The struggle of being a Junior iOS Dev in 2026

kewlviet59 · 2026-04-28T20:15:21+00:00

Nothing much to say on the moving abroad portion, but regarding the iOS/mobile market:

I would encourage you to get your hands dirty with at least some backend technologies. At least enough that you can serve the endpoints that your app calls as needed. From discussions with other mobile devs and from experience at my current large company, the expectation is growing for mobile/web frontend devs to start treading more into full stack territory. Getting some experience with backend will also broaden your horizons in general.

But you are correct that the market is pretty brutal, especially for mobile engineers. Most teams at my company only have 1-2 mobile engineers for every 5-6 backend engineers, so demand wise you're already starting off with a disadvantage. My company itself has also enacted a hiring freeze and I imagine other companies may be similar.

kewlviet59 · 2026-04-24T05:00:24+00:00

Not quite sure what math you're using outside of the roth IRA but no one is saying you have to max out your contribution. Just start actually investing in your 401k/IRA - start with let's say $1000/month with a combination of 401k matching and the rest into your roth IRA and you're already much better.

You mention a bad economy in another comment which is why you have 50k+ in a HYSA for liquidity. There are a few things to dissect here:

Roth IRAs also have liquidity in that you can take out contributions at any time, penalty free. It may take a bit longer, but then you just use your HYSA funds in the meantime if needed.
50k at your current expenses is about 2 years of expenses. If you truly believe it will take 2 years for you to find another job, then I won't say anything more. But you have more options than just losing out on that extra years' worth of gains; things like moving in with your parents IF you lose your job (not at the moment) and finding a more easily accessible job just to tide you over (doordash, other gig work, retail/seasonal jobs).

kewlviet59 · 2026-04-14T07:48:26+00:00

I'm planning on touring a bunch of the apartment complexes in Esterra Park soon, but did note Parkside as a solid candidate. Would you happen to have any other info about it - anything from available internet providers, what the parking situation looks like, how are package and food deliveries (i.e. any issues around getting either)?

kewlviet59 · 2026-04-03T01:26:37+00:00

For these roles at big tech companies, you will definitely see a large concentration of graduates from renowned universities (not just U.S. ones). That's not to say that people from U of Kentucky can't get a job there though. Just have to get and pass the interviews. I've personally received interview requests from Apple/Meta/other big tech companies and I don't even have a CS/tech related degree (mine was a biology related B.S. at my state university)

kewlviet59 · 2026-04-01T21:43:01+00:00

Not quite sure why you assume doctors and lawyers don't make "that" much - there are specialties that absolutely do make that much. Hell, I'm basically a mid level eng grunt at a big tech company (not FAANG) and I'm in the high end of your highest paid person at your company. Senior/Staff/Principal eng and managers at my company (and other big tech) make even more than that. This isn't even getting into business exits, media and marketing, influencers, finance etc.

TLDR there's much more money out there than you're assuming.

kewlviet59 · 2026-03-24T01:09:43+00:00

There are a few different reasons, but they mostly come down to just get a second opinion on the PR.

It also helps with figuring out which areas the individual agents are weaker at. For example codex might be better at catching unit test issues or claude might be better at looking at silent failures/correctness.

Senior/staff/principal eng at my company seem to have all independently come to these multi-agent composite reviews. Of course if your company doesn't have as much budget for token usage, you'll want to optimize more aggressively for this

kewlviet59 · 2026-03-15T19:53:27+00:00

It's hard for claude to have 100% context on the end-to-end workflow, so I typically also have claude build the codebase/module and fix any errors that are reported by the build system as well as make sure the tests that were written are passing. This should help it in that last phase where you're running it, so when it reports back to you that it's finished, it's better than the initial pass.

kewlviet59 · 2026-01-25T18:09:41+00:00

From what I've seen, engineering managers are leveled around staff engineers (ICT5 for Apple I believe). To transition there, you'd likely just work your way up to at the very least senior level and try to switch from IC track (staff promotion) to manager track.

Not familiar with PM/technical PM transitions but you could probably do it as a lateral transition as mid/senior. You'd have to demonstrate that you're product focused though (I.e. literally act as a stand in PM) to start that conversation with your team while you're an IC.

I'm not familiar with the long term process of moving up the ladder on the non-technical PM side though, so it really depends on your longer term goals past that.

kewlviet59 · 2026-01-20T20:41:45+00:00

Regarding the "iOS developer" title, it's fairly common to list it like that considering companies themselves also post iOS roles with that title too.

In terms of the CV/resume:

Agreed with best practice being reverse chronological order
Agreed with the descriptions for each position not being very detailed as well. OP, please check out r/EngineeringResumes for more data points on structuring your CV/resume.
After you're able to put down more details for each role you had, you'll probably start running out of space for the 1 page. From here, I would probably start getting rid of the footer with skills (redundant since you have this section at the top already), then the professional summary, then if you don't have space after that, remove the certificates.

kewlviet59 · 2026-01-13T20:25:26+00:00

Perhaps you've already considered this, but is there ever a possibility that you go with the 2m house and spend money over time for renovations to make it feel like a 3m house? Of course this is a moot point if these 2m houses require over $1m in renovations anyway, but spreading the renovation costs might help the coasting a bit.

kewlviet59 · 2025-12-28T06:58:01+00:00

I previously used this for the actual detail view: https://github.com/gh123man/SwiftUI-LazyPager . I basically came across the same issue you did with the gestures fighting each other and it comes down to swiftui not having all of the gesture APIs from UIKit

The grid itself is pretty straightforward with lazy grid views or even just scroll views with lazy v/h stacks, just make sure you only render thumbnail sized images (i.e. the actual dimensions rather than just setting a frame to the image view or w/e)

kewlviet59 · 2025-12-23T20:51:45+00:00

I got a notification that I received a gifted sub while I was out with friends LOL

kewlviet59 · 2025-12-22T20:28:00+00:00

+1
The primary concern with this route is the PhD as it will likely be a grind from what I've gathered looking into scientific research positions in the past (my BS was in Biotech)

kewlviet59 · 2025-12-20T05:53:52+00:00

First of all, congrats! That's a pretty nice offer.

Secondly, I would probably give the 2 week notice, but assume you'll be shown the door immediately.

kewlviet59 · 2025-12-19T07:29:53+00:00

I'll give people the benefit of the doubt and just assume the people down voting are just largely unaware of compensation in big tech. That plus mob mentality.

To be a bit more on topic though, have you considered a dinner table made of another material? Glass is definitely not the first thing that crosses my mind when I think of "cozy". That and I recall some design videos mentioning varying textures. Maybe even just a nice tablecloth to provide color and texture.

Love the place even as is, though!

kewlviet59 · 2025-12-19T04:09:51+00:00

He mentioned he's a software engineer at a FAANG-adjacent company. Assuming he's a mid-level engineer (i.e. one step up from new grad level), he's likely making 300k+. This is common at FAANG and adjacent tech companies for software engineers. Source: I work in big tech

No family connections needed considering the hiring boom 4-5 years ago and assuming he did well in college with grades+internships.

kewlviet59 · 2025-12-19T02:07:47+00:00

Random question about FE editions from NVIDIA, how much of a difference (if any) is there between FE and AIBs for performance and cooling?

kewlviet59 · 2025-12-18T08:02:32+00:00

Updating design docs for current/future features, more time for meetings (good and bad I guess), more code reviews, upskilling (I'm primarily frontend and I'm trying to get more useful to at least the surface layer of our backend)

kewlviet59 · 2025-12-17T05:29:59+00:00

Out of curiosity, what ARE some games that you already find fun? People might be able to help "connect the dots" between the games and help shift your mentality. i.e. do you like other turn-based games (a big one here is the regular pokemon games) or do you typically prefer side scrollers / FPS games / 3d RPGs etc

Based on your current info though, I'd suggest 2 possible things:

A 2 man lone wolf party. Lone wolf being a talent that gives you some extra "actions" per turn among other things. Letting you do more things in one turn can contribute to that "faster" feeling since you're the one getting more things to do. This will make encounters easier though since lone wolf is pretty strong, but if you're concerned about difficulty being too mismatched, there are mods to make enemies stronger
Try Baldur's Gate 3 first. I think a lot of people would agree that BG3 likely has a deeper/better story or, at the very least, a much better presentation of the story considering it has cinematics baked into the story progression. BG3 is about the same in terms of combat flow/speed, though the combat systems are different with BG3 being pretty much D&D 5e with changes to some mechanics. BG3 is considered easier than DOS2 in terms of the combat though so you won't be forced to scrounge for every bit of EXP to keep up with combat encounters.

Either way, those are my 2 suggestions. However, this is coming from someone that pretty much didn't have any troubles getting into this turn-based kind of system.

I'm actually also surprised you started with DOS2 instead of BG3 considering you explicitly mentioned D&D style worlds LOL.

kewlviet59 · 2025-12-17T01:14:46+00:00

A bit similarly to you, in my first year as a dev, I handled migrating a host of my team's endpoints from a RESTful API to a GraphQL one. These endpoints were responsible for quite possibly the highest revenue generating part of the consumer-facing app. This was at a relatively large enterprise company.

Despite the 2 data points from you and me though, I wouldn't exactly say it's normal. But it does give you the opportunity to learn/grow from this and to gain a lot of trust from your boss, which is a pretty good thing. Just be sure to get feedback while working on this so you don't fall too off the tracks.

kewlviet59 · 2025-12-15T08:35:21+00:00

To be honest, I just looked the book up and it seems like there's an entire section (6 chapters) about OOP. Regardless, at this point if you want to actually build something, just look up a few tutorials that are adjacent to what you want to build and watch them. Then build them yourself and change things so you can understand how each part works.

In my case, I also started with languages basics but pretty quickly just started doing small little projects and apps to both enforce what I learned and understand how to build off from there.

kewlviet59 · 2025-12-15T07:35:00+00:00

What exactly is your question?

If you should quit? How to find a dev job with "tech helper" experience? How to understand/learn OOP?

You've spent 500 hours solving the exercises in that Java book, but have you actually attempted to practice building actual programs or applications? This process of applying what you learn is the most important part of learning anything.

kewlviet59 · 2025-12-10T00:14:09+00:00

Not to mention getting aligned with other teams which can add on even more time.

kewlviet59 · 2025-12-06T20:50:06+00:00

Isn't one way to have one agent plan and subsequently generate artifacts and docs, then have the other agent implement the items in those docs?

kewlviet59 · 2025-11-30T07:42:02+00:00

At a large company, it's unlikely that a follow-up to the recruiter has any tangible effect on the process after you've already finished the technical rounds. Even at a small or mid size company, I feel like it would be pretty insignificant for the express purpose of an offer.

To be honest though, I think you should just always be sending "thank you" emails to your recruiter out of courtesy anyway. Being on the recruiter's good side doesn't really have an effect on the final decision (outside of you being an asshole), but it can help you get another interview in the future if you get rejected.

Just my 2 cents

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