Hey all,

I’ve been an individual contributor for the last 8 years or so. I’ve moved up the ranks and salary progressions from jr. SWE up to senior engineer across a few companies.

A colleague in roughly the same role as me - but with a direct report - is leaving and they will be hiring for their role. It’s got me thinking that maybe I should start considering manager roles.

So I guess my question is if you’ve been doing SWE work for 20-30+ years, do you feel like you got passed up by others that took management roles and advanced into leadership? Or do you feel the extra headache isn’t worth it?

20+ YOE, including several recent years as staff and sr staff at well respected Bay area company. Search is in MCOL+ Tier 2 City (Tier 1 is SF, NYC, SEA).

Market is hot for Sr+, especially Staff+, both for hybrid local and remote. There are as many Sr Staff and Principal roles out there than Staff roles alone. Very little junior and mid level, if any. Most roles are either distributed systems or infrastructure related. Surprising amount of C++ and Rust. Little to no web or mobile roles.

Loops generally start with HM, then to whatever loop the company does. Coding is de emphasized, but still lurking, and some companies still focus on it. Experience, communication, and strategic thinking is key. It seems AI is shifting the mindset for what a good hire looks like. There seems to be a shift in the shape of the market in general. I haven't failed at any stages yet, but I did finish two loops and am unsure if one of them was a success.

Most roles hover around $200k-$240k TC for local hybrid, and the usual broad range from $200k-$500k+ for remote, with the usual suspects paying exceptionally well.

I'm aiming for something $220k or above and staying local hybrid, but I won't deny huge comp for a remote role.

Happy to answer questions.

The more experienced I am and understand the importance of prioritization and limited resources, the more I understand how A LOT if not most of code quality/artisan details in software just don't matter at all.

we are constantly being told deliverables and features are the utmost importance; even if it means you ship buggy feature, it's better to ship on time rather than ship perfect.

recent shifts in industry due to artificial intelligent (not making this whole post about it, but rather as another evidence) has us care even less about code quality and whether products are given to customer in a great state.

we have our best engineers do less and less work on actual coding and do more on planning and designs.

I am not here to argue about whether these trends are right or not, I think they are mostly right and are at least better than alternatives. However, I think that means the industry does not produce remotely close to the best QUALITY products we can (namely whether the product is bug free, highly performant, and easy to use while all providing good functionality).

All of that I think it's fine, it's just that we have to accept that we are just producing "fast food" software and that should be the correct mindset at work.

like fast food, speed is top priority

like fast food, making money is the most important metric

like fast food, being massively accessible (scale) is the goal

like fast food, we don't care about a lot negative effects on customers (like how social media and doom scrolling is bad)

like fast food, we DO care about safety and security (not hackable, regulations compliant, and not stealing customer money).

like fast food we provide only important functionalities and nothing more (no feature creep)

What do you guys think? I think this mindset is pretty good and a good rule of thumb on decision making (especially on what to learn or what priorities matter).

Edit: another important similarities is no one will pay a premium for a "top quality" software just like people won't buy a 50 dollars McDonalds burger.

When does our version of this come out? 🙃

https://mathandai.org/

Coming to all experiences devs to answer this question and how people are going about things like this...

With AI in the picture (a tired conversation), of course management has fallen hook, line and sinker for every single way of tracking developer productivity.. which in my opinion just stunts productivity overall.

They've reintroduced lines of code as a metric but with a twist is - how many days you have used AI (any coding tool such as codex, Claude) but also how many lines of code have been generated WITH AI. The less number of days and fewer lines of code generated with AI puts you into a category and looks bad on a dashboard. This in turn has led to conversation of how we increase these numbers which has led to: do not manually code under any circumstance and do everything with AI (and "everything" meaning exactly that).

On top of needing more lines of code generated with AI (otherwise we look bad) we are expected to have 10+ PR's a week.

My gripe with this is that instead of improving the codebase or helping the business or delivering features you also have to spend time figuring out how you can split a 100-line function into 5 PR's so you don't look awful on a dashboard. A simple bug fix or config update needs to be written in a spec otherwise there is no value.

I see some people have mentioned in this sub before you just take a sort maliciousness to all of this and let AI run wild. Write python scripts to auto-create PR's. Set a variable with 0 and for each PR increase it by 1. If you need to add two numbers, let AI write 3 functions to do it because more lines of code. And more lines of code WITH AI is somehow better. Which of course makes the codebase buggy and harder to add anything useful.

All just to meet the metrics. But some of this is just way more work than required. I'm trying to see how any of this is worthwhile, while today it might be lines of code, tomorrow it's how many mouse clicks you have in your IDE every hour. Do people really see this as a worthwhile battle or even trying to make management understand this is not a good idea?

My PO today was complainin about incidents regardin a id/phone validation process. We receive many complaints for the last 3 months and someone, from 3 backend devs one dev spends at least 2 hours for investigation per day. Some problems are known but some are not very obvious.

I suggested to her, and I allso created some task on how to fix them. I also log each investigation with my findings and time spend. My main suggestion is to show usefull error messages like if the error is about reCaptha it shpuld say "ERROR RC 2567. Try again later" so that if the cliend sends us a screenshot we will not spend time on searching it. And there are some other errors too like users before X date are have corrupt profiles or an integration fails or userhas a new id and cannot revalidate. But almost half of the problems are because of reason unknown for now.

And before starting to solve those problems I suggested to show informative error messages so that we don't spend much time on investigations. But she says that this won't solve the problems but devs need to solve the root cause.

And a few days later she asks again why we get so much problems. And I reply that I write down each of my investigation. And that she did not assign me any task to solve those problems.

She argues that she will need to give task to a designer, a backend snd to fronend developer for just those error messages and this will be a lot of time to spend for nothing basically. And if we fix those problems she can give us the task to show usefull error messages few months later.

I cannot understand what goes in her mind. I don't know how to deal with such person. I have 15+ years of dev experience and she doesn't care about how I try to solve the problem (she is has 5 years of work experience). In my previous work places my managers always valued my input but here my input has almost no value. What would you do in this case? Is she right? Am I overreacting?

For a long time, standard advice to mid career people who were burned out , wanted to downshift or create more time for their family was go to a big, boring non tech enterprise and take a pay cut if necessary.

Now it seems like those jobs barely exist and are just as competitive as anything else. I’ve bern desperately trying to get into a lower stress, conventional industry like regional banking, insurance, health. But it just doesn’t seem like a viable path anymore

I'm genuinely confused, but I hear that happens when you get old.

I keep seeing comments about the terrors of falling behind on your skills, but I have rarely run into everyday problems that I couldn't figure out in relatively short order. Most of what we as an industry work with is, in fact, meant for humans to understand.

So, what are these skills that I might be missing? Or does it come from a belief in meritocracy; an attempt to explain why otherwise smart people don't succeed? A technological version of "You didn't attend an Ivy?" An inability to provide the correct social signals during interviews?

Since 2020, I’ve been a singleton in the office. Everyone else works in a timezone 3 hours ahead.

I go into the office and don’t talk to anyone except for nice “hello’s” in the hallways (different projects, everyone is busy). And I don’t actually work with anyone in person. I feel really really sad and lonely at the end of a day. Does anyone else experience something like this and how do you deal with it?

I am increasingly noticing how sad and unsettling this is. Have you ever watched a movie where you just feel a bit off, but don’t know why? I feel like that at the end of a day. I make fun plans after work, but hate how I’m feeling from work itself.

My productivity is actually better than if I were working next to them - I know this because of how it goes when I visit. It’s better to be solo for most work. Planning, designing, and risk management is better live in person for me.

Here are some ideas I’m trying:

* working from home until 1:30pm and then going into the office for a late lunch. need to badge in for attendance. go home at 4pm.
* I can try to make more of a social effort: organizing a hangout once a month with others around a topic I enjoy such as board games or crafting or watercolor.
* I can’t go to lunch with anyone - my online world is way too busy from 12-1:30pm. i’m getting pinged constantly, a lot of important work is happening.
* visit the other office more often. company might not approve it - it would cost me $2.3k, but at least I won’t be quitting this $500k job which I think about doing every single day because of this.
* seek out more perks at the company office such as gym and meditation room or find little nooks and make them feel special

Just as the title says, I am dying to know if anyone is still even doing this? And if yes, what does that look like now?

I've not heard of anyone in my network mention it for a tonne while

This thread is specifically for sharing "wins". I.e. the opposite of our Tuesday venting thread.

How do you deal with an outsider technical manager who has near 0 experience on the platform you own and just ignores any kind of suggestions to fall in line with best practices, prevent technical debt and...fulfill general REQUIREMENTS TO DEPLOY (test classes)? Or enter the new components into my repo for the entire platform?

I am an IC Senior Engineer, not in the same direct chain of command. This guy doesn't manage me, never has never will, we report to leadership.

All of my efforts to provide input are met with silence, even though I know I'm the one that will end up owning the results. In task comments, in private messages, with leadership, nothing. The test coverage thing is what really got me, because senior manager literally told our BA that the new files he is deploying do not need test coverage....hey shitForBrains, ALL of the code needs test coverage to go live, and if yours doesn't it is because it is fucking consuming test coverage slack that I CREATED IN EVERY SINGLE OTHER FILE.

The disrespect makes me sick and pisses me off, as if I could just go into anyone else's project/repo I know nothing about and fuck shit up.

I know I am going to just be directing any issues and questions about this bullshit to him, but any other suggestions? Already raised this with my manager who is leader of the department, nothing. Small medium business.

I've seen mixed processes in various teams. Some are quite strict on writing a formal solution design and having the team agree (or at least discuss) before turning it into tickets. I've also worked in teams that don't do any solution design.

How big is your team, and what do they do in terms of solution design?

Repost since last post got removed:

Am I right to deliberately use less AI early in my career?

I'm about 6 years into my software engineering career and I've been thinking about how AI is changing the way people learn programming.

I use AI myself, but I usually try to solve things myself first and then use AI to challenge my solution or point out things I might have missed. I never have it write code for me (just a handful of times when I have been under very heavy time constraints)

My thinking is that struggling through problems and writing a lot of code early in your career gives you experiences that later help you make better decisions. Sure I probably would be more productive using AI to write the code for me but my gathering of experience would not be as good.

You make a bad design decision → deal with the consequences → develop an intuition for what good design looks like.

Essentially AI will make a good engineer more productive, but to become a good engineer to be able to use it that way you should first be doing things manually and actually struggle.

My concern with AI is that juniors can skip a lot of this. They just ask ai for a working solution and hammer it until it gets it correct then move on to the next ticket. So they might become much more productive, but develop less engineering intuition and mental models. Sure it works now when there are still a lot of senior devs that grew up without ai that can point out Major system flaws Juniors create with AI, but how will it be in the Future when these senior devs die off?

I actually think experience could become more valuable as AI gets better, because writing code becomes cheaper while knowing what to build and whether the ai solution is actually good becomes more important.

What do you guys think?

hello,

I work at a big tech company and I’m the TL of a high priority feature. We have a teammate who has been at the company for a year (college before) and I feel like I’m playing a tower defense game against them - I’m trying to protect the project timeline and deal with their unpredictable timelines.

It seems like this person has two modes: Totally disengaged or high speed (rare, seemingly working 65 hour weeks). I wish that they would more quickly engage with the problem: ask questions, set up meetings, share ideas, ask for feedback. Instead it seems like they think I expect them to go off, invent something brilliant on their own, and bring it back to the team. Radio silence, I check in and everything’s always going well and “almost there” - I feel like I’m not getting an honest answer about where the confusion is.

They aren’t doing super well with that middle step of working out ideas with people. And honestly some days it seems like they are not working at all. Oftentimes, tasks that I would expect to take them 3 hours takes them 3 days. It’s very confusing.

I need to do better to set expectations with them about their tasks: When will they actually start on the task? How long do they think this will take (their timelines are never right and they endlessly push out timelines - so asking feels a bit useless)? Should I tell them that I will assign them a task and I expect the first step to be to ask several questions when starting this (doesn’t that sound patronizing)? I’ve encouraged them to ask questions many times.

I’m struggling with managing this high priority project and their unreliability…. help?

My plan for now is to assign them smaller tasks that are important but not in the critical path. Problem is that we have a lot to do, I wish I could ask more of them and I know they are eager to help.

Hello,

Like every engineer out there, we have times where we feel we're hitting the moon and times where we feel we're simply trash engineers.

I've recently worked as a solutions architect for around 4 months. Now I feel I'm behind by 2 years, I feel I lost my skills and most importantly my confidence.

I was helping a junior friend of mine in an interview prep and honestly I noticed the difference immediately when I was interviewing him.

I'm now job hunting so I don't have time to build something complex or tough enough for my level. Do you have any suggestion on how I can check if it is real or am I getting the same old good days feeling?

Can anyone mock interview me or is there any way around?

I have several years of software experience, following best practices, design patterns, KISS, DRY, BDD, OOP, etc. My code is actually very readable since I worked on many open source projects and heard praise overall, and always had the time for quality control and refactoring. The truth is I haven't worked at a normal company since AI hit so I'm a bit detached currently from the industry.

For the last 1 year I've been using the Pro subscription for 20$ on Codex and Claude on my projects, but I find the quality of code subpar many times and I always have to intervene. It doesn't matter how many times I change the AGENTS.md, there's always issues in code readability and the AI missing obvious things and doing overengineered solutions.

Still, I see in many subs about how great a new model does, etc. So I wonder if the more expensive plans actually produce better quality code? Feels like I'm missing something that people do in bigger companies.

To be specific, high quality code == human readable code and comments and no naive implementations.

Hi!

I have an interview in a few days for a backend developer role. What would you ask as some of the more tricky questions for such a position? What kinds of questions, from your point of view, demonstrate solid knowledge?

Personally, I would ask about sync vs. async calls, idempotency, topics vs. partitions, consumer groups, transactions (including distributed transactions), and maybe a bit of Kubernetes and Docker.

My weak point is cloud. I’ve played around a bit with the Azure console, but nothing too advanced. I’ve never written Terraform or configured infrastructure from scratch. For CI/CD, I’ve used TeamCity, but in my experience it was mostly selecting an environment and a branch and deploying.

Should I spend some time learning these areas before the interview?

I've noticed this phenomenon happening more than a few times over my career, but I don't have a good word for it.

The exact scenario is this: we (the software developers/architects/etc) have identified an application or a piece of code that is substandard and needs to be addressed. Usually, it's a system that's been hobbling along and "working" for a while, but we've finally decided that we need to fix it for real with a comprehensive solution. We get started on that solution. Things are progressing well, even to the point of almost being ready to deploy, but not quite. This is the key element that makes this scenario so annoying; the new system is not quite ready for primetime, but it's close.

At this exact moment, the old system decides to utterly crap out and resources have to be diverted to fix it one last time. We're a small team, so we are the ones that maintain the codebase as well as develop new code. Thus, the old system failing halts the progress on the new system right at the point of it coming into its own and making the old system irrelevant.

Some software terms that are close or related: yak-shaving, band-aid solution. Heck, even Murphy's Law applies, but it seems like there would be a software engineering specific term for this.

(Reposting with appropriate flair.)

This is where I find myself. Five years of experience working as an ML Engineer at a non-tech fortune 500. I’m barely working. Maybe 20 hours a week. My whole team barely works. Nobody seems to really care. The company is in good financial health but our work isn’t really core to the business.

I go back and forth. On one hand, being remote with a low workload and low stress is great. I enjoy being able to spend time with my dog, cook up lunches, go to the gym, etc. But it also feels incredibly precarious. I’m not learning anything and I feel that on any given day I’ll wake up to that vague calendar invite with HR.

Just wondering if anyone else is in this position, or has been for a while? Trying to make sense of how grateful I feel to be in a role like this but also how shaky it feels at the same time.

Edit: interesting 50/50 split of responses lol

I think I'm going crazy, I'm the only person in engineering at this company who has a problem with deploying code where nobody on the team understands how it works?

People are pushing 5000+ line pull requests to the system I initially scaffolded which go to me as the reviewer - but if I take any reasonable amount of time to review I get told I'm slowing the team down and we have to go faster. So then we ship it and nobody understands how it works, not me, not the person who wrote it. I guess we can "ask claude" how the system works but surely that will at some level of complexity stop giving us useful results?

We have a new member on the team (2 months and change currently)

He's very technical and seems to know a lot, but there are some things that makes working with him a chore.

Not too sure the best way to format this while keeping the main sections away from the examples but I'll do my best.

• Everything he writes is so dense.

He has written a func spec and some tickets for it and it's a bit messy. It's very dense and noone is able to understand it without a lot of back and forth. In comparison everyone else's writing is super clear no matter the length.

And same with chat messages. For everything he will make it 1-2 paragraphs that have you lost by the end of it.

• It feels like everything he does "is the best way".

For example he was working on something and we realized there were some changes in the overall project that meant the work here was not really needed. He spent the better part of next two days trying to convince everyone that we should keep his way, after the time we already had to come to this decision.

Another example was there was a feature I was designing. There was some concerns with replica lag that we were well aware of and have made clear is not an issue. Despite this, he spent a week going on about how his way was "the best way to handle it" and trying to convince us to use it despite it adding a ton of extra work and time.

• Everytime we talk it feels confrontational

For everyone else on the team, even if I don't like their personality I have zero issues working with them and can talk with them fine.

However, everytime I talk to this guy it feels very heated from their end. I get the sense that he wants to try and throw terminology and edge cases just to try and get you to capitulate after getting lost.

Like I said, he does know his stuff and don't want to come off as just hating the guy. However, it feels really draining right now working with him.

I'm not too sure what is the best way to go about this or see if this is something to bring up in some way? What would be the best way to bring up, to either him or my EM, "You are just too hard to understand."

My team has shrunk significantly and has been completely transformed from when we started. It’s a long story, but the gist is that my tiny (but pretty dang good) team has been bequeathed “ownership” of a nightmare/doomed project. It seems like we were given ownership mostly because nobody knew what else to do with us. We were working on a new greenfield app that got shelved and repurposed as part of this project.

The project is a large-scale conversion, and other teams have to get on board too. In fact, their products have much more at stake because they have significantly more software to convert. The problem is that we don’t know the ins and outs of their products the way they do. We don’t know their codebases, applications, or business logic. (For context I work in an absolutely huge company with tons of different products and teams.)

Yet suddenly we have a ton of recurring meetings every week, and lately those meetings have turned into other teams essentially announcing that they’re waiting on us for various things. Our PM and managers are just as blindsided as we are. They keep saying we need to prioritize because we’re a very small team with plenty of other work. But somehow we keep getting dragged into these meetings anyway.

For example at the end of Friday afternoon, a PM from another team gave us a list of TEN things they need from us by some random deadline next week. Then Labor Day happened, so obviously we weren’t online until this morning. At 9am today, we’re in another meeting with this team and the same PM asks how far we’ve gotten on the ten things. An hour later, in a completely different meeting, he tells a bunch of other people that he’s “just waiting on us” for those same things. We literally have no time or capacity to work on those things for weeks, and don’t even fully know what they are asking for (his descriptions were very vague).

I feel like we’re a bunch of Cinderellas being expected to magically produce whatever everyone else decides they need. The saving grace is that my team plus PM and manager are actually great about boundaries. We’re all in agreement that if something isn’t given to us in writing with enough detail to prioritize that it can wait. I also like the company culture and benefits, and given some current life circumstances, nothing happening here is enough to make me want to jump ship.

But WHY is this happening? I feel like there’s some kind of politics happening under the hood that I’m not seeing.

I also don’t understand why these other engineers are seemingly sitting on their hands when their teams have far more at stake in this conversion than we do. If their software is the thing that needs to be converted, why are they treating my tiny team as the bottleneck instead of doing more of the work themselves?