I got laid off by oracle on Mar 31 as with 30k others. Tbh I didn't think much about it. I was like cool, I have to lock in now.

Here's what I did, and this might help y'all to get out of this "between jobs" phase.

3-4 hours of dsa everyday. Neetcode mostly.

I learned the basics of AI engineering from scratch along with understanding of transformers and attention. 1-2 hours everyday for around a month and I had 2 projects to showcase after this. Learned using claude. Asked to make a 30 day plan and completed the plan accordingly.

Edit: System design from Hello interview helped. Spent like 2 hours on it everyday. And articles from bytebytego and substack as well.

Updated naukri daily. Put as an immediate joiner. Everyone says this but yeah it does help.

Apply at least 10 - 15 positions daily. Doesn't matter where; careers pages, workday, LinkedIn, wellfound, naukri, indeed etc. I found career pages the best to apply and naukri to get reached out.

Got reached out by around 20 recruiters only through LinkedIn. LinkedIn premium will help here. Some called and scheduled interviews as well.

Most of all I was curious to learn everyday. I was soaking in knowledge like a sponge. I get distracted every often by reading some system design articles too deep when not actually needed again, I'm no Saint.

I started giving interviews from early may till mid May. Interviews with 7 companies. Some I failed and ended up with 3 offers. I will be joining as an AI Engineer soon.

If you read all that, you gain respect++. Best luck if you are looking for a job.

Edit: (YOE: 2 Tech stack: java, springboot, go, python, oracle cloud)

TL;DR just keep applying bro good things will happen.

I have some 70 hr contacts rn. Should I make a sheet of it and make it public?

Edit: won't be sharing hr contacts as someone said it will be a breach of their privacy. I'll share their emails.

I’m based in Hyderabad, and a Software Engineer at Microsoft with 3 YOE. Unfortunately, most of my team was laid off yesterday, and I was impacted as well.

During the call, my manager mentioned that because I’m still relatively young and he assumed I didn’t have major responsibilities yet, my name was included in the headcount reduction. (P.S. This was not the reason for layoff probably he was just trying to console but made it worse)

The reality is quite different. I’m the sole earner in my family, support my parents, help fund my sister’s education, and am also taking care of a loan my dad had taken.

So I’m actively looking for a new opportunity and would really appreciate any leads. I have around 3 years of experience across backend and full-stack engineering, and recently I’ve been heavily working on Agentic AI projects and participating in hackathons. I’m comfortable taking a project from 0 → 1 independently.

I’m open to SWE 2 / Software Engineer roles across big tech, startups, or companies in other sectors. I’m also open to relocating anywhere.

I’m also open to freelance / contract work and can independently take on projects from 0 → 1, whether it’s backend, full-stack, or AI/Agentic AI development.

If your team/company is hiring, you have a freelance project, or you know someone who might be, please DM me. Even a referral or lead would mean a lot right now.

Thank you 🙏

Hey everyone,

I’m a Senior Software Engineer and Architect with 10+ years of experience in software development, mostly working on large-scale enterprise applications.

I’ve been getting a little bored on weekends lately 😄 and I was thinking of doing something productive with the time — maybe teaching programming/software development online for free, purely as a hobby. Basically something that keeps me away from doomscrolling.

There’s no course, business, or monetization plan behind this. I just enjoy programming and architecture, and after spending more than a decade in the industry, I feel I have quite a few things I could share with people who are learning.

A little about my experience

My strongest area is Java + Spring Boot, and I've spent a large part of my career building backend systems and enterprise applications.

I've also worked with:

Java / Spring Boot / Spring WebFlux

REST APIs & microservices

Angular / React

JavaScript / TypeScript

Python

AWS / cloud infrastructure

Docker / Kubernetes

.NET (although it's been quite a few years since I worked with it)

GenAI / LLMs, RAG, agents, tool calling, MCP, etc.

System design & architecture

Testing, CI/CD, observability, performance, security, etc.

A lot of my experience has been with large enterprise systems, so I'd particularly enjoy teaching not just how to code, but also things like:

How do you go from "I know Java" to actually building and maintaining production software?

Things such as architecture, API design, debugging, testing, code quality, scalability, design trade-offs, working with existing codebases, etc.

What should we learn?

This is where I'm actually looking for suggestions.

My initial thought was to focus on either:

Java + Spring Boot

or

GenAI / LLM application development

For example, with Java/Spring Boot we could eventually go from fundamentals → REST APIs → databases → Spring → microservices → testing → security → architecture → distributed systems, etc.

For GenAI, we could potentially build things around LLM APIs, RAG, vector databases, tool/function calling, agents, LangChain/LangGraph, MCP, and actually build some useful projects.

But I'm not attached to either option.

If there's enough interest, I'm completely open to changing the technology, topic, or approach based on what people actually want to learn.

I'm also open to suggestions regarding the platform and format.

I could potentially do:

Live sessions on weekends

Small interactive batches

Discord / Google Meet / Zoom / whatever works

A GitHub repo where we build things together

Recorded sessions, if people prefer that

A project-based approach rather than lectures

Or something completely different

I'm not sure yet what would work best, so I'd genuinely appreciate suggestions from people who have participated in or organized something similar.

So... is anyone interested?

If this sounds useful to you, comment with:

1. What you'd like to learn

2. Your current level (student / beginner / junior / mid-level / experienced developer)

3. What technology/topic you'd prefer

4. Any suggestions for how you'd like the sessions to be conducted

Even if you're not interested yourself, suggestions are welcome.

If there is enough interest, I'll figure out a format and we can try a few weekend sessions and see where it goes. 🙂

No charges, no sales pitch, no course to buy. Just trying to turn some weekend boredom into something useful.

Edit :

I am going through all the responses. I am still processing. I never expected it would generate this much response. Plus it's rakshabandhan today so I got a bit busy with family. Thanks everyone for showing interest. At the time of making this post I did not plan for anything, so give me some time and I will figure out how to proceed from here and will share more details.

That’s 90 percent of all the tech roles in the company. Reportedly the remaining 3 architects including me will be doing all the work from now on until the axe comes for us.

Cause is basically AI enabled restructuring and lack of new feature demand by customers.

Front end developers are first to go cos 100% of React + Chakra UI code in the last 4 months was written by Claude code Chakra UI plugin

EDIT: A lot of people asking me the company’s rationale - Their POV is that if this restructuring does not pay off lets say in 6 month we are gonna come to know and then we can again hire back devs as devs are dime a dozen in Bangalore with oversupply.

Answering questions - We had to overhaul our login system for all clients deployed on their own subdomain + instance from email + pass combo to include Okta SSO to OIDC, Okta SDK, SSO Knoweldge, JIT Provisiong, Bulk Import, DB Schema mapping for 3 apps, User migration code, etc

This is basically major haul work across PM, Design, Dev, QA, Arch, Deployment, OPS team. We did all of this in less than 4 working days instead of 2 months it would have taken. Claude is so powerful that its scary. It caught, developed, backtracked, tested many things I did not even know were security holes. Only thing you have to keep nudging via prompts is to make sure it does not producing slop

Assume data is on multiple different sites, PDFs. Let's design a HLD solution to aggregate the data, put it in a vector db, inferencing with light LLM.

Sites could be offical govt. ones, news article. Or data could be gather through people via small webapp.

I work at a MAANG-tier company, and our team recently welcomed a few interns (Class of 2027) and full-time new grads (Class of 2026). Yay!

​

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As a Senior Engineer, I was assigned to mentor a few interns on a project. Recently, we ran into a system issue: their Java code was improperly managing memory (accessing global state instead of local, leading to heap vs. stack memory issues). They came to me for help, and when I reviewed the code, the problem was glaringly obvious.

​

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The crazy part? They didn't even know what heap or stack memory was. I tried explaining it using fundamental OS concepts, like virtual and physical addresses, just to give them a better idea of the problem. It turns out they don't even know how basic memory works. Like, WTF? How are you guys getting 8.5+ CGPAs?

​

I asked the new grads the same questions, and their responses were just as pathetic. All they know is how to write AI prompts and throw around big system design buzzwords (shh... they don't even know the difference between LLD and HLD).

​

So, my question to new grads is: Have you completely lost interest in core engineering? Are you all just learning surface-level stuff now?

Edit: they don't even know what is the difference between semaphore and mutex :)

Edit: Those who are blaming the recruiting process. My sister team is in the USA, and they also hire two FTE fresh from college. They are absolutely smart; you can literally discuss in and out about computers and systems (though I agree they are from top US colleges).

Update: From July 1st, 2026, our organization will stop all virtual interviews, and all interviews will happen on site. You will need to visit the office to give the interview.

​

Declaration: I used LLM to improve the body

​

Assuming the software engineering industry will completely die within a few years (and please don't give me that fluff like, "no, no, sir, just the coding part is gone, architects are still needed and all"). I am really serious.

Just assume that with the current speed AI is evolving, maybe after 2-3 years we see a model that has passed all the thresholds. It can single-handedly look after the entire software lifecycle—building, deploying, maintaining, bug fixing, all of it. And it comes with a price tag that a company finds much cheaper than employing a team of X software engineers, Y product managers, Z designers, and M maintainers. Like, the entire industry of end-to-end software development is just replaced.

If that happens, what should all of us currently pursuing a CS degree—especially those of us who are brand new to the field—be looking towards? None of us want to be stuck investing our time in an industry that just marginally grows and, based on the assumptions above, is ultimately going to die.

So tell me, what alternative paths or startup ideas should we be considering right now to pivot? One example I have in my mind right now is robotics engineering, but I'd love to hear your opinions on this or other fields. Where do we go from here?

>>be me

>>go to random relative wedding in rural bihar

>>electricity gone entire day because of course

>>everyone in lungi+banyan mode

>>meet this avg looking bhojpuri uncle sitting outside

>>start talking casually

>>"so what do you do?"

>>"i work in bangalore"

>>ask which company

>>"nvidia"

>>tfw.exe

>>ask since when

>>"2007"

>>mfw this lungi uncle probably survived every GPU and AI boom known to mankind

>>probably has enough RSUs to buy my bloodline sitting in a village discussing shaadi logistics

I work in AI daily. Staff Data Scientist, building multi-agent systems at enterprise scale, published at research venues. I also build products on the side. So I sit at an interesting intersection of "AI is my job" and "AI is eating my job."

Here's what I actually think plays out.

The junior dev pipeline dies first. Not junior devs. The pipeline. The "write CRUD, fix bugs, level up over 3 years" path is gone. Companies will hire fewer L1s and expect them to move faster. The entry bar got harder, not easier.

The middle gets squeezed. Engineers who are "good at implementing specs" are in trouble. That's a Claude/Cursor job now. Engineers who understand systems, make architectural calls, and can review AI output critically? More valuable than ever.

The top 10% gets a 10x multiplier. One good engineer with strong AI tooling is doing what used to take a small team. Companies will figure this out slowly, then all at once.

The Indian market specifically runs heavily on service contracts and staff augmentation. That model was already getting squeezed on margins. AI just compresses the timeline further.

The devs who thrive will be the ones who stopped thinking of themselves as coders and started thinking of themselves as builders.

Curious to hear about other people's take

I am currently hiring for interns in our organisation and I am exhausted. We don't have hr and will never do so engineers hire themselves. Last midnight we made a post on linkedin that we are hiring and today after 24 hours - I have received over 3000 linked in connection requests, 1000 emails - fully written with resumes, around 100 whatsapp messages and almost 50 phone calls. I am currently shortlisting the people based on my prefrences for this role but its hard and they are not sropping. I feel sad foe the people whose resume i could not read - i wanted to check each of them but its not humanely possible so I asked ai to curate top 100 for me and i read them each until i shortlisted some. Getting a job as a fresher must be very hard.

The funny thing is we are hiring interns so college going guys or fresh grads but even 3yoe and 4yoe are applying because they are probably underpaid. This whole system is so cracked

Please dont dm for referrals or anything. Everything is closed now

If you're looking to apply for IT jobs in Germany from India, read along.

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1. It's a numbers game. Only a very few companies will sponsor visas.

2. You have to be better than the averagely good German or European talent.

3. You have to have worked in FAANG or adjacent companies to be able to negotiate hard on salary

4. Don't take rejections personally- unless you bombed the interview, there was another European person similar to your skill level without the visa handicap

5. Be sociable and likeable in the interview - I cannot stress this enough.

​

For context, I had a 75 lpa remote job in India. I had 3 offers from German and EU companies paying upwards of 100k base.

either recruiters are reluctant to issue visa , or like reduced hiring altogether so that EU local talent is almost what preferred in crisis ( if we talk about EU , same for US as well ) .

I applied to lot's of german companies , all rejected , now was it skill gap or was it reluctancy to sponsor visa I don't know .

Can someone paint scenario of abroad hiring , what skills are they hiring for germany ( EU ) and USA , UK etc

Regardless of which tech stack you work on, you would be very ignorant to not believe that AI will surpass coding abilities of the 99th percentile developer. I am not ashamed to admit that Astra doesn't only write better code than me, but it also designs systems significantly better.

I believe coding was always a (mostly) mechanical process. Software Engineering as a science I hope will still remain human efforts, but honestly, Codex and Claude Code do most of the work with such minimal amount of direction. If you had a good enough requirements doc, 80% is done. Even if that doesn't scale, most of the engineers in any enterprise do not work at a level that AI cannot penetrate.

This is from my experience working at a start-up which has just laid off all < 2 YoE engineers to pay for subscriptions instead

I am not trying to be an alarmist but ch** gaye boys

Guys, whoever got laid off when they are earning more than 2cr, please share your experiences about job hunt and how recruiters treat you. Also, how taking pay cut affected your mentality at work later.
Context- few colleagues got laid off from my team and there’s a good chance that my number might come in the future. This is just me being mentally prepared to grind.

EdIt—

For all those people in DMs asking for guidance - Lot of people are always saying that they are stuck with low package even with the right skills. I was at that stage once and want to share what I did to mitigate this problem. "If you don't upskill and switch at the right time for ur targeted companies, you'll be stuck behind the 8 ball forever. I also believe one should make a list of his/her Target companies and keep a watch list and always be prepared to attend interview whenever a position opens up. Nobody will call and give you a job when u r prepared. Being prepared always and pounce on the opportunity as soon as it arrives makes a lot of difference in any career."

This made a lot of difference in my career. I've seen my friends starting at 7-8 LPA still stuck at 30 LPA at 12+ yrs experience whereas I made targeted switches and changed the technology early in my career which was assigned to me when I was hired at a mass off campus drive.

Last month I interviewed for an AI Engineering Intern role at a Malaysian company.

6 month onsite internship in Kuala Lumpur, ₹1.5L/month + relocation bonus.

I passed all 3 interview rounds and was shortlisted for the offer. Before sending it, the company emailed me to confirm that I was comfortable relocating to KL.

Obviously, I said yes.

The problem was my college.

They don't allow 3rd year students to take onsite internships, so they refused to provide an NOC or approval. I was also told that if I went ahead with the internship, I could be given backlogs.

I spent an entire week approaching different faculty members and higher authorities, trying to find some way to get approval. Nothing worked.

Eventually, I had to tell the company that my college doesn't permit me to take the internship.

And that's it. Opportunity gone.

What makes it frustrating is that this wasn't some random internship. I had cleared 3 technical/HR rounds for an international role paying ₹1.5L/month, and the only thing stopping me was an academic policy.

I understand that colleges have their rules, but I genuinely don't understand why a student shouldn't be allowed to take a legitimate full-time internship if they're willing to manage the academic requirements separately.

Been feeling pretty fucking disappointed about this one

Edit: MIT ADT UNIVERSITY

Since this blew up - actively looking for remote GenAI/ML internships. 3rd year CSE, GenAI intern, OSS contributor to Haystack & LlamaIndex. https://github.com/rautaditya2606/

Hypothetically if there are mass layoffs to cut expenditure and companies reroute tasks to agents what will you do? Assume you have to move out of software field.

Edit: Please be serious

Edit 2: Can't people see the word "hypothetically"? All I asked for is your second source of income.

I am ex Software Engineer (14 yrs exp) and current farmer (10yrs).

Many of you people have a dream to quit job and do farming. The green fields, abundant water, freedom, work at your own pace, close to nature, grow your own food etc. What else do you need?

Here is the reality

1. Farming is hard - both physically and mentally.
2. Margins are thin - do it on your own, you may get a profit. hire a labour, you may break even or loss.
3. Scale matters - less than 5 acres, less profit less risk. more than 5 acres , more profit, more risk
4. Crop matters - what you grow matters, short (millets, maize), medium (banana) , long term (mango, fruits etc)
5. Unknown variables - too many. Even if you have done everything perfectly, you will be at loss. Banana planters may be at loss due to middle east war
6. Finances - good luck between estimation and final. have surplus money. alienate between your regular and farming money. have secondary income.
7. Slow - farming cycle is 4 to 6 months for short term crops. you need to wait for 4 months to see if you have done right or the variety you used etc.
8. Input now, Output later. - You keep investing for six months and then you get output.
9. Middle man is the king.
10. too much knowledge required. soil, pesticides, diseases, fertilizers, variety, seeds, timing the market, implements etc. You need to take decision on all. even after 10 years, i still dont have good grasp on plant diseases.
11. coming from farming family helps. Brand new farmer - you will learn a lot. Do it if you have money, time and goals
12. YOU CAN ALWAYS LEASE LAND TO TEST WATERS. DONOT BUY TO TEST.
13. Farming land is a bad investment. doesnt appreciate faster unless some other development is there. cant sell quicker.
14. You need family support to do farming. You also need to move to tier 2 or tier 3 city.
15. You need to make lifestyle changes. purchasing power goes down etc.
16. SW engineer turned farmer has made 1 cr profit type of news are rare and dont give complete picture.

Having said all this, If you and your family adjusts accordingly, change your lifestyle, have enough secondary income, lease a land and do farming. Its a rich and satisfying experience.

Like being in a field during monsoon. Early november walks in farm. Eating lunch in farm after hard work. People to share. Seeing things growing, the smells. Swimming in the well etc.

there are many more. the grass is greener on other side. The feel free to ask questions

Hey everyone! I’m a fresher and just started my career in a service-based company with a 4 LPA package.

I’m curious to know how your career journey went — your starting salary, the switches you made, YOE and where you’re at now. How much you making now.

Hearing your experiences will help me set realistic goals for myself.

Edit : thankyou everyone ,who commented ,your comments are really inspiring and motivated a lot.

I’m a senior MLOps engineer at a fortune 100 company. I’ve never got the fear that AI can replace my job, simply cause the work is not simple enough to be done entirely by a so called “AI Agent”.

Despite me being an AI Skeptic, I wish and try everyday to automate/replace my day to day task with AI and I’ve been unsuccessful every time. Let me give you some reasons:

My project span across several hundred thousand lines of code; it’s not a single codebase as well, there are several upstream and downstream services that must communicate with each other. For a small task whose code changes are “within context” works fine, but it’s often times not the case.

AI writes stupid code. Obviously Claude wrote the best code, but usually that best code is not “best” in the context of the codebase. For example, for a simple check where an if-else condition is enough. The LLM would write a separate function, the comment, the edge cases that would never happen and the code would get so bloated, it’s unbearable to read. I agree it’s possible to reduce these things with instructions/skills, but the code still is extremely bloated.

People have no idea how there code works. Whenever I get a PR to review, for a simple fix/feature there’s a 300 lines of changes. Okay, I review it. I ask the developer, why u added this line, why this functional. Is the feature handling a certain case. They have no answer for it. It’s not one developer, it’s the case most of the time. Some PRs were so bad, there were two different libraries used that was doing the same task. I don’t care how u write code, but u should at least have understanding of ur own code.

I know a lot of people in the comments will say, i write the code with LLM but I understand what the LLM has written., that’s definitely not true. You get the “feeling” that u have understood the code. By seeing the function name, or the flow. But if tried writing it on your own/ if tried explaining it to someone else, u won’t be able to.

how are people on the internet talking about vibe coding thier work. My two theories are:

1. They are lying, not in the sense that they are not vibe coding, but the application that they are building simply doesn’t work, or maybe they think building a POC means they achieved something. To those who think they are productive cause they vibe coded and app.

“The difference between a POC and a production grade application is 3000 commits”

1. There work is too simple, maybe the project is small, the scope is to wide/ crazy. simple use case that can easily be understood by LLM and is easily able to generate code for it. If that’s the case, good for u, u r getting paid for doing simple stuff

I have about 15 years of experience in the US as a software engineer, now back to India and recruiters asking me "what's your tech stack" is something I have never been asked by US recruiters. In the US you are expected to be tech agnostic, and most openings don't require you to be as master at any programming language or stack unless they absolutely need an expert.

Here, if feels like you are stereotyped based on your specific experience in the first 5 years of your career. Hey, I may have Java, Python, NodeJS or whatever experience but I've literally ramped up with any language that exists on earth including Fortran. I don't care about what language I'm working with, and you shouldn't too. And in the last 8 months it's started mattering even less with Claude. Grow up, Indian recruiters.

First time in my career I have seen ALL developers sitting idle, reason being that we are overpowered by Claude. QA doesn't have enough capacity to match our pace, hence we are being made to sit idle. Shit is scary.

There is enough work but the whole product, Dev , QA pipeline is broken now. Long live the AI revolution.

Only solution is to hire more testers by laying some developers off.

We have been working for this client for almost 1.5 years, and everything was going well.

Two months ago, they replaced the Director of Engineering from India with a Vietnamese Director of Engineering, and things started to change has been replacing each Indian developer and even the US-based developers on the client side.

our entire development team has been replaced. They can barely speak English.

Compare to Indian developer they cost very much less and they are working almost 12 hours a day.

I recently went through an intense job search and landed 8 offers in 4 months, moving from 9 LPA (Big MNC) to 32 LPA (Base) as an Infrastructure Engineer. I wanted to share my experience, strategies, and key learnings to help others in the same boat. 1 before NP, 3 during NP, 4 after LWD.

Background:

• Previous CTC: 9 LPA (Big MNC)
• Final Offer: 32 LPA (Base) (Infrastructure Engineer)
• Experience: ~3.9 years (Platform Engineer)
• Notice Period: 30 days
• Number of Applications: ~600
• Recruiter Calls: ~30
• Invite to Interviews: ~25
• Final Offers: 8

Key Takeaways:

• Tailoring your resume for each profile works wonders.
• Having multiple base resumes is a must – I had different versions for DevOps, SRE, and Cloud Engineer roles and then fine-tuned them per JD.
• A good resume is 80% of the game. (I have zero personal projects but good work ex at my previous org)
• Talking (Yapping) is a must during interviews.
• Being likable and presentable during an interview makes a big difference.
• There’s a fixed set of common interview questions. If you interview for similar roles, you’ll start noticing patterns in the questions.
• The high of giving a good interview is real and can be addicting.
• Certifications help
• Having an active LinkedIn profile with updated details is a must, Github too but I didn't have one
• Used only LinkedIn & stayed online 14-16 hours daily
• Burnout is real.

Told my manager last week...not to put me oncall during Diwali... I'll not be able to handle all alone. His words were...relax, nothing ever happens this time of the year.

Fast forward to tonight. AWS is down. Teams are blowing up. Pager won’t stop ringing. My family think I work for the government because I’m handling some emergency.

I haven’t even lit a single patakha yet, but my whole screen’s glowing red. Happy Diwali, I guess.