Just curious, with NIDC on this week, is it worth going for the one day it runs this Saturday? Working in the public sector, I was wondering what people's views are on the event

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

Their customer service is genuinely the worst I have experienced.

I ordered 5 12TB drives. Waited 5 days then they cancelled the order. I reached out to them and it took them a week and basically said try order it again (they were sold out of 12tb) so i bit the bullet and ordered 5 16tb drives.

Another 5 days pass the order gets cancelled again.

I reached out to support again and say is there an issue with me being in Northern Ireland rather than mainland UK is that the issue?

They say they are looking into it. They reply every 2 days saying the same thing that they are looking into it.

8 weeks later after escalating and many internal reviews they say it is because I’m in Northern Ireland and not mainland uk.

8 weeks, 2 cancellations just to come to the idea that I first proposed.

Asked if I can order them to a place in England and ship them myself and if they could provide any compensation for the time and effort spent on this and they in lack of a better terms said no basically to the compensation.

They are now out of 12tb and 16tb and only have 20tb left.

Additionally, I used the 10 percent sign up discount code on the previous order so now it is gone and can’t use it.

They even just said for me to try shop elsewhere.

Horrible experience and horrible customer service.

How long do people think until AI can do most coding related jobs and therefore there would be a need for fewer developers? Or eventually like one per team

Hi folks! I’m helping organise BelfastSwift, a new meet-up for people interested in building apps for Apple platforms in and around Belfast.
Our first meet-up is on 3 December 2026, 6-8 pm, at Deloitte’s office on the 16th floor of the Ewart Building, Bedford Street.
Whether you’re already an iOS developer, working in another area of development and curious about Swift, or just starting to explore app development, you’re very welcome. No previous iOS or Swift experience needed.
We’re hoping to bring people together to share ideas, learn from each other and get to know other developers locally. If you’ve been wondering about getting into iOS development, come along and have a chat!

Register here: https://luma.com/q9zbhfsx

Would be lovely to meet some of you there!

https://www.belfastswift.com

Seen a QA Analyst job advertised for Expleo on Queens Road.

Anybody any horror stories before I apply?

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!

I’m not sure if this is the correct subreddit to post on, but it’s an NI subreddit and I’d rather people from the local industry than from America advise me on this.

I’m currently working as a SD apprentice and after my apprenticeship I’m wanting to go down more of a cloud route.

Just posting this to see if anyone can give me some good tips on skills or strengths to build to further progress in this industry.

Anything even if it isn’t to do with cloud but useful certs or things I should know would be greatly appreciated 🫡

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?

Seeing an increase in 3rd level institutes and adults education centres offering micro credentials in a range of AI, Cyber and technologies.

Anyone here ever do one? Looking to hear what people's general experience was of them. Did you do an online course or in-person, did it require much additional time commitment etc.

I know quality will differ for each course and each provider but overall did you find the micro credentials course more valuable / enjoyable/ rewarding than undertaking a self paced online course or Udemy course for example?

Thanks in advance!

Hi everyone!
Curious to know what the software engineering interview process is like in Belfast these days.
Are companies using any specific platforms like LeetCode/CodeSignal/HackerRank, or moving towards more in-depth technical questions in implement XYZ in front of us or more of a system design especially with the rise of AI?
Would love to hear about your recent experiences and happy to share insights along the way too!

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.

Seems to be a lot of layoffs there.

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".

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?

Has anyone else experienced many issues with ordering pc parts to Ni?

I’m trying to order some hard drives from seagate and the order keeps getting cancelled.

I have also noticed it a lot on Amazon like we can’t even order a portable power bank and other things

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?

I live and work in Belfast, currently working remotely for a large tech company.

I'm doing an MSc Artificial Intelligence dissertation on whether folks who commit, review or operate agent-generated code actually understand it, and what the downstream risks are (Comprehension Debt in the Age of Coding Agents). I'm looking for software engineers, SREs, and platform engineers who work with AI coding agents. Happy to share the results here if there is interest.

Information sheet: drive.google.com/file/d/…/view?usp=drive_link.
Survey: forms.cloud.microsoft/e/U9qnwxDegN.

Apologies for asking in here, I don't know where else to ask if I'm honest.

My job is quite technical in many ways, and while I don't want to get into the details, it often requires custom scripts and applications to feed into some software I use.

The last time I done anything that was even close to programming was around 2002 where I built a web application with ASP3.0 (that was a long time ago)

Anyway, that's beside the point. Long story short, I am Claude-ing my way through this, and quite often I'm just doing what Claude tells me to, and not fully understanding what it is. So far I seem to be copying projects from GitHub into Visual Studio and then compiling them into executables that I don't know how to use.

Sorry, I'm trying to get to the point. It feels nasty doing this kind of work while not knowing what I'm actually doing, so can anyone recommend some online courses or training that will give me a foundational knowledge of what I'm doing, so that when Claude tells me do something, I can at least understand and appreciate what's happening, rather than blindly following instructions from a machine.

Many thanks.

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?

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?

[ Update: project has been chosen; a POS and table booking system ]

How's the form folks?

As I've said before I'm currently completing a foundation degree. For one of my modules I need to develop either a game or a business application.

I've decided to do a business application as a lot of the class is going for games.

Any suggestions on applications?

Using Visual Studio '22 & C#

Anthropic and OpenAI both dropped new models, and the interesting part isn’t just that they’re better — they’re getting a lot cheaper too. Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 is aimed heavily at coding, enterprise work, finance and other complex agentic tasks.Anthropic says it beats GPT-6 Astra on some coding benchmarks and follows instructions more reliably. It’s also cheaper than the previous Opus generation at $4/M input tokens and $20/M output.

OpenAI launched GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna, using similar training techniques to GPT-6 Astra. Sol costs $2/M input and $10/M output, while Luna is dramatically cheaper at $0.10/$0.50. OpenAI says Sol produces about half as many factual errors as its predecessor. It also claims coding performance around Claude Fable 5.1 levels while costing less.

Feels like the next big AI race is going to be who can deliver near-frontier intelligence at commodity prices.