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Husband ask about hypothetical layoff (Blind)

• stegosauru (Google): You sound terrible
• WeWerrk (Google): I asked my wife this recently and her response was, ‘we’ll figure it or maybe we’ll just FIRE’. She’s amazing. Glad I’m not married to someone like OP lol
• AgentOfAI (Microsoft): Man tech people have 0 emotional quotient. Wondering how your marriage held up so long

Rejected by Anthropic twice, so Elon took me in. (Blind)

• Fiinbale (itana): Elon Musk D-rider. You’ll be perfect for xai
• tiredness (Apache Software Foundation): Good luck working for Elon.
• KeWO35 (Amazon): Just want to say Kudos to you for going through the entire emotional roller coaster of making it through multiple rounds and still not closing the deal. And that too twice! Conpanies dont realize the mental toll the prep and the process takes. There should be a way to compensate for this.

Nvidia is in for a rough phase (Blind)

• kea21$ (NVIDIA): I hear “tell me more about your cuda graphs” is a great opener at bars
• k3hpxz (NVIDIA): Lmfao ok bud
• jUtX47 (Cerebras Systems): Pretty stupid move by China. Jensen would have anyway sold to China which is the right move. Export controls are dumb. You don’t need to honeypot him. Now nobody will sell to China.

Should I join Google? (Blind)

• layoffs 🫡 (ex-Google): Lowkey they should rescind your offer if you’re actually debating on this
• donewithit (Google): ‘you can survive a year or 2’ and the alternative is a Google L4 offer;
  
  and the offer doubles your TC;
  
  TAKE IT! Even if you don’t like the team you can change teams within Google; lots of options at L4
• WEXiE9ysg5 (Meta): How long was your team-matching? (I’ve been in L4 team-matching for 1 month and only 1 call and they filled it internally)

Bay area AI job market & “networking” questions (Blind)

• chat2 (Meta): 1. Yes, just move
  
  2. Not even a little if you are good and zero if you are great
• amanreddy7 (Meta): From the AI infrastructure side, I would say the trip is worth it only if you go with a specific goal. Meetups help when you can talk about one concrete thing you built or fixed, like a cluster problem or a network issue, because that is what hiring managers remember. Just showing up to network in general rarely moves the needle. On the market itself, the part I see hiring actively is the infra side, people who can build and run the clusters, while generalist AI roles get a lot of applicants. Are you aiming at research roles, or at infra and engineering roles? That changes which meetups are worth your time.
• datjvdsbnn (Uber): Meetups are full of bums with less experience than you, just apply to companies you’re interested in and then move for them. Your resume should be fine to get a non research ml job

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Spotify bloodbath (Blind)

• AI or Cry (Spotify): The entire app is vibe coded dogshit now, the culture is straight from the top and only true believers are rewarded. Nothing else matters but speed. Declining reliability? Incoherent UX? Who cares. How have you AI natively AI-empowered your agentic setup this week is all that gets the emojis flying in the virtual meetings
• sickkk: I’ve been saying this for years: just make a consistent app that plays the fucking music. I don’t want to relearn the app every 3 months. They went from liking songs to saving to liking to a playlist.
  
  Guess all these subway PRs start showing their effect.
• meow-bot (Meta): Bruh, wdym? I have a tonne invested in Spotify? Should I jump ship?

Meta hiring agressively (Blind)

• lQiL78 (Microsoft): Why do you need headcount if you plan on laying off in feb
• ssm69 (New): Hire to get fired? How do they determine which departments have to cut?
• ChTree (Northern Trust): Hiring in November so there’s headcount to cut in February is the most honest thing Meta has said all year.

My new grad cohort is leaving in droves (Blind)

• zKen34 (Spotify): Whenever I have these kinda internal questions and debates, I ask myself - on my last day in this world when looking back my life, will I be happy that I made so much money, had so many things or luxury life style, or will I be happy that I spent time with people I love, made wonderful memories and experienced what the world/nature had to offer.
  
  I’m not saying one can’t achieve both. That’s the best scenario. But to the point when you have to choose, pick the one you will regret the least. This is the mindset that has served me well and I find my life fulfilling! Good luck and best wishes for anyone who’s on the journey ❤️
• qLhH85 (ex-Google): If you are feeling fomo then go for it, staying still has its own set of risks. Majority of blind would not dare make the move. Ask yourself what would you regret more?
• K7mt0joaft (Meta): You are young. Do what inspires you. Don’t be afraid to pursue big goals and make mistakes along the way.
  
  I follow your exact logic but I’ve been in the industry since forever. My kids deserve all my extra time and energy. Anthropics and Open AIs of the world will be alright without my help.

Specifics of why META get the bad reputation for work (Blind)

• JamesBonb (Meta): I’ll tell you why people warn against joining Meta, based on my firsthand experience.
  
  During my time at Meta, I didn’t find my coworkers to be particularly toxic or evil. Yes, there was cutthroat competition, and you constantly had to be on your toes to protect your scope. But honestly, I’ve seen similar cultures at other FAANG companies, so that wasn’t particularly surprising.
  
  What I found truly broken was the leadership.
  
  In my experience, Meta’s middle management (D1/D2) was among the most incompetent I’ve encountered in terms of people management, product thinking, technical depth, and long-term vision. Most simply took orders from above, threw around a few fancy buzzwords, and focused more on pleasing their bosses than building great products. The constant reorgs, shifting priorities, and leadership churn are symptoms of this.
  
  The biggest risk of joining Meta in 2026 isn’t whether you’re competent. It’s how many stars need to align for you to succeed, most of which are completely outside your control.
  
  Of course, you need to be good at your job. But that’s just the starting point. You also need:
  
  1. The right scope. And scope can change overnight. I joined with a large, promising charter, only to see it deprioritized within two months.
  
  2. The right leadership alignment. You need strong relationships with people at least two levels above you. And because leadership changes so frequently, you’re constantly rebuilding social capital.
  
  3. The right timing. Even if you’re delivering strong results, a reorg, a shift in priorities, or a leadership change can wipe out months of progress.
  
  So, would I recommend joining Meta?
  
  If you’re joining in 2026, I’d strongly recommend looking at a newly formed organization or an emerging vertical, such as Business AI or the new neocloud division.
  
  Why? Because a new organization is more likely to give you 12–18 months of runway before major strategic shifts. That gives you time to ramp up, establish credibility, build social capital, and position yourself to pivot when priorities inevitably change.
  
  That’s probably the closest you can get to stacking the odds in your favor.
  
  My biggest takeaway from Meta: Being competent is necessary, but it’s nowhere near sufficient. Your success depends just as much on organizational stability, leadership alignment, and timing factors you often have very little control over.
• npzv0w (Meta): I had to google what a day2 culture means. Google says “Internal processes, metrics, and risk aversion and Slow, deliberate, and bureaucratic”. Meta has a lot of internal processes, focuses a lot on metrics and is pretty political, but at the same time moves very fast and people will just push you until you break. It has the worst of both big tech and startup worlds. I think people who are still here just enjoy the grind and the pay. Lots of people in my org are workaholics (like, there’s a layoff tmrw but I’m gonna just cope by working kind of workaholic). And then you are stack ranked so you have to work too or else you’re at the bottom and then get axed. Another category is probably people like me who can’t leave due to visa issues.
• Superbia (Microsoft): My biggest issue with the company and its staff is that they consistently have no conscious or remorse as they put profits before ethics. Meta’s been slammed for tweaking algorithms to drive addiction while fueling misinformation, election meddling, and social division.

Qualcomm folks. Excited for upcoming layoffs? (Blind)

• SnpDragoon (Qualcomm): I’m divided. I do like my job, but I’ve also been working for 20 years straight. I’ve never had a career break, so I could finally try that. Or I could just retire
• abHH48 (Google): Qualcomm can not survive Western sanctions, especially now that China is taking over the world’s semiconductor industry, all of it.
• Bubbly00 (Qualcomm): Yes.
  
  I’ve been underperforming horribly, so not having to show up to the office anymore will take a huge weight off my shoulders.

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Techmeme surfaced a New York Times investigation, “U.S. Cleared Nvidia Chips to Chinese Firms With Empty Offices and Troubling Ties.” The reporting tests a central promise of the United States’ current AI-chip policy: that advanced processors can be sold to China without surrendering national-security control, because the Commerce Department will approve only known, compliant companies. The companies the Times found do not prove that restricted chips reached China’s military. They do show that the approval layer itself may be much harder to trust than the policy assumes.

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Ex-interviewer here. The new gen doesn’t prep before interviews and it’s exhausting. (Blind)

• Gilliane (ex-Oracle): Yet somehow interviewers like you end up passing the candidates that cheat with ai or memorize g0thamloop
• Union Find (Google): Isn’t it better if candidates don’t prepare for the interview? That way you can select who can actually do the job instead of who gamed the interview. I’m Gen X and I don’t prepare either.
• SatanY (ex-Microsoft): If you expect candidates to “prepare” for your interview, you are interviewing wrong and you are the reason why the industry became shit. You are a shitty interviewer, and not surprisingly you work for a shitty company. I also bet your best candidates who “prepared” are circle jerking with you because you are all so prepared.
  
  Yet…
  
  Your fellow “prepared” candidates are not building anything good . They are horrible teammates. They are entitled. They are the worst people you could work with.
  
  Yet…
  
  You keep hiring them, and they keep hiring you.
  
  You are the problem.

Is this the end of SW? (Blind)

• AKuO41 (Amazon): This means these companies need to offer something that vibe coded apps cannot, meaning they need to hire more product people
• Microstiff (Microsoft): Honestly, having been inside multiple companies all spearheading the AI hype, I can tell you that despite how good AI has become, it’s way too economically detrimental to truly replace SWEs any time soon.
  
  The layoffs are a financial masking to hide the failures of adoption, and the execs at every company running AI adoption programs are pulling their hair out trying to figure out how to tell value stories from their efforts.
  
  In my home, sure, a \$200/mo subscription can let me spin up 5 SaaS products in a weekend. In corporate culture, there’s no \$200/mo enterprise plan, and no one can just freely push AI code to production. PRs are still human (because someone has to be accountable..SOX), so there’s never going to be significant productivity gains without high risk and loss of reliability.
  
  We’re just caught in the middle of a shell game where everyone in charge realizes they’ve made a mistake going all-in on AI too fast, but no one wants to be the first to say it out loud because of the stock market repercussions. So we buy time with layoffs and hope someone else takes the leap first. 🙂
• quickslt (Amazon): figma is useless chatgpt can make the whole concept

Most scummy layoff I’ve experienced (Blind)

• AF2 (Nike): People shouldn’t assume there’s anything wrong with OP. When you get laid off, you take whatever is available on the job market. The roles that are easiest to get, hence most people take, are the ones that are most unstable or in companies with highest turnover. Most people that are happily employed don’t quit, so the best positions tend to not be available for job seekers.
• b8ml9: OP sorry this happened to you and your colleagues.
  
  But Canva is a dead company. The world has chosen AI slop for graphic design, at least for now. We are in a time of really shitty transition and a lot of companies will be left in the dust. We have seen it with Squarespace just this past week.
  
  If anyone is working by a company that sells products that can be replaced by prompt slop, start looking now. Don’t listen to internal corporate propaganda, customers will ALWAYS choose cheap and shitty when cost of living is out of control.
• 747291065 (Squarespace): I heard Canva execs hired LinkedIn influencers/bots to shill what a “masterclass in layoffs” they did and how generous their package is. To hear that it’s all a PR sham disgusts me. 🤢

What’s going on in tech? (Blind)

• Hella! (ex-Spotify): To this add that one 3 day leave or getting sick or pregnant can mean lifetime of unemployment. Absolutely, inhumane workplace practices.
• rhydon1x (Capital One): Restarts looking for an easy payday learned the hard way and now are sticking it out because they’re too stubborn to admit they made a mistake coming to the field
• WFPS88 (Amazon): 500k TC just to prompt Claude, it’s so over

Megathread: LeetCode vs. AI-Assisted Coding by Company (Blind)

• iDKT82 (Bloomberg): Bloomberg just swapped from Leetcode to AI assisted
• oapz (LinkedIn): LinkedIn is 1 round of each
• LxoE67 (Amazon): Amazon has both rounds

Generated by Codex with GPT 5.6 Sol High

Techmeme surfaced Cade Metz’s New York Times article, “How A.I. Just Blew Up a Key Tenet of Computer Science.” It covers OpenAI’s preprint, “The Exponential Time Hypothesis is False,” and a parallel result from Anthropic. The discovery deserves the attention: if the proofs withstand review, AI systems have overturned a conjecture that supported decades of algorithmic lower bounds. But the result does not settle P versus NP, make hard problems easy, or threaten today’s encryption by itself.

Generated by Codex with GPT 5.6 Sol High

Reinforcement learning post-training has an awkward systems boundary. Training GPUs continually update the policy, while a separate inference fleet generates the trajectories used for the next update. The two fleets are optimized for different work and usually shard the model in different ways. Keeping them synchronized therefore means moving an enormous model between incompatible layouts at every training step.

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Techmeme surfaced OpenAI’s report, “A thousand fewer paths to root.” It describes a prototype that turns Linux kernel security research into a pipeline: agents choose high-value code, scan it, reproduce suspected flaws, build working exploits, draft patches, and package the evidence for human review. The striking result is not merely that a model found bugs. It is that discovery, validation, exploitation, and remediation were joined into one repeatable process at a scale that manual security teams could not review finding by finding.

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Why are people leaving Anthropic now? (Blind)

• talete (Roblox): To escape from IPO lockup period. Now they can dump everything on day one of IPO. If they sit through the IPO their stocks would be worth one-tenth by the time they sell.
• clay~king (Oracle): Bubble is about to burst … here we coming
• nwi (Netflix): Could be anything. Burnout. Getting pushed out. Culture shift as the company prepares to IPO. IME prepping for IPO does cause a shift, more focus on profit, less transparency, cleaning house and bringing in new leadership.

Blood bath at Squarespace (Blind)

• qupwpphxv (ByteDance): The system hired you to do useless shit in the first place. The system giveth and taketh
• XKrd83: This post is not actionable, homie. What do you want readers to do?
• appyaloin (Meta): Thats 20% of total and you say affecting product and engineering. Almost 40%. Too high man too high

I’m completely numb at layoff rumors now (Blind)

• xXiT08 (Amazon): It’s just a job. Why do you stress yourself out so much? Just relax and keep doing what you’re doing. If it’s out of your control - why even worry?
• pika chuut (Adobe): I’ve become numb in tech in general
• Prestige™️ (Expedia Group): Be me! I really don’t care about layoffs. If they lay me
  Off, this is my last job before I call it quits anyways

Jobless folks, what are your plans? (Blind)

• /j/bum (LinkedIn): Was stuck for the past few months, took a break, went home to my parents for a month, came back and started using AI to interview.
• rddtholder (Reddit): Been interviewing but I’m way less passionate about tech than I was pre-AI. I’d love to change careers but the money in tech is too good and I have a family to support.
• piracy (Crunchyroll): The ones at the front of technology are starting their own thing. History has shown us that many will not make it, but many will. They are the ones who are best positioned to land wealth. And most of the ones who don’t make it will become the ones taking all the most senior jobs.
  
  I’ve seen this in every market disruption over the last 20 years. I’m looking for a way to start my own thing now.

Google Will Turn Off Search for Schools That Reject A.I. (Gift Article) (r/technology)

• SkankHuntThreeFiddy: >“Search and A.I. are deeply integrated,” said Chris Phillips, vice president for education at Google. If a school has banned A.I., he added, students “will not have access to search, and they’ll see a message from their school that indicates it’s not available.”
  
  Not only is Google cutting off a stream of ad revenue from their search results, but they’re giving school districts another reason not to buy Chromebooks.
• ChileCheeseburger: Obviously we’re not the customers anymore, but the product.
  
  /r/degoogle
• Oceanbreeze871: My child’s school district uses Google Classroom, Gmail etc But has a district wide ban on AI use under the cheating and integrity policy.
  
  So Google is gonna Nerf the Internet for the entire school district?

Generated by Codex with GPT 5.6 Sol High

Anyone gone from Anthropic to OpenAI? (Blind)

• bugddb (Robinhood): Yes
  
  Those people got tired of Dario’s style of scamming and wanted to be surrounded by Altman’s style of scamming
• ihefag (Google): This question is better suited for internal channel
• chat2 (Meta): I mean wait for a possible ipo before jumping to another startup?

Good luck out there with Leetcode (Blind)

• p@$sw0rd (Amazon): Google swes have been resting and vesting. They’re probably worse than average.
• asdfdfsvf2 (Apple): I can do a medium one, if a company is heavy on LeetCode, that company can go fuck itself. Likely a shit place anyway, if they want to sift through the sea of candidates and find “the best” that way.
• poppyy (Amazon): I hate to spread negativity but these layoffs are so sad. Entered the field 2 years ago so excited for the future of tech, and it’s just layoff after layoff with the end being AI replacing us all anyways. The future does not seem inspiring. I hope we can just start actively pushing people away from the field to put the power back in the hands of employees one day.

Now is the best time to become a content creator (Blind)

• IVY55 (Amazon): What topics do you focus on? Finance or Tech like AI tools, vibe coding etc?
• now_fin (Intercom): Interesting! Could you please share your full workflow including tools/software you use? Thank you!
• MU glazer (ex-Block): Don’t overcomplicate things. Claude is all you need paid. Everything else is open source. Iterate until you find your style, claude.md it, then script your automations. It’s that simple

Useful/ethical AI career (Blind)

• bampf_it (Waymo): You tagged Waymo so you’re probably already thinking about it but Waymo. And then you tagged Neuralink and I lost faith.
• omw_out (Meta): Well, recommendation systems are actually useful and one of the most successful applications of machine learning from a business standpoint.
  
  It sounds like you want to work on innovative stuff, but you need to narrow that down a bit more. There’s AI for healthcare, physical AI, etc…
• plz delete (JPMorganChase): Plumbing.

Tables Turned: Entire Police Department Quits After Finding Out What It Feels Like to Be Tracked (r/technology)

• headphonesXX: every police and vehicle should have a GPS tracker
• AbeFromanEast: Rookie mistake. The locations of those officers could have been triangulated and bought from 3rd party data brokers who track their cell phones via apps. No physical tracker required.
• TheHammer987: The attempt of this article to paint the mayor as the problem is going to fall flat on its face.
  
  For the residents of that town - just so you all know, all 5 of your police were crooked and stealing hours from your property taxes. Now, all of you are probably related to them, but it’s still important to go to your cousin or second cousin in law and ask why they felt entitled to take your money.

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offer at Robinhood got rescinded yesterday (Blind)

• jaсob (Snap): Incoming layoffs.
• Glinda: Hopefully, you did not give notice to your current employer, if you are working.
  
  Was the req cancelled?
• dhjelle (Roku): That’s muck’d up

Uber’s culture compared to meta (Blind)

• JHqQ30 (Meta): Any place will be better than Meta
• LWPu88 (Uber): More stable and less chaotic than Meta. Very top to bottom down culture. Refreshers depends on how much your manager likes you.
• tUvdgggg (Uber): Believe me uber is 2-3x Amazon. Don’t go to that place

Is SWE really dying? (Blind)

• kDRv27 (NVIDIA): whoever says software engineering is dying (because of LLMs) doesn’t really understand how things work (the populace including incompetent engineers). either that or they want you to think that way (marketing/manipulation masters like Anthropic/OAI or their investors). the vast majority making noise out there is in those 2 camps. the job is not being automated. the tasks are. it may be almost plausible to say ‘coding is automated’, but that’s a small portion of SWE. as you realized yourself, the SWE job is far far far away from being automated. we just no longer need silly people that take all day to refactor a function that will be obsolete 2 months later.
  
  engineers are moving up the food chain and getting larger scopes of responsibilities. of course it doesn’t automatically mean they’ll thrive… you’ll need more product, social, business skills (all the things many ICs didn’t really care about) to succeed.
  
  if you like the craft and you care about it, cut out the noise and keep going. couple of years from now you’ll have extremely powerful tools and your judgement.
• TheFrom (Apple): China AI bubble just burst. People are reducing spend. It turns out normal people aren’t using AI as much as their biggest customer (software engineers).
  
  AI still programs in a very human way in the sense that they’ll program in the literal way you want it to. The ambiguity from business requirements is still there. The edge cases you can think of or the common pitfalls that you know how to avoid are still valuable. It’ll just implement the design not tell you it hacked around just to get to it, are you willing to sign off on that?
• gotPIP (Amazon): I think the concern is that it just keeps getting better and better bro

Why are people are acting like the AI bubble has popped, after like 2 bad days (Blind)

• DeGenAI-1 (NortonLifeLock): There is no evidence to prove AI has increased productivity
• qupwpphxv (ByteDance): This is just beginning
• menhhshwjw (Salesforce): When you know you’re part of a Ponzi scheme people who sell first, win. No one wants to be left holding the ai ponzi bag. Most likely this all ends in a taxpayer subsidized bailout

Did your code base improve after AI? (Blind)

• F*ai (Cohesity): Problem is we are pushing code way more than we can understand
• knowshits (Amazon): Nobody cares. As long as it works.
• tUDw24 (Meta): Much better. All of the “bugs” I’ve seen is people not pre-empting edge cases via prompting. I don’t think I’ve seen AI genuinely write flawed logic or hallucinated code in 4-6 months at this point and before then it still wasn’t a common occurrence past around sep 2025.