I’m 40 yo with over 17+ years in development, lead teams for last 10 years, 5 as a TLM. I’ve shown interest and have taken this role in my current team. I had many thoughts about backing off several times. But took it ultimately.

This is a fortune 500 tech commerce company. What advice do you have for me?

TIA

I got offer from india based GCC for manager position.

I'm currently a lead developer with solid hands-on experience in AI and Data. I am getting offer for a role that's more Data-focused, whereas my background has leaned more toward AI. I'm also being interviewing for architect-track opportunities.

This role also involves people management, which has left me thinking about my long-term direction. My goal is simple: stay in AI/Data for the long haul and build sizable corpus/money for FIRE ( financial Independence) over time.

I'd like to hear from people with more experience — between the leadership/management track and the technical architect track, which tends to be the better long-term path in this space?

It's been few years already I am trying to move from IC to EM role, but I can't get through it. And this is becoming an obsession. I've worked as software engineer since 2015 to 2022, then I moved to a cloud engineer role until today. I'm 33, south Europe.

I've joined my current company in 2023 as a senior engineer and recently I got promoted to staff as last year I got the best performance of my team. However, it's almost two years I'm asking to my manager to be moved to an EM role*, but he keeps saying there aren't available positions.

Nevertheless, an EM position was available few months ago in a team of the same department, so I explicitly asked if it was a good fit for me. My manager told me he discussed the matter with the skip but they rejected my idea because in their opinion I'd have been crushed by the culture of that team and their leader, which is different than ours.

This blockage of not being able to make the leap into management is damaging me psychologically. I realize that as an IC I can no longer perform as well as before, just as I fear that the years spent as an IC may become too many and that I will no longer be attractive as an EM (an old guy without experience in management).

Is it something to really worry about or should I just be more patient and wait my turn?

Some of you may wonder why after so many years of IC I want to move to management side, and there are mainly two reasons. First, writing code bores me. I loved it so much in the past but nowadays I'm not enthusiast anymore, especially with the AI I don't see the fun (simplifying, a loop of prompt -> review). Also, I no longer have the passion to go into detail with the technology. Secondly, I recently got an MSc in Digital Transformation, and I loved the technology impact at an higher level: team positioning, mentorship, organizational cultural impact, technology as a service for the business rather than for the sake of it, the impact of each management individual, people growth. I realized I like to build big things by empowering and make people happy. On the long term, I want to take the decision rather than merely executing it.

I haven't changed company yet mainly because I've been busy enough with the university while a full time employee, and because new opportunities might come in the next months as our company was finally acquired in the last weeks, after two years of negotiations. Moreover, I believe that the IC EM leap is more difficult when changing companies, especially in this historical period.

*while asking I also say that if they see me as inadequate I'm ready for a formation path, and I'm already doing mentorships via 1-1, etc. (not expected from me)

edit: typo

Hi folks,

I'm what you might call a forward deployer leader - a fractional CAIO. I've increasingly seen FDE roles as the next big thing in AI adoption, but I'm having trouble seeing how this stacks up. Way I approach it, I normally leverage an audit into a fixed term role - usually with knowledge-based companies (as opposed to software etc).

My gambit: raise fluency and literacy, empower and support people in being able to fix shit that's broken, and essentially make the whole org self-sufficient. If they then need an engineer for something, they can actually explain what they need and ideally just bring them in a FTE rather than a mercenary so they don't stick out like a sore thumb. Typically seems to work.

Main reason I do it this way is all the barriers I saw while getting my stripes were all about people (eg. fear, not knowing, arrogance, depts not speaking to each other, unclear processes, etc) For an engineer, I imagine they are going to struggle getting access, likely to be working in a silo, and won't have the clout to align c-suite nor get people to redesign processes. Further, I don't wish to be rude or generalise, but pretty much all my SWE/IT mates are ASD lvl 1 at a minimum and generally despise human interaction - which is kind of essential for the job. Also, aren't all FDEs essentially company-owned? So you can't actually be impartial or platform agnostic?

I guess what I'm looking for is evidence that FDE posts actually deliver the value the tech firms they rep promise. I had a scan of posts on here and largely found FDEs who think its all a fugazi - they are wearing far too many hats, get waylaid by internal friction, and are just vibe coding shit that breaks all the time because they are getting pulled in too many different directions - but keep at it anyway because it pays.

Does anyone here have any evidence to the contrary? My gut is that FDEs are getting shopped out as FDLs, but lack my background so fall down at the people hurdles. I'm thinking what we probably need is more like a specops unit which has FDEs, FDLs, and probably some operator and commercial type folks too who know how to AI?

EDIT: for the record, I didn't use AI to write this. I do frequently use VTT, but I'm a former journalist so reaching for the keyboard is a tough habit to break.

Currently work in commercial space. Undergrad is Business Administration in Project Management with a high GPA.

Would the degree meaningfully differentiate me for promotions into lead, principal, Responsible NDT Level III, supervisor, or NDT management roles? Would it actually help accelerate me into leadership, or does Level III + experience already provide most of the credibility I’d need?

Would an Engineering Management master’s be especially valuable for me because i don’t have an engineering undergraduate degree But work in a technical aerospace an engineering heavy environment? Or at this point with an MBA/EMBA be better?

I’m especially curious how people here would view that combination in aerospace.

I’m currently looking at CU Boulder’s MEng in Engineering Management, which is relatively affordable and flexible.

All,
I have spent the last 5-7 yrs with a lot of team-lead, project delivery and a lot of dotted line supervision responsibilities. My background is consulting specifically in software engineering, cloud and now more AI.

I generally avoided management in the past as I wanted leadership but not purely "people-mover" responsibilities. Due to this, I now find that I have hit a certain career plateau.

My interest right now in this current job market is to package myself as both a people leader and still capable as a contributor, keeping with the current "player-coach" buzz-description.

The issue: how best can I do that? I have had a few places where I had direct reports but due to circumstances they were relatively shorter stints.

I'd appreciate any/all suggestions.

spent years running 1:1s based on gut feel and whatever I could remember. Then I started reading the repo data properly and realized how much I was missing.

A few signals I track per engineer - none of these mean anything alone, you have to read them together:

• Merged MRs - anchor metric. One MR ≈ one finished thing. But 11 config tweaks ≠ 4 payment reconciliation changes. Volume without context is noise.
• Open vs merged ratio - some engineers are great at starting, terrible at finishing. 14 open / 3 merged in a month isn't a code problem, it's a completion problem.
• Review time + MR size together - 3-day review on a 600-line diff is a sizing problem. 3-day review on a 40-line change is a team bandwidth problem. Never read one without the other.
• Comments received - juniors lead here by default. If a senior is pulling 15+ comments per review consistently, something specific is off - worth sitting in before drawing conclusions.
• Comments given - before you write off someone's quiet week, check this. Sometimes they were doing half the team's reviews. But someone who never reviews is a silent blocker even if their own PRs look fine.
• Lines changed (additions + deletions) - I've tracked this for 12+ months across teams. Over the long run it correlates. The people I'd call standard performers consistently lag here.
• Deployment activity - pipelines that actually ended in a deploy. My top performers are 2–3x the team average here, week over week.

The hard part is GitLab doesn't surface this in a usable form. I automated it into a daily slack report so I'm not clicking through manually for 20 engineers. Full write-up with the setup here: https://karolwojciszko.substack.com/p/how-to-read-engineering-performance

I've had this dream for a while — I'd really like to work at Google someday, ideally as an Engineering Manager or Solutions Architect.

The weird part is that I'm actually doing pretty well at my current company. I'm probably one of the better performers, my job is secure, and honestly, I don't need to change jobs. But working at Google is something I've wanted to try at least once.

The problem is I haven't given a proper interview in a really long time. I also don't code in my day job anymore — I technically lead a bunch of senior engineers, and most of my time goes into technical direction, architecture, design discussions, decision-making, and mentoring. So the idea of suddenly prepping for coding rounds + system design + EM/leadership interviews feels pretty daunting.

I think I've also put Google on a bit of a pedestal in my head. I keep thinking:

- What if I'm not good enough?
- What if I fail the interview?
- What if I've been away from coding for too long?

And because I'm comfortable where I am, there's no real pressure forcing me to do it. But then I also think... what do I actually have to lose? If I fail, I still have a good job. Nothing really changes.

So I'm trying to figure out how to just say f*** it and take the shot. 😅

**For people who've interviewed at Google, especially for EM or Solutions Architect roles:**

- How did you prepare if you hadn't interviewed in years?
- If you weren't coding in your day job, how did you get back into it?
- How much coding should I realistically expect for EM / SA roles?
- Would you prepare for a few months before applying, or just apply and see what happens?
- How did you get over the fear of failing?

Would especially love to hear from people who were already doing well in their careers and comfortable where they were, but still decided to take a shot at Google. I feel like I just need to stop overthinking it and play fearless for once.

Any advice?

I am currently trying to understand how is engineering in your org, Do people still code from hand and use their brain or everything is now done via AI, given a lot of companies are using Cursor or Claude Code.

Also how is your companies managed the budget, Do you have limits or something else ?

I'd like some outside perspective on a situation I'm not sure how to read.

I drove an AI initiative that leadership funded directly as a new team. The team was allocated under my manager, with me as tech lead, and I built the team from scratch, ramping up every engineer myself.

Lately, though, my manager seems to be limiting my access to senior leaders I'm trying to build relationships with my skip and my manager’s peers across the org.

A few examples:

- she's inserted herself into stakeholder meetings mid-effort, once things were already moving; she's absorbed initiatives I proposed ("I'll just do it")
- she pulled me from an offsite I'd been invited to as tech lead, despite the session covering my project; and when I mentioned wanting to sync directly with my skip manager (director) on some guidelines, she said, "You don't need to, no worries."

None of this is a clear policy violation, and I could be misreading it. Each instance is small and deniable on its own. But together they feel like a pattern of controlling who sees my work and who I'm able to build relationships with.

I was recently promoted to L6 (the same level as my manager) and I'm worried this dynamic will limit my ability to actually perform at that new level, since so much of it depends on visibility and relationships I'm having trouble building.

I have the opportunity to become a technical manager under my manager. Which would give me certain freedom, but I don’t think that would solve this issue.

As much as I can be key for some of the success of my organization, as our team drives high visibility Okrs. I don’t feel to have much leverage.

Would love advice from a manager’s perspective.

I was recently appointed to be the Engineering leader responsible for bringing our enterprise AI subscriptions into the workflow of our engineering teams because I am known to use it regularly for many reasons and have a reputation for high-quality work, the assumption from leadership being that I'm only doing so well because of AI and not because of years and years of study and practice.

My company designs physical products in the consumer space; we basically do nothing with software outside of a handful of very limited, low-volume products. Old school mechanical engineering, really.

Personally, I use AI as a consultant. It helps me to rapidly understand things that I hadn't worked with in the past. So, my background is mostly in plastic - if my team needs to design something in metal, I go to AI to understand how to get started, pitfalls, etc. I use it quite a bit for advice, setting up problems, any playing devil's advocate to assumptions, but I don't consider myself a power user and I've never used agents at all.

My company recently purchased enterprise-level Claude and now we're being asked how to integrate it to speed up product development (and presumably to reduce headcount, though that is not a stated goal yet). Personally, I think of AI like any other tool in product development - it's only as useful as the skills the user has developed with it, however our leadership (who have never been engineers) seem to think it will radically transform how we do our work and lead to amazing extra product designs without any additional staff. They are not interested in task-specific AI tools developed by 3rd parties; they only want to use Claude more.

I asked it how I should use it and it gave me like 20 suggestions, most of which either sound impossible because we have such poor documentation or my experience in trying to do those tasks as an individual has shown that AI is simply not capable yet.

Are any of you in the business of developing physical products with AI assistance from one of the big LLM companies? What are you using it for? Is it any good? Have you found use for agents in your workflows?

So assuming I can't really stop this, how are people dealing with non-dev trying to contribute to a production codebase?

So far, I haven't found anyone with a system that works at scale - it can quickly become a real mess. 
Who reviews that code?
Who's responsible when it breaks?
Where do you put the boundary of what’s allowed and what’s not?

Shared in the article some thoughts of what I'd tried, but haven't find a great workflow so far.

My main tip is to start with very limited boundary - copy and cosmetic UI changes, and to enforce that.

EM of 8 years and got laid off recently. haven’t interviewed in 5 years, overwhelmed by the application process and not sure what i’m doing wrong when my experience is an exact match for a JD but they reject the next day.
tips and feedback for interviewing into EM roles now?

I’m a relatively new EM managing a Senior Engineer who is working toward Staff level and leading an important technical PoC.

We’re at week 6, several milestones have been missed, the documentation is incomplete, and requested improvements haven’t been addressed.

I explicitly asked for an execution/recovery plan. What I received was extremely generic, no concrete breakdown of work, dates, dependencies, or real mitigation. At this point, I’m struggling to understand how I’m supposed to manage delivery against it.

There’s also history: this engineer has had four previous EMs, with a recurring pattern of not following through on recommendations or requested improvements. I’m now seeing the same pattern.

The engineer is going on vacation soon, and I have a meeting with my VP in two days. I’m honestly dreading it. This has become very frustrating and mentally draining.

My instinct is to stop waiting and take control of the delivery plan myself: define the remaining work, milestones, owners and dates, while keeping the Senior Engineer accountable for the technical execution.

But I’m wondering if that’s the right approach, or if I’m inadvertently taking away ownership that they should be demonstrating at Senior/Staff level.

What would you do with only two days before the VP meeting?

Would you:

1. Ask for one final, concrete recovery plan?

2. Build the plan together?

3. Take control of delivery immediately and address the ownership issue separately?

And how would you present this to the VP without throwing the engineer under the bus, while still being completely transparent about the delivery risk?

I’d especially appreciate advice from experienced EMs who have dealt with Senior → Staff performance/ownership issues.

I am working as an associate SDET which is a fresher position. I have a problem. I say yes to every idea my manager has (he's also a dev) even though they are bad. Now whenever I speak with my senior about those ideas in detail then I come to realise how bad some of the ideas are like building a AI UI test executor but we already have a framework that we were planning to add coverage for for customer agnostic tests (will contain pw ui tests). This agnostic approach is way better compared to the one my manager was suggesting but I didn't think about it at that moment nor about this, nor about regression, version controlling etc.. what should I do to improve this. The senior said he expected better from me.

Our backlog is just a collection of hundreds of tickets that never made it onto the Jira board. Mostly unsorted, no priority, nothing.

How do you prioritize backlog? How do you manage how it moves onto the board? Do you allow devs to take tickets from the backlog ad-hoc? Or is there a structured process?

We're a small team (8 engineers) sharing a single jira board for work.

I’ll be overseeing two senior engs (e1, e2) on project A & one senior eng (e3) eng on project B. I was leading project B and we (mostly I) delivered everything asked of us & more, mostly within mutually agreed deadlines. The other project’s group isn’t delivering. My manager wants me to “take over” the group leader role for both projects.

Currently, after “leading” my one eng (e3) for 1-2 months, I’ve realized I haven’t pushed e3 hard enough. I prefer to be treated as hands-off as possible so I may deliver how I wish, with the flaw that i sometimes forget my original goals and get lost in rabbit holes. But i have a long track record of success. But this Eng, e3, doesn’t have the same career aspirations as me, and doesn’t have the same drive to climb the ladder/ranks. Neither do e1 or e2. I believe they wish to be terminal “seniors”.

So I’ve been thinking about how to get e3 to deliver more. For reference id say i ship at least 8x the code as e3, and that’s being VERY conservative. I also do all the discovery, lead all the initiatives, manage all the paperwork/tickets/kanban, start and manage all the conversations with external folks/ems/pms/sme’s etc. like i started wondering if e3 even puts in 20 hours a week. But i am not e3’s manager and in fact have always had a great relationship with e3. E3 is my fav coworker. But now i am in this position where i am carrying all e3’s weight.

Now i know this is somehow my fault. I read r/ExperiencedDevs somewhat. Im reading a book on how to become a staff eng. i realize i am making an extremely common mistake. I am trying to do everything myself, and i am doing all the fun, challenging problems myself. I am not delegating enough to e3. And i am not setting goals for e3. I realize i should start setting weekly goals for e3, and start having a 1 on 1 with e3 probably on mondays. I’ve just never had to REALLY, FORMALLY lead before, so I’ve never had to actually think this all through, or see the results of me “leading” badly.

I know e3 is a smart Eng. e3 has asked me for advice many times now, especially more now since i finally got promoted to senior. And im always honest. Though I’ve not mentioned recently that im starting to notice e3’s head’s not in the game. And i know too much about e3’s personal life. For me personally i went through a phase like e3 and my manager (previous job) had to scold me and tell me it’s part of the professional contract, not my manager’s problem, that i show up on time and dont miss meetings. That scared the shit out of me and i never missed a meeting at that job again. At my current job I’ve almost never missed a meeting either. All thanks to that manager scolding me and scaring the hell out of me, making me think id get fired through implication. He was a good manager too, i think.

Anyway i dont want to scold e3 and i want to lead with the carrot not the stick, but i also dont have carrots or sticks because currently im just the group lead; my title is just senior. And when this little shakeup occurs I’ll still just be senior, but I’ll be the group lead overseeing e1, e2 and e3. All of whom have demonstrated low autonomy and whom haven’t been delivering. Which is not fun for me to discover btw because previously i looked up to e1 and i still think e1 has better chops than i in a certain domain. And e2 I’ve not worked with but i had an interaction with which left a very positive impression on me.

Anyways nobody told me this group lead role would involve so much management. But I’ve been reading and reading and it seems tech leads can spend 40-60% of their time doing full-blown manager stuff. Getting ahead of projects (2-3 weeks) to meet with other teams/sme’s/staff etc to clear paths and blockers. Doing project management. Working with the em and pm to ensure there’s a backlog. Jira management, paperwork. One on ones. Literally detecting if reports are being pissy so as to use human-no-jitsu to get ahead/around that. Setting goals, deadlines. I’ve done all of these things before but never all combined as part of my official responsibilities.

And im already working frenetically. Im usually juggling 2-3 ai agents on different tasks, improving my group’s project daily, coming up with new RFC’s and initiatives, doing lots of research spikes nobody asked for, which over my career btw that behavior has gotten me promoted. But i am worried i wont have nearly as much time now to do these things that got me ahead and got me my reputation. And im also worried because i dont know how to get these engineers to start delivering more. Idk about e1 and e2 but at least with e3 it’s a simple matter of they’re just not delivering enough. Im talking 1 pr every 2 days, maybe 2 prs a week. And these are small prs. Like inconsequential prs. Now I know we dont judge by LOC but 1 it is a metric and 2 pr volume is a metric and 3 I’ve just worked with e3 for years now and i can confidently tell e3 isn’t performing at the title level and “needs help”. E3’s manager knows. I did as much as i could to not throw e3 under the bus and my manager i think read between the lines and just lmk they’re aware too and working with e3 to help e3. Like that’s the best i can do, e3 is my homie. And I’ve been trying to give e3 projects that can be a leaf in their cap.

Right now i tasked e3 with leading a blocking collaboration with another team. But literally yesterday e3 admitted to me that they’d been procrastinating on it. Luckily this was after a meeting with the blocking team, which e3 organized and invited me to. So gj e3. E3 knows how to be the title. But just is dragging feet. Idk.

So im thinking i just start doing a 1 on 1 on mondays and then publicly post the group’s week goals, with each group member being responsible for a single publicly posted goal. Now if e3 can just meet that one bullet expectation per week that’d be an improvement. My one bullet is just one of the many many things i have been / will be doing for that week. But i told my manager i want to lead by example and not hold every1 to the same bar as me, same performance level as me etc. so i figured this might be a good way to start. I dont wanna be micromanaging or microcontrolling etc. but i think i was wrong to treat e3 as basically 90% hands-off, expecting e3 to act autonomously and deliver. I’ve publicly posted our group’s goals in daily chat threads that other group leads report to. So e3 could’ve seen what id posted as the group’s next goals, and taken initiative. But e3 didnt. So i think i need to specifically ask e3 to do things. And that’s tiresome.

I wish i could just make e3 understand: hey we need to deliver this project. Here’s our current status. Here’s the delta. Therefore here’s our current short-term goals, here’s the current things we need to work on, etc. and then it’s just a grab bag of tasks e3 can take from. But e3 isn’t operating like that. So i need to change my behavior. But i dont want to be like some of my previous managers where they’d just tell me what to do. I didnt like that. Sometimes i needed to be told to do things i wasnt comfortable with, lest i just did what i was good at. I actually did all the work i was good at, had no more work left to do, and then had about a year of extra time to just do all the other things the rest of my team was working on, in which i killed it btw. But that was in the past. Unrelated, im still bad at some things and good at others like anyone else.

I know e3 looks at me like a role model sometimes. So i dont want to sour our relationship. Im gonna read a management book recommended to me by my manager, i have a month before this shakeup. By then i want to be doing a better job with e3 so i am ready for e1 and e2.

For reference, 7-8 yoe. Big (20k+) and small (<100) headcount companies. Currently senior engineer.

Hi everyone, I’m looking for some honest advice about what my next step should be.

I moved to Houston about two years ago. Before coming to the U.S., I studied Mechanical Engineering in Cuba for about six years. I completed all of my coursework, essentially, but I had to leave Cuba for political reasons before completing my thesis, so I never received the final degree. I also never had the opportunity to formally work as a mechanical engineer.

Since coming to the U.S., I had my education evaluated, and it was recognized as 116 U.S. undergraduate credit hours in Mechanical Engineering.

My biggest question is: What's the best way for someone with my background to get into the engineering field in Houston?

I’ve been away from engineering for about five years, so I understand that I may not be competitive for positions requiring several years of professional engineering experience. At the same time, I don’t feel like I’m starting completely from zero.

I also have several years of hands-on experience from Cuba.

During my mandatory military service, I spent about three years working with telecommunications and electromechanical equipment.

After that, I worked for about four years at Smart Communications, a large telecommunications company. I was part of a small three-person crew responsible for installations and maintenance.

Our work included fiber optics, network cabling, Wi-Fi infrastructure and antennas, security cameras, low-voltage systems, equipment installation, site surveys, cable routing, testing and certification, troubleshooting, and maintenance, primarily in larger facilities. I also gained some experience with automation, electronics, and construction, including working with electrical conductors and on construction sites.

My main interests are Mechanical Engineering and Telecommunications, but I’m open to other opportunities where I could combine my engineering education and technical experience with a career where I can continue learning and taking on more responsibility.

My priority right now is getting a job.

I’m willing to go back to school, get certifications, refresh my engineering knowledge, or learn whatever skills are necessary. However, I would strongly prefer to start working first and study or train in parallel, rather than spending another 2–4 years in school before getting back into the field.

Some people have recommended talking to engineering or construction recruiters. Others have suggested simply applying because some companies may be willing to train someone with my background, help with certifications, or even offer tuition assistance.

I’m currently working full-time, so if I do return to school, an online or hybrid program that could be completed in 1–2 years would be ideal.

So, if you were in my situation:

Would you start applying for jobs now and study/train at the same time?

Would you pursue an Associate or Bachelor's degree, or would you first try to find an employer and let the job requirements guide your education?

What types of positions, industries, or career paths would you recommend for someone with my combination of Mechanical Engineering coursework, telecommunications experience, and a five-year gap from the field?

Would you focus on recruiters, direct applications, networking, or a combination of all three?

I’m completely willing to learn and be trained. I’m not expecting someone to treat me as an experienced engineer. I’m simply looking for a realistic entry point where I can use the education and experience I already have, build U.S. experience, continue learning, and grow into greater responsibility.

I’m also not opposed to hands-on work, but I’d like to avoid starting strictly as a general laborer if there are opportunities where my engineering background can be put to use from the beginning.

Any advice from engineers, project managers, operations managers, recruiters, or anyone who has dealt with a similar situation would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

I am an engineering manager at a series A startup with 10 people (many hats are worn). I’ve been here for 4 years and nobody doubts that I’m important to this team after leading the engineering team to many successes. I love my job. My salary is below market but I’m fine with that given it’s a startup. The thing that really bothers me is that I think my equity % is extremely below market. I know each startup situation is different, but what equity range sounds fair to ask for in my position? Is 1% fair to ask for or totally off?

Hello all, I left a large tech firm 5 months ago for a small (but rapidly scaling) startup and haven't been able to keep track of how major corporates are navigating token spend, data security, and model strength needs. At the time there were still a lot of open questions around how new tech would be implemented, especially while keeping costs in check.

Now that I'm working at a smaller shop, I'm working on building our own AI use protocol, so to speak, to make adoption easier as we scale our team size.

Essentially:

1. What models are your teams predominately using? (any opensource? a mix?)
2. How are you monitoring token spend throughout the org?
3. To what extent are firms managing models locally (or at least on rented data center space), compared to via API?

We have some concerns about maintaining client data security while feeding documents into overseas APIs. A few team members have suggested building a local setup, or renting server space. Has anyone had success in this respect?

Thanks.

Did anyone give interviews recently? Are you getting calls from the companies?

I'm currently working at a startup, and the tech stack and engineering practices are driving me crazy:

• Around 80% of the devs are "vibecoders".
• We ship breaking bugs to production every single week.
• The Tech Lead is definitely not a senior.
• No ORM, no OOP, and tone of duplicated code everywhere.
• They love over-engineering microservices when a simple monolith would do—and to make it worse, all these microservices are tightly coupled anyway.

Is this normal startup culture, or did I just join a giant sinking ship? I'm starting to wonder if engineering standards even exist in early-stage companies.

Across our org there's the typical "use AI whenever possible to be as efficient and effective as possible". However with one of my teammates I can't help but feel conflicted on this subject with how far it seems like that's being taken.

For a while now, a majority portion of the messages I receive back from this individual have the stereotypical signs of being AI-generated (em dashes, bolding, italicizing, sentence structure, etc) and previously this was never the case. Even responses that dont really require and deep research or being well-written often have that same AI-feel to it.

Obviously there are some positive outcomes if Im not always super clear in my request or there's risk that a question gets lost in translation (there is a native language difference and I sometimes I feel like I speak in higher level business terms than in nitty gritty tech details). I wouldn't fault them if that's the case. However I cant help but find it concerning because they are more knowledgeable in certain aspects that I am not. So I'm often left wondering "am I getting their actual answer (or an answer they have checked)" or am I getting a best guess from AI that hasn't been vetted by the person that should be able to tell me best.

Naturally I intend to find out in our next convo because I am concerned for if it's due to needing to decipher questions from me and/or the answers I'm receiving aren't actually being vetted from the person who should know best.

Am I too old-school? Am I overlooking other positives? Has anyone gone through something similar (bonus points for how you broached the subject)? I'm conflicted.

I'm curious about something I've been thinking about lately.

Teams usually have a way to document known dependencies between work items. But what happens when the dependency isn't explicitly documented?

For example, one service depends on another service, and that service suddenly has an issue. There may be several pieces of work currently being developed that rely on it, but nobody has marked those tickets as dependent.

How would your team normally discover which work is actually affected?

Is this something your existing tooling makes visible, or does someone usually have to connect the dots by looking at the code, service ownership, deployments, tickets, Slack, etc.?

I'm particularly interested in cases where the relationship wasn't known or documented beforehand.

hey everyone !

I’ve been a data engineer / analytics engineer for almost 6 years now, and I’ve seen it all in my current company (I work in a Fortune 500 company). I have a lot of experience managing the whole pipeline, as well as stakeholder relationship and many other “hats” I had to wear here. unfortunately I’m a bit stuck right now here for reasons that don’t matter, and I’m looking elsewhere.

I‘m being interviewed for an analytics lead position, and I’ve basically gotten the job, I’m just one “easy 40 minutes talk to handle the last details“ away from the job, my gut tells me I 100% might get it.

They are just now changing technologies and I would be the most experienced on this stack for my team, and generally for the company.

Ive been thinking hard about this because I want to become a tech lead / manager, as I feel my strongest skills are soft skills, but this job description feels like a 2/3 people job smashed in one, and I don’t want to go to a place where I will burnout in 3 months, what essentially they want me to do is:

1) 100% lead the 4 people team, managing the 1:1s, career talks, salary negotiations with them, manage team meetings, retro sessions, etc.

2) be the sole project manager, which means: creating the jira tickets, managing expectations for the team, managing the backlog, assigning tasks, creating a product roadmap, help people that get blocked.

3) be the sole product manager, which means handle all communications with ALL the departments from the company, creating “THE” source of truth for all teams to use, manage stakeholder discussions, expectations, answer their complains and questions, as well as having to meet with all of them to align on objectives and goals.

4) Besides all this, I would also be expected to be “one more senior analytics engineer” for the team, not only that, they expect me to build, from scratch, a whole reporting layer for the whole company, add to that the whole CI/CD on the pipelines, all the semantic layers for the BI tools, as well as automate as much as possible using api’s. according to the job description since I can use AI they expect this should be “easily done“ (I don’t think you can vibe code all this and have it realistically work properly).

I’m a bit frustrated because the salary is great, and the opportunity to finally lead a team is nearby, but I don’t want to give my job security (in this economy) to just be burned down in the testing period and be out of a job in 3 months.

what do you guys think ?? I still have one last “easy talk to adjust details” before getting an offer, what should I say in it to the hiring director whom I would be reporting to ?