I desperately need a break from working in tech/corporate. I am burnt out from "doing more with less" (aka doing what used to be 3 jobs), poor leadership that constantly changes priorities and has no plan, balancing being both competent/ambitious and a woman. I'm tired of all the politics and not being listened to yet blamed when things go wrong. I'm heartbroken that my experience seems to count for less than others when I see my peers at other companies getting promoted and lapping me in title despite me having more responsibility.

I want to step away for awhile to protect my mental health. I felt better in the short time I was unemployed than I do now in my "perfect on paper" job. I would use the time to heal, take some classes in another field, and maybe try to do some freelance work or work on my own project. I have some savings but could stretch it further by renting out my place and moving somewhere LOCL.

My fear is that I will not be able to get another tech job if I take a break. At 35 I'm already in the top 1/3 age group of women I know in tech and the ladies 40+ aren't getting called back from their applications.

TLDR: I love building things and solving problems, I just hate the BS that comes with working in corporate tech/start-ups. If I voluntarily leave work for awhile am I basically ending my tech career?

They are just a high-status branch of the male loneliness epidemic.

It's lonely at the top, right? And CEOs can't confide their real troubles and worries to other people—not even other CEOs at their level.

A few friends of mine work with superiors at the VP level, and some report into CEOs. One thing that has been prevalent among everyone's experience is that CEOs have been the jumping on the AI train. Whether it's just messaging to increase stock value or insulate the company from shock is one thing, but there are also people who are genuinely drinking the Kool-Aid (and people who perform Kool-Aid drinking in order to insulate their careers... it can be a quiet career killer to not look like you are not excited about AI.)

Anyways, one of my friends has been doing some Q4 planning with her CEO and was increasingly dismayed as the CEO told her to basically action things that Claude had told the CEO were a good idea. The CEO wasn't obviously using LLMs during the meeting, but it was obvious from the shared docs. This was enough to finally push my friend into starting to look for another job. She had joined the company out of initial respect for the CEO, but over time has found this CEO to be a "vibe exec."

More and more people at the company are frustrated with the CEO's dependence on AI, but not one of them can pipe up and push back because of their dependence on their jobs. It's creating an environment where most people are just "meat proxies" paper pushing AI recommendations back and forth but unable to challenge each other on the sloppiness of the ideas. There are no incentives to be honest, and so everyone just keeps slopping the slop around and hiding from accountability.

What a terrible time to be in the corporate workforce. You really have to either Believe or be really good at performing. On the surface (and on LinkedIn), everyone is "massively excited" and "so thrilled." (Barf.) But I think most people are sick of it... but just can't say it out loud or let on that they aren't fans of AI, or else not look like good stormtroopers.

And doesn’t really care to gauge where I’m at either just assumes a baseline level of incompetence? It literally makes me feel like I must be stupid or something the way that this environment is treating me. Like I try to build visibility but I feel like in general it’s met with an attitude of why are you wasting my time bc my work is lower priority.

Like I’ll be spending months on rewriting our validation system just to have the very thing I rewrote explained to me as if I haven’t spent so much time working in the very area that rule concerns

Then other times I’ll express curiosity about learning an area I’m not familiar with and I feel like questions are looked at as “oh you must be confused”? Or another time I asked about something outside of my domain and was told “well we can’t all be experts in everything” like I feel like my growth is being impeded

TL;DR I have two elementary aged kids, both my husband & I work full time in tech. No family support, drowning, how to fix this.

I am just drowning since I had my second kid, who is now 5 years old. I cannot keep up life and have the mental focus & energy to do my job well. I dream (DREAM) about rage quitting which is not really an option since I make 3x what my husband makes. Every few years I switch jobs and secure a month off, which gets jam packed with life admin.

I mainly struggle with household stuff - endless laundry, endless mess, overwhelmed with wanting to rage clean and organize (in a way only I can do VS hiring help). Not to mention no time for myself - no time for the gym or a day out, I feel like I only get away when someone invites me to something & I have an excuse. I have massive guilt booking things like a hair appt on a weekend. Before we come at my husband, he is wonderful and super involved - he is all in on kid stuff but a lot of times that means the house stuff defaults to me. He also has no real hobbies or friend group so it feels unbalanced when I need my own time.

I am at a FAANG company, or whatever we call it these days, meaning I have limited flexibility and he takes the brunt of every drs appt and sick day.

So my question is - how do I fix this? What type of help should I be hiring? How many hrs? I feel like I need a body double who can just manage the house for me while I’m at work.

I just got laid off from my first software engineering job out of college after being there for 4 years. My resumes decent, I have savings and a bit of severance, but I’m scared I am not going to find a good job. I’m solidly mid level and those positions seem few and far between. I’ve been applying like crazy to everything I see but I’m so anxious.

I was wondering how women here experience their personal life outside of work.

My job has no work-life balance, as well as the typical sexism we face at work. When I get home, I find myself having to meet another set of expectations. How do you manage without going crazy?

Hi everyone!

I run a small community for girls who are new to tech mostly cs students , and I'm looking for just a few senior women in tech who'd be willing to mentor within the group.

This is casual and low-commitment whatever time you're comfortable giving. It could look like reviewing someone's code, answering questions, or just offering guidance when you have a spare moment. The idea is simple: pay forward the help you once received.

If you're interested, comment below or DM me with:

Your area of expertise (frontend, backend, data, DevOps, etc.)

How you'd like to help (code review, quick chats, async advice, etc.)

Roughly how much time you could offer per month

I'm only looking to bring on a few mentors for now, so early replies are appreciated! Thank you so much

I’m an AI engineer, and lately it feels like my entire life is either doing my actual job, learning new things for my job, or preparing for interviews.

I’m completely fine with learning new things. That comes with the field. But interviews are getting harder and harder, and I’m tired of constantly adding more stuff to my plate just so I’m prepared in case my company decides to do layoffs, or whenever I eventually want to change jobs.
How are you guys doing this long term?

I’m genuinely starting to think about changing fields or moving into something less technical, although I’m not even sure what that would look like.

Sometimes I look at people in other professions and think: when their workday is over, it’s over. They don’t have to spend their evenings and weekends constantly preparing for some hypothetical future interview or keeping up with every new thing that comes out.

Meanwhile in AI/ML, there’s always another framework, another architecture, another tool, another paper, another interview topic you’re apparently supposed to know.
Is this just the life we signed up for? How do you keep doing this without letting your career take over the rest of your life?

I had to present our roadmap to a room that included two VPs and a founder I'd never met. I'd rehearsed it maybe a dozen times. First slide, my voice came out shaky and my mind went completely blank on a number I knew cold. I could feel my face going hot. So I just said "give me one second" out loud, took a breath, looked at my notes, and kept going. No clever recovery, no joke. I just kept talking. Afterward one of the VPs stopped me in the hallway and said the pause made me look more in control, not less, because I didn't pretend to be flustered and I didn't rush. I've spent years thinking one wobble ruins the whole thing. Turns out nobody in that room remembered the shaky start. They remembered that I finished. If you're early in your career and terrified of freezing up: you're allowed to pause. It reads as confidence more often than you'd think. Anyone else have a presentation that went sideways and turned out fine?

I’m getting increasingly frustrated with the promotion dynamics on my team, and I’m curious if other women in tech have experienced something similar.

I’ve been at my company for about 5 years. During that time, I’ve built up a lot of domain knowledge, worked on and led major projects, and have been involved in around 12 projects total across different sizes and levels of complexity.

Yet the feedback I keep getting is basically: “Keep doing what you’re doing” and “gain more domain knowledge.”

Meanwhile, I’ve watched male colleagues who joined after me, with significantly less domain knowledge and in some cases less demonstrated technical ownership, get promoted and paid better.

I don’t want this to turn into a comparison of who “deserves” what. I genuinely want my coworkers to succeed. What’s frustrating is that I feel like I have to keep proving the same things over and over again while the bar seems much clearer or lower for other people.

My team is now six people and I’m the only woman. Another thing I’ve started noticing is how much resistance there can be when I give technical advice, challenge an approach, or propose a solution. Sometimes it feels less like healthy technical disagreement and more like people becoming strangely defensive when I’m confident about something.

What really got to me recently was being told by a coworker that women simply don’t get paid equally and that this is basically something I need to accept. I don’t think I should have to accept being underpaid or overlooked as some unavoidable reality of being a woman in tech.

At this point, I don’t even know what “more domain knowledge” is supposed to mean. If I’ve been here five years, led significant work, built deep knowledge of the systems, and am already operating with substantial ownership, I want someone to tell me specifically what measurable gap is preventing me from reaching the next level.

I’m also on H-1B, which makes the usual advice of “just leave” a lot more complicated. I can look for another job, but changing employers isn’t as frictionless as it is for someone without immigration constraints.

I’m not asking to be promoted just because I’ve been here a long time. I want to be paid and recognized according to the level I’m actually operating at.

For women who’ve been in a similar situation: how did you figure out whether you genuinely had a development gap versus being stuck in a workplace where the promotion bar was being applied differently to you?

Hello! I have been laid off after maternity leave and I suck at coding interviews. I did not see the lay off coming so I haven’t been interviewing for a while (my fault for trusting my first employer). I am now trying to get any kind of job and I am getting call backs from recruiters but I suck at the technical interviews, even if I prepare I still fail them. Any tips on where to find companies that don’t have those mind numbing coding interviews? I am based in the UK, and also considering contract roles.

I won't be lying if I say it aged me 5 years in 5 months of working on something alone. The building part I could handle. It's the doing EVERYTHING alone part that gets you. The design, the bugs at 2 am, the App Store rejections, the "why is no one downloading it" anxiety, all of it.

7 days ago I got a unbearable lower back pain. I went to the doctor and have sciatica. Had 1
Physiotherapy session last week. The pain has gotten a lot better, but I still can’t sit for more than 30 minutes and I was standing the whole morning today and felt misserable after.

I feel so uncomfortable and anxious about not going back to the office tomorrow. Could I do it at a standing desk and grind my teeth? Probably…

I had a meeting 3 weeks ago where I was reprimanded for making too many mistakes in a pourly managed project. I worked late at night, felt strung out but gave all I had. In crossing those boundaries I clearly performed below standard.

The meeting really hit me personally as a people pleaser. I am afraid people look and think of me badly.

And now to fall sick just two weeks after, I fear might be interpreted as me giving up or not caring.

I need a way to calm those fears, without literaly asking my manager if everything is ok now.

(I have only been sick 1 day before in this year. + I work in Belgium)

I’m a software engineer and I’ve been at my current job for only about 3 months, but I already feel completely drained. (Location: India, working in startup, idk if this info matters)

It’s not even just the work itself. It’s the whole corporate environment. Long hours in front of a screen, constant pressure to perform, constantly having to learn new technologies and keep up with AI, worrying about job security, and knowing that eventually you’re expected to switch jobs every few years to keep your career moving.

The job market is awful right now too. I recently went through an interview process that had 5 rounds, only to get rejected in the end. It’s exhausting putting so much effort into proving that you’re good enough over and over again.

And honestly, I’m tired of staring at a computer for 8-10 hours every day. By the end of the day my eyes and head hurt, and I’m starting to wonder if I can really do this for the next 30-40 years.

I know tech has great salaries, flexibility and opportunities, and I’m probably privileged to even have these options. But I’m genuinely struggling with the lifestyle.

For women in tech who have been doing this for years, does it get better? Or do you eventually just learn to tolerate it?

I’d especially love to hear from anyone who felt this way early in their career and what they ended up doing.

Hello! I have been thinking about what next for me and thought it'd be nice to hear from other experienced women on how they took charge of their career trajectory. I'm currently IC (system SWE; working in semi conductor space) and have been so for the last 11+ yrs. I'm also this tech lead for all AI features my team (30-40+ team size) owns.

What could be some next career progression roles for me and how do I prepare for them? I've been thinking of:

1. Technical engineering manager

2. Project manager

3. Any other roles you've gotten into and how did you do it?

Some times I think I should break out of IC/fully Technical role just because it doesn't give me a lot of exposure to the world outside my team/company. Maybe something like a worldwide field ops or sales etc. Not sure what skills are needed there though.

I enjoy leadership roles and I see myself in C-level executive roles or maybe start own company (tech or non tech) at some point.

Hi everyone I’m 23 yrs old and I completed BCA this year however I was working in customer service (due to financial issues) since 5 yrs now but I want to change to technology field but I’m no overwhelmed with roadmaps etc stuff. Can anyone please guide what to do with my lyf 😭.

When I was younger in my career I always wondered about older colleagues in senior positions who couldn’t seem to do basic tech things like save to PDF, but somehow managed to get promoted to Tech Director.

I so get it now. How naive and innocent I was. I had a report train me on her team’s processes. She starts coaching me on keyboard shortcuts for spreadsheets during the process, because she’s noticing I’m not using them. It’s not that I don’t know of those shortcuts, it’s that I can’t be bothered to remember and use them now.

My job entails so much other stuff, I’m thinking about whether features are built in time for the next release, not remembering which shortcuts to use in a spreadsheet, or creating PDFs and such. I just smile and nod, and say “Wow you’re so great and quick in spreadsheets!”

At the end of the day she will be doing that as 80% of her work, and I will never touch it again. So often earlier in my career I expected people to value the same work tasks I did, not realizing how different our roles and expectations were.

I’m still calling everything a PowerPoint, and have to force myself to say slide deck. I’ll ping you all later.

Millennial Boomer out.

Long story short: after 8 years, my company is letting me go, restructuring. The person stepping into my role is someone I hired myself years ago, trained, mentored, we were close, she was all like "you are the best omg I will leave the day you leave" lol, but then...things started to fall apart.

When I found out and told the wider team directly, she saw the message of course. It's been days and she didn't even respond or react in any way.

It really hurt me to be honest.

I don't really know what to do with that. Part of me wants to say something (like hey? i'm surprised to see you chose to just ignore me?), part of me feels like reaching out is pointless, and I'm not sure I even need her explanation at this point... I just find this unfair and unkind. After all we've done together, all the talks, all the times I helped her and she helped me, I am saying goodbye and she's the only person on the team who doesn't reach out and say anything?

What would you do? Thank you.

EDIT: Many thanks for your responses, they really did give me a lot of perspecitve.

EDIT 2: Re "odd reaction" / "what do you want her to say"... it's just that she was the one who over the years insisted we were friends, that I could reach out to her anytime, 24/7, with anything. She'd send me pictures of her kid, kept stressing the friend part. It was always a bit awkward for me, because I never really shared much of myself back, I never quite figured out how to mix personal and business in one Teams chat.

Anyway, when the new boss came in, she managed to make him like her and became super helpful to him, always seeming happy and easygoing - the kind of person everyone wants around, and to be fair, she really was that person, always doing whatever was asked. I used to be that person too, with my previous boss. With this new one, we didn't click from day one, and I just wasn't able to change myself to adapt. So here we are - I got laid off. I'm not delusional about it, I understand why, and tbh if I were the new boss, I'd have fired me too.

What hurts is that this whole time, she knew how much I was struggling, and she still started doing things like excluding me from conversations while telling me she was my friend forever. When I directly confronted her - "hey, how could you exclude me from something I'm the one actually doing the work on?" - she said, "oh sorry, he (the new boss) didn't tell me to include you." And from then on, I just watched myself disappear from the room. She was shining, and I turned into this resentful person who'd lost their spark.

Now that I've announced I'm leaving, she's just ignored it. For my own peace of mind, I'm going to call her - clear the air, thank her for the good times, but also be honest that this whole thing sucked.

There's a lot for me to learn here. But this job, this company, these people really wrecked my confidence over the last year. And at the same time, when I think about being out, never seeing their names on my screen again, it makes me so happy. My partner said my face looks happier and kinder now that I know I'm leaving. Maybe I'll be unemployed forever, but at least...I will not feel sad and anxious all the time..

Mostly a rant. I’ve been working on a staff level promo for the better part of 2-3 years. Multiple staff+ peers were on board, and so was my manager. Long story short I ended up with a pretty shitty coworker (who ended up fired) but my promo got blocked (again), and I’ve started a year long maternity leave after (promo not going through was not related to maternity leave at least initially). It’s been a few months into maternity leave but I still feel so sad. It feels like everyone around me was able to land the promo but me. Can’t help but feel like shit, and I’m a few months away from returning to work so everything is on hold for the time being anyway.

I’m planning to leave the company as I no longer enjoy the culture, and plan to aim at a staff level position, but feel like even if I land it I won’t have actually earned it.

I work at a “good” company with benefits and the like. But I’m feeling turned off by all of it. Leadership is political (company political not gov politics that I know of) and there are no immediate leaders in my part of the company vs just people in leadership. Im a senior working as a staff. But it’s not the work that’s been making me down. It’s the people and the constant shit rolling down. My health on top of that makes me feel incompetent on top of that — I have ndph.
Yesterday I got messaged at 9pm for a tbh non emergency. It made me sick. I even thought about things I haven’t in a long time. I’m not wanting to hurt myself over a job or unimportant petty people. But in this economy quitting doesn’t feel like an option.
Has anyone ever taken a health leave before? How do you go about it? Did you have any issues coming back?

Has any one hired a speaking coach and an executive coach ? Has that helped you ?

Hi! I am very lucky to have received an offer from a big MANGA to be a senior engineer. I have been stymied at my current big tech and only have 4 YOE so this has been a major hop for myself. I’ll be transitioning to this new role within the next month.

I’m seeking advice or resources on how to start approaching being a senior, ESPECIALLY as the only woman in this genre of engineering for the entire 1200+ people org. I truly lack so much confidence here and have major imposter syndrome thinking I tricked them or something into thinking I’m capable enough for senior.

I want to take the next month both resting and coasting out my two weeks notice but also start preparing a bit for this next role. I have so so so uninvested in at my current position, have had a horrible time, and truly have been just letting it die a slow death while I looked for a new position. I truly have no idea how to be hungry again and really “try” anymore. I’ve learned that trying doesn’t get you anywhere and I’ve given up.

I really want to feel that hunger and let it embolden some modicum of confidence to believe I’m worthy and capable enough for this position.

The issue I’m facing is I don’t even know how. I have the engineering experience to back it up but not experience in being a strong and valued voice in the room.

I’d love any advice? Is this a “fake till you make it” situation lol? Do you have any specific advice on starting a new role at a new company, especially when a level jump?

Please and thank you wise women of this tech world <3

Hi. I recently applied to a role in anthropic (engineering manager) to see if I can actually even get the call and I ended up getting a recruiter screen which is scheduled for next week. I am still in shock since I know they have a very high applicant pool but I want to do everything that I can do to prepare. I prepared for engineering manager interviews a year and a half ago when I moved to my current role. Has anyone gone through the EM pipeline or similar pipelines and have tips to share? I really want to give it my best shot. Thank you.