Let me start by saying that the CS market is definitely saturated; there’s no doubt about that. However, I do think the prevalence of the doomer mentality in this sub isn’t just because of that, it’s because people here just aren’t very competent.

I’ve seen plenty of evidence to support this, but the most jarring of which were comments under a meme post. Basically, the meme was about an interview question regarding finding the minimum number in an array, and the joke was that the person sorted the array and returned the number at index 0.

(Paraphrased) The most upvoted comment: What’s wrong? Can someone explain? The second most upvoted comment: Well there’s no issue with doing this, it just wasn’t what the interviewer was expecting. (No, these comments weren’t jokes)

It wasn’t until I had to scroll through 4 or 5 comments did I find someone actually pointing out how cooked the comment section was. What I’m trying to say is that, the fact that these comments—making mistakes about something so elementary in the CS roadmap—were the most upvoted, truly goes to show how incompetent a large portion of the subreddit is. Yes, getting a job will be difficult, but if this is your competition, then I think you should take a large portion of these posts with a grain of salt.

Source: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/coe_sbc.pdf

Is this something that has happened before? Should those who have already accepted offers be worried about them being rescinded?

https://www.ratemyprofessors.com/professor/2707345

Some people have no passion at all. Some people change their passions every year. Some people have obviously unemployable passions. This is the majority of people.

What are these people supposed to do according to passiontards? To kill themselves?

There is nothing wrong with choosing a degree or training pragmatically. This is in fact the only feasible option for most people.

CS degree is no longer employable but this was NOT obvious this would happen when the job market was still good.

Every fucking post is "oh no boohoo job market bad" like bro its bad cuz u probably don't actually know how to fucking code fr. Like talk about other shit like what projects are yall working on, trending repos, OSS and so on.

About a year ago I posted how desperate I was that I couldn't find an internship for last summer, and, as I was about to become a senior, I thought I was a failure.

Now, I can proudly say I got 3 internship offers, after hundreds of applications, and will now be interning at Capital One for the summer. Sometimes you just need to stick for a little longer for things to get better. I am hoping for the best of luck to everyone!

Stop paying this dude 60$ when it's already open source. Just get an API key and you're good to go.

https://github.com/Ornithopter-pilot/interview-coder-withoupaywall-opensource

I burned 26 acres of forest to get Claude to predict this cryptographically safe number.

Feel free to use it in your upcoming projects and production environments and share them with me so I can give feedback!

I am doing a PhD in AI/ML and my work has been on the broad area of federated learning for resource constrained devices with emphasis on convergence analysis, etc., and currently no overlap with hot topics like LLM/Gen AI.
Now my goal is to get a job in the bay area and move over to industry in the next 1-2 year. I do not know what I should prioritize and how to go about things.

Any suggestions on what would you suggest I should do. Feeling completely lost.

Thanks!

I’m a senior in CS at a pretty much no name school and I’ve been struggling to land offers for internships after over 400+ applications. I have no internship experience at all, just some fellowships and projects. My resume is decent enough to where I get responses back. I’ve had three final round interviews (one referral) and no offers.

The thing is, I’m not fumbling at all. For behavioral interviews, I arrive early, dress nice, I make the interviewers laugh, I answer the questions confidently, they usually ask follow ups and try to learn more, I ask good questions at the end and I’ve ALWAYS researched the company’s values and try and tailor my stories so they sound like I’m one of them. On top of that, the stories I tell aren’t even fake, I have so many STAR stories that I use for different occasions and I’m always genuine.

For technicals, I’ve passed every single one. I’ve given the most optimal solution and I feel like I do decent enough in terms of communicating my thought process. For the technicals where they ask basic OOP questions, I ace them with perfect examples and explanations. Or the ones where you do a deep dive on projects you’ve done. I explain thoroughly about a specific backend process I designed, I come prepared with diagrams of the data pipelines, and numbers to prove from tests I’ve ran.

Anyways, I know I’m ready for an internship and I’ve practiced for months being confident, grinding leetcode, and just overall learning to be a better engineer through projects. Keep in mind, my projects are pretty decent, I don’t make simple to-do apps, I’ve made things that actually solve problems and require a decent amount of database design.

When I’ve gotten rejections, I always email the recruiter and ask where I fell short, what I could have done better, what did the other candidates have that I didn’t, etc. They always respond with “we were impressed by your skills and we loved learning about you, but we had a lot of qualified candidates and it was a tough decision”. First of all, they say that shit to everyone but I’m sure there’s some truth to it. I’m assuming they mean I did good, but everyone else who did good already had internship experience, so it just makes sense to hire them over me.

My question to you all is, how did you guys do it? To the ones who had zero experience, cold applied, and landed an offer, how did you do it? What did you do that wowed the interviewers, how did you beat the odds and competed against other candidates who are more qualified than you? Thanks for any help.

I am really tired of the posts that say their lives are over, and then you find out they are 21. You will be fine. As long as you have work experience, you will be able to find a job and make career changes later in your life. Stop giving your job more value than it deserves and start building value for yourself.

At the end of the day, work is just work, nothing more.

Edit 2: The pressure people face in interviews (LeetCode grind, "culture fit" traps, etc.) is why I’ve been researching ways to fix what feels like a broken system. It shouldn’t be this demoralizing.

Edit 3: Small idea: What if we stopped playing by their rules? A few of us are brainstorming workarounds to bypass the nonsense (think: tools to highlight your strengths without jumping through hoops). If you’ve ever hacked the system or want to collaborate, DM me for an early access
here the whole story https://www.reddit.com/r/interviewhammer/comments/1cbobec/flipping_the_script_how_ai_is_changing_the_job/

If a company posted a 3-month internship role and is asking you to design a whole agentic AI app for the HRs to simplify hiring process , isn’t it a lil sus ? They’ve allotted 5 days time to design , implement , video record etc ! Would this even be a genuine take home assessment and not just to have someone do the work for you for as cheap as possible and then ghost ?

Hi, I have 3 rounds of interviews coming up for Visa (Austin).

Does anyone who recently went through the process know what to expect for these (DSA, General Coding???, System Design)?

Feel free to DM me if that's more comfortable for you.

If you thought it was tough now to get a job, prepare for when the rest of the world starts injecting money into creating their own tech companies, leaving less money for U.S. companies to hire.

2026 going to be a bloodbath compared to the past couple of years.

Good news for techies outside of North America though, if the global market itself doesn't collapse, that is...

Hi, I got a first level interview call for SWE internship position. Upon asking what to expect in the interview, I got these points from the HR:
• Be sure to go over past/current projects before the interview because we will be asking in depth about those
• Review basic data structures - this is a big one!
• Review and be prepared for basic coding and/or database problems
• Review data science and machine learning terminology
• Review database terminology
• Will most likely be asked about experience with coding languages (Python, React, Java, etc.), and any experience they have with large language models.

Since this is my first time getting a call, please please please tell me what resources I can go through within 5 days to be prepared for this interview. Would really mean a world to me!!!

Hey folks! 👋

I got super frustrated constantly losing track of my conversations with GPTs (Chat, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity). Whether it was a killer prompt, a useful code snippet, or just an interesting thread—finding it again later was a nightmare. So, I built a solution:

👉 Chat Saver Chrome Extension Chrome Extension

💡 What it does:

• One-click save: Capture any chat instantly from any GPTs (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, or Claude)
• Offline storage: All data stays securely in your browser—nothing gets uploaded.
• Built-in search: Find past conversations lightning fast.
• Organized & easy to navigate: Stop endlessly scrolling through chat histories.

Whether you're using AI for study, coding, research, or fun, this makes it 100x easier to reference and reuse past insights.

🔒 No login. No data tracking. Just a clean local experience.

Would love for you to try it out and tell me what you think! Feedback, feature requests, or bug reports are super welcome 🙏

Got in contacts with recruiter for summer 2025 internship and she sent me the OA 5 weeks ago which I aced. She then said she would send up the final round and would like the move forward but still hasn’t. I sent a follow up 2 weeks ago to which she replied that the hiring manager had a family emergency so that’s why it’s getting delayed. Now I sent another follow up a few days ago and no reply yet. It’s been 5 weeks now, are they leading me on ? Could they just ghost me or are they actually delayed.

Hey everyone!

I’m an incoming international freshman at one of HYPSM, planning to major in CS, Stats, and Applied Math. I want to use the next few months before college starts to prepare for freshman internships, and I have a few questions:

1. What should I prioritize this summer to get past resume screens: projects, GitHub, personal website, competitions, research?
2. What kind of projects actually stand out on a freshman resume?
3. Do employers care if I take advanced CS courses in my first semester or does it not matter?
4. Any examples of freshman resumes that landed decent internships?
5. I feel somewhat confident in my CS and programming skills. I have done competitive programming in the past, but I want to use the next few months to make sure I have a solid foundation. If you had a few months before your freshman year, what resources would you use to prepare for technical interviews?

Thanks!

Listen to me, in web development, everyone’s obsessed with writing react projects, and to be fair deservedly so. JavaScript/Typescript are obviously the most popular for big, tech company esque places, but I really think people are missing out on a large portion of the job market. Healthcare, banking, governments, most of them are writing .NET applications in C#, usually with Blazor. Everyone complaining about there being no job opportunities, far fewer people are learning C# and .NET development, and the people who do know it are getting older and moving out of lower level developer positions. These jobs are objectively better too. While the overall pay might be a little lower, your job security is usually higher, it’s usually less stressful, less hours, more vacation days, and easier to move up the ladder.

Hey, im currently deciding between the two. I'd appreciate any feedback or insights anyone could provide

-Canadian born citizen living in America (no citizenship or greencard). I wouldnt need h1b, since i can use TN

-Prefer to work in the USA later

-Can graduate GT in 3 years vs 5 years at Waterloo

-Im also not dead set on CS, im pretty interested in business + cs, so idk how reputable waterloo business is in America

-Costs r about the same for both

-Sibling currently goes to GT

Thank you!

I’m 18, gonna be graduating with my bachelors in the fall at 19. I don’t have any huge projects under my belt, only a couple very small scale ones. I’ve also got a couple smaller school projects. I’ve got a couple leadership roles and a couple years of volunteering experience, but no real job. I only looked for internships last year and this year, but I haven’t found anything. I’m still hoping I can get one this summer, but if I can’t, what can I even do?

hello all this is a diary entry i felt like i needed to yap into the universe. maybe someone will resonate with this feeling or share stories.

im about to transfer to start my upper division courses and all i can say is im happy that i (hopefully) will never have to touch higher level maths or physics again. at least in computer classes, there are some applications. even then, basically all of my personal programming experience has consisted of nothing more than arithmetic and basic algebra. ive spent much more time being a business/ software analyst when building apps. i cannot wait to graduate and start working, even if its not specifically swe.

im right now finishing my last physics class that i need; while its interesting, im so mentally checked out from being in school that its hard for me to care. im relying on chatgpt to teach me as well as a little rote memorization for exams. it frustrates me that when i graduate, no employer will give a care about any of the classes i took in my degree, even computer science ones. the only thing that will have mattered is how much leetcode was grinded, how hard were job apps hustled, what kind of personal projects were built, and how many rears were kissed for networking.

theres just too much dense material in undergrad only related to grad level studies to be helpful for the average cs grad. i feel like i have already crossed the threshold of the classes being an “exercise for the brain and critical thinking”. i dont mean im some know it all, but in the context of software engineering, theres very little practical experience to be gained in college. now feels like the time for working. it would be cool if the last year or two of the degree consisted literally of nothing but co-ops; working full time in some tech role.

maybe im just wishing for perfection, but dang this is how bootcamps even first started. somebody with half a year experience building web apps in javascript was much more valuable than a cs grad. thats still true today, you just are essentially required to do both now. people care more about your degree as a check mark and less of the content. because the content is irrelevant for most applications. sick.

i guess the moral of the story is to put ones head down and play the game how its set up because thats just life. after all it sure would be pretty cool to collect 6 figs sitting in an air conditioned room working 40 hours or less per week. some things you just put up with to reach your goals.

thx to anyone for sticking thru the mad ramblings. for the record, ive met great friends in college and generally had a great time so far. but im beyond antsy to graduate and start working and making money.

Do you think there would be any problems if I renege an offer when they already have a flight and hotel booked to spend a week at their HQ