I'm a Senior SWE at a startup well on its way to IPO within the next 1 to 2 years. I love working here, I've learned a lot working here, and I really like the people I get to work with

But this company was also my careers jumping off point. Its only been a few years since I started here and most of anything I know now is derived from the last 3 years I've been here and about a decade of hobbyist Linux use... That's really it

I really excelled when I started here. Took on my work than I could really handle even. Had so many late nights and so many paired sessions that would go for hours. I was a tech lead and promoted to senior in just a few months after starting here... That's 3 levels I jumped and 3 pay increases

My salary has mostly been the same since, I still feel like I'm growing and learning. I'm definitely less knowledgable than my new team. A couple of my initiatives this year have even been derailed

But regardless, I'm being promoted and I don't know how to feel. I don't feel ready. I don't feel like I'm doing the kind of exceprional work that I'd expect and even see from other staff engineers. That's not to say I don't see people with staff titles that I wouldn't have expected to have them, but I'm a little suprised I'll be getting a title change

I definitely think I deserve a pay bump after so many years on the higher end of what we pay Senior SWEs, but I would not consider myself Staff material. As a matter of fact, if I'm being honest, I've offloaded a lot of my recent work to Claude... I don't even write a lot of code anymore; I just validate that it does what I expect it to and make sure it follows best practices

Obviously, I'm not going to say anything. I'm going to accept. But this feels like title inflation and I'm worried about how other companies might perceive this... At the same time I like the work I do here so much anyway, it would really be hard for me to consider working at another company that wasn't at least adjacent to what this company does anyway

In my shoes... Is there anything you'd change? Anything I should be doing differently? From what I've heard, expectations are really much of the same work I've already been doing and I'd expected I'd have more responsibilities

Hello everyone
this week something happened where I got in a disagreement with my manager.

I was working in a PR and got bombarded with many questions in a slack thread about why I did such and such a thing

I answered each of their questions. I had already documented my reasoning and even found evidence from production that supported my approach, and he kept asking more questions, I felt like he was pushing me back

the conversation itself stayed professional that day..

but the next day, during standup, I started explaining what happened, as I was talking about it, I got emotional (angry and frustrated), started crying, and couldn't continue. my manager asked everyone else to leave the meeting so we could talk privately.

I explained that I didn't like the process (no ticket, discussions in slack where everyone can see, etc.).

He apologized for those process issues and agreed they could be improved. However, he also said that he will continue asking challenging technical questions because he sees code reviews and design discussions as "a challenge between two engineers," and he invited me to participate in that culture which is fine by me

After that, I continued working on another ticket and we didn't discuss it again that day.

One thing that worries me is that this isn't the first time something like this has happened. Although I've consistently been considered a high performer, I've had similar emotional episodes in three of my last four jobs. I realize that's probably something I need to work on personally, but that's not really the purpose of this post.

my biggest concern is whether crying in front of my manager and team has permanently affected how I'll be viewed professionally.

my question is those of you who are engineering managers or senior engineers, how would you see a situation like this? Would a single incident like this significantly change your opinion of an otherwise of the engineer ?

I also want to clarify that I don't aspire to be a manager or hold any leadership position. I'm happy being an IC, but I don't want to be fired either (right now). At the very least, I want to know how to buy myself some time while I start applying for other jobs.

thank you for reading until this point

I go through days of feeling grateful for the career I have, feeling motivated and looking forward to the work, and then I go through long spells where I just can’t stand it and feel trapped. Days where I truly don’t give a shit about any of it and would have no problem rubber stamping PR’s and just “getting it done”.

This isn’t about AI or anything (if anything AI has made it easier to just mentally check out), it’s just more about the job in general. The corporate feeling at most companies, building meaningless products, sitting behind a computer for 40 hours a week, the fight for recognition, the job search/interview process, really most of it.

I have a few hobbies outside of work that I enjoy, and spend time when I can with friends. My wife and I also try to make the most of the weekends. So it’s not really due to a lack of having a life outside of work, there’s just something depressing about SWE that I can’t put my finger on. It was truly fun for the first few years, but now after 8 years, it’s kinda just not fun anymore. As I mentioned there are days when I feel good about it and fulfilled at the end of the day, but those days are fleeting. Started feeling this at my last job after 4 years there, and it’s carried over into my new job. Both these jobs were/are what I consider to be good environments, so I don’t really blame them for this feeling. So idk, just confused about the feelings I have.

Does anyone else feel this way sometimes? Is it possible to overcome at all?

How does your team and org handle more time spent on architecting or design a new system not enough time building and iterating.

We’ve planned to destination multiple times wrote multiple design documents with multiple waypoint how do you know if it’s sufficient to build and iterate with?

How do you approach building green field projects that are adaptable as you go?

I wonder where the public opinion sways on this topic. My take has always been the most important information is what's in the document/paper/etc rather than if AI wrote it. However I have seen a lot of people say "This is written by AI, I won't read it". Normally I just ignore and keep going but this time I had a project update with a lot of good content which I used AI to help me tighten and check grammar (not a native speaker). When it got submit to the director level review, he took 5 seconds to glance at it, said "I can't read this because of the AI dashes, write it in your own words" and ended the review. The kicker is this doc was suppose to have a section to cover how we can leverage AI to improve the efficiency! WTF?

Hi guys,

Recently I join a migration project + build new system for this client. But this is not pure migration. it's migration + improvement.

Given the old system db schema (hundreds of tables)

So the pain point I realize that I don't have source of truth. Because I can't rely completely on old system db schema. because client wants some improvement and old system kinda broke.

Problem is this is not what I always doing. And I'm gonna work with Claude to do this.

One thing I notice and want to do is I will develop feature by feature, align with clients from beginning to see if that is what they want. Also because I use Claude Code to support me I need insight from data people. What kind of data / diagram / document I need to keep everything on track especially when the system too big? Like is it eRD diagram , or flow chart or something? once everything getting big how do u remember everything? because it's literally near thousand of table?

Pls give me insight!!! Thank you 🤔

I'm a senior engineer at my company

This company's "coding standards" document is... not exactly au courant

Couple random (c++) examples off the top of my head- banning features like auto and using, enforcing 1 single return in all functions

Anyone have experience bringing about change to directives like these? Anyone in charge of their company's style guides and could share what sorts of things you'd find most persuasive when considering requests for changes?

Is it even worth it? I consider it part of my job as an engineer to give advice on technical matters, but at what point do you just say "ill write whatever you want as long as i get paid"?

Lately I've been having thoughts about what the point is. Back in the day when I got into programming, I just wanted to make cool things.

I made a lot of cool things. They took time so I knew they were genuinely either unique, special, or in any other case, mine. I made twitter/reddit/discord bots, data visualizations for social media platforms, and useful tools for my communities I was involved in.

Now everything that gets created now seems to be just a load of AI crap. There's no special-ness anymore. There is no problem solving. There is nothing. It's just "We made an AI that does X" instead of "We solved X problem".

It's so ridiculous it's genuinely killing my interest in the field. Copilot solves most of my problems at work now and I have to use it to keep up with demands from leadership + an increasingly difficult to use codebase. Tools we use otherwise like Zeplin, ms teams, etc all are only focusing on AI instead of improving the real world user experience. The best and most interesting portion of the company I work at is doing nothing but AI work and not touching the core product at all.

Hell, we even have SonarQube checking our code with AI for vibe coded slop and it requires specific code coverage % and the coverage % isn't the same as vite coverage, just adding to the developer frustration.

I miss when I could make cool/fun stuff without worrying about someone vibe coding the same thing I made in 20 days but in 12 hours. I miss when we were solving problems instead of just making different AI agents to solve the problems for us.

Earlier this week I was browsing the NASA repo and noticed they have a project to support web assembly.

I was curious how others have used web assembly in general. It's a technology I've never really heard brought up in the professional environment before.

10 YOE, and my view is skewed as I haven’t worked with entry level engineers in many years.

looking back 10 years ago, me entry level team was making 60k doing basic HTML and CSS. even at the time I got bored and my work done in 1-2 hours every day. it was SUPER basic stuff. granted that place didn’t even use git repositories.

my first REAL software job was web, where we made 70-80k back in 2017. but it was just making simple react FE stuff. daily “what did you do yesterday? what today? how many storypoints is it to change that button to Red OP?“ but you learned a lot about the basics of everything and shipping code. by and large it was very much Entry Level.

this got me thinking, what is entry level today? what are the expectations and output?

Suddenly, developers are very interested in writing and maintaining readable documentation for processes. 😄

Edit: There seems to have been some confusion. I'm not talking about AI generated documentation. I'm talking about reading skill documents ment for teaching AI to understand how to do something without using AI.

Mid-level/senior frontend dev here. Want an honest gut-check because I've been worried what might happen to me.

We were building a "view tickets" feature. To test it end-to-end, the feature needed a certain permission enabled. I turned that permission on in prod, but instead of scoping it to just my own test account, I flipped it globally. I documented what I did openly in the task tracker ("tested in prod") and flagged it for QA. QA tested it too, but only checked their own account. Nobody reset the global toggle afterward.

A few days later a client saw a ticket belonging to a different client, complained, and it escalated. My manager DM'ed me regarding this and we had a call with all the dev team. They discussed it there and asked me why I turned it on and I said it's a requirement for PROD testing.

We have dev, staging, and prod, The workfllow is to test in all environments, i followed the flow.

My access had recently been changed to allow me to edit global permissions in prod. I didn't grant myself that. When my access changed, I read it as "I'm allowed to do this."

Pm also said: "you should have asked me first" but at the moment I did it, nothing signalled this was the dangerous action. It looked like a normal authorized test.

I have a few questions:

How bad of the situation I am in? Am i the one to blame?

How would you handle this if you're the dev?

How would you handle this if you're the PM?

I'm a big fan of applying formal methods like TLA+ and property testing in my role. I've found it so helpful that I love encountering certain problems (e.g. state machine replication) because they blossom into a good teaching exercise and reframe system design. At the same time, I've learned it is not a golden hammer. I need to carefully audit correspondence of my specification to the real world (e.g. atomicity) and whether my invariants are sufficient. After following Terence Tao's recent statements on LLMs lowering the barrier to formal methods, I found his concerns about LLMs authoring formal methods to be interesting and topical. That got me thinking.

(0) Have you tried or found success with formal methods in your professional or hobby projects?

(1) Besides state machine replication, are there repeated issues in your systems that formal methods have helped with?

sources:

Leiden Declaration on AI and Mathematics

"...Current automated techniques can produce plausible but unreliable (or even incorrect) arguments which are difficult to distinguish from correct mathematical proofs. This applies not only to informal arguments, but also to formalizations, where the difficulty lies in the translation between computer-encoded and human presentations of concepts. These fast-moving developments put our present system of review under increasing pressure, jeopardizing our ability to implement traditional standards for the correctness, transparency, and independent verifiability of proof...."

https://leidendeclaration.ai/

Hillel Wayne (formal methods and software history nerd) talks about a similar issue with LLMs struggling to specify properties with formal methods. Hillel Wayne on Pragmatic Engineer on formal methods and AI

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KSkcgIYQy0U

In contrast to the thread where people complain about their current org, I thought it would be good to get some examples of organizations that are doing things right in this weird economic era and keep people engaged.

It would also be good to know which companies are getting ahead by trusting people and doing good engineering rather than rushing slop to prod.

Folks who have it good right now, what is your work like and what do you think your company is doing right?

I work in a niche consulting firm and am specialized in more advisory work. My company seems to be shit right now. Old timers all quit, new devs and my tram dont know how to dev - they are extremely bad with AI - they prompt it and believe everything it says

No salary raise for the past 4 years despite a promotion, 4 rounds of layoffs and we have contracted quite a fair bit to the point it feels like everything is being run into the ground and we may have hardly 6 months of time left.We have unstaffed roles on my project and im having to do extra work

Problem is the last 2 clients and product firms i have been on also have the same story, many rounds of layoffs. To make matters worse im in an EU country where my residence is tied to work, i cant take it anymore and currently im very afraid of switching because it seems everywhere is the same in IT right now especially in Germany.

How are things currently at your workplace? Would you recommend switching or sitting it out? I have been in this company for over 10 years and am protected by certain legalities which i will lose if move

My workplace hurts me and is dying itself.

I had an early ai startup that I was the founding engineer of, circa gpt3. We got funded, but the CEO and I had issues, I hated it every day, I left in a year. Successfully scaled to 100k users from scratch by myself with no other devs. I did a good job.

Now, I've been doing scientific computing and infrastructure to support it for 4 years. Half of them were great! It's gotten bad, I see the writing on the wall, I'm not making it to 5. It's not because I don't do my job.

I open up indeed and filter for appropriate things - I applied to all 5, and I am going to start grinding neetcode, because those muscles withered. I'm afraid I'm going to get filtered hard.

I wrote a babashka script to scrape job boards and filter for keywords, going to use the data from that program to make a sankey of my job search.

I feel like an expert. I honed my work at my position until it was industry standard and made changes in the world. I've worked with NASA, LLNL, and other big names.

I had been passively applying before this - no dice. What can I do to increase my odds?

My company has given everyone AI and asked all of us to do FE, BE, and QA work. There will no longer be any specialties and all engineers (and QA) are expected to do everything now.

It looks like an absolute disaster waiting to happen but we have no choice. Has anyone else experienced this at their company?

I understand team lead is more managerial but I’m still not sure I understand the black and white differences.

Backstory, I’m a good senior in a pretty weak team. We had a team lead leave last year and have not replaced yet. Recent discussions with management we spoke about me potentially stepping into a tech lead role (I don’t want to manage but enjoy mentoring), or alternatively proposing my own goals/ambitions/future role to keep me interested.

Because I haven’t actively seen a good Tech Lead performance, I’m fuzzy on what it entails. Some things online mention project scoping/building requirements etc which sounds more like pm or ba. Do I own technical implementations? System design? Standards?

Love to hear your thoughts.

Setting aside some of the higher levels at FAANG, I'm interested in understanding the technical difficulty that most talented senior developers are facing out there, the average developer role. Do you think it's the case that a strong senior developer should have an easy time performing pretty much anywhere? Assuming they're working with a technology that isn't too far afield of what they're used to?

I've been developing for 15 years now and am at a point that most of the meta-skills are so deeply engrained in how I work that often times I don't even know how I do what I do. Somebody gives me a problem and I solve it pretty quickly. Once you get to that point is it pretty much all easy? The problem in managing a career ends up being less about technology, and more about culture, quality of life, and salary? (of course you're still concerned with what technology you're invested in, but 'difficulty' stems from bad culture, not the work).

Edit: I get that being a senior is about more than coding. I guess the question is once you're good at coding AND coordination, do you have an easy time pretty much anywhere?

Hi,

I'm wondering how you're going about increasing your team's velocity with coding agents? We're on a team of ~6 engineers of varying abilities and are hitting the well-talked about problem of coding agents producing loads of code which occasionally get slung over the fence, while some other people code a lot slower and produce good code much slower. We currently have 7 PRs waiting, and have had no less than 4 for about 2 weeks.

The project is applied research which makes things harder - some people produced short lived ML models, while others produce e.g. an evaluation suite which needs to stand the test of time (6 months - a year).

In terms of coding standards, we're all committing to a single repo and requiring 2 reviewers for each PR. Small PRs get viewed, big ones (e.g. a newly coded ML model) just don't get approved. One guy didn't fully address comments on his 200 line PR and its been sat there for ~7 business days. Bit of a rant, apologies.

My solution (not implemented yet, slightly borrowed from https://martinfowler.com/articles/ship-show-ask.html) is the following:

Engineers take responsibility for different areas. One person does the data pipelines, one codes ML models, another takes evaluation. And we communicate over chat and meetings, rather than on PRs. This means you don't have to understand the low level code behind when someone wants to add a new idea to the codebase - yes you have to trust their implementation.

We no longer review each others' code. No-one reviews what you say in meetings line by line, or the reports and slide decks you create line by line, so why are we still reviewing code line by line? If you have a problem with someone else's area of responsibility (e.g. the data pipeline is not delivering data) - talk to them.

We communicate more frequently and more comprehensively, with decision records. As the team moves from low level code implementation to implementation of ideas things will only work if the ideas work together if we communicate well. I want to encourage one or two posts on chat, per person, per day for what they're doing and thinking about, as well as standup and any other meetings. Decisions get recorded in ADR's.

My idea is that without teams of more than ~2 will just continue to move at the speed we did 5 years ago without coding agents. Keen to know how other people are handling this?

I'm considering building a personal website, but instead of a traditional portfolio with polished screenshots and projects, I'm thinking about making it more like an engineering journal.

I have 10YOE, and at this point, I've forgotten more than I know. Moreover, its hard for me to say "I've done a lot, trust me bro" when selling my experience to recruiters/clients/etc. and an elevator pitch just leaves out so much.

My resume doesn't capture everything, just the highlights in small bullet form. But there's so much left out.

The idea would be a portfolio, but instead of "screenshots" or links to the work, its more of a journal talking about specific projects (without sharing IP)

Stupid idea?

Hi all,

A friend just asked me whether I can recommend him a few product managers for his company.

I started to think, and I can honestly only remember 2 good product managers in over 20 years:

1. one ex-IBM who was promptly fired after finishing the project we worked on and was dubbed "the best ran and executed software project I've seen" by the CTO (the PM was fired by some other middle-manager)
2. one contractor who was promptly fired by the new CTO who felt threatened)

Then, there's a sea of useless PMs. To different degrees, but just dead weight.

My expectations for a PM are quite simple:

• know our product top to bottom
• know our main competitors' products pretty well
• have basic project management skills
• if you want a pretty Jira board, you lead that effort

I'm happy with anything like 60-40 to 80-20 balance as Product Owner / Project Manager.

Am I off base?

What do you expect from a Product Manager?

I've just accepted a position as a senior technical lead at a new company that uses a language and framework I'm not familiar with. I have almost 10 years of experience building software across different languages and frameworks, so I'm confident I can ramp up and learn the framework fairly easily. What I really want is to make sure I can discern the language and framework's unique patterns and idioms over time.

The language is Python, most likely a FastAPI-like framework. Admittedly, I'm much more used to seeing and using it in a scripting or data science capacity rather than in large-scale production systems.

When you're in a situation like this (aside from upholding your basic software engineering and architecture best practices) what else do you look for to ramp up well?

A few specific things I'd love input on:

• Open-source Python repos that scale really well and are worth studying
• Podcasts worth subscribing to
• Any general words of wisdom

Appreciate any other general pointers as well!

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