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Hey !!!

If you land at Kempegowda International Airport (BLR), you already know the pain: an Uber, Ola, or BluSmart to places like Indiranagar, Koramangala, Whitefield, or HSR Layout routinely costs anywhere between ₹1,000 to ₹1,500+.

Most of us end up taking the cab alone with 3 empty seats.

To fix this for myself and fellow travelers, I built a lightweight, privacy-first web app to help travelers find co-passengers heading to the same neighborhood and split cab fares on the spot.

How it works (Zero Friction):

\* No Signup / No Login Required — No passwords, no phone numbers, no forced downloads.

\* Check-in in 5 Seconds — Select your terminal (T1 or T2), choose your drop neighborhood, and optionally enter a nickname.

\* 45-Minute Live Matching — See co-passengers who landed around the same time heading to your area.

\* Live In-App Chat — Coordinate a quick pickup spot (e.g., "Near Pillar B3 at T1") without giving away personal contact details.

\* Auto Clean-up — Tap "We Paired Up!" to exit the queue once you find a co-passenger, so the active list stays fresh and clutter-free.

The app is completely free to use.

Try it here: Bangalore Airport Cab Share

Tip: Bookmark the link or add it to your phone's home screen so it's ready to use as soon as your flight lands!

Would love for the community to try it out on your next flight into BLR and drop any feedback or suggestions below! Safe travels! ✈️🚕

I want to build a career with high earning potential and long-term growth.

For people earning ₹50 LPA or more:

What's your educational background? IIT/NIT or a regular college?

What field do you work in, and how many years did it take to reach this level?

What skills or career decisions helped you the most?

Is an MBA worth it for reaching this salary range? Does the college brand matter more than the degree itself?

With AI changing the job market, which careers will remain valuable and pay well over the next 10–15 years?

If you were starting your career today, would you pursue an MBA, focus on technical skills, or choose another path?

I'd appreciate honest experiences and practical advice. Thanks!

Edit : thanks to each and every person who commented 🌸

1.) The craft has now shifted to being able to write precise, concise, human readable specification documents which can be translated by the LLM model into clean and well structured code efficiently.

2.) The challenge is, LLMs do not work like compilers i.e they are non deterministic by nature and hence it is difficult to predict what it will generate when the prompt becomes more abstract and detailed.

3.) I fall in the mid-level engineer category and I find it so difficult to get the LLM to write concise and clean code for a task.

4.) Management keeps saying that I need to loosen heavily around the structure, design and code cleanliness and I think that is a recipe for disaster.

5.) I am young and I find myself once again confused and anxious about being in the right career

Question 1: In your workflow, how are you getting IDE agents to write precise, concise and well-structured code?

Question 2: If you create detailed specification documents for the LLM, how much time do you actually spend in creating the documentation itself as compared to iterative-prompting technique (you write prompt, code gets generated, you review it, you again write prompt and repeat)?

Question 3: How much time do you spend reviewing the code as compared to you would have spent in iterative-prompt-review technique?

Thanks.

I run a small job board for engineering students and freshers, so I filter a lot of postings. Between 25 Sep and 13 Oct I looked at 20,118 engineering jobs in India that were tagged "Entry level", all at established companies (around 1,900 MNCs, product companies and funded startups, no random agencies).

Here's what they actually were:

- 43% had Senior, Lead, Principal or Staff in the title

- 7% were level II or higher (SDE III, Engineer 2 and so on)

- 6% were Manager roles, another 6% Consultant or Architect

- 18% asked for 2+ years in the description, and 6% asked for 5+

- 6% were marked Mid-Senior on the posting itself

- About 10% passed every check and were genuinely open to a fresher

Real titles that were tagged entry level: "SDE III - Backend", "Red Teaming - Manager", "Senior Consultant", "Informatica Developer | 4-7 Years".

What helped me filter:

1. Search with fresher words instead of trusting the filter: "SDE 1", "Associate Software Engineer", "Graduate Engineer Trainee", "2026 batch", "fresher"

2. Skip anything with II/III, Senior, Lead or Manager in the title, whatever the tag says

3. Ctrl+F "years" before applying. Most of the fake entry-level ones say it in the second paragraph

Happy to answer questions about how I counted.

With AI, building a software becomes cheap. Anyone can built their own software. So the software commodity has become very cheap, and anyone around the world can built it quick.

When such a commodity can built for almost free and by anyone, how will you see the existing tech companies survive ? how will software engineers survive ? also there is exactly no real skill acquiring while doing any project at a company, one can be easily replaceable with anyone anytime. There is no difference between an software engineer working at google vs any other company, both use AI , and learnings are same.

what would be the future jobs of software engineers? if they transition to a new role, what would be it?

how will be the software industry would look like ? will it be more decentralised with very low pay?

I've been thinking a lot about my work and life lately, and there are not a lot of people I can talk to in my real life about this situation, so here I am, looking forward to how you guys are feeling about this whole thing.

I have genuinely loved programming more than half my life. I wrote my first program in BASIC when I was 11 years old. I always enjoyed solving problems. And, I have done fairly good for myself, graduated from one of the IITs, worked across FAANMG and startups for the last 10 years, built personal projects with over thousands of users. I have genuinely enjoyed my work, and it never felt boring, or exhausting.

But, that spark is gone. With the rapid advances in LLMs in the past couple of years, and the increasing demand for shipping things quickly and without oversight, the joy of building things is gone. Now, don't get me wrong, I understand these tools are powerful, and they are only getting better each day.

I am a staff engineer, so I know software engineering is not only about "coding". But, in real world, with the pace that everyone wants things shipped, and the fact that you're not closer to the codebase as you used to, I find myself "lacking" in how well I understood systems that I built, or used. All of the things that actually gave me joy, getting in the "zone" and coding for a few hours straight, debugging a problem that had a couple of engineers at their wits end, writing a well thought through design doc, discussing actual optimisation problems at scale, none of them are happening anymore.

Financially, I'm fortunate to have accumulated a great deal in savings and investments (over 9Cr). But, I feel I'd probably need around 12 Crs to comfortably call it a day. Now, that would probably take a couple of years, or more (the market gods haven't been that happy lately), but the fact that I am so close, has made me even more disillusioned about the whole thing. I am not here to brag, or be a case of "my steak is too juicy and my lobster is too buttery", but money alone is no longer a motivator, and every day feels like wasting my existence.

One of the things that I was looking forward was to move abroad in a couple of years. That was also one of the motivators to stick through it, but the anti immigration sentiment across US, the visa situation (or lack thereof), the job market situation, and the fact that nobody knows what's out there in the next couple of years has made me reconsider whether even that's an option.

This has left me in a strange position. On one hand, I have a career that has treated me well financially, and coming from a not so great financial background, leaving so much money on the table given the uncertainty in the future, seems, for lack of a better word, stupid. On the other hand, I'm increasingly questioning whether I want to spend those years doing something I no longer find as fulfilling.

I'm curious to hear from people who have experienced something similar.

• How are you thinking about the future?
• People who were planning to move abroad in the next couple of years, are you still considering the move?
• For those pursuing FIRE, have the changes in the past couple of years, affected your plans in any way?

P.S. No tokens were wasted on this rambling.

I recently interviewed for a Machine Learning Engineer (IC4) role at Coinbase in Bangalore through a referral. Here is my experience.

My background:

• 2.5 years of experience at a product startup

Online assessment
First, there was an online psychometric and reasoning test, followed by a recruiter call.

Then came a CodeSignal assessment with three coding questions:

• A simple DSA problem
• Implementing bagging (bootstrap aggregation)
• Implementing Naive Bayes from scratch using only NumPy

Domain round
This round covered basic ML concepts and coding. I had to implement gradient descent for linear regression and answer questions about loss functions, parameter initialization, and batch vs. stochastic gradient descent.

There was also a SQL section, which was honestly my weakest part. I rarely use SQL, so I struggled quite a bit with the queries. An AI assistant was available for checking syntax, but you could not use it to generate the entire solution.

Tech Execution round
This was a practical ML problem. We were given a heavily imbalanced fraud detection dataset in CSV format with more than 45 features. The task was to build a model and justify the decisions around feature selection, missing values, class imbalance, and train-test splitting.

Behavioral round
The hiring manager asked about my previous projects, professional experience, why I wanted to join Coinbase, and a project I was particularly proud of.

I am here to confess.

I am a 2025 BTech grad from a tier 3 college. I got placed in one of the top 10 service-based IT companies in India in September 2024 for their cute little salary, but I was very excited. Previously, I tried getting an internship, but I could not land one anywhere, so this was a very big achievement for me. A guy who couldn't get an internship got placed in an MNC, first in his department. I was very happy.

Days and months passed. No updates.

I tried many companies. I tried Cognizant. During the coding round, my poor old second-hand laptop didn't work in the middle. I couldn't complete the round. I raised mails, called the support team, explained my situation, but nothing worked. After that, they mailed again, saying they would interview me for another role. Got selected in that (mail came after 6 months). Got excited again. Onboarding was on my birthday, then, due to some background issue, some name mismatch in PAN and offer letter, the offer was revoked, and they went completely ghosted.

Then came IBM. Did well in the coding round. 2 questions: 1 passed all test cases, another question failed only 2 test cases out of 15. Didn't get another round mail. Then suddenly, in a Telegram group, one random guy said he went to another round. He cleared one question completely, but in another question, only 3 cases were passed for him. Don't know why he got into the next round but I didn't.

Then came Virtusa. I did aptitude, coding round 1, coding round 2, and communication round. All I did well, but I wasn't moved further. They hired on a first-come, first-served basis. I found out by asking a few peeps in Telegram. Even though I did well and completed all the coding questions, guys who did only 2 or 3 coding questions were moved to the next round just because they completed the communication round before me.

Then came Accenture. Passed all their rounds continuously, then, due to their stupid exam platform issue, I couldn't enter the coding round. I was waiting in the lobby for 3 hours. I passed and moved forward but couldn't enter there. I raised queries, sent emails, called the support team. They rescheduled my coding round. Cleared it, cleared the interview, received a congrats mail, but after that, complete silence.

On the side, I was giving my everything for Zoho. Completed 3 rounds, waiting, thinking to myself, this time I will definitely get that Zoho offer, but instead received a mail that hiring was frozen.

Tried startups, but all they offered was 2 to 2.5 LPA with a 3-year bond. I didn't join there.

I was also doing an internship at that time. The manager was shit, but I bore with it. They offered a very good package for freshers, but when I asked about it, they said they had just hired freshers and couldn't hire me now. After the project was completed, I was left out, even though I gave my best there.

There are a few companies where, if I had prepared well, I would have gotten in, but I didn't because of me. I will accept that. But there are others which had nothing to do with me. I didn't make any mistake. Why me? I asked myself.

Then got into one of Infosys' subsidiary company. I wasn't happy, but I had to in this market.

Job commute is long, daily wasting 4 to 5 hours travelling. Pay is not much, tech stack is old, maintenance job, daily getting drained the shit out of me. Can't enjoy what I have, can't leave because of all the things that happened to me.

But due to the current market conditions and things that personally happened to me during my job search, I accepted it.

Don't know what to do. Just a confession from your fellow so-called future of Indian youth.

Hey everyone,

I’m a frontend engineer, and I wanted my portfolio to feel less like a template and more like somewhere you’d actually want to hang out. So I built Ritik’s Desk, a paper-craft desk you can poke around on.

• Experience lives on sticky notes and projects on postcards.
• There’s a dark mode toggle, a few sounds, and a contact form that folds your message into a bird.
• There are 4 secrets hidden on the desk, and I’m curious how many you find.
• If you’re in a hurry, there’s a 30-second tour and a plain résumé view.

It’s built with React and TypeScript. I’d love honest feedback on the interactions, performance, and mobile feel, and on anything that feels confusing or gimmicky.

🔗 https://ritiks-desk.vercel.app

Thanks for taking a look!

**PwC vs Deloitte USI: which is better for work-life balance, hikes, and variable pay?**

I have two offers for an AI Architect role (India) and need help choosing. I have 9.3 years of experience in total.

**Offers:**

1. **PwC**
   * Designation: Senior Manager
   * Salary: 46 LPA fixed + up to 35% variable

2. **Deloitte USI**
   * Designation: Manager
   * Salary: 50 LPA fixed + up to 10% variable

I'm drawn to the Senior Manager designation at PwC, but I'd like to hear from people who have worked at either firm.

**What I'd like to know:**
* Which has the better work-life balance?
* How are annual hikes and promotions at each?
* How reliably is the variable pay actually paid out, and at what percentage of target?
* Does the Senior Manager title at PwC mean a real difference in role and growth, or is it just a title?

Thanks in advance!

Hey everyone,

I currently earn ₹16 LPA CTC and have around 5 years of experience. I have two options from the same company, and I’m genuinely confused about which one to choose.

Offer 1: Kolkata
CTC: ₹22 LPA
Closer to my hometown, although I would still need to rent a PG or flat in Kolkata because my home is quite far from the city.
Lower cost of living.
The company’s Kolkata office is relatively small, so there may be fewer opportunities to network and collaborate with other people.

Offer 2: Bengaluru
CTC: ₹26 LPA
Higher salary, but obviously higher living expenses.
A much larger office with more people to work with, learn from, and network with.
Potentially better professional exposure, collaboration, and opportunities to grow my career.
I feel that moving to Bengaluru might push me out of my comfort zone, help me socialise more, and allow me to focus more on my career.
My biggest concern with Bengaluru is being far away from my family. Realistically, I might only be able to visit home once or twice a year.
On the other hand, I’m thinking about the long term. Joining at a higher package could potentially help me negotiate a better salary during my next switch. I also feel that being in a larger office with more professionals could open up more opportunities for learning, networking, and career growth.
Kolkata would offer a more comfortable lifestyle and potentially better savings because of the lower cost of living. However, since I’ll have to rent in either city, the difference in living expenses might not be as significant as it initially seems.

What would you choose in my position?
Is the additional ₹4 LPA worth moving to Bengaluru, considering the higher expenses?
Does working in a larger office actually make a meaningful difference to networking and career growth?
Would you prioritise family proximity and savings, or take the risk of moving to Bengaluru for potentially better long-term opportunities?

Thanks!

Hi guys, i want to get locked in this weekend, suggest me something new i can learn and utilise the knowledge!

I recently joined a new company. As an experienced Dev I always help my peers. But I have observed that people here aren’t being straight with me. They either don’t help at all or try to make it difficult for me to find answers. I would really appreciate some advice on getting these blockers removed. I don’t want to keep cc’ing my managers or leads in everything. Below things are quite frequent which I’ll tell with exact scenarios

1. Not giving clear straight answers when asked a question. ( I was given a task to setup my system. Instead of telling me how to set it up, the guy intentionally setted it up using an old way that their team used to follow. On asking other teammates I got to know that there is a new and better way which this person never told me )
   
2. ⁠Intentionally deflecting me here n there instead of helping. ( a person had setup Kafka in their system, i was given a task to set it up again for another similar project. Instead of just verifying the things like bootstrap or providing me jars they asked me to go to others for things that I need. They were assigned as a POC by the manager himself.)
   
3. ⁠Wasting time only acting as if they were helping (o was assigned a bug to resolve something in production. there was some issue with the db record. I asked the person owning that particular feature for help. He got on a call with me asked me everything I did, steps I took to resolve it and then left saying he couldn’t help after 1.5 hrs. I raised this in demo call after getting humiliated and when my manager asked he fixed it in 15 mins)

I sometimes get very angry and disheartened by these things. Is this politics or showing their dependency. I’m not asking technical help only infos like where to get bootstrap address, jars, files or db details which are not being provided to me. On pushing them either they don’t reply or deflect it to someone else who I don’t know. Then I ping them and they take their own sweet time before replying.

Is looping manager in everything the only way? I am a bit lost on handling these situations and people. Any advice or suggestion is highly appreciated.

Hey everyone,

I'm at a career crossroads and would appreciate some honest advice from people who've been in a similar situation.

Here's my situation:

- Current CTC: ₹5.5 LPA

- New offer: ₹14 LPA

- Experience: 1+ year

- Current company: Remote work, good work culture, comfortable environment, and a decent work-life balance.

- New company: Mumbai-based role that requires relocation, but seems to offer better technical exposure.

My current company is trying to retain me and is willing to increase my compensation to around ₹8–9 LPA at most. So, staying would mean keeping the comfort of remote work and a familiar environment, but accepting a significantly lower salary than the external offer.

On the other hand, moving to Mumbai would mean a higher cost of living, rent, commuting, and adjusting to a new work culture. However, the ₹14 LPA offer is a substantial jump, and I feel the new role could help me grow faster professionally.

I'm trying to look beyond just the immediate salary and think about where I'll be in the next 2–3 years.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on a few things:

1. With 1+ YOE, would you take ₹14 LPA in Mumbai over ₹8–9 LPA with remote work?

2. After accounting for Mumbai's rent and living expenses, is the difference still significant enough to justify relocating?

3. How much should I value a comfortable work culture and remote flexibility at this stage of my career?

4. Would you prioritize higher compensation and potentially better technical exposure early in your career, even if it means leaving a comfortable job?

5. If you've made a similar switch, did it help your career in the long run?

I'm not looking for a simple “always take the higher package” answer. I'd genuinely appreciate perspectives from people who've experienced both sides.

What would you do in my position, and why ?

you're trying to keeping up with all the AI and tech stuff and feels impossible, as everything drops on X first and there's way too much of it, even doomscrolling x, you will miss a lot.

made a daily newspaper for it.

new edition every morning, 5 min read. headlines are jokes, news is real. helps you stay up to date about anything that happens in tech/ai world. without having to waste time doomscrolling.

I have 2.5–3 years of experience in the MERN stack and I'm looking for a job in Hyderabad.

If anyone has recently got a job in this range, could you share:

1. How did you get it (portals, referrals, LinkedIn)?

2. What did you prepare, and how?

3. Which companies are hiring right now?

Thanks in advance!

I am currently earning around 13 CTC in a small service company(1500 employees).

I do not see any openings for .net developers, while I see relatively a lot more openings for java developers.

Objectively

1) Where am I financially, in terms of salary.

2) Is there a future for .NET ,

3) if you are a net dev, what are your plans, salary and experiences.

By god grace I landed into a startup like company ( old company but less than 15 employee).
My work is primarily Java backend(springboot) and little frontend with NextJS.
Need to work adding new features and maintain code on ERP products.

I do understand the code and they allow AI assist code.
Problem is I find that I am doing most of my work with AI. I don't feel like learning. If I try to write code with hands , it will take more time.

My goal is to become great at backend enough that I won't need AI if AI bubble pop.

What should I focus on ?
what should I learn down the road in 2 yr time.
What would you expect from Java full stack from 2-3 yr exp.

note: pay is peanuts but I am more for learning.

So yesterday I had my first ever interview and I can believe that I bombed it.

I knew the answers before going in the cabin as soon as I reached the cabin my mind went blank the technical lead asked me the same question twice as I was telling everything related to it but not the defination.

The HR started to ask questions, about future plan and i directly said I would like to be in this company for atleast 2 years.

When I came out of the office i realised all of my mistakes and that made me realise how badly I answered the interview. There were more questions which I answered badly like really badly. I atleast somewhat answered the technical questions but i checked all red flags while answering to HR.

In the end when they asked me if I have question for them I asked question to Technical lead which pissed him also i guess.

And now I am thinking about it continuosly and don't know what to do.

Please if anyone have experience with such situation tell me how did you deal with it.

Hey everyone!

I’m a 2025 AIML graduate based in Bangalore. I completed an internship at a company, but the role wasn’t very technical, and taking up a full-time position there didn’t seem worthwhile for my career goals.

I’ve been unemployed for the past 5 months and have been trying to find a job, but unfortunately, I haven’t received many interview calls. I’ve had a few assignments here and there, but nothing that has led to an actual interview.

I’m now considering joining a training institute with placement assistance, and QSpiders/JSpiders is one of the options I’m looking into. I’m particularly interested in learning DevOps and trying to get into a technical role.

I wanted to ask people who have experience with these institutes:

Is QSpiders/JSpiders worth joining for DevOps training?

How good is the teaching, especially for someone starting from scratch?

Do they genuinely provide placement opportunities, and how good are the placements?

What is the current fee structure for the DevOps course?

Are there any other institutes in Bangalore that you would recommend over them?

I’d really appreciate honest reviews, especially from people who have studied there or got placed through them.

Thanks in advance for your help!

Curious to see how other developers set up their work desks. Do you use a single monitor or multiple monitors, a standing desk, a mechanical keyboard, or any other accessories that make your workday better?

Hi everyone. I wanted to put this out there because I’ve been feeling completely disillusioned lately, and I honestly don't have many people in my real life to who would be able to give a suitable conclusion.

I’m currently 20 years old, trying to grind through an IGNOU BCA degree while teaching myself full stack web development on the side.

But to be completely honest, I’ve struggled with math, calculations, and raw logical aptitude ever since I was a kid. While everyone else seems to effortlessly grasp complex logic and syntax, I’ve always felt painfully slow, like my brain just isn't wired for it.

To pay for degree, I spent time working a hectic call centre job. That experience gave me a brutal wake up call about the corporate world dealing with constant pressure and endless talking completely drained the life out of me, and I ended up burning out and resigning at the end.

Now, looking at the wider tech and job market, everything just feels broken. Seeing entry-level roles get choked out by impossible requirements, people with years of experience struggling to survive, and the general toxic hustle culture makes me wonder why I'm breaking my head over math and code at all. I originally thought about specializing down the road like trying to break into application security or bug bounties but between the situation I am seeing, I feel completely inadequate compared to the talent out there, it feels like an uphill battle I'm bound to lose.

I also took a Btech after 12th but had to leave that due to finances and later after a 1.5 year break of doing random stuff, I managed to get this IGNOU BCA. But during the btech I was awarded a medal in entrepreneurship subject, but failed in programming logic and math which I cleared in re exams. I also presented a lot of projects to different project cells and enjoyed doing that also dealing with people and processes in general.

I’m at a crossroads where I'm seriously questioning if continuing down the pure software path makes any sense, or if I should look at completely pivoting toward management, business roles, or an MBA down the line just to escape the code rat race. I am generally more better at people and took a couple LinkedIn gigs before where I grew small companies LinkedIn pages.

Any seniors or people who are in the same situation your advice would really really help me!

I would like to connect with people who are getting good pay but the skills and techstack are notnin demand and outdated and they are not learning much in the job and unhappy.

Hi all, I need some advice choosing between two offers.

About me: Data Engineer with 5 years of experience in Spark and Scala, currently working at a bank on 20 LPA fixed.

Offer 1: Synechron
- Role: Data Engineer
- CTC: 32 LPA fixed
- Location: Bangalore, hybrid

Offer 2: Genpact
- Role: Data Engineer
- CTC: 35 LPA fixed
- Location: Bangalore, hybrid

Both are hybrid and in Bangalore, so the difference is mainly the 3 LPA and the company.

For anyone who has worked at either one:
1. How is the work culture and work-life balance?
2. How are appraisals, hikes and job stability?

Thanks in advance!

I was reading on internet that growth is slow but work culture is good? is it true?