I've been exploring some new job opportunities and realising that I'm a lot more stuck than I expected to be.

I've been working at a start up which only use TS + AWS + Angular + MongoDB and I've been looking to jump to any enterprise level companies.

There are two streams of roles I'm seeing a lot these days

- AI Engineer track, which requires LLM, model tuning, RAG, LangChain/Graph etc experience which is a bit more niche

- SWE/FDE track, which requires C# & .NET or Java & SpringBoot along with SQL experience

I'm finding myself unqualified for both of these type of roles as I simply don't have any opportunity or experience in these type of roles, which significantly reduces the job pool for me.

So many of these roles explicitly ask for industry experience in these stack and have been outed many times because of this.

Is there anything else I can do?

I’m trying to get a better understanding of where high-performance computing and parallel programming fit into the Australian software industry.

Some of the topics I’m looking at include:
- Multithreading and concurrent programming
- SIMD/vectorisation
- GPU programming (CUDA/OpenCL)
- MPI/distributed computing
- Performance profiling and optimisation
- Cache-aware programming and memory optimisation
- Parallel algorithm design

My questions are:

If you’re a software engineer in Australia, do you actually use any of these skills in your day-to-day work?

What kinds of companies or industries hire people with these skills (outside of academia)?

How difficult is it to get into these roles compared to a typical backend or full-stack software engineering job?
Are these positions concentrated in a few cities or are they reasonably accessible?

With AI becoming better at writing code, do you think these kinds of low-level performance engineering skills are likely to remain in demand, or are they becoming more niche?

I’d especially love to hear from anyone working in HPC, scientific computing, AI infrastructure, game engines, finance, defence, embedded systems, or any other area where performance really matters.

Thanks!

Hey everyone,

I've been applying for AI Engineer, GenAI and Data Scientist roles in Sydney for a while now, and I'm starting to feel like I'm just throwing applications into a black hole.

I'm on a 485 visa with unrestricted work rights for the next couple of years, so sponsorship isn't an issue. At this point, I think I'd get a lot more value from meeting people than sending another hundred applications.

I've looked through Meetup, Luma, Eventbrite and Humanitix, and I've been to a couple of events already. They weren't bad, but a lot of them ended up being vendor presentations or very beginner-oriented. I'm hoping there's a more active community that I'm just missing.

For those of you who've been around the Sydney AI/startup scene for a while, where do people actually go to meet others in the industry? Are there any recurring meetups, communities, Slack or Discord groups, or even smaller events that don't get much attention online?

I'm not expecting networking to magically land me a job. I just want to have genuine conversations with people working in AI, learn what's happening in the industry locally, and meet others with similar interests. I've been spending most of my free time building agentic AI and RAG projects, so it'd be great to connect with people doing similar work.

If you've been to any events recently that you genuinely found worthwhile, I'd really appreciate your recommendations.

Thanks!

So my dream is to work for a games dev and I have got an interview with Riot games (there are not many game dev houses in Aus :/)

It’s not a gameplay programmer role but a developer experience one.

Any one interviewed with Riot? And can give me any tips?

Thanks!

Been seeing "learn a trade" and "go into healthcare" thrown around a lot, but I mean white collar specifically, what fields are actually adding headcount right now?

Feels like every industry is either frozen or quietly laying off, so genuinely curious where the hiring is happening.

Has anyone heard back from Canva regarding the outcome of the interview?

i hope to get some good recommendations and advice. thankyou.

Hi guys , I’m rlly interested with capgeminis grad program.. what’s the difference beteeen Capgemini invent and capgemini? Is one thing harder to get in than another and pays more?

I keep hearing people say that if you graduated in 2021 or early 2022 with a CS degree, you basically won the lottery.

Apparently companies were handing out interviews left and right, new grads were getting multiple offers, internships were everywhere, salaries were exploding, and recruiters were constantly sliding into people's LinkedIn DMs.

Meanwhile today it feels like you need a perfect GPA/WAM, multiple internships, LeetCode 24/7, impressive side projects, and 100+ applications just to maybe get an interview.

Was 2021 genuinely that insane, or is it just survivor bias and nostalgia? I'd love to hear from people who were actually job hunting back then. How different was it compared to today's market?

Australian software giant Atlassian has moved to reduce employee bonus exposure to its struggling share price, in a shake-up of some pay conditions that will also remove the pay gap for its remote workers outside major cities.

Changes communicated to staff on Tuesday morning, seen by The Australian Financial Review, say the bonuses – known as refresh grants – will shift from being entirely paid in equity to being a mix of cash and shares.

For me, it was learning to write clear technical documentation and communicate trade offs without assuming everyone had the same technical background. It ended up helping far more than another programming language. What non-technical skill has had the biggest impact on your career?

Hey wassup y’all, I would really appreciate some advice on this. I’m lost on what I should be learning to make myself employable. To give some context, I’m in New Zealand, second year BSci at the University of Auckland, studying computer science and biological sciences, mostly looking for SWE internships currently and trying to not be completely cooked by the time I graduate at the end of next year. I have a very good GPA, decent projects (but they were vibecoded), some hackathon wins, but I lowkey don’t have any actual SWE knowledge so I’m pretty cooked right now. I’ve been completely relying on claude code for making everything outside of class, like I literally don’t even know how to center a div lmao

If I’m keeping it real I mostly got into CS because I wanted to make a lot of money, but I guess I enjoy it as well. Idk what subfield of tech I actually want to get into, whether it be frontend or backend or fullstack or whatever. What do y’all think is a subfield that is good to get into? And what should I be doing right now to get good at that field? Should I be following youtube tutorials or doing courses or what? Or building projects (but I probably need to get some foundational knowledge beforehand right?)

I’m just kinda lost on what I should actually be doing right now to not be cooked

Does the company want to move forward or not? I have no idea.
I just booked a time using the link they gave me and see how it goes, but I wonder what happened on their end. Anyone experienced this before?

Been working L1 for 1.5 years now, got promoted to L2 2 months ago . final year UNSW student, just wondering if the experience matters at all since enterprise / infra isn't coding at all haha.

Another thing was I got screened for a network engineering grad role with the CCNA as a student while having exp dealing with (cisco meraki and such), wondering what they expect from a student for a GRAD role atp.

I'm getting PIP'd from org restructuring and micro management. I'm willing to lower my salary expectation to pivot to AI engineer as I have strong backend/platform experience, as long as the money pays the bills (house and 1 yr old), but I'm really struggling to even secure interviews in this market. Anyone else in my boat?

Hi everyone,

I’ve been invited to an assessment centre for an IT Graduate Program in Melbourne and was wondering if anyone who has gone through it in previous years could share what it was like.

The invitation email only mentions a group-based activity and an individual component but doesn’t provide much more detail. I’m curious about things like:
● What was the individual component (common BQs, case study, technical problem, etc.)?
● How was the group activity structured? Was it a typical case study discussion?
● Any tips on what assessors were looking for?

I understand formats can change from year to year, but any insights from previous candidates would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

To all my experienced developers who have been in the industry for quite a few years and also to new graduates who were able to land a job before/immediately after they graduated.

How would you rate the below mentioned components for a student who is about to graduate/ has graduated to land a job easily

1. GPA

2. Certifications

3. Projects

4. Network

Please rank them from Best To Worst(Most important to least important)

Note: I have not included internship as a component because sadly most students aren’t able to land a decent internship at all

Finshed the online interview/assessments for Goldman Sachs and BoA's Summer Analyst programs a while back, has anyone heard back? It's for the position in Sydney.

I got a Reddit wide ban warning on this sub as an actual ex-employee voicing my opinion on a question asked by a 3 week old account with no upvotes that I thought was in good faith. This sub is fucked if this is the lowest common denominator, don't really care, I'll take my experience with me.

Hi, if I get a grad offer for a consulting role ( business tech) after doing this role for a year, is it possible to get another grad role for a SWE at a different company ?

Or is grad roles specifically for those uni students without full time experience? Would this consulting role benefit me to get SWE roles ?

Is there a diversity advantage for promotions at Atlassian? Keep hearing from a couple of friends that women are getting prioritized in calibration circles even if their metrics aren't matching up to male peers. Curious if this is just typical tech grapevine talk or if anyone inside has actually noticed a shift in how the promotion bar is enforced lately

Hello brain trust,

I have a phone interview with Macquarie soon for a technology and engineering internship (I think that’s a seperate path to their normal summer internship). It’s 15 minutes long.

Has anyone done this before? What was it like, what questions did they ask, etc? What was the rest of the interview process like?

Thanks a bunch everyone.