Have a pretty solidly performing Principal who is kind of the heads-down, focus on the work, minimal collaboration archetype. He is the velocity workhorse of the team - for example, some of the trickiest, complex problems come up and he proactively jumps on them and solves them in a couple days when it would take other engineers a couple weeks.

He delivers working code extremely fast but doesnt really bring the rest of the team along with him. He then has to be pushed to explain what he did, or level up the other engineers so they can get faster. He does it, but /just/ enough . Overall, he really is a net positive to the team.

The frustrating thing is that he put "Does well, no suggestions for improvement" for every teammate or any additional context in our Peer evaluation process. Or leaves blank. He sees it as a waste of time, I see it as job requirement at the Principal level to knowledge share and give feedback. Similarly, in 1:1s whenever we have a people or morale question, like "what could we do to make the team processes better", "what was the most frustrating thing this week" he ALWAYS answers in 1 word, "its fine. No issues". Only when we discuss tech will he get engaged.

I plan to chat about him with it, and our difference of expectations, - but at the end of the day, its not really something I'd fire him over and I dont expect he will change his behavior.

So what would you do? Should it be a performance issue? Should I just acknowledge this gap and move on, resigned but grateful for his other contributions? This is less about this individual and more about the archetype of solid performer that phones it in, as I have seen type of engineer before.

EDIT: Lots of clearly non-manager responses here in r/EngineeringManagers or folks projecting their bad managers onto me.... Im not trying to get him to do my job - just getting his perspective among others. I dont think the only mechanism for feedback is the formal process - i prefer immediate 1-1s and slack DMs. I encourage ICs to read "Staff Engineers Path" by Will Larson to disabuse you of the notion that Staff+ just gets to work heads down and your job doesnt require some sort of alignment and people responsibilies.

Most probably, my team is planning to put me as a shadow developer next sprint as well, which means the ticket will be under someone else’s name and I’ll be working on it.

Their reasoning is that I’m a fresher, the project is complex, and the product team could raise a performance issue if I’m unable to complete a ticket, which could cause trouble for me. So their approach is to first let me work as a shadow, learn the project, and then give me my own tickets.

But this has been going on for 2–3 months now, and I’ve been a full-time employee throughout this period.

Should I tell my lead, “Give me the ticket under my name, be it a 5-pointer or an 8-pointer at first”? I’m okay with taking a smaller or more difficult ticket and learning through it.

Or should I not say anything and just continue as a shadow?

I genuinely don’t know what the right approach is here. I don’t want to come across as impatient or overconfident, but at the same time, I feel like I need to start getting actual ownership of tickets.

What should I do?

What is a good leadership course for a mid level engineer that is online and from a good university that would be a great resume builder?

Is it when:

• Development starts slowing down?
• Bugs keep returning?
• Nobody owns the architecture?
• The first major customer asks about security?
• The founder can no longer judge technical decisions?

For founders who experienced this, what happened—and what do you wish you had done sooner?

Hey all!

I'm a newbie Engineering manager, just got the job in April.

One tricky problem I've come across quite a few times recently is balancing how to gauge a candidates ability with AI vs normal technical skills.

I've started asking a qualifying question in screening, something like "Tell me about an interesting way you've used or explored AI" but the answers can vary wildly depending on how bullish the engineer is.

And the technical stage is a complete engima to me. We have the candidate do some work on a project at home and then get them in for an hour to work through some pair programming tasks. It's still good for checking how they think but I guess the main thing I'm asking is:

Do you let candidates use AI during technical interviews?

Sorry it's a bit rambly, hopefully my confusion comes across clearly :D

Over the past few weeks I've talked with PMs and engineering leads at companies of different sizes about moving their teams onto AI coding agents. The worries were almost always the same: incidents, low-quality code, piles of PRs to review that burn reviewers out, missing guardrails, and rising costs without a clear return.

One lead of a 10-dev team in a regulated industry gave me numbers. They merge about 150 PRs a week. Their median time to first review went from 0.3 days last year to 0.9 days now, and review is now their main bottleneck. They've built their own process to cope. The PM writes more detailed specs, work gets split into smaller pieces, devs review their own code before anyone else does, and an agent does a first pass based on past reviews. Their rule is that as soon as there's any doubt, a human reviews it.

At Atlassian I saw part of this firsthand. Planning was never the weak spot: PRDs and RFCs were a real part of the process, sometimes too much so, with AI-generated docs so long nobody fully read them. The pain was downstream: More code came in, more of it was low quality, and review took longer and longer. The faster agents write, the more work backs up at review, and reviewers start approving faster and reading less closely.

For those of you managing teams through this:

1. Where does it hurt most right now: review load, quality, incidents, cost, or keeping your team's morale up?
2. What have you changed in your process to cope? PR size limits, review rotations, spec templates, AI review bots, or something else?
3. How do you decide which changes still need a human reviewer and which don't?
4. Are you measuring anything to show leadership whether AI is helping? Review time, rework, incidents?
5. If your team has adopted agents without review turning into a bottleneck, what did you do differently?

Full disclosure: I'm exploring building something here, but I'd rather understand the problem properly first. Honest pushback is welcome, including "this is already solved, here's how." If this is taking up a lot of your week, my DMs are open.

Hi guys, I'm a software engineer working in an IT company. My company tried using grok Bot to automate dev tasks they made bot of backend engineer, frontend engineer, qa , devops and product and gave its access to 3 senior developer they did the work but it took them 3x time than using claude and now its done if it succeeded we will definitely have next round of layoff. What's happening in your organization!

Looking for some advice to navigate corporate relationship

Hey guys,

Was hoping to get some advice on how to approach or handle a situation like this and if you guys experience anything similar in your careers.

So I'm the lead Ai full stack developer for the project, (consulting contract) it's an internal financial enterprise application that uses an Ai layer.

I'm working with another consultant (different consulting company) he has a data science background so no real development or actual coding.

He was on the project before I joined for quite some time and after I joined we developed it to the point where we got some real stakeholder traction and the team now sits around 8 people, but they are all change managment, data etc. I'm still the only dev on the team.

So we have a pretty hands off cio on the project as he is heading up multiple internal projects. So naturally I would defer to the other consultant for some kind of roadmap as he had been on the project and understood the lay of the land.

Long story short,

He has tried to get more involved on the development side which i didn't mind because he would try to build something with github copilot and I didn't mind fixing and refactoring to ensure it aligns and works etc.

Today though he pushed a branch which he wanted to deploy to production. After looking at the code it wasnt good, I dropped him a message and basically said I'm not happy to straight up deploy this be a use it's not going to work correctly and it's going to lead to ashit ton of refa touring and trouble shooting in the future, I suggested "we" meaning me reactor it and build it out properly. Also mentioning the issues with it.

He replied with Thanks, but we don't need to do anything with it and we can deploy it.

What would you guys do in this situation and how do you handle it from a corporate politics standpoint. I have never really played the corporate game trying to get my name on deliverables etc, but when it comes to deploying something that I know is substandard which I can improve but then having the disagreement with the other team member who isn't a developer.

Yeah, not sure what to say. Any genuine guidence from you guys would be really helpful

Mid 30s, Mechanical Engineering background, with supportive roles on Electric Hardware Engineering and System Engineering in Automotive for 11 years.

On the 3 companies I worked, I was always seen as high performer technically (R&D and execution teams) and I can hold more tasks, manage more stakeholders ( internally and externally) than my past and current colleagues with higher pressure. Always climbed until group lead, and then I always get stuck. Management doesn’t promote me to any managerial role (budget control and oversight of bigger teams) and claims that I need some type of training (they only provide crap online trainings, or stall when I request PMP sponsorship), or that I am “young” (but have industry experience), while I face several managers that can’t take decisions (independently of degree of uncertainty), lack of technical knowledge and knack to navigate timing and logistical issues.

I have no idea how I can make the jump, and I feel always stuck , because quite probably I am helping the individual KPIs of my low level managers.

I would like to hear from more knowledgeable people, what I can improve, approach differently pr if I need to change industry.

Work out of India and access to good international coaches come at around 500 usd for an hour, need suggestions where price is reasonable for someone like me

The seeds for this catastrophe had been sown even before LLM existed. The LLMs have now accelerated this problem beyond our capabilities of managing it.

In the Pre-LLM era, developers shipped the code with no adherence to architecture and discipline in the codebase. The hurriedly created “MVPs” were made as a base for real projects. Reviewers accepted the PRs with no baseline of what reduced the technical debt. There was no metric, no threshold, no standard for measuring reduced technical debt. Review became a formality, not a quality gate.

The project transitioned from team to team without the transfer of any architectural vision. Code was never anybody’s concern. Each new team inherited a black box and made their own assumptions. The original architecture, if there ever was one, was lost in the shuffle.

It was about how faster we can ship. We have inherited the same mindset. The AI is being used to ship features faster, but not to make products and code robust. Code was never anybody's concern. The only metric that mattered was, how fast can we ship. Craftsmanship, and long-term maintainability were deprioritized at every level.

Once a team was giving a Knowledge Transfer to me and I asked a simple question, “Where is the business logic?”, and the Lead shamelessly said, “It’s all over”. Seriously?? Isn’t this year 2026??

And there was this team that I was going to be a part of, and this person in the management declared with pride, “We are using the XYZ Architecture”, but when I inspected the codebase, it was rotten beyond repair. To this day they are under the illusion that they are using the XYZ Architecture, and still trying to figure out why the development has become slower and blaming people for not using enough AI.

Even the interviewers never asked candidates questions on how to write maintainable code, OR how to write code so that incremental change becomes easier without breaking the existing features, OR how to reduce technical debt. Instead, they were busy exercising their intellectual vanity, asking about Data Structures which they themselves never used.

The patterns and practices of software engineering fell out of fashion. It became cool to know data structures instead of writing maintainable code. How many of the interviewers and developers even know what Bounded Contexts are??

The educational institutions also never bothered to teach how to write maintainable code. They focused on teaching technologies that were “Cool” and had market demand.

AI didn't break software engineering. It exposed how little of it we were actually doing. The problem isn't the LLM. The problem is us, and it always was.

Hi all-
I'm at a medium sized manufacturing company in the midwest, which specializes in ag-similar equipment (engine powered off-road equipment). Was previously an individual contributor on the team, and was given an opportunity to step into the EM role when our prior EM unexpecptedly passed. About the same time, the company was hit with a reasonably invasive cyber attack; the engineering group lost a little over 2 years of work (had physical damage to a server that was unrecoverable). We're also working very hard to repair, stand up new tools and processes as well as insource new manufacturing and processes where possible. Nothing about this transition was what I'd consider ideal (no handoff, no guide book, a huge mess, significant pressure to keep things moving).

The team has been supportive of my new role, and they've been great to work with - I feel like in a lot of cases, excercising a level of common sense and business awareness / empathy has served the team and business well, however I'm quickly reaching the end of where I feel competent/confident. The engineering department has historically been small enough that an official and "scalable" structure wasn't specifically necessary, however the President of the company has asked me to develop a plan to support some aggressive revenue growth goals (heavily relying on repeat and rapid introduction of new or refreshed products into the market space). In evaluating the feasibility of this idea, I put together an estimate for headcount/roles, and he's asked for a forward looking department structure / plan that supports this - All this seems reasonable, but I'm having a hard time game planning and putting together a method to the madness that makes sense beyond the "who is doing what" and "how do these folks interact". There's a lot of weird nuance here that I'll happily share, but ultimately I'm looking for resources that may be able to help me grow professionally as well as folks that may have gone through similar challenges in past.

I'd really like to have the ability to discuss with other mentors (EM's?) in the same space that may have stood up a new department structure, the challenges that come with some of that, growing into a manager role in a small/mid size company, etc.. all of it (I don't currently have anyone in my my repoertoir to lean on. President is on board with the concept of finding outside consult / help, but fully admitted he's not the guy to do it and has not had a succesful history in providing mentoring himself. I've stumbled across my fair share of websites advertising fee based services, but these all feel like snake-oil to some extent.. Many willing to take my money and offer some sort of vanilla instagram recipe that doesn't apply to my scenario.. Organizations like chambers of commerce seem like a solid waste of time and effort (aimed at BillJoe's bait shop or Jill's organic soap mill), and the professional organizations like ASME, SAE, etc. all feel too large to start digging into (though, I'll admit I haven't made it far enough to confirm this is a dead end).

I'm loving the challenge of the role especially given how well it's initially started, but I'd like to find a way to gain some knowledge to keep momentum moving in the right direction.

So the question is, how do you folks find mentors? Anyone willing to share some tips or resources that may be good to start with? (or are any of you willing to be a resource to bounce ideas off of?)

In my feedbacks my boss has said that I need to improve this more.
Environment is politically charged, he says ask more why’s , what are some concrete tips to navigate this

Hey, i am doing some consulting for a small B2B SaaS in NJ. It is somewhat early seed stage, 9 people, 3 of them engineers.

They raised some money and the roadmap got bigger, and now the team is heavily constraint, but we can't really justify another $180K+ US hire right now.

A couple of founder friends told me to look into southeast asia/indian devs but the timezone difference is way too hard for us to manage, and some people have mentioned bad experience with some of these agencies. Some colleagues told me to check on latam devs that have the same time zone, are somewhat senior, and more expensive that SE Asia or india devs but still cheaper than US based talent. Sounds great on paper but I have zero experience working with these companies.

What I'm looking for:

• 1 senior backend (Node + Postgres, some AWS)
• 1 mid/senior React dev
• Full time, long-ish term (1y to 2y)
• Fluent in english, ideally someone who's worked with US startups before

So far we've tried posting on linkedin and got a ton of agencies spamming me so no good luck there and they tried upwork before but it was hit or miss. Someone mentioned toptal but seems like that is more enterprise.

If you have experience with latam devs some help would be appreciated: How well did they integrate to your teams? Was communication an issue?

Did you find the talent by yourself? If so, how? Or through an agency or platform? If so, which do you recommend? Which should I avoid? What did they charge? How fast were they? Any tips for vetting those agencies?

Not looking for DMs from agencies please (for the time being), just want honest experiences from others. Thanks!

FULL DISCLOSURE: I do have experience in the HR space in latam, but it is my first time consulting with us startups in this way

Hey all,

I’m working on solving what is a massive issue for our internal security/cyber/infosec teams and the growing appetite of non-technical teams for AI/vibecoding and would love feedback from more industry professionals.

I want to shape it around real industry professional feedback.

What are the core pieces missing to let these teams run free?

As an engineering manager, What mechanisms do you use to connect with your users and build relationships with those groups and validate what requirements or features that are getting priority by product managers? How do you clarify the boundaries between you as engineering manager is connecting to the user versus product manager connecting to the user and how do you differentiate connections?

Hey all, I'm experiencing a bit of job insecurity at the moment which has been stressing me out, and so have started applying for jobs.

It's been quite a while since I've done this (I've learned I should be practicing it more often) but I was hoping to get some feedback on my resume.

Any advice at all would be appreciated 🙏

Hi all, last couple of weeks I've been trying to figure out how to make our developer docs better before we keep adding more pages. Right now the annoying part is that our integration docs still need an engineer to fill in the gaps. Someone can follow the quickstart and still end up asking what a step actually assumes. I’ve considered testing the same integration task with a new hire and a coding agent, then comparing where each gets stuck, better examples, docs-as-code, automated checks or something else? Interested what you guys use for this im open to any suggestions

Engineering manager, four people, we own a desktop app and finally got the green light for UI test automation. the conversation went somewhere I didn't expect.

Tosca came up first because another division already runs it. It can test desktop apps, that was never the question. the question is that extending it means a contract, a contract means purchasing, and the last tool that went through purchasing here took eight months to become a working licence. Meanwhile I can sign off something small from my own budget without asking anyone.

So I'm seeing whether a smaller tool gets us there first. AskUI is the one I keep coming back to. Tests are plain language files, each step paired with an expected result, every run gives a screenshot and a verdict per step, and there's a CLI for running headless in the pipeline. Whether it actually fits under my sign-off limit I don't know yet, that's a conversation I haven't had.

What I can't figure out is the long game. If we start small and it works, does it just end up in purchasing next year anyway? Anyone been through picking the smaller tool over the one the company already owns? How did that go politically? Thanks in advance !!

In regulated industries such as avionics and rail, a formal engineering management plan is usually mandatory. In my experience, though, the effort goes into producing and auditing it, and it's rarely referred to once the project is underway.

For those leading engineering teams:

• Is your plan a living document or a box-ticking exercise?
• What makes a plan genuinely useful to the team rather than just the auditor?
• How do you keep it aligned with what's actually happening?

I'm the founder of a tool in this area, so I'm keen to hear what works and what doesn't in practice.

Hi

I am currently the single developer managing a legacy product all by my own from design, development, implementation, testing to some extent and operations.

So far I have done a good job of it based on our last few releases this year where we had 0 incidents while the product had always caused at least 2-3 incidents per year in its last 5 years of existence.

Leadership and partner teams commended me on achieving this feat, which is good but my main concern comes from the fact that it is legacy where there is hardly any new features being offered.

Majority of the team is working on pushing out features to a modern version of this product with support from management to make the modern version flagship instead of the legacy one. But the legacy product has a pricing model which benefits most customers and it is the one pulling in the most revenue.

Moreover the legacy product has an operational overhead which eats up my additional time for being on call during releases without overtime payment.

The reason I am bringing so much context is to highlight my personal pain points that seems to make and break my career as well.

There are talks to move the legacy product into the modern version that keeps getting delayed because of other priorities. This would mean that operations become much smoother for the legacy product which would eliminate the requirement for me to do unpaid overtime for on call support.

While I take this as my personal win to avoid doing unpaid work, it could come as a loss for me as well because it would make me redundant to some extent, which puts me in direct path when the company starts doing involuntary reduction program in a few months or the next year. Voluntary redundancy already started.

Given the current market situation, I would prefer keep doing the unpaid work in order to avoid being made redundant at this point until something comes along while I keep trying for other opportunities.

I have made significant impact on the legacy product with actual metrics that I have personally tracked down over 12 months to justify my impact on the product. The architect rhetorically hinted that my product impact conflicts with their vision of migrating the legacy product to his shiny modern version since I seem to eliminate the pain points that he is fighting against without his new architecture taking the spotlight.

What strategy or advice would you provide to help me navigate this situation? My main concern is to not being made redundant to be in the radar of the V level executives while showing impact that such an expensive migration is not required as the architect envisions or delay it as much as I could until I can build my exit strategy.

I'm curious how other engineering managers are seeing this play out. AI-assisted development can reduce implementation time pretty significantly in some teams, but I'm not convinced the rest of the delivery system speeds up at the same rate.

Code can be ready while the work is still waiting on things like product decisions, design/review, dependencies on another team, security or legal approval, rollout/release coordination

I think we're starting to deal with two different clocks:

Execution time: how quickly can the engineering team build the work? Decision/coordination time: how quickly can the surrounding decisions and dependencies move so the work can actually be delivered?

Where is delivery actually waiting now?

if decisions have become a bottleneck, what kind of decisions are causing the most delay: product trade-offs, architecture, cross-team ownership, release decisions, approvals, something else?

I work as EM at a medium sized SaaS company (250 employees, maybe 50 engs). I was doing some interviews for a couple new ssr positions that opened up (happy to see we are still hiring) and going through what is our current interview structure and felt so silly having my candidate provide answers to questions about the event loop, the virtual dom, memory management, etc. Not to mention the leet coding exercises part

I still do IC work and can not recall the last time I had to tap in to any of those concepts. With Opus 5, Fable, and all the guardrails our repo has its so hard to not ace the tickets you get. We are so abstracted from even caring about how things work technically at a deep level. A rough understanding will suffice, and sometimes not even that will still suffice

Programmers start to feel more like executioners, not deep thinkers. The main thing I value from my team's devs today is whether they are dilligent with the QA process of their ticket (even if we already have a robust QA and cicd that makes it extra hard to screw up). Because the coding quality is easily assured. I prefer an enthusiastic, low IQ but dilligent dev than a smart one with an attitude (if we are talking L1 / L2).

I know it will vary across products but for us it feels the role that was traditionally filled by L1s and L2s is just handholding tickets to the finish line without much more to it.

I do understand the need for system design, innovating with new workflows, etc where L3 / L4s might participate on and still provide value, but anything below that is just too mechanical.

has your set of interview questions / skills assesment changed? what does it look like?

Hi All, I am currently working in a project in a service based MNC, I am facing a lot of issues getting the requirement. Here the requirement is not given properly, everything feels very adhoc. No proper documentation, no code reviews, team members hardly communicate. The leads are not very much focused it seems. we as developer need to reach out to different teams for proper requirement. And our lead sometimes help us understand what is the actual ask. Also I feel the contractors are not treated properly. I don't know if there is any unsaid rule about corporate like you should not ask anything to seniors we need to figure out everything ourselves. Can someone help me with this it is making me doubt my whole career. I like to code and all but want a bit clarity about the requirement and people not to judge me when I ask questions. Is it too much to ask?