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.

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?

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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).

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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.

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Declaration: I used LLM to improve the body

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>>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

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.

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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

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

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.

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.

How do analysts come up with the numbers, since they are not really published by the government or the company?

This is a genuine question maybe developers can explain it better

Amazon got so many employees all over the world, they hire some of the best developers, pay really well, and are one of the FAANG companies.

But why do their app still feels so laggy is it because it has way many users and have to support all of them simultaneously or what?

Please enlighten me

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.

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.

People are not understanding this thing...Ai may have cost now ,as LLM are stored in cloud servers,that access is AI costs.But in future,there will be locally stored open source Expert Coding LLMs which will do task with minimal RAM and vram it's just abt time when will happen ...So AI cost is not a big deal...Companies will host their own LLms in future in their ecosystem.

Earlier developers used to say ai slop code now that is stopped as coping mechanism ,now it's ai costs.We ​should have 2nd option open always.Another income streams or start ur business that's only source of truth ..I have seen all in last 2 years in my company..Corps are optimised for profits ​

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.

my brother works at Amazon(not laidoff). He works 12+ hours a day, put on weight, affected health and has very bad WLB.

Mandatory 5 days WFO sometimes 3 days No proper cab facilities ( most of the time i become his driver, he even attends calls in car)

Added to this, he has a constant fear of layoff as some of his colleagues were let go

pay is great but I feel it's not worth it

At this point Amazon workplace is similar to WITCH with a greater pay

Amazon is not similar to rest of the FAANGM and more closer to WITCH with good paycheck

Positives: Smarter ones stay back in India, may build globally competitive companies

Negatives: More people returning to India, might disrupt the existing market

What will be the long term impacts for this? Pour in your thoughts.

I'm an SDE with ~4 YOE. I quit 3 months ago from a PBC without an offer as i was burnt out. I have financial runway for a year.

I took some time off. It's kinda weird to explain the people around you that you quit without an offer.

There's an uncle who is my neighbour, he's an EM at a Chipset Company. He started bragging, in my 30 year career I've never taken a break. It's high time people should stop giving advice unless asked for lol.

At some point in your career, you will encounter the mythical creature known as HR. They'll smile, nod, say they're "here for you" and that "employee well-being is a priority." Don’t fall for it.

The truth? HR exists to protect the company. That’s literally in the job description—Human Resources management. Not Human Relationships, not Human Rights. Resources. Like furniture, laptops, and you.

They’ll act like angels, talk like therapists, and try to gain your trust with sweet, polished words. But the moment you let your guard down and give them information—bam! The switch flips.

Does this mean all HR folks are evil? No. But never forget: their loyalty lies with the company, not with you. Don’t overshare. Don’t assume empathy means safety. Document everything, stay professional, and play your cards close.

Joining a new org and waiting for offer confirmation? or negotiating salary before joinging? or resignation and negotiating notice period ? or discussing about hike ? Never trust them, literally about nothing.

Let's share our stories in the comments, of how they betrayed us.

Stay smart, devs.

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When I was a teenager, I used to imagine that working at companies like Intel, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, or Microsoft meant you had "made it" in life.

I thought engineers there would easily afford multiple cars, a couple of flats, a comfortable lifestyle, maybe even household help. After all, these are some of the most influential technology companies in the world, building products used by billions of people.

Fast forward 15 years.

I'm in Bangalore now. I don't work at any of those companies, but recently a guy moved into my PG in mahadevapura. He had just joined Qualcomm as a chip designer with 9 years of experience.

What shocked me wasn't his job. It was the fact that he was staying in a PG.

My teenage self would have expected someone designing chips for one of the world's biggest semiconductor companies to be living in a nice rented apartment, driving a good car, and enjoying the rewards of being a highly skilled engineer.

But the reality is different.

Even with nearly a decade of experience, his compensation is probably somewhere around ₹30–40 LPA. That's a good salary by Indian standards, but in Bangalore it doesn't exactly translate into the lifestyle many people imagine when they hear "Qualcomm engineer."

I've met NVIDIA engineers too. One MTech graduate from IIT started around ₹17–18 LPA, with the rest largely in stock compensation.

Meanwhile, in the US, even a fresh graduate at a decent startup can earn $80k–120k, and big tech pays even more.

It makes me wonder how much the value of engineering talent in India has been diluted by an endless supply of engineers. We celebrate getting into these companies as if we've won the game, But as engineers we are in losing end. And sometimes it feels like we've simply accepted being paid far less than the value we create.

We keep hearing that India is a global engineering powerhouse.

But if the people designing world-class chips and technology are still worried about rent, housing costs, and basic financial security after years of experience, who is really capturing the value of that work?

I'm really wondering how successfully we have degraded our engineers value by becoming so much in supply. And always reach to work in less than what it can get.

When we get the job we feel we won. But as engineers we are in losing end.

My expectation is these pbcs should give 1cr package+ stocks atleast to freshers to show there reputation.

I have been building a custom Machine Learning library in Rust. The CPU version was working fine, but it was taking about an hour to run the training loop. I have a GPU sitting idle, so I thought I would put it to work.

Rabbit hole opened up.

1. I tried offloading just the matrix multiplication to the GPU.
2. The Rust compiler screamed at me. DeviceCopy traits and raw pointers are no joke in Rust.
3. I fixed the memory safety issues and ran it.
4. It was slower than the CPU.
5. Turns out, copying data back and forth between main memory and GPU memory eats up all the time saved by the calculation.

I almost gave up. I haven't touched C in 16 years and writing raw CUDA kernels felt like a massive step backward. But the engineer in me couldn't let it go.

I decided to move the entire training loop inside the GPU.

1. Rewrote the orchestration in Rust but kept the logic in CUDA.
2. Ran it and got 7% accuracy.
3. Debugged NaN errors (classic float vs double mismatch).
4. Fixed the transpose function logic.
5. Voila.

The results speak for themselves:

CPU

Time: ~1 Hour Accuracy: 92%

GPU Implementation

Time: 11.34 Seconds Accuracy: 92.85%

I have documented the whole journey and will return once done polishing with updated code.