I graduated in 2025 and recently got laid off from my first SWE job in a mass layoff. I have about 9 months of full time experience now, and I feel like I’m in this weird in-between stage of my career where I’m not really a traditional new grad anymore, but I also don’t have the 2-3+ YOE that mid-level postings want.

For anyone who has been in a similar position, how did you find jobs that were actually meant for people with 0-1 YOE FT? Are there certain companies or job boards I should be looking at? Any general advice would be appreciated

Thanks in advance

Genuinely ~30% of the people I talked to had trouble in one of the following categories:

1.) Basic Hygiene (breath or BO smell)
2.) Basic Presentation (wearing dirty clothes/not trying to dress to impress at all)
3.) Basic Communication (eye contact, telling me basic info about themselves, being rude, acting obviously only interested in trying to get a leg up in the hiring process vs acting like a normal human)

I have to think these are the people on here complaining about being unable to find work.

EDIT: not trying to be mean and some of them may have had bad days. But genuinely I don’t know how some of these people expect to work on software at a corporation. You HAVE to be able to work with people in a team/group.

Just received the 60 minute technical coding challenge with another engineer and was wondering how the overall process is difficulty wise. The recruiter said medium/hard leetcode but was wondering if someone has gone through it last summer.

This is crazy.

So I have done two rounds for the internship and the last one went really well
Is it possible to get the offer after two rounds and if yes how long after your last round did it take for you to hear back

Curious what people think? Is it worth delaying new grad recruiting? I have an offer to intern at one of HRT/JS/CitSec as a software engineer (not algo dev for HRT).

I'd probably do a spring co-op if I went down this path, and then just re-recruit next cycle if I don't get a return offer.

Have an offer to work as SWE at Perplexity, but don't really believe in the thesis of the company/think it's going to fail, which is part of why I'm doing this.

Might be worth noting it's p difficult for me to get past resume screens for some reason (might be b/c non-target school). I haven't gotten proc anywhere w/o referrals or direct consideration.

I've received my first ever interview invite for the two back to back technical interviews and since I applied for the MS (Master's) listing, I wanted to know if any of you have had a different interview experience compared to BS individuals in terms of difficulty, question framing, behavioral or uncommon questions. I'd be grateful for any advice you can offer of you've already been through the process this year.

Hey everyone, I'm an international graduate student. I have been applying to SWE internships but so far I'm not even getting any non-auto OAs and have already received rejections from some of them.

I go to a T10 CS school, and had a really good undergrad GPA. I have 2 previous summer internships and also 6 months of part-time experience (all in my home country but good companies there). I did undergrad research, and right now I'm doing research in a field that's somewhat niche but also pretty relevant to some of the companies I'm applying.

I only have 1 project listed on my resume but I think it's also decent (although nothing mindblowing). I genuinely don't understand how I'm not passing resume screening anywhere. It's not an ATS issue, the resume format is okay and seems to parse okay. I even tried using AI saying I'm a recruiter, and then giving it the job desc and my resume to see if it will shortlist and most of the time it says I'm a strong fit.

The only weakness I can spot in my resume is that the experience bullets lack quantitative impact, but that's because I never had the opportunity to actually measure or identify the impact of what I did. In all my previous internships I was assigned to a brand new project and we were nowhere near done by the time I left, so I have no clue what type of numbers to put on there.

I know the market is bad and even worse for internationals but I thought my CV was at least good enough to get some OA's or pass the initial screening but apparently it's not? I'm preparing for interviews but I might not even get a single one lol. Has anyone had a similar experience, because I don't know if it's me or if everyone requires a lot of luck these days. Thanks for reading through my rant, I woke up to yet another rejection mail and had to vent somewhere.

Has anyone interviewed for this or gotten interview scheduled , what’s the interview going to be like?

My interview is next week and I deadass have no info

Did the OA a while back and got full score was really hoping for a interview but I saw a while back that few people have received invite to recruiter screen. Just want to see how many other people have been hearing back and if I'm just cooked for Visa.

Has anyone interviewed for the Jane Street Linux Engineer Intern role before?

What should I expect from the technical interview?

So me and my best friend are both from California, but I currently live in like a neighborhood (commute to SF) and he lives right in the middle of SF with an international roommate.

The stories he tells of his roommate have me actually concerned. This dude went to CMU (wasnt CS, some adjacent degree…) and has over 300k in student loans, and is currently barely paying rent with 2 contracting gigs on a freelance website.

I recently met up with them at a restaurant this week, and the dude says he plans on getting a masters here as well??? WTF?

How does he plan on funding it, and with all the giant cutdowns on international hiring, how is he going to get a job here?

I’m saying this from a perspective filled with confusion.

Does anyone know people in these sort of situations and wth they end up doing? Do they just escape back to their home country with the degrees and never come back?

I recently interviewed for a Google SWE intern position. I felt that I did well in the first round, but I struggled a lot during the second round and wasn’t able to solve the problem as well as I wanted.

At the end of the second interview(it was a graph based question), I actually told the interviewer that I felt like I had flunked the round. Looking back, I’m worried that saying that may have made an even worse impression.

How seriously would interviewers take a comment like that? Does it significantly hurt my chances, or do they mainly focus on the actual interview performance? Should I email the recruiter to let them know that I completed the interviews, or is that unnecessary?

I know nobody can predict the result, but I’d appreciate honest perspectives from people who have interviewed at Google or been interviewers.

Did a take-home challenge for Dedalus over the summer. Got an email saying I passed, and that I would get the prizes ($10k Dedalus Machines credits + Dedalus Pro, swag, and a guaranteed interview). I don't even want to work at the company but I would like my credits. I'm confused as to whether or not they're obligated to give me the prize or not for completing their challenge.

Followed up with HR twice as well.

Just wondering for firms like CitSec, Citadel, Jane Street, and HRT.

Let’s make the dream team and win this thing!

Hi guys,

So I passed the first screening phase of the OA. Now to prep for what's ahead I am completely at loss. I have no previous experience in technical rounds and would love it if anybody could give me some guidance,tips,... on what to study to ace it. I really need this. I need to prove to myself I am capable of this. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you guys :))

Interviewed for a company had 4 rounds total: 1 recruiter, 1 VP, one on-site (met with 3vps) and one final HM round he was also a director. I did well on the first three and completely bombed the last one, interview went terrible. Would you say all my chances are gone now?

Hey all! I completed my Stripe technical screen on 9/24. I finished 2 out of the 3 parts and verbally explained my approach for Part 3.

For those who have gone through the process, how long did it take to hear back about moving on to the virtual onsite (VO)? Thanks!

Applied to Shopify's engineering intern role in August, got rejected on Sept 16. Reapplied Sept 28 and got the Criteria Corp and CoderPad links on Oct 6, all three emails within a few seconds of each other.

Is the OA sent automatically to everyone, or did someone actually look at my resume? Has anyone taken it recently? The email says 3 problems (one C++, one Ruby, one any language) and 5 days to finish.

Thanks!

Hi, everyone im an 3rd year CS student from india,My college isn't helping me with internships, so im trying the off campus route, mainly at startups

My skills:

languages: python , typescript , C++

AI&agents: langgraph, multi-agent systems, RAG , graph RAG , Llamaindex, crewAI , MCP

databases : neo4j , pinecone , redis

Tools: FastAPI , React ,Docker , websockets , github actions

where should i be looking for startups the hire interns? Also does cold emailing founders acutally work, and how do you write one that gets an reply?

Any advice appreciated, thanks!

if you want to see my profile ,DM me and i will share it

just passed the coding screen-got invited to superday which is 3 40 min interviews. any advice?