I work in a high stakes, fast paced, critical product team. I don't want to be identified so I won't list the team roles but we effectively have no dedicated manager or tech lead. It's effectively a bunch of Indian contractors and mid/sr SWEs on one team, and there is a hardcore culture silo.

Everyone puts their heads down, keeping their work as silo'd as possible and just report statuses. The PR reviews are mostly rubber stamps and the code is mostly AI generated.

I try to do my best to contribute to engineering leadership, I.e. pressuring people to put their designs to large features or greenfield development into a document and review it with the team before full sending a 40+ AI generated file diff PR, proactively commenting on PRs, assigning follow up tickets to indovidual engineers where I feel substantially necessary, etc..

But part of me is burning out being the only one who seems to care about anything other than doing what is specifically assigned to me. My last team had strong engineering leadership and my partner's current org also has very strong tech leadership as well (possibly even a little too much to the point where every PR gets heavily scrutinized). Also the current "sr" SWE is one of the most major contributors to the culture as well, and effectively does almost nothing I'd expect a senior SWE to do, they are more of a scrum master and EM.

Any tips on dealing with this culture? Should I keep up the tech lead role even though I'm mid level and not the sr? Should I just go along with the rest of the culture and just blast out as many tickets as possible? Should I look to transfer teams in the mid future? Should I be grateful my work isn't being blocked by a million other highly opinionated, vocal engineers?

Any advice is greatly appreciated

Feels like AI has been especially taxing on the mental states of developers and the outlook of this industry in general (understandably so). Would anyone else be interested in a weekly thread to share your "wins" or other good things as a brief reprieve?

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 want to gauge how much my chain of thought here aligns with what people experience. Because (spoiler): even a "bug that never happens" being unhandled makes holes in my mental model of code. One isn't that bad, but there tend to be more in larger codebases.

Let's say there's a bug that's almost impossible to reproduce. Do you care about it or not?

Example: a websocket reconnects -> the old connection's onmessage is still awaiting data.arrayBuffer()and finishes after the new connection has already delivered a fresher value, and overwrites it with an older one.

```typescript

let currentValue = 0

function connect() {

const socket = new WebSocket(url)

socket.onmessage = async ({ data }: MessageEvent<Blob>) => {

const message = decode(await data.arrayBuffer())

currentValue = message.value

}

socket.onclose = () => setTimeout(connect, 0)

}

```

In that example, it really can happen when the payload becomes huge + under CPU contention.

The fix is around three lines but adds effectively dead code.

```typescript

let connectionId = 0

function connect() {

const myId = ++connectionId

const socket = new WebSocket(url)

socket.onmessage = async ({ data }: MessageEvent<Blob>) => {

const message = decode(await data.arrayBuffer())

if (myId !== connectionId) return

currentValue = message.value

}

socket.onclose = () => setTimeout(connect, 0)

}

```

But I'd accept it just because the complexity was already there, in the model of the world the reader builds in their head. "This execution can lead to data corruption" is what I read in the original. If I see it handled, I let it go and move on with my actual task. If I see it's not handled, I get distracted and have to remind myself that this code is all right.

There's often more than one such bug; it's damn distracting in my opinion.

If the idea isn't detailed enough, I did a more detailed write-up with my position on that on my blog: https://www.dearlordylord.com/blog/mandelbugs-and-heisenbugs-as-attention-distractors/

But the general idea is hopefully presented as concisely as possible in this post. What's your take?

I'm working on a few ongoing projects right now that I've had to cut some corners of quality (large PRs, code that isn't super documented) as my skip was putting a ton of pressure on my manager at the time to deliver XYZ in a quick timeline and then forcing the entire team (namely me) to pivot to other projects for scope.

For example: I start working on Part 1 of project 1, I can round it off but can't finish it (make it "quality") because my skip sets deadline for Part 2 of Project 1 to be much sooner.

Then I get thrown into being lead on Project 2 because the original guy quit and left 0 documentation. I get told it has a deadline for the following week.

Enter manager 2, who replaces manager 1 during the madness. He's been giving me feedback that the code that the decisions I've made (Project 1 Part 1 and Project 2) aren't really to "standard" and he's implying that I'm not meeting expectations, even though my old manager approved of the decisions I was taking/the direction I was going with the project.

Is it worth it to change teams? I got the highest rating during July's yearly review cycle which is equivalent to Top Performer, but my fear with this new manager who came in 3 weeks ago is that I'm definitely not meeting these updated expectations.

In addition to an annoying job market it feels like my career is over because I don't have real k8s experience other then running some small on it. Recruiters seem to pigeonhole me into these types of roles though. I've worked in large tech companies,(worked on services in the 100m qps area, 100k vm environments).

Any way to successfully get past this? maybe I need to frame my background better? I've done things like running k3s and honestly it's pretty boringly simple? I'm not sure what exactly people are looking for? Companies also use eks so they're not even running it? Idk what I'm missing? I've had interviews that either asked me to write config files or quiz me on trivia which could all be in docs anyway.

I have a couple of juniors working on my team who would use AI to make changes without caring for actual system integrations because AI thought the implementation is ok vs requirements without correlating with the actual integrations contracts at all.

Maybe if they feel frisky they would go about trying to understand what actually needs to be done on a brownfield project but only upto a point that matches the acceptance criteria. Frustration like I thought this was going to be an easy fix is quiet common feedback when tried to make accountable. Well its not because you did not priortize understanding the fix over telling claude to build you a plan to get this over with.

Our team does a lot of middleware integrations so we constantly have to run transactions with systems that are not under our control, difficult to QA, subject to flakiness, rate limits while having strict contract integrations to prevent abuse because they are used by many other tenants which are not our team.

Most of the time this translates to the fact that QA tests are not enough to mark a bug or feature as complete. Often times, you need to test against the real live system integrations to make sure SLO, SLI, SLA, regressions are as expected, using automated checks as much as possible or in certain cases by hand because of the complex nature of the test.

Juniors just assume QA being green gets them off the hook and they can close their tasks as completed while the real closure comes from the fact that live systems do not get regressions or upset other live systems that we have stake at.

We (me and another senior engineer) often find out after live deployment that things are failing silently for weeks or loudly right after until the next on call because no one tried to be accountable to see their changes go through. At the end, it falls upon to either me or my colleague to fix the mess left behind by our juniors because we are the primary owner of our system SLA, SLI, SLO. We tried to coach them but it always comes down to how they feel about the topic vs their current shiny task that just keeps burning us out in response to fight fires.

How do I communicate the missing accountability with my manager without sounding condescending in favour of sanity and not burning out while not pointing fingers?

I was looking for your general perspectives but I also have my own scenario I’m looking for advice on

1- how did you (if at all) change your efforts after having kids? did you look for different work? did you perform less adequately? did you stay the same?

2- I’m currently on a one man DEV team. I know the product in and out. We had 2 bad contractors that were let go.

The product itself has been around for 30 years and appears stable, but new features aren’t selling.

I’m looking into potentially transferring within the same company to a new team, on a brand new product.

The thing is, I’m expecting my first baby soon. And I’m afraid I won’t be able to ramp up and perform as well as I would in the current team I’m on.

The company has asked me if I want to stay or transfer, and I’m just trying to decide the best approach.

I' m currently working as a Software Engineer for 3+ years now in a consultant company. While I work along with the customer who is in a banking industry, I came across a stream processing system project. Its job is to look a different data source and events and try to match a pattern to detect an anomally, a normal anomally detection system actually.

The system primary use Apache Flink for processing and Apache Kafka for the pipeline. Both of them handling the job just fine for the last year.

Initially, it's just a normal map, aggregate and joining with not so much stateful action. Which make testing quite easy, just test it braching logic on top with some null data handling in case of missing data or an event that came too late.

Now for the fun part, There're new requirements stated that they want to add logic like if A happend for 5 minute, B should not be fired given some tedious logic. Which is pretty much a stateful logic with very sensitive to time. The process is also start to getting long while each step's complexity and fragility is increased. Combine together resulted in a fragile pipeline that will crumbled if some data is arrived 1 minutes late.

I've though that just creating more the test cases to cover it should be fine. But after investigating, My test case is almost trippled because each step need to effectively handle out of order, timeout etc. Resulting in a overwhelming test that also hard to understand. Now I start to wonder if it's the testing problem or the pipeline is badly designed and caused it to hard to test properly.

I want to know how stream processor with stateful action is design and test in the real world. And what are some traps that might lingering around ready to burst. So I can point it out since it's still possible to make a change now.

writing code cheap now .. and it looks clean sowmtimes but huge loc... small features or issues . Idiomatic, properly typed, reads fine in review.

And the job is just... write more code. Ship faster. So the volume is up, review bandwidth isn't. We have org-wide review skills, central conventions, the whole thing... still feels like running to stand still.

The bugs that slip through aren't syntactic anymore. Webhook fires twice under retry, handler isn't idempotent, race condition only hits under real traffic. None of that shows in a diff.

How are people actually catching this before prod? Unit tests don't cover it, mocks lie... staging doesn't replay real failure modes. What's the actual process these days?

Regarding return statements inside functions, which way do you prefer? Usually we have freedom for that and it makes a significant difference on how the code looks (more/less indentation, tracking in your mind is different)

Long time ago I started using returns for early guards. Then I additionally started using return instead of the last "else" block. And then after a while I started returnmaxxing everything in between for the lack of a better word... But now im looking at the other way around (single point of exit) and maybe something is there.

I haven't found a lot of discussion, theory or arguments online. Best argument could be: if you use var_dump and console.log (my apologies), a single point of return might be easier for debugging. But im more interested in overall style and readability and maybe some other arguments. Do you guys have anything on this? Thank you

I'm looking for some advice and apologies in advance for a long, rant-y post.

I have been an engineer for just shy of 10 years. As I've grown over the years, my manager, who I've worked with for most of my career, has given me progressively more and more complex feature work that requires heavy design and consideration of tons of edge cases.

Starting around late last year, I've been finding myself in a very unhealthy "loop" at least once a week when I'm actively working on a feature. I'll design a feature and write code that a bunch of people sign off on. Things seem fine and actually work when I test things out. But then days or maybe weeks later, I'll realize there's an edge case that I didn't consider or things in reality don't work out in exactly the same way my original design had assumed. Or there's an actual bug that never came up in my original testing but I see in an internal environment later. This sends me into a full blown spiral where I'll work super late to figure out a solution because the features I've been working on lately have tight deadlines, and internal customers regularly check in on progress. Or, if I don't figure it out, I'll have to call up my lead the next work day (in internal panic) to pick her brain and see what she thinks. Normally we'll arrive at something we're all happy about. But this loop I'm in where I get super anxious and stressed about something I've missed causes me to regularly lose my ability to relax after work and be present when I'm with company, and in some occasions, I even lose sleep over it.

I'm starting to think this career isn't for me. My job has also gotten a lot more stressful because of AI. Management thinks it'll help us become massively more productive, which isn't even that true. But the idea that it can has made our annual reviews stricter than before. On top of that, because our team has a foot in the AI race now (previously our team had nothing to do with this space), we're facing customers that want things faster and faster and I personally feel the pressure from them, even though my manager is doing his best to shield me from it all.

I'm afraid of missing deadlines, and post-that, facing the wrath of my management chain and having to answer why there was a miss.

That's not to say that I feel this way about my job every single day. But when I do feel this way, it completely derails my day and evening (and some weekends too), and my singular focus is on work. I'm so tired of this feeling. Is this what burn out feels like?

At this point, my financials are solid. So even if I lost my job, I'd be good for a very long time. I don't even have the energy to think about looking for a new job right now. But if I did try to look for one, I'd want a role with a lot less pressure. I wouldn't even mind a pay cut.

I'd love some advice from anyone that has felt in any way similar to me. Thanks so much in advance.

I recently heard from a friend that their workplace put in an "AI policy" that included, before endorsing the use of AI for a project, an explicit discussion of whether the benefits to the project outweighed the externalities of AI usage in environmental and social costs.

Is this sort of thinking common? I've never heard of anything similar before. At my current workplace (which is populated by fairly progressive people who don't like Elon Musk very much) I made the mistake of suggesting we discontinue Cursor use after the SpaceX purchase, and got feedback that this is not at all the sort of thing we should be thinking about, the only thing that matters is maximizing the business value of the company. If Cursor is less expensive and more effective, we'll use Cursor, nothing else is relevant. Deciding to do something less effective because of some outside ethical consideration is basically negligence.

Now I see things like 1Password supporting a pretty explicit racist and wonder, if the company proposes using 1Password, is this sort of thing appropriate to bring up? Or am I being an irresponsible employee for even thinking along these lines?

I made a thread in /betteroffline some time ago how my company (not a tech company) will now embrace agentic coding. My manager, who is a 50-year old no-coding db guy, was immediately sold on this. He is the type of person who loves to deliver quick solutions, but doesn't like the nitty gritty part of problem solving.

For many years we have had this internal tool that is complete jank made mostly by an external company in SAP. Stuff tacked on over the years, changing anything is a nightmare. There has been a lot of talks about replacing it with something new that is more maintainable, well thought out and just works in general. Due to security and governance, the decision was made to create this new tool in Power Apps. I raised the possibility of building it ourselves as a website since I know the basics and could technically do that. No, security and governance, need to be done in Power Apps. Ok fine. A lot of the initial building blocks have been made by me in Power Apps whenever I've had time just so that everything will connect later on. Everything is modular, but ties in together nicely and the stuff we have works.

Now all of a sudden, "he" has "made" this website that the external company that made the original app will publish. Its very straight forward and this could have been done in Power Apps and been tied into the rest of the solution. He has apparently also made pages for setting up things like categories and users etc - things that already exists in the Power App solution. So now we have 3 (!) competing solutions - the original one that everyone uses, the Power App stuff I've been making on the side since no time has been properly allotted, and his new vibe coded thing.

The issue I have is not that it is vibe coded, although I have warned him about maintainability when the scope increases. This was just brushed off. The main issue I have is that this was done entirely without any input from the team. No discussion about what could be added, no discussion about how it should tie in to anything else, no discussions about what to do with the existing Power App stuff, no discussions about how this will be maintained. Nothing. For the longest time, I have gotten the sense that the rest of us are only here to create solutions he is not capable of and that he secretly resents us for it. So when this opportunity arises, it's not surprising at all that he is behaving like this.

To be honest, I am getting extremely fed up with this. I can only see this getting a lot worse as more and more of these ill thought out solutions are being shat out.

Anyone with similar experiences with non coding managers just doing their own thing? How the F are you even supposed to deal with this?

So i’m a senior software engineer with almost 9 years of experience, mostly backend stuff, a lot of AWS, serverless, Node.js and JavaScript in general. Lately i’ve been watching how fast everyone is adopting AI and honestly it’s making me less interested in this field, or at least less sure about where it’s going, and i don’t want to just sit around waiting to see if i end up on a layoff list.

What i really want is a backup plan, something i can lean on if things go sideways, and ideally a path where the demand is more stable. I’ve been thinking about cloud or solutions architect roles, maybe DevOps or platform engineering, and cybersecurity has been on my mind too, but i’m not sure which of those actually hold up better long term or if i’m just chasing titles.

For those of you who made a move like this from backend, what did you go into, how did you get there, and what should i be learning or doing now so i’m not the one who gets cut? Any honest takes appreciated.

Jobs in the corporate world and start world impact can be very different. You can wear many hats and be given the opportunity accomplish a great deal of things across multiple domains, some not even just dev.

Personally I've had experience in product/project management, frontend, backend, devops, engineering management, and director level decision making at one role and then just a backend developer at another more corporate role.

What is the best way to structure your impact based on this issue?

In my career I've noticed this from time to time and it's become a pet peeve. Say you schedule an hour meeting with 6 people and the title of the meeting is "Onboarding project X on platform Y". The meeting starts and one guy says "So how do we onboard project X on platform Y?" and the other people say "yes, that is what we are going to try to figure out in this meeting...". And sometimes these people only ask questions in meetings and often they are very obvious questions that everyone already knows are important. Then that leaves the other people in the meeting to try to actually figure out the answers while the person who asked the question thinks they have contributed simply by asking the question.

Don't get me wrong, it is sometimes very helpful to raise a question that perhaps the rest of the group has overlooked. But raising a question everyone is already aware of then acting as if you have made a valid contribution which absolves you from having to try to actually answer it is very annoying.

For those who have been in software development for 10-15 years and beyond, what do you think about your career prospects in this field in the long run? Do you see yourself staying in the field long term, or do you see yourself pivoting to a different career?

If you plan to stay, what keeps you motivated and excited about continuing your job in the field? Do you strive for specific titles/seniority, is it a bigger paycheck, or something completely different that keeps you going and excited?

I've been in this field for 10 years now, and in my close circle of friends who are also software developers, I see the tendency that people feel burnt out to the point where they don't seem to care about career growth and consider switching to something completely new. I am no stranger to those feelings due to what's been happening in the tech field over the past few years.

Would be curious to hear some thoughts from people who have been doing this for a while now.

I'm a software dev on a small team at a non-tech company. We maintain a very standard vanilla CRUD app.

We were all brought on as full stack devs, but over time some of my coworkers have isolated themselves to strictly frontend work, or strictly backend work, etc. I understand this is somewhat normal, since people may have a talent for or more experience in an area. But I'd think that over time you'd want to build up experience in other areas too. I'm not saying we need to become experts across a wide variety of technologies, but at least know the basics to really consider yourself "full stack."

For example, one teammate only does frontend work. He whines if he has to touch any SQL and actively avoids it or any backend work if possible. This leads to terrible design decisions where he's trying to do logic in the frontend when it belongs in the backend, even if there are already established patterns in our code he could follow.

Similarly with other teammates, but swap out "frontend only" for "backend only" or "DB only", etc.

What's frustrating is that they always take those tickets. They've also cemented themselves as "the frontend guy," "the API guy," etc., so they've become the go-to for architectural decisions in those areas. What's even more frustrating is that they aren't even better in their areas of "expertise" than other devs who work across the full stack, and they haven't improved over time like you'd expect. In fact, because they lack knowledge across the full stack, I feel like they make terrible design decisions all the time. How can you fully design a feature if you can't think through the flow of data and logic across the DB, API, and UI?

I'll admit I'm a little envious that they've carved out these niches for themselves.

Just wondering if any of you have encountered this, how you handle it, etc. In my case I feel like it's mostly a team culture thing and there's not much to be done about it. My manager is aware, but it's unfortunately just how we operate. I'm curious to hear others' thoughts and experiences.

At face value, it seems to me that other careers such as business analysts, consultants, doctors, lawyers and pilots value experience, contacts made over the years and resume built far more than software development since one’s newly learned skills quickly get devalued over time.

Now, on top of this, their also seems to be a quite layer of ageism in the industry where companies have a preference for younger engineers who are more willing to give out their hours than older engineers.

Any thoughts on this point of view of the industry? What is the best way to handle these issues in the case that they are true?

Is it worth the career path in the long run despite the ageism and an experience that doesn’t quite appreciate or compound in value over time? In fact, that “experience” also gets people stuck in fixed modes of thinking, and this is why continuously revitalizing the company’s talent pool with new talent becomes ever more important as the company grows. Another reason why there seems to be an inherent ageism in the industry.

If this ageism is true, a software dev may benefit from looking to pivot into new career paths as they grow older; ideally careers that value age; perhaps career paths with more people interaction involved.

After being in the industry a few years or close to retirement, would you still choose this career as your first option?

What would you have wished someone would have warned you about?

In my case, after being a software dev nearly a decade, I wish someone would have warned me how many hours I would spend outside of work learning new technical skills. The skills treadmill is intense. I also wish someone would have told me the importance of setting my boundaries in the company and my team because usually they will want to get more out of you.

I'm in a scrum team where we had a great tech lead previously who moved to a different team and we got a new tech lead a couple months ago who uses AI for everything. This guy burned through 2K worth of tokens a few days into the month! Usually, the token budget resets every month. He has not built anything at all. Mostly small PRs and config changes.

He stopped reviewing PRs and created an Agent to review the team's PRs on his behalf. Keep in mind that we already have a PR bot! Anyway, his bot would leave so much text on every single PR that is mostly AI slop and noise. He literally expects us to respond to each and every comment left by his bot.

At one point, there were 10 different blocks of text left by his bot on one of my PRs. The PR was a small PR to add 2 columns to a schema. This literally copy and paste from one of the PR change requested. It is only a small snippet:

Ticket alignment: fine.  PR body already flags that and points to the real work.

Schema has been verified? The claim has no provenance. Treating it as acknowledged rather than hidden, but flagging since nothing enforced the ordering.

Major - (Needs a fix):
In Spark SQL, cd  AS create_date , not two columns — AS is optional in the grammar, so this parses cleanly and fails silently. It doesn't corrupt anything, it just means the "no drift across the existing column list" claim isn't actually true for create_date specifically. Worth fixing and re-running before treating that table's validation as complete.  Initially looked like it could cause false-positive drift. 

The review is awful and unnecessarily verbose. Makes shit up sometimes too. He completely stopped manually reviewing PRs and would completely rely on the bot. He would block team's PRs until all bot comments are addressed. I have raised issues during team meeting that we already have automated AI code review and his bot is redundant. He refused and said the bot provides a different context.

Now, I am forced to use AI to respond to his bot's wall of comments but he won't manually approve the PR and we would have to satisfy his bot wtf. This is driving me up a wall.

The problem is that I get change requests which don't make sense in a weird convoluted sentence structure and waste time on pushing back. I also get NO proper PR review or feedback.

I like AI and use it daily so AI by itself isn't a problem. But I feel like some colleagues use it in a weird/wrong way.

I have this one colleague who uses AI to its maximum capability, he is a frontend dev who writes the frontend to an application my team is building. Its all done by AI, and I don't really care. He can do it in whatever way he want's.

My problem with his AI usage is that he often makes requests through slack to my team. Either a bug or a feature request. But instead of writing it himself he asks AI to tell us what he want's. And I don't mean that he asks the AI to cleanup the language its entirely written by AI and I assume the bug/feature he is requesting is made found by the AI. Sometimes they make sense, but fairly often they don't and we have to push back. And he inputs our response in to AI and asks AI to respond. I feel like this is sometimes outsourcing his thinking to both AI but also to my team who has to respond to some of these requests. If he makes a request that doesn't make sense I have to spend time investigating the request or justifying why we shouldn't do it and in a lot of cases he would also have noticed this if he spent time investigating it.

Am I being unreasonable thinking that he should spend more time instead of trusting AI?

Would it be reasonable to raise this as an issue during retro, maybe saying something in the lines of "I don't think we should communicate to each other through AI"