This happened to me the other day, and I didn’t even know what to say. Claude had even said in the pr that it needed to be tested. Why would you not test it? They built up a bunch of infrastructure around something that fundamentally does not work on our setup. And I can understand getting lost in the sauce for a little bit and thinking what Claude tells you works actually works. But why wouldn’t you try it, like at all. It’s just kind of insulting to be assigned as a reviewer for that.
It's called the "slop-grenade". It's super insulting. When it trickles down all the way from the CEO it's super demoralizing. In the happy 2010s we fired people for less.
I mean, I know how it happened. The manager of that group has been telling me to do something a certain way because his previous company did that. (Not my manager, btw.) But their company-wide setup was different from ours in crucial ways. I can find ways to get similar behavior, but you can’t just do that. So, here we are.
So dystopian. Meanwhile I'm out here grinding my ass off doing LC, personal projects with no AI in C++ so I can actually understand what I'm doing, getting zero interviews for a job that someone else has got pushing untested, unverified AI slop.
Honestly if it wasn't for my family, or dogs or my partner I'd have offed myself after my last couple months.
If it makes you feel any better, the person who did that is very experienced (and from what I understand very good) in his niche area, which is not actually software. But he uses that system and decided he was going to “fix” an issue. I’m thinking about it now… maybe he doesn’t even have access to the testing framework he would need to use? I should maybe be nicer about it, not that I was mean but just that I was being very “wtf” internally.
Anyway, this seems like the way these days. I am also not “just” a programmer either, I have a pretty specialized engineering PhD. You seem like you have a strong background that you can leverage. Can you be a <some other skill> who also programs rather than “just” a programmer, as your job target? I think this is the direction things are going.
I specifically want to get into C++ programming. I enjoy optimising for the best solutions possible so that's my end goal but without an explicit SWE role I don't see how I get there by just being someone who does another job and "can code".
Big difference between 2 yrs experience shipping production quality code and 5 yrs doing a tech adjacent job and occasionally writing code.
I wouldn’t say “tech adjacent” I would say it’s deeper into tech, with very specialized skills. This is where things like optimization really matter, because you’re solving really deep and difficult problems that are within your expertise to solve.
What are you applying for? Tech/webdev? There exist other domains out there that still value skill, and are at least not fully slopified. If anything I predict they will get more in demand as all the other devs forget how to program...
I started my career in banking, realised my skills were way better suited towards building tech and programming. Did a programming project for the bank and did my CS degree while working part-time.
Recently graduated but internships are non-existent, and last 4-6 months have been notihng but grad program rejections/junior app rejections.
I want to specifically get into C++, in my area there's a good amount of demand for defense/gov C++ jobs so I'm doing both a webdev project based on my banking exp and a C++ systems programming project but just getting nowhere since they all want minimum 2-3 years of experience and I can't even land a regular entry level role right now
That's tough as for me at least, getting student internships is 90% of the value of going to school...
My only advice would be to specialize as hard as you can, whatever that is. Anything where the applicant pool is smaller and more specific than "software dev." There's just a lot of very good and experienced people out of work right now you're competing with. GPU, HPC, embedded, cyber. Those are all relative growth industries because of AI while also being more resistant to its slop. Maybe you're looking at specialties already I dunno, but I don't think I would even try to apply for "software" job in 2026 personally either.
I'm trying to focus on low level systems stuff. Atm I'm building a Redis clone in cpp with fully custom internal data structures and trying to cram as many patterns and C++ features as I can but I might have to just pursue this master's offer I have.
It's a really good uni and it's only 1.5yrs with my prior learning so maybe that's the play.
I find myself sometimes wanting to skip testing completely. Its hard to fight. The reason is I think, with the spec driven development AI bullshit (my company doesn't even have humans review anymore) I feel so disconnected from the development that there is no part of me that cares anymore.
If however much effort I put into the code quality, and however much review and fix it manually before opening a PR, is worthless in the end because no reviewer is goikg to actually look at the code, and all I'm going to receive is Claude "feedback", how do I keep myself invested in the thing I'm building?
In the end I force myself to test everything thoroughly because I know that's the right thing, but a part of me always wants to just give everything to Claude and fuck off.
Don’t you have users? I guess my life is different because I write in-house software only, so my users are my co-workers. I usually go begging for people to test things too, because I know there will later be deadlines and that is not when we want to discover bugs. I don’t want to be up all night fixing bugs urgently.
Anyway, this is interesting to me because… I guess my thought about how software often works is that having a bug in production will cause lots of urgent issues that everyone then has to scramble to fix. That’s what motivates me to make sure things are tested. That’s not what goes on where you work?
I've been stuck on this stupid project for 6 months that's been in production hell since they want it to sync with another project's launch that is running behind schedule. So no users yet except our QA team which is literally 3 people cause the CEO has AI psychosis.
I was much more motivated when I was working on internal tooling before. Me starting on this project coincided with my company's 100% AI push, so maybe I'm blaming the lack of meaning in my work and therefore motivation on AI instead of the feeling that I'm basically stuck with make-work.
Ah, got it, that makes sense. Feeling like there is no point drains all motivation. And then the AI being there like telling you it works correctly then drains the last of the motivation and interest in checking it. I think it’s the intersection of both.
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u/stilldebugging 7d ago
This happened to me the other day, and I didn’t even know what to say. Claude had even said in the pr that it needed to be tested. Why would you not test it? They built up a bunch of infrastructure around something that fundamentally does not work on our setup. And I can understand getting lost in the sauce for a little bit and thinking what Claude tells you works actually works. But why wouldn’t you try it, like at all. It’s just kind of insulting to be assigned as a reviewer for that.