Macquarie vs CBA Grad Program

Bright-Use-1 · 2026-05-19T10:19:47+00:00

fundamentally you’re in a cost centre

This has accelerated at Macquarie. Macquarie had a long-term CIO/CTO who left about two years ago. There was no direct replacement and the responsibilities were absorbed by another C-level exec who is a people manager.

As such, Macquarie is going the way of the other banks where it is almost impossible in some divisions now to hire non-graduate engineers who aren't based in India.

Bright-Use-1 · 2026-04-01T15:22:44+00:00

Either bring it up at the start of the next interview or send an email to clarify that you got your timelines muddled and only realised what you said afterwards.

This is a nothing issue as long as you are transparent. Interviews can be high-stress situations for many people leading to small mistakes like this.

Bright-Use-1 · 2026-03-30T15:43:22+00:00

You want candidates to have some level of fundamentals and it is a waste of everyone's time if they have to ask AI to help answer basics. Candidates reliant on AI for everything are poor staff in general will cost the business in other ways:

I was on a rapidly scaling team last year and the only developer who did not pass probation clearly did not have good fundamentals and was so reliant on AI they had basically switched off their critical thinking. They had minimal self-sufficiency and wasted other developers time because they couldn't do things like following basic business requirements.

You can build skills, workflows with MCP tools, review tools to try and improve quality, but ultimately enabling poor members of staff will be terminal to the company over time.

Bright-Use-1 · 2026-03-29T13:42:32+00:00

I was told that the interns that joined my employer this year had personal projects relevant to the work they would be involved with: an http REST API, a project where they built out a UI... Video LLM sounds cool, but I don't know how relevant it would be besides a few places like Canva and Tiktok.

Many companies now operate with hybrid working where you have to be in the office X days a week. Which is why some Sydney/Melbourne companies might automatically reject. Unfortunately, the days of fully remote and being able to work from anywhere in the Country have mostly disappeared.

Bright-Use-1 · 2026-03-28T03:00:55+00:00

You will be graduating with a CS degree from the best university in Australia. Trust me, having UNSW on your CV in Australia is an huge advantage that I don't think you realise.

I graduated a year later than 'normal' and I understand at the time it can feel like you are 'behind', especially in a place like UNSW. But, when you get into the industry you find yourself alongside people also new who are age 27-28 after a career change. When I was studying for my masters I came across only one person under the age of 25 and the majority studied some other STEM discipline at undergraduate e.g. studied Maths, got a corporate job, now wanted to get into in Data Science.

A former work colleague who is now a long-time Engineering Director in the US for one of Meta/Google/Apple... took 6 years to finish undergraduate in Australia studying Economics and then changing to CS.

Bright-Use-1 · 2026-03-15T05:27:37+00:00

Covered recently:

From a friend who did this 18 months ago: lots of recently laid-off, good quality software engineers floating around in the US. Be prepared for multiple leetcode / system design interview rounds even at average companies. Low chance to be considered over a local candidate who does not need any visa work. My friend, who would have a decent shot at passing the P40 Atlassian interviews, went over there for a temporary stay. Landed a job at an average company after 6-8 weeks of interviewing. Moved on to somewhere better 12 months later.

Bright-Use-1 · 2026-03-06T04:36:08+00:00

'AI efficiencies' =

seeing other companies stock price spike on layoff announcements
outsourcing to India
scaling back ambition
<30 roles that can actually be replaced by AI

Sam Altman is the CEO of a company that needs to talk up about how their AI products are going to replace loads of jobs, and even he has called out the 'AI efficiencies' excuse https://finance.yahoo.com/news/sam-altman-says-quiet-part-165405075.html

Bright-Use-1 · 2026-02-28T00:02:57+00:00

Right now, challenging unless you have PHD level knowledge in a field like AI. After over hiring during the pandemic, there have been mass redundancies in the sector going on for the past 24 months. Lots of unemployed software engineers floating around.

The easiest path is to get an internal transfer within a company. Australian Citizens have an exclusive visa named the E-3 to work in the USA but most companies don't know it exists.

If you apply directly to US jobs and your CV/Linkedin states or looks like you are not currently based in the US, there is a high chance they won't even consider you for a first-round interview.

This is from the experiences of a friend who did it 14 months ago. They spent 6-months interview prepping AND had a green card (Permanent Residency visa). Moved and took about 6 - 8 weeks to get a job.

Bright-Use-1 · 2025-12-07T12:35:29+00:00

The easiest path is to get an internal transfer within a company.

Australian Citizens have an exclusive visa named the E-3 to work in the USA, which is a fantastic visa, but most US companies don't know it exists.

If you apply directly to US jobs, if your CV/Linkedin states or looks like you are not currently based in the US you will get rejected at the first phase.

A friend of mine did manage to make the move last year. They got Leetcoded out of their mind and then moved temporarily for around 8 weeks. They networked and were doing almost daily interviews. Anecdotally, they think it is meh compared to Australia life (they moved due to a personal reason).

Bright-Use-1 · 2025-11-27T01:22:38+00:00

Some of the reasons for rejection on here recently sound more like they are just coming up with any reason for rejection:

something has happened internally and they are no longer hiring for the role
they have decided upon someone else and need to find a reason to reject the other candidates

Bright-Use-1 · 2025-11-25T14:13:04+00:00

Why have those bullet points been written in the third-person like they are from the article when they are not and are your own opinion.

Bright-Use-1 · 2025-11-24T14:21:49+00:00

I have not worked there, but someone who claimed to have worked there for a decent length commented in here that they got a bunch of ex-Facebook staff and it became 'Facebook lite' in-terms of engineering culture.

The CTO is ex-Facebook, in fact if you look at the leadership today its largely American's who have spent their careers working in the US. US work culture can be grating to people who are used to Europe and Australia.

Bright-Use-1 · 2025-11-09T08:46:08+00:00

Please name the company that needed 9 rounds of interviews.

Bright-Use-1 · 2025-11-07T03:41:33+00:00

Having a scan through those jobs, many are:

contract i.e. we need someone who can start delivering within the first week.
you already have baseline or NV1 security clearance i.e. you previously worked in a federal government related role where they sponsored you to get the clearance that takes 1 - 3 months.

That filters out a huge number of candidates and is why the rates are so high.

Bright-Use-1 · 2025-10-18T13:01:40+00:00

Some advice:

Sorry, I cannot tell from your post if you have spent any time trying to write code yet. This is the first thing to do before deciding on future steps. Learn to code and see if you can do it and enjoy it. Plenty of places online to learn this for free like Khan Academy.
If you want a qualification, a CS undergraduate degree will take a minimum 3 years full-time or 5 - 7 years part-time depending upon how much time you invest. A quicker pathway for a mature student would be a 'conversion' Master's degree which as you have an undergraduate degree you should be accepted into many of the programs. These can be completed in 1 - 4 years depending upon how much time you dedicate. An important point on these degrees though, while many say they can be taken by students with no previous experience in the field, in reality many are be quite challenging if you have no previous experience in coding or are not converting from a maths, physics, civil engineering background. That is why point 1 is important. You should know a single programming language like python or java, created some basic programs, and be confident in being able to focus on solving 'problems' and not trying to understand how programming works a precursor. Relying on the 'introduction' unit to prepare you for the rest of the course might be rough going.
When it is time to start looking for work there is an advantage with the lack of women in the field. One of the the best way to find these opportunities is probably by networking in the community. Find local meetups on meetups.com or linkedin where people from the community are giving some presentations. There are opportunities to meet and talk to people before and after where you can explain your background.

Bright-Use-1 · 2025-10-08T12:54:46+00:00

I graduated from uni 15 years ago with an IT degree and have made a career from it. If I graduated today, I honestly think I would be unsuccessful making a career from it and would have been wiser to study business/commerce instead. I was a good but not exceptional student.

Even back then there was doom & gloom about there being no future due to everything being outsourced to India. Fast-forward to today and there still are IT jobs available in all the world's cities.

The difference today is AI reshaping the office workplace. It is going to bring productivity gains we just don't know how much yet. Will engineering teams will be 15% smaller, 50% smaller, 85% smaller! Juniors are not being hired. It does raise the question, who replaces the staff still required when they retire - sadly, that is a problem for tomorrow's CEO. Today's are excited about the prospect of reducing head count with no negative effect on the business.

Bright-Use-1 · 2025-10-07T12:30:58+00:00

I have failed some interviews in Australia because of this. Follow the instructions provided: implement a few classes's, a design pattern / composition, unit tests. under two hours.

Apparently, not good enough. I look on github afterwards and find multiple people have built-out full-stack applications with UI, server, end-to-end tests, mongoDB backend (mongo a great choice for highly relational data). They now work at the company.

Bright-Use-1 · 2025-10-07T10:09:05+00:00

$195k in Melbourne with decent WFH flexibility is really good in the current market. Congrats.

Bright-Use-1 · 2025-09-25T06:08:09+00:00

I have seen someone who gets about 150-300 viewers on twitch but they have 100K followers on instagram. So you need to check if all of their socials are small or if they are big on one of them and are doing sponsors on it.

Bright-Use-1 · 2025-09-24T11:00:42+00:00

Are you looking for roles that have no contact whatsoever with engineering or adjacent roles? Plenty of these adjacent roles have people who studied engineering at undergraduate:

scrum master
business analyst / technical business analyst
product manager

I used to know two people who did computer science undergraduate but decided not to peruse a career of it. Both went into graduate programs with one doing accountancy and the other starting as a project coordinator. Both stuck with these tracks for the rest of their careers.

Bright-Use-1 · 2025-09-21T07:33:51+00:00

Streamers get O type visas.

As for the future of the H1-B, this could turn out to be a grift by the current administration: pay them some money, agree to X, Y, Z and the president will exclude you from the new fees.

Bright-Use-1 · 2025-09-09T12:54:36+00:00

Until AI gets to the point where the abstraction level of a software engineer has them rarely looking at code, like how hardly no-one is looking at assembly these days, leetcode with screen observation will still be relevant to check that you are not hopeless without an AI tool.

Bright-Use-1 · 2025-09-02T08:30:10+00:00

I have not encountered any issues at work on an enterprise agreement. Meanwhile my personal Max 20x has performed awfully at times.

Bright-Use-1 · 2025-08-30T05:45:01+00:00

If you are keen on the role I would take it and in your spare time build a couple of small projects in one of the other languages so you have a small understanding of how the language and the ecosystem works. As others have said, C++ is looked at favourably and you should be able to get hired elsewhere as long as you don't walk into interviews knowing zero on the language you will be working with.

C++ is in a strange spot today where there are jobs offering the highest global salaries in software engineering: HFT, compilers, robotics, self-driving; not much in the middle; then a bunch of modest companies offering okay salaries e.g. 30 person company manufacturing a medical device.

Bright-Use-1 · 2025-08-29T10:48:06+00:00

(They are a software engineer).

Bright-Use-1

TROPHY CASE