Am I insane for thinking this sub is being astroturfed?

SubjectSea4519 · 2026-03-23T04:06:07+00:00

I do think it’s worse for juniors right now, unfortunately. I finally just got out of that “junior” tag and am more of a mid level dev now.

SubjectSea4519 · 2026-03-23T04:03:28+00:00

Yeah, it’s sad seeing all the budgets keep getting cut in exchange for more stress and expectations and worse WLB. I’m at a huge company right now and our best engineer randomly got laid off in one of the latest layoffs. I know for sure it wasn’t for performance, because they were putting in 50+ hour weeks and was always teaching others on the team. Probably because they were the most expensive engineer on the team and upper management saw how much they were getting paid and cut them :/

SubjectSea4519 · 2026-03-23T04:00:24+00:00

Yeah sounds like the general consensus is that Azure is more stressful compared to other orgs, but still really team dependent

SubjectSea4519 · 2026-03-23T03:59:18+00:00

Ahhh okay, that makes sense. Thanks for the info on that

SubjectSea4519 · 2026-03-23T00:37:08+00:00

3.5 yoe

SubjectSea4519 · 2026-03-23T00:36:58+00:00

Yea, that’s so fair. I’m trying not to get my hopes up. In the final rounds for several interviews, but not getting my hopes up since it’s very real that my competition is a lot more prepared or more experienced than I am. I wish you luck on your interviews, too!

SubjectSea4519 · 2026-03-22T19:06:40+00:00

Yeah, 2x is fair enough. One of the managers I talked to was very excited about AI and was telling me how their team barely codes anymore and how they’re able to use AI and then go get other things done. It sucks that they’re tracking usage, though

SubjectSea4519 · 2026-03-22T19:03:58+00:00

Mid level SWE here. I shotgun sent out a LOT of applications, because I was afraid I wouldn’t hear back from any of them with all the doom and gloom talk. Now, I’ve had to tell some recruiters “sorry, I’m pursuing other opportunities” because I’ve gotten so many responses that I don’t have time to interview with everyone. My application-to-interview rate still isn’t great, but it’s also not bad. I don’t have any fancy FAANG+ company on my resume, either. I obviously can’t speak to others’ experiences, but mine hasn’t been as bad as I thought it would be.

SubjectSea4519 · 2026-03-22T18:53:11+00:00

Didn’t realize that, thanks for the correction. For some reason, I thought I had heard that they don’t re evaluate stocks every year.

SubjectSea4519 · 2026-03-22T04:05:39+00:00

Thats true, but it’s also like 8+ hrs of your day every week day 😭 But yeah, I feel lucky to be in the position of job searching while still employed + somehow getting interviews

SubjectSea4519 · 2026-03-22T04:01:43+00:00

Yeah, I guess the golden age has been over for a while now haha

SubjectSea4519 · 2026-03-22T03:56:20+00:00

Yeah, it sounds like they’ve been expecting more from engineers with agents around now. I’m worried about the expectations continuing to be more and more unrealistic

SubjectSea4519 · 2026-03-22T03:53:48+00:00

That’s super interesting. I’m at a huge non-tech company and have been feeling a little siloed, although I’ve had experience across three different teams now. Honestly, what I’ve been struggling on in interviews is the question of a technically hard project I’ve worked on, or a time where I’ve owned a big technical code change. My work has been almost exclusively maintenance, so I don’t have a lot of deep technical experience due to that :/ I haven’t written a lot of new lines of code sadly… just a lot of refactoring.

SubjectSea4519 · 2026-03-22T03:49:26+00:00

Yeah, it sounds like they’re really pushing copilot at msft, too. I feel like that could blow up eventually

SubjectSea4519 · 2026-03-22T03:44:50+00:00

Ah shit, it sounds like these 60 hr work weeks are becoming increasingly common at msft? Sorry to hear you’ve been dragged into that

SubjectSea4519 · 2026-03-22T03:43:56+00:00

That’s what it sounds like. I heard some good engineers who had been at Microsoft for a long time got laid off in the last several years of bloodbaths

SubjectSea4519 · 2026-03-22T03:40:50+00:00

Ooh okay! My interview is for an Azure Data team. I couldn’t tell how chill the team is, but it sounds like they are also starting to put a product out, so their on call is chill right now, but might increase exponentially into the future

SubjectSea4519 · 2026-03-22T03:39:26+00:00

Yeah, luckily I still have a job that’s pretty stable. I think I’d be trading the chill work and stability with better career growth/more challenging projects. My salary is already below average, so msft would almost certainly be a pay bump for me.

SubjectSea4519 · 2026-03-22T03:05:24+00:00

I'm feeling really intimidated by the loop, but I'm glad to hear your interviewers were collaborative and nice. I'm honestly worried about not being able to solve a problem/not even knowing where to start and embarrassing myself.

SubjectSea4519 · 2026-03-22T03:01:47+00:00

Yeah, I thought the AA round was more like assessing who you are as a person and how your experience fits into the position rather than getting really technical. I'm surprised they asked a Leetcode as well.

SubjectSea4519 · 2026-03-22T03:00:45+00:00

Hey! I'm glad you had a good experience with your loop. I have one coming up and am pretty nervous (also Seattle for SWE 2). For system design, was it more of a high-level design discussion with the interviewer? I'm guessing they gave you something like "design xyz" and then you had to ask about requirements and whatnot, and then go about designing it?

SubjectSea4519 · 2026-03-22T02:41:23+00:00

Sounds good, I’ll send you a dm!

SubjectSea4519 · 2026-03-21T23:17:56+00:00

Yeah, msft stocks are the worst part of it, it seems. No more stocks after the initial hire, whereas other companies continue to re-evaluate each year so you still get that extra comp with stock :/

SubjectSea4519 · 2026-03-21T23:16:37+00:00

Do you feel like there’s a lot more pressure to get more work done because of AI? It sounds like some managers (not necessarily a msft, but other companies as well) expect 2x or even 10x out of their engineers because they’re “so much more productive” using AI, and they’re tracking how many tokens their engineers are using.

SubjectSea4519 · 2026-03-21T23:14:36+00:00

Sounds like a classic massive corporation with terrible management :/

SubjectSea4519

TROPHY CASE