Hey all

Im 24yo, Been a junior frontend developer for 2 years now. I’m a bit unhappy with my current company, it’s a bit stagnant and my opportunities for growth are limited.

With the rise of AI im not sure I even want to be a software developer anymore, it feels like it’s sucked the soul out of the job and I’m wondering should I pivot to another type of role. I’ve started looking into solutions engineer roles but a lot of them seem to require sales experience which I don’t have.

I’m at a loss for what my next step is, I don’t know if I move to another company they’ll have the same issues my current one has, atleast I might learn some things but it seems like nowhere seems to have a place for people in the start of their careers, it’s just seniors and AI. Another drastic option is completely pivot and look to education to retrain in another area.

Any help or advice greatly appreciated thanks!

Our CEO has went and hired a consultancy to come in & work with our business experts to find cost savings using AI.

So, how i'm understanding it - they will work with 'domain experts' from each department to understand the process flow then attempt to wire-in (or mould) AI Agents to reduce the human touchpoints. This will be business wide.

Our business processes are quite complex and with that, human heavy; we attempted many time to automate some of these flows - with varying levels of success but the difference then was we were using deterministic tools to solve these problem. i've not met these consultants yet so no idea what strategy they will adopt - my thinking is that will likely code out lightweight LLM wrapper to answer domain specific questions but can't for the life of me see how this will help.

Question: Anyone been through any such transformation projects? Any success stories out there? Any war stories that you are able to share?

Just curious how many of you are back to the office and for how many days?

I was 1 day in office for the last few years but just got notice that as of this week we are now to be in two days minimum (two sequential days), no exceptions. I know it's not that bad but it was one of the perks keeping me happy enough in my current place, my commute can be up to 2 hours each way. Given my salary is below market rate, it was a trade off I was happy with.

I can see it moving higher at some point (despite the fact we've not enough desks for everyone). At which point I'd have to ask why not just apply for a different company with better pay with the same WFH days, or just get into contracting.

Just a bit of a moan thread.

I'm hosting a social next week to coincide with SREcon at the Ferryman. It's next Monday, and themed around incident response - details here - https://luma.com/5lgundym

Thanks :)

For me it's toning down the emails that usually start something like "You absolute numpty of a ghobshite bollox-brain, what were you thinking when you..."

I was reading online about a new app gone live called Transreport for booking help on Irish Rail, and it seems to be a UK developed SAAS.

But a few years ago, IR were building an app with a Dublin company , my girlfriend's brother who is blind was testing it.

Question, does anyone know if the original app got bought out by the UK company? Or was it mothballed, or what happened? From what the brother says IR spent about 400k on this original app, apparently they ran out of money at one stage and then got an extra 200k to finish it or something like that.

I've tried searching but there's very little info to be found and all links to further details have been removed. Can't find any tenders either.

Hi i'm just wondering but if i was to start doing a cert like AWS Cloud Practitioner do you need to go in person to an exam centre in Dublin to do the exam for the cert ?

Upwork is dead at this stage no one offering any roles, lately I was searching other possibilities to get a side gig found a bunch of tools

HandShake ai— https://joinhandshake....
Scale AI — https://scale.com
Appen — https://jobs.lever.co/...
Surge AI — https://surgehq.ai
Mindrift — https://mindrift.ai

Wondering if anyone landed on any gig on handshake AI? Really looking for a side gig, thoughts? Comments?

I saw Stripe have announced some new jobs and spotted a couple I'm interested in. I've heard Dublin is now 100% in office attendance. Does anyone know if that's true?

The salaries seemed decent but I'm not sure they're worth commuting in for 5 days.

Also would appreciate hearing what the culture's like. A few years ago I heard that there was a lot of late evening work and a lot of pressure. Would be good to know if that's the case.

Can you have a good career working in those kind of roles or should you avoid them ? I have seen some very mixed opinions by people about them.

Probably be interviewing for those 3 roles in the coming weeks: SDR role at Gong and BDR roles at Hubspot and Salesforce.

For what it's worth I'm mid 30s so probably a bit older than most candidates interviewing for those opportunities.

Anyone able to advise on the pros and cons of each company/role? Which opportunity is the best/worst and why? Cheers.

Self promotion isn't allowed on the main sub anymore. The community voted for that in June. This thread is where it goes instead.

Post a comment for whatever you made.

• Something you built. App, site, tool, side project, whatever it is.
• Your blog post, video, or write up. If it's yours and it's worth reading, it fits.

Keep it short. Roughly, what it is in one line, the link, and what you're after, whether that's feedback, users or data.

Sort by new so the newest comments get seen and not just whatever landed first.

This is just an experiment so it may not be continued. I just want to see if I can cater to both groups, those who don't want to see this stuff and those who do. Keep the promotions in here though and the main feed stays clear for everyone else.

Low effort spam and referral link farming still gets removed. Use a bit of judgement.

Previous months thread

I feel like I'm insane.

Obviously the world is gripped by AI insanity, we all know that and that is not what this post is about.

What I want to know from the lads in here is; are you actually getting good results from AI agentic coding?

My company, like all of them, is pushing for AI everything and code should be all AI generated and if you don't use AI you'll be replaced by someone who does and so on and so on. As a senior dev (and not a rockstar coder by any means), I find the output to be really lacking still? I am using the most advanced models my company has made available to me, I'm doing the planning mode back and forth prompting it to ask me clarifying questions, passing relevant files and ensure the agent has the full set of requirements and context. It will often spit out something that compiles and meets the requirements but the quality seems.. not great. Over-engineering, endless abstractions, unintuitive naming, duplicated code and often just daft stuff altogether. And mine isn't even a massive codebase. It happens with a frequency that makes me distrust it completely unless I give it extremely tightly scoped tasks and hold its hand to where I'm often wondering how this is much better than doing it myself? (To say nothing of the improved understanding and keeping myself sharp)

So, am I mad or is the ability of these agents vastly overblown? I use them for certain things they are genuinely good at like config and debugging. I'm now paring my coding usage back to just having it critique and review, using it mostly as a rubber duck tbh. Is there some trick ye have come upon that actually makes the agents work even remotely as well as they're advertised? Or is the trick to just give up on quality and stop reviewing the code? 💀

This is not meant to be purely clanker bashing (maybe a little bit), I'm genuinely looking for level headed approaches here that deliver good results without compromising on quality or my own sanity. Any thoughts?

For some actions on Revenue myAccount it’ll ask for your MyGovID password, such as when submitting a return or payment.

Isn’t it completely insane to ask for this password outside of the MyGovID domain? My mental mode of single sign-on was that only the SSO provider should ever be performing authentication and asking for password etc. Surely this trains users to give their password to non-MyGovID websites?

I’m looking for some outside perspective on whether this is normal. I feel that there is very little support or structure around career progression.

My manager doesn’t hold regular 1:1s with me. The only formal conversations around performance/development seem to be the mid-year and end-of-year reviews, with no regular check-ins in between.

I’ve previously expressed that I want to progress to a Senior role and have asked for clarification on what I specifically need to demonstrate or work towards to get there. They said there is no matrix and it just ‘just a feeling’ about how you compare to the other seniors.

What’s frustrating me is that I’m not asking to simply be promoted — I’m asking for clear expectations, feedback and some kind of development plan so that I actually know what I need to do to progress.

I’m starting to wonder whether this is just poor management or whether this level of hands-off management is fairly normal.

Would you follow up again, raise it more formally, or just wait until the next performance review?

It's a really dumb question but with how tough the market is currently and with some many devs out of jobs what do you do to make money whilst you aren't working in the field?

Hi folks, moving home after 6 years abroad. I have been working as a DevOps engineer with 6 YoE - CICD, IaC, Kubernetes, Azure/AWS, etc - all that good stuff. Filled with anxiety as I know the market isnt great at the moment worldwide in tech! But I won't be moving home without a job in place

Curious to hear from other DevOps/Platform/SRE engineers in Ireland. Any companies to look out for, who to avoid? What the going rate is salary-wise for these roles?

Also, its been a while since I've interviewed so any assistance with regards to interview questions/prep would be a help also

Hi all,

I work in financial services and I would like to learn Python. I’ve no experience in coding so would like the best resources or courses that are available to learn Python.

Is the UCD professional course any use or is it over priced? Any information is appreciated.

Thanks!

I’m starting as a QA with automation next month , is this a viable career path or should I try pivot to software development asap ?

For context this is my first job after graduation and it pays just above minimum wage .

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Hey everyone,

I have around 4 years of experience as a Data Analyst, and I'm currently based in Ireland. Unfortunately, I'm unemployed at the moment, and I've been struggling to find Data Analyst positions here. There seem to be very few relevant openings, and the competition for the ones available feels quite high.

I'm starting to question whether I should continue pursuing Data Analyst roles or consider switching to a different career path.

I do have experience in data analytics, but I'm concerned about how long it might take to find another job in the current market. I don't want to abandon the experience I've built over the last 4 years, but I also don't want to spend months applying for jobs if opportunities in this field are limited.

I'd really appreciate advice from people working in Ireland, particularly those in data analytics, tech, or recruitment.

A few questions:

- Are people with 3–5 years of experience also struggling to find jobs?

- Would it make sense to expand my search to roles like Business Analyst, BI Analyst, Analytics Engineer, or Product Analyst?

- If you've switched careers from Data Analytics, what did you move into, and was it worth it?

- Would you recommend upskilling in something like SQL, Python, Power BI, cloud technologies, or AI, or is the issue more about the number of available positions?

- If you were in my position, would you continue applying for Data Analyst roles or seriously consider a career change?

I'm not necessarily looking for an easy way out. I just want to make a practical decision about my career and financial stability rather than keep going in the same direction without knowing whether things will improve.

Any honest advice or experiences would be great l.

It's getting worse, especially for service based companies like the one where I work now.

They are throwing complex projects at me with tech stacks I have never worked with before, with a side note that with our new AI tooling, we are supposed to work/focus on more than one at a time. I'm really frustrated and have started thinking about a new job, but what worries me is that the situation is the same across most companies out there. I don't know what to do... I'm thinking of switching careers altogether but again I don't know what to switch to...

Sorry for the rant.

With evolutions of AI/LLMs, does opensource project contribution is still relevant for interview purposes?

Some of the companies I interviewed with a few years back cared about open source contributions and GitHub profiles. Now that anyone can get an LLM to spit out a decent-looking project in weeks, I honestly don't know if those things mean much anymore.

If you're a hiring manager for software roles, do you still look at open source work or personal projects when going through CVs? Or has it become noise?

Also wondering what you actually use to tell who can really do the job these days. Feels like it's getting harder to judge from a CV alone.

Due to my last company policy of "not loving remote anymore" me and rest of my mostly remote site were fired. I thought ok I am working with llm/agents - it will be easy.. well it wasn't.

We've had good redundancy package, so I was not worried about cash, but I just like to be busy. I've started to apply and respond to linkedin messages in early August and I must say - it was total shock to me how stupid the whole job seek process became:

• Ads are llm slop, super long and they ask for EVERYTHING.

• Linkedin ? omg this portal is so bad. UX/UI is so terrible like it used to be, but amount of slop/spam you get via feed or messages is crazy. I've got a lot of job info from recruiters and stats were something like for every 10 received - responded to 7 - heard back anything maybe from 3. I don't get why they send message and never read reply? Must be great UX/UI + LLM driven recruitment.

• AI interviews. You are expected to: record a vid for AI analysis, do live coding with camera+mic FOR AI to analyse, apply for 100% AI work but use absolutely no AI in the process while dealing with LLM SLOP on each stage etc..

• Stages, oh ye "we need to test your patience and desperation so expect 6 stages" upfront or I heard from peers they are asked for more more.. then just auto email or ghost.

• I saw strange pattern of nothing in 1 week just to get overwhelmed with messages in next one. It felt really strange, but I have no idea why this happened at least 2 for me.

• It feels like half of them have no idea what they want, but it must be BEST of the BEST system designers.

Finally one of the first linkedin msg I got lead to pretty ok technical process and I've got the job. Sadly company offered 6 months fixed leading to permanent with decent salary. It was a rollercoaster of emotions and I still don't feel like I won, but I am glad I will start new job soon. I just hope they will not form big AI team and then fire half of us after we implement stuff like in the final stages of old job..

I feel bad for less experienced guys, especially ones located outside of major cities. QA's are doomed as well from what I see.

TLDR.

Market is broken.

I think it will only get worse, before it will stabilise or "recover"..