Hey everyone, I'm a principal software engineer with 15 years of experience. I've worked at FAANG companies and startups, both remote and on-site. There is a lot of negativity on this subreddit, and for years I've talked to people who say "I've applied to hundreds of jobs and can't find anything!"

I've gotten pretty good at finding jobs over the years, and I think some of you might find this useful.

(I dictated this and had AI format it, but it's not AI-gen, hand to god lol. Frankly the formatting still looks weird but I can't be bothered)

1. Don't apply through company websites

Submitting your resume directly through a company website is useless. If it wasn't useless 10 years ago, it certainly is now with the flood of AI-generated applications.

It can actually be worse than useless. Once you're in a company's system, recruiters may not be able to get a referral bonus for you, because you're technically already a lead. You may be removing someone's incentive to place you.

2. Build a big list of target companies

Aggressively list companies that interest you. Narrow by salary, location, remote-friendliness, etc. if you want, but cast as wide a net as possible. More offers mean more negotiating leverage. Use AI to help you build your list. Build a daily AI job that finds and compiles relevant jobs from those companies and similar for you, then take those job listing and shove them under the nose of some recruiters on linkedin with your resume in hand.

3. Work LinkedIn systematically

• Maintain a LinkedIn account. You don't have to post, but add all your professional and school contacts. Connections are what let you message recruiters and employees for referrals.
• Referrals and recruiters are how your resume actually gets seen.
• Use AI to find a couple of recruiters at each target company, plus a couple of 1st-, 2nd-, or 3rd-degree connections who work there.
• Add and message all of them. Ask for referrals or opportunities. Every one of them now has a financial incentive to help you land a role. If that doesn't work, ask on Blind (I know, it's a depressing cesspool).

4. Check out Wellfound (startups)

Startups are booming in 2026. AI gives them a real shot at competing with big players, who are mostly rent-seeking, not innovating, and laying people off. Startups are also how you stay current with the fast-changing AI landscape, since big companies move slowly.

• Aim for a solid salary: roughly $100K–$300K depending on your level.
• Ask for some equity as a lottery ticket. Try to negotiate up to 1%.
• Many startups are remote-friendly, so you can cast a wide net.

That's how I found my latest role.

5. Interviewing

Honestly, I don't know what interviewing looks like in 2026 with all the AI craziness. Do your best.

6. If you can't find a job, especially as a new grad, etc., apply to contracting companies

Contracting companies are in every major city and hire people like crazy - anyone they think they can place at a temporary contract at another company, because they scrape some of your money off the top. But it is a job, money, security, and frankly you will get exposed to and learn all sorts of technologies, make tons of professional contacts, and often get a full-time offer from the company you're placed at.

7. If you STILL can't find a job, especially as a pre-grad, new grad, etc., apply to internships

Some of you haven't even considered applying for internships. Guess, what, internships are for SOMEONE, and that someone is people with no experience like you. Swallow your pride, work a summer internship for 3 months, get paid, get better at working, and you may literally be handed a full-time job after that. If not, you will at least have professional references, contacts, and experience, which will give you a significantly higher chance of getting a full-time job.

8. Always negotiate

No matter what offer you get, negotiate upward. It costs you nothing and could be the easiest money you ever make.

• Don't commit to anything on the phone. Say you need to discuss it with your family.
• Then go ask Claude how to negotiate your way up.
• I prefer to do all my negotiating over email.

Good luck!

If you're looking for a position then get the fuck off this sub. It's full of insanely toxic people who hardly give any useful advice. They're so certain on the future of technology by saying that AI is completely wiping out the job market but for some reason are still apart of a sub that exists to help people start or continue their careers in CS.

It's my final semester of uni and I have so many friends at school who've had multiple internships and co-ops and are hopeful of their future. I myself just accepted an offer that starts in January. The job market is shitty, the economy is fucking awful and companies are obviously using AI as an easy excuse for their mass layoffs. If you're truly that convinced this career is dead then do yourself a favor and figuring out how to use that to your advantage or shift your goals. Do literally anything other than reading Reddit comments.

Hey all,

I'm a principal level dev (10 YOE) at Microsoft and was recently offered the buyout. My area of expertise is in building internal supply chain tools within Microsoft for our datacenters etc.

I still get 2-3 messages a day from recruiters in my Linkedin with offers at the senior/staff level, but I haven't interviewed in 10 years.

How brutal is the job market right now? I was offered 39 weeks pay which is pretty enticing but my job is super easy and low stress as is right now. Genuinely don't think I'll accept the offer, but I'm curious how difficult it is to find a similar paying role right now.

Open to moving to NYC/SF etc

Thanks!

A little question that I've had for years.

Let's say that you're Google and employ 60k software engineers. Every one of those engineers has access to your monorepo with all of its code, and little to no guardrails on copying whatever code they may want to. You have employees from dozens of countries and backgrounds, each with varied motivations. Any of them could bring their work laptop home on a random tuesday, download the code for any million/ billion dollar product and copy/ move it to another device, if they really wanted to.

Why don't we ever see this happen? Obviously, it's illegal, but people have broken the law for less. It wouldn't be hard for an individual to copy/ paste an entire million/ billion dollar product and sell it to an undercover buyer secretly for personal gain. It also would not be hard for a foreign government to insert an employee from their country to steal IP and copy those products in its own for economic/ political gain.

I there something that I'm missing here? It seems way too easy to steal literal million/ billion dollar products and also difficult/ impossible to trace if someone had done so smartly. I would expect companies to silo and lock down their products more to prevent things like this from happening.

Title.

Ai writes 95% of our code now, and does it in 1/100th the time.

I'm at 75 reviews in queue, only 5 of them are less than 1000 lines. It's been like this for two weeks.

What do you guys do?

Hey folks!

A few months ago, I made this post about a big tech company reaching out to me with a job opportunity while I was still an undergraduate.

Well, after a long interview process, I got the job!!

I'm still finishing my degree, so this is a pretty big milestone for me. I'm super excited about what's ahead!

I can't share too many details due to an NDA, but I'm happy to answer any general questions about the interview process, my experience, or how I got here.

Just wanted to share a positive update, especially for other students who might find themselves in a similar situation!

Despite everything you hear about the tech job market, opportunities are definitely still out there!

Earlier yesterday, Microsoft announced buyouts for nearly 60,000 employees which is a socially acceptable way of preparing the Microsoft global workforce for brutal layoffs. 1-2 years ago, us newer engineers started sounding the alarm when we realized our callbacks were going down day by day. Some of you said AI wouldn’t take jobs and it’s nothing more than a fancy chatbot, some of you said it was a phase and that the engineer will always prevail.

High TC, coddling behavior in the office and lavish lifestyles have blinded you guys from the realities of late stage capitalism. It does not matter if you’re a new grad or a L6 staff engineer, the machinery of capitalism will not spare you. With that, I say you owe us “doomers” and “crazy” people an apology.

Edit: I’m employed

Context: US Citizen, California-based role

"Holy cow", is all I can say.

I have never really interviewed at a big tech company in the past. Usually I do not apply to these because the rigorous interview loop is hard to justify a 150k salary and 40+ hours of work a week. But I am tired of my current job. It is fully remote and really chill, but I feel like I am not learning enough. I would consider myself a solid engineer in practice, so I felt like it was going to be easier than I thought. I also get paid less than I would like to at 3 YOE.

I decided to apply to a big tech SWE role asking for 4 years of experience. I do not understand how I even got interviewed in the first place, but the recruiter asked about my experience and I answered honestly. He emailed back an hour later mentioning that the hiring team would consider my candidacy.

So knowing full-well that I basically was underqualified, was probably going to get grilled at a level higher than my expertise, and was probably going to fail most of the interview, I decided to prep for everything.

I spend two weeks preparing for LeetCode interviews. I solved about 10 problems a day, and revisited problems that I have done in the past. I personally despise LeetCode, but I gave it a shot anyways. My brain was fried by the end of the day, and I felt sick sometimes. Kudos to those who can actually do this grind. I also prepared for system design heavily, and this was the one I was least worried about. I practiced behavioral problems so that I would know how to answer them properly.

The Interviews:

Technical Screen - LeetCode and Theoretical Questions

For the first technical screen, I was asked technical questions for about 20 minutes then given a LC problem that I have not seen before (not surprised). However, I was able to implement a brute force solution very quickly in about 5 minutes after discussing my approach. After I was asked to optimize, I actually recognized the optimal pattern through my practicing. I implemented the optimal approach in about 10 minutes. I discussed time complexity, tradeoffs, etc. The guy was young around my age and we chatted up a bit after. This is probably the best I have ever done in a LC round (and under 20 minutes, too). One hour after this interview, the recruiter emails me to state that I am moving up to a full panel.

First Round - LeetCode

The interviewer was a few minutes late, and introductions ate up about 10 mins of the time. I was again asked a problem that I have never seen before, but I quickly recognized the brute force approach. However, the interviewer's connection was laggy and was a little hard to understand, and I feel I heard her say that the approach is inefficient (which it was). So I was like, okay, well I am not sure how to optimize this approach, but after thinking it through, I was actually able to provide a sub-optimal approach. Zero hints so far. This one was good enough to implement and she gave me the go-ahead. I wrote the solution in about 5 minutes using binary search. She mentioned that this approach was better than brute forcing, but asked if there were a better way to optimize this. I told her that I couldn't really think of anything right now, but I kept dry running test cases to see if I can find a pattern - I couldn't. She gave hints but after a while, she mentioned the optimal approach but asked me not to implement it. I guess that was probably it for her. I give this round a Lean Hire with a best case Hire rating. Not too bad, but I am not the best at Leetcode puzzles.

Second Round - System Design

The interviewer was very nice. Cracked a few jokes and laughed. I could not really understand him too well, but he seemed genuinely interested in my experience for a few minutes. We then go to the whiteboard and he gives me a prompt that literally describes to architect my current position's system architecture. Needless to say, I felt this round went amazing. We also chatted a little bit after the round. I would give this round a Strong Hire. I have never done better than this in a SD round.

Third Round - Engineering Manager

This interviewer was also very nice. We did not do introductions but she basically grilled me to the core on my database and architecture concepts - when to handle things like replication, caching, running migrations on production data, etc. We also discussed my previous projects and work experiences. I was asked how I used AI, and I answered in a very good way. But then she got deeper, and I was starting to fear that my lack of experience was starting to show. Either way, I think I answered correctly, but I might've missed more higher level concepts that I have not necessarily touched in my SWE career. I give this round a Hire rating, maybe small chance of a Strong Hire.

Fourth Round - HLD/LLD??

My recruiter mentioned that this round would consist of "application architecture". I immediately jumped to thinking that this round would be more OOP and LLD, so when I went into the interview, I had my assumptions all wrong. This was just another System Design round, and I did not realize that until he asked "How do we scale this?" and I felt like I was thrown a curveball 15 minutes in. I thought this was LLD since I was asked to design a parking lot system - one of the examples ubiquitously asked when doing LLD interviews. The good news was that when I do LLD I always break down the problem into Functional and Nonfunctional requirements, come up with entities, data structure, and algorithm before I start coding. I was SOMEHOW already half of the way there to design this system without even knowing I was needing to design a high level system. The problem was that I already spent a long time going into the low levels of the system that it made it sound like I was going too deep into low level by that point. I immediately abstracted my details from things like algorithms, low-level dependencies, and data structure to mentioning things like horizontal scaling, API endpoints, and components. I then decided to draw up my HLD and by this point I did not have much time left but the system was super easy, so I talked through my design decisions etc. I think this one was a Lean Hire just because of how much time was burnt going through LLD halfway. Probably the worst out of the 4 interviews.

Retrospective

I have not heard back yet as I have just finished my panel yesterday, but I do not anticipate an offer. I do not think I did good enough overall, especially on that last round. I did feel like I did exceptionally well in the technical screen/system design/EM round, but hey, negative marks drag you down much more than positive marks.

Needless to say that I think I am going to stay at my company a little longer. I never realized how bad you would have to go through the gauntlet to get into these positions, and hopefully have someone to not critique you massively on your negative marks. I will probably only target regular tech roles without the prestige or rigor of joining a big tech company. The experience was great nonethless, and I learned a lot

I got laid off May 2025 and haven’t worked as a SWE since. I have taken a long hiatus due to mental health reasons (won’t get into it, but I was really bad), financial problems, relationship issues, all just one after another. I did a little job search back in late 2025 and got to a couple final rounds but never got offers. Then more things went down, but now I am back. Is it possible for me to get a job? I worked at 2 F500 companies primarily as backend or full stack. I got my hands dirty on a lot of different tech. React, Angular, Java Spring, AWS, SQL/NoSql, Docker/K8, IaaC. Unsure if I will be able to get a job or not given the market and my career gap.

I'm sure you remember those videos from a few years ago. Girl in her twenties flexing high quality work environment with unlimited free food, spending their day playing ping pong or meeting, no coding, and then ending the video with "oh and I made a quarter of a million dollars last year btw, and another company just offered me 300k TC".

Do these roles still exist? How has AI and the general turmoil in tech affected them?

I’m a software developer with about four years of experience. Seeing people lose their jobs with AI being given as a reason has me wondering what I should be doing now.

I’m not expecting the world to end. But I am worried that finding decent work will get harder, and I don’t really see what the alternatives are supposed to be.

People often say “learn a trade,” but wouldn’t those jobs feel it too? If a lot of office workers lose their income, there’s less money to spend and more people looking for other work. Or am I missing something?

What would you actually do in my position? Save more cash? Buy stocks, since companies might benefit from automation? Gold? Move into a different field?

I’d like to avoid looking back in a few years wishing I’d done something while I still had a steady income. Curious how others are thinking about this.

Hi everyone,

I'm a senior software engineer with 8 years of experience, sole founding engineer at a successful startup. My track is strong but I still do not feel confident in my skills. I often fake the confidence because I feel everyone does it.

I've been trying to get more into devops, terraform ... My main problem is that pre-AI, I would suffer through the nitty gritty and eventually really have a strong knowledge of what is right and wrong. Now AI develops it, reviews it.... I still have to own this code, but I haven't been "baptized by fire" to really be a good judge of this code. I can read and learn about it but it's not the same. If something goes wrong I'm going to look like an absolute idiot because I can't properly articular what happened.

Any strategies to properly learn things that you haven't learned pre-AI ? There is always the option of practicing on my own time with 0 AI, but I'm wondering if others have figured out a different strategy

I've been getting spammed by LinkedIn recruiters on the daily, most of them reaching out about founding engineer roles at AI startups in NYC.

I have 4YOE, at a no-name startup, and had joined as eng #3. I've worked across the platform, having joined as a frontend eng but eventually transitioning to being a full stack engineer. My profile is not remarkable.

I get inMail like:

• "first engineer at a pre-seed NYC startup building an AI back-office (bookkeeping, AP/AR, payroll) for SMBs. $150-200K + up to 2% equity, in person in Manhattan. Fancy hearing more?"
• "The role: AI Product Engineer on a 7-person pod. Full stack, features owned end to end, on customer calls yourself. Unlimited AI tooling budget, meals in office, monthly team dinners at Michelin-starred spots. $200K to $300K base, top-of-market equity, Hudson Yards 4x/week"
• "Not only will you get to work with some of the brightest minds in the space (ex Ramp, Google, Clay, Poolside), but you’ll have the opportunity to own features end-to-end, bring structure to ambiguous problems, work directly with customers and iterate on their feedback, make strong technical decisions, and ship high-quality code. Cash up to 300k + significantly above market equity".

Most of these sound interesting but as someone with limited experience, how do I spot a good one from the rest, and why am I suddenly receiving so many of these when my experience is not really commensurate with the roles they're trying to fill? What skills should I have in order to be a good fit for these, and how do you generally interview prep at one of these places?

Thanks!

I've been employed at a publicly traded tech company in Ontario for approximately 13 months in a non-technical role. I'm in my late 20s, earning a six-figure base salary. Location: Ontario, Canada

This week, HR presented me with two options: enter a 30-day Performance Improvement Plan (PIP) or accept a mutual separation package.

Separation offer:

• 7 weeks of base salary
• No bonus (annual bonus scheduled for early next year)
• No unvested equity (next vesting date is approaching)
• No benefits continuation
• No additional vacation payout mentioned

HR has also stated that they will not provide a written separation agreement until I explicitly choose the separation option over the PIP. If I don't choose separation, the PIP begins automatically.

Additional context:

• My role has changed significantly since I was hired, including the introduction of sales targets that were not originally part of my responsibilities.
• I have documentation of shifting performance expectations during my coaching plan, unequal portfolio distribution compared to peers, and positive performance reviews throughout my employment.
• The company conducted layoffs earlier this year, and I've heard that affected employees received more generous packages, although this is unverified.

Employment agreement:

My contract contains a termination clause limiting my entitlements to the minimum requirements under Ontario's Employment Standards Act (ESA), including a waiver of common-law reasonable notice.

My questions:

1. Is 7 weeks a reasonable separation package for someone with 13 months of service, or is there a basis to negotiate more?
2. How enforceable are ESA-only termination clauses in Ontario, particularly those explicitly waiving common-law reasonable notice?
3. Does HR's characterization of this as a "mutual separation" affect my legal rights or potential EI eligibility?
4. Is it standard practice for HR to require me to choose separation before providing the written agreement?
5. Would the documented changes to my role and performance expectations have any relevance to negotiating a better package?

I plan to consult an employment lawyer before signing anything, but would appreciate any perspectives from this community.

The best people will take the deal as they're the ones who know they can get another job easily. It'll be like the reverse of what Jack Welch instituted at GE.

I’m looking for a free ai mock interview tool for me to practice speaking and gives detailed feedback. Asks interview questions, analyse speech with pace, pauses, filler words, gives a report with scores. Most tools I found have free trial limits, websites, GitHub projects, self-hosted tools are all fine.

Been working in corporate America for over 10 years and I may have had maybe 1 or 2 good managers.

Quite honestly some of the things people stress over is too trivial like everyone on their team coming in by 8am even tho rest of office arrives between 9-9.30.

But I have this managers who has a reputation of being a bad manager. Being overly Imposing on the team and that shit just weighs the team down.

He has a tendency towards favoritism. He took this senior under his arm and dude trusts him with everything and pushed the senior towards a lead role in another team.

While he has his favorite the rest he just cuts from the clique. And we are just wondering like what the fuck. We just have no one to complain too.

And it's a repeating pattern where he keeps forming a circle of trust and basically leaves the others out in the cold.

I just cant forsee any consequences he faces cause he doesn't change his behavior and why would he, it's openly known how much everyone on the team don't like him. People on other teams openly tell us yeah he's bad. im pretty sure senior managers know as well. I dont feel like anything can be done

One of my friends, in the same company different department, who had a new manager who just wanted to get rid of him put him on a PIP.

He tried to dispute the PIP with paper trail of evidence showing his performance is not worthy of a PIP including consistent performance reviews that shows hes exceeded expectations and meeting notes and recording

HR didnt care. He still went through the PIP and got let go. Fortunately he found a new gig with 2 months.

Like this shit just sucks man. My old manager was solid and was the one who hired me and wanted me to grow as a developer and wanted to push me towards senior roles. Loved that manager. I hate that that manager had to relocate countries. This new guy just sucks. I wish I had my old manager

Previous company had a director who failed upwards to becoming a VP.

It just feels like becoming a manager is a timing issue and not a skill at times.

For context, I'm in my senior year working towards a bachelor's in CS. I attend a T10 school and have a SWE FAANG internship on my resume. I have a great network as well. I will not receive a return offer from any internships.

Like many others, I've been struggling to land a new grad role for SWE or anything else related to tech. The application process is grueling and is taking a toll on me. Despite this, I’m trying to stay optimistic that I’ll land something.

I don't believe that the tech industry is doomed, even despite AI sentiment, layoffs, and the job market not improving. However, that doesn't mean that I think the industry is good. I'm becoming increasingly uneasy about firing all cylinders for tech. I don't know if I want to play this game anymore. Even if I do land a role, will it even be worth it? Even if the future is uncertain, with all the risks and red flags that I keep seeing, I don't know if I want to put myself through that.

I like shipping features and owning technical systems. But a good part of the fun was writing and organizing clean code by hand. Now that's gone. My attempts to write a portion of code by hand at my internship was discouraged. Babysitting AI is not really fun.

At first, I felt trapped, but now I'm starting to consider pivoting into dentistry. Why? It requires a high level of trust and tactile skills. It's also medicine adjacent. I wanted to become a neurosurgeon growing up and often watched surgery videos when I was little. Owning my own practice sounds more appealing than working long shifts at a hospital. Dentistry gives me little-no exposure to death and life-threatening situations. I'm also incredibly lucky enough to earn my bachelor's with virtually no debt to pay.

There are also reasons for me to be hesitant. I've had little exposure to owning a business or working in a role that requires great interpersonal skills. I've never shadowed a dentist and still have lots to learn about what it's like to become and be one. I also do not meet most pre-med requirements. Of course, dental school is a massive investment in time and money.

I've also considered looking into getting a master's in CS. However, I'm beginning to realize that the CS courses I've been taking haven't been as interesting as I hoped. My favorite topics were computer graphics and to a lesser extent, operating systems, but I can't say I cared about the rest of the courses I took. It also would be doubling down on an investment in a field that I'm nervous about.

I want to know if anyone else here is considering this exact career change. If not, what other fields are you guys considering pivoting to? I'd also like to know if you agree with my sentiments or if I should hold it out on tech just for a little longer. Please feel free to tell me if you think I'm overreacting.

Microsoft (MSFT) announced on Monday that it was offering voluntary buyouts to roughly 60,000 employees as it looks to reshape its organization for the AI era.

I've been contracting for a US software startup out of Spain for 3 years, invoiced monthly, set my own hours with no benefits or holiday pay…

And when they let a chunk of the team go a few weeks back they told me contractors were fine because we weren't employees on the payroll.

A Spanish friend who works in HR mentioned that what I've described sounds a lot like "falso autónomo", which is where continuous work for a single client over a long period doing the same work as their employees would qualify the relationship as employment under Spanish labour law anyway, and she mentioned there's case law on it for exactly this kind of setup.

I'm not in a bad position right now since I kept my contract while other people were let go, but if she's right then the company has been getting the cost structure of a contractor while the relationship has looked like employment.

And from what I've read the usual fix is them converting me to a proper employment contract through an EOR like Deel or Workmotion, though I'm not sure whether raising this changes anything good for me or just makes things messy.

For anyone who's been through something similar, does raising this tend to go well or does it just blow up a relationship that's otherwise fine?

Does anyone here work on one dedicated large scale project in their SWE role? I juggle a few projects and it’s cool to see different aspects of the business, but I wish that I could “lock in” entirely on one project and learn it in and out.

I have one guy on my team who has one dedicated project that he works on, but i’m curious to see what the norm is.

I worked at a single firm for a decade as a software engineer and was recently laid off about a month ago. Started off working at the firm as a frontend engineer straight out of college on a team using ember.js, and got moved around in the firm over the decade learning new skills and frameworks (mainly React.js, Spring Boot and API/backend, and AWS), and taking up more responsibilities (deployments, training new hires, etc).

By the time I was laid off, I primarily worked across the stack building APIs (from SQL -> UI presentation) and doing cross team collaboration, and I had been doing that for the later half of the decade.

I've been applying for senior software engineer positions with more rejections emails than I count, but I have gotten some interviews (some of which I was told I got the job, all of which lead to no offers).

I'm curious if I should take the leap and apply for staff/principal engineer positions, and looking for guidance from the community. To be honest, I read the job descriptions for some of these positions and think there's no way I'm cut out for them. They tend to ask for leading infrastructure design, meeting and organizing changes across the whole org, and making decisions that I quite frankly haven't had the opportunity to gain experience in my YOE.

On one hand, I think I'm just suffering from imposter syndrome, because I know I can learn and do just about anything (if I can't do it today, given enough time I will be able to). On the other hand, I think there's real legitimacy to my concern, and that I'd actually be making a fool out of myself applying for these roles.

The "new grad" flair here is almost its own sick joke. Feel free to laugh.

I graduated back in December of 2022, with a B.S. in computer science from a state university. I had initially thought that I had a shoe-in at a tech role - some small contracting company, which we'll call "R", had enjoyed the resume I sent and offered me a position as a contractor in training back in Thanksgiving, so I gladly accepted.

I ended up working part-time at a pizza place for a year before "R" took me off their waitlist and accepted me into a role (which, being vague, was not actually software-related). I took the role like an idiot, and flunked the first interview because I didn't have the right experience. They offered me a second chance, but the interview ended up getting put off for so long that I finally bit the bullet and left "R" for a more promising position, at another contracting company called "F". If you know how these contracting companies work, please feel free to bring out the clown horns and cream pies.

"F" was, for what it was worth, much higher quality than "R", and I did briefly hold a "production support" role at a bank for a while. It wasn't programming, though: I essentially stared at a wall of 3000 processes that ran as a batch a few times daily, and there were a few deadlines throughout the day where my team would have to ensure that the processes were fully finished. I also did some light ticket work that involved some basic SQL queries in a company database, but that's about as close to programming as the job got.

Budget cuts happened. I got let go from the bank, returned to "F", and after I couldn't secure another position in 3 months (mainly because I was picky and didn't want to leave my immediate state), I got let go from "F" as well. I got a low level IT job a few months later, and I've been coasting on that ever since (about 10 months), but again -- that's IT, not software. I don't think I've written a single line of code at this job, unless you count Outlook inbox rules to filter emails to the right place.

I can't help but feel like a failure. I took an expensive degree at a state university because I fell for promises that it would be free money and 75K salaries right out of college. Now I'm making 45K and just got off the phone to ask my mom for $500 because I can barely make rent.

I've hardly done any programming since, either professionally or as a hobby. The entire field feels like it's shifted since I graduated - I "laid low" for a bit, hoping that things would eventually stabilize and that entry-level positions would open up again, but they never did, and now the job market looks entirely unrecognizable to me.

Be honest: is it too late for me? I'm realizing now that I'm four years past graduation and still barely self-sufficient, and I feel like it's my own fault.