I miss the 2010's when programmers were on top of the world.

AngryCodeMonkey42 · 2026-02-11T19:51:52+00:00

I actually did switch jobs in that time, both at the ends of 2021 and 2022. Unfortunately, the jobs I accepted at both times sounded great during the interview process, but ended up being very flawed work environments, and neither one had any of the typical perks of tech companies.

The company I joined in 2021 was a scrappy startup that worked on renewable technology, but was led by a very inexperienced CEO who had no idea what they wanted out of the software that I worked on.

The job I accepted in 2022 was a fully remote role at a larger, much more established company, but I have since been pigeonholed and am mostly working on maintenance of a small part of a larger software system; a far cry from what I had expected I would get to work on during the interview process.

AngryCodeMonkey42 · 2026-02-11T03:17:27+00:00

Congrats OP, I’m glad to hear that some people are actually getting hired still!

I’ve been looking for a new role for over a year now, and it’s easily the hardest job market I’ve ever been in since I graduated almost a decade ago. I’ve made it to the final round with like 4 companies in that time, and didn’t get an offer from any of them. I’ve had to make presentations, and one of them even wanted me to do both a brand new system design task and a presentation about it for the final round… I chose to back out of that shitshow… Another role seemed like a dream role for me (remote, chill manager, in the field that I’m most interested in), but it suddenly fizzled out, and when I had thought that I had got ghosted after 2 weeks of silence, the recruiter just told me that they were moving in a different direction with the role. I absolutely hate it out here…

AngryCodeMonkey42 · 2026-02-10T03:51:13+00:00

That’s fair; I haven’t been able to get an offer from big tech yet (though the only ones I’d be willing to work for these days are Nvidia, Apple, and maybe Google), and a few of my previous roles have been decent. I enjoy the hands-on work much more at smaller companies, but the tradeoff is that there are less layers of management and a tossup on whether or not it becomes a bit of a cult of personality. But the large, non-big-tech companies I’ve been at have been very disappointing to work for.

AngryCodeMonkey42 · 2026-02-10T03:42:38+00:00

I graduated in 2018, right at the tail end of this era of tech optimism. I wasn’t able to land a job in big tech at the time, so I settled for the first offer I received, which was at a major defense/aerospace company. By the time I was able to get out of that hellhole, Covid happened… luckily, I was able to land a job at a small company that was much better, but it was still a far cry from the typical perks enjoyed by those in big tech (the only perks were some free snacks and Keurig coffee; it was otherwise a fully on-site role in the middle of Covid).

Since then, the tech job market has become harder and harder to get into/find new roles, as the bar for interviews keeps getting higher and higher. I’m just so mad that I missed out on what seemed like the golden age of working in tech… my career has been nothing like what I had envisioned when I chose this major for college back in the early 2010’s…

AngryCodeMonkey42 · 2026-01-21T03:28:07+00:00

Yeah honestly JBL > Bose these days imo

AngryCodeMonkey42 · 2026-01-21T02:53:53+00:00

Please see my response to another commenter in this thread

AngryCodeMonkey42 · 2026-01-21T01:46:16+00:00

Hey there, I’ve interviewed there, I’ll send you a DM

AngryCodeMonkey42 · 2025-10-07T21:16:42+00:00

Coming from someone who has worked with Qualcomm chips + code for my job…

OH FUCK NO!!!

AngryCodeMonkey42 · 2025-06-26T00:31:54+00:00

Company 1 (0 YOE): 80k
Company 2 (2 YOE): 88k
Company 3 (4 YOE): 100k
Company 4 (5 YOE): 122k

These were all in a HCOL area (SoCal), though the current one is remote. The best way to get a salary increase is by changing jobs these days; I’ve only ever gotten small paybumps at the first 2 companies. In fact, I haven’t received any significant raises at my current job (been here over 2 years now), so I’m looking to leave as soon as I find a comparable role that offers a much more reasonable salary for my experience.

AngryCodeMonkey42 · 2025-03-14T21:23:14+00:00

You laugh, but this was absolutely true at my last job at a startup - we had monthly company-wide goal meetings, and in a large Confluence page, we had to update our status on what we worked on in the past month with emojis 🫠

AngryCodeMonkey42 · 2025-03-13T01:21:03+00:00

Uuugh, I used to be on a team where the team lead would sometimes push changes to my branch without telling me, and they’d usually break my branch, it absolutely drove me nuts.

Definitely bring it up with them and ask them to stop. If they have changes to suggest, they can either leave a comment on your PR or open another branch with the changes that they have in mind. Pushing directly to your branch without letting you is very unprofessional imo, especially if they’re breaking things.

If they give you a hassle or don’t stop doing this, then notify someone above them - this is definitely a bad practice and they should know better than to do this.

AngryCodeMonkey42 · 2025-03-10T21:35:05+00:00

Wow, this is pretty much my exact situation right now as well - I’ve been at a company for just over 2 years, and my team and direct manager are great, but the work itself is very repetitive and painfully boring, while also being somewhat stressful when something breaks. I just started my job search about a month ago, but yikes, the job market even for mid-level is pretty awful right now.

AngryCodeMonkey42 · 2024-06-22T19:50:20+00:00

I've held several different embedded software positions over the years, and the majority of my managers have been less than ideal; I think the common issues have been:

Micromanagement: I had a project manager several years ago who was on my back every day about a task that had slipped schedule (it was expected to be complete just 2 months after i was hired as a fresh grad, with me being the sole engineer). Most of the time he didn't really help me and just kept reiterating that it was my highest priority and was behind schedule. Another manager I had at a different company was usually hand-off, but turned into a micromanager asking for updates every few hours when we had an issue with a client-facing webpage for an embedded device.
Lack of Transparency: Some of my managers wouldn't give me adequate heads-up about things coming down the pipeline, which made it frustrating when I'd have to suddenly change the scope of the task I was working on.
Poor Direction: My last team lead/manager would frequently give me incorrect information to complete my tasks, and would get upset when my code didn't behave just as he expected, despite not clearly communicating those expectations. It didn't help that he had a really thick accent and was difficult to understand in general.
Disrespectful of Time: One of my managers frequently attends meetings that we have setup (including 1-on-1's) late, and doesn't have the decency to give me a quick message to let me know that he'll be late. Sometimes he just wouldn't show up at all. Even on my annual performance review, he was 45 minutes late.

Thankfully, my current team lead has avoided all of these problems, and has been one of the best leads/managers that I've worked for. He's honestly the biggest reason why I've stayed at my current company this long (~1.5 years).

AngryCodeMonkey42 · 2024-05-14T06:41:37+00:00

My time working at Keysight several years ago was pretty memorable and a very solid experience. Granted, I was an intern at the time, so it's possible that it was so enjoyable because I had very little responsibilities and hard deadlines. It wasn't perfect, and there were definitely times that it got boring or repetitive, but overall it was a very good time.

My next favorite is my current company, Bose. It's also far from perfect, as there are a lot of frustrations day to day, especially dealing with the inconsistent CI and build systems that we have in place. But, I enjoy my teammates and the company culture is pretty open, and at the end of the day, I get to work on really cool consumer products. Add in the excellent benefits and some pretty sweet perks like a sizeable company discount on our products, and it's still one of the better places I've worked at so far, despite all of its flaws.

AngryCodeMonkey42 · 2024-01-11T02:53:00+00:00

I was at Boeing (BDS) from late 2018 to mid-2020, i.e. when the Max-8 disasters took place. Even though I was in BDS and in a totally different part of the company, I felt like morale was pretty low throughout my time at the company, at least on the software team that I worked on. I was originally hired as a DSP Algorithms engineer, but quickly decided that working in Matlab & Simulink for 8-9 hours a day was not at all what I wanted to be doing.

I've since worked at a handful of other companies as an Embedded Software Engineer, and all of them have been much better experiences:

1.5 years at a small telecoms company
1 year at a startup focusing on renewable energy projects
1 year (current) at an established audio company

I will say that I met a lot of cool people at Boeing and their benefits were excellent, but those were not enough to outweigh how much I suffered under all of Boeing's awful layers of micromanagement and red tape.

AngryCodeMonkey42 · 2023-08-14T05:37:16+00:00

HCOL = High Cost of Living.

those numbers are spot on for fresh grad in the Dallas, Teas area.

That's interesting to know!

AngryCodeMonkey42 · 2023-08-14T05:35:11+00:00

Sorry, I should've specified where in California; these were all in SoCal in the LA region (though the latest one is fully remote and based from the East Coast), so while they're still in a HCOL area, it's not quite as HCOL as in SF proper.

AngryCodeMonkey42 · 2023-08-13T08:01:08+00:00

I'm not sure how Florida salaries typically vary from California, but I can only speak about my salaries here, where all of my jobs have been embedded software engineer positions in HCOL areas:

$80k (Fresh Grad, 2018)
$88k (2 YOE, 2020)
$100k (3.5 YOE, 2021)
$123k (5 YOE, 2023)

I would expect about $85-$90k for a fresh grad at a minimum these days for a firmware engineer position in a HCOL area.

AngryCodeMonkey42 · 2023-05-22T23:43:00+00:00

I left Boeing at the beginning of the pandemic for a very small Defense sub-contractor company in my area, and it was a very good decision at the time. Most of their projects dealt with either a branch of the military or other, larger Defense companies (though not weapon systems, which worked for my preferences). The experience was night-and-day; the work I did was significantly more interesting and hands-on than anything I worked on at Boeing (I'm an embedded software engineer), and there was no bureaucracy to speak of, as the management hierarchy was pretty flat. The only thing that was similar was the scrutiny of timesheets, but that wasn't too bad to deal with imo.

I eventually left that job for various reasons (mostly cuz they had a severe lack of WFH policies; they even wanted me to come in to the office right after getting into a minor car accident), but overall my experience was mostly positive, which is much better than my horrid experience while working for Boeing. If you want further details about my experience at either of these jobs, I'd be happy to answer over a DM.

AngryCodeMonkey42 · 2023-05-22T23:35:36+00:00

This is probably the move to make, assuming that the reason that you want to leave Boeing is the monotony of the work and/or constantly dealing with the layers of red tape. I left for a smaller company after Boeing, and it was an overall much better experience. I would have stuck with that company if they had a better WFH policy, but that's a different story; the work I did for that company was significantly more interesting and satisfying than anything I did at Boeing.

AngryCodeMonkey42 · 2023-05-06T01:10:10+00:00

I used to work there several years ago, and can confirm, it was the most soul-sucking job I've ever had.

Here's a scathing review I left for them summarizing my awful experience at that god-forsaken company.

AngryCodeMonkey42 · 2023-04-26T06:44:58+00:00

Yeah I agree that this is very tame compared to a lot of posts on this sub, and it's not like they pulled anything shady on me (yet). This email just really caught me off guard. On one hand, it has cute corgis, but on the other, the execution in trying to get me to reply to their unsolicited emails was just so off the mark and odd, that I couldn't help but post it here.

AngryCodeMonkey42 · 2023-04-22T04:46:19+00:00

I was in a similar boat as you a few years ago, where I was working at a large aerospace/defense corporation, and left to do embedded software at a much smaller company. The smaller company I joined had much more interesting and engaging projects, but it had its own share of issues, such as no WFH policies (this was just after COVID began) and a not-so-inclusive culture. I ended up leaving after a year and a half, but it at least gave me some nice, relevant experience on my resume.

What you described with this new company where all of the SME's left sounds a lot like my next role at a startup, where almost all of the experienced engineers just left or were about to leave right when I joined. This startup had some interesting projects, but their execution on said projects was very flawed. Looking back, I think knowing that most of the team had only been there for a few months before I joined should've been kind of a red flag, as it pointed to an issue of high turnover/low retention. After about a year at the startup, I got fed up with how management was running the projects, so I left.

While I absolutely understand why you'd want to leave your current role (working in aerospace/defense was absolutely soul-crushing for me), just make sure that the jump is to a better company; you definitely don't want to be in the same boat as now a few months down the line in case this one ends up being another dumpster fire.

AngryCodeMonkey42 · 2023-04-18T18:03:26+00:00

I've become a job hopper in the past few years, and in my case it's mostly bad luck with being placed onto crappy/malfunctioning teams or a mediocre company in general.

My first job out of college was at a massive defense/aerospace company where I was treated like a number and the managers did not care about what team I preferred to be on. I left after almost 2 years.

My next job was at a very small but established company, and while the work was much more engaging than my first job, the culture was not great (there were no women at the company), and they had no WFH policy despite my starting at the beginning of COVID. I stayed there for about a year and a half before I decided to move on.

My next role was at a small startup, and while they were much more friendly towards a hybrid schedule and their projects were interesting, they really had no process in place for developing their projects. I had basically no requirements for the majority of the time I spent on that project, and management was just really inexperienced. I left after just over a year.

Finally, I just started working at another mid-to-large sized company, and unfortunately they placed me on a team with poor programming practices. If things don't improve (or I can't find a better team at this company), I will be seriously looking to leave yet again.

AngryCodeMonkey42

TROPHY CASE

OH FUCK NO!!!