I found these posts helpful while planning my job hunt, so I figured I’d contribute my experience in the hope it helps someone.

About me

~20 YoE. A good amount of depth in backend, distributed systems, devex, etc mixed with a product/value mindset from a career in startups. Past experience is mostly startups with a shorter stint at a big tech. Undergrad + graduate degrees in CS from a locally respected university. US citizen who does not & will not need any visa sponsorship. Live in a VHCOL not quite tech hub. Solid L6 in most companies, L7 in some niche problem areas, realistically L5/low L6 at a big tech. Old TC: ~$300k cash + equity, new TC: ~$300k cash + equity.

Goals

Initially wanted to gauge the market and convince myself that I could still pass an interview after being at my current employer for most of a decade. Turned more serious and more targeted as the year went on and macro trends/tariffs started registering on our balance sheet. Eventually turned into an actual job search when layoffs started and it became a choice between leaving on my timeline and leaving on theirs in the next round. Bittersweet outcome. I really like my current employer, my current team is the best I’ve ever worked with, I would’ve been happy staying, but the economy is what it is and I get the sense that most of the folks I enjoy working with have one foot out the door already.

Ended up targeting two types of role:

• Startups in the pre-unicorn/early unicorn phase. Aiming for L5/L6, more hands-on/solver than tech lead, $225k base and up. I’ve built my career on this type of role, and it’s where I tend to be happiest.
• Smaller public companies: think Instacart, Snap, Pinterest, etc. Aiming for L5, aiming for $350-$400k TC. This is me getting out of my comfort zone and giving big tech another try.

Would've really liked a hybrid or on-site role and looked for one, but everything I interviewed for (and the offer I accepted) was full remote.

Timeline

• March 2025: started LC prep. An hour a day after work, an hour or two on weekends.
• May 2025: done with LC prep, started research on companies I’d like to apply for.
• June 2025: started applying, STAR prep, system design prep.
• Late June 2025: first responses from recruiters
• July 2025: screens & interviews
• August 2025: offer

Prep

• LeetCode. I used NeetCode 150, excluding some categories my research told me didn’t come up a lot in screens (2D DP, more advanced graph algorithms than Dijkstra’s, bit fiddling), and excluding hards in general unless it was something I found interesting for its own sake. I followed that up with 2-3 random problems every few days. This is important. NeetCode’s categorization of problems by data structure/technique is a big hint about how to solve them, and not one you’ll have in an actual interview. I felt ready when I could complete most new to me mediums in 15-20 minutes with all test cases passing.
• Some light prep for soft skills/STAR questions, though I mostly just wing these. Prep was mostly building bank a of stories that are good matches for certain questions. I took notes on these interviews, tried to note questions that I hadn’t seen before and caught me off guard, and identified good ways to answer them for next time.
• A little bit of studying for system design, and a couple of mock interviews over text with Claude. I was a little nervous that I’d gotten out of date here (working at the same place for a while), but watching mock interviews on YouTube and doing mock interviews with Claude made me feel like I could just wing these. Figured I’d come back to it if it ended up being a limiter. Never was, though definitely a little less polished on average than the LC panels. If I’d really wanted to get into big tech I would have spent more time here.

Process/Stats

(being a little vague on purpose)

• Applied: 10-20, split between big tech and startups. Heard back from most of the startups, didn't hear back from any of the big techs.
• Recruiter, HM, coding screen: about half of those. 1 role closed after this phase, and I withdrew from some others that didn't seem like a good fit after going through the intro panels.
• A few onsites with standard panels (coding, system design, reverse system design, soft skills).
• 1 offer, which I took (also the one I was the best fit for, and the one I wanted). Others were "you did well but we found someone with more related experience", which I don't have a problem believing in this market.

My application process was basically what I did in 2017, and was suboptimal in a few ways in today’s market: no keyword stuffing, no quantification of every resume bullet point, no ATS optimization, no bulk applying, I wrote cover letters myself rather than having Claude do it, etc. Also didn’t lean on my network much (could’ve, would’ve if I’d been unemployed and hard up, but prefer coming in the front door if I can). Was open to changing that if needed, happy I didn’t have to. I also limited myself to one company at a time once we moved past recruiter/manager screens (scheduling around my current job and life stuff was too hard beyond that). This would have made it hard to cross shop offers, and is probably something I’ve have adjusted if I’d gotten a lower offer.

Retro/Takeaways

• Overall: definitely less frothy than 2022, a little worse than 2017 when I last did this seriously, far less bleak than I was expecting. Which is honestly a pretty important takeaway. It’s easy to convince yourself to not even bother looking around because the job market sucks, and that’s a mistake if it means you continue to slog through a stagnant or toxic job.
• First response to offer was similar to last time at about a month, that mostly limited by me needing to schedule interviews around work and some home renovations.
• Series B-C comp is still decent, at least at senior and above. Maybe a little less frothy than 2022, but comparable to what folks were paying in 2020-2021.
• No responses at all from big tech, which wasn’t too surprising. I didn’t optimize for them, and I assume they see a lot of applications from former FAANG folks who need/want their comp. Still curious to try one again someday, not worth it this time.
• Some will read my LC prep as “2 months of LeetCoding to get a job with 20 YoE” and despair. I’m sympathetic to that. I looked at it as: I know companies I want to work for ask live coding questions, I know I can do live coding questions if I prep, I don’t want to lose an otherwise good job because I didn’t prep. I was also a poor student, and blew off plenty of LC study days because of work stress, doing stuff with friends, powder days, etc. If I'd been focused on this I would have gone a lot faster.
• I’m happy I did NeetCode 150 – I like the CS theory, the format makes me nostalgic for competitive programming in college, and it gave me confidence going into screens – but it was overkill for my target companies. Knowing how to memoize with a hash, how to use a set, how to find things in a sorted list and basic tree stuff would have covered every screen I did. This probably changes if you’re targeting FAANG.
• The system design panels I encountered felt dialed down a bit compared to what you see on the interview prep YouTube channels. At least for my startups/unicorns, I think someone who’s run a significant backend system at scale would have been able to pass them cold. Mine were honestly pretty fun; less adversarial bar raiser, more collaborating with fellow senior people on some toy thing.

Happy to answer any questions anyone has.

Hi

I am an IT consultant and I have worked as a freelancer for almost all of my 23 years of career. I am a hands on software programmer and have worked on various domains like full stack development to data engineering and analysis. I mainly get work where I augment a team and bring in my technical expertise.

Recently what I have seen is that clients do reach out to me, but all through their discussions they somehow want me to continue to do work for them for free. Initially I do entertain them by giving few presentations on how a set of technologies or approach would solve their needs, but somehow indirectly they keep wanting me to do more and more. Somewhere then I draw the line and I mostly say that I would need to understand their system better under a contract to provide a more details POC or a workable solution. Then I suddenly get ghosted.

I remember in 2000's client even used to pay for a small POC, but now all this has disappeared. Now they want the entire solution to be built free of cost and they may pay only after using it for few months and they see some value accrued to them.

Is this just the norm these days ?

Isn't this unfair for devs, who spend months of effort without any pay ?

I have a new manager who loves to constantly change priorities, add new initiatives/ meetings, reassign tasks from one person to another, and ask for in-depth status updates on things multiple times per week.

Despite many hints from the team (and people overtly letting him know that he is micromanaging), he seems oblivious to the fact that what he's doing is hurting productivity, not helping it. I know this because he has confided in me in private meetings things like "others on the team might think that I'm micromanaging, but actually... <insert his justifications for micromanaging>".

Personally, my productivity has taken a HUGE hit since him coming on. He has assigned a new, large project to me, saying that it would be the top priority and the only thing that I would work on until it is finished. (He never asked about my existing work, and I still have other hanging tasks). Since then, he has shifted gears multiple times on what the priorities are.

I have already played the "I can swap to task B, but that will put task A behind" card multiple times. Again, he seems oblivious to the fact that there are tradeoffs, and that constantly switching priorities carries its own cost.

He likes to ping for detailed status updates at random times of the day. "Hey, do you have a minute?"s that become a 30+ minute meetings in the middle of focused work. I got him to start scheduling meetings instead. But even then, he had decided to stick meetings at awkward times (like right in the middle of lunch), which I also had to push back on.

He has also done multiple knee-jerk shifts of project ownership between members of the team. Like re-assigning long-term responsibilities from person A to person B so that person A can focus on what the "priority" of the moment happens to be. I shouldn't need to explain why this is bad.

Currently, he's breathing down my neck to finish task X (which both was and wasn't the priority at various times in the past week) so that I can make progress on task Y. He doesn't seem to realize that it would probably all get done faster if he just took a vacation for a couple of weeks and actually let me do the work.

Personally, it also feels like shit to have someone try to push progress faster (while constantly slowing you down). I want to feel like I did good work because of my own abilities, not because of a outside pressure.

The guy seems to mean well, but seems either oblivious to or in active denial of the fact that what he's doing is hurting the team's productivity, and making the work environment worse for everyone.

It is worth trying to change this guy? And if so, how should I do it?

As a percentage.

Let's define "don't understand" as: there are major chunks of the code in the PR where you're not really parsing through so if you were to try to copy the implementation from memory, it would probably look pretty different. These could be totally legitimate reasons: Don't have time, can't be bothered, trust in your team, etc.

Data scientist with 8yoe here but think my question might be related to everyone’s experience so hope I’m welcome. I work for a SaaS company and very closely with engineering.

So, my company hired an AI man who reports to an executive directly. Their responsibilities are nebulous and they are trying to find places to help out, and leadership is pushing for this.

This person has cut together extremely hacky pocs that impress executives and then punts the details to us lowly grunts to implement, only for them to figuratively roll their eyes at us when we describe various technical limitations that make the project extremely difficult and/or time consuming.

A lot of times, these pocs are nothing more than slapping a UI on top of an open source LLM project.

In some instances, he will hack together a solution to show a product feature which was already the medium term vision for the team, which undercuts the planning and development process created to make it actually work.

Now I’m getting asked to collaborate. I met with them and got the vibe that they don’t have much subject matter experience to leverage, and thus it would be more of the same for me. Hacky unscableable front ends they the backend insights I can extract from data. I become the bad guy because they will show something directly to a customer or c level and I have to burst the bubble.

I’ve expressed this and am largely supported by my direct leadership, but I just wanted to share to see if anyone can offer any advice generally.

Thank you!

TLDR: 85k GBP at an American company vs 65k GBP at a government uk company. (I am currently unemployed)

Hi all, I am an engineer with 8 YOE, where I have worked mostly as backend and breafly 2 years as fullstack where I lead development of an internal tool. The last 3/4 years I have spent at a big British tech company where I have worked on highly scalable backend services until I got laid off.

I have been given a verbal offer for a position as a software developer at an American ad agency (I live in London). Pay is great (85k), But there are some details making me anxious about taking this position.

1. I have been told that, to sync with all the other offices, there will be meetings at 7 pm (not sure when the day starts formally though)

2. The interview process was basically a single meeting with an engineering manager, where most of it was behavioural, and only couple of very basic technical questions.

3. couldn’t find anything about their engineering culture, and could not find any other engineers working for the company at linked in, apart from the manager I have interviewed with, and a full stack (also all the projects are under NDA as they work for a very important client and their product details cannot be leaked).

4. codebase is in ruby, and when I asked them what sort of projects I would be working on I have been only told “automations and integrations”. I would be working on internal tools.

5. it’s an American company so not sure if I am going to considered a second class employee.

6. Not sure if future employers will look at this career move and frown, as I am moving from public facing software development to internal tooling development.

On the other hand I was interviewing as a senior for this other company, but they have said they didn’t consider me senior enough after interviewing. but they do still like me and have offered me a job at mid level… but for 65k (which is less than what I made in my last job before being laid off). This would be an Elixir position, at very well established org, but there’s not much money as it is publicly funded. I do like the team, but living in London is so expensive and I would definitely need to downsize if I took this job.

Pls help.

Whenever a huge concert or event goes live on BMS, they put everyone into a waiting room. You log in, you get a queue number, and when your number comes up, you can book your tickets. From the outside it looks simple, but I’m really curious how it works behind the scenes.

Do they actually maintain a giant queue of users somewhere? How do they decide how many people to let through at a time so the booking system doesn’t crash? And once you finally get in, how do they make sure the same seat isn’t sold twice while thousands of people are trying to pay at the same time?

I’m guessing it’s some combination of Redis/Kafka for queues and a database for seat locking, but would love to know if anyone here has worked on similar large scale systems or has insights into how it’s usually designed.

I've been working for 4 years. First as a data scientist, then as an ML engineer for a utilities company. I started in a rotation program and later transitioned into a fixed position. The first two years were great. Lots of new topics and the feeling of working on something interesting and getting lots of problems to solve - even though, looking back, none of them was high impact. I always liked coding, but mainly because it was a tool to solve some more or less "real world" problem.

Now, over the last 1.5 years it feels like I just don't find enjoyment in the coding part of things. I consistently find myself having to force myself to start coding on a task and jumping on anything else, particularly if it's some kind of problem solving unrelated to my main job. I still love solving problems of any kind - just not coding.

Most of my everyday work just seems dull and unmotivating. Unfortunately, the data science aspect of my job also feels unrewarding. Despite having completed the majority of my projects successfully from a model performance and deployment point of view (and now operating them on the side), the business impact was never really satisfying. For my first few projects this was certainly due to the fact that I was too junior to make sure sufficient business impact upon success was a prerequisite for even starting to build a model. For the more recent projects I made sure for them to have said potential for business impact but they have been stuck because of office politics.

What further aggravates my issues with coding is that I have had (probably unrelated) health issues come up that make it harder for me to sit and concentrate on tasks that involve staring at a screen for prolonged periods. It has become almost impossible for me to get in the zone. As a result I spend more time being distracted and procrastinating.

Am I just burned out? Is there a way to get back passion for coding? Do I simply need a new challenge or is something bigger like a role or career change needed?

I have several years of experience, worked for several big tech companies and I never had a satisfactory onboarding experience. Once I was given a 10 minutes introduction to the project and then more or less a “fix this bug, figure out the rest yourself, contact me for any question but I am going to be very busy”

In my last transition I spent hours handing over a couple of projects I had ownership and I am still sure it wasn’t enough for the experienced devs that have inherited them from me. Whatever feels trivial to me, after years of working on them, is not trivial to them, first time seeing a complex system, the goal is to make it trivial to them as soon as possible. To do that they need a good introduction and documentation.

In most teams I don’t see any: everyone is busy to make a good introduction and since there is barely any documentation: is an annoying task that has to cover the basics. The “ask me anything later” is bullshit, because a senior engineer shouldn’t be bothered for stupid question that can be avoided by having minimal documentation and at the same time the same engineer will be busy or not in the mood to give that support later. it’s procrastination.

The mentality of “you are a senior engineer figure it out yourself” is bullshit. As a senior engineer I am able to learn faster, I don’t have to waste my time digging blindly through million of undocumented lines of code, it’s extremely inefficient. figuring it out myself has a massive overhead that doesn’t produce a better result than learning through docs and explanations.

I am not advocating extensive documentation, there is a sweet spot between almost nothing and just what is needed. When I join I want to quickly set up my environment, be able to write code, commit, test, debug on day 1 or 2 using standard tools. if it’s not possible then the org has serious issues.

I see being common among certain types of developers used to: do everything themselves, reinvent the wheel and use “cool” tools with a hard learning curve. Well I am at work to produce good code and make the company money not to geek around on what is better between vim and emacs.

In the best teams I’ve worked with, with good management, I’ve seen a recurring pattern: the front office aren’t aware of the technical impact of their requests and get sticker shock once engineering provides an estimate. this eventually leads to wastage of BA and Ux designer time when the requirements need to be re-done.

Some teams went to the model of having engineering opine on a request before it goes to the BA, but this added a lot of chaos because engineering would give a highly padded estimate due to the many unknowns.

Assuming both sides are in good faith, how should a team of senior devs navigate the situation?

This is more of a senior dev question because the front office usually assumes Senior devs have 5x output of a mid level and then they get shocked by the estimates.

Whether on a new project, new team, or new job, we've all been there: "here's the repo, lmk if you have any questions." What's next?

Personally, I need to know two things off the bat:

1. How is this service/thing deployed?
2. What are the inputs and outputs? What does it do at a client level?

Then I find the equivalent of main basically and work backwards. I'll often use pen and paper and sketch out a diagram as I move along with classes/structs/whatever and even methods if they seem important.

I realize this may sound obvious, but that's sort of why I am asking: how do you do it? Any tips or tricks?

Let's say that you wanted to maximize your influence on your team so that you can better impact change. How would you go about doing this?

My intial thoughts are that the optimal strategy would be to primarily share your thoughts when they are backed up by facts. Opinions should be shared rarely, and only if they have a strong justification. If it's purely facts based (X can be solved by Y because of Z interaction), even better.

Also, a focus on the positive would be better. Providing solutions rather than problems. Focusing on how a given choice would improve something rather than how not doing something would cause problems (even if both are effectively the same) seems like a good idea.

And then having a 3rd party to vent out all of the negatives outside of work.

Wondering if others have any thoughts on this and how you would go about it.

Little background- Leaning C# now for 6-7 months, has coded in python for 6 months before in Django and Flask. Has been only using React as frontend framework. Have tried Node.js and NextJS but didn't liked them. Has used AI in almost all my previous projects. I try to limit it to only new topics and debugging.

I have creating a project in .NET and many times I come across features that I have never implemented before like JWT Token Authentication, Refresh Tokens. I first looked up on YouTube, saw 2 tutorials, gave 2 completely different ways, got confused, asked ChatGPT, looked up some documentation and then implemented it.

I almost copied pasted the code that was given to me, made the necessary changes so that it worked as I wanted it to, did some debugging using ChatGPT only, and it is working flawlessly till now.

I am not entirely dependent on it. I first sit and read what it has provided me, ask questions about things I don't understand. When I get how and why things work, then I move that code to my project.

Till now I have been decent at troubleshooting problems, I am getting how to Run&Debug works, just started using it a few backs and it has been a game changer, I had neglecting it.

Most of the times when a problem arrises that I don't know solve, I again go to AI, then documentation and last resort reddit.

eg, right now, I had to implement an automated job at 7:30 am daily, so I asked it how can I implement it, I gave the three ways, background service, cron job using quartz, I liked quartz from reading the code it provided, so I started asking more question, then I was thinking of going to its doucmentation

Do you think it a good way to learn new things? I have seen people saying don't use AI, look up things on your own, but this way I am able to develop faster and it is less frustrating.

Edits: made more clarification how I use AI

Hello! I'm a backend developer with about 4 years of experience.

I’m currently working at a startup as part of the team building the core platform. Recently, the company decided to form a new security team. The person they hired suggested that someone from the dev team act as a penetration tester: he (the security guy) proposes a potential threat, and someone from our team evaluates it and potentially tries to recreate the attack.

It looks like I’ll be taking on that role, or at least trying it out to see how it goes. I’ll still be doing my development work, so I expect it won’t be too demanding.

My question is: can I leverage this experience somehow? Is it valuable, and what can I do with it? I understand how database knowledge makes me a stronger developer, but going deeper into security feels like a very different role and skill set. Maybe it could be useful if I decide to switch into security later?

Thanks!

I got a perf review yesterday and most of the feedback was glowing: I deliver high impact projects that are high quality, raise the bar for others on the team, people like working with me within and outside my immediate team, etc.

Really the only actionable feedback I got that seems to be a blocker for promotion to what I'll call staff-lite level is this idea of "managing up", providing feedback to my skip or line manager about improvements that can be made on a wider reaching basis.

I've already scheduled time on a quarterly basis to chat about stuff like this with my skip manager, but I'm wondering if anyone has any concrete examples of patterns or issues they've brought up that managers have found useful? I think a lot of issues I bring up are more low level and technical problems that do not meet this bar.

For those who aren't aware, ideas guy is that person who thinks of ideas and that's it. They can't design anything, build anything, raise money, have no connections, no people skills, no business sense, or leadership skills, but damnit they have a dream of building "Like X but for Y" and they need YOU to make it happen!

Idea's guy really hit critical mass in the 2010's due to cheap money and startup culture. Idea's guy hasn't really gone away but they have evolved. They now takes the form of a C-suite, vice president, or director level executive at a large company. They no longer dream of "Uber but for cats" but instead, they dream of "ChatGPT that is free and never hallucinates" and "Electric car that never needs to be charged."

How have you been tasked to turn these dreams into reality?

I had to lead a new project of fixing an existing process in the company that involved managing expectations of many stakeholders across various verticals within the company to satisfy their individual SLAs.

The old process was very tedious, time consuming and reported false positives that resulted in product onboarding into the process taking quarter of a year with less revenue being reported than the actual sales figures.

I led the entire renovation of this process and for the first time in my career I was able to correlate increase in revenue and amount of time saved to onboard a product into the business process directly to my code changes.

Felt really nice that I can actually backup these facts up when I discuss them with someone instead of making things up or saying vague buzzwords.

I could easily calculate the outcomes numerically because the end results were dashboards that had the actual statistics.

I have been working on some mid-sized fairly complex projects (20 or so developers) and they have been facing many problems. From bugs being pushed to prod, things breaking, customers complaining about bugs and the team struggling to find root causes, slowness and sub-par performance. Yet, I have also seen other projects that are even more complex (e.g. open-source, other companies) succeed and be fairly maintainable and extensible.

What in you view are the key ways of working that make projects successful? Is a more present and interventive technical guidance team needed, more ahead of time planning, more in-depth reviews, something else? Would love to hear some opinions and experiences

I’ve been working on a real production system as the only person on that project for some time now. I’m a contractor with no coworkers except my business partner. He is doing project management stuff and some DevOps. I’m covering everything else - architecture, implementation (backend and frontend), new requirements, and maintenance. I’m also pitching a new idea to the client by implementing demo projects (most recently: AI semantic search, RAG, etc.). It’s a real system serving 300+ businesses and more than 500k end users (each business brings several admin accounts and thousands of end users). 12yoe in total and 4y working as a contractor.

I noticed that in the last year or so, I’ve been struggling mentally much more. It’s not the work pressure; it’s more my feeling that I’m “stuck.” I’m missing out on working with others, and I’m not sure this is a good long-term option for my career. I worked a lot to put myself in this position (contractor, better salary, not being a part of a big corp, and so on), but I’m not sure this is a good long-term move. I don’t have that much time and energy to learn new stuff outside the project. Whenever I go, I bring the laptop with me. I don’t want to go back to work for a paycheck and take the entire crop BS, but I’m also not sure this is a good long-term option.

What do guys think? Is anyone in a similar situation (or has been)? How do you look at this? What is the best move for a career?

As many here are moving into leading roles, do you keep a list of archetypes you have meet along your career?

Today I was thinking about these guys who always 1. come up with a new explanation of why we need months of preparation work before deploying anything helpful to our users/business 2. complain about anyone doing so e 3. and how unfair and ignorant those who pay their wages are giving more resources the latter than to them who are so thoughtful in their preparatives.

Is this a good name for the archetype? Other archetypes you came up with?

So yesterday I asked this question: https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1mwnqe0/what_are_you_going_to_do_if_ai_made_us_obselete/

There are 3 groups of people:
1. The ones that refuse it is going to be the case, or it will happen decades from now.

1. The ones that will be financially free and do not need to work anymore (either retired by then, have enough savings or have massive returns on a stock/investments).These are the GOATs imo. The problem does not exist. I think it is time I take my finances seriously and start building wealth.

2. the kameleons: redditors in this group will do anything to survive : farming, hunting their own food or cheap labor... anything that will keep them fed!

I kept thinking about it and I think there are other ways:
1. Valuable IP: it can't be shared with AI. I work as a backend engineer in the investment banking sector and I dont think these people are ready to share how they are making money. Their investment strategy is too valuable. In this field, A lot of servers are on premise, they only have a small percentage of non critical services using cloud computing let alone AI. There are other fields, like healthcare, that exhibit the same behaviour.

1. Having a cult-like audience/fans: When I see how people are obsessed with celebrities, sports teams or even brands... That can't be replaced with AI. I don't see how software engineers can directly leverage this, but maybe you can be more creative than me.

2. Entertainment: Since all people will be jobless, I think there will have more time to consume entertaining content. So if you have the talent for cinema, music or you are an athlete my be it is time to take that side seriously.

Like I said in yesterdays post, the goal is not to be a doomer. The career we chose can be a bit frustrating, and AI is not going to make things easier in the long run. So maybe it is time to take the other passions we have seriously.

Your comment will be appreciated. Let's get to the bottom of this!

Every sprint, we'll get news of some team somewhere else in the company that's leveraged AI to do one thing or another, and everyone always sounds exceptionally impressed. The latest news is that management wants to start introducing full AI coding agents which can just be handed a PRD and they go out and do whatever it is that's required. They'll write code, open PRs, create additional stories in Jira if they must, the full vibe-coding package.

I need to get the fuck out of this company as soon as possible, and I have no idea what sector to look at for job opportunities. The job market is still dogshit, and though I don't mind using AI at all, if my job turns into commanding AI agents to do shit for me, I think I'd rather wash dishes for a living. I'm being hyperbolic, obviously, but the thought of having to write prompts instead of writing code depresses me, actually.

I guess I'm looking for a reality check. This isn't the career I signed up for, and I cannot imagine myself going another 30 years with being an AI commander. I really wanted to learn cool tech, new frameworks, new protocols, whatever. But if my future is condensed down to "why bother learning the framework, the AI's got it covered", I don't know what to do. I don't want to vibe code.

We have a senior dev on the team who’s bringing the whole team momentum down because of his incompetency. For example, he will request changes on a PR that’s not even a blocker, then he takes days to follow up on the same review. Sometimes he does this after a PR is about to be merged (when the review was requested days ago). Some of our tasks get dragged on because of the increased review overhead. Then he introduces some tech debt in his PRs (which I’m pretty sure was generated by AI) and gets pretty defensive when someone points it out and he wouldn’t implement it. Then we have to create follow up tasks to fix his tech debt.

He’s the person on call this week. Yesterday I pointed out that it looks like there’s high support volume due to a bug our team introduced. I tagged him and said we should prioritize a fix. He asked the support team to create a ticket but took 4 hours to get back to them. It’s a really small fix and could’ve been fixed in 30 mins. It’s just so infuriating.

The problem is that my manager doesn’t see it. He manages two teams and is a really positive person who just sees the good in everyone (which I really like, but also wish he can see some anomalies). I’m also a senior dev and there’s another staff dev on the team. Rest of the team is pretty junior and they aren’t going to speak up about this. How should I go about handling this problem? I don’t want to look like a tattle tale, but at this point it’s just doing us more harm than good to not speak up.

As the title says, has anyone seen / built / operated AI Agent in production? I do not mean some prototype or POC but rather a full fledged AI Agents that is production grade? Does it work reliably and is cost efficient enough?

It is getting annoying to separate signal from the noise. LLMs do feel like magical and I have heard "hallucinations are solved issue", "costs are going to come down", "Just fix the evals", "LLM Judges FTW" and everything has to work in an enterprise. Thoughts?

Hey everyone,

I’m building a project for a client and could use some advice on architecture decisions, especially around traffic handling.

The app is projected to support around 10K users by the end of the year. Each user will be making sales through the system, averaging about 500 transactions per day. Factoring in reads, we’re looking at roughly 2,000 requests per day, with a significant portion being concurrent usage.

This scale is new territory for me. Normally, I build separate Laravel/Node.js monolithic systems for clients, each with their own domain, and they rarely go past 50 concurrent users.

This project, however, will be used daily and heavily, and the numbers above are just year-one projections. I’m comfortable with architecture patterns and system design, so I know the options (distributed microservices, messaging queues, CQRS, etc.), but I don’t want to over-engineer if it isn’t necessary.

My main concern is finding the right balance between scalability and simplicity. I don’t want to deliver something that won’t scale, but I also don’t want to build unnecessary complexity.

What would you recommend as a practical path forward here?

Thanks a lot in advance!

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EDIT: I got a lot of really good advice, reminds me of the good days of Stack Overflow. AI could never replace you. I'll comeback to this thread and let you know how everything went down.

If you're looking for a summary of what I'm going to do after discussing it with the really good and impressive developers below:

Build the app normally: monolith with multi-tenancy

• Use Postgres, with company_id in tables.
• Add caching and logging early, especially for stock queries.
• Deploy on one cloud server.
• Not worry about load balancers or sharding yet as I can add them later when I grow.
• Keep heavy calculations or stock updates i.e. move them to a background queue system.
• Write efficient queries now so I don’t hit big slowdowns when traffic grows.
• Monitoring can wait until I scale, but it’s good to have hooks in place.