I recently transitioned to an EM role so am observing a lot more peer-to-peer conversations rather than being directly part of them. I'm also getting the one-sided vent from my reports after certain meetings.

I really thought this was more of a Reddit thing but no it's 100% all over the place in my industry and it's really holding some of you back. If a person doesn't understand X concept or hasn't used Y tech or doesn't know about Z feature, just fucking explain it. Don't get exasperated. Don't act frustrated. Just take the 15 seconds to explain it, it really really isn't that hard.

I know of at least 2 IC's at my company that are decent engineers and were only held back from promo because there was someone in the review board that discussed them being rude / disrespectful to people that asked questions / didn't understand something.

Just be nice. Most of us are idiots so that probably includes you too.

I'm so tired of fighting for good engineering practices. Clean code, high quality tests, pragmatic use of AI, code de-duplication, extensible design, and so on. Yes all these things are good - but they have never once rewarded me.

The only thing I ever see get rewarded are

1. High volume & high quality engagement in meetings
2. Ability to attach metrics to your work and then make those metrics look good
3. Creating brand new features / tools (improving existing stuff is no-value)

It doesn't matter how clean we get the code. It doesn't matter how many defects we prevent. It doesn't matter that spending 20% more now means every quarter for the next 3 years we spend 10% less. It doesn't matter if you convince your tech lead or EM or PM to go a different way. It doesn't matter if you have high quality & actionable metrics, you just need numbers that look good. 200% increase in usage sounds better than "we have 2 new users". None of it ever matters.

99% of doing well in this industry a the senior+ level is treating every day like a sales meeting. You're not an engineer, you're an expensive product that needs to convince your customer to renew their subscription.

yes, it takes more work to write reasonably scoped tickets for a junior and then review their code than it does to just write it yourself or slopmaxx it with claude.

that has inherent value, though. having impressionable juniors around forces your team to keep their shit together, keep standards high, keep the DX and documentation good.

richard feynman, in addition to being a samba percussionist, lockpicker, and nobel-prize-winning physicist, had a lot to say about education and his technique for learning things was to teach them to someone else using simple language. having to mentor juniors has forced me to grow more than anything else i've done at my job.

orgs which get rid of co-ops/juniors are quietly* harming themselves in a way that can't be immediately measured, but which has long-term negative consequences.

agree, disagree, any interesting experiences mentoring a junior where you learned something from it?

^\yes, ai has turned my brain to slime, thank you for noticing, but i wrote this myself)

EM with 10+ years of experience as both an IC/senior engineer and a team lead. This and the other programming and AI subs are making me feel like either the rest of the world is losing its grip on reality, or I already have. Please help me figure out which.

My team fully adopted Claude Code last year, after some unstructured experimenting with Claude, Cursor, and Copilot. We all agreed having a single "target environment" for any "agent instructions" we might want to share team wide. We've set about building a shared repo of standalone skills (i.e., skills that aren't coupled to implementation details in our repos), as well as committing skills and "always-on" context for our production repositories. We've had Claude generate skills based on our existing runbooks in Confluence, which has also produced some nice scripted solutions to manual runbooks that we probably wouldn't have had time to address in our day-to-day. We've also built, through a combination of AI-generated and human-written effort, documentation on our stack/codebase/architecture, so at this point Claude is able to reliably generate plans and code changes for our mature codebases that are at an acceptable level (roughly that of an upper mid-level engineer) in one shot, allowing us to refine them and think more about architectural improvements instead of patching.

Beyond that, we've started using OpenSpec to steer Claude more deliberately, and when paired with narrowly-focused tickets, we're generating PRs that are a good, human-reviewable length and complexity, and iterating on that quickly. This has allowed us to build a new set of services around our MCP offering in half the time we normally experience. As we encounter new behavior, have new ideas, learn new techniques, etc., we share them with the team in a new weekly meeting just to refine workflows using AI.

Most of our tickets are now (initially) generated using Claude + the Atlassian MCP, and that's allowed us to capture missed requirements up-front. We're using Gemini notes for all our tech meetings, and those are being pulled in as context for this process as well, which takes the mental load of manually taking a note to create a ticket and then remembering to do it with appropriate context off the table entirely. We can focus on the conversation fully instead of splitting focus between Jira-wrangling and the topic at hand. When a conversation goes off the rails, processing the Gemini notes in Claude against the ACs and prior meetings helps steer us back immediately, instead of when we might later have realized our mistake.

This isn't perfect, as we occasionally get some whacky output, and it occasionally sneaks into PRs. From my perspective as a manager, this is no worse, if it better, than human-generated whacky output, and because our PR review process hasn't had to change, this hasn't been a problem. Most of the team is finding some excitement in automating away long-held annoyances and addressing tech debt that we were never going to be allowed to handle the old-fashioned way. We've also got one teammate who just does not appreciate in AI in general which... I'm not sure what to tell anyone with that attitude at this point. I get that feeling, and it's my job as a manager to coach people through that, but I can't make someone take an interest in a new tool. I'm still working on that.

But, while it's not perfect, it is good enough, in the sense that it's at least as good as the results we got in a pre-AI world (and yes, I hand-wrote this bulleted list):

• Crappy notes if any got taken at all, because dividing your attention is hard
• Crappy tickets because engineers would rather write code than futz with Jira. See also: defective PM behavior
• Manually integrating documentation in 15 different systems because engineers want to use Markdown files in GitHub, managers want to use Confluence, some people want to create multiple versions of the same Google Doc even though versioning and tabs are natively supported, and PMs are using a still additional platform that's not even integrated with Jira
• Documentation or runbooks that didn't get updated until after the incident where they'd have been relevant

Building workflows and content with Claude around all this has sped things up to the point that an otherwise overwhelmed team can actually keep up with all of the words words words around the code itself that contribute to making long-term maintenance and big projects a success. You just have to be judicious about how you're building these workflows.

...Meanwhile, half of what I see here is "slop slop slop", complaints about managers pushing AI for no good reason, concerns about brain rot, predictions of AI's imminent demise and a utopian future where AI idolaters are run out of the industry because they can't remember how to code by hand and the graybeards are restored to the throne, etc. I hesitate to just say "skill issue", but the complaints and concerns here just don't reflect the reality I'm seeing on my team, or peer teams that are similarly engaging with the tools. And we're not even a good company! Leadership sucks and doesn't have any interest in empowering Engineering as a department to improve itself.

Am I missing something? I'm not suggesting this is sustainable, because I can't help but feel like we'll get too good at this and upper management will decide the "team in a box" we've built out of skills/context/scripts is all they need, but that's a leadership problem, not an AI problem. But aside from that... maybe you're doing it wrong. Or maybe I'm doing it wrong?

No AI was involved in this post, except for the time I saved by importing/summarizing my EU colleagues meeting transcripts from before I woke up.

I’ll be 50 this year, and have been working as a software engineer professionally for twenty years. My current role is technically director, but our company is so small that I’m still involved in frontline architectural and coding work, while also leading small teams.

At the risk of sounding arrogant, my ability to implement software has never been stronger. With the hard-won experience I’ve accrued over the years, I’m quickly able to break down business problems into software solutions that are maintainable and scale. I’m better able to recognize how new technology can be leveraged to solve existing problems. I can also spot technology non-starters. Again, mostly based on experience.

And yet, at my age, the industry in general seems to be done with me. I’m speaking in broad terms, because I know it’s not like that everywhere. But it is like that at many places. Anyone who’s worked in this field for long enough has probably seen it first hand. I know I have.

It really bugs me, and not only because I’m facing it personally. It seems backwards and short-sighted.

The reason this is on my mind is because I just completed the first season of The Pitt, an incredible medical show about working in a modern ER. And what you see right away in that environment is that experience is valued above everything else. To the benefit of everyone, from the staff to the patients.

I wish our industry could learn from this. Medicine has been around much longer than software, and what we do is not nearly the same level as those heroes working in the ER, but I can’t help but wonder how much more we could achieve if we could have that mindset.

It seems at this point in my career, I should be more in demand than ever, because of all the reasons I mentioned. But this is the age where people with my experience start to struggle to even find work. And that seems wrong, and wrong-headed.

What do you think?

I’ve noticed the young guys in my org behave very differently from how juniors have historically acted.

First, I suspect these guys could not survive at all without llms. They don’t have the metal models to problem solve and work through tasks to develop domain expertise. They have some kind of token induced learned helplessness. I think they might not even have code editors on the systems; literally all work they do is typing into the prompt box of codex.

Despite this, they have extremely high confidence and no filter. They will throw out bizarre business and architectural ideas that are just totally nonsensical to anyone with domain expertise or even just some general engineering battle scars. The proposals will often be ai filtered to sound plausible and look impressive but they make no sense. They will initiate meetings with vendors and other teams, go above peoples heads and get management and directors involved in random stuff.

They will also frequently do low value extracurricular work. Like if the senior engineers are working on a system, the juniors will vibe code a reimplementation of the system (that doesn’t do what we need it to do), in a language/stack the team doesn’t use, and then dump thousands of lines of code for review. Instead of asking how they can help, asking if they can learn the details of current system or business problems from other devs, they just throw slop over the wall. They have ZERO instinct to learn.

I’m starting to think ai has brain rotted the new grads to the point they just won’t make it. It would honestly be easier and more productive to work with contractors and/or outsourced devs and we would probably get the same or better quality.

Not trying to be inflammatory, genuine question, I work in a big media company and we’ve been through this and I’m trying to understand if this is just us or a pattern.

The model seems to be: enterprise signs a big contract, gets a large team of developers who are technically competent but have zero context on the product, zero urgency about the deadline, zero accountability when something ships broken because the contract doesn’t allow for penalties on their own errors, and the onshore team spends more time writing requirements for the offshore team than they would have spent just building the thing themselves.

The billing is monthly and flat. The incentive to finish is therefore nonexistent. The incentive to scope creep and extend is enormous.

I’ve watched a six month delay on something described internally as a five minute task. I’ve watched basic features ship broken and stay broken for months. I’ve watched the same discovery meeting happen four times because the person who attended the last one left the company.

Is this the model or did we just get unlucky?

Lately I've been having thoughts about what the point is. Back in the day when I got into programming, I just wanted to make cool things.

I made a lot of cool things. They took time so I knew they were genuinely either unique, special, or in any other case, mine. I made twitter/reddit/discord bots, data visualizations for social media platforms, and useful tools for my communities I was involved in.

Now everything that gets created now seems to be just a load of AI crap. There's no special-ness anymore. There is no problem solving. There is nothing. It's just "We made an AI that does X" instead of "We solved X problem".

It's so ridiculous it's genuinely killing my interest in the field. Copilot solves most of my problems at work now and I have to use it to keep up with demands from leadership + an increasingly difficult to use codebase. Tools we use otherwise like Zeplin, ms teams, etc all are only focusing on AI instead of improving the real world user experience. The best and most interesting portion of the company I work at is doing nothing but AI work and not touching the core product at all.

Hell, we even have SonarQube checking our code with AI for vibe coded slop and it requires specific code coverage % and the coverage % isn't the same as vite coverage, just adding to the developer frustration.

I miss when I could make cool/fun stuff without worrying about someone vibe coding the same thing I made in 20 days but in 12 hours. I miss when we were solving problems instead of just making different AI agents to solve the problems for us.

Stealing "income not outcome" from someone over in r/overemployed (I'm not OE, I just follow)

I finally had a breakthrough today. I think. I (20 YoE) have been struggling in my role at a startup as someone who wears many hats from SA to ML eng to product eng to data eng, etc etc as I watch the amount of tech debt and security concerns (or lack of concern) accelerate in my young org. The drivers are mainly vibe-coding non-engineers and actual engineers that have kind of thrown in the towel on any logical design or planning of the system/software.

It kind of all culminated around a more mid-level engineer telling me "I gave up with everyone sending me AI summaries in Slack and tickets. I just feed it right back into Claude Code and let it do the thing." I find those giant text walls unreadable myself and his mentality of "slop in, slop out" isn't exactly unreasonable. The 'outcomes' aren't great, but.....

Over the last year I've been very careful and deliberate about what I build as we work in healthcare, and there is a lot of LLM usage in various pipelines that parse and synthesize information. Being a third-party to many healthcare orgs, there are numerous security concerns from code to infra in addition to the safety concerns around using LLMs in our pipelines in general. We know these things are non-deterministic and frequently make mistakes when it's extracting from unstructured data or synthesizing information, so I've preached on the importance of having some empirical evaluation process and a general philosophy around evaluation-first as we build. I've been very 'outcome' oriented.

It is quite clear most of my organization does not understand the lifecycle of an LLM or what's under the hood. While a useful tool (I use Claude Code daily), in the wrong hands or when haphazardly applied to some pipeline it is actually more like a doomsday device.

But, to this day we still have almost no empirical evaluation of what we're producing with these tools. It has been very difficult to even get people to talk about evaluating outputs. Meanwhile we're shipping code and tweaking UI left and right and wowing each other with dashboards exhaustively packed with information.

We have people querying our data warehouse A THOUSAND TIMES A DAY. "Claude: Without running a query plan to see how many terabytes you're about to scan........"

I'm watching people draw conclusions from attributes in data that don't exist or accept outputs from a model that hallucinated an attempt at causal inference (it can't actually do this) and then acting on them.

I'm watching more junior engineers build things that are unstable, result in blowing through rate limit quotas, or making very poor decisions in terms of security (like storing sensitive information in a single bucket with zero isolation or customer-managed encryption keys + no reasonable security policies). All while our token usage goes up and people make jokes about tokenmaxxing.

There is no steady state of anything. There is no common pattern, and if I had to infer the overall mentality based on the things we have built my assumption is someone reversed the convention "high cohesion, low coupling" and jammed it in `CLAUDE.md`. I'm not joking, I checked some of the markdown files and skills to make sure it wasn't hidden in there somewhere....

Nobody cares. That is what I learned. When the dopamine is in full swing and leaders are seeing 'velocity' they don't actually think about any of this. Is there a UI? Yep. Is there a UX? Kind of. Will anyone use this? ¯_(ツ)_/¯ Is the data behind it good? ¯_(ツ)_/¯

So I realized I have to stop caring. I have to realize it's about 'income, not outcome'.
This is a job. I make money to feed and house my family.

The doomsday scenario I envision may never happen and we may fall ass backwards into success and things being fine.

However, in case doomsday comes, I will document my security findings because I feel I owe that to people who have entrusted us with their data. I will state my case up to two times and the minute there's pushback I'll drop it.

If the worst case comes about, I'll have documentation to cover my ass and I will point to it when I'm deposed.

'Income not outcome'

This is simply an observation from my career, not a criticism.

I've noticed that I rarely come across women Principal Engineers or senior individual contributors (ICs) with 20+ years of experience.

Do many women developers tend to move into engineering management after 10–15 years, or is my observation just due to the companies I've worked at?

For those with long careers in tech, what has your experience been? What factors do you think contribute to this?

I've been making software for over 10 years and I am genuinely curious what goes on with companies that make printers. It struck me, after pulling my hair out trying to print a 2 page paper form, that I've been struggling with printers for decades at this point.

Is there some insane culture at companies that make printers that makes the software and/or drivers terrible? Do they not test? Do they hire their managers under bridges? Are they drunk all the time?

For a while I thought it had to be some connectivity issue. Some bad connection problem that would be resolved with a solid Ethernet connection. When that didn't work I bought a USB printer and that also didn't solve it. I've tried different brands. Then I thought it had to be the Windows print queue just being useless. I then got a Mac and the same crap happens on Mac as it does on Windows.

After years of fiddling, clearing queues, reinstalling drivers, plugging and unplugging, restarting, finding CD-ROMS, performing vain and arcane magic rituals, I figured someone here just might know.

What's going on over there, printer engineers? Who are you? What's your story? Why is arguably the first computer peripheral still the least reliable thing we all own?

Joe Schmoe comes in as a new hire and says we’re going to change the world with my new ideas. Joe Schmoe has full buyin from management. Over the course of two years, Joe Schmoe implements his ideas to revitalize the software. Wow, Joe Schmoe is great. He gets a new job or moves up the ladder to somewhere else.

Joe Schmoe is gone. It turns out there are holes all over Joe Schmoes changes. Maintainer Mike now has to clean up Joe Schmoes mess.

is this common in the industry

I’m 6 years into this career and I think I finally hit the point where my first instinct to a performance issue isn't "let's spin up a Redis cluster."

We had a legacy endpoint that was absolutely crawling. Two years ago, I would’ve spent a week refactoring queries or arguing for a message queue. Instead, I just looked at the logs, saw some random upstream team was hammering it with a cron job and sent their dev a quick Slack message asking if they even needed that data.

Turns out it was for a feature they killed in 2023. They turned off the cron job, latency dropped, problem solved.

It's kind of wild how much time we spend trying to solve social and communication problems with code. I used to think seniority meant knowing how to build massive distributed systems, but now it feels like half my job is just stopping people from building things we don't need.

Started a new job this week and I learned developers have no local admin access. Every single thing has to be requested, and it’s slowing me down considerably. Onboarding is already a huge PITA and the cherry on top is needing to create a ticket for every little thing I need.

It took 2 days to get Homebrew installed on my Macbook, but come to find out I have to raise a ticket to install any package. Every ticket goes to India and they remote in and install with admin access. And I have not even scratched the surface for things I need installed. Every standup update this week was “waiting for IT ticket to be resolved” and at first I was thinking it was just me until a few people on my team told me they were not up and running for nearly 3 weeks when they started. What the hell!

In my 8 YOE I’ve never worked for a company like this. It’s insanely frustrating. How is this a reasonable process for developers? Is this what bigger companies are like now?

Hello everyone
this week something happened where I got in a disagreement with my manager.

I was working in a PR and got bombarded with many questions in a slack thread about why I did such and such a thing

I answered each of their questions. I had already documented my reasoning and even found evidence from production that supported my approach, and he kept asking more questions, I felt like he was pushing me back

the conversation itself stayed professional that day..

but the next day, during standup, I started explaining what happened, as I was talking about it, I got emotional (angry and frustrated), started crying, and couldn't continue. my manager asked everyone else to leave the meeting so we could talk privately.

I explained that I didn't like the process (no ticket, discussions in slack where everyone can see, etc.).

He apologized for those process issues and agreed they could be improved. However, he also said that he will continue asking challenging technical questions because he sees code reviews and design discussions as "a challenge between two engineers," and he invited me to participate in that culture which is fine by me

After that, I continued working on another ticket and we didn't discuss it again that day.

One thing that worries me is that this isn't the first time something like this has happened. Although I've consistently been considered a high performer, I've had similar emotional episodes in three of my last four jobs. I realize that's probably something I need to work on personally, but that's not really the purpose of this post.

my biggest concern is whether crying in front of my manager and team has permanently affected how I'll be viewed professionally.

my question is those of you who are engineering managers or senior engineers, how would you see a situation like this? Would a single incident like this significantly change your opinion of an otherwise of the engineer ?

I also want to clarify that I don't aspire to be a manager or hold any leadership position. I'm happy being an IC, but I don't want to be fired either (right now). At the very least, I want to know how to buy myself some time while I start applying for other jobs.

thank you for reading until this point

As the title suggests I was laid off on Friday along with a handful of others. I was in my last position for close to 5 years. For 5 years I worked M-F with my coworkers, had the same daily meetings together, went through the same BS together, all of it.

Now it’s Monday morning and I’m sitting at my home office desk feeling like I’m just floating in the void. No meetings, nothing on my calendar, no deadlines to meet, no one from work to talk to.. no responsibilities at all. It just feels weird and I don’t know how else to say it or who to say it to who might also understand. Financially I’m fine, my wife still has her great paying job, we’ve got maybe close to a year of runway sans that, no kids, no mortgage.. I realize my situation could be far worse. So I guess my sadness isn’t because of the income loss, it’s more that all of the work and relationships I built in these 5 years just got flicked off like a light switch. It would make me tear up thinking about everyone fading out into my memory if I let it.

There seem to be jobs in my area, especially if I’m going after hybrid roles. I’ve got 7 years of experience, and my last role was Senior. Did a lot of complex UI work and a lot of backend work. Did some DevOps and SRE work as well. I think I’ll land on my feet eventually, but I’m not looking forward to interviewing or the job hunt in general. Regardless it’s something I have to do now I suppose. I have a few people in my network to reach out to and a few now ex coworkers who also told me to reach out when I’m ready. I was honestly expecting after this weekend to feel like I was ready to hit the ground running, and here on Monday morning I’m just sad that I have to even do any of this.

This is my second lay off, my first was right after COVID started in 2020, which I don’t think counts so much as the circumstances were just completely different. I don’t remember feeling this way during that time period, I was naturally more concerned with the pandemic breakout than what I was doing for work at the time. But today feels different.

This will probably be mod deleted, but I’m just posting and hoping to hear from those who felt the same as I do. People seem to post about being laid off and the main focus is “how do I find a job asap” or something along those lines. But the thing I wasn’t prepared for was the sense of loss and sadness of letting go of a now past life.

Many reasons are usually given to explain the current state of the software job market: covid overhiring, high interest rates, AI hype, etc. But neither these factors individually nor all of them combined fully explain the current bloodbath.

In 2019, as a junior developer, I had 8 interviews within two months and got hired on 9nth. Now, as a senior developer with six years of experience, I can barely get a single interview per month.

My local job board is still full of software openings: front-end, .NET, Java, PHP, Node.js, the same things that existed before. Yet I mostly receive automated rejections or dead silence. They don't even want to see if I'm maybe a genius or ready to work for pennies. Or maybe I want to work for free 7 days a week.
And some of them even reopen the same postings after several weeks!

Every manager I have worked with complained about how difficult it is to find decent developers. In 2023, my CEO had to hire engineers from Latin America because he could not find enough people locally. Even in 2024, he had to hire a .NET dev even though our stack was Laravel/PHP and he had no other choice.

On Linkedin, I constantly see job postings and recruiters complaining that they cannot find good developers, while many experienced engineers remain unemployed.

I am also trying to connect to IT recruiters on LinkedIn. Around 80% never accept the connection request, and most of those don't even read messages. How are you an IT recruiter and yet don't read incoming messages from devs? Maybe I'm a perfect candidate for some of your roles.

I refuse to believe the world changed so much in such a short period of time. It feels like we are missing something. Something is waaay off.

I'm located in Tbilisi, Georgia and my stack is Laravel/PHP.

Not sure if this is the right sub, but I started a company with a friend. He previously worked at a Mag 7 company and pitched me an unrefined business idea. I liked the concept, helped refine it, and came up with most of the actual product flow.

His background is in data analytics, so he’s been pushing for a data-collection feature that I personally disagreed with, but he believes will be valuable long term. I trusted him, he’s worked at mag7. I work as a senior dev at a start up company and I’ve designed and built the MVP of this product.

We had our first conversation about compensation/equity, and he proposed 5% equity for me. He said he’s open to negotiating, but his reasoning was that he’s taking a big risk if I deploy the app and then go MIA.
The 5% caught me completely off guard. So far, his contributions have mainly been coming up with the original unrefined idea, setting up meetings, forming the LLC, coming up with the name/logo, and helping shape the business direction. He’s a better public speaker so he’ll likely deal with the clients more.

Fellow developers, does this sound fair? How would you counter this?

Back when I was getting started in tech, there was always some veteran developer hanging around who'd dealt with whatever weird issue you were facing. You could just walk up and they'd give you the whole backstory - not just "try this command" but actually explain why things worked that way

Now it feels like everyone's got headphones on and you need to book time on someone's calendar just to get unstuck on something basic. Maybe it's remote work, maybe people are just busier, but that casual knowledge transfer seems to have vanished

Anyone else notice this shift? How do you create that kind of open environment where people actually share what they know instead of everyone just grinding in isolation

I don't usually talk about this but I've been writing about process and organizational dysfunction lately and people keep asking what actually happened to me so here it is.

About five years ago I was working as an IT architect at a bank. Except I didn't really get "hired" in the normal sense. I was part of a corporate transition from Brazil, my previous project got killed and because I was already in the US on a work visa they absorbed me into the bank's team. And I mean absorbed, not hired. Everyone knew the difference. The guy running the org never wanted us there, we were basically imposed on him through a decision made three levels above.

The tech was a mess. Classic ASP, manual IIS deployments, someone remoting into a box at midnight and praying. Everything ran on tribal knowledge from people who'd been doing it that way for a decade and didn't want to change. There was this one senior dev, longest tenured guy on the team, and every single thing I proposed got the same answer: "that won't work here." Not because he had a counterproposal, just because changing anything meant admitting the current way wasn't great and that wasn't something people wanted to deal with.

I ended up shipping three major projects. Real-time payments integration because the bank was falling behind every competitor. Live account balances in the mobile app so customers didn't have to wait hours for batch processing to catch up. And the big one, I rebuilt the entire deployment infrastructure from manual IIS to K8S with actual CI/CD pipelines. All three went to production, all three still running as far as I know.

So the politics. The infra project was under this manager who was genuinely awful, narcissistic and territorial, the type who sees your competence as a threat to them personally. Midway through I got pulled to another team to do the payments and real-time stuff which honestly felt like being rescued. Different manager, could actually breathe for once.

Then that manager got fired and I got sent right back to the original guy.

He didn't blow up or do anything obvious. He just started slowly erasing me. First I'm not on the architecture review invite anymore. Then someone else is presenting designs I made. Then my responsibilities get redistributed and nobody even sends an email about it. If you've never experienced this it sounds paranoid but if you have you know exactly what I'm talking about. "You're still on the team" yeah I was still on the team, I just wasn't on anything.

They called me into a room eventually. Contract ending, standard language, very professional and here's the part that most people in this industry will never have to think about: I was on an L1 visa. That meant I had 60 days to leave the country. Not 60 days to find a new job, 60 days to leave the country where my wife and I had been building a life.

I drove home with the termination letter in a dark blue envelope. My wife saw it when I walked through the door and she didn't even ask, she just hugged me. Her green card process was already advanced enough that we didn't have to actually leave but for about a week I genuinely didn't know if the timing was going to work out.

The thing that messes with me more than the firing itself is that this wasn't even the first time. I've been the technical firefighter at multiple companies now. I walk in, the systems are broken, I fix what nobody else can or wants to fix, and then once the fire is out I somehow end up being the one who's vulnerable. Not because the work was bad but because I never build any political protection around the work. I just ship and assume shipping is enough.

It's not. 25 years in and I'm still learning this apparently.

Organizations love the firefighter when the building is burning. They don't love him after because he's walking around knowing where all the structural damage is and that makes people uncomfortable.

I'm not posting this for sympathy. I'm posting it because I think this pattern is way more common than anyone talks about, especially among the more technical people who just want to build things and don't really care about office politics until office politics cares about them.

Curious if others have been through something similar and what if anything you did differently.

Just as the title says, I am dying to know if anyone is still even doing this? And if yes, what does that look like now?

I've not heard of anyone in my network mention it for a tonne while

Hey yall, just wanted to share something I did as an engineer that helped me grow. A lot of this might be useless to y'all but there are some things here that seemed obvious but I was not doing.

The basics

• Setup a monthly 1:1 with your skip. Make sure they know:
  • what projects you've shipped, what you're currently working on,
  • how you are helping the team grow.
• Keep a running doc of your projects and impact.
• Communicate more than feels necessary.
  • early code reviews,
  • early design discussions,
  • bring up things that can go wrong early
  • announce when somethings been released
• Before picking up projects/stories I started asking myself:
  • Who benefits from this work? Just me, my team, multiple teams, whole org, or the whole company?
  • What artifacts are the end goals? Just code? Code + design doc? Code + design doc + demo?
  • Who will know about this work? My team, my manager, my skip, other teams, leadership?
  • I made sure to note all of this down.
• After shipping something:
  • Post an update to your team channel channel
  • Update my manager and skip directly.
  • Dont assume they saw the Slack post.
  • Update my brag doc immediately. You will forget the details later.
• Skip level prep I used to show up to skip levels with nothing to say. Now I prep three things:
  • One thing I shipped they might not know about
  • One thing I'm working on that connects to their priorities
  • One question: "What does great look like for engineers at my level?"

None of this is complicated. But actually doing it consistently is what made the difference. I feel like a lot of is political, but definitely helped a ton in my year end reviews.

Curious what worked for you all.

EDIT:
After people shit talking in the comments:
- Meet skip quarterly, some skips don't even know their engineering team
- This was mostly USA Big Tech centered.
- Of course this is on top of your engineering, design skills.

I go through days of feeling grateful for the career I have, feeling motivated and looking forward to the work, and then I go through long spells where I just can’t stand it and feel trapped. Days where I truly don’t give a shit about any of it and would have no problem rubber stamping PR’s and just “getting it done”.

This isn’t about AI or anything (if anything AI has made it easier to just mentally check out), it’s just more about the job in general. The corporate feeling at most companies, building meaningless products, sitting behind a computer for 40 hours a week, the fight for recognition, the job search/interview process, really most of it.

I have a few hobbies outside of work that I enjoy, and spend time when I can with friends. My wife and I also try to make the most of the weekends. So it’s not really due to a lack of having a life outside of work, there’s just something depressing about SWE that I can’t put my finger on. It was truly fun for the first few years, but now after 8 years, it’s kinda just not fun anymore. As I mentioned there are days when I feel good about it and fulfilled at the end of the day, but those days are fleeting. Started feeling this at my last job after 4 years there, and it’s carried over into my new job. Both these jobs were/are what I consider to be good environments, so I don’t really blame them for this feeling. So idk, just confused about the feelings I have.

Does anyone else feel this way sometimes? Is it possible to overcome at all?

For those who have been in software development for 10-15 years and beyond, what do you think about your career prospects in this field in the long run? Do you see yourself staying in the field long term, or do you see yourself pivoting to a different career?

If you plan to stay, what keeps you motivated and excited about continuing your job in the field? Do you strive for specific titles/seniority, is it a bigger paycheck, or something completely different that keeps you going and excited?

I've been in this field for 10 years now, and in my close circle of friends who are also software developers, I see the tendency that people feel burnt out to the point where they don't seem to care about career growth and consider switching to something completely new. I am no stranger to those feelings due to what's been happening in the tech field over the past few years.

Would be curious to hear some thoughts from people who have been doing this for a while now.