Hi all, almost-20 yoe lead here that absolutely loves their workplace but feels like there's no future here. I've become attached to the product having built majority of it myself, I can see an obvious gap in market where we can be a profitable company, but the company has not moved upwards in years. I'm thinking of moving on because I'm very frustrated: I have so many things I want to work on, improve, tighten and polish here, but there's simply no budget or fiscal sense for it. If only we had people that actually knew how to sell...

As a bit of a background: I joined this startup 4 years ago, joined a team of two mid-level developers, and since then we've hired only one more (also junior/mid-level so you can imagine the code quality). We work in HR/LMS area - nothing revolutionary except we do a lot of different things very well. Most of our dozen clients are with us because they got tired of paying for 5 different subscriptions and they love they can have it all in one, albeit with lower quality.

We've doubled our customer base since I've been here, landed a Series A through a couple of smaller VCs, but we're nowhere near net zero MRR let alone in-profit, and it's not looking like we'll go anywhere within the next 12-24 months. I 100% blame our founders for that because I think they're solid at managing a software company, but absolutely not suited to selling software.

• There are two founders, one has pure technical PM background in Microsoft and the other spent most of the career as a paralegal/legal for many corporates. Absolutely no sales experience between them
• They're targeting corporations with 1000/2000 employees and you know how slow they move
• On average we get 2 or 3 of these a year, but we also lose one or two. Progress is minimal.
• We're alive today because founders are running after (and landing) government subsidies, but this is one-time influx and not recurring revenue.

What frustrates me, and what I need your help with, is that I've become quite attached to the product. It's quite big and I know everything about it, and I know how much crap is in there. I could easily create a year's worth of backlog for 5 people working only on features, or at least 6-7 months of platform refactoring and improvement. Unfortunately, there's no sense to do any of this because we're literally running on fumes. Case in point - I've had to take on contractor work for the past half a year because money was not there for full salaries.

Having been here for 4 years I can see the potential in the software and I'm absolutely certain there is a place on the market for us, but I'm also very, very skeptical that we can reach it.

Have you worked at a similar workplace, seen it fail or just stagnate in front of your eyes? How did you deal with that? And also - when's the time to simply throw the towel in and look for something else? I'm not necessarily after money or status at this stage of my career, with kids growing up and all, but I can't imagine working anywhere else because of the sheer fun and freedom I have at this workplace.

I recently joined a 5 year old start up with ~200 employees, and I'm concerned about being able to maintain a proper work life balance due to employee behavior after only my first week there.

My question is how do I maintain a proper WLB when employees and teammates are working an almost 9-9-6 (sometimes even a 9-9-7)?

For starters, I have almost 9 YOE, I've worked every from start ups to FAANG, and even co-founded a company that's going through an acquisition. I have been searching for a new job for the last 5 months and feel super lucky to find the job I have now due to this awful job market. It's remote, pays a HCOL U.S. salary even though I'm remote in a LCOL area. The company itself is doing really well and the people I work with are very pleasant and collaborative, with low egos all around.

However, people are working and messaging me (and each other) on Slack all the time. On my first day there I was getting slack messages from teammates and upper management past 10 PM for non-urgent matters. People are holding meetings on Sundays. SUNDAYS. There was no mention of a 9-9-6 in the job description, and during the interview I asked about expected working hours and they informed me it's a place where you take whatever little (or a lot of) time you need to get your job done. No one is monitoring how long you are online, as long as you meet your job expectations. However, I see from a lot of people (specifically people on my team) that they're working at all hours of the day and night. People are submitting PR commits at 8 PM on a Friday night and often throughout the weekend.

Before you say quit and find a new job, know that I don't want to quit. I believe the company has a good trajectory and a truth path to IPO, and the work is interesting. I just want to set boundaries so that I don't burn out and my family doesn't hate me.

My wife and I are a bit at odds here, because while we do agree I need to set boundaries, I feel that I need to do a bit of 9-9-6 (maybe 9-9-5 and some hours on Saturdays) for the first 1.5-2 months so they know I'm a team player, then once I've proven myself I can set more boundaries and work a traditional 40 hours/week. My wife thinks I need to stick to \~40 hours/week now otherwise they're going to take advantage of me and expect me to do 9-9-6 indefinitely. We had a really bad experience when I was working at FAANG because I was hospitalized from all the stress (on-call, awful teammates and managers, terrible culture).

TLDR; joined a new company that I really like but many teammates and employees work an almost 9-9-6, I don't want to do that. How to set boundaries?

EDIT: I want to thank everyone for their replies and input. Consensus and takeaway for me is that I need to put myself and my family first, from day one. I don't have to exactly work 40 hours a week or a 996, but choose the schedule that works for me, get my work done and turn off my phone/notifications when I'm not working nor want to be bothered. I tried it today and declined a late end-of-day meeting, and no one batted an eye. Gonna keep it going.

I felt unusually competent this week when a dataset I track unexpectedly came in handy for an “unrelated” project. Hell yea.

I also felt unusually competent when I sealed some baseboard cracks with silicone gel/caulk, and the ants stopped coming in. Hell yea.

I would like to know what key skills you consider important for people doing requirements gathering and/or project management.

Background:

I have students learning requirements gathering & project management skills.  What topics would you recommend?

  This is for 1st year students doing a bachelor's degree in IT. 

Resources:

Resource recommendation much appriciated. website, blogs, videos, books.

Current topic ideas :

•   Use case, Use case diagram, User story, Sequence Diagram / Swim Lanes 
•   Activity Based Planning (Joel on software)/ Mom test (book)
•   Team work (Google Aristotle Project) 
•   OKR  (Objectives and Key Results)
•   Work breakdown structure 
•   Baseline (Project Baseline estimates of time, cost)
•   Comparative Estimating (historical benchmarking), 1,2 and 3 point estimates
•   Kanban etc
•   MVP (Design, Evaluation, MPV Validation Techniques)   
•   Prototyping (Paper prototyping, Digital prototyping) 
•   Test-Driven Development 
•   Quality control (Defect density tracking)  
• Change Control/Change Management 
•   User personas

A thread for Developers and IT folks with less experience to ask more experienced souls questions about the industry.

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Please keep top level comments limited to Inexperienced Devs. Most rules do not apply, but keep it civil. Being a jerk will not be tolerated.

​

Inexperienced Devs should refrain from answering other Inexperienced Devs' questions.

I've been a lurker here since pretty much it started gaining traction.

And it's becoming very obvious that it's increasingly turning into r/ProgrammerHumor where anyone with even a couple years of experience as a developer could tell that an ever growing number of these people have never been paid to be a developer at a company in their lives.

This is how nearly every comment chain goes now:

1. Arguments/Debates/Discussions are started by Person A, as they should.
2. Person M, who is completely out of touch with how things work replies with something ridiculous.
3. Person A or Person B, replies to them, who very obviously has experience and breaks it down for them ELI5 style.
4. Person M doesn't understand any of what they said, so they say something else more ridiculous.
5. Go back to 2 and repeat until Person A or B gives up.

I don't have a solution, but any Person B's out there should understand that stating an issue doesn't require one.

Original study Link here

Another study Link here and excerpt below:

AI helped participants better discern what’s real – and resulted in a 21% higher chance they would make the right call. But their unassisted performance, when reviewing new images without AI’s help, grew 15.3% worse in the experiment’s fourth week. “These results indicate that while AI may help immediately, it may ultimately degrade long-term misinformation detection abilities,” the study noted.

Not just chatgpt but AI coding is a relevant comparison as well. Loss of skills and thinking are even more prevalent with software development.

At this point there is strong evidence that AI does not increase velocity much outside of startups because it moves the bottleneck to review, and does not solve the political, procedural or practical friction in large enterprises that soaks up most time anyway. Various academic studies have also shown low impact to overall productivity at the firm and individual level.

But it seems like this reality is not getting through to engineering leaders AT ALL. My questions is, under what circumstances will tech leaders be forced to drop the narrative? Because the gulf between people who use AI to do our daily work and the higher ups who don't code anymore just keeps getting wider.

I haven't worked in a high AI usage team post-AI. Pre-ai, I would say that it wasn't too bad. On the teams I’ve worked with, each person would write a design doc before beginning a project, which the entire team would carefully review. There would be a designated reviewer too who would give the final signoff and help them make sure the doc is up to par before bringing it to the rest of the team. This process was slow enough that it was relatively easy for a techlead to keep tabs on everything.

Also, I’m hearing that some folks are skipping design docs altogether. How does cross-team / cross-functional collaboration work in those environments? In my teams, we used design docs to get everyone on the same page before the project begins.

In your answer can you also mention a bit of context on whether this matters for your team? e.g. the size/speed of the team and the risk level of the code you're handling

Edit: we are using the CDK

I'm starting to dislike Cloudformation.

Three times in the past several months we have had to stop what we are doing and address an issue with cloud formation related to the amount of things that the cloud formation is tracking or how they are connected. It's really annoying when you get stopped on a deploy because you added one thing and that tipped a stack over to being too large. A few months ago we had to split our stack into three and that was quite a bit of work. Multiple pull requests trying to address issues that came up.

We are on AWS, so maybe the answer is there isn't one. And we are certainly not going to Azure / GCP to address this issue.

If there aren't any alternatives what are the best practices to avoid these issues? I feel like we should have started with 15 stacks or something like that.

This thread is specifically for sharing "wins". I.e. the opposite of our Tuesday venting thread.

Curious about the experience of other engineers combining work at a pretty demanding company (classical FAANG-adjacent) and side gigs, like Mercor AI?

My main question/worry is not about the side gig itself, but rather about mandatory disclosure to my employer (I am pretty sure any such company has it as a requirement in its code of conduct)

The second question is Mercor AI in particular. Any experience with such side gigs?

Edit 1:
Location is Canada.

With all the AI nonsense going on, I had a thought at work today that turned into an interesting discussion with a colleague:

"What would I do if I was the only person with access to Claude (or insert any LLM) 5+ years ago?"

People would think I was a fucking wizard

FE changes? NO PROBLEM

Critical DB change? Don't worry, I've produced a stored procedure to validate the whole thing

Want to use some shiny new framework? Interesting. Here's a document explaining why you're an idiot for suggesting it

Regex? I suddenly understand it better than the compiler folks (and nobody ask questions)

What would you have done with your own personal LLM back then?

Trying to lighten the mood in here with all the (very justified) negativity around this tech revolution

Unserious answers only pls

Hi all,

I am a mid-to-almost-senior developer at my company. I have been given a new project to cut my teeth as a lead developer. Fairly small project, small-ish scope. I would describe it as a case management system with some file uploading, approvals, roles, basic audit trailing.

I built a PoC based on our discussions with the client. They really really liked it and said it's everything they could have needed. However, after meeting with the architect on our broader team she asked me why I didn't just use xyz technology (such as PowerApps, PowerPlatform, Sharepoint, etc).

I didn't really have an answer because our team has always been in charge of building custom solutions with Angular, React, NextJS, Springboot middlewares. That kind of deal.

So my question to all of you is how do you go about doing an analysis on what is an appropriate stack to use?

One thing she kept mentioning is cost, security, hosting.... which I totally get. Custom solutions can end up more expensive. However, so can Microsoft/Office365 solutions when you factor in things like licensing.

If it helps to know, we are a government entity so accessibility and security are top of mind for the application.

Any advice about how to navigate this would be appreciated.

Thanks.

I've recently been given the green light to hire a new junior dev. Up till a year ago, I would have known exactly what I was looking for and how to find someone who would be a good fit but nowadays, I honestly don't know what I could want.

First off, because of AI reasons, we don't want someone who will want to write code - they're going to be sorely disappointed with the role and probably fight against it or at the very least feel demoralized. This probably eliminates the vast majority of comp sci majors I would expect. But do I really want to hire a non-programmer for this role? I shudder to think of the level of slop that our repo will become.

Then I also start to wonder if this role even requires a certain level of intelligence at all. If all the person will need to do is tell the AI "it's time to start doing our next task" and to hit commit when it's done, it seems like this is a job that could be done by just about anyone.

Ugh, is it time to retire yet?

I'm trying to change an instinct I've spent years developing.

When I see a design problem, unnecessary complexity, or a better model, I naturally want to fix it. Doing the minimum requested and knowingly leaving something worse than it could be feels wrong to me.

But I'm increasingly convinced that the strategically correct move inside many companies is: do what's asked, raise the concern once, then let it go.

I'm trying to work that way now.

It makes sense intellectually. I still dislike it.

With AI making implementation cheaper and delivery faster, I'm curious whether other experienced developers are going through the same adjustment.

Have you changed what "doing a good job" means to you?

i was very excited about code generating ai tools since early days of github copilot in vscode, was using it daily since chatgpt release and wrote almost all code through prompting (html/css/javascript, python, ruby, terraform etc) for years. It felt very good at first.

However, about a year ago i started to notice subtle (at first) negative changes in my mental health. It's hard to describe in words this negative feeling because it's very basic and fundamental, but over that last year it progressively developed to the point where I started to suffer mentally. I should have just stopped using ai tools right then, but i continued, probably supported by the enthusiasm of my collogues and the ai excitement in general, or maybe because of the loss cost fallacy -> i already invested years in building these skills. Or probably because i was addicted to ai, if there is such thing.

one day it got so bad that i decided to try to stop -> i uninstalled all local ai tools and unsubscribed from their services (claude code, cursor etc.) and tried to start thinking and coding manually. I also told my team that i no longer review machine generated PRs from others. The change in my mental state was immediate and positive. Work was hard at first, i was fighting my habit to reach for ai chat each time i'm stuck or need to figure out stuff. I did slip to free chatgpt chat several times, but i overcame those impulses after a month. i remember feeling very tired at the end of the day for first couple of weeks, but the tiredness felt good, it's like when you feel tired after a workout -> it felt earned.

im very glad i made this transition back to manual thinking, reasoning and coding, i have been 'clean' for about two months, i no longer feel tired. My mental state went back to normal and i enjoy my time at work now.

im not in a habit of telling other people what to do and how to live their lives. I respect your agency and your choices. If you like ai, if it makes you happy, gives meaning to your life -> then im truly happy for you, keep doing it. I wish i felt the same but i don't. Notice that i did not make any judgment on the quality of ai code or the productivity gains that it enables because first i frankly don't know, and second it's not the reason i stopped using ai. My mind is the only thing I have, my well-being (and happiness of people around me) directly depends on it, and i want to take care of it.

This was my little journey, thought id share in case some of you had similar experiences (feel free to share or dm me).

<3

What’s up with job applications asking in depth questions about projects we have worked on ?

Every job application these days wants in depth answers on distributed systems or backend systems I have worked on.
A lot of this is already on my resume. Why do I now need to do extra work to frame it in a more specific way and add more details just to fill out the application? These are mandatory fields. This feels really frustrating to me.

It’s a lot more work and time to just fill out an application that I’m not even sure a person is reading. I feel like those kinds of questions are what I expect to come up during an interview because they are meaty topics. Am I being unreasonable ? Hiring managers, are you’ll actually reading these ?

AI disclosure: I did not use AI for this. Please stop deleting my post 🙏

I think there are few misconceptions in the industry about system design.

First of all it applies to every type of software engineering.
Backend, web, whatever are different domains but it’s necessary on them.

Many companies don’t have system design interviews.
Many of them that do use a formulaic approach with interviewers that aren’t that good at it.

There is a surprisingly huge amount of senior engineers that doesn’t do it, ignores it o, worse, thinks is a waste of time.

The industry is changing rapidly and as the code production speed increases, system design is needed more than ever.

Are we aware of this? Many of us don’t. Please consider this.

As a pro tip for interviews: if they don’t have a system design stage, try to ask system design related questions to your interviewer when you have time for it, if they struggle with answers it’s a red flag.

Does anyone use WelcomeToTheJungle.com for job openings? They used to be called Otta, then changed to their current name for reasons that were never very clear. Now they’re moving to a new platform that requires users to save and migrate their information manually, even though that sounds like something the company should be able to do themselves. Anyone know what’s going on?

I have a situation, I'm a tech lead for a project in a corporation and i work from home. The project is great however to move to the next step in the career it seems like it's all about politics and networking, which as wfh person I don't rly have. Ofc i know key ppl i've worked with but it seems like most decisions are done at hotel lobby after the party or something like that... On the other side if I want to switch the company It seems like the good roles are available through networking or if I have a personal brand... which is the part I hate, Always posting on X or linkedin... What are your opinions on this or have you experienced something similar ?

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

I joined a new company back in March as a Senior Software Dev (10 years experience), and can't really put my finger on what feels off. Everyone on the team is super nice and talented, but we just have different work styles. It's almost like a tabs vs spaces thing (not literally. I don't care about those trivial debates), but for everything. Sometimes it is actual tooling/language choices, but even just the work style. For instance, sometimes I get a task and 3 people jump in and start trying to solve it on a call. I've never asked for help. I've asked if I look like I'm struggling, but I get a "nope, this is just how we do things" answer. It's over-the-top pair programming. There's way too many cooks in the kitchen on almost every issue. There's also a culture of "fix everything" and "let's analyze the performance of this" with VERY little prioritization work being done. If anyone on the team sees an issue, they start working on it right away.

I've worked at several companies, big and small, slow and "bleeding edge" (ugh), but I've never seen such a lack of streamlined priortization-to-single owner workflow. This is a publicly traded company, so not some growing startup.

If you've been in a similar situation, how did you manage it? What are some steps I can take to start "gelling"?

(I suppose there's two issues here in disguise. First is how to cope with a team you don't gel with, and second is how to handle this particular style of... chaos?)