r/ExperiencedDevs

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.

Company does hardware and you definitely know it. Job was staff level for internal dev platform/tooling. More SWE than SRE. I have 26+ years of experience, coming up from an ops background.

The interview actually started poorly. I was given homework that included some working code that asked to pick one of two changes. I thought I would do extra and do both. My first mistake. I had everything working correctly, but forgot to check the tests before turning it in. The second option ended up taking longer than I anticipated, so I was in a rush because the interview was at 7AM and I wanted to get enough sleep. (I’m in the US. Interviewers were in the UK.)

Right off the bat, the interviewer, also the hiring manager, that reviewed it told me one test failed. He decided it would be a good exercise to troubleshoot it. I had already interviewed with him once, so no intro was needed. The other person who was supposed to be there hadn’t joined yet. I was so thrown off, I forgot the syntax for running all of the tests at once.

As I’m looking at this thing, I see four more people join. No introductions. They’re just watching me flounder trying to figure out what I had fucked up. It was not obvious, and it was like my brain shut off on how to troubleshoot the issue. This went on for almost 15 minutes until he told me what was wrong.

I was then given an exercise to build an api for a reservation system including tests. It says it is supposed to take an hour. I had 45 mins left in the interview. I had to start from scratch. I’m not the fastest typist. Autocomplete wasn’t working. I was still rattled and fumbling my way through it. I ended up running out of time before having to start the next interview, which was system design. I’m much more confident there and I feel it went fairly well.

I’ve been trying to accept that I probably won’t get an offer. I actually really liked the manager, and based on the initial interview, I felt like I had a really good shot at it. I know they’ve probably already made their decision, but part of me really wishes I could send a follow up and explain that as soon as it was over, I went back and clearly saw where I fucked up. It was embarrassing and a situation that was my own creation.

I haven’t had to interview a lot, but I’ve interviewed lots of candidates and always pushed back on interviews including live coding because I feel the pressure doesn’t give an accurate representation of someone’s abilities. Especially for someone experienced.

Is that kind of live coding exercise the norm for staff level roles? Is someone supposed to be able to complete that in less than hour or am I just slow? Could sending a follow up email help, or would it just seem desperate?

Fuuuuck…

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 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.

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.

At this point, how much of career growth in tech comes down to luck?

Good CTC, good company, good projects, and good overseas opportunities often seem to depend as much on timing and luck as on skills.

I feel 70–80% of people are reasonably talented now. Most people can learn, adapt, and work with different tech stacks when given the opportunity.

Is the game becoming more about being in the right place at the right time?

It feels like we are coming full circle to the times of the Silo Engineer, but on steroids. Back in the day when social media feeds were chronological (if they even existed), the Silo Engineer would retreat into his cubicle to Create (it was usually a he).

He was Creating and Creating, and then a few weeks later the results came back. If you were lucky, you got what you asked for or something close to it.

No one knew what the Silo Engineer was making, whether it was a sound solution from the architectural, security, or code quality point of view. It was a Silo. There was little discussion or collaboration, there was only self-review of code - at best.

After exiting the Flow, the Silo Engineer would often come back to his Work weeks later and wonder: "who in the F wrote this S?"

... It was beautiful.

Seems like with LLMs we are entering that era again, but it's different.

Smaller teams, mentally overtaxed developers, exhausted from scrolling walls of generated code they don't understand, on multiple projects at once - no one really talks to each other again.

Tickets - Claude, Slack messages - Claude, code reviews - Claude, "have your Claude talk to my Claude".

So, here we are - same idea, but at a higher, more reckless pace.

Let's see how this ends, I guess ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This is one of my pet peeves: the inability to actually deprecate the "old" version of something is always so hard. There are always users who don't want to switch. Or that obscure feature you don't want to support in v2 that keeps users from switching. Or my favorite: a general suspicious attitude against all new software.

I'm currently writing internal software for a high tech Corp. It's an even worse situation than writing paid software for actual customers.

Did you manage to deprecate it? Even to delete the code entirely?

Before containers and Kubernetes, I deployed services onto virtual machines. We had a fixed number. When the peak arrived at night, whoever was on call tried to spread the load by hand. Buying more hardware took time, and some unreliability was acceptable.

Then AWS and Cloudflare made it easier to throw money at capacity and let some infrastructure scale. You have to design the system with scaling in mind. And a bill.

Now tokens add cost.

If you own both the service and the bill, what’s your strategy? How do you cap, what cap acceptable? How to gracefully degrade? And how rules applies across the organization?

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

​

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.