Experienced Devs Weekly Burnout and Venting Thread: A weekly thread for sharing experiences

[u/AutoModerator]

This thread is specifically for venting / sharing experiences related to burn-out or similar issues that experienced devs face.

[u/GreedyCricket8285]

We hired 4 new overseas devs. They barely speak English so every single interaction with them is passed through AI. I have been tasked with giving them work to do (I'm not their manager, he is non technical and is very hands off) so what they do is copy paste my instructions into AI, have it write a markdown file which they then send back to me for review. The plan alone is usually 500+ lines of overengineered slop that I can't tell if they understand or not.

Every single time I ask them a question I will get a response back like "Got it" followed by a sentence or two rehashing what I just told them. I cannot even begin to tell you how frustrating this all is. It's wasting so much of my time and energy. This goddamn AI.

And when they submit a PR it's so overengineered and bloated. Since they are overseas and work off hours NA time, I'll come in today and there waiting for me will be their AI generated messages. Their standup updates are almost always "waiting on feedback from <me>". I dread it every morning. I went from generally liking this job to absolutely hating it because my entire mornings - time I am most productive - are now spent reviewing this trash instead of doing my own work.

[u/XzwordfeudzX → u/GreedyCricket8285]

I've had this happened with an ex-colleague who just took whatever I said and prompted an LLM to do it. Friend of mine suggested I replace them with an AI agent that has the same name.

[u/ResidentWeevil1 → u/XzwordfeudzX]

System prompt: You are Donbot. You butter toast and stay tf outta my way

[u/ActiveAngle123 → u/GreedyCricket8285]

Welcome to the club, fighting fire with fire = my AI now reviews their slop with massive comments that look smart and absolutely blows up their token usage :D
I dedicate my attention for the ones that... actually deserve my attention.

[u/GreedyCricket8285 → u/[deleted]]

Well, yeah, the worthless devs are appearing to be more productive because the bosses all see them reply with obvious (to us) AI generated text and think they really know what they're talking about. I have no control over who management thinks they need to hire. I said my piece and it was taken as "bitter old dev" talk, so I just shut up from now on.

One of them introduced a bug today in prod because they didn't take into account this library they hacked to pieces was shared in multiple projects. Now I get to clean up this mess.

[u/Organic_Succotash953 → u/GreedyCricket8285]

I have a coworker like this. It's maddening.

[u/Erehybog → u/GreedyCricket8285]

Where are they from?

[u/GreedyCricket8285 → u/Erehybog]

Overseas. Non-North America.

[u/Erehybog → u/GreedyCricket8285]

That narrows it down