I just graduated with my bachelor's in computer science at 26. I had a good GPA, but it took me a few extra years to get through the program for various personal reasons. My main concern right now is the age gap. Since I'm starting my career a few years behind the typical age group, I'm worried I might never catch up financially or professionally. Will companies view my age as a red flag for entry-level roles, and does starting later cap my ultimate career trajectory?

My current full-time job is a total dead end and I'm miserable, but it's stable. A recruiter reached out about a contract-to-hire position that's exactly what I want to be doing, but I'm wondering if it's just going to be a glorified temp job. Would it be crazy to leave a permanent position for this?

How do you handle a PM who won't stop creeping the scope after sign-off? Seriously, every single sprint it’s the same story. We agree on the goals, lock it in, and then a few days later it's "just one more small thing." Except that "small thing" completely blows up the architecture and wrecks our timeline. How do you guys manage PMs who do this without completely destroying the working relationship?

Do you think microservices have saved or wasted engineering time? Argument for the latter: most engineering teams adopt them before product market fit, scale, team scale, and operational maturity. These teams would likely have been better off with a modular monolith. I’d love to hear your experience. Let’s discuss!

I’m feeling annoyed because I feel like I haven’t built a single new thing in months. Every week is the exact same cycle of chasing down outages, rushing out hotfixes, and patching tech debt that was written before I even started working. I'm starting to wonder if the whole industry is like this, or is my company just uniquely chaotic?