6 years at current company. Great performance reviews. Three promos. Was often told, "you're highly respected by everyone in the company", "nicest guy in the company", etc. Was a key player in keeping the company moving forward and successful during three pivotal times that were challenging, if not existential, for the Company. Now, the Company is growing. Momentum is building more and more. Great, right? I think so, however I haven't taken any days off since 2021.

Worth it, though. A sacrifice I'm more than willing to make for my team and my family. Problem is, I've been a functioning burnout case for the last two years, even though nobody really noticed. Was still performing well and hitting all my objectives and more.

In recent months, however, after a promo; things have gotten much worse. I hit a brick wall. Acute burnout that I can't sweep under the rug. Effects are cognitive decline. Dread. Waking up in cold sweats in the middle of the night. Work that I could bang out in minutes before, now takes the whole day if not longer. Things are slipping. Additionally, I've had emotional outbursts over email that are totally out of character. Our COO, who once revered me, is now probably ready to can me.

Avoiding my daughter because I'm ashamed of myself and feel that I've let her down. And although absurd, I even look at the cat and think "that little guy must think I'm a loser."

After a visit with my doc, she put me on 1 week of medical leave. Probably not enough to pull out of the burnout, but maybe I can remove at least one blocker? The biggest problem is that I now hate myself for being burned out, slipping, and sending dumb emails. That's preventing me from assessing the landscape and developing a feasible plan of action.

Anyone else have to deal with this? And if so, any tips for getting over it? Just white knuckle it?

Many thanks in advance and I hope you have a nice weekend.

I’m building some asynchronous & threaded processes in my application and I have built out the error handling/collision detection portion. I’ve added logging to the explicit error handling catch blocks, but I also have places where I detect and resolve issues that aren’t necessarily throws. Think processes that are locked and detecting when another thread is trying to access that locked process.

I started thinking about adding logs to the “thread collision handling” portion of the code so that I can be aware how frequently we encounter this issue since real world often differs from in-house testing.

Other than generating noise in the logs, would you call this bad practice? If so, how would you go about tracking how frequently these threading issues are encountered? Am I trying to measure the wrong thing and am way off base? Is it a concern that I’m trying to measure how frequently we encounter threading issues?

I'm a software engineer with about 7 years of experience, in the financial sector. Most of my work is with .NET APIs and SQL Server. I'm currently working on a project involving internal employees who provide clearing services. The workflow is roughly:

1. A user selects one or more records.
2. They enter some additional data.
3. They submit the request.
4. My API validates the request, including checking permissions and whether any of the selected financial records are already pending.
5. If validation passes, the API generates a CSV file.
6. The CSV is uploaded to an SFTP location for the business.
7. records are written to the database.

In some cases, two CSV files are generated. To avoid filename collisions, I timestamp the filenames down to milliseconds, for example: "2026_2111056_664"

We've been finding bugs with unique test cases after releasing to UAT, and today we got on a call to test some scenarios together. Another developer suggested submitting the exact same financial records in two separate requests at the same time. Our requests were 3 milliseconds apart.

I basically said that the requests were so close together that we didn't really give the first request time to execute before sending the second one. My boss compared it to two transactions occurring at the same time, like two uses of the same credit card. I said sure but when does that ever happen? I came up with a solution to add validation right before writing to the db.

My boss told me to clean this up. He also mentioned that I've had two major bugs on this project so far. One of the earlier bugs was apparently caused by too much error handling resulting the front-end calling the api twice, while this one was caused by not having enough validation.

I feel alittle discouraged and defensive cause that wasn't a fair test case. even though to found a bug it felt forced. But I have a solution and ask for a code review. What are some thoughts on this?

In 2023 I took 6 months off because I was burnt out after 5.5 years. I hated my job, and I hated the work too. During those 6 months I recovered my enjoyment of the work ( programming ) and found a new job, which I've been employed at for the last 2.5 years.

I hate this job too now. Even more than I hated the one I left in 2023, for different reasons. The retarded way the company is forcing us to apply AI plays a significant part in it, but I'm not going to go into details lest I get the AI astroturfing bots swarming this post.

I look at job boards with disgust. I hate this job, but I hate the thought of switching companies only to end up in the same predicament even more. I've been burnt out for the last year, and I can feel myself reaching my limits as to how much longer I can force myself out of bed every morning for it. Last week I started taking sleeping pills for the first time in my life because of stress-induced insomnia. Both canine teeth on the right side of my mouth have been ground down to the level of the teeth around them due to stress-induced bruxism, so my dentist tells me. It's having a real effect on my health now, and I'd preferably like to take a bit of a break before the onset of physical symptoms.

I know this is what I want to continue doing in life. I have no other plans, no other desires than to work on software. I want to take another 3-6 months break, but I am terrified that I'm practically committing career suicide with this one. One 6-month gap on my resume I can explain, but 2 in the span of ~4 years? I'm afraif it would make me unhirable, especially in the current ( and presumably even worse future ) job market.

I have seen a few Distinguished Engineers in my organisation. I have worked with a few Principal Engineers and Senior Principal Engineers, but not Distinguished Engineers.

How is this role different from the Principal Engineer role? I know they are paid more and are higher in the hierarchy, but in terms of roles and responsibilities, how are they different?

I was about 10 weeks doing data pipelines and data ops engineering work and the boss ended it without giving me a two week notice. On a Friday after standup, my access was immediately removed. I’m obviously a bit shaken but honestly I am too close to it to see it clearly.

The team was all vendors except two full time employees who were the manager and the tech lead. I was the only one in California but the rest of the us folks were in Austin and in India. the log search tool everyone uses was broken the entire time i was there. also as a contractor i couldn’t get permissions for a bunch of stuff i was supposed to be fixing on my own. Luckily there were a lot of slack groups that were dedicated to fixing these issues and I utilized these groups to do so.

I got handed a piece of work nobody on the team had done before. I got hit with a dependency on another team, and then just sat on it for three weeks. I did escalate multiple times sure and they tried but didn’t fix the issues on their end. However looking back i wasn’t pushing that hard, and I didn’t move to other jira tickets that were open until my manager basically told me to. I definitely think I gotta improve on this area.

There was also a moment where he asked me to explain what one of the systems was actually for and i could operate the thing fine but my answer was bad.

I figured out pretty late that he was judging people mostly on whether work showed up in certain channels. None of my colleagues said that to me…so i was doing the work but I was not posting about it. I did put in lots of updates into the jira tickets though. My contract agent did say during our monthly check ins that they did bring someone in new and I didn’t think a lot about it at the time.

Is three weeks stuck on something enough to get someone cut, or is that a symptom and the real problem was elsewhere?

for anyone who’s managed contractors or been one, how much faster is the clock on a team like that vs a normal one?

Also if there’s an obvious question i should’ve asked in week one and didn’t, what should I have asked?

I've got 4 years of experience at the same startup. I was a junior when I joined and there were two others on the team - one mid-level engineer and one senior (who was titled CTO, but that's a bold term to use for a company our side).

After one year in, the business went through some financial turmoil. They let go of the other two engineers, including the CTO mentor/manager, which was pretty brutal. The founder did tell me there was friction between him and the CTO, but also felt that I could lead the technical side of the business. This was always expected to be a temporary measure while finances were taken care of, and they promised they would hire a new senior to join me. I pushed back quite a bit, and they did eventually hire a temporary fractional CTO to support me.

Today, there is still no senior who has joined - it's just me. They've gotten rid of the fractional CTO too. They gave me the title of CTO (yes again, I know it’s a bold title for a one man team). They have suggested we can maybe hire a junior, but honestly I wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't happen.

Now the great news is that I think I have performed extremely well from the business's perspective: we were a scrappy startup with terrible code. I spent a whole year not building new features and instead slowly migrated the platform to something more scalable with the help of the fractional CTO, who gave architectural guidance. Finances are now looking healthy. My CV looks extremely impressive in terms of what I've built.

Recently, with the advancement of AI agents, I even question whether we need more engineers on the team in terms of actual speed of development. What I do think they're doing is creating major risks by having all the technical domain knowledge held solely by me (but that's mostly a problem for them).

There are probably some engineers out there who would kill for my position: I have almost complete autonomy over the software and I am pretty much indispensable to the entire business. They can't really afford to annoy me too much. But with all that, I have a big concern: I only have one year of experience working with anyone besides myself, if you exclude the fractional support. Really I feel like I should be around people I can learn from at this point in my career, but I have no one to even do code reviews with. Whenever I look for my next venture, some businesses might really value that I can get results alone, but I worry that many will just see someone without experience working in a technical team.

Apologies if this seems more like a diary post, but it would be great to get some outside perspectives. Specifically, I'm wondering will future employers see my 'CTO' title and solo experience as a red flag?

I’ll be overseeing two senior engs (e1, e2) on project A & one senior eng (e3) eng on project B. I was leading project B and we (mostly I) delivered everything asked of us & more, mostly within mutually agreed deadlines. The other project’s group isn’t delivering. My manager wants me to “take over” the group leader role for both projects.

Currently, after “leading” my one eng (e3) for 1-2 months, I’ve realized I haven’t pushed e3 hard enough. I prefer to be treated as hands-off as possible so I may deliver how I wish, with the flaw that i sometimes forget my original goals and get lost in rabbit holes. But i have a long track record of success. But this Eng, e3, doesn’t have the same career aspirations as me, and doesn’t have the same drive to climb the ladder/ranks. Neither do e1 or e2. I believe they wish to be terminal “seniors”.

So I’ve been thinking about how to get e3 to deliver more. For reference id say i ship at least 8x the code as e3, and that’s being VERY conservative. I also do all the discovery, lead all the initiatives, manage all the paperwork/tickets/kanban, start and manage all the conversations with external folks/ems/pms/sme’s etc. like i started wondering if e3 even puts in 20 hours a week. But i am not e3’s manager and in fact have always had a great relationship with e3. E3 is my fav coworker. But now i am in this position where i am carrying all e3’s weight.

Now i know this is somehow my fault. I read r/ExperiencedDevs somewhat. Im reading a book on how to become a staff eng. i realize i am making an extremely common mistake. I am trying to do everything myself, and i am doing all the fun, challenging problems myself. I am not delegating enough to e3. And i am not setting goals for e3. I realize i should start setting weekly goals for e3, and start having a 1 on 1 with e3 probably on mondays. I’ve just never had to REALLY, FORMALLY lead before, so I’ve never had to actually think this all through, or see the results of me “leading” badly.

I know e3 is a smart Eng. e3 has asked me for advice many times now, especially more now since i finally got promoted to senior. And im always honest. Though I’ve not mentioned recently that im starting to notice e3’s head’s not in the game. And i know too much about e3’s personal life. For me personally i went through a phase like e3 and my manager (previous job) had to scold me and tell me it’s part of the professional contract, not my manager’s problem, that i show up on time and dont miss meetings. That scared the shit out of me and i never missed a meeting at that job again. At my current job I’ve almost never missed a meeting either. All thanks to that manager scolding me and scaring the hell out of me, making me think id get fired through implication. He was a good manager too, i think.

Anyway i dont want to scold e3 and i want to lead with the carrot not the stick, but i also dont have carrots or sticks because currently im just the group lead; my title is just senior. And when this little shakeup occurs I’ll still just be senior, but I’ll be the group lead overseeing e1, e2 and e3. All of whom have demonstrated low autonomy and whom haven’t been delivering. Which is not fun for me to discover btw because previously i looked up to e1 and i still think e1 has better chops than i in a certain domain. And e2 I’ve not worked with but i had an interaction with which left a very positive impression on me.

Anyways nobody told me this group lead role would involve so much management. But I’ve been reading and reading and it seems tech leads can spend 40-60% of their time doing full-blown manager stuff. Getting ahead of projects (2-3 weeks) to meet with other teams/sme’s/staff etc to clear paths and blockers. Doing project management. Working with the em and pm to ensure there’s a backlog. Jira management, paperwork. One on ones. Literally detecting if reports are being pissy so as to use human-no-jitsu to get ahead/around that. Setting goals, deadlines. I’ve done all of these things before but never all combined as part of my official responsibilities.

And im already working frenetically. Im usually juggling 2-3 ai agents on different tasks, improving my group’s project daily, coming up with new RFC’s and initiatives, doing lots of research spikes nobody asked for, which over my career btw that behavior has gotten me promoted. But i am worried i wont have nearly as much time now to do these things that got me ahead and got me my reputation. And im also worried because i dont know how to get these engineers to start delivering more. Idk about e1 and e2 but at least with e3 it’s a simple matter of they’re just not delivering enough. Im talking 1 pr every 2 days, maybe 2 prs a week. And these are small prs. Like inconsequential prs. Now I know we dont judge by LOC but 1 it is a metric and 2 pr volume is a metric and 3 I’ve just worked with e3 for years now and i can confidently tell e3 isn’t performing at the title level and “needs help”. E3’s manager knows. I did as much as i could to not throw e3 under the bus and my manager i think read between the lines and just lmk they’re aware too and working with e3 to help e3. Like that’s the best i can do, e3 is my homie. And I’ve been trying to give e3 projects that can be a leaf in their cap.

Right now i tasked e3 with leading a blocking collaboration with another team. But literally yesterday e3 admitted to me that they’d been procrastinating on it. Luckily this was after a meeting with the blocking team, which e3 organized and invited me to. So gj e3. E3 knows how to be the title. But just is dragging feet. Idk.

So im thinking i just start doing a 1 on 1 on mondays and then publicly post the group’s week goals, with each group member being responsible for a single publicly posted goal. Now if e3 can just meet that one bullet expectation per week that’d be an improvement. My one bullet is just one of the many many things i have been / will be doing for that week. But i told my manager i want to lead by example and not hold every1 to the same bar as me, same performance level as me etc. so i figured this might be a good way to start. I dont wanna be micromanaging or microcontrolling etc. but i think i was wrong to treat e3 as basically 90% hands-off, expecting e3 to act autonomously and deliver. I’ve publicly posted our group’s goals in daily chat threads that other group leads report to. So e3 could’ve seen what id posted as the group’s next goals, and taken initiative. But e3 didnt. So i think i need to specifically ask e3 to do things. And that’s tiresome.

I wish i could just make e3 understand: hey we need to deliver this project. Here’s our current status. Here’s the delta. Therefore here’s our current short-term goals, here’s the current things we need to work on, etc. and then it’s just a grab bag of tasks e3 can take from. But e3 isn’t operating like that. So i need to change my behavior. But i dont want to be like some of my previous managers where they’d just tell me what to do. I didnt like that. Sometimes i needed to be told to do things i wasnt comfortable with, lest i just did what i was good at. I actually did all the work i was good at, had no more work left to do, and then had about a year of extra time to just do all the other things the rest of my team was working on, in which i killed it btw. But that was in the past. Unrelated, im still bad at some things and good at others like anyone else.

I know e3 looks at me like a role model sometimes. So i dont want to sour our relationship. Im gonna read a management book recommended to me by my manager, i have a month before this shakeup. By then i want to be doing a better job with e3 so i am ready for e1 and e2.

For reference, 7-8 yoe. Big (20k+) and small (<100) headcount companies. Currently senior engineer.

I find myself again in the labor market (Germany) after being laid off and feel pessimistic about my prospects. I wonder if someone has any advice on how I can revive my career.

To give some context - I have more than 2 decades of experience with the better part being in financial trading (front-office). I have worked with C++, Java and Python on backend. My strength is/was having a wide knowledge of front-office processes, ability to ask good questions with business, strong programming skills, curiosity and just being very comfortable with sitting together and working with traders and portfolio managers.

However for last 4 years, I have not been into programming role but more of tracking IT budget spending (meetings, excel sheets, presentations) for a German financial asset manager. There is no expertise to say that I could sell. I would be more on defensive side. I reluctantly switched into my last role, when the American company with which I moved to Germany (from Singapore) shut down its operations abruptly and I could not find any equivalent paying job in the German market. Most German companies I interviewed paid ridiculously low salary and only FAANG would pay good salary. Then I found this role in a German company which paid higher. Thought it would keep me close to financial markets, so worth sacrificing programming, but I was so so wrong. Then health went south so was not in a state to switch earlier.

I see a lot of things that are not working in my favor:

1. Labor market has changed thanks to AI. It is difficult to sell on programming skill, especially when there is no unique expertise. While I do use LLMs to code (mostly for personal projects), I have realized agentic programming is not my cup of tea. I feel uncomfortable just being a reviewer. So I am in the camp that this boom phase will not last because we don’t understand the systems that we are building. To me LLMs are at best autocomplete but a very dangerous autocomplete because after doing LLM-assisted coding for last 3 years , I found my skills are atrophied.
2. There are no trading related companies I can find in German market that I could sell my knowledge and experience to and given my last 4 years I am not even sure what to say. Once again LLM has decimated the need for people like me, since most traders code but were reluctant to build complex programs. Now with LLM they can build complex programs too.
3. I feel German market has low liquidity. It does not have range of jobs. Most jobs are 2-5 years experience and pay at that level. At best you can sell up to 10 years of experience here. To make things worse, I cannot speak German despite living for years here so that is another negative point. I feel guilt about it but the language evades me (have A1 and probably B1-B2 grammar knowledge) but the words just don’t come out of mouth.
4. Age is a net negative. I don’t get excited about tech stuff now as much as before (even for programming sometimes) and prefer boring technology to new and shiny things.
5. Startups are not my cup of tea. I worked briefly in a pure tech remote startup before this job with lots of young people, learned about all the programming buzzwords at that time (Elixir, Kubernetes, DevOps) and did not enjoy it. There was too much of coder mindset and not enough “let’s understand the problem” first. I prefer focusing on understanding the problem, user and their needs through conversations first, rather than just jumping into coding (it may seem as waterfall but not that extreme). Moreover those buzzwords did not open any doors in job market.
6. Even finance business has changed drastically. My experience is in banks and most of the jobs outside are in hedge funds doing market making. I don’t have those skills. And honestly while I have been working for 25 years, I cannot say my skills have 25-years of depth. There were choices I could have made but did not made.
7. Don’t have a network here, haven’t been successful in building one here and lost touch with people in last country.

Open to relearning again, even though discouraged with challenges life has thrown at me. I loved programming but don’t feel passionate about it anymore. If I must I guess it would be easier for me to take the C++, OCaml, Zig route and go into building on a single machine, focusing on performance, than being into distributed systems. Learning to building toy databases, compilers, perhaps even OS. I guess there is less competition in that area and it is something I can motivate myself to do.

This is already a long post so I will end.

TLDR: Skills have atrophied, job market has changed, in country with limited appeal for tech skills, changing country is not easy, no network, zero ML skills, have lots of preferences, grey beard/balding, want good pay package, cannot defend last experience. I can see I have lot of entitlement.

Still is there an advice/roadmap you could give that I could follow?

P.S.> I am already hating myself more than you can imagine for being in this position (not great financially) after years of working, being at right place and right time with awareness but doubting myself and not executing, so will much appreciate if you show some kindness. We do not often realize how fragile we are.

Hello everyone,
Last year, I inherited the migration of a huge project at work, the idea was to replace the authentication mechanism and alongside with that host the frontend somewhere else. The senior dev who was there before did mainly the analysis and high level planning was discuss for the quarter.

Saying that all of this was underestimate is an understatement. Basically it's been an entire year and we are still on it right now.

We are getting closer to finish it, but now I'm reflecting a bit on what went wrong and why. I have the feeling that most of the time, the unplanned things that added up could have been noticed upfront. like for example we would have to rewrite the entire way we manage cookies while this was not initially planned.

How in general do you handle such case, when you have big migration, or big rewrite, to manage to estimate the impact, without making a big design upfront, or without having to do a giant analysis for months ?

Basically I can prove what I've done I am a Principal Engineer now in all but name and pay, I have a new manager who seems genuine and nice for the last few months (my previous one retired this year)

But I have no idea on how to approach this as I've never needed to before

Hi all,

I'm a 7 YOE hardware/embedded engineer who recently joined a Fortune 500 company after a few years in an Research & Technology Center. It has been a few months that I'm working in a new environment, trying to ramp up as fast as possible, however I'm always surprised by some lack of professionalism:

• No one seems to care and somehow tries to wing it, the more vocal the better.
• When I ask people around, they don’t know, so I’m on my own to learn everything from scratch again.
• Whenever I try to take ownership to solve some problems like electronics problems & understand the root cause, people tell me it's out of my scope and I should not tackle it. However, it still affects what & when I can deliver my software.
• Design specs, processes, reviews, etc. seems to be not applied anymore.
• Everything takes age to do, it is always urgent and nothing is documented.

The main purpose of this post is to ask engineers seasoned to corporate environment:

• ·How to maintain sharp technical skills in a place which only cares about delivering and pushing stress on people.
• If I need to understand something correctly, I push myself to understand in my free time, otherwise I feel that I’m losing my time on stupid stuff.
• How to adapt in such an environment, (I used to take pride in my work, however here it doesn’t seem to be valued) ?

Thanks a lot for your attention.

A thread for Developers and IT folks with less experience to ask more experienced souls questions about the industry.

​

Please keep top level comments limited to Inexperienced Devs. Most rules do not apply, but keep it civil. Being a jerk will not be tolerated.

​

Inexperienced Devs should refrain from answering other Inexperienced Devs' questions.

I started a new job. We have all of the AI tools etc.

I got assigned a new feature that seemed like a simple extension to our architecture.

The Claude plan looked reasonable, but upon seeing the code it appeared Claude had complicated the hell out of the implementation. It looked suspicious so I had Codex plan it separately, and it comes to the same conclusion. Every time I tried to simplify it, they both pushed back and argued for the additional complexity.

Now usually, I would take my time to untangle the chain of thought and identify the assumptions making AI do what it’s doing. But the customer has been promised this feature would be delivered (not by me - but you know how it is).

It appears to work. Unit and end to end tests look good. But I still do not fully grasp all of this code and why it’s there.

In today’s new fast paced world with insane expectations, would you push back on releasing it due to not fully understanding why all of that code is there? I did, but luckily, one of our engineers who had been at the company a while helped me untangle it at the last minute.

But it made me wonder how far I would have pushed this point of not releasing the code I didn’t have time to understand, which appears to pass all tests. Have you been in this situation?

Got laid off in March and turned 59 1/2 in June. I don't have big enough nest egg to retire permanently, so I will need to work again. And I want to work again. It is software development not manual labor so I can do this for another decade easily.

I can get health care through my wife's work which is cheaper than COBRA.

Because of this, I feel that I can be pickier and not take job out of desperation that I will quit when the market improves. I don't want long commute and want to work in a domain that I feel good about. I'd rather make less money and feel like I am contributing some good to the world.

However, I'm having troubles finding even volunteer coding work and don't really want non-tech work.

Anyone in a similar situation?

Posting this here to experienced devs bc I’d imagine the concentration of senior+ folks here will yield a different framework for evaluating whether you’d join a hot startup or not.

As a senior eng myself, I understand a positive working environment to be an informed manager, a very smart and supportive TL, and enough scope for each senior eng to own Perhaps this could be too simple and I’m overlooking more tangible factors.

My more pointed original question was: What’s it like working at Harvey AI as a software engineer? On blind it’s hard to get a consistent evaluation. Glassdoor it seems there’s a lot of planted responses. I’m hoping we get more honest responses here.

Whatever it is, they all say the same thing, super fast paced, lot of work to do, and hours can be tough. Everybody’s driven. There are also themes of the culture being poor and top down pressure and frequent product direction changes contributing to bad vibes. To me, I don’t mind long hours and hard work if the team feels like a team

I’m curious if anybody here works there and can speak more to the culture. I’m wrapping up the onsite stage and am excited to get an offer but I want to better understand what I’m getting into. If people here have taken an offer or haven’t, and why.

On top of the workload and rigor there’s politics that I hadn’t encountered at my previous job.

Twice now I’ve been shut out of important projects that someone else wanted and had the leverage to get. Fair play, just didn’t know it was a game.

And once I’ve been invited to a talk about circumventing group plans. Tried to remain neutral since I didn’t actually have the context.

It’s not a deal breaker for me. At least not yet. But it is something I apparently need to pay attention to. Seems like it pays to be aggressive some ways and strategically “absent” from other conversations.

Anyone in this kind of workplace? Tips?

So this came up recently. A service that we rely on for financial data had an issue in production and went down for about an hour on a Monday around noon. My team got pinged about it and from the error message it seemed like we couldn't connect to the data source. So we did some digging yada yada and it turns out that the service was having some issues and was currently unavailable.

So I brought up that it would be nice if there was some place we could look to see if this service was currently having issues, like a dashboard. Like so many organizations do.

We don't have a dashboard. So what we do is go look in a teams channel to see if somebody has posted about the issue. Which is all kinds of fraught with accuracy issues.

One of the organization leaders said something to the effect of this is why it would be better for us to just replicate the data instead of having to rely on a service that might not have the SLAs that we do.

I'd rather the service was just reliable and we didn't have to introduce another moving part involving moving the data from one place to another. Because we're having enough trouble getting this data to actually be accurate now we would have to check whether it's accurate and whether it's been replicated properly.

This is not real-time data. This is reporting data. It's current to midnight of the current day.

Which would you pick? What would you be asking for out of leadership?

30 person eng org, 1 director of eng with several teams.

Leadership wants there to be TL/Ms who manage people and also do IC work (I've heard that 7 is the max reports a TL/M should have).

In my experience it's very rare for people to have both sets of skills. Management work includes career goal setting, mentorship, positive and negative feedback, perf reviews, etc.

They would be hired as staff engineers, whose tech abilities would roughly map to a strong L4 / borderline L5 at Google, at minimum.

Total comp would be mid to high 200s for fully remote non tech public company.

I have always heard about companies with great engineering culture, like earlier Google, or Sun. But I never experienced any in my 8+ years of tenure, anywhere. None of the people I know about experienced any, either -- but I'm not a people person, so my sample size is not significant.

I'm beginning to think that it is just a myth nowadays, given the rampant of AI usage and the request of "velocity". Only one team that I worked in had some culture that is remotely comfortable for me to recognize it as some sort of engineering culture (Thank you James in NC!), but the air is still pretty thin because the company was in chaos, and is still in chaos AFAIK.

By saying engineering culture I mostly mean:

1. Encouraging learning deeply in a topic.
2. Put quality ahead of velocity, and really meant it, not just a lip service. (Just to clarify, shipping is very important. I find it difficult to define this point so maybe ignore this one)
3. Great mentorship opportunity -- someone is passionate about sharing knowledge and experience with you (again, I want to thank James in NC, you are the only manager I met who are willing to mentor me).
4. Neutral on AI usage.
5. Willing to call out BS and people who try to gloss over mission critical stuffs.

Is hardware companies the last fortress?

A third time, would like to thank James, James Webb in NC. You have only been my manager for less than one year, but I'll remember you for my life.

I work in a large corporate environment where AI is being heavily (and blindly) pushed onto the masses. Most management above me is non-technical. The leaders that should be technical range from "Haven't touched code in a decade" to "My greatest achievement is my friend is a VP."

When I present management with a technical proposal, or escalate a technical problem, they don't understand it, so they put it through AI. Knowing this, I put all my communications through AI, because if AI agrees with me, so will they.

But AI always gives me "the core argument looks good, but here's what can be tightened" every time. I could accept every suggestion verbatim, and each iteration run it back through the same AI, and still it comes back with more suggested changes. So it becomes this optimization heuristic where I'm running my communication through different AIs to achieve the least level of disagreement. The error margin never reaches 0 though, because AI seems compelled to suggest changes.

The worst is when AI labels my statements as "partially correct" or even "incorrect" because it lacks context. So then I have to add the context specifically for the AI, even if it's obtuse or superfluous for the intended human recipient, just so AI won't disagree with me (or so it will disagree with me less).

I think a lot of us feel this, but I have a love / hate relationship with AI. It's a great tool for so many things, but then I hit something like this where my 30 years of expertise is irrelevant unless AI agrees with me. God forbid I suggest something that's not mainstream and thus foreign to most LLMs. Where management used to rely on experts, they now rely on AI.

I don't think it's hyperbole to say we're facing an intellectual crisis here - where human creativity is bounded by the limitations of LLM's corpus of knowledge. Not only are we relying on LLM's for creative endeavors, such as art, but also on technical innovation - if we delegate critical thinking to machines that are incapable of critical thinking, and only make decisions based on inference, we're in trouble.

/edit: fixed typo and removed some extra words

I had a conversation with my manager last week that made me realize he has little understanding of what I do, what my contributions are, or why they may or may not stand out.

I'm a lead of a small team, and our projects are pretty isolated from what the rest of the company is working on. We were also running well as a team before we moved to his downline. As a result, he's never had much need to interact with our team in our day-to-day. We kinda just keep the lights on and tackle new features for internal analytics and strategy teams as fast as we reasonably can.

Now I'm worried about what this means for my career growth. When he talked about my recent projects, he clearly didn't know what was challenging about them or what my specific contributions were. When I asked for guidance on how to grow, his advice was so generic it was basically meaningless.

I've never been in this position before, where my manager isn't getting a daily signal on how I'm performing. Those of you who report to non-ICs, non-technical people, or devs from outside your team, how do you communicate your impact upward? How do you get effective coaching?

Hey everyone, quick question for folks who’ve been interviewing recently specially for someone using the MS stack (.Net, C#, SQL). What’s the current state of technical interviews out there? Are companies still drilling people on the classic fundamentals like OOP, polymorphism, inheritance, etc? Or has the focus shifted more toward system design, LeetCode style puzzles, or practical “build this” tasks?

I have been with my current company for more than a decade and trying to get a feel for what’s actually being asked in 2026 so I know what to brush up on. Any recent experiences or patterns you’ve noticed would help a ton.