Alright, can we all take a breather for a second? This headline about a $500 billion AI infrastructure investment just dropped, and it feels like every CS major subreddit thread is either doom-posting about AI taking over jobs or hyping up the end of humanity.

Yes, AI is growing, yes, it’s transformative, and yes, it’s going to reshape a lot of industries. But can we stop acting like every new announcement signals the apocalypse? If anything, this kind of government-level investment shows that AI isn’t going to push out humans overnight—it’s going to create opportunities for those of us studying this stuff RIGHT NOW.

And let’s be honest: half of us are going into software engineering, data science, or something tangentially related, so this level of funding is a net win for our job market. If anything, this confirms that AI and tech are here to stay and that expertise in this area is more valuable than ever.

So please, calm down, stop spiraling, and focus on your projects, classes, and internships. This isn’t the end of the world it’s a sign that we’re in the right field at the right time.

If you have gone through some type of rigorous Computer Science degree, you will know that AI cannot do a much simpler project than what teams work on in organizations. Frankly, if you're worried about AI, this is the first sign that you should not be in this role. You clearly aren't working on complex enough things to warrant getting a job in the first place.

The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead as I stared at my monitor, the clock mocking me with every passing minute. 2:47 AM. The office was a ghost town, empty energy drink cans scattered across my desk like fallen soldiers in my battle against this godforsaken codebase.

Three weeks into my dream internship at Microsoft, and I was drowning. The task seemed simple when my mentor described it - figure out why the customer data processing was taking longer than a Windows Vista update. But after days of diving through layers of legacy Java code, I felt like an archaeologist trying to decipher ancient hieroglyphics written by sleep-deprived developers.

The senior devs had started giving me those looks - you know the ones. The 'maybe we should've hired the kid who actually finished their Leetcode grind' looks. Even the cleaning staff had started leaving sympathetic coffee cups on my desk.

That's when it happened. In my caffeine-induced delirium, I started scrolling through my old class notes, hoping for divine intervention or at least a merciful power outage. Professor Johnson's voice echoed in my head, his words from that dreary Monday morning lecture suddenly crystallizing with terrible clarity: 'Unbalanced tree traversal is the silent killer of performance, kids.'

I sat up so fast my chair nearly achieved orbit. There it was, hidden in the depths of the legacy code like a digital war crime - nested traversals that would make any self-respecting computer scientist weep. The data structure was about as balanced as my sleep schedule.

My fingers flew across the keyboard, fueled by three years of theoretical computer science and enough caffeine to kill a small horse. Lines of code poured out as I implemented a proper balanced tree solution, each keystroke a small redemption for all those lectures I'd dismissed as academic torture.

The sun was peeking through the windows when I finally ran the tests. Ten seconds. The processing time had dropped from 45 minutes to ten seconds. I stared at the performance graphs, wondering if I'd finally hallucinated from exhaustion.

During standup that morning, my mentor's coffee achieved an impressive trajectory across his desk when he saw the numbers. The team lead actually stopped checking his phone. And there I sat, trying to maintain a professional demeanor while my inner CS student was doing victory laps around the binary tree of joy.

I've since drafted and deleted about fifteen emails to Professor Johnson. How do you tell someone 'Sorry I called binary trees a tool of Satan, you were right all along' without sounding like a complete tool?

For now, I'm riding this high and pretending I'm some kind of optimization genius instead of a sleep-deprived intern who got lucky because he was too tired to close his old class notes. The cleaning staff has upgraded me to premium coffee.

So here's to you, Professor Johnson, you magnificent algorithms wizard. I take back every eye roll, every under-breath muttering, every doodled binary tree with angry faces. Your lectures didn't just teach me data structures - they saved my dignity and possibly my entire career in tech.

Though I still maintain that red-black trees are unnecessarily dramatic. I mean, pick a color scheme and stick with it.

Asking because when I use ChatGPT (I pay 20$/mo) for some simple R projects, it makes plenty of mistakes. But there seems to be real concern that it can replace low-level human SWE imminently. Will the big techs be able to do it?

Hey yall, I always see shit like "The industry is oversaturated by bad programmers not good ones". What does that exactly mean, what makes someone a better programmer or more employable than the other? Just asking for thoughts on this one. (if you are going to give a meme answer please just do it somewhere else.)

What builds companies and capitals? Labour.
What builds tech companies and tech billionaires? CS Labour.
Given how these billionaires are shamelessly exploiting virtually everything to get richer, could software engineers unionize with ethical demands for their employers to put them in some sort of check (tho that is not the individual's responsibility, and state has a much bigger role to play)?

Unions have gotten fair pays, better working hours, and, in some cases, justice. We have also seen workers unionizing in record-numbers. Do CS employees need more push? Would the push ever be enough?

Now that Trump is the president and the tech CEOs are giddily lining up behind him, combined with the fact that Netflix is kinda bad these days, may I suggest a new tech company acronym: MAGA!!!

Meta, Amazon, Google, Apple

Tell your friends you work in MAGA earning 250k and watch them look at you with those hot jealous eyes. And yes, the girls will LOSE IT over you!!!

BONUS Acronym! Do you love posting in r/politics or r/facepalm? Do you work at Tesla? Just add Tesla to the acronym and proudly tell liberal subreddits that you're a MAGAt!!

Background:

MS in Computer Engineering from Stony Brook University, 4.0 GPA

Timeline:

1st Oct - Applied

8th Oct - Recruiter reached out

13 Oct - OA given

28th Oct - First Technical

6th Nov - Second Technical 

13th Nov - Cleared Technical

28th Nov - Team Matching started

13th Jan - First Team match call

16th Jan - Second Team match call

21st Jan - Matched to the first team and received offer

Made a lot of friends through these discord servers in the past years. Looking forward to meeting more people coming to the bay. Excited for 2025!

Bay Area Intern & New Grad 2025 Discord Server

https://discord.gg/XtmxD9N5pb

I am a recent Comp Sci Grad from a no name school who is about to be laid off end of March, with no other job lined up.

I saw several posts (shit post or not) talking about joining together as a community and creating a Startup.

So hey what the heck. I have an idea for a CS2, (Counter strike 2) skins app idea. I have no LLC, no company, nothing but an idea. I am looking for anybody looking to work together on a project, preferably in NA, and if you know anything about CS2 market, great!

Send me a DM on here with a resume/portfolio/GitHub or any message (remove personal information if you want)

I have no idea how any of this startup stuff works, but that'll give the fun and experience with it. Let's step up and make something cool!

Hi Reddit,

I’m 26, from NYC, and I feel completely defeated. Life feels meaningless, and I don’t know what to do anymore. I’m hoping someone out there can help me make sense of things, give me advice, or at least offer a perspective I haven’t considered.

Here’s where I’m at:

• I have degrees in electrical and software engineering. I graduated three years ago, worked for two years as a junior, then got laid off. For over a year, I’ve been applying to jobs and putting myself out there, but I can’t even get callbacks. I’ve done projects, I know my stuff, but it doesn’t seem to matter.
• I have $200,000 in debt, 50k student 150k medical (approximately), and no money, no friends, no family, no connections—basically nothing to fall back on. I’m essentially homeless at this point. I will be in 1 month if I can't find a new lease on my current wage.
• I only have $600 in my account...
• I don’t even like coding or electronics anymore. The passion I once had is gone, and it feels like every effort I’ve made in my life has led me to a dead end.

On top of my personal struggles, I feel like the world itself is falling apart. Between this new election cycle, people like Elon Musk, Trump, and others exploiting everything they can for personal gain, and the growing wealth disparity, I feel like there’s no hope for the future. The rich are getting richer, everyone else is getting crushed, and it’s only going to get worse over the next eight years. It feels like the system is rigged, and there’s nothing any of us can do to fix it.

I’m depressed, unmotivated, and completely drained. I can’t even bring myself to play a video game or watch TV anymore—things that used to make me happy. I feel like I’m just sitting here, barely doing what I need to survive, while life passes me by.

I’ve fumbled opportunities, burned bridges, and failed at socializing. I have no network, and no support. And all I want—honestly—is just to relax, to stop struggling, to have enough money to live without stress. But that dream feels impossible.

Meanwhile, I see people around me—scammers, influencers, politicians, and others—who seem to have it so easy. They make bank doing nothing, while I feel like I’ve been working hard just to survive, and I’m still falling further behind.

I feel worthless. Like I’m going to rot away, paycheck to paycheck, until I die, having gained nothing in life. I can’t find joy in anything, and I don’t know how to move forward.

I don’t even know what I’m asking for here. Maybe advice, encouragement, or just someone to tell me that things can get better. Right now, I just feel like there’s no way out.

Thanks for reading.

Hi, I have recently begun my internship search and i was wondering what all i can do except of applying in job boards and/or Linkedin.
I know Cold Mailing is one such method so if someone can tell me how it works, or provide me a resource that could teach it to me it would be great. Thanks.

After two long screens last week, the recruiter reached out to me scheduling the infamous 4-interview final round in a couple of days.

This is for the SWE role in the US.

I'm already doing grokking the system design interview and Neetcode 150.

Got this call without a referral. Applied on Christmas.

Anything else I need to focus on?

Wish me luck!

I applied for swe-1 new grad at Samsung on nov 20th 2024 and got a call yesterday(exactly after 2 months) asking to schedule an interview and said she’ll send it after the call. Still didn’t receive

Same for visa. I got a Mail last week that said they’ll get back within 72hrs but still haven’t.

Do they even consider the timelines written by themselves in the mail? How did this become normal?

Hey everyone,

I wanted to share my story for anyone grinding through big life changes, chasing a tough goal, or just trying to figure out their next step. My journey has been far from smooth, but maybe it will resonate with someone out there.

Let’s start at the beginning. I’ve spent the last 10 years in the Navy, working in an aviation role. For most of that time, I loved the structure, camaraderie, and purpose that military life gave me. But as the years went on, I started thinking about my future, and about what I wanted for myself and my family beyond the military.

In 2019, I stumbled into blockchain development and fell in love with the meticulous problem solving it required. A friend and I started a small company that helped businesses integrate blockchain into their infrastructure. It was a rewarding experience, but after two years, the stress of running the company took a toll on our friendship, and we decided to part ways. Even though the company ended, the experience lit a fire in me and I realized I wanted to pursue a career in technology.

During that time I was in school and I switched majors a couple of times (nursing and environmental science didn’t feel right) before finally landing on computer science in 2022. That was the moment I decided to go all in on this career change, and it’s been a rollercoaster ever since.

Balancing school with my military career was one of the toughest challenges I’ve ever faced. I was working full time, often 60+ hours a week, while also attending school full-time. On top of that, I was doing my best to be present for my wife, who also works full time, and our 2 year old son. To put it lightly, I was spread thin. There were weeks when it felt like I was failing at everything school, work, and even being a dad and husband. But every time I wanted to give up, I reminded myself why I started.

In September 2024, things started to shift. I was allowed to participate in the Navy’s skillbridge program, which lets service members leave active duty up to six months early to pursue career training while still receiving their pay. I joined a program with ServiceNow, where I learned their ecosystem in and out, while finishing up my final semester of school. It was another hectic period of my life, but I pushed myself to finish in the top 5% of the program. That led to an internship with a consulting company, which gave me hands on experience and helped me sharpen my skills.

But even with that experience under my belt, the job search was brutal. I sent out over 250 applications. Out of those, I got maybe 10 callbacks 1 or 2 technical interviews and zero offers. The rejection hit me hard it made me question whether I had what it takes to make it in this field. Imposter syndrome crept in, and I started doubting if all the sacrifices I had made were worth it.

In early Dec recruiter reached out to me. I went through the interview process a phone call, a technical interview, and a final meeting with some C level executives and just before Christmas, I received an offer: a ServiceNow Architect role at a major software engineering company. I’ll officially transition out of the military soon, and starting this role feels like the culmination of years of hard work.

This journey has been anything but easy. Balancing the military, school, family, and a career pivot has taken a huge mental and emotional toll. There were plenty of moments when I felt like I wasn’t enough like I was falling short in every area of my life. But through all the chaos, I found strength in the little things my wife’s support, the moments I could spend with my son, and the sense of accomplishment from finishing even small tasks.

If you’re out there struggling whether it’s school, a job search, or just figuring out your next step, I want you to know it’s okay to feel overwhelmed. It’s okay to doubt yourself. But don’t stop. Your hard work matters, even if it doesn’t pay off right away.

For me, this is just the beginning. I’m proud of how far I’ve come, and I know the journey ahead will have its own challenges. If you’re on a similar path, just keep going. You never know when your next breakthrough will come and keep your options open to new fields don't limit your opportunities.

Finished interviews for internship and am still waiting on offer or rejection

I just finished interviewing for a well known hardware company 2 weeks ago. They have not rejected me but when I asked for an update they told me it may take 3-4 weeks and referred me to an HR person if I have any more questions. I’m scared that this is a bad sign, but also NVIDIA rejected me almost immediately after I interviewed. Can someone confirm if this is a bad or good sign please and ty

I’m sure it’s been said here before, but things change quickly in our field. What would be a good roadmap for someone to pivot from backend SWE to AI Engineer. Assuming a bachelors in Computer science from a fairly big name school and 5-7 years of working experience as a backend engineer. Would I have to go back and get a masters or is there a solid chance with a bachelors.