r/ExperiencedDevs

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.

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

Given that our jobs will eventually be mostly automated, what jobs are you thinking of pivoting to?

looking for honest perspective from people who've been through a few cycles.

i'm about 5 years in, all of it at a single large, well-known tech company. my experience splits between SDET / test infrastructure work and data engineering, and I've been targeting SDET, Developer Productivity, and Platform roles. i'm bracing for a long search, but I want to calibrate my expectations against reality instead of just doom.

two things I keep chewing on:

1. for those hiring or searching at the mid-level right now, how rough is it actually? is the slow, low-response experience I'm having normal for this market, or a sign I'm doing something wrong?
2. does having only one employer on my resume read as narrow or risky to hiring managers, even when it's a recognizable company? i can't tell if that's a real disadvantage or just anxiety talking.

not looking for a resume review, just candid takes from people further along.

The trend I keep hearing is that LLMs absolutely need to be paired with strong engineering practices or inexperienced devs make a mess. But recently I read on Thoughtworks that they recommended adopting Claude (assuming that proper engineering).

That raises the question: what are they actually good at? In what ways do you find LLMs genuinely helpful?

Speaking from my own experience the only use I've found is using them as supercharged documentation / a Stack Overflow alternative. Ask small, localized questions about specific pieces of syntax.

Hi fellas

Im a senior architect overseeing a platform project in a multi vendor setup, i am myself a contractor and a lot of devs in my team are from the client

The problem is there are a few smart young ones that go and vibecode entire frameworks and libraries and sneak them in as build plugins. Given the political nature of things i would like help to deal with this.

Is there a way where such things can naturally flow into build radiators etc? Prevent excessive overengineering is what im trying to do

PS - No AI was used for framing or anything for this post.

Hey, I have about 7YoE and I joined a mid-sized B2B SAAS startup in late ‘24 and have been working there since.

I originally joined in the designation of Software Engineer II and got recently promoted to Senior Software Engineer here.

The company makes good money and have very wealthy clientele. However, their entire software foundations seem extremely flimsy to me and my team often suffers from the shortcomings of several other systems randomly failing on us.

Result of this? High support volume, high amounts of customer asks, incidents and support tickets and we crumble under the pressure.

For the first year of my tenure, I tried to do RCA fixes and aligned with several cross functional staff engineers to maintain a standard of delivery ensuring our systems don’t regress.

However, our business leadership itself is against all of this. They want their products out as soon as possible and our Eng leaders don’t have the backbone to pushback for quality.

This means no matter what we do, we’re stuck with a mountain of garbage that never clears. You do blitz week, quality week, operational week everything has been tried on the book, 3 months later we find ourselves back in square 1.

Now I have given up and sorta lost interest in all of this. I focus on my core project deliverables, begrudgingly take up Oncall and only think about all this stuff for that 1 particular week.

I had a 1:1 with my manager and he said that since I’m a senior engineer now, I should be taking a lead on one of the operational components (like API Failures) and attempt to keep it as healthy as possible.

Now, I know this ask is not unreasonable and I have done this throughout my career, however I’m extremely bored and want nothing to do with these things in my team as I’ve given up all hopes of things getting better. I like doing projects and maintain high levels of quality there, so i don’t think I’m burned out. But I don’t have any motivations to fix systemic issues here. I don’t wanna get promoted to staff anytime soon either.

Does that make me a bad senior engineer?

Backend code often gets organized around entities without anyone really deciding to do it.

OrderService
PaymentService
InvoiceService

A table appears, then comes the repository, service, controller, DTO, mapper.

It is everywhere, so it stops looking like a choice.

Then behavior gets buried inside noun-shaped buckets.

OrderService
├── OrderRepository
├── PaymentService
├── InventoryService
├── PricingService
├── ShippingService
├── NotificationService
└── AuditService

That is not one thing.

It is several workflows grouped together because they all touch an order.

I prefer making the behavior explicit.

PlaceOrder
├── CalculateOrderPrice
├── AuthorizePayment
├── ReserveInventory
├── CheckOrderFraud
└── SaveOrder

CancelOrder
├── LoadOrder
├── RefundPayment
├── ReleaseInventory
└── SendCancellationNotice

Now the code says what the application does.

The dependencies say exactly what each use case needs.

This is not against OOP.

PlaceOrder, AuthorizePayment, policies, entities, and workflows can all be objects.

The problem is not objects. The problem is treating database entities as the default architecture.

That works fine for CRUD.

In complex domains, it hides rules, workflows, ownership, and change boundaries behind generic services.

The part I find interesting is how unquestioned this pattern is.

Who has seen this done well around use cases or capabilities?

And how did you convince a team with strong egos that this was better than another round of SomethingService?

I’m a tech lead for the team and have been trying to get a junior developer on the team to improve for about a year. I’m at the point of giving up on this person as nothing has worked. Two other seniors on the team have tried to mentor the person with no luck. All in all, three senior engineers have tried multiple ways to work with them…hands on, hands off, small tasks, big tasks…nothings changes their work output, attitude, or productivity.

This person takes an entire sprint to do an equivalent of what an intern would do, equivalent of 1-2 sprint points. If larger tasks are assigned, they never get it done on time or right even if it’s broken down for them. When things gets difficult , they take time off and someone takes over the work. We have unlimited time off.

When discussing issues with this person, they say all the right things but outcome never changes. Manager is aware of the issues and says he’s continually working with this person to improve.

Should I be blunt and tell my manager this person should be on PIP? I’m not sure if my manager is intentionally keeping this person around due to budget issues of hiring another person or keeping him around in case of layoffs.

I'm seeing a pattern in my organisation.

Junior developers are becoming Mid-level developers, and Mid-level developers are becoming Seniors. But once you reach Senior Engineer, career progression seems to slow down dramatically.

There are plenty of Junior and Mid-level positions, fewer Senior roles, and only a small number of Principal, Staff, or Distinguished Engineer positions. Companies seem comfortable promoting Juniors to Mid and Mid to Senior, but promotions beyond Senior are much rarer.

Is anyone else seeing the same thing in their organisation? Has the Senior level become a bottleneck?

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?

Companies usually say they’re anonymous, but of course that doesn’t mean they can’t trace it back to that employee..

Would you ignore the survey completely, be brutally honest, or lie so the company score is 10/10…

I don’t get it.

WHY are you asking me to review your code and give feedback on improving the way you structure your code, to extract a new closure you shoved into a massive function into another method, or to stop using magic numbers, or to stop writing such poop variable names, to stop putting business logic where it doesn’t belong.

IF ALL YOURE GOING TO DO is paste my comments into ChatGPT and tell me:

“Your instinct is correct. But the reason I XYZ”

“You’re absolutely right that XYZ, but”

“I’d prefer to keep this PR scoped to”

“Following the existing pattern”

“For now, I wanted to minimize X and avoid touching surrounding logic”

“What do you think?”

I really can’t deal with reviewing code anymore and I’m tired of having to explain BASIC things to someone who’s apparently a senior engineer. Why are we turning the PR into a discussion and making ME look like the one asking for too much. I never asked to debate why we should be extracting hardcoded values into constants, or stop exacerbating existing issues.

What’s the point in reviewing code if I’m not even talking to YOU.

Genuinely recently had to go back and forth in a PR about extracting something out of a massive function. I gave up at the end and just said “Look, it’s your call. But I would highly recommend doing this. Feel free to resolve…”

At the moment I work for a state funded company that turned out to be very political. My role is to design cryptographic protocols and writing libraries for p2p authentication and authorization, applied to the renewable grid.

To put things simple, there are two teams:

• Team A, made by the high performers
• Team B, where I work, with the people performing not as well

A few months ago a big mess happened:

• Most PMs and engineers make HEAVY use of LLMs
• People read neither the tickets nor the code, which means we have a high hallucination rate
• On my side I always try to read and understands, and I consistently write RFCs/ADRs to document the work
• When team A tried to use my library a huge chaos happened because the interfaces and the flows were incompatible

I got heavily criticized by team A, and my reaction was to point towards the RFCs/ADRs, but also to take blame so we could focus on finding a way forward.

Team A manager complained a LOT about me, while my manager defended me with great energy. Also the PM in my team is pissed at me because all the hallucinations in her tickets finally came to evidence.

Now team A manager approached me in private and proposed me to join their team, but my manager really dislike him and is pissed about having mostly not-so-good engineers to work with. I'm afraid I would hurt him if I were to switch teams, and I'm also afraid the manager of team A is not a nice person. But on the other hand joining them would be a defacto promotion.

What would you do in my place?

Basically title. 8 YOE. I am realizing more and more as I build more agent loops and have more things running in parallel that AI has trivialized the part of software engineering that I enjoyed most, which is coding and deeply understanding systems. Prior to getting laid off at big tech, I could take my time and AI-ify the parts of the work that I wanted to automate (i.e. huge chunks of boilerplate). My bottleneck in this environment was not coding, so I could really pick and choose what I used AI with.

After getting laid off and pretty grueling interview process which involved 8 onsites and a not great offer reneg (from me) to a 996, I joined a startup where I've been for a few months. They build an AI tool, are 100% AI first, and have encouraged me to chat with their agent instead of talking with folks for a walkthrough. Fair enough, I can change, so I've very much embraced the new world. At any given time (when I am on my computer) I have at least 2 or 3 agents working in parallel on stuff.

At first it felt very powerful to have this productivity, but what I am now spending 90% of my time on is reviewing PRs and doing QA on the output of these LLMs, and sometimes embarrassing myself in reviews since the understanding of the LLM was not correct (and partly my fault for not asking the agent more about the codebase so I can fully understand the problem a-priori). I deeply do not enjoy this work, it doesn't feel fulfilling and it is draining. This is coming from someone who, prior to the OpenAI / Anthropic ascendency, was very very interested and actively involved in AI research!

Additionally, where the company is positioned against it's competitors it feels like a lost cause. I feel like I have job security as probably 10 to 15% of the company has left within the last couple of months, but if we don't raise things won't bode well.

What are people doing to find more joy in this work, while maintaining productivity that's on par with peers? Are there fields that are "too hard" for LLMs to work on or reason about? At this point I'm considering transitioning to either the medical field or a skilled trade, but I know that I'm probably better off sticking in my current career.

I have heard the answer of having an outside life, or having hobbies, and I do have them and they do help! I need to be able to find fulfillment inside of 8 hours a day 5 days a week though.

I’m hoping to continue the discussion on this helpful, but locked, thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1gz9ksj/my_senior_engineer_interview_experiences/

TLDR competitive jobs are competitive to get into … lol

I have 7 YOE and have worked at 2 of the FAANGs, trying to get into one of the MANGOs or whatever the acronym is now. Unfortunately, I just blew a few interviews for top companies like Anthropic and Databricks. I’m feeling kinda bummed, but I was hoping starting up some conversation here and hearing other people’s lessons learned and struggles might help build some understanding.

The context of this thread is based on companies that pay over 300-400k, that ask Leetcode style interview questions and have tough multi round onsite format interview processes.

Some observations I’ve made in my experience:

1. It would appear that in an AI world, there’s tens of thousands of laid off people looking for jobs, and thousands of people that’re using AI to cheat. The bar to pass a phone screen now is you have to pass 100% of every part, including “optional”, of the interview, or you fail. I don’t know. I haven’t interviewed in over 5 years so maybe it’s just how this always has been. For some questions, I really thought what I put forwards was solid, but it hasn’t been good enough.
2. For top companies paying > 500k, you need to get almost perfect on every question to proceed. It is naive to believe “we just want to hear how you think”. Close is not good enough, failing a test case or not being able to solve an edge case fails the entire interview. It’s that black or white: your code must be fully runnable and the output must be correct. There is ZERO room for error.
3. Job listings sometimes just aren’t real or the recruiter is backlogged with too many applications to ever get back to you, even with referral. I’ve seen the same jobs on a career website for like 6 months now. Referrals can help get the interview. Even then sometimes they just interview you just to hang out, but there never was a position that was open or a good fit for your resume. Perhaps this to show people that they are doing well financially.
4. AI infra has been hiring like crazy. Senior engineering roles are very specialized and it’s not *that common that companies will be looking for generalist product / backend roles. I’ve also heard that a lot of companies are looking more towards graduating their intern classes to do the simple product work, and look to industry for very specialized SMEs to solve the real, hard problems. This makes me regret spending the past few years working in the product space and wish I stuck to solving tough backend problems at scale.

I’m hoping I can stay hopeful that I’m gonna land something. I don’t even know what skills I have left to tell people anymore. 70% of my job in my current gig in big tech was about communicating wins to director level leads, driving alignment with XFN, and scoping out projects to help our team hit our goal. All of this is done with strong product intuition but that seems to be very cheap nowadays in applying to other companies. They want to see you be able to scale up AI infra or build native apps, but in big tech as a product eng, a lot of these skills are abstracted from you into very simple building blocks so you just focus on driving impact and alignment.

Hopefully this is some reasonable discussion. I don’t think I’m fully concise or on the noise with these ramblings but there’s an idea in there somewhere. Would love to hear some success stories or coping strategies in the job search journey.

I'm looking for honest feedback from experienced software engineers, especially anyone who has gone through repeated job losses.

Before 2023, I had a long period of stable employment as a software developer. Since then, I've been let go from three different jobs (lasting roughly 2.5 months, 1 year, and 6 months). It's been a huge hit to my confidence, and I'm trying to understand whether there's a pattern I'm missing rather than simply blaming bad luck or bad companies.

Looking back, I can identify a few things. In one job, I challenged technical decisions and was vocal about technical debt. In another, I mostly kept my opinions to myself, completed and delivered the solution that satisfied the requirements, but was eventually told they expected more from someone on a senior salary. But this was a remote role, firmware development, so, in hindsight I think things would have gone differently if I were onsite for a longer period. But its speculation. In the most recent role, I was working for a consultancy and had a conflict with a client. I lost my composure, became argumentative and passive-aggressive, and although I delivered a working solution, the client gave negative feedback, and I was eventually let go.

I'm starting to think the common thread isn't my technical ability but how I handle disagreement and frustration in professional settings. I care a lot about engineering quality, but when I believe decisions are technically poor or unfair, I sometimes let that frustration show in ways that damage relationships.

Has anyone here been through something similar and managed to turn it around? If so, what changed for you? Was it communication, emotional regulation, expectations around seniority, choosing different companies, coaching, or something else? I'm genuinely trying to learn from this and avoid repeating the same mistakes in my next role.

13 yoe, mostly backend (Java), I'm in southern Europe, in case this is relevant.

I'm (allegedly) senior, and I've been hunting for a new position for a little whil now; I'm looking for a similar position (Working as contributor in a single team building shit), as I have zero interest in the possible "upwards" paths that I see (Lead Engineer, Team Leader, Staff Engineer, Architect).

The thing is that I've had an incredibly low "reply rate" on my applications. While I've been blaming the current market and my salary pretensions (I'm in a good position right now, and it looks like the vast majority of companies in my country are paying way less than what I earn), I've been slowly realizing that most positions I've seen are looking for people with not a lot of years of experience (from 2 to 6, maybe 7, I might have seen one asking for 8 years of experience, but never more than that).

I've been thinking that maybe companies don't want to hire in my zone seniors anymore because we are more expensive, but after a conversation yesterday in a different subreddit, I realized that most of those "3-6 yoe" positions are listed as "senior."

Which leads me to my question. Back in my day "senior" was 10 years of experience (maybe 7 or 8 if you were lucky), but nowadays it seems no one is looking for people with more experience than that. My own team (and well, the whole company) discredits that, as we are all seniors with several years of experience, and I myself entered as "almost senior" five years ago (8 yoe), but the searches on LinkedIn (With its many, many, many, caveats) are telling me I'm too old to be senior.

What is going on? Do companies not hire "seniors" (Whatever that means now) with more years of experience? It is just the market now? Is my "only way out" to pivot to a different (less technical, which would be a no for me) position?

I've 5 years of experience. I've recently put on a new project which was previously a solo-dev venture. Said solo dev is a fair but senior to me - around 15 years of experience.

Very nice fellow, very hard working and smart - but I find that he's either reluctant or not confident enough to share work / more complicated tasks. FWIW, the code base is a cluster fuck. Basically modifying a small class could potentially topple a small government in a different timezone. So all changes have to be done carefully.

The issue I've been having is that we split the work / tasks, and occassionally I'll go ask him a question and the conversation is like

/*
me: "hey is doing X correct?"

him: "yes, that's right. but we need to take care of this X + A thing"

me: "ok, so A is based on blah blah right"

him: "no, we have to check this other thing B that A depends on."
him: "it's fine, carry on with your current way and let me know once you've pushed your change. i'll fix it later"
*/

i find this a bit weird, if i were in his position i'd try to explain what we need to do so the other dev can implement the right thing, instead of trying to fix his code. but i've seen this pattern a few times. dont know what's going on here... does he think i'm incompetent or what... to me it seems like he prefers to write the code himself as he has been the solo dev here for a long time