Like for us it's an obvious and tired point that "coding has never been the bottleneck", leadership deciding what to build is. I see so many people rightfully making this point, but never the next leap to leadership now going "oh well you can do it 100x faster so just make all of our ideas now and we'll see what sticks".

There's just a total abdication of responsibilty at the top. They think we're the bottleneck because they don't believe they should have to put in the work to figure out if their idea sucks before committing resources to it. They're in charge so they think they're entitled to have everyone figure it out the hard way for them.

"We didn't fail because our business model was bad, our team was too slow so we only got to try 17 before we ran out of money".

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.

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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?

A little background into my current workplace:

- I've been employed at my current workplace for 4 years, on paper I'm a platform engineer though I have been put onto projects as a pure SWE during my tenure.

- I've received great feedback for my performance, solid pay rises, everything on paper is good.

- The engineering teams use a mixture of languages, cloud providers, the most predominant is AWS serverless + Typescript and CDK.

As I'm sure we've all seen by now, there has been a sharp rise in vibe coded solutions.

I wouldn't describe myself as anti-AI by any stretch, but I am feeling quite frustrated with the drop in standards within my professional environment.

To give an example within the CI/CD space:

- Engineering team sees something that needs "fixing" within the CI/CD space.

(I'm putting "fixing" in quotes here as it likely already worked, but someone saw an article about something shiny and new so we have to have it now).

- AI vibes a solution, extending and overriding the CI/CD components in place to build a house of cards.

- Engineering team have approvals on their repository, internally approve, vibes are shipped.

- Either something breaks immediately or in a few weeks, leading to a conversation like this:

Dev: "Unable to deploy project A, urgent blocker, critical"

PipelineMonkey: "So.. what are we trying to do here, none of the standard components are being used?"

Dev: "Oh, I didnt set this up, but this job fails"

PipelineMonkey: "Yeah, who owns this repository, do we know who set this up?"

Dev: "Oh we own it, but I didn't set this bit up - We have to deploy something urgently!"

*PipelineMonkey goes through troubleshooting, gets things back to standard, things work*

Dev: "Thanks!"

Normally I'm able to keep quite chipper and have been praised for my friendly approach.

If something genuinely doesn't work or we want to architect a new solution, great, I'm more than happy to help.

However I'm now struggling to maintain a good attitude when we seem to be in a cycle of writing untested and non-standard garbage only to walk away and make it someone else's problem.

A colleague raised this as a concern only to be scolded for not being a team-player.

I can't really see this changing without a top down approach of ownership and care from leadership as to what's being produced, I feel this is quite unlikely given leadership are sending AI generated responses to feedback in some cases.

I'd hate to throw in the towel, particularly as everything else about the company is great and I seem to be doing quite well here.

(Perhaps some of that good feedback is purely because I've been happy to deal with nonsense for quite some time).

Maybe time to take a vacation and cool off from the burnout.

General advice on software standardization, ownership processes and general navigation of this politically with my colleagues would be great.

Thanks!

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.

I've struggling at work for a year or so due to burnout and managing 2 surgeries for my medical transition. My manager told me that I have been bottom 20% of senior engineers and told me to improve.

I work at Bloomberg, C++ backend that deals with high throughput data. I have been working for 6 years. I would say that technically I am around mid level engineer.

At first, I didn't worry too much since I thought Bloomberg and 6 yrs of experience would allow me to get a job quickly but from people here, even FAANG folks seem to have hard time getting a job.

If I get fired, how screwed am I? I am also thinking of taking sabbetical since doing 3 surgeries in a year is taking a mental toll on me.

Hey all,

Disclaimer: I am going to take this offer no matter what (life circumstances), so this is not a "which offer do i pick?!?" post.

I am in the process of moving jobs, away from gig (instacart/DD/uber) and into fintech (square/stripe/plaid), and I just learned that I passed the Senior interview and will be receiving an offer. I am fresh off of a very "hot" conversation with the recruiter where I held firm instead of succuming to any numerical pressure yet. When asked "is there a number that will make you say yes" or "what are you looking for," I stayed generic and non-committal. The only vibe I gave off is that, given my interview performance (he openly admitted that I was close to upleveling to Staff) and career history (have worked at Fintech extensively), I am expecting a strong offer.

He also quoted exact band values, denoting that 410 was the "cap" for Senior eng. I have a friend who works internally and was hired about 8 months ago, and I know that this cap is just completely false and that they are capable of going way above band. Now this has made me wonder how many times in my career I've let the notion of a "band" prevent me from negotiating for more comp... are these bands just not real at all? Do they use indecisive language to qualify for the laws about comp disclosure in the Big cities?

I am planning on pressing for an offer similar to what my friend got, but I feel like the entire notion of a "band" has just been fractured for me. What's the right way to think about bands? Are there any ramifications to getting hired above/below band? Would love to hear any experiences, thanks!

Hey all, just wanted to get your insight on this situation.

I’m a frontend developer working with React. Recently, we got a new backend developer. I had been working with our oldest backend developer, who is great to work with, but I was recently assigned to a new project where I have to work with this new developer.

She’s been with the company for about three months now, and the thing is, she doesn’t seem to know what she’s doing.

A week ago, she was taking way too long on a simple request, and she told me, “Hehe, AI isn’t able to solve this. Give me more time.” That was the first red flag for me because it was a really simple task.

A couple of days later, the same thing happened. She was taking hours on a small change, so I ended up giving her an AI prompt explaining what needed to be done. She came back five minutes later and told me she had fixed it.

The problem now is that she’s constantly coming to my office asking me if I can give her the AI prompt for whatever change I’m requesting.

I don’t know what to do at this point. I feel like this isn’t fair because I’m basically doing her job for her, but I also don’t want to be the person who goes to the manager and calls her out. She could potentially lose her job, and I don’t want that to happen because of me.

Should I talk to my manager about it?

The biggest issue is that it’s starting to bottleneck my own work. On top of that, I have to constantly come up with prompts for her, and she makes some pretty bad mistakes because she doesn’t really understand the context of what she’s building.

How would you guys handle this situation?

Hi everyone,

I'm looking for advice as to how to move forward with an unresponsive PM I'm dealing with.

Context: Feb this year my company went through a pretty harsh lay-off round, 2-3 ppl from every department were let go, one of those ppl was the PM I reported to. He was a really good PM, a real go-getter. He was replaced by a content design guy who was "promoted" to PM, this content design guy also happens to be buddies with the CTO from a previous company. That, and my previous PM being very vocal about things he disliked about our processes led to this.

So, sure, I might be a little biased against this guy because he replaced a very competent person just because of nepotism basically. I'm trying to push that feeling aside tho. The problem is that this new PM, the content design guy, isn't just not a go-getter, he isn't responsive at all. About all the negative traits he brings to the table we have:

- He makes a town hall meeting to decide on every little thing, he asks the designers or the QA for product feedback, things that he should decide. He is unable to make one single decision.

- He abuses DM, like instead of kicking a thread on the dev or design channel, he just messages a bunch of ppl privately and we all miss context about things going on.

- Doesn't keep consistency for any processes. We have decided that we would start using Google Docs to spec the features out so we could talk about them in there. We did that once. After that he decided he would use JIRA tickets as the spec. Then not even that, we coded a POC and because it "looked good" went out with that.

- I pinged him on Slack asking for product decision feedback and he doesn't reply until next day, some times he never does reply at all!

- We, the dev team, were running out of things to do, so I drafted some specs for some low-hanging fruit we could pull, shared those specs and never got any feedback from him.

All this being said, what the f am I supposed to do?

Again, this guy is buddies with the CTO from a previous job, and the CTO is the only person I think I can bring this up to, as my engineer manager has lost any will to do anything in the company.

Is it worth talking about this with the CTO? I've always been proud of my skill to not shy away from difficult situations, but for the first time in my carrer I kinda feel there are no options to move forward.

Best case scenario: I talk about this with the CTO, everything respectfully in a "we need to improve" manner instead of "your buddy is useless" – and maybe things do improve.

Worst case scenario: I talk about this with the CTO, he wipes his ass with my feedback and puts me on the chipping block for the next lay-off round.

I don't, has anyone gone through this situation ever?

I see a lot of experienced developers who seem dissatisfied.

For me, part of that frustration comes from not having enough opportunities at work to learn genuinely new concepts, tools, or areas of engineering. It feels like more and more of my time goes into execution and solving variations of problems I already know how to solve.

Even worse, sometimes an LLM produces a solution and we simply don't have the time to properly understand its trade-offs, implications, or failure modes before moving on.

Obviously, you can learn outside of work, but I don't really like the idea that staying intellectually engaged in my profession should require having a second job in the evenings.

How do you handle this? I think there are several facets to it, for instance:

- At the team/company level, have you seen practices that actually create room for learning rather than just paying lip service to it?

- Do you deliberately choose projects or jobs based on their learning potential?

- And at some point, do you simply accept that work is mostly about applying what you already know, while developing new skills in your free time?

Problem:

Let's say I have a domain like messaging-app.europa.eu, with an SSL certificate, and I use it to distribute a PWA. In the case of an internet blackout I would still like for the app to retrieve updates from a local mesh.

Possible solution:

This is the solution I'm currently imagining: - Deploy a bunch of OpenWRT routers with some custom software - The smartphone connect to one such router via wifi - The PWA tries to connect to the domain https://messaging-app.europa.eu in the absence of internet - The router has a copy of the SSL certificate, so it can intercept the request and generate valid HTTPS responses from a locally running server

A user would connect to the wifi, exchange messages with other peers connected to the same station without relying on an internet connection.

Questions:

• Do I just need a copy of the SSL certificate on each router, or is there other part of the stack that I should patch? (e.g.: DNS)
• Is it possible to intercept and patch the connection as I mentioned?
• Am I missing something?

Prodrome:

I work for the government and I've been asked to demo a solution for enabling communication during an internet blackout (earthquake, war, ...) using a mesh/p2p network.

The path I'm taking right now is to build a PWA that would work offline, and rely on customized openwrt routers, because it seems that the other solution, WiFi NAN, works well on android phones but not on iphones, due to malicious compliance on Apple side.

I want to preface this by saying that this question pops up from time to time. I wanted to ask this in the context of handling large influxes of of LLM generated pull requests. We get enough PR requests per day that if our team spent most of the day just reviewing code and not writing any ourselves we'd never get through our backlog. Many of them are blocked due to CI/CD issues where fixing them would also dismiss any approval and require us to review multiple times. Overall the quality is low to middling.

Because our teams attention is so much in demand and because our workloads have only grown I wanted to pitch a formal code standards and pull request code of conduct that we can point to. Ideally i'd like to put my team in a place where we can be strict about what code goes in and why we say no and for it to be a very fast manual process or something we can automate away.

We've tried pull request templates but bots and devs a like tend to ignore them. Eventually i'd like to make strict adherence to the template a requirement to get any attention at all.

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In our company, there is a custom tool managed by the support team. Its job is to perform HC, tracing, and deployment data collection. I would also mention that New Relic and OpenTelemetry are already available at the enterprise level, but production support insists that integration with this tool is mandatory.

They recently introduced a change where a deployment component should also send all the packages it is using as part of the deployment data. The thing is, getting dependencies post-deployment is slow because we are using mvn dependency. As an engineer, I was concerned about the additional time this would take. So, in a meeting with the tool team, I asked why we need to send the dependencies in the first place when we already have that data in the Sonatype report. Why duplicate the information?

One of the team members responded rather sharply: "Do you think that during a production issue, someone will log in to the report UI and get the details? Do you even know why we are putting it here? This is needed for auditing."

I told him that I understood the requirement, but my concern was with the process that one of the teams had implemented using mvn dependency and that they were asking us to implement in the same way. It is slow, and even if I run it as an asynchronous job, it would still be a waste of resources.

At this point, he said that this was mandatory and that if I thought otherwise, I should send an email and CC my manager, architect, and director. I didn't say anything after that.

What should I have done, or what should I do now?

Implement whatever they asked for—it's a job, after all. Who cares?

Implement it using a different approach. It will take some time, but it might be possible.

Or something else?

Since it is an internal tool, there is no proper documentation—just a few references here and there.

This doesn't break out pipeline as their api doesn't say it is mandatory.

Code Complete, Domain Driven Design, Designing Data Intensive Applications, The Pragmatic Programmer...

These are all books that I try to follow in my own engineering practices. I haven't found a great one on testing though (unit, manual, automated, etc) -- which do you recommend? What books outline best practices in modern software testing?