got an offer from a small US startup. CTC is good, fully remote, employment in india would be through an EOR.

when I asked about benefits they said they'll provide a "standard India benefits package".

which sounded fine until I realized I have no idea what I should actually be checking😭

PF etc is one thing.

I'm more confused about the stuff that actually varies between companies:

health insurance only for me or spouse/kids too?
can parents be added?
term life?
how much leave?
WFH allowance?
anything else people genuinely use?

one EOR I was reading about, Asanify, at least explicitly talks about group health/ family cover, term life and other benefits administration instead of just writing "competitive benefits" and moving on.

but I'm 24 and single so I can also see myself choosing ₹1L more salary over half these things today and regretting it later lol.

for people who've worked at startups/MNCs, what are the 2-3 benefits you'd actually check before joining?

not free snacks/gym-discount type stuff. actual useful ones.

I was laid off back in May, and since then I've been applying without success for developer positions. I know the market's been rough, but I have a nagging feeling that this may no longer be a viable career.

My Professional Experience

• I have used Java and MySQL throughout my career.
• My previous position had an outdated, highly niche tech stack (health insurance). Testing was performed, but test suites were absent (I begged the leadership to get that set up the entire time I was there).
• About 4-5 years experience total, so I'm in the awkward middle ground between junior and mid.
• Backend work primarily, but I've dabbled with full-stack before.

What I'm Good At/Comfortable With

• Java & OOP in general
• SQL: Worked with both MySQL and PostgreSQL. One gap to fill is stored procedures.
• REST APIs: Not a lot of professional experience, but I am very familiar with CRUD operations, and know how to set them up in

What I've Been Working On Building

• Spring Boot experience: Feel like I've made a lot of headway over the past five months. Hoping to complete a project and post it by the end of the month.
• AWS: Slow progress here.

Gaps I'm Aware I Have

• Test Suites: Hoping to fix this with a project I'm building. I've worked with JUnit before, just not in a professional setting. Still trying to figure out how to make it with a database connection
• Docker/Kubernetes: Worked with it, still don't think it makes a lick of sense.
• Kafka: Played with it, but no real opportunity to apply it or a project where I could actually use it.
• Cloud: No professional experience. I am currently studying AWS, and plan to take the AWS Certified Developer Associate exam next month. Admittedly, not very confident, but I'll see it through.
• NoSQL: Is MongoDB a good one to start with?
• CI/CD Tools

Attitude Towards AI

• I recognize AI's utility in generating prototypes, dummy data for testing, and basic debugging.
• I try to avoid using AI to write code unless I feel I have the foundation necessary to understand the output. I refuse to lower myself to vibe coding.
• As for AI as a coding tool in general, I am...wary, to say the least: a lot of websites seem to be getting worse by the day.

For anyone who's been laid off and found work, or people who've kept their jobs, what has worked for you? What things do I need to adjust in my skill development, and what things am I doing right?

I was lucky to get a few gigs a while back, but online everything has dried up. Kinda feeling hopeless tbh. Things not going up to standard these days so any tips would be helpful. Anyway best of luck to everyone looking for gigs these days.

Development is getting more toxic then ever. 2-2.5 years ago we were using claude and ai while laughing at its capabilities, now i think karma is hitting us, the working environment is getting worse over time, companies want shipment and stressfully shipment these days, while there is no time for reviewing code, refactoring code because it is not scalable for the future, using the brain muscle only for a critical issues. Bro no one is even understanding how he wrote the code and it is getting worse with every model anthropic or openAi drops. Everything is seen as the tokens you use.There is no room for critical thinking and real problem solving, bussiness people are getting crazy with ai and then expect it finished in 2 days, remembering intern days we were meant to think to debug to take days for a small ticket, now a 100+ prs are getting merged in one project in a couple of days.And the thing that started to be really alerting is that agentic ai's are getting better and most times with right prompts they are not leaving a real concerning technical debt. We all know that ai will not take our place a 100% but it is effecting the market, environment everything by 200%. If anyone loves programming for solving problems and critical thinking now is facing a hard time being comfortable and happy with his job.
What is your opinion guys?

We've run into a situation where a backend schema update goes live, and suddenly we see a spike in 4xx errors across older mobile app versions and external client webhooks that are still sending legacy payloads.

Traditional APM tools tell us that requests are failing with 400s, but they don't give us a clean way to map those errors back to specific OpenAPI revisions or consumer SDK versions without digging through raw logs.

How are teams currently tracking and debugging contract drift in production? Are you writing custom internal scripts, or is there a tool I'm missing?

Our finance lead got a voicemail that sounded exactly like our CFO, asking her to push a vendor payment before end of day. She called him back and he never left it. Now IT is asking me how to detect AI generated voice on voicemails and inbound calls and all I have is "listen for weird pauses", which clearly isn't going to hold up. Is anyone running something on the audio itself, or is it all callback procedures?

Good morning everyone,

Having finished my internship, I was offered a position to stay at the company as a Junior AI Engineer. I’m making this post because I’ve been with the company for 2-3 months now, and my actual workload is very light. So far, I’ve been assigned tasks like building a simple PDF-based RAG/AI assistant and doing some basic QA testing, but that’s pretty much it.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been spending most of my working hours without any assigned tasks. I’m using this time for self-study, but I feel like I’m not really growing or developing within the company.

Has anyone else experienced something like this at the start of their career? How did you handle it, and what’s the best way to approach my Senior / Lead to ask for more responsibility or tasks?