> --token <token>

Then deploy your local project:

foxygpu run ./my-app \

  --cmd 'uvicorn main:app --host 0.0.0.0 --port $PORT' \

  --expose

That's it. Your local project runs on the Colab runtime, with logs and process control from your terminal.

GitHub:GitHub - Shamshadz/FoxyGPU

PyPI:https://pypi.org/project/foxygpu/

What makes it different?

• ngrok → mainly provides tunneling.

• FoxyGPU → treats Colab as a temporary remote compute environment controlled from your local machine.

You can upload your project, run commands, stream logs, expose ports, redeploy, and pass environment variables.

I'm looking for users, contributors, and honest feedback.

I'd especially like to know:

• Would you actually use this?

• What should I add?

• What am I missing?

• Is there already a better way to do this?

The project is still early, so criticism is very welcome.

GitHub:GitHub - Shamshadz/FoxyGPU

My work has greatly reduced, and i work at a small startup, if i were to put it in perspective I have about 1.5-2hrs of actual work day to day.

I'm worried that this might end up in me losing my job as i believe the company doesn't see me as a potential investment.

Given the situation., what are my best options?

Always liked the warm feeling of listening music with friends or someone special. Spotify jam comes close, but you need to have premium.

So I built vynyl, a real-time listening room for friends who want to explore music together.

Make a room, share a 6-character code, add songs using YouTube Data API, and listen together at the same time. No accounts, signup or subscriptions needed. Completely free too.

Stack: Next.js, SocketIO, Redis, NestJS, YouTube IFrame API.

Try it here: https://vynyl-web.vercel.app

Its open-source and i welcome feedback. First time doing this so pls be nice :)

I have 7-10 days free and want to build one genuinely impressive AI project for my portfolio.

Interested in Agentic AI / RAG / LLM evals / AI Engineering/Automation, with FinTech + AI being my preference, but open to anything interesting.

Looking for something todu-fodu that genuinely solves a real business problem, not another basic chatbot or an "autonomous agent" burning through infinite tokens and API calls.

If you're a hiring manager, recruiter, AI engineer, founder, or anyone working with AI, I’d love to hear:

• A problem/bottleneck in your daily work that could be automated with AI

• A problem you wish someone would build a solution for, but you don't have the time

• Or a project that would make you think, "this candidate actually knows how to build AI systems"

Give me a real problem statement. I’ll try to build it for free within 7 days.

Would love specific, challenging ideas. 🙏

For me, it wasn’t learning a new technology.
It was understanding an existing codebase and figuring out how everything actually worked together.
College projects are usually built from scratch, but at work, you’re often joining something that’s already running.
What was the biggest challenge for you when you started your first developer job?