r/ExperiencedDevs

I work in a large corporate environment where AI is being heavily (and blindly) pushed onto the masses. Most management above me is non-technical. The leaders that should be technical range from "Haven't touched code in a decade" to "My greatest achievement is my friend is a VP."

When I present management with a technical proposal, or escalate a technical problem, they don't understand it, so they put it through AI. Knowing this, I put all my communications through AI, because if AI agrees with me, so will they.

But AI always gives me "the core argument looks good, but here's what can be tightened" every time. I could accept every suggestion verbatim, and each iteration run it back through the same AI, and still it comes back with more suggested changes. So it becomes this optimization heuristic where I'm running my communication through different AIs to achieve the least level of disagreement. The error margin never reaches 0 though, because AI seems compelled to suggest changes.

The worst is when AI labels my statements as "partially correct" or even "incorrect" because it lacks context. So then I have to add the context specifically for the AI, even if it's obtuse or superfluous for the intended human recipient, just so AI won't disagree with me (or so it will disagree with me less).

I think a lot of us feel this, but I have a love / hate relationship with AI. It's a great tool for so many things, but then I hit something like this where my 30 years of expertise is irrelevant unless AI agrees with me. God forbid I suggest something that's not mainstream and thus foreign to most LLMs. Where management used to rely on experts, they now rely on AI.

I don't think it's hyperbole to say we're facing an intellectual crisis here - where human creativity is bounded by the limitations of LLM's corpus of knowledge. Not only are we relying on LLM's for creative endeavors, such as art, but also on technical innovation - if we delegate critical thinking to machines that are incapable of critical thinking, and only make decisions based on inference, we're in trouble.

/edit: fixed typo and removed some extra words

A little background into my current workplace:

- I've been employed at my current workplace for 4 years, on paper I'm a platform engineer though I have been put onto projects as a pure SWE during my tenure.

- I've received great feedback for my performance, solid pay rises, everything on paper is good.

- The engineering teams use a mixture of languages, cloud providers, the most predominant is AWS serverless + Typescript and CDK.

As I'm sure we've all seen by now, there has been a sharp rise in vibe coded solutions.

I wouldn't describe myself as anti-AI by any stretch, but I am feeling quite frustrated with the drop in standards within my professional environment.

To give an example within the CI/CD space:

- Engineering team sees something that needs "fixing" within the CI/CD space.

(I'm putting "fixing" in quotes here as it likely already worked, but someone saw an article about something shiny and new so we have to have it now).

- AI vibes a solution, extending and overriding the CI/CD components in place to build a house of cards.

- Engineering team have approvals on their repository, internally approve, vibes are shipped.

- Either something breaks immediately or in a few weeks, leading to a conversation like this:

Dev: "Unable to deploy project A, urgent blocker, critical"

PipelineMonkey: "So.. what are we trying to do here, none of the standard components are being used?"

Dev: "Oh, I didnt set this up, but this job fails"

PipelineMonkey: "Yeah, who owns this repository, do we know who set this up?"

Dev: "Oh we own it, but I didn't set this bit up - We have to deploy something urgently!"

*PipelineMonkey goes through troubleshooting, gets things back to standard, things work*

Dev: "Thanks!"

Normally I'm able to keep quite chipper and have been praised for my friendly approach.

If something genuinely doesn't work or we want to architect a new solution, great, I'm more than happy to help.

However I'm now struggling to maintain a good attitude when we seem to be in a cycle of writing untested and non-standard garbage only to walk away and make it someone else's problem.

A colleague raised this as a concern only to be scolded for not being a team-player.

I can't really see this changing without a top down approach of ownership and care from leadership as to what's being produced, I feel this is quite unlikely given leadership are sending AI generated responses to feedback in some cases.

I'd hate to throw in the towel, particularly as everything else about the company is great and I seem to be doing quite well here.

(Perhaps some of that good feedback is purely because I've been happy to deal with nonsense for quite some time).

Maybe time to take a vacation and cool off from the burnout.

General advice on software standardization, ownership processes and general navigation of this politically with my colleagues would be great.

Thanks!

Hey all,

Disclaimer: I am going to take this offer no matter what (life circumstances), so this is not a "which offer do i pick?!?" post.

I am in the process of moving jobs, away from gig (instacart/DD/uber) and into fintech (square/stripe/plaid), and I just learned that I passed the Senior interview and will be receiving an offer. I am fresh off of a very "hot" conversation with the recruiter where I held firm instead of succuming to any numerical pressure yet. When asked "is there a number that will make you say yes" or "what are you looking for," I stayed generic and non-committal. The only vibe I gave off is that, given my interview performance (he openly admitted that I was close to upleveling to Staff) and career history (have worked at Fintech extensively), I am expecting a strong offer.

He also quoted exact band values, denoting that 410 was the "cap" for Senior eng. I have a friend who works internally and was hired about 8 months ago, and I know that this cap is just completely false and that they are capable of going way above band. Now this has made me wonder how many times in my career I've let the notion of a "band" prevent me from negotiating for more comp... are these bands just not real at all? Do they use indecisive language to qualify for the laws about comp disclosure in the Big cities?

I am planning on pressing for an offer similar to what my friend got, but I feel like the entire notion of a "band" has just been fractured for me. What's the right way to think about bands? Are there any ramifications to getting hired above/below band? Would love to hear any experiences, thanks!

Hey everyone, quick question for folks who’ve been interviewing recently specially for someone using the MS stack (.Net, C#, SQL). What’s the current state of technical interviews out there? Are companies still drilling people on the classic fundamentals like OOP, polymorphism, inheritance, etc? Or has the focus shifted more toward system design, LeetCode style puzzles, or practical “build this” tasks?

I have been with my current company for more than a decade and trying to get a feel for what’s actually being asked in 2026 so I know what to brush up on. Any recent experiences or patterns you’ve noticed would help a ton.

I've struggling at work for a year or so due to burnout and managing 2 surgeries for my medical transition. My manager told me that I have been bottom 20% of senior engineers and told me to improve.

I work at Bloomberg, C++ backend that deals with high throughput data. I have been working for 6 years. I would say that technically I am around mid level engineer.

At first, I didn't worry too much since I thought Bloomberg and 6 yrs of experience would allow me to get a job quickly but from people here, even FAANG folks seem to have hard time getting a job.

If I get fired, how screwed am I? I am also thinking of taking sabbetical since doing 3 surgeries in a year is taking a mental toll on me.

Hey all, just wanted to get your insight on this situation.

I’m a frontend developer working with React. Recently, we got a new backend developer. I had been working with our oldest backend developer, who is great to work with, but I was recently assigned to a new project where I have to work with this new developer.

She’s been with the company for about three months now, and the thing is, she doesn’t seem to know what she’s doing.

A week ago, she was taking way too long on a simple request, and she told me, “Hehe, AI isn’t able to solve this. Give me more time.” That was the first red flag for me because it was a really simple task.

A couple of days later, the same thing happened. She was taking hours on a small change, so I ended up giving her an AI prompt explaining what needed to be done. She came back five minutes later and told me she had fixed it.

The problem now is that she’s constantly coming to my office asking me if I can give her the AI prompt for whatever change I’m requesting.

I don’t know what to do at this point. I feel like this isn’t fair because I’m basically doing her job for her, but I also don’t want to be the person who goes to the manager and calls her out. She could potentially lose her job, and I don’t want that to happen because of me.

Should I talk to my manager about it?

The biggest issue is that it’s starting to bottleneck my own work. On top of that, I have to constantly come up with prompts for her, and she makes some pretty bad mistakes because she doesn’t really understand the context of what she’s building.

How would you guys handle this situation?

Hi everyone,

I'm looking for advice as to how to move forward with an unresponsive PM I'm dealing with.

Context: Feb this year my company went through a pretty harsh lay-off round, 2-3 ppl from every department were let go, one of those ppl was the PM I reported to. He was a really good PM, a real go-getter. He was replaced by a content design guy who was "promoted" to PM, this content design guy also happens to be buddies with the CTO from a previous company. That, and my previous PM being very vocal about things he disliked about our processes led to this.

So, sure, I might be a little biased against this guy because he replaced a very competent person just because of nepotism basically. I'm trying to push that feeling aside tho. The problem is that this new PM, the content design guy, isn't just not a go-getter, he isn't responsive at all. About all the negative traits he brings to the table we have:

- He makes a town hall meeting to decide on every little thing, he asks the designers or the QA for product feedback, things that he should decide. He is unable to make one single decision.

- He abuses DM, like instead of kicking a thread on the dev or design channel, he just messages a bunch of ppl privately and we all miss context about things going on.

- Doesn't keep consistency for any processes. We have decided that we would start using Google Docs to spec the features out so we could talk about them in there. We did that once. After that he decided he would use JIRA tickets as the spec. Then not even that, we coded a POC and because it "looked good" went out with that.

- I pinged him on Slack asking for product decision feedback and he doesn't reply until next day, some times he never does reply at all!

- We, the dev team, were running out of things to do, so I drafted some specs for some low-hanging fruit we could pull, shared those specs and never got any feedback from him.

All this being said, what the f am I supposed to do?

Again, this guy is buddies with the CTO from a previous job, and the CTO is the only person I think I can bring this up to, as my engineer manager has lost any will to do anything in the company.

Is it worth talking about this with the CTO? I've always been proud of my skill to not shy away from difficult situations, but for the first time in my carrer I kinda feel there are no options to move forward.

Best case scenario: I talk about this with the CTO, everything respectfully in a "we need to improve" manner instead of "your buddy is useless" – and maybe things do improve.

Worst case scenario: I talk about this with the CTO, he wipes his ass with my feedback and puts me on the chipping block for the next lay-off round.

I don't, has anyone gone through this situation ever?

Problem:

Let's say I have a domain like messaging-app.europa.eu, with an SSL certificate, and I use it to distribute a PWA. In the case of an internet blackout I would still like for the app to retrieve updates from a local mesh.

Possible solution:

This is the solution I'm currently imagining:

• Deploy a bunch of OpenWRT routers with some custom software
• The smartphone connect to one such router via wifi
• The PWA tries to connect to the domain https://messaging-app.europa.eu in the absence of internet
• The router has a copy of the SSL certificate, so it can intercept the request and generate valid HTTPS responses from a locally running server

A user would connect to the wifi, exchange messages with other peers connected to the same station without relying on an internet connection.

Questions:

• Do I just need a copy of the SSL certificate on each router, or is there other part of the stack that I should patch? (e.g.: DNS)
• Is it possible to intercept and patch the connection as I mentioned?
• Am I missing something?

Prodrome:

I work for the government and I've been asked to demo a solution for enabling communication during an internet blackout (earthquake, war, ...) using a mesh/p2p network.

The path I'm taking right now is to build a PWA that would work offline, and rely on customized openwrt routers, because it seems that the other solution, WiFi NAN, works well on android phones but not on iphones, due to malicious compliance on Apple side.

Something I keep noticing and cannot unsee.

Before LLMs, maybe two percent of people could write code. That has not changed. What changed is that the rest can now produce something that looks like code, and they have no way to distinguish a working system from one that merely runs. So you get the confident version: developers are finished.

Move the same person one field over, into something they actually know, and the verdict inverts inside the same conversation. A lawyer on drafting. A doctor on a differential. An electrician on a load calculation. No, it makes far too many mistakes there, you cannot rely on it for that.

Everyone is an optimist about other people's professions and a sceptic about their own. That is not hypocrisy. It is the only honest reading of the evidence each of them has, because inside your own field you can see the errors and outside it you cannot. You count what you can see, and conclude there is nothing to count where you cannot.

Which means the enthusiasm is not measuring the model. It is measuring the gap.

The version of this I hit at work: generated code compiles, the demo runs, and that tells you nothing about what happens to a half-finished write when the network drops, or which of three plausible schemas falls over at forty thousand rows because the sort happens after the join. Those do not surface as errors. They surface as absences, and no model volunteers an absence. Someone who can read the code sees the absence. Someone who cannot sees a working demo.

I use it daily and it made me faster. But I have noticed my opinion of it is highest in the areas I know least, and I now treat that as a warning rather than a recommendation. The question I ask is no longer "is it good at this" but "would I notice if it were wrong". When the answer is no, that is not a green light, that is the whole risk in one sentence.

Curious whether people here see the same inversion in their own orgs, or whether there is a reading of it I am missing.

I see a lot of experienced developers who seem dissatisfied.

For me, part of that frustration comes from not having enough opportunities at work to learn genuinely new concepts, tools, or areas of engineering. It feels like more and more of my time goes into execution and solving variations of problems I already know how to solve.

Even worse, sometimes an LLM produces a solution and we simply don't have the time to properly understand its trade-offs, implications, or failure modes before moving on.

Obviously, you can learn outside of work, but I don't really like the idea that staying intellectually engaged in my profession should require having a second job in the evenings.

How do you handle this? I think there are several facets to it, for instance:

- At the team/company level, have you seen practices that actually create room for learning rather than just paying lip service to it?

- Do you deliberately choose projects or jobs based on their learning potential?

- And at some point, do you simply accept that work is mostly about applying what you already know, while developing new skills in your free time?

Abruptly quit? I have enough savings for a while but it’s almost impossible to get a job again in this market.

Quiet quit until they fire me? That’ll leave a bad taste in your coworkers and managers mouth if you ever want to reach out after spending X years at the company.

Interview at other places? I’ve been doing that for MONTHS and no offers (see point 1).

Any other devs in this position / have suggestions (serious replies only please)?

I want to preface this by saying that this question pops up from time to time. I wanted to ask this in the context of handling large influxes of of LLM generated pull requests. We get enough PR requests per day that if our team spent most of the day just reviewing code and not writing any ourselves we'd never get through our backlog. Many of them are blocked due to CI/CD issues where fixing them would also dismiss any approval and require us to review multiple times. Overall the quality is low to middling.

Because our teams attention is so much in demand and because our workloads have only grown I wanted to pitch a formal code standards and pull request code of conduct that we can point to. Ideally i'd like to put my team in a place where we can be strict about what code goes in and why we say no and for it to be a very fast manual process or something we can automate away.

We've tried pull request templates but bots and devs a like tend to ignore them. Eventually i'd like to make strict adherence to the template a requirement to get any attention at all.

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

Code Complete, Domain Driven Design, Designing Data Intensive Applications, The Pragmatic Programmer...

These are all books that I try to follow in my own engineering practices. I haven't found a great one on testing though (unit, manual, automated, etc) -- which do you recommend? What books outline best practices in modern software testing?

This issue has been going on for months now, I am dealing with a new system and learning about it. Colleagues that have been working on it for many years didn’t explain anything but still told me to ask for information which they are not that easily giving instead of figuring out myself.
Well when I ask there is a 50% chance they tell me something wrong.

They don’t do it on purpose, they simply overestimate their knowledge of the system the built or worked on for many years.

I always have to fact check them which means that asking them for advice is almost pointless. if I donk’t fact check often I waste hours on an implementation based on the wrong information.

I am not talking about simple questions but questions about the design and inner working of a very complex system.

AI is helping but it’s not fixing the human interaction, which is often unavoidable.

what do you advise?

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In our company, there is a custom tool managed by the support team. Its job is to perform HC, tracing, and deployment data collection. I would also mention that New Relic and OpenTelemetry are already available at the enterprise level, but production support insists that integration with this tool is mandatory.

They recently introduced a change where a deployment component should also send all the packages it is using as part of the deployment data. The thing is, getting dependencies post-deployment is slow because we are using mvn dependency. As an engineer, I was concerned about the additional time this would take. So, in a meeting with the tool team, I asked why we need to send the dependencies in the first place when we already have that data in the Sonatype report. Why duplicate the information?

One of the team members responded rather sharply: "Do you think that during a production issue, someone will log in to the report UI and get the details? Do you even know why we are putting it here? This is needed for auditing."

I told him that I understood the requirement, but my concern was with the process that one of the teams had implemented using mvn dependency and that they were asking us to implement in the same way. It is slow, and even if I run it as an asynchronous job, it would still be a waste of resources.

At this point, he said that this was mandatory and that if I thought otherwise, I should send an email and CC my manager, architect, and director. I didn't say anything after that.

What should I have done, or what should I do now?

Implement whatever they asked for—it's a job, after all. Who cares?

Implement it using a different approach. It will take some time, but it might be possible.

Or something else?

Since it is an internal tool, there is no proper documentation—just a few references here and there.

This doesn't break out pipeline as their api doesn't say it is mandatory.

I have always struggled with estimation. For most of my nine-year career, I was a serial underestimator, and I’ve only really gotten the hang of it in the last few years. I’ve relied on the standard tricks: multiply the initial estimate by 1.5, account for the percentage of engineering time that will be lost to other work, and add a buffer for testing.

Now, though? I have no idea what to do. Things that used to take weeks now take days. My team was just assigned a “half-year” project. It has a ton of scope: we’re building an entire backend system and a new internal app.

We spent a few weeks on design, and then pressure came from above to have the core of it ready in a month and a half. My first instinct was to push back violently, but instead, I decided to spend a day putting together a plan for agents to implement a simple demo. I had AI do some market research for the app and examine potential features and UX. On Friday, I gave the design, constraints, and market research to an ultracode agent with a single goal: give me a working demo backed by realistic synthetic data, with fully functional plumbing.
It’s already done, so now I’m having it add extras…

Honestly, it’s far beyond my expectations, and I only had to steer it three times over the course of two days. It’s obviously not ready for prime time. There’s still security, performance, God knows what new requirements will come in, and the work of pulling in non-synthetic data once everything is secured. The point, though, is that this was a very nontrivial amount of work, work we estimated would take a team of three more than two weeks.

To make a long story short, I have no idea how to give estimates anymore when AI continuously surprises me with how quickly and thoroughly it can accomplish things. My team estimated two weeks just for a prototype. On a goddamn whim, I had a more complete version finished in three days. Some of the most time-consuming elements of the job have become trivial, yet other elements are completely unchanged, and it’s hard to know how to weight them.

Does anyone have updated tips or tricks? Leadership is continuously pushing for accelerated timelines, and I honestly think we can meet them. But every instinct I’ve developed over almost a decade in the field screams at me to fall back on the ultra-safe estimates that I know are overestimates in today’s world.

I work at a large automotive company on customer-facing projects. Customers come to us with edge cases where the system fails.

My job is to investigate, find the root cause, propose a fix, estimate the effort, assess the risks, present to stakeholders, and help decide if it's worth doing.

I'm good at it. I trace failures to their physical causes. I scope solutions from quick parameter tweaks to full architectural redesigns. I present tradeoffs for my module and dependent modules. I coordinate across departments. I assess business viability.

On paper, seems i am becoming a senior engineer. Here's the problem: the answer is almost always "not worth it." Too expensive. Too risky. And i agree to be honest. Wait for next generation. The customer gets a report. I get the next ticket.

I'm building every "senior" skill except the only one that actually matters on a CV, the proof that I built something end-to-end.

How do you get out of this loop? Shall i update my CV and leave? Shall i implement the proposals but as projects?

SWE, 7 YOE

I kind of don’t get where this career is going anymore. Right now I use AI to write code, I have my own ways of validating it, some skills, I use loops, I come up with whole processes around it to solve problems as well as possible and generate new features “one-shot” if we already have a gold standard for that type of thing in the repo (basic CRUD, for example), so that’s how I work now.

I try to review the code at least roughly, if not all of it, to check it’s not doing anything weird etc. For example, I don’t read algorithms that are supposed to collect and transform data, because they usually just work, so I mostly focus on the architecture etc.
My problem is that our competition is a guy who vibe codes his app and pushes a ton of features into it, and from what we know they’re very simple and very incomplete features, but the market wanted them.

Our system is very advanced and has much more complex systems, but fewer of them, and now management is furious that we as engineers aren’t producing as much as some guy who vibe codes his own project and isn’t even in IT, and they keep pushing for more and more features. But since our system is already brownfield and has a lot of other stuff, some of those features are hard to introduce and take more time. I suggested to our manager that we ship those features in a stripped-down form, just so they exist, and improve them over time, but the argument is that since he already has them, we need to have more.

We’re a software house, and as a team of 7 we’re actually doing 3 projects for three clients, and there’s pressure from every side that they vibe code more than we deliver.

Before the whole AI boom we were in a position where, of course, a lot was needed, but we were also delivering a lot for the size of our team. Now expectations have grown massively and it’s hard to keep up with them.

I kind of don’t understand. Maybe we’re doing it wrong and shouldn’t look at the code at all, just push everything as it comes. It would be a bit faster, but definitely not as fast as they do it. From what we know, they don’t even come up with functionality or think about it anymore, they just tell the AI to add something new and then market it, and that’s it.
What does your work and workflow look like to speed things up?
I feel like we’re 3x devs when we should be 10x, and we don’t know where our problem is.

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.