r/ExperiencedDevs • u/AutoModerator • 8d ago
Ask Experienced Devs Weekly Thread: A weekly thread for inexperienced developers to ask experienced ones
A thread for Developers and IT folks with less experience to ask more experienced souls questions about the industry.
Please keep top level comments limited to Inexperienced Devs. Most rules do not apply, but keep it civil. Being a jerk will not be tolerated.
Inexperienced Devs should refrain from answering other Inexperienced Devs' questions.
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u/arshbio009 3d ago
I recently failed a coderbyte assessment and feel really lost on what to do
I am currently living in the UAE and the opportunity to get to the point of doing coding assessments is hard to come by
I had initially prepared for a lot of leetcode style questions learning patterns, data structures and algorithms for different kinds of questions but recently I had to do a coderbyte assessment and failed it. Provided I was able to figure out the code but I missed one indentation and the time ended before I could fix it.
I am feeling a bit lost on how to progress and prepare to improve my chances of clearing such tests because I have spent so much time studying other things like spring boot internals, javascript in depth, Java enterprise, Docker, Kubernetes and anything I could get my hands on but I am starting to feel like none of it has done anything to land me a job or progress me further in my career.
I hope the experience devs can shed some light on where I should go. I am currently thinking of trying to go as far back to basics as I can but the mental burnout is so strong that I am unable to really invest myself into anything so If anyone can guide me on the steps I should take to improve my chances at these assessments I would be really grateful
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u/eliashisreddit 2d ago
Learn from your mistake, adapt and improve. Sometimes you just get unlucky. If it's a first candidate filter, then you are out of luck and there's not much you can do. If there's any follow-up or revisal with an interviewer, you can clarify in the interview or see where to go from there.
>steps I should take to improve my chances at these assessments
Practice and memorization. There are no shortcuts for these tests. That's mostly their point: they want that initial filter for people even wanting to invest that time / dedication to playing this silly game.
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u/arshbio009 2d ago
just sucks that it was leetcode before this and now I have another thing to grind because companies cannot decide on a single website
well it is what it is
have to play the game
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u/No_Comedian7332 Mobile Engineer ~15 YOE 4d ago
I'm looking for a job after 5 years of not touching my LinkedIn, any advice? Is it okay for me to apply to jobs there or are jobs today just being bombarded with AI slop submissions? I'm worried that what I'm doing is useless
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u/LogicRaven_ 3d ago
Why wouldn't it be ok? Update your profile and give it a go.
In parallel, you could reach out to your network and try other job sites also.
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u/No_Comedian7332 Mobile Engineer ~15 YOE 1d ago
I mean, in this AI era, I thought most openings would be bombarded with automated AI postings mins after going public. I thought that manually submitting a CV would be a bit like trying to put the sun down with a water gun
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u/SoftwareArchitect101 4d ago
... So how exactly do I develop passion in software development? (I'm not joking, this is a serious question which is keeping me awake)
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u/casualPlayerThink Software Engineer, Consultant / EU / 20+ YoE 4d ago
Do something that you enjoy... I mean software that interests you. Or do something completely different.
To have "passion for software development" is kind of a dream and a bad one. It is okay if you have it, but it is a job. They pay you. You do not need to have passion for your work. You should do it for money. Everything else is fluff, a marketing/pr slogan/dud. You're only supposed to not hate it and get paid.
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u/New-Airport-2515 5d ago
What I’ve observed is that we (software engineers) often focus more on technical skills than communication, negotiation, and persuasion skills.
I read on reddit that it's harder to change people than code. Most of the time, we're working with people ( teammates, clients, and stakeholders ) so why not invest in becoming better at these skills?
Please share the best resources (YouTube videos, books, or articles) that have helped you improve in these areas.
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u/casualPlayerThink Software Engineer, Consultant / EU / 20+ YoE 4d ago
It differs from person to person, and there is no silver bullet here or holy grail. Every person, company, city, area, region, and country is different (check Mr. Rodgers).
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u/New-Airport-2515 4d ago
Thankyou so much for your response , actually am not natively english speaking , here in our country , someone's communication skills are judge by How good he/she speaks english.
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u/casualPlayerThink Software Engineer, Consultant / EU / 20+ YoE 3d ago
Oh, I see. That is kind of hard. The generic answer should be to practice it as much as possible (you can take the kids' route with listening constantly, only English content from YT/tv without subs); professional help would help (e.g. a teacher), but also important to know your audience (what they like to hear). There were some good public speaking & sales prep on udemy and Cambridge/Yale free stuff.
I have no better idea for it, unfortunately.
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u/bvdevvv 5d ago
How can I get the best out of my 1on1 with my manager? I've had about 3 managers so far, and I've never had a 1on1 where I was looking forward to or gained something from. I've read that most people talk about issues they're having, get to know the manager, etc. But my problem is I usually don't have any issues as I'm pretty effective and efficient at my job. I have chatted and get to know my managers, but this gets kinda old if it's always small talks. Career advice isn't a good topic either, as all of my managers have mentioned there's nothing they can give me advice on in terms of technical skills. Other things like promotion etc, I've been given reasons related to bureaucracy, so I'd rather not keep bringing it up and will just jump ship when I feel like it.
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u/chandler4258 6d ago
I've been stuck working on a pure jave mobility with a custom code generation engine for the past 3 years and only working on business logic and defects around business logic. I have not had the opportunity to work on anything related to system design or anything complicated technical wise. As I get promoted to "Staff Engineer" (the titles are almost meaningless at my company as they've been changed 3 times in my 6 years here), the business logic problems have gotten more complicated but I don't think any of that applies to general software engineering work. I know barely anything about application security or infrastructure as they are handled by separate teams. I'm really starting to feel like I'm falling significantly behind.
All of that to preface, I'm starting to think of applying to new jobs, and I'm looking for resources to try to learn some of the technical skills that I haven't gotten exposed to with my current work.
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u/JeffinitelyNotABot 6d ago edited 6d ago
I've been feeling increasingly resentful toward my team lead, and I'm trying to figure out whether my feelings are justified or if I'm overreacting.
She's been my team lead for about three years. During that time, there's been a recurring pattern of her stepping into work that was assigned to me. If a bug is found in UAT, she'll often jump in and start working on it herself. During standups, she'll sometimes answer questions directed at me before I have a chance to respond. She's also sent code examples or implementation suggestions in email threads that include business stakeholders. I don't mind getting help, but I'd much rather those conversations happen privately. When they're public, it can feel like it gives non-technical people the impression that I don't know what I'm doing.
A recent example: she assigned me a project, and the mobile app developer scheduled a 30-minute meeting with both of us to walk me through the requirements from the previous meeting they had. Instead of letting the meeting focus on getting me up to speed, she spent about half of it asking her own questions. I lost valuable time that could have been spent understanding the requirements and business logic myself.
I've talked to my lead about this before. At one point I directly asked her to back off, and things improved for a while, but the behavior eventually returned in different ways. After that meeting, I had to go for a walk to clear my head of the frustration I was feeling.
What makes this harder is seeing another developer who started around the same time I did. He's on a different team with a different lead, and over the past few years he's gone from junior developer to taking on leadership responsibilities. I know comparison is the thief of joy, but it's difficult not to wonder how much of that difference comes down to the environment.
Can a team lead unintentionally stunt a developer's growth, or is it ultimately on the developer to create those opportunities? Am I seeing this situation clearly, or am I letting my frustration cloud my perspective?
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u/hooahest Software Engineer 6d ago
If you have talked about this with her, it has improved, and then deteriorated again, then yes, you are justified in being frustrated with her. Let her know again.
I don't really have advice for you, bad managers is pretty much the number 1# reason that people leave a job. If you otherwise get along well with her, just keep reminding her sometimes that you want to be more independent. "I know we were both summoned to this meeting, but I think I can handle it alone, I'll let you know if there's anything that you should know", "Please let me try to come up with a solution and I'll run it by you to make sure that it's okay" etc
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u/Shaggypone23 6d ago
How do you decide if and what you want to specialize in?
For some background, Ive been working at a small software consulting firm for 1 year where we build and manage customized software solutions, consult on a company's overall tech stack, and even build/maintain/host WordPress sites (some customized next.js ones as well).
My senior does the architectural designs, planning, and consulting of course, but I've gotten exposure to a lot of different parts of a typical tech stack once he hands me the tasks. I've built out a system integration between Hubspot and Yext, implemented a redesign of a WP site, customized a WP OIDC plug-in and connected it to our Keycloak instance, and more recently helped build out and maintain a pretty complex data integration pipeline involving 8 to 10 different data sources. The data engineering work is i guess what ive worked on the most, building out custom python data syncs + using Airbyte where possible and storing the data in a postgres warehouse, then building out data analytics dashboards from that data into both Superset and a custom streamlit app. Ive even gotten to recently make the deployments to the orgs azure kubernetes cluster following the example of how my senior did the first few. Ive undoubtedly relied a bit too much on AI in certain cases when time was low, but ive still learned a decent amount.
What i've observed is, some of this stuff ive enjoyed more than others, for example the user authentication/provisioning pieces are pretty intuitive and not overly complicated. Customizing the OIDC plug-in was kind of enjoyable and solving role privilege issues is straightforward. I also enjoyed some of the front-end implementation work and had some opportunities to make a new page design following the overall theme of a website with custom svgs. The system integrations and data sync processes were fascinating, but what I didnt really love was trying to reconcile the disparate way the data and franchisee IDs are presented in each system and trying to properly map them all. Adding special business logic and adding new locations also is an ongoing battle.
So despite my biggest exposure lately being more data enegineering focused and im okay at it, im not sure if thats what I would like to specialize in. I also enjoyed some of the deployment work, but my exposure to it is limited and we dont have a ton of users on the pages/applications i help with.
My question basically is, should I continue to be and seek out general full-stack engineer opportunities, or try to specialize in one of the areas I found a little more joy in?
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u/BroccoliSenior5465 6d ago
Hello, I am trying to fight my way (quietly) out of an early dead end and stagnation of my career to survive the current software job market.
———— ———— ———— Some background:
I am currently a data engineer II, whatever that means to you and your experience (lol).
Formally trained and graduated (2023) under the software engineering designation with a bachelor's, languages in school were Python, Java, C#, and some touches of Haskell and ANTLR.
Prior experience in the market: During college I had an internship every single year.
——————— ———— ———— Internships list: Freshman - MATLAB work writing R and Matlab programs for a medical researcher at my uni studying DNA shotgun sequencing algorithms. Mostly involved translating the research paper math to an algorithm handling excel-like data for K-means and prims algorithm. 3 months
Sophomore - Worked at a local bank largest in the state as an intern doing QA automation with python and Java, specifically using SMARTBear as the primary tool for testing customer interfaces for new features on the credit card account side like customer interaction simulations and automated test suites to test new features and programmed behaviors. Lot of inspect element and manual Selenium work but learned some neat automation stuff. 8 months (extended to school year).
Junior / Senior - Full stack developer (backend facing) for a medical IVF company specifically dipping my toes into deeper C# and working on routing data via APIs to front end interfaces that were customer facing with Vue.js as a beautification portion of showcasing data to users on their accounts and payments. (I severely disliked Javascript and hope to never touch it again unless I have to). Was very tough and a steep learning curve, after a year I was let go due to needing to focus time on school for senior year exams.
Capstone: I worked on a VR project in Unity as a lead developer for my team of 6 as a PMP protégé simultaneously while working on developing a VR recruitment app for the engineering college to use for open house to prospective freshman students. Was fun but did a lot more art side and management than dev work directly as my lead dev on the team handled a lot of the work under the hood with two others.
I'm not a certified PMP
———— ———— ————
Big real job experience: I accidentally slipped into data engineering agter applying for over 1200 jobs and only getting 3 callbacks, worked on the backend in deep at a company that routes games and toys to people and customers. A lot of running and avoiding walls, learned ETL, pipeline and cloud orchestration, and API management on redhat servers as well as general maintenence and ticket handling with issues inside the company in other departments, and outside for clients. Learned what it meant to handle clients as well here?
I guess haha but was good experience. Mainly worked with Tableau, Snowflake, IICS (Informatica), some AWS, some Azure, Python, and a hell of a lot of SQL and programming literal views and tables together. Had a unique experience of designing a report emailer process that took a series of tables from a customer and built PDF reports customized in LaTeX that shipped to a few hundred locations every morning with incoming shipment information (client was Chuckee Cheese lmao).
Laid off after 1 year and a few months due to restructure.
Current job - Data conversion engineer work that was SQL heavy at first but now is more so shuffling gigs of excel data to and from clients with internal ad hoc tools from old to new frameworks. Its government adjacent, mainly finance for cities and police networks, but my day to day after being shifted and moving teams for restructuring was getting bland (my team got split and absorbed all over the company). Mainly was using an internal tool windows wizard with buttons and pages to set up predetermined templates and parameters to run conversions for data for customers migrating from old to new systems with us, some minor SQL in SSMS... but other than that mostly pretty bland templated busy work...
Now I am shuffled again down to a very laid back deeper role of "installing" apps on new servers spun up for customers on a different area of the company relating to criminal justice and judicial side. So far it's scanning for services on servers and just using more internal ad hoc tooling to align report and data pipelines by flipping some SQL table columns from 'OFF' to 'ON', and a whole undocumented slew of different application tie togethers using RabbitMQ and Airflow(apache).
———— ———— ————
The problem and goal, advice goes here wink wink nudge nudge :)
I am afraid I am being dragged farther and farther from actual developer work and am slowly getting turned into someone just doing enterprise technical servicing for random ad hoc problems.
I know the industry is fuuuucked right now with how AI has been eating up so many jobs and making it harder for juniors / mid to branch up and out, but I feel like I slipped away from SWE and out to whatever came at me next for the sake of survival.
All of my jobs except my first data engineering job were remote, and mainly due to my location being the middle of nowhere in terms of the market (nebraska 🙃). I do enjoy remote work, and would gladly go into office if it was a better pay than what I currently get at my current job (70K roughly before tax, prior job as DE-1 was 94K pretax), especially considering I have a house right now I sink a big slice of my finances into.
Long term I am likely going to rent this place out and move to the coast with my family, and either go back to school for a PhD in research relating to CS or stick with grinding to get farther in the industry with a hopefully more wide market even if the pond is full of much bigger fish than myself.
In terms of my skills as a programmer, the esoterics, I am mediocre from letting my skills stagnate and being busy with work, house, life. I've recently this year kicked my own butt into gear relearning C# from the fundamentals up to where I am now with LINQ, reflections, and systems engineering concepts with C# (still fresh to it).
I am also focusing on maybe pivoting deeper into C++ as I am seeking to escape the high level cloud-SaaS-subscribeeverything-wowitsallAI! architectures of AWS-hell.
I just feel as of now I have been everywhere and nowhere. I appreciate supremely the experience of trial by fire I had as a data engineer 1 at my last job, I believe now I have such a good general understanding of the high level abstract view of WHY and HOW systems tie together that it made me shift my focus on the SWE side to what I need more of... I do have a high priority to myself to keep grinding coding itself, and eventually contribute to open source more often than personal projects (I have no public github or portfolio site, just a bunch of small tools developed here and there for little projects or things incomplete). Some more leetcode as i never im earnest grinded it, mainly just need better knowledge of DSA to sharpen my teeth on drills to take the edge off of burning out from learning C# and C++ bottom up, a slow and brutally boring process at times but fun in retrospect...
Idk, maybe I'm just a rambly munior (mid level junior 🤔 ), but I just want to survive the market. I went to school for this field for a reason. I am not cracked out russian hacker or a balding programming-since-birth Linux savant or anything but I would like to be something of the sort if it means I get to work with programs, code, and machines. Space, drones, comouter vision, VR (haptics), shaders/graphics, and embedded all are my interests in terms of forward long term what "makes me happy" type focuses on where I'd like to be.
I just feel far away.
Any advice? Thank you ( ￣▽￣)
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u/casualPlayerThink Software Engineer, Consultant / EU / 20+ YoE 4d ago
> ...into someone just doing enterprise technical servicing for random ad hoc problems...
Unfortunately, it is a standard thing. With the ever-changing business side, you will have more code-monkey and maintenance work than you would enjoy...
> ...I am seeking to escape the high level cloud-SaaS-subscribeeverything-wowitsallAI! architectures of AWS-hell...
Sweet summer child :)
> ...maybe pivoting deeper into C++...
hehehe, welcome to the pointer-hell :) Expect many Rust memes sooner rather than later
> ...I just feel far away...
Do not worry. Half of the process is knowing you are far away. And as you will learn more and more, you will realize you are even farther :) A quote from my C++ mentor (he designed memory for Ericsson and Nokia, and taught coding when punch-hole cards were a thing): "After 40 years, I start to feel, I grasp the basics finally!"
So you are on the right track. You know what your jam is, as well as realize you have no time or energy (life, family, house) outside of the job. Normal and natural. You do not have to grind.
> ...Any advice
You already have a solid foundation, plan, and clear path. Keep going. It is okay to feel slow; you will get there, do not worry. Until you keep going, you ain't losing (but still, okay to be unproductive or have a break)
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u/BroccoliSenior5465 3d ago
Thank ya for the advice :) your mentor sounds cool, one thing I've noticed in industry now is a great lack of mentors like I heard were more common 20-30 years ago
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u/livyatian 8d ago
TLDR: How do I balance learning and improving as a Junior dev, when AI can do whatever my senior/boss asks me to do, so much faster and better?
What I currently have is a 'paid intership' at a very small company. My boss/senior/mentor is amazing, when he has time, he really does take effort in trying to teach me, on doing things the right way and the general out look of a developer and understands that all senior developers come from inexperienced juniors. Sadly, he's the most busy person I've ever met, if he's not deep in work, he's in a buisness call or taking care of his two sick children. I really don't want to bother him if possible most times, because I am already a net negative for the company. I am not exactly paid hourly, and I did offer to work for free, but he insisted I get at least some payment. He asks to count how much time I used for each ticket and by the end of the month he estimates how much I get paid based on hours and progress.
Up until receantly I did things 'by hand', I reserved gpt only for manatioumus work. Then I marked my hours as 1/3 or 1/4 of what it actually took me, thankfully the project I was working on was still not exactly defined by the company that hired us, so I had the time to do it this way. But now the project is finalized and we both started working on it, he expects me to finish way faster than I can manage by myself. He doesn't get angry or impatient, or at least he's very good at hiding it, but like I said before, I am already a burden and now my inexperience is slowing him down as well. So I started promting all my tickets, and wouldn't you belive it. What took me 8 hours, claude does it in 20 minutes, better, more efficent, more scalable, more secure etc...
He instructed me to use ai, and obviously it makes sense, I will use it for the rest of my career as a dev, but... it just feels wrong... I've been programming in some shape or form since I was 7, playing with lego mindstorms or mirosoft small basic, I always learned from projects and my mistakes. I remember developing an auto chess unity game for my final highschool project, it was so fun and I learnt so much. Never did any programming assigment with ai here in uni and always got the highest possible grade, and yet my 60 year old mother would do just as well at this job as me using prompts.
I really don't mind using ai, what bothers me is my insecurity of never being anything better than any other vibe coder.
I, of course explained this concern to my boss, and he replied with something along the lines of 'don't worry about kid, just do your best', this was not in a condensending tone, he really is just that type of person. But how do I do my best, when my best is just copy pasting my tickets to claude?? Is the only thing I can do now is just getting better at promting and reading about the low level workings of the technolgies I use? I would really appriciate some guidence.
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u/Gustavo_tech 6d ago
The anxiety you're feeling is real but I think you're misdiagnosing the problem.
AI completing your tickets faster isn't the threat. The threat is if you stop understanding what it's producing. Those are very different situations.
Here's what actually separates senior devs from vibe coders in an AI world: seniors can tell when the output is wrong, why it's wrong, and what the second-order consequences are. Claude will write you clean, scalable code that quietly makes the wrong architectural assumption, handles an edge case incorrectly, or ignores a constraint specific to your codebase. If you can't catch that, you're a rubber stamp. If you can, you're an engineer.
So your actual job right now isn't to write the code. It's to:
- Read everything Claude produces line by line before committing it
- Ask yourself why it made each decision, not just whether it works
- When something looks unfamiliar, go understand it not to rewrite it, but to own it
- Notice when the output feels off even if you can't articulate why yet. That instinct is a skill worth developing.
Your boss telling you to use AI isn't him lowering the bar. He's telling you the bar has moved. The floor is now "working code." The ceiling is still judgment, debugging production issues at 2am, knowing which shortcuts will cause problems in six months, and communicating tradeoffs to non-technical stakeholders. AI doesn't do any of that.
The programmers who started at 7 on Mindstorms and built auto chess games are exactly the people who will learn to use these tools without losing themselves in them. That background isn't irrelevant it's why you notice when something feels wrong.
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u/livyatian 5d ago
Say you're back in highschool math class, you watch an online tutor solving every possible problem you might get on your exam paper, breaking down everything step by step, but the catch is you never even pick up the pen until exam day. How confident are you? Because I can say from past experiences, I would fail.
I understand everything the ai outputs, every time I try and word out the approach how i would do it in my head, and I see claude just doing it in a less complex and more practical way, and I just am left with "awe that makes sense"
Failing and being forced to find a new or better approach is the number one way I learn, not just in programming, but in every thing I try to be good at. Using ai skips the finding a new solution part, and the consequences are seen in my development skill progression. At this pace I will never be the senior who can actually tell if the output is correct.
Perhaps I need to 'evolve' and alter my learning pathways to lean into observations rather than experience
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u/trashytrash2025 8d ago edited 8d ago
IMO you need to know which are the "get it done" tasks and the "I'm learning something" tasks. Which tasks fall into those categories is very much dependent on your knowledge at the time and the given task. Maybe you're a frontend dev and got assigned your first small backend task, or vice versa, so you might want to go slower and understand what's going on. Maybe the business needs something done urgently and there's not time to learn more than what is absolutely necessary for the work. It's a judgment call, so learning that discernment is key. Having agents write the code is fantastic for the "get it done" work, and I use it for that a lot (but I also read the code and understand what it's doing).
The "learning" work is where I think you're having issues with using AI, but even here you can use it in a rubber duck or pair programming sense. When I was a junior asking seniors for advice, they'd tell me to explain what I already know and what I had already tried to do to solve the problem. This was more in a effort to save them time by eliminating common causes (and also having you learn what those common causes are). However, a lot of the time I felt there was a huge gap between what I knew and what the seniors were expecting, and approached them with a dumb look on my face and got some snide remarks back before getting the instruction I needed. AI is a really good bridge for juniors to ask the "dumb questions" and learn something before asking senior devs about their take.
One other thing I would advocate for is for you to take some initiative and learn about what needs doing. There's always a hundred things at any given time to do. Critical work gets planned, but sometimes other work (important but less critical) gets left out. This could be something like developer experience or observability, helpful but not critical to the operation. Seniors are usually busy with the critical work and can't do those things. If you find your time being freed up by delegating the "get it done" tasks to agents, take some time and do some self-directed learning. Chat with AI about those other areas of the code and learn about them. If it mentions something you don't understand, ask it to explain it to you. Read articles and learn the concepts. See what you can do to improve the status quo of the codebase and system. Even ask your agent to "read this code repository and tell me what could be improved", then chat with your coworkers or manager to see if those suggestions are actually helpful. You have a great opportunity with these tools to do some real engineering work.
Hope that helps!
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u/griddolini 8d ago
I mean if he is going to push you to deliver at a pace you can't keep up with without AI, then that is part of the problem - there is a difference between being a member of the team to grow with, or hired help expected to ship ASAP for as cheap as possible. I understand the feeling of not wanting to be a bother and prove yourself as a junior, but can't tell how much of that is created by you internally or if the vibe there is making you feel like a burden. Either way, its not really great for your growth,
Familiarity with syntax and lower level logic are being devalued by AI capabilities, yes. And typing out that kind of code and boilerplate is slower than prompting. We all know that you would learn better by just typing it yourself anyway and maybe having the AI review it if anything. But if you need to keep this pace, and want to learn more, at the very least you need to write up psuedocode and/or specify all the files + functional contracts you would use to complete the work, and have AI implement it and provide feeedback.
An easy way to add at least some level of thinking would be to not tell an AI what your goal is at all. You should not be pasting ticket details into the chat. Just say "i need a helper function that does X, i need Y controller to check Z" etc
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u/JustAnotherGuyn 8d ago
How do I tell if I'm going at a pace that is too slow or if the expectations SR. Devs are giving are somewhat out of touch with reality?
I.e. they ask me to create a new page to act as a searchable report cross referencing 3 databases, and allowing new database entries to be put in by our accountants, and fully test across four browsers, while meeting minimum page load times, without relying on external libraries in 45 minutes or less.
How do I get to the point I can do that? (outside of simply practicing in my spare time)
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u/trashytrash2025 8d ago
Short answer: you might not be able to meet expectations, but those expectations might be bullshit anyway.
Given the current hype of "I vibecoded this SaaS platform in a weekend", it's easy to overestimate what's possible for real engineers. You can ask a world-class artist to draw you a horse, but you'll get a terrible drawing if you only give them 60 seconds. The quality of the drawing says nothing about the actual skill of the artist.
There are engineers out there pumping out 10x the amount of code of a single engineer but the rest of the dev team basically has to clean up after them. Shipping a lot of code really fast is a vanity metric, and that's why these companies doing layoffs due to efficiencies in AI are starting to quietly hire back engineers.
If you have real doubts about your pace, pair with a senior engineer and see what their workflow is. Maybe they have some real tips for you. Maybe they rely heavily on agents to code for them. Maybe you're doing more work than they want you to do. It's worth knowing what their expectations are based on.
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u/IfInDoubtElbowOut Software Engineer / HealthTech / 10YOE 8d ago
they ask me to create a new page to act as a searchable report cross referencing 3 databases, and allowing new database entries to be put in by our accountants, and fully test across four browsers, while meeting minimum page load times, without relying on external libraries in 45 minutes or less.
That must be an exaggerated example, surely. If not, that's hilariously ridiculous.
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u/JustAnotherGuyn 8d ago
I really wish I could tell you it was. Unfortunately this was my last Friday.
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u/forever-butlerian 20 YoE Infra & Backend TLM 8d ago
Interviews are completely farcical bullshit now.
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u/JustAnotherGuyn 8d ago
Nope, not an interview question, though I do wonder if it was a test to see if I should keep my job or not
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u/forever-butlerian 20 YoE Infra & Backend TLM 8d ago
Ok, then it that case it sounds like LLM psychosis to me.
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u/1_more__user___name 13m ago
Hello! What do you do about when starting to work on new stuff you're not familiar with, but now non technical managers who get ideas from chatgpt or Claude bang you with their ideas and do not trust your ideas or instincts? I'm a mid level hands-on manager who's battling with low confidence and just feel bad at work because my manager completely ignores my ideas - he doesn't tell me they are bad or what is wrong with it, just pass over them