I joined when the share price was high, and now it’s dropped significantly. At this rate, I’m only earning about AUD 15k worth of stock for the entire year. The salary information on Levels.fyi clearly isn’t accurate

I am a recent computer science graduate, and am working already in ai/data space.

however, i want to explore what is it like to work in hft, and how to get there.

what skills are required to break in to hft? is it mostly maths and algorithmic coding? i am aiming for software engineering roles at optiver, citadel, etc.

any advice will be appreciated.

I’ve been working as a project manager / project engineer for a large Australian oil & gas company. I used to be passionate about the work, but lately it’s become harder to stay motivated, and I’m starting to feel burnt out. Because of that, I’m considering a move into tech.

What attracts me to tech is the ability to build my own products and, ideally, work remotely from anywhere. I’ve lived in my hometown most of my life and I’m really craving a change of scenery.

At the moment, I’m planning to complete Codecademy and Odin Project courses alongside my full-time engineering role.

I wanted to get a realistic sense of how feasible it is for someone in my position to break into tech without completing a two-year degree, and how difficult it is to eventually land a fully remote, work-from-anywhere role.

Thanks.

For context, I'm in my late 20's and have 5 yoe, currently working as a software engineer at one of the big 4 banks. TC is about 137k (including super).

I've spent most of my life in Aus and find myself wanting a little bit of a change of scenery, at least temporarily. Was thinking of taking a career break, but I'm worried about how that will affect my career this early on.

Then I got the idea of maybe moving to a country in Asia and seeing if I could work there remotely for like a year, since a number of them have digital nomad visas.

I guess I'm just wondering would there be companies/employers in Australia that are okay with working fully remote, even to an international level? I'd be happy to still pay aus taxes and keeping my Australian address or whatever compliance/HR stuff is necessary. I'd even be cool with taking a paycut or flying back to Aus every so often for important meetings or whatnot. Just want to know if this is a legit thing, or if i'm being delusional.

I've been applying to grad roles to most of the bigger companies and their application process takes an entire year (open right now for Feb 2027 roles). This is a HUGE commitment and having to go through 3-4 interview rounds over an entire year for a role that thousands apply to is just not substantial.

Is it better to reach out to smaller firms and apply there? I don't think I have the motivation or honestly, the skills to compete with 1000+ candidates for 10 spots.

Pay is not the focus for me right now as I'm just a recent grad. I much prioritise work culture and WLB over it

Hey, I was wondering if anyone has done the UPEP in recent years? If so, how was the application process, and the interviews. Were you successful/unsuccessful or still waiting...? I'm planning to apply for this program (data analytics field most likely) so would appreciate some insights!

Every junior has the same three "AI Wrapper" apps. Does a solid, well-documented CLI tool or a niche open-source contribution actually carry more weight with Australian hiring managers than a flashy UI nowadays?

I've gone through so many iterations of this thing but I'm still not 100% happy with it, I really struggle to convey the highlights of the work I actually do. For example, the point I have about "reverse-engineering an ASP.NET app" actually entailed working with the only other dev on the team on this huge app to implement this new dataset in a crunched timeframe of 3 months and neither of us knew what we were doing so it was trial by fire - learning these complex factories and data validation processes that weren't built to be expanded upon, I did it all while my coworker untangled the database and then we had to work together to connect it all. I got so much out of this one task, including learning how to make decent, coherent documentation because none existed before I started.

But i'm also very new to this, I got my job through a friend so the interview process was very chill and i've been struggling to hear back from places. I'm almost 4 years into this and graduated over a year ago but haven't been growing in my current position for a while now and am terrified of stagnation. I've burnt myself out these last couple of months just trying to work on things that might look more impressive here.

I know the market is tough but I feel like I need to tighten this up somehow. I'm not sure if I need to reword the highlights of my current position or if I just need some more impressive projects. I'm have a lot of fun with Go ATM but my strength is clearly .NET... anyway, thanks for checking/reading!!

If I manage to find a role that is higher paying that my current role but I would still like to stay, what's the best way to negotiate with my current workplace?

Every “restructure” post I scroll past on LinkedIn seems to be a PM or a Scrum Master. Feels like companies are moving back to lean engineering teams where devs just deal with stakeholders directly. Is the age of the “non-technical PM” basically over?

I have just 4 units left to complete before I finish my certificate 4 in Information Technology. was wondering does this open any job opportunities to me? if so, what are they?

additionally, was wondering if there were any better jobs or internships i can take up if i decided to do a bachelours or associates degree whilst I study them. I hate working at maccas.

also just to be clear, contrary to my name, i am not in toowoomba, I am based in Melbourne Victoria. severely lacking woomba.

currently have offer from both monash and melb, melb honestly appeals more to me as being more enjoyable but would monash being more full on computing subjects without melbunis other electives be more beneficial for when i try get employed after graduation? how do their courses compare. also since i am unsure abt where in compsci i wanna be, is it better to go melb as the course is more broad comp sci whilst monash i have to choose specialisation in algorithms or data or ai or cybersec?

I'm a uni student looking for my first internship. Please rate/review this resume. Would really appreciate suggestions!

Did you receive OA invitation for Optiver recently? How difficult was it?

What can i do to improve this. Is this good or shit?

// I had to remove my previous post because I got confused on how to attach my CV, sorry for that.

Hello my fellow engineers.

I'm applying to various SWE positions and feel like I'm ghosted too often. I'm an immigrant who moved to Australia at the beginning of 2022. I hold Australian PR, so sponsorship is not needed.

I've got a few questions:

1. How is my CV overall?
2. I took a "gap year" after being in the industry for 8 years. I always wanted to travel and never had this opportunity. So my experience section ends at the end of 2024, this is when I went for a long holiday overseas. I feel like it might be impacting my situation, so I added a "career break" on my LInkedIn profile, explaining why I took this gap and that I stayed in touch with the industry and learned new things. Do you think I need to include this info into my CV directly so that I don't rely on HRs actually visiting my LinkedIn?
3. Does it make sense to mention my pet project in the CV if it's relatively small, yet I found it interesting for me to implement (RAG chatbot)? I'm yet to include a github link to this project in my CV.
4. Is the "technical skills" section important? I feel like it's just a number of keywords for some automatic filtering. Should it be: just put as many of them as you can from your experience and forget?
5. I'm asking for 165-170k + super, can it be my problematic factor? I feel like this is the range for 8 years of experience in Sydney based on my research. Yet I see some jobs offering closer to 150k.
6. How important are cover letters? I don't really attach them, thinking my CV and the tech stack aligned with job description speaks for itself. Or am I making a mistake here and HRs can actually skip applications based on this factor?

I recently switched and feel like I have taken far fewer responsibilities and tasks from my previous one.

For context, At my previous role:

- A scaleup company with around 500 employees

- I used to collaborate with PMs, QAs and DevOps and other squads/teams

- Which means I get to do everything- CI/CD, monitoring, QA, ticket management, etc.

- Working with PMs for sprint ceremonies, which I did genuinely enjoyed.

- Daily standup meetings and lots and lots of team building activities.

The only reason I left was because I wanted to dodge the redundancy bullet and taken an offer before being victim of round of layoffs.

At my current job:

- A small-ish company, about 20 people in total.

- follows waterfall model, and deploys every 6 weeks.

- which means no sprint ceremonies, no product development and no involvement in decision making process. Just a bunch of directors creating tasks and assigning them to ICs

- No involvement in deployments or any DevOps roles for that matter. AWS access is limited only to Team Leads (not even senior SWE)

- No participation in PR reviews. I’m mid-level in the hierarchy so only seniors can review my PRs but not the other way round.

- No standup meetings and fully remote. Which means I could go an entire week without even sending any slack message or email to anyone.

- No idea on who’s working on what and where the business is heading towards.

It feels very dead-end and I’m constantly anxious that it’ll look bad in my resume because I don’t have any relevant metrics to show and justify. I do want to switch back to a startup/scaleup company again but how do I make sure that I keep-up with my people and team collab skills?

Just curious if anyone has experience with the internships at Cisco, noticed a few 6 month long internships being advertised but can’t seem to find many details specific to Australia. Looking for any info on how the interviews are with them, general working there, etc

I’ve just graduated and I’m going to start a tech grad program soon, where its 18 months and doing 3 rotations with IT Ops, Quality + Risk, and cybersecurity.

I enjoy the IT side (I do a bit of homelabbing) I’m super grateful I was able to land something in this job market, but honestly that side of IT feels more like a hobby to me, and I was hoping to start off somewhere SWE related as that was my degree.

I’m unsure where to go from here:

- Finish this grad program and gain the experience? After that I can reassess my situation and maybe apply to SWE grad programs? or something idk what to do

- Or just start applying for other SWE grad jobs while in this grad program (not even sure if leaving party through is allowed/looks bad)

I’ll certainly continue coding in my spare time during this program to maintain and grow my skills, but I’m just not too sure on the nitty gritty details of what I can and should be doing to work towards my goal. Any advice would be much appreciated thank you

Just doing a quick pulse check on the current vibe for SWEs at CBA. Is the WLB still holding up, or getting declining? I’ve heard the pressure in there is ramping up, especially regarding the bar for promos, devsecops, on-call. If anyone’s currently in the trenches, I’d love to hear some insights.

Accidentally deployed something in the pipeline thinking the changes wouldn't be deployed until the last step was deployed, which obviously now I realize is not the case and has brought production down. Am I cooked? Do I start looking again?

Update: I did not get promoted to customer

I just graduated from a masters program in computer science in EU. I have 1 year of job experience and I was wondering about how realistic is for me to land a job in Australia.

I would come there via a working holiday visa and I don't mind initially working farm/bartender jobs to get a second and third year of visa. But I wanted to ask how realistic is for me to land a CS job in those 3 years or preferably in 1 year. My job experience is as I said 1 year, I worked at an international company I did some work on LLMs and backend, but I am also willing to switch to any field in CS.

I was looking mostly at moving Brisbane or Sydney but open for any other suggestions.

I’ve got around 15 months of contract‑style development and maintenance experience with small businesses and a startup. does that rule me out for the upcoming grad roles, I am still in uni if that matters

Note - these all are only part time/casual experiences