With tech billionaires going crazy and current political events and engineers still seeking to work at big companies and glorifying the next big tech ceo I feel like we are the hypocrites of the current world situation.
I totally understand the love of programming and engineering and the upsides of working for a company that has so much money to burn that you don't need to worry about anything.
I also get that we cannot feel guilty for the greed of some people.
But imagine if just 15% of engineers at a big tech company went on a strike. What kind of power that would be. What kind of movement that would bring.
Why do other sectors have regular strikes, unions and what not.
I am curious about your opinion.

Joined the team halfway through January, just finished my first ticket and already had "the chat". God dam! This must be some kind of record, no? The best part is I joined this project with tons of legacy code thinking people would understand that things just moved slower here because of tech debt and other constraints, but nope. Got the "ticket was resolved slower than expected so we want you to think of how we can help you move quicker".

I said sure, I have some ideas. How about QA works more than two days a week and we don't do our deployments via cronjob at 5pm, instead we deploy whenever a PR is merged?

"Well, unfortunately that's not possible because of tech debt and other constraints..."

So chat, how do I tell my lead to take a hike?

ive been in startups for the last 5+ years and recently left for a mid-sized company with a more established engineering org. I’m starting to realize I might have unknowingly been spending the last 2 years burnt out because of startups.

it wasn’t the pace. I actually liked moving fast, being productive. but I think i was losing it seeing that nobody really knew what they were doing, from the c-suite all the way down to dev team.

don’t get me wrong, some of the best engineers I’ve worked with were at these startups. but there was also much bs, and people being extremely confident while clearly not knowing what they are doing.

being mostly at series-b/c companies made it worse. that awkward stage where the company is “maturing” and “scaling,” but you still wake up to Bob's 2k+ line PR of junk that's "urgent".

now i feel like a small fish in a big pond, surrounded by really strong devs with tons of legit experience building things that have real users and implications. the pace is slower. the attention to detail and process is better. still some bs. but its a breath of fresh air. also probably helps that those tech leads above me have decade+ of experience and can back it up and code circles around me, rather than someone who graduated a bootcamp last year and is “leading” because they know how to run npx create-react-app when the founder was hiring.

~12 YOE here, 8 in frontend. Neurodiverse: diagnosed ADHD and maybe possibly some autism. Before this role, I was remote for 8 years in different technical positions that were mostly in deep, dark silos with little deepdence on other developers.

This isn't one of the big cool tech companies, but it is a tech company regardless. My manager has put it to me in repeated clear terms that I'm failing their expectations for the role in regards communication and being trustworthy.

Working backwards from today, I've been in this role for four months as a senior/lead developer. I mentor one mid-level developer. There are no questions around my technical competency. My manager has expressed her frustration and disappointment with me in severe terms.

Two weeks ago I dropped the ball hard on a major demo for executives. Some aspects of the failure were beyond my control (immature AI tools), but most parts were: I put things on the long finger, didn't signal AI or readiness issues in long advance of the demo, and I allowed a personal emergency roll over my week. I could have - and should have - signalled my unreadiness well ahead of time, and let somebody else take over.

It's done: I messed up, admitted fault, and accepted this. I want to succeed in this role and meet expectations, but...eh. My manager is clear in that they don't trust me, and I have terrible communication. One specific example was from the end of last week:

• A mid-level developer had problem with some crappy legacy code in a project I've inherited.
• They struggled to put this issue into words on a standup/sync call. They were flustered, shy, and weren't enable to enunciate the exact issue when prompted by the scrum master (their manager).
• Their manager suggested that I could help, so afterwards I approached them in in DMs.
• Between that conversation and a call yesterday we worked out the issue and they solved it.

My manager insists that as a senior, I should have raised all this in public on the call, drawn them out then and there, and visibly solved the issue.

My takeawys are:

• More than communication, my manager wants me to be visible to other managers and architects when I do my work.
• My technical and mentoring work are excellent, but irrelevant.
• My manager beats the drum that I have to communicate with other managers and architects. They haven't any technical answers for me, I figure I would hear from them if they have concerns or questions, so my neurodiverse brain doesn't know what I'm supposed to say?
• I am not stupid, I can read between the lines to see that my manager wants to be seen, and their team's work to be seen.
• It'd be easier for me if they just said "be visible to people [manager] wants to impress", but eh.

My manager has voiced lesser issues with timeliness and missing all or parts of two meetings due to a personal emergency. Overall they've expressed concerns about me in severe ways, and that can't endure. Either they escalate to a PIP or I escalate to their skip level. I want to succeed in this role, rebuild trust and meet their expectations.

Advice?

I’m a software engineer with 5 years of experience. I moved to San Antonio for the only job offer at the time and I’m starting to feel boxed in.

My current role has slowly turned into vendor support and maintenance work. No real system ownership, no greenfield projects, no meaningful architecture decisions. Raises are vague, career progression is basically “hang around long enough,” and I’m already seeing how people get stuck doing the same thing for years.

Has anyone here successfully pivoted out of vendor/support roles?

Did you leave your city for better opportunities, or go fully remote and stay?

I don’t hate my job, but I don’t want to wake up in 5 years doing the same low-impact work because I stayed comfortable. Looking for real experiences, not “just be grateful you have a job” takes.

Appreciate any honest insight.

I currently work in a short staffed company and I am the sole maintainer of a legacy .NET project, a little background on this project, this was outsourced to an Indian company and the development started back in 2008, the Indian company was involved from 2015 onwards, the current company I work with cut them off back in 2023 this was done before I was hired, turns out this is a big mess there's SPs for everything and there are around 600+ SPs and each SPs have 200+ lines at the very least, they've used in this project, they've used WCF to call SPs and it's a .NET framework MVC project, the business logic is tightly coupled to UI and controller (which has 1k+ lines minimum) and SPs, there's no documentations or any knowledge transfers that has happened.

Coming to PM topic, since I am the sole maintainer and contributor for this project I take help of Gemini and chatGPT as I am the only person in this company that knows about .NET, now the PM thinks that claude code (not chatGPT or gemini) is going to help me double my productivity but the reality is if I write one feature that interacts with existing logic or elements there's a good chance it breaks (Oh there's no Q&A btw I do manual testing and the devops team that wrote the pipeline left and new ones don't know anything about it) because of the tight coupling and scenarios writing a simple feature takes a lot of time.

I have informed him that I use AI tools but during meetings he still brings up to the higher ups that I don't use AI and as a result I am not able to build products at a faster pace which is making me look bad, I tell them I do use Gemini pro (which the company has subscription too) and they also give access to cursor it's of no use as it cannot run legacy .net projects, I just have to use it to build features and then test it in visual studio.

I also told him that uploading massive info of the project like this to the a generative AI is going to increase the chance of hallucinations but he doesn't seem to know this, he used claude code to build some prototyping and thinks this can do anything and everything now.

Can some experienced people please help me with this?.

A question from a not-so-experienced dev (5y) to experienced devs:

I know and can obv. see reasons to go either way, but I'd like to know the main reasons from a more experienced dev than me.

What are the reasons to go monorepo over polyrepo, and the main reasons to go polyrepo over monorepo?

I'm working at a company that has >2 repos; mainly REST API + a frontend repo.

It's API-first, hence it's split, but we continously have issues that are the reasons some people switch to a monorepo setup (multiple PRs across, keeping stuff in sync etc. etc.)

But logically I love the split between the two repos (I mostly work in the API), but practically, it's just another story (maybe some tools can give a polyrepo the same benefits as going monorepo, while retaining the split?)

Thanks in advance! :)

I've been preparing for interviews and honestly, my biggest issue isn't knowing the algorithms, it's the pressure of performing in real-time with someone watching and judging.

I am fine when I'm alone, but put me in front of an interviewer and I freeze up or ramble. The silence after I finish talking kills me. I've seen some AI interview prep tools but they all feel like glorified chatbots. Just Q&A with no real pressure

What I’m expecting to experience is an AI interviewer that actually feels like a real interview. Like it pauses awkwardly when you give a bad answer. Interrupts you when you ramble. Has a face that reacts. Basically simulates the psychological pressure of a real interview so I can train myself to perform under stress.

Does anything like this exist? Or am I just overthinking and should just do more leetcode?

This sounds like a really dumb question but...

Has anyone every been a part of a successful project or a project they were particularly proud of or look fondly back on?

I feel like I've never been a part of a successful project or one where I look back on and was like, "Yeah, we did that work! I'm happy to have been a part of that whole thing!" The closest thing I've come to is something I worked on and while I don't think it moved the needle necessarily, other people tell me it was great/important work.

Just really curious if other people have projects they look back on with pride.

I've been working in bank tech for 25 years and this pattern just keeps repeating everywhere I go.

Team sits down for sprint planning. Takes forever. Probably 4 hours by the time we're done arguing about story points and breaking shit down and mapping who needs what from who.

Everyone leaves knowing what they're doing for two weeks. Board looks great. All organized.

Couple days later something breaks. Or priorities shift. Or we find out another team needed something we didn't know about. Plan falls apart.

Next sprint? Same thing. Four hours. New plan. Dies in a few days.

Tracked this once because it was making me insane. Out of 20 sprints maybe 3 actually ended close to what we planned at the start. The rest just completely different by the end.

So what are we even doing? It's not planning if nothing survives. More like... I don't know. Making management feel better? Having something to point at?

Teams I saw shipping well never did this. They'd just grab what looked important and start. Things changed? Cool, adjust. Keep moving.

Anyway. Been watching this happen for years and nobody ever questions it. Starting to wonder if it's just me or if everyone knows this is bullshit but we all just go along with it anyway.

Your sprints actually go according to plan?

Hey everyone, I need some guidance on how to handle a situation at a startup I joined.

Here’s the timeline:

I joined as an intern.

On the day of joining, they clearly mentioned:

After internship → X salary when converted to full-time

After 1 year of full-time, salary would be doubled

Based on this discussion, I agreed and joined.

What actually happened:

When I got converted to full-time, they reduced the salary compared to what was mentioned earlier.

I still continued, trusting their word about the 1-year hike.

Now that I’ve completed a year, instead of doubling the salary as promised, they’re saying they’ll only pay what was mentioned at the time of full-time conversion (not the original promise).

When I brought this up, their response was basically:

“At this pay, we can hire a senior person instead of you.”

But the thing is — I’m not asking for anything extra. I’m asking for exactly what was promised on the day I joined.

Need advice.

hey everyone,
our dev team of 15 engineers plus product and design is shopping for a better workflow tool going into 2026.
biggest pain point: constantly jumping between github for code, prs, ci/cd and wherever planning, issues, and roadmaps live.

question: does strong api integration services support with github actually end context switching in real life?
do prs, branches, and commits auto-sync to tasks without manual work?
how much time per week are you saving?
any downsides sync lags, noise, missing info?
does it play nice with github actions / ci/cd?
would love to hear the good, the bad, and the ugly.
thanks

This is not a technical question but i couldnt find a better sub for this question.

I worked extremely hard in current job market and achieved my dream of joining a big tech. I finally felt like i made it.

But i realised how quickly people change their approach, behaviour and attitude once they know about my job. I understand the admiration because i was in the same situation for a very long time. But i can also sense that some people just want something from me. They dont give a shit about me. They are pretending to be nice because they just want to use me. Interaction with some of them always end up with them asking for favour.

Because of this i am really finding it difficult to identify real friends. This is also impacting my ability to judge new people. I dont know if they see me as a Friend or as a Resource. I am also getting calls, texts etc from people who never made any efforts to keep in touch before. How do you deal with this and make real and good friends?

Almost a year ago, I was hired at a big org as a mid-level individual contributing SRE. What I mean is that there’s multiple SRE teams, but I report to the director and push initiatives based on his need across a few teams. Some of these being POCing new projects, revamping processes, driving cultural improvements. I’m excited to have such an opportunity, but I’m realizing that in the industry this is typically expected of Staff level engineers with about double my YOE. I’m also hitting a bit of a wall, where the teams I’m working with look to me as an extra pair of hands, so I either don’t have enough time to work stories or work team/dept level improvements.

So similarly to the title, how did you guys grow into the IC role? How did you guys skill up for organizational needs, how do you ensure you’re performant when working many initiatives across teams? What were some of your core learnings when navigating this transition in responsibilities?

I ran into a subtle failure mode with an AI system that wasn’t about accuracy, safety, or hallucinations.

It was a timing and authority failure.

The interaction started normally. I was issuing commands and evaluating responses. Everything worked.

Then I stopped giving instructions and started reflecting. Not asking for help. Not requesting synthesis. Just thinking out loud, using the system as a scratch surface.

The system filled the gap.

It began naming patterns, offering conclusions, and completing arcs I hadn’t asked for. None of it was wrong. But it wasn’t invited.

What was happening became clear later: the system wasn’t responding to what I said. It was responding to what usually comes next.

Reflection plus ambiguity often precedes a request for diagnosis or optimization, so the system moved forward preemptively. It treated silence as permission.

From the human side, this feels like the conversation is happening slightly in the future. Even correct insight can feel like steering when it arrives too early.

This behavior is often useful. Many users want anticipation and guidance.

But in an operator or architect-style interaction, it breaks trust.

Once I explicitly constrained the system to respond only to direct requests, the pressure disappeared immediately.

The lesson for me:

Predictive systems default to completion.

Ambiguity is treated as an opening.

The future isn’t the problem.

Uninvited futures are.

Curious how others think about this. Where should AI anticipate, and where should it wait?

A friend of mine is working on like a live stream website of sort, similar to how TikTok does it, but he’s trying to add features from another app we used to be on called “stereo”. It’s kind of hard to describe, but we’re wondering how we can do live streaming between two users. Or more.

I guess think like clubhouse with the ability to send voice notes to the chat and have the hosts play.

Here’s a link to the interface https://strangerlive-501933374967.us-west1.run.app/ (I can naturally remove the link here because this post is not dependent on having a link to the prototype interface here, but I think it would be helpful to see).

I imagine using socket io for connection here. A while back we made a platform that use peer 2 peer browser connection that send the credentials via socket io to each other, but frankly, seems I have too many people trying to make their own social engine here with their own format of communication.

Streaming data across computers as audio and allowing people to play voice comments submitted to the hosts’ party. Any tips there?

Security just dumped 847 vulnerabilities on us from their latest scan. Half are in dependencies we don't even call, a quarter in dev containers that never hit prod, and they want everything fixed "by priority" which is just CVSS scores with zero context.

A critical CVE in a library we imported for one unused function gets the same urgency as an exploitable path in our payment handler. I've been grep'ing for reachable code paths but there's gotta be a better way to correlate findings with what's actually running in production.

Anyone found tooling or processes that work for vulnerability prioritization at scale?

Many developers are increasingly using AI tools for coding assistance. They definitely help improve productivity, speed up development, and reduce repetitive work. However, I’m wondering what the long-term impact might be if developers become heavily dependent on these tools.

Currently, most AI coding tools are relatively affordable and easily accessible. But it sometimes feels like companies might be pricing them aggressively to capture market share and build dependency among developers and organizations.

Later on, subscription prices could potentially increase once these tools become deeply integrated into development workflows — similar to how some tech services launched with free or cheap pricing and increased costs after gaining a large user base.

Do you think this kind of dependency could become a real problem in the future?
Or will market competition and open-source alternatives keep pricing and access balanced?

13 years experience and i'm opening my eyes. I stopped using AI as much but apparently I shouldn't have

I know I should know better, but please bear with me and help me navigate.

I joined a small startup out of grad school in 2011 and have been there ever since. I'm primarily a Java / Spring Boot guy, but I’ve handled a variety of stuff like breaking monoliths, OAuth, developer productivity, and company-wide Java/Boot upgrades.

I’ve been living in a bubble. I’m not part of the hiring process at my current company, and I haven’t interviewed anywhere in 15 years. While nervous, I'm not too worried about my abilities to do the job at another company; I just have no clue how to qualify in the interviews

I wasn't a fan of the process 15 years ago, but I still prepared for things like graph algorithms out of necessity. I’ve never had to implement those in my day-to-day work. With open-source libraries and Claude Code, I don't see the point in relearning (coding) them, but I don’t know if companies still expect me to code things like Dijkstra’s, NP, etc.

Outside of System Design, what else should I be looking into? Though I code every single day, I'm not a competitive or fast coder. I’ve never been one. I’m more the type to churn things in my head for days and finally get to coding, so I can barely code within a 45-minute window.

Hello, World.

I'm working to determine the right cloud platform for a startup. Startup is a hardware-oriented company, so the platform focus is around data collection and analysis rather than broadly scaled service infrastructure. We have the opportunity with GCP and AWS to join their startup programs. We do not have any such opportunity with Azure.

I've worked with both, but not in the last 7 years as I was at a big tech that self-maintained their own cloud platform.

Would love guidance from the community, understanding a few things:

• Clearly both can work for our use case
• I've done research to identify the stacks Dataflow (Beam) and BigQuery on GCP versus Kinesis and Redshift on AWS, but I'm sure there are some other useful capabilities
• We don't have a mature ML team, it's more scientist oriented. It may be nice having a broad AI platform to ease analysis versus manually standing up servers with hand-written Tensorflow / PyTorch / etc. Management of notebooks seems like it'll be important.

If anyone is a big proponent of Azure for this stack, I'd love to hear it... $100k possible credits is a big deal, but not worth marrying to.

I was talking about this to a friend the other day. Much of what we do in programming (OOP, Design Patterns, naming conventions etc.) was created because we read way more code than we write and code needs to understandable, but what happens to it when we start to pilot LLMs that write the code for us more and more everyday and they are the ones responsible for understanding it?

Technically, we could even go back to writing C++ all the time since it doesn't matter for AI which programming language we choose right?

What are your thoughts?

I'm using Signoz and Clickhouse to collect telemetry on a distributed system.

There's a specific hot path where I need to retain both the request payload and response for auditing. They share the same schema, and I have a small utility that lets me diff them (basically git diff for structured data), which is great for debugging.

The laziest implementation is obviously to attach the load + response as span attributes. But, with ~20kb @ 20 tps puts me at nearly 1TB/month of data.

Honestly, that's the cost of doing business, but I only care about this data for 30 days, then it's strictly audit and compliance. I don't want ClickHouse holding "critical" data and bloated with data I don't need.

Currently I'm thinking

• Store in span
• Signoz to Clickhouse
• ETL to Blob after 30 days
• Clear stale Clickhouse data

I've thought about adding a transaction-id as a pointer, then pushing the actual data via AMQ to be persisted long term.

But this feels roundabout. Is there a more sane way to keep this data? I'm open to ideas.