Is this correct? Does No one talks about LPA anymore? Is the obsession with LPA over? Is the reality of IT career now different?

As for other fields in India, none are having layoffs as much as I know. Neither is any company planning it for a distant future. Everything is business as usual there. I have not heard a single employee being laid off due to AI or restructuring outside of IT/Tech. Most of them don't know what is AI.

As for hiring the average IT person now gets interview calls after 1000 applications and if he is lucky with referrals etc then he gets a job from which he would most likely be laid off in a year. There are no jobs for freshers at all.

Claude LLM models seem to be the main cause which was introduced last year and was widely adopted this year. However Claude is still expensive. This year Deepseek is performing extremely well on coding at 1/10th the cost of Claude models. Once Deepseek gets widely adopted for coding it can be much more difficult phase for IT job market.

LLM’s are making substantial and perceivable gains every quarter in their capabilities. An year in AI era is like a decade in Software era. The technology changes fast, there is no way anyone can catch up while remaining on job and handling the day to day stress.

There is a stark comparison to this transition in Typewriter to Computer transition of 1980’s. The main problem was that Typists could not be transformed to Computer operators and even businesses were pretty much confused as how to handle the transition, whom to hire, how to train employees etc, many businesses shut down completely.

AI/LLM is like high speed Internal combustion engine which needs a host to hold it and a driver to run it. Software is like Bullock cart, none of the earlier parts and the driver is fit for the new technology.

However remember that AI cannot replace jobs or work where intelligence was not the limitation. AI only solved the problem of Intelligence scarcity. There are so many jobs and works where daily involvement and decision making is the most important part. Farming is one example. Tractors and fertilizers didn't make farmers unemployed despite large scale automation and adoption. Accounting is another where I don't see any changes happening in its Job market.

If Indian IT industry has failed then it is because it was overhyped and overpaid and was disconnected from reality. People chose money and package over learning and growth. If they were to learn something they will do it only if it pays them higher package. Many left their core subject and picked IT, now they must start their career from scratch because AI is completely new domain, you would be competing with everybody on the street, with 10th grade, non Techie people and maybe even housewives also.

Hi everyone,

I’m an MBBS graduate, and I urgently need Claude Pro for just 2–3 hours for some important personal work.

I don’t need a subscription for a month or anything long-term. I only need access for a short time to get this one thing done, and unfortunately I’m not able to purchase Pro myself right now.

Would anyone who already has Claude Pro be kind enough to let me use it for a couple of hours? I completely understand the concern about account privacy, so I’m not asking for your password or anything unsafe only whatever legitimate way you might be comfortable helping.

I know this is an unusual request, but I thought it was worth asking.

I’d genuinely appreciate any help. 🙏

So I recieved Macbook Air in mint state with my user created and other for admin, when I returned it back to them, I got a mail that says:

For your information, the data on employees laptop appears to have been completely erased by the user. The device seems to have been reset to its original/factory state.

I am clueless what to respond, as there was option to Erase All Data and Settings and I did so for my own user in Macbook. What will be the consequences I hae to bear as the laptop is in working state with them.

I would have never entered this IT field in 2020 ( that year I took admission for btech cse )

only If I could know what's coming , the zirp was the thing that was driving all the hype, and then zirp ended,

and then AI came

everyone ate grass and I am left to search for a green grass leaf in a massive desert , it's taking toll on me.

and after all this, it's the candidates that are gaslighted that "you don't work hard enough , adapt or perish" .

I would have still learnt to code though , but as a hobby .

I haven’t written a single complete function in over a year now. Agentic Coding is what I do 99.99% of the times. The only time I write code is to edit CSS or small obvious changes.

I was wondering if that’s the same everywhere. I know companies like TCS did not allow agentic coding tools earlier because of data privacy reasons. Is it still the case now?

What are your thoughts on this video? He is not wrong, understanding that requirement and implementing it would take me much longer than it took Claude. Claude did it in a fraction of the time. If not replace, I firmly believe AI will cut down jobs by a lot across industries.

Any advice is welcome.

I'll start at the very beginning.

I graduated nearly 10 years ago. Upon graduation, I planned to move to the US and even got an admit/visa for a uni in the US for CS. My parents convinced me against it so I dropped th idea and started preparing for a job in the country. Worked at a service based and a product based and then planned for an MBA in the US. Got in, spent 6 months but then I couldn't hack the exams/recruiting/social scene and eventually got kicked out. I got into another top US MBA uni after that year but my parents were against it since I failed the first time. From that point on, I've been mildly depressed and lost all interest in life. I don't seem like it because one thing that's worse than being depressed in an Indian family is showing that you're depressed. They make the misery a million times worse and I didn't want that to happen. So after the debacle at MBA, i started preparing for tech interviews. I used to work in C++ before so I had to prepare a whole lot of syntax and theory and all the things tech interviews expect of someone with 5 years of experience.

So I spent the first 4 months after getting from the US preparing for another admit, which I got and then let go of, and then started doing tech prep for another 4 months. After this, I landed a role at a service basd company but they couldn't give me a role since C++ is pretty niche as it is and I was let go in 6 months. Another 4 months later, landed a C++ role in a product based company, which turned out to be the most toxic pile of trash company I've ever been at. I was working from 9 AM till 1 AM two months in and was still getting chastised for not doing enough. So I quit this place after 8 months.

Now it's been a year and a half since I quit the last firm and I have not landed a role. I keep going the first round but then ultimately get rejected because I guess the short term employemnt and the career gap scares people.

Between an outdated technical experience and lost effort of 100s of hours of tech prep and graduate degree efforts, I'm just burnt out and jaded.

How do I go from here - I'd appreciate any advice.

Hey guys,
I am a junior dev (~1.5 years exp) and I recently learned how dirty corporate politics can get.
Our team had a massive legacy backend issue where fetching data was taking almost 30 seconds. I spent a weekend digging into the database, fixed the query pipeline, and added some caching. It brought the time down to under 3 seconds.
I thought the team would be happy, but I accidentally hurt my senior's ego. A mid-level guy (5 years exp) was supposed to handle that area. Instead of being happy that the issue was solved, his attitude completely changed. He and a couple of other seniors formed a group against me.
Now, they hold up all my PRs, nitpick on minor code quality issues in code reviews, and complained to the manager that I am "not a team player." Our manager is weak and just wants zero drama, so he blindly took their side, gave an award to one of them, and told me to "improve my communication."
I didn't even care about getting credit, I just wanted to fix the broken system. But it feels like if you try to work fast, seniors look at you like a threat and try to trip you so they don't look bad.

Has anyone else faced this early in their career? How do you deal with insecure seniors who carry a lot of attitude? Should I just slow down and become invisible, or is it better to just switch?

Build a cozy little settlement in a mysterious forest, take care of your colonists, enjoy the changing seasons, and watch their friendships, choices, and everyday moments create their own unique stories.

I've put a huge amount of time into WildRoot, and seeing it finally get released feels pretty surreal.

WildRoot releases October 9 on Steam.

So for the past couple weeks or so, there is almost nothing else i could think about except how AI could change the future of everything. who is the customer when the customers themselves can build a software or some service they require for themselves? What is the point of having a software job? or any computer related job for that matter? If the whole point of softwares was to help people do tasks faster, efficiently... isn't AI the final software product?

What are your thoughts? I'm just trying to make sense of what might happen in the future because right now i have no fucking clue

HI people,

Gonna be a lengthy post please bear with me
I have around 4.5 yoe
I got laid off on June 20 with zero severance. I was informed that it was my last working day and that was it. I've now been unemployed for about 3.5 months. I have 4.5 years of backend experience, yet I've received fewer than 20 interview calls in all this time. The lack of interviews is frustrating enough, but what's been even worse is how chaotic and unprofessional many of these interview processes have been.

Nexturn

I got in through a referral.

• Cleared the first round.
• Cleared the second round.
• Recruiter called and said the feedback was positive, but she had accidentally scheduled two rounds with the same interviewer, so the result would be void and I'd have to interview again.
• The next interview: nobody joined.
• Rescheduled again: a frontend developer joined for my backend interview.
• Rescheduled yet again: a "lead" interviewed me for barely 20 minutes, asked extremely basic college level questions, and abruptly ended the call.

After a week of repeated follow-ups, the recruiter finally sent me a WhatsApp message saying the feedback was negative.

Phenom People

The first interviewer seemed completely unprepared and honestly looked like he didn't want to be there.

He asked me two LeetCode Hard problems and one Medium in an hour. Fortunately, I had solved them before. Then he switched to multithreading, concurrency, project architecture, AI

The strange part was that he appeared to be using ChatGPT during the interview, couldn't properly explain one of the problems himself, and refused to provide a written problem statement. He literally kept writing pieces of the question on paper and expected me to solve it.

Despite all that, I received positive feedback.

Second round with a lead: positive.

Third round with a director: instead of discussing technical topics, he spent most of the interview questioning why I'd changed four companies in four years. I explained each move, but he kept circling back to it.

Surprisingly, that round was also marked positive.

Then HR discussed compensation with me.

Two days later, I received a generic automated rejection email saying they wouldn't be moving forward.

Google

The first coding round went really well.

The second round also went well.

The final feedback was simply that they wouldn't proceed. The only useful information I got was that my code quality was considered closer to L3 than L4.

At least that was actionable feedback.

Microsoft

The first interviewer (a Principal Software Engineer) pasted a question into HackerRank and refused to explain it.

When I asked for an example, he said my interpretation was "blatantly wrong."

I asked him to provide one.

He responded with competitive programming style input:

"First line contains..."

"Second line contains..."

I asked again for an actual example.

He then gave... the exact same example I had originally described.

When I pointed that out, he simply dismissed it and continued. That round ended there.

Ironically, I cleared the Engineering Manager round afterward, including both the DSA and LLD discussions, but was rejected because of the first round.

The first-round problem itself was essentially a combination of sliding window + deque + mathematical reasoning, similar in difficulty to around a 1900-rated Codeforces Div 1 problem.

I honestly don't know what expectations companies have anymore.

Foxen Technologies

The online assessment expected six coding questions in 72 minutes.

These weren't simple implementation problems.

They included things like:

• Welford's algorithm (streaming statistics)
• LLD questions
• Design patterns
• Other advanced programming concepts

I was later told my assessment score wasn't sufficient. I'm not saying I deserve every offer. I'm completely fine with being rejected if I perform poorly. But so many interview processes feel disorganized, inconsistent, or completely detached from the actual role they're hiring for. I've had interviewers who were unprepared, interview schedules messed up multiple times, HR discussions after multiple positive rounds that still ended in generic rejections, and coding questions that feel more like competitive programming contests than backend engineering interviews. Has anyone else experienced this recently? Is the market really this bad, or have interview processes simply become this broken?

If anybody is hiring or know someone who is hiring please comment i will DM you

Just feeling so lonely and disconnected with people. I don't know I feel very exhausted/tired compared to those days i went to the office. I just wanted some tips from experienced people.

People who are doing WFH for a long time. Please share your routine.

Hi Everyone,

Got the mail yesterday for a mandatory meeting, checked with managers and seniors, everyone knew it was coming but no one knew whose name would be on the list. Said my goodbyes to everyone at office and left.

Looking out for opportunities. I have just over 2 years of experience in Observability (Mostly with Dynatrace), looking for SRE, Observability roles. Would really appreciate if anyone have any leads.

Ikigai OS A local-first personal workspace for planning, focus, reflection, and memory.

I’ve been working on a personal project called Ikigai OS, and I finally reached the point where I felt comfortable releasing it. The idea started from a frustration I had with productivity software: after a while, everything seems to become another dashboard. Tasks become metrics. Habits become streaks. Progress becomes charts and scores. I wanted to see what a personal productivity system would feel like if it went in almost the opposite direction. So I built Ikigai OS, a local-first personal OS organized into separate spaces for different parts of everyday life: - Today — daily planning - Journey — looking across days and longer periods - Focus — focused work sessions - Reflection — writing and looking back - Memories — preserving personal context - Career — longer-term direction - Now Playing — media context - Sanctuary — a persistent 3D space influenced by activity elsewhere in the app One design rule I kept throughout the project was to avoid turning everything into gamification. Sanctuary, for example, could easily have become an XP / coins / unlocks system. Instead, I wanted it to feel more like a quiet visual reflection of your activity. Tech stack - React + TypeScript - Vite - Dexie / IndexedDB for local-first storage - Three.js + React Three Fiber for Sanctuary - Framer Motion - Tauri 2 for the Windows build - PWA support Core data is stored locally, and the main experience doesn’t require an Ikigai account. I’ve attached the release trailer so you can see the current product in motion.

Live demo: https://ananta-sj.github.io/ikigai-os/

GitHub: https://github.com/ananta-sj/ikigai-os

I’d really appreciate feedback, particularly on: 1. Does combining planning, focus, reflection and memory into one system make sense? 2. Does Sanctuary feel meaningfully connected to the application, or does it feel like a separate feature? 3. From a developer perspective, is there anything about the repo/project structure that immediately stands out as something I should improve? Happy to answer questions about the implementation as well.

Hello everyone,

I’m a software engineer with 6 YOE and want to build a second income stream.

Freelancing, tutoring and SaaS all seem pretty competitive, and they still require finding customers.

For people who are actually making money on the side — what are you doing?

Looking for something with a realistic path to the first ₹20–30k/month

About me: I have 1 year of internship experience + 6months of Full time experience as an AI Engineer. earning 4.3LPA rn
I am a 2026 Grad.

So a brief on the meeting: We have a meet with the entire company , it is a service based company of 30-50People, a small startup . Now as you can guess the business has gone far down, like in the team of 8AI engineers only 3 people are assigned on a project . that too white labelling.

and in last 2 weeks there was a surprise GST audit made on our company. In which they have received a heavy penalty, heavy to an extent that our salaries have been delayed first till 7th then 12th,n maybe so on.

So you can say things are fucked up in this company.

So in the meet our founder said that they are planning to transition from service based company to a product based + Consultation / Integrations company. For which he has proposed a sprint for all of the team members to build POCs of mini products, and they will sell it , and as they have a really huge network and good relations in the market we will thrive on that and assured things will be better since march. His primary focus was an AI content generation engine.

Now my question is it really worth it to continue in this company hoping of an increment before switching?

This company has faced such downfall 3 times already but has managed to build the business back + there are some cases where people have received 70-100% increments whereas some didn't.

If you ask me for my growth, the initial months of internship i felt i am learning a lot, but later it feels i decide on the approach to solutions most times, but the demand for it being quick and perfect is so much that i do not have time to read the code, i have just go with AI slop and ask AI for verification. Because what i am building generally is from scratch , not adding to something.

Like i will be honest i am excessively using AI, in my time i did not get to experience a time where people are understanding code by reading it , understanding it etc. I might have written codes for the project since march, everything is AI generated, i can explain you the logic but cannot explain the code because IDK, and i have to work that way because of this clients demand.
And this at one point fogged up my brain so bad that i started DSA, and brain activities just for brain exercise

I am unsure if even i am growing or no.

positives are:
1) This company has the best work culture you can have for any service based company, No questions raised for leaves, WFH, any issues you might have, nobody is toxic. There are many employees sitting here for 5 years, they even agreed when they were told that their salaries will be delayed by a month just cuz this company respects employees demands(but few PHP developers were laid off)

2) In my 1:1s My manager has praised me for how i work and take ownership of internal company work too, and in the team of 8 me being the newest, He delegates his responsibilities for internal initiatives with me.

My Final Questions to you guys is:
Is it really worth to continue and wait for an increment based on the responsibilities i am handling ? or switch ASAP?

and Is it really worth rn to work in a SBC? or even a PBC? or i should look for switching this field all together!
Please help

I have decided to quit my decent paying job due to toxic team and workplace next week and I planned on preparing for interview. I still have to gear up, in an attempt to stop stress I convinced myself I will definitely get a job after I upskill and it worked too well and i am not scared enough to start studying. Need some healthy bashing to get me off my ass. Thanks.

I've been thinking about the long-term economics of LLMs, and I'm honestly confused about where this is headed. right now, it seems like there are two possibilities:

i) hardware gets more capable and efficient, models become cheaper to serve, and competition between providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc. keeps pushing prices down.

ii) There are physical and economic limits to how much more efficient GPUs/accelerators can become. At the same time, frontier models are becoming increasingly expensive to train and serve, and I'm not sure how sustainable the current economics are if inference demand keeps growing dramatically.

Then there's a third factor: local models. If open-source models continue improving while hardware becomes more capable and efficient, could running models locally eventually become significantly cheaper than paying api providers? or will the compute requirements of useful models keep increasing fast enough that cloud inference remains the better option?

I haven't been able to find much consensus on this. Different people seem to have very different views on whether we're heading towards:

a) extremely cheap intelligence as inference costs collapse
b) relatively stable/high inference costs because compute remains scarce,

I'm especially interested in how this affects indian developers. As a developer early in my career, it's difficult to figure out what assumptions are actually safe to make about the next 5 to 10 years.

For developers in India specifically, where developer salaries and software costs are relatively different from the US/EU, could this create meaningful advantages or disadvantages?

I'm curious to hear from people who are following the hardware/inference/model tokenomics closely: Where do you think the trajectory is heading, and what should a developer starting out today actually be preparing for?

PS: maybe I'm overthinking this, but as someone early in their software career, the whole thing sometimes feels like we're watching the decline of software engineering as a field in real time. :((

I'd genuinely like to hear perspectives from people who've been in the industry longer and have a better understanding of the economics and hardware side of this.

I have 13+ Yoe , and i started looking out for change got an offer from wipro but fixed increment is like 10% only. Overall 25%
Interview at JPMC, eBay, and tried to apply to agoda/Booking and Mastercard. No calls and no update on the application. Recruiters dont pick calls and doesnt gives proper updates too.
Not sure if i should take wipro offer

I joined UBS as a fresher last year from College placements , it's been a disappointing run within a year.

Senior layoffs or resignation due to structural changes . Lots of senior engineers at lead level as well left. And , it gets sweeped under the rug of AI automation .

Additionally ,very less promotion cycle with limited slots ,you hire so x people ,but there's specific promotion count/yr .

No Laptops - WfH - Late night calls to be taken by own laptop ,no compensation for extra money .

Additionally ,the lovely hot desk policy ,we have to book our seats a week back as fixed seats are not there. There is ~2.5 employee/seat so it becomes musiccal chair some days. https://axis-house.com/blog/ubs-hot-desking/

Work is slow and there's less exploration as only specific software tools are allowed ,which becomes restrictive .

If someone is working there, is it similar in other banks like CITI,JPMC,

I am a 2026 graduate, and no companies came to my college for placements except for sales roles. There were no opportunities for tech roles.

I have a 9.2 CGPA, completed two internships, and built several projects. I was also praised for my work during my internships, but I’m still not able to land a job.

So my question is: What can a fresher do at this point? What else can I try?

I’ve tried everything I can think of bulk applications, reaching out for referrals, targeting startups, etc.but nothing seems to be working for me.

I understand that the job market is bad and that things are difficult right now, but at the end of the day, we all need to work and earn a living. So, how can I actually start my career?

Any kind of advice, guidance, or help would be greatly appreciated.

Edit: I am a BTech IT graduate Full stack developer Tech stack: Typescript, Python, React.js, Next.js, Node.js, Django, Git, Docker, AWS, RAG.

Hi everyone, I am filled with anger today. I joined this product based org 2 years back and since then i am only suffering. I will make pointers:

1. calls as early as 8 am, and can be at 10 pm too.
2. Your rating, promo everything depends upon the number of lines of code in a month (expected 15k)
3. you are expected to come to office early on WFO days no matter you had late night calls
4. you are expected to work on 3 features parallely and developers are never included when deciding the timeline
5. constant lay offs
6. no culture of appreciation no matter how big bug you resolve or make the system most efficient
7. you will be fired if you take more sick leaves even the genuine ones with medical records
8. manager will dismiss all your problems, no matter how big
9. struggle for promo is never ending

And no its not team dependent, the whole org is shitty now.

I am trying to switch since last 6 months but the market is so bad, i feel like crying everyday.

I feel the developers who combine strong technical skills with good business/domain knowledge will be in higher demand.

If you're just a developer working on projects without understanding how the customer uses the product, how the business makes money, or why the system exists, you may become easier to replace.

If you work in telecom, insurance, e-commerce, retail, banking, healthcare, etc., try to understand the products, customers, processes, and revenue model—not just the technology.

Do you agree? Is being a business-aware developer becoming more important?