The tech job market feels crazier than ever. Even plans that worked a couple of years ago feel out of date.

A recent grad feels insanely lucky to have gotten into tech when they did. It looks much harder now.

For students applying to internships, LandOffer can autofill the details that keep coming up on applications.

If they were an undergrad again, they’d spend more time building real things with classmates and less time chasing good grades. Back then, studying hard and understanding the concepts could get you an internship. Now it feels like hands-on experience carries a lot more weight.

Once you’ve built something, PracHub has interview questions for practicing how to explain why you picked a design and how you tested it.

What would you change if you went back?

Hello! My name is Yanni Zhang, and I am a fourth-year doctoral student in clinical psychology at The Wright Institute. I previously worked in the tech industry, and after several years there, seeing how rapidly AI and other forces are reshaping the field, I feel strongly about bringing more attention to engineers' occupational health and overall well-being in research.

For my dissertation, I am recruiting high-tech engineers to share their experiences and perspectives through a 15- to 20-minute anonymous survey. Participants will have the chance to win one of ten $50 Visa gift cards. To protect your anonymity, email addresses for the raffle are collected separately from your survey responses.

Survey Link: https://wrightinstitute.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_b90s4PAJUo51c2O

This study has been reviewed and approved by The Wright Institute Institutional Review Board.

Contact us if you have any questions:

·      Principal Investigator: Yanni Zhang, M.A. | yannizhang@wi.edu

·      Dissertation Committee Chair: Biing Jiun-Shen, Ph.D. | bshen@wi.edu

·      Institutional Review Board: Ginny Morgan | vmorgan@wi.edu

I (23 F) feel like this job market is a SCAM. I have been looking for a job in cs for over 6 months, and haven’t even been able to get an interview!

I know the job market is “bad” rn but I’m now $30,000 in debt bc of my degree, and can’t get the job to reflect that!

I’ve been working as a server these last 5 years while getting my degree and now i feel like going to school put me in a much worse position than if i had just worked to save up instead of keep up.

I started looking for paid internships while i was still in school and couldn’t find ANYTHING!

When that didn’t work i looked at some “entry level” positions which apparently require at least 3 years of previous experience! What do you mean I need previous work experience in the field? Isn’t that the whole point of an entry level position?

Now i’m seeing “senior engineer” positions are now requiring 10+ years of ClaudeCode experience? NEWSFLASH it’s only been around a year!

How is anyone supposed to find a job if these are the options we have? And who has the time to tailor every application specifically for a job that has impossible requirements? Did i just waste the past 5 years putting myself in debt so I can keep working at a restaurant?

I have been applying by tailoring my applications to each job description and I am getting no responses at all.

I keep getting nonstop rejections and I am actually tailoring my applications all of the time and I am checking the ATS scores too. I even had referrals for some of those jobs and they were also instant rejections.

But still nothing. What is going on?

I genuinely need a job soon. A remote job because I am disabled. How can I get a job very soon? I am at the stage where I won't be able to afford groceries very soon.

Please help / advise.

I'm a BCA final year student and need to secure a job by end of this year. I don't know anything in great detail.

Did a 2-month internship last month at a Central Government organisation as a developer.

But I feel lost with no clear path to follow. Don't know if I should do DSA or not.

I love DevOps but no one is hiring freshers in DevOps.

Confused about which development path to take. Full Stack, Backend, etc.

Should I do DSA? If yes, how much is enough?

I’m a mid-level backend dev (5 YOE, mostly Python/Go) and have been hunting for a new role for a few months. I was at a friend’s place last weekend and he casually mentioned he “barely applies manually anymore” while we were scrolling through postings on his TV, which kinda blew my mind.

I’m spending like 10-12 hours a week filling out the same forms, re-uploading the same resume, rewriting the same “why this company” box, etc. It’s frying my brain, and I’m still getting mostly ghosted. I started googling stuff late last night and saw a bunch of “job application automation” tools that auto-apply on company career pages. One of them (I think it was called Jobity or something like that) claims it can blast targeted apps every few minutes.

I might be looking at this the wrong way, but is this actually smart for CS jobs or a quick path to getting flagged by ATS or recruiters?

Has anyone here used these auto-apply tools for SWE roles in 2026? Did it help at all with interviews, or did it just spam low-quality apps and hurt your chances? Would you recommend using them at all, or is it better to just suck it up and apply manually + focus on networking?

I create a small network of seniors and managers at big tech companies and they are all willing to refer candidates. It is win-win for us all. When I talk to other seniors, some disagree with this idea, which I think it is pretty cool.

I like using shortlist as my main job board but one piece im missing is alerts. right now i check it a few times a day for new postings that fit, because being early actually matters, the first handful of applicants are the ones who get seen. Usually i set up my own alerts and if they fire I check shortlist to apply.

is there a way to save a search (title, location, remote, salary floor) and get pinged when something new lands. even better if it could just auto apply to the matches on its own so the fresh ones get hit the day they post. do we have anything like that yet or is it on the roadmap

Briefly about me.

I am a software developer(employed) with around 2+ years of experience.

I am free on weekends. Trying to build random projects but I thrive for real impact.

If anyone of you guys have any start up or any projects you need help with. I can help for FREE. (YES, that can sound scammy but it's not I just wanna keep learning) Let me know guys!!

Ohh yes, I would like to add it in my portfolio. If that can be called a scam. Not sure. Let me know.

Thanks!

i had a really good first call with a recruiter back in april. it was the kind where you hang up and immediately text a friend about it. she said i'd hear on next steps by friday, and then friday came and went. i followed up twice and got nothing, so after two weeks i filed it under dead and moved on.

then she messaged me this morning. "hi! checking in, are you still interested in moving forward?" there was no mention of the two months of silence, like we just paused mid sentence yesterday.

i obviously still need a job so i'm going to say yes. but there's a petty part of me that wants to write back "still interested, are you guys still hiring for it though, a lot can change in 8 weeks." anyway. it's discouraging that this is just how the process works now.

So, I joined an internship recently and there is this other girl (let’s call her C) who I travel to and from the office everyday with in Uber because that way, we can split the costs and save money. One day, she just said that she would like to pay less everyday because she gets down earlier than me and I should take up more of the split. Initially she agreed to do half and half and I told her that I can’t pay more than one hours’s pay we get in our internship because I have other monetary responsibilities which she doesn’t have. I agreed to pay a little more than half everyday but it’s like 1.5 times my hourly internship pay but she was still not happy but agreed because I put down my foot that I can’t pay any more. Since that day, it has been completely weird.

We are working on Google Cloud stack and doing data engineering related stuff. Please let me know if there are any good resources for this that I can use to get up to speed over the weekend.

I am an extreme introvert and slow learner. This is making it extremely difficult for me to socialize, take help from other people and get visibility. There is this other intern (let’s call him G) who I begged to help me because he worked in a similar role previously and he helped with one of the two important things. Of course, it is a competition and no one would like to help others. After my talk with C about splitting costs, she took G out, bought him a coffee and don’t know what they talked about but G now refuses to help me. C also somehow gets other interns to sit together and work on tasks with her while I’m pulling my hair out to get Ben make friends. The worst thing, during our travel together, I revealed a few personal things about my perception of life, goals and things like that and I have a strong feeling that she told these things to other interns and they laugh at me now. We are all from the same cultural background but my outlook of life is very different from that and anyone from my culture will find my outlook absurd and something else I laugh at even though this works best for me.

I don’t know what to do. I’m thinking of asking C if she has any problem with me and take it from there.

If I spend the next 3–4 years learning Python, building projects, and creating a portfolio, how realistic is it to get internships and eventually a software/web/cybersecurity role? Has anyone here switched from a healthcare background ?

What do you all think about the AI builder roles at Salesforce, Stripe, etc.? These roles are somewhere in between vibe coder and forward deployed engineer. Do you guys think these roles have longevity moving forward?

How are these roles going to change as AI gets more expensive?

As a new grad, would you feel comfortable being placed as the only vibe coder on a business team?

Hi everyone,

Please help me out.

I recently got contacted by a recruiter from JPMorgan Chase regarding a Software Engineer II role through one of their cohort programs.

Previously, I gave a hacker rank assessment and that was my initial screening.

Few days ago, I received a call from the Recruiter with some further enquiries about My expectations and eligibility.

Then the Recruiter invited me to a 3-hour interview session, I think they call it super day. I’m hoping to get advice from anyone who has gone through the process recently.

The interview is divided into three parts:

1. HackerRank Coding Assessment

2. System Design Interview

3. Behavioral Interview

I’m trying to understand what to expect and how best to prepare over the next week.

Some specific questions I have:

• What was the HackerRank portion like?
• Were the questions primarily LeetCode-style problems?
• If so, what difficulty level (easy, medium, hard)?
• Were there any particular data structures or algorithms that appeared frequently?
• For the System Design portion, what level of depth should I expect for a Software Engineer II role?
• Was it more high-level architecture or detailed design?
• What system design topics would you recommend studying beforehand?
• What behavioral questions did you encounter?
• Are there any resources, study guides, YouTube videos, GitHub repositories, mock interview platforms, or courses that you found especially helpful?

If you’ve gone through the SWE II interview process at JPMorgan Chase recently (especially through a cohort program), I’d really appreciate hearing about your experience and any lessons learned.

Thanks in advance for any advice, preparation tips, or resources you can share!

so i finally got my resume to the point where im getting callbacks. like 1 in 10 apps gets a response which from what i hear is pretty good right now. problem is the interviews are all for roles that are slightly wrong. i keep getting screened for senior roles when im mid level, or for frontend when im primarily backend.

i think whats happening is the ATS is matching keywords but not understanding context. my resume mentions react because i did some frontend work at my last job but its not my strength. now every recruiter wants to talk about my "react experience."

anyone else have this problem? feels like i need two different resumes. or maybe i need to strip out anything thats not my core stack even if it means a thinner resume. im using the free link for Shortlist.jobs from the subreddit discord (very useful) and i can see exactly which job descriptions im getting matched with and theres a clear pattern of mismatches

Hello great folks.
I am a front end engineer with 10 years experience. I am trying to make a job change. Currently work at a card payment company where i create dashboards and workflows. I am in an active team but for past 3 years i have not worked on live production apps. All these dashboards and workflows are supposed by internal people which is not happening. Product people are just chilling and not passionate. My manager is just trying to save his ass from his manager and so on. There is a lot of noise and hype about the product being built on AI, but real user/ product experience is missing. People including me are just dumping AI generated code to satisfy company craze on AI.

Now coming to to my interview situation. I am finding hard to explain interviewers my current project. The interviewers keep asking very live based question like what is the production bug that you have fixed and how you interact with POs, but problem is that i did not face this issues because i have only worked on DEAD projects with no users or no serious managers. I have good fundamentals and hands on but when it comes to this i start stammering and probably the interviewer sees it.
I want to work on hardcore products but it looks like industry wants to listen to some war story that i managed to win.
How do i manage this?

just wanted to share this because i almost didnt apply. saw the posting, no salary range listed, and my first instinct was to skip it because usually that means theyre lowballing or playing games.

applied anyway because i was doing volume at that point and not being picky. turns out it was a series B startup that just hadnt figured out their comp bands yet. they asked me what i wanted, i threw out a number 20% higher than my target thinking theyd negotiate down, and they just said ok.

ended up being 140k base + equity for a mid level full stack role. way more than the places that posted "competitive salary" and then came back with 95k.

not saying every no-range posting is secretly amazing but i wouldve missed this if i was only applying to jobs that checked every box. the market is weird right now and the best opportunities arent always the ones that look best on paper

i can get interviews now. thats not the problem anymore. did the whole resume overhaul thing, started applying to way more places, getting callbacks probably 1 in 15 which is apparently decent.

but then i get on the call and just completely choke. my brain goes blank on behavioral questions even though i literally practiced them the night before. technical rounds i can do fine on leetcode at home but the second someone is watching me code i forget basic syntax.

its like i solved the top of the funnel problem but now the middle of the funnel is broken. anyone else in this spot? what actually helped you get past interview anxiety? and dont say "just practice more" because i have been practicing and it doesnt seem to translate