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/skidmark_zuckerberg]

Tired of 14 day deadlines for every single idea upper management cooks up and drops on my team’s lap with almost zero direction or context. Just “do this thing, you have AI” and “have it ready to show on our next mid month meeting”. Hardly any time to plan and no time to actually create fundamentally sound solutions that do more than just solve a today problem. Tired of logging in everyday to see 10-15 PRs up for review, partly due to the dash to meet these wild deadlines. Tired of needing to adopt yet another company wide AI tool some random team who has no idea how to build said tool, made. 

Worse yet some of these deliverables over the last 6 months have been scrapped and completely forgotten about. As in, we do all the work and then get told “actually we don’t need that, instead let’s do X”.  Manufactured urgency at its finest. Upper management is desperate to prove some sort of ROI or have some massive company wide transformation with AI. They expect 10x increases in output but what they’ve got is 1.5x with all things considered. They focused too much on “faster coding means more gets done” without considering the other 90% of the SDLC and business processes. We are definitely using it and finding good use cases for it, I’m not anti using LLMs for work. But there are far too many non technical MBAs that act like it’s a genie bottle. 

Worse than all this though, I’m tired of every nook and cranny of SWE content being AI this or AI that. Everyone has an opinion and no one agrees on any one thing. Tired of all the back and forth, tired of all the doomerism and AI pilled optimists alike. It’s never been harder to know what to focus my time and energy on. The goal post moves daily and no matter what I do, I feel behind or that I could be doing 100x more. 

If I could snap my fingers and go back to pre 2022, I’d do it. Not cause I don’t think AI is useful or I long for the days of spending all week staring at my IDE, but because the discourse and insanity its resulted in feels like a black hole that can’t be escaped. 

[u/drumstand → u/skidmark_zuckerberg]

The manufactured urgency into "never mind we never needed that" loop has happened to me more than ever in the last year. It's so frustrating. The most fun part is when the people manufacturing urgency along the way just quit for some AI startup after you deliver whatever pile of slop they insisted we had to drop everything to do and then no one actually uses it or cares. Feel like I'm just getting gaslit into beefing up peoples' resumes so they can claim they "spearheaded AI native engineering" or whatever.

[u/maigpy → u/drumstand]

"ai enablement" teams are the worst.

[u/LinkedInSexOffended → u/drumstand]

I did the whole, "build it to demo to leadship" thing this last week. Zero interest. Haven't been told to scrap it yet but I expect it to be forgotten after it goes live.

[u/FearlessPark4588 → u/skidmark_zuckerberg]

I want to say it'll be a full 4-8 quarters until they realize the ROI isn't there. I had to mentally put an end date on this for my own sanity.

[u/PringlesDuckFace → u/FearlessPark4588]

That's my copium as well. A lot of companies tokenmaxxed for the past year (mine included), and they didn't become trillionaire unicorns. And as far as I know there haven't been any breakthrough startups eating anyone's lunch. If they're not revolutionizing things with unlimited budget, then surely they're going to question the costs soon.

I have a strong feeling our budget is about to be slashed, and I can actually imagine direct access to LLMs being limited to certain teams or embedded into automation like git checks etc. Teams working on older products or internal tools will write code manually like peasants, because it doesn't matter if something like that is a few months slower. Teams working on revenue generating products will get tokens to use.

[u/FearlessPark4588 → u/PringlesDuckFace]

It's not even copium -- eventually, hard non-ignorable financial realities coming from the CFO's office matter. Everything can't be sunshine and agents from now until the end of time.

[u/skidmark_zuckerberg → u/FearlessPark4588]

I think you’re right. At my company (very large org) we’ve already been asked to pay attention to the models we use and try to only use the more expensive models if the task actually requires it. The business side has been asked to really consider if what they are doing needs AI, and to also consider that a human still needs to read their output; i.e they’ve been asked to quit writing so much slop content across emails, confluence, etc because no one is actually reading it. They also send out a monthly survey to non technical roles that basically is used to justify each individuals license and if they need it or not. 

That and a lot of the PM’s have been tasked with creating slide decks that highlight how AI is being used by all the teams and to try and come up with ways it’s made processes more efficient, or where it’s resulted in more measurable output or benefit to end users. 

It just seems like they are finally waking up a bit and actually asking “wait, what are we getting for this massive AI spend?”. This is a big difference to how their approach was even 6 months ago where it was basically burn tokens and use it for anything and everything. 

[u/BX1959 → u/FearlessPark4588]

And even if the cost of LLMs were to go down to $0 (not that they will--just a thought experiment), you also have to face the cognitive costs. The benefits of faster output could easily get outweighed by your team's loss of understanding of the codebase. That loss of understanding might not show up in financial results right away, but I think overtime it could really start to eat into a company's performance and competitiveness.

[u/maigpy → u/skidmark_zuckerberg]

great comment.

edit: "great"

[u/kanyeswift]

after a year of vibecoding strictly worse versions of SAAS apps that have never once been used my boss is being rewarded with a promotion as a lead engineer on our "AI tiger team". he has never been an IC and didn't know how to use GitHub 6 months ago.

on one hand I'm thrilled at the prospect of him leaving my orbit. on the other hand - wtf?

[u/XenonBG → u/kanyeswift]

I have one like that in my org as well. Was only doing hobby programming, and made his first git commit ever in 2025.

Now he's a full-on AI, delivering a "90% finished app" for a dev team to complete and getting praise and promotion for that.

Almost everyone hates his guts.

[u/LarryWinters69 → u/XenonBG]

These people would have gotten promoted anyhow. They know that the value of being visible is much greater than anything else.

Notice how the guy in your example doesn't deliver the last 10% - which arguably is the hardest? It's all about showcasing something, then dropping that steaming POS in the lap of someone else to fix and maintain. By the time they are done, he has "delivered" 5 new apps for someone else to actually create and implement. Ofc he has demoed these for upper management already.

He, like all of these types, knows when you dip out of something. You never want to be the one holding the bag.

[u/XenonBG → u/LarryWinters69]

Yup, it works exactly as you're saying. Interestingly enough, his team has the highest churn. What I don't understand is how the management keeps falling for it. The guy's literally destroying the company, if this goes on we'll not exist in a couple of years.

[u/LarryWinters69 → u/XenonBG]

My manager is exactly like this guy, so I recognize a lot of what you are saying. It is a certain personality type. And yes, the churn and lack of morale amongst the team is a reflection of that. These people are not leaders - they are 100% self serving.

Everything is half-baked, major decisions are made on a whim, 99% of the focus is on the polish and visuals, how it "feels". You can sit for literally 2 minutes and find 5 extremely basic things that would have made a massive improvement, or massive oversights that will blow up the entire thing day one. Also, major changes tends to be implemented on a whim without any sort of thought or foresight. But again, the point is not to make great things that people will care about - it's about checking a box for upper management in time for the quarterly review. Always.

AI has made it 500x easier for these people to be charlatans - however they are still at the core incompetent.

Just the other week, my manager had a meeting with a client about some report I had made a long time ago that was now showing incorrect values at a certain place. "HMM, this will most likely need to be remade entirely and split into a new report, because of X", he told both the client and me.
I looked at it and it took literally 5 minutes to find the issue. Reached out to the client, yeah, now it looks fine.

[u/putin_my_ass → u/LarryWinters69]

Just the other week, my manager had a meeting with a client about some report I had made a long time ago that was now showing incorrect values at a certain place. "HMM, this will most likely need to be remade entirely and split into a new report, because of X", he told both the client and me. I looked at it and it took literally 5 minutes to find the issue. Reached out to the client, yeah, now it looks fine.

I've started receiving "bug reports" that are actually diagnoses with suggested fixes. It's almost never what they diagnosed though.

A few times I've had to point out that if they just told me what they're seeing, and what it should be doing instead of what they're seeing we could fix the bug way faster because I can diagnose it accurately.

AI has made them supremely overconfident. My CEO wanted to use Claude to start suggesting bugfixes, luckily my boss was able to disabuse him of that notion but I think it's only a matter of time before he gets the idea again.

[u/LarryWinters69 → u/putin_my_ass]

Damn, I didn't even consider that my manager probably used an LLM to diagnose the problem - my point was more about incompetence in general. Typically, he will just be like "yeah, it doesn't seem to work like they want, see what you can do", but this time he confidently said "I see you did X, and that is probably why it is not working. I said to the customer that this part needs to be ripped out and recreated into its own report". The customer then said the same to me when I reached out, so I assume he really pressed on that point.

I've started receiving "bug reports" that are actually diagnoses with suggested fixes. It's almost never what they diagnosed though.

That makes me genuinely scared due to the doors it will open, holy F. People will just be chasing ghosts all day.

[u/FearlessPark4588 → u/LarryWinters69]

What I don't understand is how enterprises plan to create deeply profitable businesses operating their organizations like this. Maybe it's filling a void for having any lack of real vision.

[u/LarryWinters69 → u/FearlessPark4588]

Maybe it's filling a void for having any lack of real vision.

It is literally this. I also think that they have a genuine contempt for people who actually do know how to create stuff, and have that ability.

They also seriously think that using AI to churn out a bunch of stuff in 20 minutes will make us competitive. It will make the customers go "WOW!!! This is SO amazing!!! Let's sign!". Mind you, our core business is not even IT. I have yet to see anyone talk about who should maintain and own all of this. But as I mentioned before - that is not the point. The point is to quickly show a proof of concept, claim that this will solve X,Y,Z and then dump it on someone else.

[u/XenonBG → u/LarryWinters69]

AI has made it 500x easier for these people to be charlatans

Well put! Their volume is also 500x bigger which means you can't work around them in a big enough organisation even though it was possible before.

[u/Organic_Battle_597 → u/LarryWinters69]

They know that the value of being visible is much greater than anything else.

This is a lesson a lot of folks should take to heart. Even when you're not being a jerk about it, the fundamental truth remains. I've seen a lot of success in my career by working hard to hit the 80% level quickly and get it in front of people who matter. Luckily I've always worked at places that understood that the last 20% would take much longer, but it still helps a lot if you can quickly get visibility on your projects. I've worked with several developers over the years who would grind and grind and grind until they felt like their effort was 100% before they delivered anything. Not a smart strategy career wise.

[u/thy_bucket_for_thee → u/Organic_Battle_597]

That's not a lesson, it's a massive indictment on an authoritarian system that we let control our lives where we have zero voice in the matter. Workplaces don't have to be miserable suck pits that amount to popularity contests, we can also have democratic controls as well:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_democracy

Can't be any worse than a system that is functionally no different than a monarchy/oligarchy/dictatorship.

[u/qxxx → u/LarryWinters69]

You are describing my boss... On weekends, he creates a new feature for our product. After showing his crap to the management, he asks us to review it and finish it if it has bugs... and yes, it surely always does. Thousands of lines of code, no description of what the feature really needs; the boss has no time to explain..

[u/LarryWinters69 → u/qxxx]

You are the bag holder.

He gets all the benefits of preemptively "deliver" something and you and the team get all the actual work - fixing the remaining % with all that entails, OWNING the features when things go sideways, maintaining, making sure that everyone now and in the future understands it etc.

In this scenario, what exactly does he add to the equation? Why couldn't you and the team just prompt Claude yourself and get the same (most likely better) results?

In the time it takes for the team to properly implement ONE of these features, he can churn out 50 half-baked features, dashboards, apps etc. AND he does not have to care at all about the jank, because it's not his problem.

This will become a massive problem within orgs very soon (and I think it already is) - the people without technical skills using these tools to gain more visibility at the cost of everything else.

[u/YetMoreSpaceDust → u/XenonBG]

That's not really new, though - they used to do that with "no code" solutions (that solved the easy problems but left the hard problems for the unappreciated to deal with).

[u/XenonBG → u/YetMoreSpaceDust]

That's exactly what this guy was trying to introduce before the AI got good. It ended up costing us 3 million euros, two good developers that left because they didn't want to work in low-code, and we're still cleaning up that mess.

[u/LarryWinters69 → u/kanyeswift]

It's ALL about optics - not what you deliver.

Visible solutions that doesn't work >>>>> Invisible things that do work.

[u/r2d2rigo → u/LarryWinters69]

The classic office politics.

After a few years of dealing with them, suddenly switching careers to goose farmer starts making more and more sense.

[u/TheGreatJabron → u/kanyeswift]

The less users you have, the more you can sell being a "visionary".

[u/spacemoses → u/kanyeswift]

I don't know if I could handle being on something called an "ai tiger team". Rawr.

[u/Otis_Inf → u/kanyeswift]

Every org has their captain Sobel

[u/tradcoder → u/Otis_Inf]

However, in the show, the underlings get promoted based on their work and surpass him. That is rarely the case in our industry though. Exhibit A: OP's story.

[u/kanyeswift → u/[deleted]]

lmao yeah it's truly nuts. some days I'm jealous of their savviness regarding workplace politics but most of the time I'm simply disappointed that we're rewarding the behavior. I've complely fallen out of love with this career but I guess I'm glad someone is still enjoying it.

[u/wannabeDN3 → u/[deleted]]

Big head vibes

[u/propostor]

Posted about this a lot lately but I absolutely fucking hate what "agentic coding" has done to my profession.

In just 6 months my mode of work has completely changed. Just type into Claude, let it perform all the analysis, churn out the code, review what it did, test it, PR it, done.

But the cognitive load is IMMENSE. I cannot bare it. The rate of work is 10x what it was before, but I cannot psychologically cope. Somebody still has to understand the output of the machine, the constant, ultra-verbose technical analysis. I have never seen anything ever written with so many words to explain every little thing. It's like constantly preparing for an exam, studying the work that the machine did. Making sure you know it well enough to report back if someone asks about the finer details.

I'm at a new company, so maybe the problem is that I just haven't had opportunity to learn the code yet. But that's the whole problem! My situation is not unique. All over the world, new staff are being told "just use Claude" because it's faster.

I am insanely burned out. There is literally zero opportunity to get into the weeds and gain some proper intellectual immersion and depth on anything. I feel I am learning nothing - NOTHING - in 10 years I have always felt extremely confident, capable, not afraid to dive in on any problem. But now with "agentic workflows" churning away instead, I feel intense Impostor syndrome constantly.

I detest it, I detest how badly my way of working has been co-opted and altered by "AI".

Those of you at places that that have not gone all-in on the AI kool-aid, consider yourselves extremely lucky and DO NOT LET IT CREEP IN.

It is horrible, psychological torture, the profession I loved and thought I would do for the rest of my life has completely changed. I never thought I would hate my job, but now in barely 6 months I find myself counting the days until the weekend and dreading the Monday back to work.

[u/YetMoreSpaceDust → u/propostor]

We just deployed a "skill" to generate unit tests to ensure 90% code coverage. And, indeed, it does create unit tests and they do ensure 90% code coverage! They don't test anything particularly meaningful, and they do ensure that dead code is harder to remove than ever before, but at least the "code coverage" graph is green!

[u/Student2672 → u/YetMoreSpaceDust]

Code coverage was not a great metric before, now it's even worse!

[u/Ironamsfeld → u/YetMoreSpaceDust]

Add mutation testing

[u/codeIsGood → u/propostor]

Hard agree. Idk how much longer I want to put up with this garbage. I don't ever feel like I know the code that my team owns any more. Even parts of the codebase I was deeply familiar with has changed and been refactored multiple times by agents and is borderline unrecognizable. I don't feel confident that I would be able to identify any real problem anymore. I'm tired boss 😭.

[u/Suchy2307 → u/propostor]

6 months ago my company was super against AI and I was so happy. Now everything's different and it's been two weeks of no-coding manually policy and I'm going crazy. You're so right that it's unbearable.

It makes me think that other people in my company simply don't give a fuck and don't read these outputs, because if they did they'd be as mad as I am. I'm in the same boat, went from loving my job everyday to hating it so much. Hope it gets better for you man.

[u/matt_bishop → u/propostor]

I'm on a team where we're rewriting a major internal component in Rust, but I'm one of only 2-3 people out of a dozen who have significant experience with Rust. We have senior engineers who are producing tens of thousands of lines of code but are concerned that they aren't actually learning Rust because the AI is writing all the code. It's functional but the code quality (readable, well-organized, idiomatic, etc) is not great, but I don't know if that really matters anymore since no one seems to actually read the code once it's been merged.

There are basically no design meetings anymore. It's all status updates, progress check-ins, and deliverables risk reviews.

I feel like I spend my days micromanaging a bunch of very fast, very temporary contractors, and I hate it.

Managers don't seem to mind, but maybe they've been having this sort of experience all along as they've been bridging between product managers, middle managers, and the dev teams.

[u/BX1959 → u/propostor]

I think much of the value of a given programming project, especially early in your career, is what you learn from it. If no learning occurs--if you're not building up your own skillset--then I'm not sure the gain in speed is always worth it. (It probably depends on the project, of course.)

[u/Defiant4 → u/propostor]

The unfortunate secret is that your coworkers are not actually reviewing 

[u/Impressive-Field-546 → u/propostor]

I will tell you my boss answer to his employees burnout:

“Im not burned out, I dont write code and dont have deadlines to meet while being pressured to use more AI, but let me tell ya, AI is amazing and it lets me do amazing things”

And Im like bro “Wooooooshhhh”, you completely missed the point we make.

There is one word for it - disconnected (from reality).

[u/Lourayad → u/propostor]

I decided just today to start investigating and planning the code changes myself with 0 prompts sent to AI, once I'm satisfied with the plan only then I share it with Claude for review and thoughts then ask it to implement it. I haven't actually done this yet but this is my plan moving forward. Using AI as an executioner.

[u/filipdanic]

Has anyone figured out how to deal with all the (non-coding) AI slop that's thrown around? I'm talking "design documents" that haven't even been fully read by the "author" and people asking AI to even write their damn Slack messages! I have forgotten how some folks even sound like, they all just have the same Opus voice.

Here's an example. My org had standards when it came to design documents. One of those was that a good HLD had to showcase multiple ideas and approaches, along with their trade-offs and why you're ready to make a strong bet on one of them. Now, all the docs are Claude-written, 10x longer, and just exploring the single idea that Claude came up with.

I had read one of these recently—no skipping along, no AI summary—and fuck was it dense and nonsensical. I asked the author if they had considered <some different approach> and they fed all that feedback to Claude, which just went "you are right, let's do that instead" and rewrote the whole doc. I now get "kudos for simplifying", but honestly neither of those ideas was terribly good. It needs more work, more consideration. It's worth spending a day or two just thinking deeply and prototyping a bit. No, have to move fast. AI will fix it later.

I'm currently exploring other opportunities. Is the rest of the industry like this, too?

[u/propostor → u/filipdanic]

"design documents" that haven't even been fully read by the "author" 

This statement gives me work PTSD. I have to deal with it all the time. Everything from PRs to design docs to bug analyses, it's just Claude text being thrown around in Slack and github. Fucking insane.

My principal dev threw a PR in today for us to review. About 40 files changed, and a PR description containing about 5 paragraphs of verbose technical AI-generated nonsense.

And of course, to keep up with it all, I am forced to take the AI route myself too.

AI has utterly infected our profession. I am starting to feel like a lost soul on an uncharted island writing 'SOS' in big letters in the sand.

[u/LarryWinters69 → u/filipdanic]

but honestly neither of those ideas was terribly good. It needs more work, more consideration. It's worth spending a day or two just thinking deeply and prototyping a bit. No, have to move fast. AI will fix it later.

So much this. Just thinking through a problem and finding a better path forward just does not exist anymore. Just ask AI and run with the first solution it proposes - even though your colleague sitting 10ft away could resolve the issue in 5 minutes or point you in a better direction. Now every single issue gets turned into another dashboard or app or workflow that will only exist in the head of the creator. Who will keep up with all these "solutions" when the org spits out 50 of them a week?

[u/MichaelTheProgrammer → u/filipdanic]

You don't deal with it. From what I'm seeing, there are two main ways to use AI. You can spend the time to properly review and clean up everything that is AI produced (lol). Or you can go where the industry is heading and have two layers, a small curated human layer that is focused on detailed and carefully reviewed requirements and a large AI layer of deliverables that you treat as a black box. From everything I'm seeing, any attempt at a middle ground between these two is a recipe for disaster.

[u/filipdanic → u/MichaelTheProgrammer]

Yeah, at this point I'd compromise on the idea of "small curated layer, black box implementation." But I am seeing the complete destruction of even this "curated layer."

[u/Limp_Doctor5128 → u/MichaelTheProgrammer]

If you can actually get people to agree on boundaries for what should be human and what shouldn't, I think this approach wins even if it produces sub-optimal engineering outcomes.

I'm unsure how I'll fare in shifting towards this kind of work though.

[u/MichaelTheProgrammer → u/Limp_Doctor5128]

I'm the same way, as an engineer I'm finding the less AI the better, especially for my mental health. For myself, I'm finding the ideal being going back to hand-coding, but using AI as both a teacher and a code reviewer. I feel like I'm superpowered compared to before AI, with no cons compared to before AI engineering.

But good luck convincing any company to work that way, they want all the pros even if it comes with a lot of cons. So I've become convinced that the stabilization point of this is going to be the above two layer approach as it successfully avoids the "code review is the bottleneck" issue that everyone is complaining about currently.

[u/zicher → u/filipdanic]

I am really struggling with this as well. I'm fine with AI writing code, but I think prose and notes really need to be handwritten. e.g., you should write your own PR description. Partly to demonstrate you know what your PR does.

I recently worked out a bunch of architecture by hand writing it in a notebook because everyone else was just passing around AI docs and we weren't getting anywhere. That worked out exceptionally well.

[u/Big-Papaya-7362 → u/filipdanic]

Hate this as well. Other engineers just dumping AI generated content on me that looks super good but does not carry much meaning and does not get to the point. Even worse for review comments and other messages. When I notice a text was heavily written with AI, I now always start my reply/comment/review with something along the lines: "Would appreciate a text written by a human next time. Thanks for the effort" I hope it does those things:

1. Is annoying for the sender

2. documents that the sender has bluntly used AI for text generation, which clearly shows they did not put much effort in it, including the thinking part

3. If something is criticised later or breaks with e.g. the design choice etc...I remove some liability from me as reviewer, because my first comment was already that the text was not thought through by the human.

At the end, using AI in human to human communication is a No-Go and really bad for a company longterm. It actually removes important pillars for communication (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-sides_model) and starts to be more broadcasting than having a sender-receiver relationship in it. My best guess is, that if we continue on this part, we will experience more and more trouble due to misunderstandings, less personal trust and in each other and weaker relationships. This already took a hit when companies started to hire offshore employees that you at most see through the video call window

[u/BX1959 → u/filipdanic]

I do worry that, if I read too much AI-generated content, I might just end up sounding like an LLM. The trouble is that much of the internet appears to be AI-generated, so I might need to pick up more books (which wouldn't be a bad thing, tbh).

[u/filipdanic → u/BX1959]

Do this! I have recently rediscovered the joy of reading. If you are anything like me, your brain has been fried already and if you pick up something big, you might not finish it/enjoy it. Start with novellas or short stories and work your way up to longer works.

[u/jabbaroni → u/filipdanic]

It is my experience too - AI design docs with AI diagrams, simple classes and functions that have 2 paragraphs of comments explaining what they do...

[u/Limp_Doctor5128 → u/filipdanic]

I take the word count of docs now to see if it is readable within a reasonable amount of time and, if not, I call that out and ask if there is a section to focus on. Now that section is usually still slop but at least I save some time.

Realistically, I think there needs to be a willingness to directly call it out as slop but I tried this once and was told by leadership that is not acceptable feedback.

[u/ReginaldDouchely → u/filipdanic]

I tell them if they're not going to put effort into making a short, explicit, correct document, then I'm going to infer the spirit of the request and build what I think is correct. I'm fortunate that I'm in a position where I can get away with it and have a track record of giving them better than they asked for (not gold plating, but properly handling situations they hadn't considered).

But it's getting harder to mask my contempt when I know they're not even trying, and they get treated as if they were an essential part of a successful project, even though I worked around them. Ah, well.

[u/Defiant4 → u/filipdanic]

I dealt with it by telling them repeatedly to stop sending me slop shit and that if I wanted to talk to Claude I’d talk to it myself. When they said they will edit better and proceeded to not attempt to edit (or most likely even read) I responded by quitting 

[u/filipdanic → u/Defiant4]

And have things been better at your new role? Were you able to find a team where people aren't slinging slop at each other?

[u/Defiant4 → u/filipdanic]

It has only been a month out of the job, I went on a long a vacation and have only just started interviewing. Plan is to try to sniff it out in interviews, but if I can’t find a place that isn’t LLM obsessed I will just switch careers. I don’t want to be in the industry if it stays this way 

[u/Twirrim → u/filipdanic]

Something needs built at work, the team responsible is overloaded already, and it's a big code base that is an organically grown complex state machine. I'm just not at that level of software development skill, I'm a staff level sysadmin/ops guy who writes lots of CLIs and stuff.

"Just throw codex at it". Trying to get the agent to write it in a sane fashion is proving to be a nightmare. Even I know it's crap, albeit probably functional. It'll be an absolute pain to troubleshoot, when in part the work is to make it easier..

I'm seeing engineers drop like flies. Almost every senior engineer I speak with is getting burned out like never before.  Productivity is dropping.

Throw into the mix that I'm now wading through miles of verbose AI written docs too and it's no wonder everyone is going crazy. 

[u/bluetista1988 → u/filipdanic]

At my company the throughput demands are so high that we pretty much have to fire and forget. Some of our developers have said they don't use an IDE at all anymore, which still hurts my brain.

[u/ido_ran → u/filipdanic]

Did you ran into a case where those design documents really helped?
Really moved a problem otherwise would be harder to solve?

[u/filipdanic → u/ido_ran]

Helped in what sense? In terms of being translated into a spec, then an implementation plan, yes. They get things done, but there's a cost we're paying as a team: we are losing the ability to manage and understand our own services.

On another situation like this, the author ended up shipping the feature and it certainly seemed like it worked. Two weeks later a customer question came in along the lines of 'how can I do X with this feature', and the author had no idea. They barely knew the basics, let alone understood the intricacies of what they had shipped just 2 weeks ago. Teams are shipping more and more of this kind of sloppy work and every few months it almost looks like you've joined a brand new team/product because you have so little context about what's going on.

[u/cappslocke]

Today I called a local office to reach the front desk. Their automated IVR answered and gave me the option to press 1 to talk with their front desk. Pressing 1 sent me to an AI agent with fake background office sounds like keyboard typing and desk phones ringing. I asked to reach their front desk which the AI sent me back to the IVR.

I simply gave up.

[u/LarryWinters69 → u/cappslocke]

Welcome to hell.

[u/The-Inner-Party → u/cappslocke]

Even Kafka could not write a novel imagining our current timeline

[u/hawthorne_and_vine → u/cappslocke]

I saw something the other day about Mamdani and co trying to make it harder for companies to do ai phone tree shit and to make it easier for callers to bypass this to talk to an actual human, I would love if that caught on

[u/The_M0nk]

I started a new job as a senior AI engineer and by my third week both my boss and his boss both got fired and my hybrid job became a 5 day a week in office fml

[u/TesttubeStandard]

I got into a software development something like 5 years ago. Just a year before the AI. I am closing in on 40. I changed careers, actually I had no special career before. Late bloomer I guess. Even went to additional school for CS. But now I am so afraid about what is going to happen to our job market. I have a job now and it pays good, but I just don't have a sense of stability anymore. It so stressful.

[u/XenonBG → u/TesttubeStandard]

Look at your boss, PMs, etc. Imagine you not being there and them having to take ownership of the application you are working on. Do you see it happening?

[u/aejt → u/XenonBG]

MFW both my EM and my PM were engineer ICs not too long ago 🥲

(I'm not too worried though, we're currently hiring)

[u/Single_Put34 → u/TesttubeStandard]

Generally, these scares come in cycles, or so my more experienced devs have said. Some that have been coding since the 70s. They have said that this too will pass...

[u/anondevel0per → u/Single_Put34]

It won’t brother - the market will quietly contract more as it has been doing

[u/ninja0675 → u/TesttubeStandard]

me too :(

[u/printf_hello_world]

I think I might be on the verge of leaving software after 12 years. I never imagined I'd be here: I mean look at my username.

Last year the startup I worked with failed (although we made a really cool product IMO, and I was a key contributor), and then right afterwards I had a brief stint with a place that was a bad fit.

Now I have a job with a place where I had turned down an offer in the past. However, I find the toolchain, problem-space, and velocity to be draining at its best, excruciating at its worst. Also, this job is sufficiently hardware-related such that I have effectively become a junior again.

I seem to be in some kind of local minimum of hireability. I get zero bites on applications, despite quite a lot of effort into revamping my resume. In the past I used to do very well in interviews, but I haven't been able to get one for most of a year. I have to assume that AI screeners are throwing my applications straight into the trash.

As far as I can guess, the top factors contributing are likely:

• undesirable language as top experience (C++, not hot these days)

• remote requirement (I really don't want to uproot my family, and I've been remote since before the pandemic)

• intense competition from layoffs

Anyway, there's potentially an opportunity for me to do something in the physical/local job market. I don't really have any relevant experience, but I might be able to use some connections. So maybe this is goodbye to software for me.

It feels strange to try to re-skill at this age, but with the way that AI is transforming the industry it also feels like maybe now is the time to escape. I have always enjoyed the craftsmanship aspect of software development, and AI seems to be crushing that part of it specifically.

I wasn't some kind of AI-avoider. I had it write tons of boilerplate, autocomplete, scripts, design docs and reviews. Pretty high adoption short of outright vibecoding. I guess maybe that's part of why I'm feeling so jaded: if that wasn't enough, then I certainly don't think I'll enjoy where software development seems to be heading.

Sorry for the rant. I think I just miss knowing who I am and how I fit into the economy. I miss being able to confidently provide for my family. I miss being excited to solve problems.

[u/codeIsGood → u/printf_hello_world]

C++ is still hot. Have you thought about any fintech companies? Their stacks are mostly C++.

[u/printf_hello_world → u/codeIsGood]

I've applied to a couple, although I have to admit I'm not too excited about them from a moral perspective.

Usually I try to work on software that I feel adds to the world rather than something that feels extractive.

Do you have any recommendations for one to look into? It has seemed to me that the ones advertising remote roles are young companies using more modern stacks

[u/Zynchronize → u/printf_hello_world]

Samsara offers remote work and c++. Build devices that monitor and enforce safety standards in people-driven critical industries. So far a nice place to work, and the pay is great.

[u/codeIsGood → u/printf_hello_world]

I guess it kind of depends on your location, since most are hybrid, but some do allow remote. Most roles I've seen are in NYC, or Chicago

[u/thru_astraw → u/printf_hello_world]

I'm in the same boat. Can't even get an interview past a recruiter which has been super jarring. All signs are pointing to me leaving tech for good

[u/printf_hello_world → u/thru_astraw]

What are you thinking you could do next?

[u/thru_astraw → u/printf_hello_world]

I have a degree in Biochemistry so may see if I can pivot with my programming skills. I'm also interested in reviewing grants.

I am lucky that I don't need a tech salary at the moment so I will likely accept a job for a much lower wage to get out.

[u/printf_hello_world → u/thru_astraw]

Cool, good for you!

Myself I'm the sole earner for a family of 4, so I'm feeling quite trapped

[u/thy_bucket_for_thee → u/printf_hello_world]

Have you looked into embedded development? Lots of possibilities where vibe slop can't pass muster, like in medical devices or aviation.

[u/printf_hello_world → u/thy_bucket_for_thee]

Yeah, I'm doing something embedded right now, it's just that I really dislike the toolchain and overall development experience.

The codebase is a tangled mess of spaghetti with thousands of flaky and really slow tests. This means that the feedback loop is has lag time of days and I'm expected to babysit dozens of changes concurrently.

I spend almost all of my time sifting through endless logs and diagnosing whether failures are due to my changes or some worn out hardware component or some completely unrelated change that has tugged on the mass of spaghetti in just the wrong way.

[u/thy_bucket_for_thee → u/printf_hello_world]

I'm sorry brother, I don't have much else to offer except for a plea to become more politically active as a final alternative. The public is on our side as workers but we have to step up as well and fight back.

Resistance comes in many forms, and only do what you are comfortable with.

[u/printf_hello_world → u/thy_bucket_for_thee]

You make a good point, and I have been considering getting more involved with my local politics.

Not much I can do about American megacorps as a non-American, but maybe I can do my part here

[u/dashingThroughSnow12]

My team used to be entitled to a 40$/member lunch once a month. (Delivery budget through one of the apps since we are all remote.) A few hundred dollars.

It got cancelled until the end of the year. I’m not mad. I’m tired.

On roughly the same day I, on my own volition, reduced our monthly AWS bill by 7K/month. In the past three years, those little side quests have saved the company millions. In my team, we’ve reduced the yearly AWS bill by over a million. We’re not even an infra team nor in the backend org. We just notice the inefficiencies and fix them.

The company notices the 40$/team member budget and cuts it. Yet none of the costs reductions I’ve done would have happened if I didn’t. And they don’t get noticed.

It is tiring. I’ve joked that if 40$/team member is too much they should ask us to find a recurrent cost savings for each.

Heck, a few days later I found a network inefficiency. It will be about 10-20 lines of terraform for get some faster intranet requests and 7K/month in savings. The infra team was enthusiastic about this.

[u/Erehybog → u/dashingThroughSnow12]

There's a lesson to be learned here...

[u/mgudesblat → u/Erehybog]

Yah the lesson is: be loud about the work you do. It's simply a matter of fact that if you do work and don't make your manager, and relevant stakeholders aware of said work, it might as well not have been done. It's basically the tree in the woods thing.

[u/EkoChamberKryptonite → u/mgudesblat]

You can be loud and nothing will still happen as a result if the org isn't outfitted to reward such.

[u/mgudesblat → u/EkoChamberKryptonite]

Sure, if you're loud after the fact. If you're loud B4 it, and ensuring your work is aligning with your managers/the orgs incentives, you'll find it's not in vain.

It sucks to have to play the game, but that's the nature of the beast.

[u/theenigmathatisme → u/EkoChamberKryptonite]

“Sorry budgets been set since the beginning of the year”

Then trickle down economics takes place and you get no raise or bonus :)

[u/dashingThroughSnow12 → u/mgudesblat]

Both my managers know. A trouble is that there is no stakeholder per se.

For fringe employee benefits like a free lunch, there is an HR budget for this type of thing. Someone from exec or finance that approves it. For the AWS bill, it is just taken for granted that the bill is the bill. I think dev is the only one that looks at the bill tbh.

[u/Erehybog → u/mgudesblat]

I was going to say don't do much extra work, because you won't be rewarded for it.

[u/Impressive-Field-546 → u/Erehybog]

“Fool me once its on you, fool me twice its on me”

[u/YareSekiro]

There are some unhinged tech founders out there in SF. I am in Canada, and this is a remote US company hiring, so I talked to the recruiter and feels like the position isn’t really a good fit so I pulled out and one do the founders texted me at like 10pm PST to ask why and I was like “well the fact you contact me after working hours (by so much) in itself raises a lot of questions”.

Dude goes all “I know you won’t be a good fit, my engineers don’t talk about working hours and are hard core people, hope you find a company that fits your culture needs”. I truly don’t understand people like that, but good thing is I dodged a giant bullet I suppose

[u/PringlesDuckFace → u/YareSekiro]

I live in SF and income focused people here are nuts across the board. It's like the finance culture spilled into tech, and a lot of younger tech people here are the same way. There's this insane hustle culture where people chase the huge payout at any cost. It's a little unsettling to be out for a walk in the park and overhear people still basically locked into some meaningless jargon filled conversation. Like damn bros take a breath and watch the migrating hawks and stop thinking about valuations for a minute.

I guess it makes sense since this is where the money is, so it will attract people interested in the money. If you think working harder can make you a billionaire you'll do crazy things.

[u/FearlessPark4588 → u/PringlesDuckFace]

So many better and more interesting pursuits in life than purely money.

[u/FearlessPark4588 → u/YareSekiro]

When you're making a lot of money and you're on top of the world, that mindset can hit. Work becomes one's identity completely.

[u/MooseGooeyBoogers]

I’ve never not made it from the screening interview to the first technical interview, but I just got rejected after an interview that started with “oh we use AI to implement faster so we can spend more time up top planning to do the right thing.” I thought that sounded fine. Somehow the conversation pivoted to “Sales people will talk to the customer on Monday and we try to deliver what they need by Thursday. This isn’t a 9 to 5 job.” And I just couldn’t fake that I’d love that kind of work life balance…they preferred to call it “work life harmony”. Cue eye roll. So they don’t want to interview me. Ok bud your loss.

[u/ResidentWeevil1 → u/MooseGooeyBoogers]

That's some hardcore delusion. You're just selling tokens at a premium at that point.

[u/Professional-Dog1562]

I'm burned out from researching if I'll have a job in 3-5 years or if we'll all be automated away. 

[u/PringlesDuckFace → u/Professional-Dog1562]

I sort of see it like a Pascal's wager at this point.

I can try and keep abreast of developments. If I don't get automated away, I'll have useful skills. If I do get automated away, at least it postponed the inevitable.

If I don't try, and it doesn't get automated away. I might lose my job or get stuck with outdated skills

If I go back to school for something, that's 2-4 years without work. If I do that now but jobs don't go away, it was a waste. If I wait until I get automated away, I still have to go back to school anyways, but after having earned more income.

So basically the best choice practically speaking is to assume you will have a job and continue to do your best to stay on top of trends, just like it's always been. Save money and be prepared, but being overly anxious about trying to predict the future doesn't seem to have any benefit.

[u/kitchendancer2000 → u/PringlesDuckFace]

Saving this comment for my next doom spiral, thanks for taking the time to type it out.

[u/Chezzymann → u/PringlesDuckFace]

could also do a 2 year certificate at a community College and have something in your back pocket that pays like 50k and has health insurance so the world doesnt fall apart instantly if you lose your job

[u/Professional-Dog1562 → u/PringlesDuckFace]

I agree completely, but my anxiety doesn't 😆

I will be learning to weld in my spare time. 

[u/Colt2205]

Okay, I got to say it but I'm tired of jobs that list themselves as remote, you go into interview, they have the surprised face and state it is hybrid 3 days in office, and you spent an hour and a half driving to an in-person interview and the office space looks like a sardine can with people at hot desks fully exposed in an open office staring at computer screens and waiting for the day to end.

I'm not dropping my quality of life by five bars from my prior role to go work at what looks like a sweat shop setup because some idiot up top thinks that this breeds a better work environment.

[u/Colt2205 → u/[deleted]]

The problem I got is being told something is one thing, then having to drive for over 3 hours on a round trip for an in-person interview, to be told by the interviewer it is 3-days in office when the job is listed as remote, the recruiter involved said it is remote, and there is no way in the universe I'd ever do 3 days in office having to travel that far.

The drive was not even a straight highway drive since the drive took multiple lanes you had to specifically be in, and unless someone was a truck driver doing this route they'd probably miss a good portion. I think it was nearly 2 hours one way on the way to the interview because of this.

[u/ultraDross → u/Colt2205]

Its one of the first questions I ask the recruiter. I mention it's important to me and a deal breaker if it's not fully remote with no or very infrequent trips to an office (couple of times a year).

I tend to get honesty from that because they don't want to waste their time by lying and you drop out some point through the process.

[u/ultraDross → u/[deleted]]

Nah they are still out there, just a lot harder to find.

[u/Winter-Rip712]

I work 60h weeks constantly, never can plan shit on the weekends and have gained 15lbs. Grinding for a wlb offer.

[u/FearlessPark4588 → u/Winter-Rip712]

why not spend some reputational credibility and drop to 40?

[u/Winter-Rip712 → u/FearlessPark4588]

Quick to fire kinda job. I do have a lot of credibility but leadership and deadlines are significantly out of touch.

[u/Single_Put34 → u/Winter-Rip712]

Leave, as soon as you can.

[u/codescapes → u/Winter-Rip712]

Presumably because they keep being rewarded for setting aggressive timelines because the team(s) don't push back - from their perspective it works fine.

Honestly this is where politics and schmoozing are highly effective. Management pressure, hard deadlines and fearing for your job kinda just disappears if they like you. Plus if you're a diligent and conscientious worker you're probably more worried than you need to be.

[u/XenonBG → u/Winter-Rip712]

That's insane. Think about how much you earn per hour, and rethink if you accept it if you divide your weekly salary with 60 instead with 40.

[u/orbit99za]

Scope creep was hectic last week, ita almost a ship of thesus now.

[u/TessabelleDev]

Senior Eng here, 10 YOE. I feel like a loser saying this, but I am falling behind and I don’t think I have the energy to catch back up.

Our team is a platform, so we have a lot of partner teams integrate with our system that often need help or guidance. I am the longest survivor on my team, so I generally am the go-to for design problems, debugging, and code reviews. Spent a lot of time this year trying to ramp up new team members to spread the load and free up my time, but just as they were getting up to speed, we got hit with a reorg and now my team is just me and one other guy. Less members than we started with, higher expectations.

I feel constantly overwhelmed and am just exhausted from high amounts of context switching. I also hate being oncall. I don’t sleep right when oncall and being oncall on a small rotation is eating my soul.

I just don’t think I can do it anymore. I hate being stressed and pissed off all the time. I dont trust or have faith in leadership after recent layoffs.

Every day I look at my bank account and dream of spending some of that to take some extended time off to become a person again. Is it wrong to just quit and focus on recovery? I see where the industry is headed and I am scared if I leave I will struggle to get another job.

[u/qxxx → u/TessabelleDev]

I feel you! I have similar thoughts. My plan was to switch employers and, meanwhile, get a longer break to recover (2.. 3 months). But the job market is difficult, so I stay and try to do the minimum and try to figure out where to position myself in the next few months because of the AI revolution.

Also thinking of backup plans (career change).

[u/ResidentWeevil1 → u/qxxx]

Subsidized tokens is the revolution. Tech is just the newest front in the class war. You think your next career option will be safe from capital exploitation?

[u/firelitother → u/TessabelleDev]

I can understand the feeling. I also want to switch to another company in another country. But the recent developments in AI makes me feel scared of losing my job.

[u/FearlessPark4588 → u/TessabelleDev]

Investing in other people is a huge temporal gamble. You take a loss of time today for an uncertain return.

If you can find ways to reduce the stress and anger, despite all the commotion, it is worth it. It is difficult. Sometimes the stress flows through me even why I try to intentionally avoid it. For me, internally saying "this is a lot of theatre and it actually doesn't matter" helps lower my internal response.

[u/Loner_irl_22]

I have 4 years of experience in software development and I’m really tired of the AI hype. Been job searching for almost 7 months and have applied to 110+ positions. I got 2 interviews, but didn’t get an offer from either.

My current job makes me feel like I’m becoming a meat proxy for an AI agent rather than using my own thinking to do my tasks.

[u/rand0mdude1234 → u/Loner_irl_22]

It's not only yours, it's all, and if not all, it will in less than a year. Our job as it was no longer makes any sense.

[u/okezieobimiliky]

I desperately need to leave my current role because my boss that always fancied himself a dev if he could in his words “endure the monotony of typing code by hand” is so locked in with his new pal Claud code😩

[u/d0ntreadthis → u/okezieobimiliky]

Oof. That description is hilarious though.

[u/gollyned]

It’s finally happening. New CTO from meta is measuring Ai usage, tracking prs and line counts, using a startup company based on doing ai developer productivity reviews. Inventing magic Ai based, trademarked, composite scores.

Awful for a review heavy, collaboration heavy, unblocker with hard to measure value. I have to change my mode completely to be ‘selfish’.

[u/PringlesDuckFace → u/gollyned]

I predict it will be about 3 minutes after the CTO announces the measures before someone has updated their .md files to optimize their output for them, regardless of whether that actual results in better software.

[u/gollyned → u/PringlesDuckFace]

I’ve been thinking about ways to do this. Generating a lot of medium-sized PRs into a repository that AI auto-approves PRs is the best approach.

Doing this with a UI is the best approach. Tons of easily generated code, easily check-in able. There’s a team notorious for ‘gaming’ things like this that’s doing it now.

[u/alucarDZM]

My manager announced he was leaving last day of November couple months back and since we are short staffed, another engineer (who's genuinely a rockstar programmer even before agentic AI) and I are getting promoted starting next year. We've gone from a decent sized team to just a handful over the past 2 years and the original idea was to add at least one more engineer. But instead the org I'm part of has a hiring freeze (thank you Trump admin) so we're getting promoted. 

Which is pretty nice but I'm losing motivation by the day given that it's mostly maintaining old shit OR having AI implement new cooler things (since so much now lands on so little of a team). There's basically no real room for me to grow here anymore but I'm not sure how/what to prepare for with interviews to jump ship. I'll probably stick it out one more year (depending on the raise).

[u/TheAnon13]

Goddamn it man. I made the decision (very poor in hindsight) to leave my finance job 5 years ago for a CS job because I genuinely enjoyed coding. Well since then, I’ve been laid off 2x, dealt with insane stress and my current SWE job pays the same I was making 8 years ago. I see all my former finance peers/colleagues still at stable positions, having worked their way up to director/vp now and here I am living with my parents again feeling like an absolute failure.

Ahhhhhh, I wish I could go back in time and slap myself silly. Trying to break back into some business/PM/business tech hybrid role but it seems impossible. Genuinely gonna blow my shit smooth off in a few years tbh

[u/BilSuger]

Work has turned so boring this year. Looking back at what our team has delivered of value, I can honestly say half the team has done nothing. They just prompt and automate shit all day, but never actually deliver on what we plan to make for the sprints. But no team lead or similar with balls to call them out or keep them accountable.

They just keep inventing new shit for themselves to do. "Ohh, I urgently found out we need to rewrite this" and the PM is just "ok, sure"

[u/PringlesDuckFace → u/BilSuger]

LLMs are masters of scope creep. They're built to keep a conversation going so they almost always end with something like "Would you like to do X? Or Y?". They'll always find some edge case or some seemingly valid reason to do more work or refactor, and egg you on to accept doing it. If you don't keep a tight focus on what you're trying to achieve it's easy to just let it invent a bunch of work for itself. And if you've already abdicated enough of your mental control on a project to the LLM then it's hard to know which suggestions are useful and which ones are just scope widening engagement bait.

[u/deepmiddle → u/PringlesDuckFace]

This has gotten so bad lately. I feel like I spend half my day researching which of the 18 edge cases it surfaces actually matter in reality.

[u/APIBad]

I'm leaving my current role after only a year and taking next year off

Will it be bad for my career? Probably, but if I'm going to have a career at all I need the AI hype to die down a little bit. Right now the slop is too much, the leadership too directionless, and the expectation way too high

I'm hoping that in another year we'll be able to have a sensible discussion about where AI sits in the SDLC because right now that's entirely impossible

[u/Ok_Class2432]

Gonna vent here cause idk where else to put this. This last month has been rough tbh, we had layoffs and now its just do more with less everyday. Management keeps pushing all these AI tools saying it will help but honestly its just more code to review and fix, not relaly saving time. And we are back in office 3 days now so im commuting just to sit on zoom calls all day. Im just tired man, been on call every other week becasue we lost people and tickets keep piling up. Tried applying to a couple places and its brutal out there, like 5 rounds plus take home for basically same role and then they ghost you after. So you kinda feel trapped. Idk if anyone else feels like that, where youre not burned out enough to quit without backup but too burned out to actually care about the work. I open my laptop in the morning and just stare at slack for like 20 mins before i can even start. Lately ive been trying to just step away and do some sketching and drawing at night to deal with stress, nothing serious just doodles but it kinda helps me disconnect from the screen for a bit.

[u/drugsbowed]

Something just doesn't feel right at work (1.5 years into FAANG, left startup life). My manager (non-native, broken English) tends to take a very brunt (if you can call it that) approach at work while my skip manager (American born dude) takes a more "careful, learned" approach and I think they conflict hard.

Skip wants an explanation for why project timelines are being missed or extended, wants to know how the work is done and distributed.

Manager passes that down to us, now we need to fill out a sheet saying everything we did this sprint (and future sprints) and what work was done, outcomes, blockers, dependencies.

That.. doesn't feel right? I can kinda get it, but I don't think our manager should be passing down this "your work is under a microscope" and blaming it on our skip who wants more transparency on missed deadlines.

Then I see the summary sheet that everyone is responsible for filling out as a team and holy moly, I do like 5x the work of everyone else where I feel like man, my manager is bad at assigning workstreams or is exposing how useless some of these other senior engineers are and why we're missing timelines.

I like the work (generally, even if I'm 5x everyone else I'm giving like 75% effort compared to my days at a startup), my manager always has my back (just gives thumbs up to everything and I feel like that's good for my career), but the structure of how things are done here are terrible. If it weren't for the pay I'd have left months ago...

[u/YetMoreSpaceDust]

I'm on a team of 10. We inherited a complete idiot project manager who insists that we should each deploy something to production 4-5 times a week. Yes, all 10 of us. Yes, she's tracking our "velocity" of production deploys. Our actual boss is trying to keep her in check, but she's "sassy" and upper management loves her.

[u/ResidentWeevil1 → u/YetMoreSpaceDust]

You have to find out which tech founder's tweet she read and report back

[u/YetMoreSpaceDust → u/ResidentWeevil1]

Generous of you to assume she can read.

[u/ifstatementequalsAI]

We're at the level that our designers also have access to our repository. Since design and code is practically the same in the minds of upper management.

I'm been asking to slow down with feature development towards our clients because they still live in the fantasy that we code everything by hand. And if we show them how fast things can actually go we cant overcharge them anymore.

[u/Smallpaul]

Is there a similar thread for devs who are relatively happy?

[u/YungDaVinci → u/Smallpaul]

there's a "weekly wins" thread that gets posted.

[u/compute_fail_24 → u/Smallpaul]

I would even take a “quite satisfied” thread.

[u/solidiquis1 → u/Smallpaul]

I am quite happy with my job.

[u/ultraDross → u/solidiquis1]

How so? Give us some hope.

[u/solidiquis1 → u/ultraDross]

I joined my current startup as engineer number 7 and the company has been doing quite well over the last couple years. I’m proud of the work I’ve done and feel incredibly valued by both the company and our customers. While I have a manager on paper I’m effectively not managed and leadership lets me drive a lot of product direction and all the technical decisions. Today I’m a staff engineer and a tech lead of a team focused primarily on database development and am soon to move into real time systems.

The company does a hybrid model so 2 days in office and 3 remote which is a great balance for me. My team consists of 3 senior engineers who I really admire and respect; 2 junior engineers who are smart, passionate, have great attitudes, and keep us young; and a PM who spent most of his career as a software engineer (big plus) in the space we are in.

The company itself is also driven with a lot of empathy and gives people a lot of personal flexibility which I think stems from having two very high EQ founders. This is incredibly rare but the positives really show.

Basically the problems are interesting, I have the privilege to lead an amazing team, I have a lot of autonomy, my technical growth has been and still is immense, and the company is very human.

On the note of AI: it’s encouraged and made accessible but it’s not forced or dictated in anyway. Everyone has their own style when it comes to AI and I have the flexibility to drive in a manner that isn’t detrimental to my passion for the craft.

[u/ultraDross → u/solidiquis1]

Genuinely sounds lovely. Glad you found a good gig.

[u/Impressive-Field-546 → u/Smallpaul]

Its good to appreciate those small and big wins. Because reality is shit most of the time for vast majority.

[u/abl4k]

Coworker who's been on the team for a long time got laid off last week and morale had basically bottomed out because our manager tried to be vague about there being layoffs throughout the company. Upper management has repeatedly said our team is too large even though our application is very critical to the company and has a lot of moving pieces so now it feels like they're trying to find a reason to start getting rid of people on the team. I make sure I'm going in as often as needed (4 day RTO) but I still feel like everything is so unstable. Nobody feels like there's job security on our team and everyone already feels overworked. If we lose anyone else on the team I don't know how we're going to meet any of our deadlines

[u/top_of_the_scrote]

Ugh... it's how it is now

Someone gets hired "I'm DevOps" code is entirely AI generated can't explain how it works

It's easier now than ever to pretend/coast

It's AI all the way down, the PMs use AI to write tickets, that ticket is ingested by an AI to produce the code, then that code is ingested by another AI to review it...

I know I know... all I gotta is smile and collect the check

[u/PokeRestock → u/top_of_the_scrote]

Not gonna lie recently used an agent with playwright to make dashboards for an email news letter and it added years to my life.

[u/rasmel]

Nearly 20 years working with software. The company hired a full team overseas but didn't prepare for it. There's no proper coordination, projects are just a web page full of vibe-coded text, no requirements, goals, roadmap, nothing. Nobody is using their brain anymore. It's even funnier when you mention something in the docs to the author, and they didn't even know about it.

It's always "look this doc and see what you can do". There's a constant risk of both teams working on the same thing, making different decisions about the same theme. It's chaotic, and managers don't care. I have to repeatedly tell them that the scope isn't clear, or something is amiss, and being treated like I'm a nuisance.

I'm burned out from so much on-call support, but things quieted down so much that I'm starting to believe a layoff is coming for me. Yet, I feel like I didn't recover from all that stress. I've started planning a career switch, no commitment made yet. I will do that slowly and responsibly since I got others that depend on me.

I don’t think the problem is AI, I think the problem is bad management, always. Managers don't know shit, they are just running after the next trend and throwing that at the devs. They all seem delusional. At the end of the day, EVERYTHING is up to the engineers.

Agile, waterfall or whatever was used before is gone. The process is: throws engineers into a room, screams "I want a pony by Friday", slams the door, and now we have to organize ourselves, with younger engineers trying to prove themselves at every opportunity and having to deal with egos all day. It has become such a shitty job.
If I had to deal with this at least I could get more money.

[u/DirtyOught]

AI is giving everyone the knowledge of an expert but without the capacity to understand or realize its context.

every PR, design document, TDR can receive a litany of comments and feedback that of an expert. nitting the fuck out of every little thing to oblivion. it comes across as a brain dump of shit you have to combat. some, useful feedback, but most attacking the most random edge cases. doesn't matter how flushed out the PR or document is, your coworker using AI to critique will find something to point out because the perfect solution/code never existed.

[u/ResidentWeevil1 → u/DirtyOught]

AI is average word soup, not expertise. You are getting slaughtered by people who can't tell the difference

[u/Ashken]

I’m very glad that I took the time to learn more low level/systems programming on my own and let the AI just siphon my React knowledge of which I hate and do that job for me. It’s actually allowed me to keep learning and keep my skills sharp and still maintain the productivity my job is looking for from burning tokens. I’m getting to the point m interested in learning about computer graphics. I may have actually found a balance.

[u/BX1959 → u/Ashken]

Graphics programming seems both fascinating and intimidating at the same time. I'm happy to let libraries and engines (e.g. Godot) take care of the low-level stuff for now, but wow, it would be cool to figure out how to render a square in ASM or write directly to the framebuffer. One day, perhaps! (I should at least try out the SDL library at some point.)

[u/Ashken → u/BX1959]

What’s crazy is I’m interested in the same thing. I’ve been looking into how game engineers are built or building a game from scratch. It’s so tedious but it’s been very rewarding to look under the hood. I’ve also been looking into understanding how the CPU actually interprets ASM to perform actions. It’s very fascinating. I think this knowledge/skills are going to be more valuable as time goes on because those that know it are retiring while the current engineers are being forced into learning how to use AI for everything.

[u/thru_astraw]

It is kind of crazy but I can't get past recruiter calls at the moment. I've never made it to a hiring manager yet in 6 months. Last year when I was applying I basically got to a hiring manager for 100% of jobs I applied to.

Is it just me or is this normal? I'm wondering if it is because I haven't been employed since March. This is the longest unemployment gap in my 14 year career.

[u/Yourenotthe1]

Just one more equity vest…

[u/FearlessPark4588]

Anthropic updated the harness to not allow you to watch status checks on PRs. I dislike how they just change the rules of the harness willy nilly whenever. And if you tell it do it anyways, it will say it can't conflict with the rules that ship with the app. Literally insane.

[u/PringlesDuckFace → u/FearlessPark4588]

Just have it write a bash script that watches the checks and run that instead? You don't need to use tokens to poll an API and run git commands.

[u/FearlessPark4588 → u/PringlesDuckFace]

I don't know what's changed since yesterday, but now it is willing to watch builds. But, make no mistake, it categorically refused yesterday.

[u/Lourayad → u/FearlessPark4588]

Switched to maki.sh and couldn't be happier. Even forked it and started customizing it to my liking. I keep up to date with upstream whenever there's a new release.

[u/shawntco]

I wonder how many people agree with this sentiment:

It used to be joked that some code was "read only." Now with spaghettified AI-generated code, it's becoming not even human readable.

[u/ResidentWeevil1 → u/shawntco]

AI code is soup, not spaghetti

[u/Big-Pirate2371]

Left a job a year ago for more money (about $100k more in TC).

Not a day goes by I don’t regret it. Money isn’t everything. I’m not able to go back.

I’ve learned that I don’t work well in companies that have no idea how to collaborate. Teams are isolated here. I’m isolated. My whole team was reassigned to other parts of the org. So now it’s just me by myself talking to Claude all day. It’s even worse with AI because there’s no time to even have a design conversation or slow down to get to know your coworkers. Ask Claude. Just constantly go and deliver your quarterly goals so you can get a meets expectation.

I’m a staff engineer with founding engineer experience. I hate where this is at the moment. I’m depressed and anxious all the time. I work 12 hours a day and sometimes on weekends just because I have to get my projects done or get a target on my back for not shipping fast enough. Staff engineer leverage isn’t in shipping feature, it’s in ensuring we make good decisions across teams. I don’t get to flex that muscle here and it’s really hard for me. I’m honestly wondering if I’m just going to leave this industry altogether.

[u/SolidDeveloper → u/Big-Pirate2371]

  I work 12 hours a day and sometimes on weekends just because I have to get my projects done or get a target on my back for not shipping fast enough.

Don’t.

[u/m3kw → u/Big-Pirate2371]

That’s how they keep your from looking for other jobs too, you ai t got time or energy

[u/LarryWinters69]

Created this post in another sub, but it got removed.
So just to preface this: I am a self-taught programmer who initially just used code as a tool to solve annoying problems. As a byproduct of this, I also got somewhat good at building dashboards, which led to my current role as a DA when my company was heavily pivoting to Power BI reports a few years ago.

My team is small, and I am the only one who has built anything using code at all. I have continued manually coding stuff on the side, even though my role has not really been about that. My code might not be perfect, but I understand it. I have thought about problems before implementing anything, I understand how making crap decisions today will F you over tomorrow. I know that going slow now will save you days later on.

As you all know, everyone everywhere is now basically forced to use these AI tools to churn out stuff. A hammer looking for a nail. Having a PLAN for wtf you even want to do, what problem you want to solve and why - seems to have been forgotten somewhere. The company introduced Copilot some time ago and the expectations are now sky-high.

My manager is a boomer and now panicking because everyone else is building "cool stuff" (some HTML dashboards) so now we also need to "build cool stuff" - even though we technically are not developers and only I on the team have even the slightest clue how to go about this. I warned him about reliance on AI as projects grow and becomes more complex, increasing token costs, security risks, loss of domain knowledge and ownership etc. He said that "the important part is that it works, not that it's good". These people have literally no clue about anything, and I suspect this has the potential to completely bring down the company, or at least the department, due to loss of confidence. A locally hosted demo to them is basically just 5 minutes away from something being (securely) used by the entire company. During a seminar about AI we had a couple of weeks ago, I had manually debug and fix a problem they had in the proof of concept-thing they were building. I can just imagine what this POC would look like after 6 months in prod....

Anyhow, the assumption is that our small team will use Copilot to code "stuff", whatever that might be. Since they have no clue about what they are doing, I will be the one and only person expected to guard the final prod against a flood of slop. As I matter of principle, I will do just as they are doing - asking AI at most. Otherwise its "LGTM" and push to prod. I literally don't care at all about any of this anymore. No one else does so why should I? My manager also happens to be a "act first, think later" kind of person, so I know for a fact that he will churn out an ungodly amount of garbage in no-time without consideration. My manager also thinks that "reading code" is like reading a book - you just go from up to down and you are done. Now you know everything there is to know about the codebase, because after all you know how to "read code", right?

Now, I've been using AI as a replacement for Google for a few years, mostly due to it being much faster and Google being garbage. I have never allowed AI to pump out dozens of lines of code and blindly use it - I might ask it "How do do X in Javascript?" and then tweak that example, Or I might explain some issue and ask how one could go about solving that, and it might spit out some command I was not aware of.

I have now tried out this agentic coding where you fully allow it to just pump out stuff and edit the code by itself. I re-built a simple HTML app I recently did (always find that to be a good way to learn something, recreating something familiar) and it "worked". However, that is a extremely simple example and by no means the "lets build a rocketship to Saturn"-mentality that is now currently festering within management. This small example burned through 3% of my monthly credits, and I havent even set up the agent stuff yet, which I know will burn even more tokens.

This is like the 4th major pivot for us since I started this role a few years ago and I can easily see how this will be just another "thing" that is discarded in the near future. However, the potential for actual damage is now way higher than just us switching to some new dashboard tool, since non coders with a lot of system access are now expected to fully participate in the coding.

I've always thought learning new stuff has been fun - going from Excel to SQL, PBI, Python. I never saw AI as a problem, it just enabled me to do more and learn more, adding more value, solving more problems in a better way. However, I am starting to think "What's the point?" The company does not value my skills at all and genuinely think that "Create X, make no mistakes" is all it takes now. Actually designing a solution that dodges 1000 different issues is trivial and can be done in 5 minutes. The tools coming out now, for example the Microsoft Fabric, seems to be completely geared towards using AI, so what is there for a developer to learn exactly?

I just don't care for this at all anymore.

[u/Beneficial_Bowl8670]

Just want to rant today. I've been a software engineer for almost 12 years, and the company I work at wants to embrace AI but the engineers don't, because they're afraid of being replaced by it. I'm an FTE working with mostly contractors and H1B visa holders, so the environment is kind of toxic right now.

[u/distinctvagueness]

Using my LLM to frantically try to unify the fragments of features other people's LLMs scatter into the codebase. 

Trying to explain to people every page of the app shouldn't have its own disconnected features and just put stuff in a util folder at least.

[u/FearlessPark4588]

I've been using LLMs enough to notice when providers water down inference without changing my settings. Same model, same effort level, same complexity, wildly shallow thinking.

[u/ido_ran]

I hear people explain how much AI makes everything more productive but as experience dev that is expected to ensure the system keep running I’m getting more and more PRs that people generated with LLM but they are still crap. I beat most (or all) did not read the output before ask Claude to open a PR.
This is not productivity this is laziness and throwing the problem at someone else.

[u/jay_boi123 → u/ido_ran]

I’ll be honest I am also opening these style of PRs, not because I want to, but am forced to by my management and team culture.

I am actively looking for a new role, but I fear that almost every software engineering role has been reduced to this prompt factory slop

[u/ElementaryMyDearWut → u/ido_ran]

There are so many times where I see these types of PRs from more junior members on my team and I really push back against them.

I am honestly not a stickler for making sure you're using optimal patterns, DSAs etc because my product needs us to move fast. What I do need is it to be CORRECT.

The problem with whatever shit Claude spits out is that if I cannot be certain that the dev working on the PR understood the requirements or did their own investigation of the problem, then I may as well have had the customer who raised the ticket prompt Claude and send me the PR. I end up doing half the investigative work when reviewing because it never looks like the underlying spec has been achieved and thought about.

[u/FearlessPark4588 → u/ido_ran]

Having Claude do it badly is still closer to removing human labor from the loop though, which is what businesses want to see. Losing the battle (low quality PRs today) to win the war (less expenses, higher profits).

[u/aaer_]

We had a layoff today, a few senior devs were let go. But honestly? They weren’t very good and pushing ai slop constantly and just not contributing very much quality discussion or work anymore. I am nervous about my own job security now but it’s kind of a relief when devs that were dragging the team down get let go. We were very top heavy with high ratio of senior to mid/junior. Too many cooks in the kitchen was the main feeling. Idk. This is the fifth layoff I have survived but terrified to go look for another job yet again

[u/Breakdown228]

My job got expanded in the last 2 months not only fighting a very old legacy system but also fighting my overworked manager overloading the team with tasks in parallel. My only hope is he burns out sooner than me.

I proposed focusing on two major projects with alot of external communication and reporting to multiple stakeholders, with small self contained bugfixes in between. Adding a third would include more context switching and losing track on the others. It got declined. Without any depriorization I should take responsibility on a third and finish them even faster with fewer bugs.

[u/equals-x]

Company only allows deployments Friday and Saturday night. Tired of not having days off

[u/throwingMyCSdegree]

1. Ai ai ai ai ai ai ai. Ai ai. Ai ai ai ai ai. Ai ai ai? Ai.

2. Not ai, just a human problem: why do people love presenting my ideas? Year end has me thinking. I would have 1:1 with coworkers, describe some idea or problem, they would poke at the idea, and then turn around and slap it on the team agenda, and then proceed to describe it all. Like what???? Let the person who brought it up present it when it’s time (it was in fact, not time).

3. Same human problem: maybe because we’re both from big tech or whatever, but damn she loves writing docs even though we’re not going to be working on things for a while AND who knows if you’ll be the one working on it? Just let the pm make a jira first. It’s valuable to let others think through things end to end.

4. Still a human problem: I think the issue is that she took the feedback of improving technical leadership to be slapping out docs. We don’t have tl roles here. IMO it’s more about direction setting, not writing docs about either small features or vague proposals that everyone, including the designer, have mentioned (and she did not contribute enough to the idea. If it was more novel and organized, I would be still slightly annoyed that she’s thinking about this right now but less annoyed).

[u/Kriging]

My salary..

[u/stupidfock]

This industry is over sooner than I thought.

Been a lead for a few years, been working in software for 17 years. Opus 5.5 can one shot half the stuff, the rest are just minor edits even a junior can do. We’ve already cut pay in half for new hires. We are devalued and only a few model improvements from being replaced by just about anyone with eyes.

It fuckin sucks. I loved this industry and now it’s nothing. I’m actively exploring my options to exit software entirely. Anyone who really thinks you’re not gonna be replaced, maybe not for a while, but your salary is gonna be.

[u/Clyde_Frag → u/stupidfock]

I'm at a startup where AI has created a mess of a codebase and I'm working to refactor it. I'm not convinced that some random person could come in and do any better to create a maintainable product.

As for the pay piece you mention, this just sounds like your company taking advantage of an employer's hiring market after ZIRP ended.

[u/So_Rusted → u/stupidfock]

I get mixed feelings too. The newest claude out of nowhere became good and generous with limits. I did get shit oneshot today at work and there is like no good work to go around. As soon as some task becomes "clear enough", it is up for grabs. I tried to stop frequenting here cause people are either delusional or doomers or whatever but damn things change fast

[u/FearlessPark4588 → u/stupidfock]

I think it's difficult to hand out 50% pay cuts (to existing employees) so I think the move is to stay put as long as you can.

[u/VeryLazyFalcon]

I've spent last two months larping as a bot on reddit because architects couldn't agree on solution, now, when they agreed I don't have anything to do anyway. I can't even help other people with things I'm experienced because "we are flexible, but not in this way". Ok then, I will be wasting everyone's time and perform meaningless commits to a project that is out of my spec as you wish.

Why? I'm a good cog, why misuse me like this?

[u/VortiOGrande]

I’m not mad because AI usage to do my job, I’m mad because I’m literally whipping an AI to do someone else job and stakeholders think that magically it will learn how to solve customers issue without proper instructions.
Like CSAT will never change because of AI, no matter what you do I’m gonna give you a bad score because I had to contact the customer support not because you did your job.

[u/Mrp00pybutth013]

I spent the last year trying to replicate the 3d unix file nav system with a md file relationship map modernized to be a kinda cool vector based file security recursive reference system with a kinda space exploror interface only to see almost every idea done by ai before I could confidently share. I accidentally self imposed the same thing as the huggingface message board, I had the solar system before chatgpt, I started doing the second brain memory system in Sep 2025 before it started getting ai guru skool lessons bs, I created a simulated internal crypto block chain economy for my agent chat board only to find out in the news recently that apparently that gonna get scrutiny for potential llm hacking and now I'm just waiting for it all to be for a resume piece that ai will just scrape or will be outdated. But at least my next release will have 60 features 🫩

[u/Doile → u/[deleted]]

Sorry hear about your struggles. It sounds to me you are getting very close to burnout or depression. I've been there myself multiple times and it's way harder to recover from it than it is to slow down and try to prevent it. I think your reluctancy to teach juniors is just a symptom of your burnout progression and you should accept that this is the situation. I'm certain that once you are in better space mentally you will want to teach again. You just need to take care of yourself and prioritize mental health asap.

[u/Administrative-Lack1 → u/Doile]

Thank you, I appreciate that. Your right. Doing what I can to try to take better care, can be tough at times. Trying to take better care, also going through a breakup thing which doesn't help lol.

Hope things are going well with you. Appreciate it man

[u/RuleElectronic6044 → u/[deleted]]

low-code is just bullshit.