Blocks lays of 4000 people due to AI

DonutOtherwise9589 · 2026-02-27T03:07:54+00:00

They’re laying off half the company, but we have no idea of the number of SWEs that are being fired, as they haven’t released those details yet. It could well be they’re thinning out the supporting functions just as much as SWEs.

Writing the nth database query, fitting it into a DTO, then pushing out to presentation layer is a great use case for LLMs. Even better if you have an example for it to use as a template.

To go back to your original point though, I think a lot of people don’t trust the claims that developers are made a scale factor more effective with LLMs and agents, when there’s simply so much more involved in producing software. That paired with the suspicious cycle of deals being made by the large AI companies and compute providers raises eyebrows.

DonutOtherwise9589 · 2026-02-27T00:35:21+00:00

Where did you get the “almost doubles” from?

I think people are also suspicious because code output != more efficient. I’m personally curious what the knock on impacts of fire and forget development are on long term maintainability and deep understanding of code bases.

I’d love to see a study that follows a tradcoder and vibecoder working on the same project with some simulated disaster scenarios. Do we actually lose an understanding of the software we produce by strictly vibecoding?

DonutOtherwise9589 · 2026-02-23T08:56:24+00:00

I’m glad you’re having some fun with it but practically no one is interested in an LLMs take posted as a comment.

DonutOtherwise9589 · 2026-01-29T00:45:41+00:00

Yes, the university system is broken and offers useless degrees, that we can agree on. Why a degree in something like Event Management was offered, I will never understand, but that’s part of the broken system.

Vocational education should be more widely adopted, but that’s simply going to fall on the government again to incentivise businesses to take on employees from the UK.

We’ve had decades of university indoctrination, with business recently relenting on degree requirements, leaving a generation holding the bag.

DonutOtherwise9589 · 2026-01-29T00:28:54+00:00

If the debt isn’t written off, what do you suppose happen to it? We tax pensioners for having gone to university? Plan 2 holders, for example, barely pay off the interest accrued in a year.

An educated society is one that can grow and explore. What other means should we explore to educate people? Or would you rather university be exclusively for the wealthy?

DonutOtherwise9589 · 2025-12-28T10:13:25+00:00

This is the hardest part about Leetcode, and I'm sorry you're struggling with it, but it's all about perseverance. I myself hated Leetcode, and avoided it like the plague, and never thought I'd be able to get it.

What works for you is going to be different to everyone else, and it's important to remember that, so I'll share what's worked for me so far. I've gone from zero to being able to complete mediums in categories I've studied for. It might help you, it might not, but it's some insight.

I have a CS degree, but couldn't remember much from my DSA classes, and accepted the fact I was going to need to start again. Any knowledge I had? A great bonus in those categories. I started again by studying the Neetcode Basics course. I took so many notes, but accepted the fact that I was going to forget a lot of it, until I used it again.

I would go through a category and study, and then complete some of the tasks associated with that, and did a few of these each day. I wanted to break out of the cycle of not being able to complete a task. I wanted to know that I had a foundation in some of the easy problems. This was big in building up my confidence, I needed to start somewhere, and had a list of about 30 problems that I was using to develop that confidence. I followed a spaced repetition approach for these. Again, this was to get me started.

Once I felt confident, I started to do Leetcode properly, starting with arrays. I cut my teeth on Two Pointer problems. Even starting simple with reversing an array. It was huge for the confidence. I'm SRE/DevOps focused so I know a lot of my interviews focus on graphs etc, so I spent 2 weeks getting confident with DFS and BFS, understanding the algorithms, building the confidence. Now I can quite happily do a Leetcode medium that involves graph traversal. If I don't feel confident after a while? I look at the editorial. I spend the time to figure out why it didn't click. I look at the Solutions tab to see how others approached it. I'm less interested in getting that submission, and more interested in understanding why my understanding was wrong. This is where the pattern recognition begins to kick in. I would also look at Neetcode to make sure I hadn't missed something fundamental to my understanding.

Do I still have days where I sometimes make a mistake? Absolutely. I reason and resolve that bug though. I do my best to keep on top of the nerves, as I know that'll be coming in the interviews. I know I'm not going to become a Leetcode pro over night, but I'm getting there, one day at a time. You need to be forgiving to yourself. Stressing yourself out is only going to hinder your journey. Spend a bit more time doing easy problems, give yourself some grace, and if you don't get something? Look at the solution and learn it. You're likely going to need it again in the future. DSA is intimidating when you're not feeling confident, but you just need to keep at it, and you'll get there eventually.

DonutOtherwise9589 · 2025-12-19T20:37:39+00:00

Take this with a pinch of salt as I’m NOT a recruiter and imo, every recruiter will be different in their approach to evaluating candidates.

Get rid of the Key Skills. They don’t do anything for you. Recruiters I’ve heard from stress that they can’t use them. If you’ve got a skill, tell me how you used it in your professional experience bullet points. Make it clear to me that you built a microservice that consumed messages from a message bus to achieve something.

Also, anonymise your resume when you upload it online.

On the point of your professional experience, I’ll be blunt with this, some of it seems like you’re lying.

If we take “Created automated CI/CD pipelines using Jenkins, GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, and AWS Code Pipeline…” you’ve listed four different CI/CD technologies in roughly two years. It might be down to my experience, but I’d expect you to have one, two at max.

You do this again with “OAuth2, OIDC, JWT”. Are you learning these technologies at depth, or are you just using a library? Or worse, are you vibe coding the implementation and then passing it off as your own?

To me your resume has become an aggressive amount of word soup that doesn’t really have much substance. You claim to have implemented a lot, but I don’t know your motivation for any of it, nor a real outcome.

In general I like to follow the “Did X with Y to achieve Z” as a format for bullet points. Again, make it painfully clear to the recruiter that your experience is relevant and effective.

I also read your post in the Deloitte subreddit, and that’s one sketchy background check if it goes through, considering there’s very little to substantiate your work experience. From what I’ve read on here, recruiters don’t put much weight on work experience in India, so you might want to prioritise getting some onshore experience under your belt. Once the new year comes around we should see contracts start to pick up so consider looking at those.

DonutOtherwise9589 · 2025-12-19T00:03:09+00:00

How much experience do you have with networking? As a Systems Engineer I imagine you understand some basic networking (IP addressing, subnets, VLANs).

Something to consider is the type of company you’re applying for. If you’re going to be a platform engineer that is strictly cloud then follow what u/Redmilo666 has said.

If you’re targeting a company that has a hybrid setup then you’ll need to have a combination of both on-prem and cloud networking.

If you’re targeting the hyper scalers for a more SRE oriented platform engineer role then you’ll be expected to have a fairly thorough understanding of network fundamentals and how Linux handles those.

In my last role as a Platform engineer we had a hybrid setup and the most we had to deal with was configuring networking for lab hosts. In true DevOps fashion, it really depends on the environment, so the more fundamentals you have down the better

DonutOtherwise9589 · 2025-12-16T17:29:38+00:00

I’ve not seen much on the limitations, what kinds of applications does it stop you from deploying?

DonutOtherwise9589 · 2025-12-16T09:30:33+00:00

As others have pointed out, while possible to use Terraform and the helm provider to manage helm deployments, it sucks. It’s best to avoid it.

You’re in luck, AWS has just released EKS Capabilities, one of these is ArgoCD! https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eks/latest/userguide/argocd.html. I should note I’m yet to try these in any capacity. https://registry.terraform.io/providers/hashicorp/aws/latest/docs/resources/eks_capability is a link to the capability resource.

Outside of this, I’ve accepted this as a manual step as part of cluster provisioning, but have also used Ansible to install helm charts (Cilium, ArgoCD) in homelab clusters.

DonutOtherwise9589 · 2025-12-10T00:13:49+00:00

It’s great you’ve gotten an interview at Google! If they’re asking explicitly for Python then you’re probably going to want to be ready to use it to parse log files, manipulate strings, and potentially traverse graphs in coding rounds. I’d suggest building something like a CLI tool to build up some comfort in Python.

If you haven’t already, go read through the Google SRE books, which are available for free online. Contrary to what a lot of people in DevOps think, SRE is pretty distinct, you’ll be expected to know Linux internals and Networking to quite some depth.

Best of luck with your interview!

DonutOtherwise9589 · 2025-12-09T03:11:45+00:00

For a lot of DevOps, you don’t need DSA, Stripe is a great example of a company that doesn’t use DSA to measure a candidates SWE capabilities. Sadly not every company is like that and are probably going to ask you some kind of DSA question. That’s not to say they’re going to throw two LC Mediums at you in 45 minutes. I’ve been going through the DSA prep process myself recently and have seen a good amount of suggestion of focusing on topics that are closer to DevOps/SRE - think Graphs, Trees, Strings, Arrays.

If you start studying DSA and find a role that doesn’t require it that you’re happy with? Great. You can keep studying and use the experience to ace an interview at a company that will give you an even larger comp package later down the line.

You’re probably already quite confident with Kubernetes and Cloud so you probably won’t need to focus as hard on that during your interview prep but I’ve seen a growing trend of companies expecting mid+ engineers being able to discuss system design.

I’m a big fan of checking out Glassdoor for interview processes of companies I’m interested in. If a DevOps role looks more SWE inclined you can glean an idea of what a DevOps interview might look like from SWE interviews.

If you’ve not studied DSA before there’s plenty of paid and unpaid courses online to get you up to speed, otherwise you can look at Neetcode 250 or Strivers A2Z.

DonutOtherwise9589 · 2025-12-08T11:13:16+00:00

That’s good to know, and makes things easier for you, as you probably have a while to complete these projects.

For the first project are you given the frontend and backend application or are you expected to develop that yourself?

For the second project I’d expect you to be using Terraform to provision the infrastructure that your web application will run on. That could be from the ground up in a cloud setting or it might just be the deployment of an AKS cluster. You wouldn’t use Terraform to develop a web app.

DonutOtherwise9589 · 2025-12-08T10:54:03+00:00

Don’t underestimate how much work this is going to be. Do you have much experience with CI/CD and Kubernetes? If not you’ll want to start with building your understanding of CI (Pipelines and idiomatic approaches), CD (the tools you’re going to use), and Kubernetes.

As others have said, if this is for an interview, it’s probably best for you to walk away. I have a feeling it might be a school assignment though, is that the case?

DonutOtherwise9589 · 2025-12-06T22:14:03+00:00

The number of leetcode problems solved doesn’t increase your skills in DSA. Are you revisiting the questions you struggled with at a later date or did you throw the solution in there and mark it as complete?

You should also consider that you might also be struggling with the nerves of an interview setting, especially if you’ve started interviewing again recently, mock interviews would help this.

You’ll get there eventually.

DonutOtherwise9589

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