CSCareerQuestions

Where are you applying? Is it only locally for in office or hybrid jobs? I said "fuck it" and applied worldwide: Japan, Singapore, Portugal, Switzerland, Australia, Thailand, Canada, South Africa, Fiji, etc. You'd be surprised how many are actually willing to provide a work visa for candidates.

Also, if you're willing to move or just work remotely, there are many more options. I was open to seeing a different place and so far that's been to my advantage.

Relocateme, ethicaljobs, jobsforgood, ratracerebellion, 4daywork(week), offerzen (post your profile and let employers find you), remote dot com, and other sites all make this kind of stuff possible.

Anti Commercial-AI license

Hmm, I'm having trouble just landing interviews. Probably 50-100 applications before an interview. The possibility of losing my home is all that keeps me motivated. I do like software engineering though, and am always working on personal projects that probably won't make me money.

But yeah, I do find it hard to motivate myself for practicing leetcode problems, and I do suck at them, since most stuff is just about remembering algorithms I learned in a class more than a decade ago, and the few times I've needed to implement them myself in my career, I'd just look them up.

I'm not sure it's "AI" causing lack of demand though. It's just most large companies have given up "innovating," and are in rent-seeking mode now. In the US, at least, I've heard that many companies are only hiring devs in India to backfill the devs they've laid-off or quit. I've interviewed with an agentic AI startup, and it was pretty obvious it was "Actually Indians" (underpayed, overworked devs would fix the shitty code their AI agent would write). Most of the interviews I've gotten were to lead a team of all-remote Indian devs.

• Got a degree in game programming
• Every big game developer is doing layoffs
• Indie studios are full or closing
• Guess I'll just go fuck myself

This system is broken, there is no longer a social contract, our country takes everything and gives nothing

Crime is unironically more accessable and rewarding than being employed in America.

Nothing will meaningfully improve until the rich fear for their lives

I'm in the same boat; I no longer have any motivation to self study and pursue excellence in these skills - 'AI' has destroyed that. At least back when searching Google / Stackoverflow / reading Documentation was still a thing I saw the value in making my own notes so as to reduce the friction in recalling the concepts, but with AI it's become trivially easy to get an answer to any question.

I've been distracting myself with learning other skills (i.e. how to drive, taking certifications, applying for Working Holiday Visas), but these are dead ends.

I'm still employed, but only a matter of time before I get laid off I think.

• I couldn't even clear the first round of Leetcode test.
• I can barely solve 1 or 2 LC questions a day
• I've tried to read system design for a while but can't find any interest in it.
• everything feels so pointless.
• I just want to play video games and watch movies
• till these darks days pass
• I don't think I have any real passion or talent for programming
• I don't what level of panic I should be feeling right now.

Sounds pretty depressive to me. And a depression does not help with tackling a depressing situation. Get any help your able to get in your area for your mental health – therapy, medication, self help groups, sports, yoga, whatever. You deserve a happy life, don't let depression destroy it.

Grinding LC questions just makes me feel worse, because i know that being good at those won't guarantee me job security. If i'm going to have to blast through rounds of torture, just to be laid off 3 month later, what's even the point.

This is one of the few industries, where the demands keep rising exponentially, with no regard for peoples wellbeing

I'm right there with you, mate. I graduated just in time for the whole industry to be about "AI". I don't want to work on AI. I hate AI. I also don't feel qualified for the jobs I'm applying for. Sure, I did the degree, but I don't feel like I learnt anything in it well enough to call myself qualified.

LC blows. I've been on the side of interviewing and hiring engineers, and the only thing LC is good for is filtering down when you have way too many decent candidates to reasonably interview, like on the order of hundreds for every position. It's like how ivy league college admissions are very arbitrarily selective - getting in is way harder than actually doing the work once you're there. They just need a way to toss out most applications without too much risk of dropping the most promising ones because they don't have the time to critically assess everyone.

Whether someone can remember the algorithm for depth first search they learned 10 years ago but never needed to use is totally useless. System design knowledge is much more relevant, but not as easy to auto-grade a candidate on. But more than either of those is someone's ability to...you know, actually do the daily work and take responsibility for the systems they work on. I actually hope the AI interviewer pre-screenings can take the place of unhelpful algo centric automated assessments.

Like: What does the candidate think about testing? How do they plan a large project? Can they form opinions and drive the outcome of a technical discussion towards a robust solution? Are they capable of organizing complexity into manageable and composable units? Can they quickly debug a problem to identify the root cause? Can they write code to do something practical and similar to the actual work my team does on a regular basis?

Anyway, I'm rambling. If I were in your shoes, I'd look into a trade certification program. Go out and repair wind turbines or something. Sitting in a chair all day looking at screens leaves people depressed.

At least you're getting interviews