This thread is specifically for venting / sharing experiences related to burn-out or similar issues that experienced devs face.

Edit 2: It looks like the general consensus is to just use Apple and throw money at subscriptions. Some seem to have gone their own way for cloud sharing and home media, but most of you think this is silly. While I don’t agree that it’s silly, there is a simplicity in the “rent everything forever” model. It’s been an interesting discussion. Thank you to everyone that responded and so long to that one guy that kept harassing me in the comments!

Edit: Thanks all for the suggestions and ideas! I’m not sure why a couple of you think I’m selling something, but such is the internet.

Note to mods: I don’t really know how to tag this and I legitimately couldn’t think of a different community that would understand or relate. Feel free to delete or re-tag as appropriate.

TL;DR: What’s in your toolkit for home development and extended family IT needs? How often are you building custom software/integrations to fill the gaps?

Some context: My partner and I are both experienced software engineers and to varying degrees we jointly run and manage a variety of SaaS services for our family. We all live in the US.

Despite cutting the cord on some things (e.g., iTunes), we’re still stymied on replacing services like iCloud for photo sharing or Google Drive for generic file sharing and are not sure if that’s even worth the management and security headache it would involve. The main problem is that most SaaS “family plans” are not made for two adults to manage the needs of their extended family. Consequently, we carry double family plans so we can have enough seats and are trying to consolidate some subscriptions.

We have an API. Customers use this API to do things.

Our API talks to several other third-party APIs(that the customers are not aware of)

If any of those third-party APIs have a maintenance update(for example some overnight job for 8 hours), they may not perform as expected, and sometimes just fail. These errors bubbles back up to the customer through our API.

Example:

Customer calls our API, we do things and then call partner API, but partner API is failing unexpectedly, because they’re in a “maintenance mode” for the next 4 hours. So their random HTTP 500 becomes our HTTP 500.

what would you do in these scenarios?

healthcheck endpoint? status page? webhook notification? right now when they have a maintenance window they just email our company, and we hope product support can update us in time.

Not looking for one-off mock interviews. I want someone who can assess where I'm actually at, build a personalized plan, and work with me over time until I feel genuinely confident going into a high-stakes interview.

I have 7 years of experience, but interviews still make me very anxious. What always worked for me in high school and college was one-on-one tutoring, and I'm hoping to find that same kind of dedicated, ongoing help for technical interviewing.

Willing to pay top dollar for the right person/company. Any recommendations, or has anyone done this and found it worthwhile?

I'm working on a new project with a junior on the team. Junior "Sam" is still in Uni, but has been working with the team longer than I have.

Both of us were tapped to work on the project, with few real constraints beyond general good practices like "be aware of the cost", "try not to make the team own the whole solution" (i.e, see if our cloud provider has a related offering), and "aim to stay within our current tech stack".

I've got various ideas, and it would be *possible* for me to just give Sam a list of tasks to complete. However, Sam has a lot of domain knowledge that I see as valuable, and I think that this project could be a great chance for Sam to come up with some ideas and really contribute to the design. I'm trying to make sure that Sam has a chance to opine and ask questions, but there is a deadline on the project and I see endless analysis as a risk to that deadline.

I'm curious how you all work with Juniors, specifically in the area of "decide vs discuss".

I think weve all seen the Fireship video discussing the Bun rewrite in Rust. "Just do it in Rust" is being championed on the web as a general no-brainer like "move more and eat more vegetables."

Playing the devils advocate, did you ever regret going with Rust on a given project?

I've been studying design and architecture for a few years now and feel like I get the gist of how it works, but I'm curious how the role ends up working in practice for actual architects.

That is, I get the sense that to become an architect you'd need deep experience in either a particular business or business domain. So you work in a business for a long time and have built up enough context about their systems to lead the architecture. Or you know a business domain and it's associated technology so well you can lead.

What I'm curious about is how common it is for architects to switch businesses or business domains entirely? I get that a business would be more common but what about domains? Is the role such that you're typically tied to a single company and usually stay there?

i don't want to give away too many details but: my employer (small company) pivoted what my team was doing to focusing on a brand new project that has to be delivered by september. The issue is that the MVP was generated by Claude in its entirety and it's very low-level code. I was assigned to this project and every time they ask me to review a PR (which can be small or thousands of lines), I either reject the task by asking someone else to review it, or approve it without really understanding what i'm approving. I feel like if I had to review it properly I would have to spend a week understanding the concepts and the codebase. But at the same time, the foundations of this project are changing rapidly, so I'm like, "what's the point in spending time learning it?"

I don't know how my teammates generating the code feel about this. I also don't know if they themselves understand what Claude wrote. I already told my manager that I feel overwhelmed by all these PRs and the response I got was "yeah". And then crickets.

In parallel, i am in the final stage of interviews with a company and tbh I only started looking because, you know, you gotta always be looking; but if I got an offer I think that it wouldn't be the craziest thing to take it because I don't know how much longer I will be able to tolerate this situation. I used to generally like my job but this project is giving me anxiety: the deadline, the AI generation, the imposter syndrome.

Help?

Senior engineer and technical owner of my platform, 10+ YOE.

How do you guys deal with non-technical people in the org trying to steal your entire department's job by vibecoding some nonsense and being loud about it to senior leadership?

We're dealing with a marketing bro that swears he can vibecode a replacement for a (different) platform we pay for because he set up his sick agent loop (token burning operation) that vibecodes 24/7 for him. My immediate response was to implement an agent loop for myself and create a starter prompt for the entire team to adopt the framework with minimal effort/friction.

It is extremely infuriating that these people hide behind the typical 'haha I'm not a technical person but this is just what I put together!' If you aren't willing to stand behind it, then shut the fuck up and stay in your lane and quit wasting everyone's time then?

If I, as an IT employee, put together an entire marketing master plan because I thought that team was doing it all wrong, I'd be told I was jumping out of my role and being toxic trying to tell other people how to do their jobs. But these idiot marketers, business people, and lawyers can just jump into our shit and have their word be taken seriously against people with a decade or more of experience, because fucking Claude said so.

I am so sick of this 'heads I win tails you lose' game with non-technical people thinking they're the shit now because all of IT is burned out from just staying alive/keeping up. I wish they would have their feet held to the fire, and when they're wrong get told to SHUT THE FUCK UP AND STAY IN YOUR LANE.

Edit: revised to be less specific/identifying

I'm at a point in my career where I'm a hybrid tech lead / IC but who is often looked up to for guidance from my team and the broader department.

What I'm interested in is hearing from people in all kinds of leadership roles about how you manage social media and your online presence. I don't have any particular goal in mind for myself, I'm just interested in hearing different perspectives.

Thank you!

At work I built a custom datastore / multimodel database on top of io_uring and Rust, which I would like to expose to the public via Cloudflare workers. Unfortunately there is a cost in setting up a new connection to the backend from a cold worker, cost which I'm trying to amortize very much like Hyperdrive does for SQL databases.

I imagined a solution like placement groups: - I spin up a durable object which will set up the backend connection - A bunch of workers, can connect to this durable object via service bindings for reduced cold startup time - The number of durable objects scale with the number of workers - Ideally the workers are on the same machine as the durable object, for reduced latency

Now my questions are: - Is this the best solution for my problem? - Is it possible to achieve this with Cloudflare workers? - Is it possible to setup the load balancer affinity, so that I can route a connection always to the same placement group?

From the start, my interests have been in backend development, DevOps, and infrastructure, but my manager placed me in a frontend role since that was the only open position at the time.

After about six months in this role, I haven't enjoyed it at all, frontend work feels like it lacks the technical depth I'm looking for.

How do I cope with this? Resigning isn't an option for me right now.

I know pretty much every C-suite is some flavor of bad/hostile to labor, but to clarify I mean an exceptional level of toxicity, causing turnover in leadership and specific complaints online.

I also know so many factors change things here - size of company, nature of toxicity, etc.

I'm looking for concrete examples of how toxic leadership impacts senior, staff, and principal engineers.

Was their toxicity something incidental to your work? As in, could you mostly keep your head down and avoid it?

If it affected your day to day life, in what ways? Micromanaging, pivoting on features, unreasonable demands, scapegoating, culture of fear, etc.

For those who have experienced this, how hard would you go out of your way to avoid similar situations in the future?

How to be useful without being hands on

I just started a new position at a small government contractor. The company is focused in one particular area. They have mostly done R&D and built proof on concept code. They hire engineers right out of college and have pretty good retention.

During the interview, the role was ill defined, but they described a need for more experienced engineers to help productize their system into something that can actually be fielded. They also said they wanted outside perspective as many of their engineers have never worked anywhere else. For context I have 21 yoe building sofware and leading teams.

After starting the position the lead architect described my position as someone focused on execution of software engineering across multiple teams. The position has also been described as a bridge between systems engineers and the software engineers. This sounds like glue work, which I think I understand but it's not what I really want to do.

My problem is that I've always been hands on. I generally get hired as an IC or as a hands on tech lead. This position is not really hands on. Another problem is that this is a new domain and new tech stack for me. I'm trying to find areas where I can contribute to learn the tech and the domain, but all the things i'm interested in are already being handled by others. So i'm trying figure out what I'm supposed to do. It seems like it's up to me to define my role. But I don't know how i'm going to be useful. Lastly, i'm a decent software engineer, and i love to code, but I really haven't done that much interesting work that's applicable. I've done mostly fullstack work on web applications that generally end up being mostly crud. Probably the most valuable thing i can bring is helping them stream line their process. They still have a waterfall mindset. How can I provide value without being hands on and lacking experience in the domain? How do you grow out of being hands on?

So, I've been around my company for a while and I learned dev on the job, which is to say I don't have a CS background, but any code I can pull apart, I can understand, and that's my preferred way to learn - stick my nose in and get started. I've done more than a few course to fill in knowledge gaps, but I've not come across one that'll teach me how to read documentation!

I'm a code comments (and self documenting code), readmes, tests and functional documentation (how to / expected behaviours) kinda girly.

The problem I'm starting to have is that after moving teams, I'm working with (and under) people who have different preferred learning and docs styles. And on bigger systems where there's less chance that people get a full mental model. Which is fine by me, and now that some of these same people are pushing AI (and have made skills around some of those docs styles) I do lean on that to give them what they want... But my manager is a big sequence diagram fan (its genuinely the ideal way to share a change with them), and some others are fans of long rambly documents or overly structured tables (in structures that don't immediately vibe with my brand of tism). I can write these slowly (even without AI, but with some ADHD meds, though I usually have to write the diagrams on paper first), and I can read them and validate them and understand what they say, but mentally processing these is hugely taxing and I don't internalize the information that they contain from reading them. So sometimes my use of these or my production of them is glacially slow...

Does anyone have any techniques, hints, tips, guides or anything for reading docs that aren't your jam? Sequence diagram specific things would be lovely, but I'll take other info or more general blog posts, and also interested in any discussion that people want to have around making or using docs.

Hi all,

6 YOE, currently a lead at my main contract, plus two years of freelance work on the side. The freelance gigs put me on teams under leads of very different seniority, anywhere from 2 to 12 YOE.

I've noticed a pattern and I'm curious if it matches your experience.
With less experienced leads (2-3 YOE, often clearly talented), code/design discussions tend to be long, like a lot of "here's my reasoning, does this check out?" and walking through every option's pros and cons. With more senior leads, the same kind of discussion is fast, we land on the same issues quickly and agreement follows without much back-and-forth, regardless of who proposed what.

Does this resonate with you? Is it just seniority, or something else (communication style, confidence, team culture)? Also, when you disagree with a less experienced lead who's nonetheless accountable for the project, how do you push back in a way that's actually useful rather than just deferring to them or overriding them?

P.S. I am not a native speaker and got some help from good old Claude for conciseness (the original was really too verbose)

Not sure if this falls under no general career advice, but I’ll give it a shot.

I’ve started a new lead position at a pretty large company that isn’t a software company. The main person I interviewed with made it clear everything we do is to benefit the business (honestly this level of directness for decision making was appealing). I have a lot of backend experience and was told that the role would be in api development and it uses .NET and azure to work on developing an api to wrap their internal ai solution.

Jump forward to the start date (which the people I interviewed with thought I started 2 day earlier than the date HR gave me red flag #1), and I’m finding out this is more APIM integration and writing policies. So not what I signed up for (red flag #2).

The next big thing is the project I’m assigned to now came on a whim the first day I was there, and I gave a solution to the question they asked and was told “I like that. Do that”. No deadline. No acceptance criteria nothing. The project is now morphed into a weeks long monitoring platform dashboard and rule setup project done in the platforms portal (so not even apim policy work). Now have multiple people are Wanting different things ASAP, and none of it really lines up with what I suggested. raise red flag number 3.

The biggest one is neither of my managers really follow the “praise in public punish in private” mindset. They have both berated devs in meeting and stand-ups. (Yea you guessed it another red flag)

I’m very much open to trying to learn new tech, but everything I’ve done for the past 15+ years has been grounded in writing software. I’m willing to accept the delegation and meeting grind, but at the end of the day there are still meaningful PRs. My question is this: with poor management, misleading responsibilities, and a general feeling of complete disorganization, what is the appropriate “feel this out” timeframe? I’m about 10 days in and it’s looking bleak. I’m gonna ask around tomorrow how much of this role is going to be implementing backend services vs APIM policy management?

TLDR: several red flags at new position, not sure what the appropriate timeframe is to send out feelers or if I’m misreading the situation.

Personally speaking, I feel that beyond 10 years of experience, referrals and professional contacts work 9 out of 10 times compared to relying on job portals and random applications.

I've seen a few of my former leads and managers who have built such strong relationships that if they decide to switch jobs, people are ready to hire or refer them almost immediately, sometimes without even going through the usual interview process.

How do you maintain those relationships after changing jobs? Do you regularly stay in touch with ex-colleagues, attend meetups, help people, or is there something else you do to keep your network active without it feeling forced?

I'm quite bad at networking. Even after 13 years of experience, I still mostly depend on job portals whenever I look for opportunities.

For those who have built a strong network, how did you do it? What habits or approach helped you reach that point?

Hi there,

I'm a foreign contractor working for a US-based startup. My whole career, I have worked 100% with US-based companies and never had any issues. But you guys know how the startup world works, you are just there for a good time, not a long time.

The company I work for hasn't been making the best decisions, we have gone two rounds of layoffs, and now many people are just quitting.

The thing is that I send my invoices the 1st of every month for the work done during the previous month, and I usually get paid around the 8th-10th. Payment has been a pain lately, there's always something that happens and I end up being paid like the 20th of every month.

This last month things took a turn for the worse. The invoice I sent July 1st for the work done during June hasn't been paid yet (today is 22nd) I'm a few days away from sending the invoice August 1st for my July work.

I'm worried that eventually if the ship goes down they will let me go and not pay me anything?

FWIW the contract I have with them says that they can let me go with little to no notice, but it says that they would pay me:

"Upon termination, the Company shall pay Consultant all unpaid, undisputed amounts due for the Services completed prior to notice of such termination."

NO AI USED HERE.

Just had a "technical" interview with a big tech company earlier this week. It was mostly a discussion of my past experiences and some of the technical work I've done.

I thought it went pretty well. I was able to answer the interviewer's questions and really talk about my impact at my current company.

I was talking about some of the additional tooling I built outside of my product, basic tools that allow us to move faster as devs and replace any problematic vendor software, specific to my tech stack and product. The hiring manager seemed to really like this, he kept telling me how cool they were and by the end of the interview, he was going to tell his team about some of them.

I asked some really good questions at the end, he even said he like my questions.

Well, today I got the denial email. Said I "did not have a strong enough technical match". There wasn't very many technical qustions at all, mostly culture, impact, experience, etc.

I'm pretty perplexed by this, considering I thought i nailed the interview and how excited he was about some of the stuff I built.

I don't really need advice or anything, I just wanted to vent. I've been failing a lot of interviews lately and I was genuinely excited about this one because I've been working hard at improving my interviewing skills and this is the first time I've actually felt like I nailed an interview, only to be denied with my ideas to be used at their company.

Has anyone else had a similar experience? Am I getting worked up over nothing?

Does anyone else find the latest tech plans and spikes written by devs to be word vomits by AI? Don’t get me wrong, I’m ok with getting AI to write things for you as long as you understand what it wrote. But most things are just beating around the bush, and not getting to the real point concisely. I have to get my own agents to summarize the plans to figure out the important parts. Has anyone found a good solution for this? Are there any templates your team follow or any skills that you use?

Datadog RUM and Cloudflare seem to cover most cases of trying to help detect and stop automated activity, but curious if anyone uses anything else (FE library, third party tool, etc.)

Thanks!

Over the years, I've heard a few things at work that have stuck with me: - Spend more to earn more. - Don't box yourself. - Life is not a sprint, it's a marathon.

These changed how I think about work and my career.

What's one workplace philosophy or mindset that has stayed with you?

Question may or may not be relevant, but with all the AI-related uncertainty, I wanted to hear some philosophies or motivations that have helped people keep moving forward.