The TL;DR is the sole moderator account had been deleted and there was a 90 day wait before I could be added as a mod. Plus life delayed this further.

I have no idea why there’s an approval for people to join. That’ll be fixed today.

Hopefully we can kick off this community again. Especially with such a massive amount of change in the tech industry.

Also if anyone else would like to he a mod let me know so this doesnt happen again.

I'm in my early 20s and have been working as a software engineer for a few years now. I'm earning a decent salary, have progressed relatively quickly and, on paper, things are going well.

The problem is that I'm just not enjoying it anymore. I used to love programming, building projects and learning new technologies, but lately I've become completely disengaged. I often finish work feeling mentally drained, despite not actually being overworked.

AI is another concern. I use it extensively at work, and increasingly feel like I'm just prompting and reviewing generated code rather than actually engineering anything. It's made me question both my enjoyment of the work and the long-term future of the industry.

I've always been interested in cars and have recently started learning more about ECU tuning, diagnostics and engine calibration. The idea of working on something more hands-on genuinely excites me. I've even considered eventually pursuing it as a career or starting a small business, although I appreciate there's a significant financial barrier to entry.

Part of me thinks I'd be mad to walk away from a relatively comfortable career, especially when I've already put years into it. But equally, I don't want to spend the next 30–40 years doing something I don't enjoy.

Has anyone here felt similarly about software engineering or successfully transitioned into a completely different field? Did you regret it, or was it worth taking the risk?

Hi all,

quick note first: this is the TECH job market only, not the whole Irish one. It covers the 96 tech companies I track in Ireland (software, data and product roles, plus the sales and ops roles at those companies), read straight from their own career pages. If you work outside tech, these numbers won't match what you see, and that's expected.

The job hunt is rough right now, so every week I count what's actually open, to give a real picture instead of hype or doom.

Full report is here always for free ..

The board ended the week of 26 October at 1,400 open roles, 49 fewer than the week before. 119 went up and 184 came down, so it shrank this week.

Who posted new roles:

• Intercom (Dublin): AI customer service software, 6 new

• Cisco (Galway): networking and security, 6 new

• Toast (Dublin): restaurant payments and software, 5 new

• Notion (Dublin): workspace software, 5 new

• MongoDB (Dublin): database software, 5 new

• Qualcomm (Cork): mobile chips, 4 new

• Intel (Leixlip): chip design and manufacturing, 4 new

• Micro Focus (Cork): enterprise software, 4 new

Who took roles down: Mastercard closed 30 and opened 6, Google closed 20 and opened 12, Amazon closed 17 and opened 11, Microsoft closed 13 and opened 4.

Dublin holds 948 of the roles that name a city, but Cork has 164 and Galway 50. 86% of postings need nothing but English.

What it pays:
only 277 of the 1,400 postings (20%) state a salary, and those lean to international companies, so read this as what tech postings that publish pay offer, not what a typical Irish job pays.

Their median is €95.8k, middle half €77k to €118k.

If you're starting out:

525 roles went up in the last 30 days. 38% have been up 60+ days, and I can see how long a role is up, not whether anyone gets hired from it. If you're short on time, start with the fresh ones.

There are 39 internships and 20 junior roles, 4.2% of the board. Junior roles went from 12 to 20 in a week. Google has 10, Amazon 9, Qualcomm 7 and Anduril 4.

Visas: 53 postings say something about visas, and 24 of those offer support. 30 mention relocation. Remote shows up in 14% of listings.

A role counts as closed the first time it's gone from the company's page, which doesn't mean someone was hired.

I'm sharing this data to give you a clearer picture of what's actually happening in the tech market. It helps you understand the trends and make informed decisions based on real data rather than assumptions or fears.

If you want to have overview of the tech market in EU, check the latest EU insights form here ... always for free!

Welcome to the community! Whether you’re a Senior Dev in a Belfast skyscraper, a Grad just starting at Ulster or Queen's, or a remote engineer working from the North Coast—if you're part of the software industry in Northern Ireland, you've found your people.

Why does this sub exist?

The tech scene in NI is punchy and growing fast, but our discussions are often scattered across LinkedIn or private Slack channels. This is a public space to:

• Talk Shop: Discuss local tech stacks, architecture, and engineering hurdles.

• Career Growth: Get honest advice on local salaries, company culture, and interview tips.

• Stay Connected: Hear about local meetups (like BelTech or NI Dev Conf) and networking events.

• The Craic: Let's face it, the NI tech scene has a specific vibe. This is the place for it.

Quick Start Guide

1. Grab a Flair: Look at the sidebar/menu and pick your flair. It helps others know your perspective when you're giving advice.

2. Check the Rules: We keep things local and high-quality. No recruitment spam outside the monthly thread, and keep the "gatekeeping" to a minimum.

3. Salary Transparency: We’re big on helping each other get paid what we’re worth in the NI market. Don't be afraid to talk numbers.

Where are the Jobs?

To keep the main feed from being flooded by recruiters, we have a Monthly Careers Megathread pinned to the top of the sub. Please post all listings and "Who is hiring?" questions there!

Introduce yourself!

In the comments below, tell us:

• What part of NI (or remote) are you in?

• What’s your main tech stack?

• What’s your favorite local office perk (or favorite local coffee spot)?

Let’s build something great together.

Seems to be a lot of layoffs there.

I’ve been a software engineer for about a decade (In the grand scheme of things I know this is next to nothing), and lately I’ve realised I don’t actually hate writing code but I think I hate what “modern” software engineering has turned into.

It feels like there is no sense of craft anymore. In the places I have worked, its slowly seems to have dwindled away.

Most of my job feels like gluing together abstractions I didn’t design, pulling in massive dependency trees, and optimising for speed-of-delivery instead of correctness, elegance, or understanding.

My node_modules folder and PHP vendor folder is larger than my first flash drive, and nobody even blinks at that anymore. I've seen engineers who have a 4 button project pull in entire frameworks just to make those buttons work instead of using basic JS and HTML because its "effort".

What really gets to me is that it feels like nobody genuinely cares. We care about velocity, deadlines, optics, and shipping “good enough,” but not about building something we’re proud of. The incentives reward sloppiness at scale, not thoughtfulness. If something breaks, we patch it later. If it’s ugly but works, ship it.

I’m also starting to question the whole structure of work itself. Constant context switching, fake urgency, endless meetings, meetings about having meetings about a meeting we had with a guy who had a meeting with someone else, and spending my best mental energy on things that won’t matter in a year is just exhausting. I don’t feel lazy. I feel disengaged and kind of sad about it.

I used to love this. It’s what I always wanted to do, and now I struggle to force myself out of bed to do the same thing for the next 40 years or more.

I had a chat with a friend of mine who works in legacy systems maintenance for a large aircraft manufacturer and some of the things he talks about having to do with the constraints of legacy systems is incredibly slick... but in places I've worked, the phrase "we don't have time" has become evermore common.

My knowledge itself is niche and very industry specific (HSIA / Networking). Do I keep trying to grow within this industry? Or do I make a shift in my knowledge and try and get myself embedded into the technology that actually seems cool?

I know I'm not alone in this, and I know there are engineers who have been in this game a lot longer than me who have been here and have managed to get past it.

If you are here right now, what bothers you about it all?

If you got past this, how did you do it? Did you take more control over your own life, or did you make a switch to something more interesting and involved?

I find NI especially, people are very hush about their salaries.

Even amongst close friends it takes a few pints sometimes for them to open up.

I think sharing salary data is useful, most of the sites like levels.fyi cater more to America, England and Mainland Europe.

This thread is not to serve as a bragging thead but just to give people an idea of what's out there.

The big recruiters like Vanrath, MCS and such have a salary guide they share which I find to be fairly accurate as well for reference.

This might sound a bit strange, but has anyone else noticed this?

I've had a few conversations recently with friends and people outside the industry who seem very quick to tell me how AI is going to replace software engineers, how SWE is a dying career, how there's no future in coding, etc.

It's not even necessarily what they're saying, but almost the way they say it. Sometimes it feels like there's a weird sense of satisfaction behind it, as though they're almost glad to see the industry struggling.

I'm not denying that AI is changing the industry or that the job market is difficult. I'm well aware of that, and it's something I think about myself. But there's something a bit odd about people repeatedly telling you that your career is supposedly finished, particularly when they don't work in the industry themselves.

Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but I'm curious whether anyone else has experienced this? Is it just the people I'm around, or have others noticed a similar attitude?

Belfast Tech Week is coming up and there’s a ton of events happening all across the town. You can get more info on it here.

If you have any events on that week and want to showcase them post them below.

I have a HR consultation meeting on Monday regarding potential redundancy. I asked UTAW/CWU who I've been with for 2 years to attend the meeting with me.

They tell me they don't attend the meetings. I have another colleague in a different union whose rep is attending his meeting.

Im struggling to see what I'm paying for with UTAW if they won't do this.

Hi folks! I'm helping organise an incident response-themed meetup on Thursday 26th October at Ormeau Labs in Belfast.

If you're working in or alongside incident response (SRE, devops, platform, etc.), the topic might be of particular interest. There'll be food, drinks, a panel session and then an optional trip to the pub afterwards.

Would be lovely to meet some of you there.

https://luma.com/iuriiitu

Now that everything is getting thrown at Claude, we are getting bigger and bigger PRs, some PRs are hundreds of files being changed and it's too much of a cognitive load to take on when it comes to reviewing a PR.

Is anyone else experiencing this now? How are you tackling it? Any advice on getting a handle on this?

Our process used to be, we receive user stories at the start of the sprint, we break it down into tasks, and we would try to keep one PR per task. This was manageable because the scope of the task was small enough that you could tell what the PR should consist of.

Now our process is that we throw an entire user story at Claude into plan mode, tweak it etc. until it gets it right, then throw a PR up for it. We still sort of break the user story down into tasks but it's mostly used to track hours worked on a user story but it feels redundant to me.

Would love to hear how other places are changing their process to adapt to insane amounts of AI usage.

First off, it's a bad time to be someone who was in love with the art of coding though, I do understand and sympathise with that.

Butttt.... I write zero code by hand anymore, and I absolutely love it. I feel like AI has freed me of shackles that were reducing how long it took me to create things.

I ship 100s of PRs a month now, not just features but fixing tech debt, improving our internal processes, upgrading our “software factory” ( I do fucking hate that term though). QA’ing parts of our product with computer / browser use more effectively and quickly than I ever could have done manually. I’m also freed to think deeply about our direction as a startup and our architecture and experiment with things that I would previously never have got the opportunity to do.

Then I get to delve much deeper into evals / llm obs etc as that's such an important part of our core stack. I can kick off experiments over night and come back to the results in the morning.

Anyone else feel the same?

Belfast seems to be getting a lot of attention about its growing tech sector, startups and all these exciting companies setting up here.
But anytime I speak to a recruiter about looking for a new role, they just seem to push TP ICAP. Once I tell them I’m not interested, I never hear from them again.
Surely there’s smaller companies or startups around Belfast and NI looking for software engineers?
Where’s everyone finding these jobs? Recruiters and the usual job boards seem pretty useless unless you want to work for one of the big companies.
Just wondering how everyone else is finding the job market at the minute?

Hey folks, with things changing quickly with AI, I'm curious to hear from anyone that has interviewed recently.

Are Leetcode style questions still a thing (were they ever really a thing in NI)?

Is using AI incorporated into the interview process?

Is there a bigger focus on system design now?

I've noticed that there has been an uptick in roles and I've been at my place now for ~4 years now. I've only ever worked here so I'm not well versed in the interview process but am considering dipping my toes into job search.

Would appreciate any info from devs, hiring managers, business owners etc.

Thanks in advance!

How's it going folks?

Just wanted to say a quick hello, great to see this sub active as I had previously not known about it.

Currently enrolled in a computing foundation degree, final year starts Monday so I may come seeking advice.

We are working on a community driven Translink Bus tracker focused on Northern Ireland.

The main goal is to build a frontend and backend system for:

- Bus routes and stops

- Journey Tracking

- More accurate arrival predictions

- Compare official/gathered data

Long term, the project is designed to integrate with official data sources (e.g. Translink APIs**)**, with optional GPS/community data to improve accuracy.

This isn’t a tutorial. it’s a real project, already in progress, and we’re looking to bring a few more developers into it.

We’re especially interested in people who:

- Are comfortable reading and contributing to an existing codebase

- Have experience with backend (Python/FastAPI, Java, Maven and Spring Boot.)

- Care about clean architecture, performance, and maintainability

- Want to build something genuinely useful for NI

Current stack:

- FastAPI (Python)

- SQLAlchemy

- Java/Maven/SpringBoot

- PostgreSQL

- Service-based backend architecture

- Frontend in progress (modern / Uber-style UI)

If you’re interested give me a DM and we can talk more. We have GitHub and project specs sorted. We just need the right team. Any questions ask away!

It’s Sunday night. I’m sure for a lot of people the dread has kicked in for returning to work.

If you could do it all again and change your career or were financially stable enough to get out of IT now, what would you do?

First week of the final year of my foundation degree complete.

Doing modules on Event Driven Programming, Software Testing and Cyber Security. This is the semester I've been looking forward too.

All in all good week. Anyone working on any side projects or anything?

Having graduated last year with a first class honours in computer science (and with a years placement at a pretty big company), I now find myself 6 months into a job at another company, still doing software engineering, however, I am not sure how good my wage is at £27k per annum.

If you were in my shoes would you be looking for a better paid role or take the experience?

I’m currently leaning more towards staying to get up my experience but if the salary I am getting is really as low as I think it is then I would consider going to interview somewhere.

Been hearing about even more RTO and office only roles and much less fully remote in the South. Have any of you had to deal with an RTO or heard about many of them up here?

This is the place for all things career-related in the Northern Ireland software scene for [January] [2026].

To keep the main feed clean and high-quality, we ask that all job advertisements, "Who is hiring?" questions, and salary discussions stay within this thread.

For Employers & Recruiters

Please use the following template to help our members:

• Company: [Name]

• Role: [e.g., Senior Java Dev / Lead QA]

• Location: [e.g., Belfast / Derry / Fully Remote (NI Based)]

• Tech Stack: [e.g., AWS, React, Python]

• Salary Range: [e.g., £50k - £70k] (Highly encouraged for engagement)

• Link/How to Apply.

For Job Seekers

If you are looking for work or career advice, feel free to post what you’re looking for:

• Role Type: [e.g., Graduate / Mid-level]

• Preferred Stack: [e.g., .NET / Azure]

• Location Preference: [e.g., Hybrid Belfast / 100% Remote]

Note on Salary Transparency: We encourage open discussion about pay. Knowing the local market rates helps everyone—from grads getting their first "big break" to seniors ensuring they are being paid fairly for the NI market.

Please remember: Keep it professional. Personal attacks on recruiters or companies will be removed.

In my company there is an expectation and pressure that you'll use it. If a team's usage is low the manager is scrutinised. However they haven't gone full "no-one is allowed to manually code anymore".

Does anyone have recommendations for co-working spaces in Belfast?

I work remotely so would be once a week at most for a change of scenery. Thanks!