Generated by Codex with GPT 5.6 Sol High

Got PIP’d. Passed it. Got laid off three weeks later. (Blind)

• Ediodlik (ex-Bank of America): We need unions.
• 16inchdick (Microsoft): These corporations getting wayyy too comfortable exploiting us. Time for a commie revolution or some shit
• 101011010 (Pinterest): What company

Pay stuck at 2018 levels (Blind)

• GoonDocks (Moloco): You were being overpaid in the past, this just levels you appropriately.
• fUIv61 (Salesforce): 350 10 years ago you should retire.
• AzGS64 (SoFi): You were at 350 8-years ago?

What is the future for our kids? (Blind)

• briskCopy4 (Block): I don’t even have kids but I’m terrified for the next generation
• FdeSF (Salesforce): Following
• «-_-» (Amazon): AI is not creative!

What company has fallen off the hardest? (Blind)

• nbcx (Amazon): Fucking Amazon, it’s now a H1B hellhole.
• 👁️🫦👁️🫵🏻 (Lucid Motors): Lucid
• VP_Tushar (LinkedIn): LinkedIn had the biggest drop for sure

Anthropic - no coding interview anymore (Blind)

• yacdiz (Microsoft): 20 references required
• Nlwl78 (Fanatics): False, just had a Staff+ coding screen last week
• Talibanger (CrowdStrike): Why are they even hiring? Thought they had AGI.

Generated by Codex with GPT 5.6 Sol High

Techmeme surfaced Anthropic’s October 22 report, “LLMs are making formal software verification feasible at a much larger scale.” In collaboration with Theorem, Anthropic used Claude to turn existing fuzz tests into machine-checked proofs about compiled software. Across 123 open-source libraries, the system proved that 239 test entry points cannot crash for any input smaller than 64 MB under a defined execution model. That is narrower than proving the libraries bug-free, but far stronger than running even trillions of sampled tests.

Generated by Codex with GPT 5.6 Sol High

No interest in AI - what’s next? (Blind)

• logixxku2 (Microsoft): I agree, AI has taken the joy out of programming. It’s just waiting for the code to generate now. Nobody is an expert anymore. It feels like just waiting to die.
• gtq87623d (Google): If you hold an undergraduate science or engineering degree, you could sit for the patent bar exam. Also, in 4 states (California, Washington, Virginia, Vermont), you don’t need a law degree to be a lawyer. (I know this only because I went to a patent law feeder engineering school.)
• ⭕️ingBack (Microsoft): Medicine

LAYOFFS AT EBAY CAME FROM NOWHERE (Blind)

• djsjf9 (Capital One): At least they’re doing an ethically by today’s standards with an actual layoff instead of fake PIPs.
• HaoZhang (Meta): OP if you’re not in the top 10% of performers (you should be getting strongly exceeds or greatly exceeds ratings), you should be expecting layoffs to hit you.
  
  Don’t say it came out of nowhere. You should expect it.
• netsecpan (Palo Alto Networks): Who uses ebay?

Meta’s Muse was a stroke of genius (Blind)

• callstack (Microsoft): I see 2 main roadblocks:
  1. Companies will put up barriers so that only agents they sanction can interact with their website. Like amazon banning Muse.
  2. When companies permit certain consumer agents to access their site, will that agent actually act in the user’s best interest, or the company’s interest? What about things like ads and sponsored products/offerings?
  
  I really hope this can take off though. I’ve been travel planning and would love to have more powerful agents do research and filtering, and not paid off by companies to influence this research. Claude has done decently well but I’m hoping that these sites don’t start locking down what agents can glean from their sites.
• olalalelo (Bolt): Muse wasn’t the first successful proof of concept , openclaw was. Rise of Muse like products is obvious at this point
• pika chuut (Adobe): Why are you licking meta’s ass?

For people who passed the Anthropic or OpenAI loops: how did you know you were ready? (Blind)

• poppity (Amazon): +1.
  
  I’d love to know as well. Btw OP if you’re interviewing at those places rn lmk. I’m preparing for OpenAI (FDE, which has way less resources for study than SDE)
• DocuSFO (DocuSign): How you know that you may have loop next year ?
• AlphaBlndr (Google): I don’t these companies’ interviews are any special compared to Google or other big techs. They just tend to be more selective and a lot more luck is involved because of that.

Anthropic lost \$80 billion in 2026 🔥 (Blind)

• pqs888 (Broadcom): When is ipo? I hope it will be a success because if it fails, it’s not just anthrop going down but it will take all tech along with it. Market likely priced in government bailout if things get worse
• Go8he: > driven by \$72 billion in accounting charges tied to changes in the value of financial instruments Anthropic issued to raise money
  
  So they gave away equity in exchange for cash, the company increased in valuation, and it showed up in the accounting as a \$72B loss because it was worth more than when they issued it?
  
  If I’m reading that right, it seems like kind of a nothing burger. They didn’t lose money; they incurred an opportunity cost from giving away equity for way less than it became worth as they grew.
• fkxs04 (Amazon): They call me bubble boy
  
  They call me chicken little

Generated by Codex with GPT 5.6 Sol High

GitHub’s hardest repositories exposed a subtle distributed-systems bottleneck: a quorum can require only a majority to commit and still be throttled by every healthy replica. GitHub’s existing storage layer waited for all healthy replicas before releasing a repository-wide write lock. Once replicas were split between its data centers and Azure, a roughly 25-millisecond cross-region round trip sat inside every serialized write. The design remained correct, but its coordination scope made the busiest repositories impossible to migrate without collapsing their throughput.

Generated by Codex with GPT 5.6 Sol High

Techmeme surfaced Amazon Web Services’ October 21 report, “Amazon Threat Intelligence identifies PHP2Shell exploitation prior to public disclosure in MadPot”. AWS found an attempt to exploit the newly disclosed PHP flaws on October 17—four days before the public advisory and patch. By the time the embargo lifted, multiple actors were testing proof-of-concept code against its honeypots, and AWS says PHP2Shell is now being broadly exploited in the wild.

Generated by Codex with GPT 5.6 Sol High

Meta bar shockingly low and hiring again, can refer (Blind)

• w6rst (ex-Amazon): how low? I want to only fail every coding challenge. If i cant, not low enough
• dsfghhr (Amazon): What’s the WLB/weekly hours to not get laid off / PIP’d?
  
  Is 40 hours/week with 5 week vacation is possible?
• sfhnbdc (Snowflake): No thank you, I don’t want to have this on my resume.

Offer on PIP (Blind)

• lb5fh6: You think another company will know the internal workings of another corporation down to the individual level?
  
  How are tech people so smart yet so incredibly foolish
• Jun3Jun3 (Adobe): Don’t worry. Start the new job and don’t look back. Congratulations.
• TimTofld (Figma): Stop imagining things. If you have offer already that’s the best thing that can happen in this situation.

Google L7 verbal offer - help evaluate (Blind)

• Ivms47 (Google): How is Oracle paying you so little?
• EjFB85 (Oracle): Stay at Oracle. You’re clearly not gaining much by switching
• FXMe27 (Google): Accept it, but beware FDE is a meat grinder

Polymarket says ChatGPT has only a 9% chance of being the best AI in 2026 (Blind)

• jester53 (Oracle): Who the hell is picking Muse?
• CrayCray3 (Microsoft): I mean they are all kinda the same-ish. The top ones just keep slightly leapfrogging each other every few months.
  
  Plus what are they even measuring, the family of models , the apps, the agents???? And by what criteria????
• PKhM27 (eBay): Always remember, who is deciding these probabilities? Some random gamblers who did some analysis, that may not be a good proxy information.

Apparently, amazon has \$220B for AI but not for employees? (Blind)

• cPML84 (Amazon): Ai chips are a better investment than a raise for you
• qwe432 (Microsoft): “We”? Sweetie, there is no we. There’s you. There’s Amazon. There is no we.
• ztco76 (Amazon): Well that’s kinda the point, laying off people so that you can buy chips. Not saying I support it, but ai investment is better than labor investment, it’s just the sad truth we have to deal with.
  
  This industry used to be that talents investment is the best ROI. So you got 400K SDE2 in some cases. Now it’s a different era, and we can only accept the market is not on our side.

Generated by Codex with GPT 5.6 Sol High

Techmeme surfaced Anthropic’s October 20 report, “Using Claude to reduce the attack surface of code”. Most AI-security work asks a model to find individual vulnerabilities. Anthropic tested a different strategy: map which code an attacker can reach, then move unnecessary functionality behind authentication, configuration checks, user actions, or later protocol stages. The point is not to prove the code bug-free. It is to make unknown bugs harder to reach before anyone knows they exist.

Generated by Codex with GPT 5.6 Sol High

Got an xAI offer and a friend told me I’m making the worst mistake of my career. (Blind)

• Boohoofe (Amazon): I’ve heard they have shit wlb, but I don’t know much about xai tbh. How did you prep? how did you get a first round?
• mustafuh (eBay): I’m currently at xAI. It’s a tough gig and the hours are long. But at the end of the day you’ll be growing very quickly here doing some of the best work of your life. It’s not for the faint hearted but I make 2.2M at 28 years old and I’ve led projects that I couldn’t dream of before I joined this place.
  
  Stay away from negative people who have stopped dreaming big. Come over.
• KMVz77 (Meta): Make the decision based on role, level, comp, and how interesting the team is to you. Not what your friend says. There’s also just lots of political(ish) bias against specific big tech in general, but I can’t imagine someone hating Elon but being okay with Zuck lmao.
  
  I’ve never worked for Elon, but from what I’ve always heard, don’t expect good WLB or easy work. I’d imagine it wouldn’t be much worse than Meta though (team dependent).
  
  If I worked in-office at Meta, and had a better offer in xAI with interesting work, I’d take it.

xAI’s “No LeetCode” Interview Is a Joke (Blind)

• atwx (ByteDance): Agreed. I’ve been thrown off by similar experiences at startups. There’s no shame in saying you use LeetCode-style questions instead of practical coding problems. Just be upfront about it. Otherwise, it’s a waste of everyone’s time.
• iRpT46 (Grammarly): To be fair: given Elon BS claims over the last 10 years, if you still believe what his companies claim, that’s on you. 😂
• chadzeus (Mastercard): To be fair, Leetcode still absolutely helps for any coding interview, even when they claim it’s not DSA or Leetcode.

Performance focused reduction at Qualcomm now (Blind)

• srsgabria (Intuit): 22% is what I heard
• Odysseyus (Intel): If performance based layoff is done, Christiano should be fired first. Worst CEO among big silicon companies
• hubnoa (HubSpot): We are having ourselves a (performance) competition. First place: a new Cadillac, second place: a set of steak knives, third place: you’re fired.

Every talented person at Meta that I know is leaving (Blind)

• ztni32 (Meta): As they should. It’s a shitshow working inside. It used to be an amazing place to work. Now it fucking blows. So your senior most people get paid a fortune while limiting upper mobility for everyone else and creating a culture of the hunger games. Nobody wants this shit.
  
  Anyway, yeah, definitely looking to get out of there.
• Poor2Rich (Alarm.com): This is the perfect time for me to join!
  
  Tc: unemployed
• justread27 (Microsoft): But where are they going? Which company isn’t laying people off

LinkedIn offer validity period. (Blind)

• JOsExWife (Two Sigma): Email just went out yesterday about a hiring freeze at LinkedIn bro
• asdfvbh (SmartNews): 1 yr. but don’t count on it. Its only the hr who can vouch for you and a lot of them won’t to keep existing pipeline engaged and going
• coasting🏄‍♂️🏄‍♀️ (LinkedIn): lol I was one of your interviewers.
  
  If you asked me this question 4 years ago I would’ve said 6-12 months should be safe and you can count on it.
  
  But my answer isn’t the same today. Given how the market is and how we’re hiring in a very targeted way most likely it won’t be available in 6 months.

Generated by Codex with GPT 5.6 Sol High

Techmeme surfaced DeepSeek’s October 20 release of DeepInfer, the inference engine behind DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash. Model weights usually receive the attention in open-AI releases, but running a large model cheaply and predictably is a separate engineering problem. DeepInfer is interesting because DeepSeek has published part of that less visible production layer: optimized kernels, distributed execution, speculative decoding, scheduling, deterministic modes, and structured-output support under the Apache 2.0 license.

Generated by Codex with GPT 5.6 Sol High

What company did you almost join that would’ve RUINED your career? (Blind)

• unsecure (Pinterest): no i took all the bullets and my career is already in ruins
• WKzn20 (Akamai Technologies): I have a few.
  1) Amazon. The whole org got laid off a couple of months after I declined the offer. Interestingly, I also regret not joining them right out of college when their stock was under 35.
  2) Nutanix. Massive layoff one month after I declined.
  3) Meta. Whole team laid off barely a month after I declined.
  
  BTW every single time I chose a startup over big tech and the startup also failed. FML…..
• nearlydone (Walt Disney): Enron. I tried so hard to get on there. It was right before they crashed. I ended up getting a job literally right across the street from their two towers in Houston. On the day they collapsed I stood and watched from across the street as all the Enron people filed out the door with their cardboard boxes. I was never so happy to fail so miserably at getting a job.

Got lay off once, never again. (Blind)

• ⛩️Shogun⛩️ (Oracle): I realized what a trap career ‘progression’ within a company truly is. The politicking, getting passed over for promotions, and working hard to impress your boss and their boss.
  
  Instead, work a maximum of four hours and spend the rest of your time preparing for and taking interviews. Find a better offer at a new company, and switch. Rinse and fucking repeat. You need to go for the company that gives you the best \$\$\$, so that you can retire early from this terrible industry.
• k1ngG (LinkedIn): Isn’t that mentally straining. Having to constantly prepare for interviews.
• Pegr0Oyzk (Motional): Sounds like the fast path to burnout, but I suppose it’s better than scrambling to prep for interviews when the next axe falls.

60-80% of SWEs will lose their job over the next 4 years (Blind)

• Prestige™️ (Expedia Group): They cannot write BFS. No one cares about BFS
• SatanY (ex-Microsoft): If you are still asking people to implement BFS, the problem might not be the others…
• allsns (Microsoft): Tell me which big tech company’s headcount went down?

companies with low pay and AMAZING wlb (Blind)

• vgtdh (Amazon): Used to be government jobs. Still might be. But apparently everything is in turmoil under this administration
• 582!! (Amazon): Horrible mistake of voting republicans!
• .horn dog (Meta): The answer is always the same: Microsoft

Microsoft pulls out of AI datacentre project in Essex over power supply concerns | Datacentres - UK (r/news)

• darknekolux: The concern: they were actually expected to pay for the electricity /s
• Intrinsic_Idiot_3076: AI Data centre got pregnant despite MSFT pulling out. /s
• CryMoreT_T: It’s funny US companies and Chinese companies have the opposite problems. One has the GPUs but no power. The other side has power but no GPUs