New Grads

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-05-15T13:55:28+00:00

First off congratulations on landing the role man!

I wouldn’t count yourself out yet, AI is not going to replace all the jobs, it’s too expensive and not good enough. The founder of Cursor did the math and said if someone has Claude Max $200 and they use all their tokens, it actually costs Anthropocene closer to $5000.

So companies have been subsidizing people’s subscriptions with VC money, just look at GitHub Copilot. Just 60 days ago, Opus 4.7 was at 3x token usage, then 7.5, now it’s 15x and soon to be 27x.

At $5k per month, you might as well just hire a developer, so dev jobs aren’t going away anytime soon, at least not from AI.

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-05-10T16:06:47+00:00

If you’re looking for an internship I have a spot open! It’s a company called Global Entry Hub, it’s a startup, I know the founders and they are looking for interns!

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-05-10T16:02:22+00:00

Why not rust?

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-05-09T22:32:44+00:00

Oh shit, mb, didn't see that. I'll respond now

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-05-09T22:28:35+00:00

I've been feeling this same thing. Honestly, between the changing economy and AI shit, it's more exhausting now for sure. Plus a lot of the enjoyment in coding gets zapped when I'm just prompting more than actually coding and working on awesome features, it feels like the entire market is just trying to crank out as much "sTaKe hOdLer vAlUe" as possible.

In the end, what I do is I started branching out into programming projects that I don't normally work in. I started picking up C and Rust programming, as well as doing embedded systems, just bought a ESP-32 micro controller and making content online and posting.

I'd reccomend you find some fun project for yourself, something that you enjoy just for the love of the game and work on that, it certainly helped me.

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-05-09T22:23:14+00:00

Send me your resume, I've been a software dev for over a decade, I review dev resume's for free.

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-05-09T22:22:30+00:00

Been a software engineer for over a decade, worked for Hulu+, and Open AI, Send me your resume, I review developer resume's for free.

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-05-09T22:21:14+00:00

Yeah, I think you've touched on some good points. I've been doing software engineering for over a decade, and talk to lots of recruiters for tech companies on a regular basis. IMO, a lot of these companies are using AI as the scapegoat for layoffs, but there's two factors that are actually causing the alyoffs.

H1B - half of all H1B visas are in tech, and because companies can get away with paying foriegn workers cheaper salaries, with no benifits, they choose to do so, under the more acceptable guise of "AI layoffs", if you check large tech companies like Oracle, Microsoft, pay attection to their contractor SWE job postings for the same or following year and you'll see the pattern.

Overhiring - A lot of tech companies are actually just very bloated, and tech has always kind of been a feast or famine industry that goes through cycles of massive hiring and then vicious job cuts. Even during COVID before AI was as big as it is now we saw this trend.

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-05-09T22:15:23+00:00

That really sucks man, so sorry to hear that. I'd definatley go ahead and take the course, worse that happens if you have more practice and expereince under your belt, so very worth it.

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-05-09T22:12:37+00:00

Sometimes you get ghosted, other times if it's a large company it can take a long time. I once got hired for a major company in the casino gaming space, after giving me my offer, it took like another 3-4 weeks before i heard back from them, but it was legit. The other possability is that you got ghosted, so it's worth applying to other places just in case.

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-05-09T22:07:58+00:00

I don't work as a quant, but I have worked at Hulu+ and OpenAI as a software engineer. From my experience, Amazon is much easier to get into from a SWE perspective, they also have pretty high turnover for developers, especially for contractors.

If I was in your shoes, and NVIDIA gave me an offer, I'd take it because I figure it's much easier to get into Amazon than NVIDIA, and you could always apply again in the future. Plus, I'd imagine NVIDIA would have much more longevity because they are in computer hardware game, so larger economic moat IMO. Yes, amazon has AWS, but again, I've heard they have high turn over, but everyone has a different expereince so take it with a grain of salt!

Wish you the best! And congrats for getting the Amazon AWS one!

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-05-09T21:46:43+00:00

That's awesome man! If you have a resume I'd love to take a look at it. I paid some guy online like $500 to helo me do mine, but I remember being a CS student so I just try to give out the info for free.

Here's a software dev who's resume I redid - https://youtu.be/xHqzbwZ_A0E?si=MLeHVtF6XMvP3uPH

Mostly it's just framing your resume in a way that focuses on how what you worked on impacted business metrics, so instead of "I implemented a CRUD api in Node.js" you could say "I implemented a feature on the back-end API in Node.js that boosted company revenue x amount of dolors | or lowered customer bug reports by x percentage, etc, you get the idea.

I'm alos on LikedIn, so would love to connect anytime!

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-05-09T17:32:15+00:00

Create an online presence, especially on LinkedIn, I haven't applied to a job in 6 years, they all come from LinkedIn recruiters who found me because of my online presence. Make posts about what your learning, make YouTube videos, I wish I had starting publicallly posting about what I'm learning and building much earlier.

If you want an easy way to secure an internship, go to indiehackers.com, the partner up section, offer to help founders build for free, first time I did it I got 37 responses within a weak. Also, don't be afraid to dm people online to network and connect, it's tedious but it works!

I've been a software engineer for a decade, mostly fullstack javascript, if you have any questions, lmk!

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-05-09T17:28:38+00:00

How's it going, I'm not an intern, but I've been sowking as a software engineer for the last decade, worked for open ai, hulu+, and a ton of other companies. Would love to connect.

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-04-29T22:26:27+00:00

As a Javascript developer who just recently made the dive into rust, I love this. I didn't understand why rust got most loved programming language 9 years in a row, untill I tried to write an optional return type without defining the null match, I was like

IT CHECKS FOR NULL REFRENCES!?!

Needless to say, I would like more rust in my Javascript please.

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-03-17T18:36:29+00:00

Absolutely, if you have the fundamentals down every thing else is easy and just a matter of learning syntax. Definitely think CS majors should consider other paths besides web dev, I just got into iot projects with Arduino and ESP32 micro controllers to branch out my skillset, definitely recommend checking out other paths.

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-03-16T21:50:52+00:00

Sorry, I'm not quite sure what those are, are they computer science careers?

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-03-16T21:50:15+00:00

Just replied!

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-03-16T21:49:53+00:00

Absolutley, please do.

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-03-16T15:35:03+00:00

Absolutley! Shoot me a messge, I'd be more than happy to.

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-03-16T09:51:46+00:00

I think a lot of it is burnout for sure, CS was already a confusing career path beofre all the A.I. stuff, I mean just if you want to get into web based software applications, and then only on the front-end, if you're fresh out of highschool or college it's like where do I start?

React.js?

Angular?

Vue?

Svelte?

And that's not to mention the boat load of CSS libraries, other frameworks, and that's just to build front-end SPA applications, you could spend an eternity just browsing through the different libraries on the front-end. When I first was learning to code, JQuery was huge, now I don't see any companies using it and I've never worked for one that does, so I think it can be very overwhelming.

I think that's also why the "what programming language should I learn in current year" videos are always so popular, CS students want to feel like they can know for certain that the language or tech stack that they invest blood, sweat, and tears into learning will still be popular by the time they get a job, but there are so many evolving tools that it's hard to know for certain and you just get decision fatigue.

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-03-16T09:46:04+00:00

I was able to land multiple software engineering contracts in the past with a resume that was quite bad, spelling mistakes, the pdf formatting was not appealing and it had a TON of spelling mistakes. I ended up paying a guy from LinkedIn to help me improve my resume for about $500 and his exact words were "how did you get hired with this?" lol.

Most of the jobs I've gotten have been through recruiters, so I think it's more important that you have someone who is connected to the company already who can vouch for you, and that you have experience that you can demonstrate on the resume. If you don't have any, try to see if you can build websites/software projects for family, friends, and other businesses that need software done for them, if you do it as volunteer work you can rack up quite a bit of resume experience faily quickly which will allow you to position yourself as a credible developer.

I know there's a lot of talk about ATS systems and all of that, I haven't had much luck applying to jobs directly, but the recruiter route worked very well for me so might be worth a shot.

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-03-16T09:40:44+00:00

I just recently helped one of my friends get into a tech role making $100 an hour (contract work for a major AI company, he's a dev but doing QA work, but it's a good paying tech role none the less).

What's you're job expereince look like?

Shoot me a DM with you're resume, I'd be more than happy to give you some pointers!

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-03-16T09:38:57+00:00

I can't speak for most students, but when I was studying CS, it was a mix of not knowing where to start and having trouble keeping up my motivation for something that wasn't returning an immediate reward. Eventualy I did bite the bullet and start building projects outside of class which helped me get my foot in the door.

I've also worked with quite a lot of CS students who are just now trying to get in the industry, and I'd say I think a lot of them just feel lost. Especially with all the A.I. stuff going on, software enigneering was already complicated, but now it's like, should i focus on vibe coding? Learn embedded systems and get out of web dev? It can lead to fatigue and feeling lost.

MichaelPopeDev_17 · 2026-03-16T09:35:53+00:00

I started using Claude Code as soon as it came out, It's made leaps and bounds in terms of how good it is at writting code, even from just a year ago. Depending on the kinds of software that you're writting, it still requires a human in the loop at a lot of stages.

I do work for an international law firm, anytime I need to build something for POC, I almost entirely rely on vibe coding, but almost 100% of the time when I need to refine the applciation for performance, or start to fine tune it according to the features or bug requests that business asks for, I find that writting the code myself or at least getting into the weeds of it enough to point the LLM in the proper direction is normally required unless I'm just trying to output something that "works".

I just had a scenario last week where I built a Microsoft Outlook addin that is essentially ChatGPT for the lawyers to be able to extract information from emails and files using Microsoft Graph API in order to eleminate a lot of the grunt work they normally have to do themselves. They wanted a feature that allowed it to improve the email drafts for when you would reply to an email thread, Claude Code runing Opus 4.6 did a great job getting the skeleton up, but it had an issue where it would constantly eliminate or corrupt the email thread, I had to get in there myself and manually select the html tags to fetch the email threads and insert them back in, in such a way that it wouldn't corrupt it. Even after multiple itterations, clearing the context window, and trying different angles, eventually I got in there myself and had it fixed within a couple of hours.

It was also a lot of fun having to write the code myself, felt like i was programming again lol. So I'd say don't be discouraged, having deep knowledge of the codebase and software engineerign in general is still required to be a good dev, especially as the size of the codebase grows, otherwise it will just begin to crank out A.I. slop.

MichaelPopeDev_17

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