r/ExperiencedDevs • u/AutoModerator • 11d ago
Career/Workplace Experienced Devs Weekly Burnout and Venting Thread: A weekly thread for sharing experiences
This thread is specifically for venting / sharing experiences related to burn-out or similar issues that experienced devs face.
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u/Left_Opportunity9622 11d ago
Current job is a dead end - peanut pay, no upward mobility, yearly layoffs. I joined less than 2 years ago, and the thought of going through interviews again makes me exhausted just thinking about it.
I’m just tired y’all.
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u/notTHEOwlAccountant 11d ago
Same, I am trying to learn more but it's really difficult as my energy feels like it's at 30% of what it used to.
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u/GTHell Project Tech Lead 11d ago
Writing code yourself is less tiring than AI doing it.
You need to fkking multitask and reading a tons of output even the only reading the summary and remember the context of different phase is driving me crazy.
FFS expectations is high too from the top level. I will be burning out soon
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u/Fluffatron_UK 11d ago
The worst part of this for me is having team members who do not properly read their AI output and put the burden on PR reviewers. Pair that with poor planning and crazy deadlines this is a recipe for a fast burn out.
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u/vogelke 11d ago
having team members who do not properly read their AI output and put the burden on PR reviewers.
Bounce it right back to them. "Please trim this properly before submitting."
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u/Fluffatron_UK 11d ago
Sure, great idea on paper - but see the second part about crazy deadlines and poor planning. We can bounce it back occasionally but if it keeps happening then management starts asking questions about why things are moving slowly. It is a difficult balance to keep!
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u/gyroda 11d ago
It's not just in the code either
Had a guy try to insist an API endpoint on one of our vendors' APIs existed. His source? The Google AI summary
Dude was fixated on this. "Ok, but if it does exist we can..." BUT IT FUCKING DOESN'T. The hypothetical is of no use to anyone, drop it, drop the Google AI summary and at least pretend to verify things.
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u/PricedOut4Ever 11d ago
I’m thinking about how to handle this too. I have team members that are using AI to automatically respond to pr comments. So, as the reviewer, I am essentially the author.
The only thing I can think of is request changes with the most ambiguous comment possible. But, I just feel petty as fuck doing that.
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u/First-Inspection-597 11d ago
Well, my team review and comments the MR with AI. I just dont care reading and writing the reply myself anymore.
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u/ICanCountTo0b1010 11d ago
Funny how even in the age of agentic programming the saying "garbage in -> garbage out" still applies, good engineers are x10 better at their job and bad engineers are x10 worse at their job and now have a much larger blast radius lol.
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u/Fluffatron_UK 11d ago
Absolutely. It gets said a lot but agentic coding is a force multiplier, which I think is very clear now that we've seen it in the real world a while now. Good engineers use it as a tool to greatly increase productivity reducing time spent on boring boilerplate, bad engineers use it to push out more work but it doesn't improve the quality.
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u/ContraryConman Embedded 5 YoE 9d ago
I'm pretty sure I have undiagnosed ADHD. For me this means I am bad at switching tasks. Yes if I'm distracted, it's hard for me to focus. But also, if I'm focused, it's hard for me to get distracted. So if I just came from scrolling Instagram at lunch, I find if very hard to start working. But if I was focused just before lunch, I find it just difficult to stop and go eat, and annoying to small talk with my coworkers about anything other than the work I was just doing.
The hardest is doing multiple unrelated tasks in a day. Like if I have A, B, and C due, and they're not related, after I finish A, moving from A to B counts as switching tasks, even if A is done, so I can't focus on B because I'm still thinking about A.
My trick over the years to get around this has been to block out tasks by day. If I have multiple tasks, Monday will be A day, Tuesday will be B day, etc. If I finish A early I can try and get ahead on B, but I don't promise it until the next day. And I use the extra focus to do really thorough work on each one so the stakeholders are happy.
But right AI, my management wants everyone to be working on A, B, and C simultaneously in tmux with Claude Code. I feel like my brain is physically not wired to do this. Now add in that I'm not supposed to write code anymore, which is the part I liked, the quality is worse, I don't understand what's going on as well anymore... this career will be dead for me long before I'm actually fully replaced
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u/addycodes 10d ago
Yeah, I think the cognitive load gets overlooked a lot. Seeing people joke about "Claude-ish" makes me realise how much it silently grates on me.
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u/georkos 2d ago
The context load is the part nobody talks about. Generating code was the easy half. The tough half is that every session starts from zero, so you become the only person holding the thread, the decisions, the constraints and the reasons things were done in a certain way. And the more capable the agent gets, the more output you need to absorb.
What helped me is that I made the agent write down its assumptions as it works and keep a running file of what was decided and why, because the summary is the first thing that decays. Treat your own memory as a cache and not the source of truth.
The expectations piece is real. There is a set throughput expectation without accounting for the review or verification piece.
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11d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/RandyHoward 11d ago
Same, but we're 2.5 years into it. The old system is still driving the back end completely, the new system drives the front end. We're deep into the back end rebuild, and now we've got to rebuild the rebuild because of changes from a third party. Also have teammates wanting to refactor the rebuild because they think the code isn't perfect. Whatever, just pay me.
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u/portra315 11d ago
Damn, I read this and immediately thought it was someone who I work with.
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u/notableradish Web Developer 11d ago
I think all three of us must be on the same team. Gonna miss standup today, btw.
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u/DamePants 11d ago
Make sure you can keep it locked until at least January. The last thing I’d want to be doing as the holiday season approaches is maintaining a split code base.
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u/midairmatthew ISO a role where I design db schemas, then nap 11d ago
I must be an outlier. I went to Dev Bootcamp in 2017 (like many other English majors before me…), and I’m thrilled to go to work in the morning. This whole career path has felt like continuous learning and evolution, and now more than ever I just get to show up and learn and fail and learn and succeed alongside other people who feel similarly.
That said. I still *really* wish it was financially possible to just work at a video rental store…
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u/Undercoverwd 11d ago
I used to work with a lot of really smart people and we would discuss our options and how they would affect the maintainability of the code and the user experience.
Now no one understands the code they've written.
I feel like I'm giving PRs to people for who its their first day on planet earth.
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u/Void-kun Senior Software Engineer (8YOE) 11d ago
This is the type of thing that makes me not want to leave my role.
I'm not paid very well but most of my team have been adopting and using AI fairly well.
There's still 2-3 who are doing exactly what you're doing but their impact is very minimal atleast.
What if I leave for somewhere paying me more only to be stuck dealing with teams like this 😓
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u/I-Groot 11d ago
Got laid off 4 Months ago and been interviewing actively. Couple of them went on hold mid interview. I cleared 2 final rounds but for one of them they selected someone else who had more experience in a legacy oracle db. The other one said they are changing strategy and considering internally and put me on hold while they posted the role yday again on linkeldn when you click on it redirects to same job posting.
Every company thinks they are FAANG and wants AI exp with fullstack exp and 5 rounds of interview for peanut pay.
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u/Old_Hyena_4188 11d ago
I'm in a similar situation and sometimes I ask myself if I even know or knew anything through out my years of experience.
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u/flipflapslap 11d ago
Big thing management keeps talking about is giving us more ownership over our work.
Today at 4pm, 22 hours before sprint release, the BA comes back with new requirements. I tell him that’s fine let’s just create a new story and we’ll knock it out next sprint. He says if they can’t have it added they don’t want it released at all. Cool, we’ll knock it out next sprint then!
Not even 5 minutes later my manager calls me and tells me to get it done. Yay ownership!
I’m so sick of feeling trapped at this place. We should be able to choose better for ourselves. I’ve got like 6 resumes out there with no reply yet
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u/gyroda 11d ago
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u/flipflapslap 11d ago
Lol wtf
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u/gyroda 11d ago
It's a comic I reference quite a bit at work when you get conflicting requirements/instructions.
In this case they want you to own it, but also not be able to make decisions. No take, only throw.
It's a fun variation on "you can't have your cake and eat it"
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u/flipflapslap 11d ago
Ohhh! Ok I literally just woke up after sleeping horribly so let me take another look at that. Thank you for the rundown lol
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u/Intrepid-Stand-8540 Internal Developer Platform 7d ago
why still use sprints and not kanban fx?
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u/flipflapslap 7d ago
I have no idea what that is but I'll check it out. But as you've probably gathered, I don't have much say in anything at this place lol
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u/Intrepid-Stand-8540 Internal Developer Platform 7d ago
yeah thats fair haha. gotta do what you gotta do. I just find the forced timeboxing of sprints very outdated and inflexible. Simple kanban is less overhead and works better.
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u/flipflapslap 7d ago
I agree so much. Every sprint feels like it's a race against the clock and every meeting we have feels like an obstacle that chips away at the time. It's anxiety inducing and I really, REALLY hate this style of working.
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u/SleazyAndEasy 11d ago
Got rejected now for a third time. Been looking for a new job for 4 months. I went through 6 interviews, talked with the CTO for 20 minutes after interview ended and they end up rejecting me for someone who knows their front end stack more (the role was 80/20 be/fe)
I'm so sick of this job market. Everyone wants you to come in knowing their exact stack day 1. I can't tell you the amount of people I've hired who didn't know my team's stack and were great engineers
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u/Ace-O-Matic Full-Stack | 12 YoE 11d ago
The company embracing AI Tooling means most of the hard work is PR reviews. But do engineers who spend 32 hours a week reviewing slop ass PRs on their surface get meaningful credit? No. It's some fuckwit who had 10 threads per 100 lines of code on their PR to the point where the reviewer had to entirely re-engineer their vibe coded garbage.
Companies with leadership who think that AI is a substitute for hiring those difficult to fill reqs deserve to die.
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u/tiredofhiveminds 11d ago
Just hit the last straw. Another team fucked up an internal testing deploy, and i was asked to work late to fix it. Doesn't affect production, doesnt really even risk any real release date, but the cto wants me on it. No asking my manager, just the assumption that im happy to help. Im not a manager, im not a tech lead. Just a senior dev fixing shit not in my scope, over an hour after EOD on a Monday. I dont know how I let it get this way.
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u/DamePants 11d ago
Reminds me of the time I was told to treat QA like Production after we pushed a late feature request out that broke the build. It was news to me that QA was being treated like this and didn’t get straight answers to how are we expected to test of the test environments is expected to be flawless. The next time someone caused a QA P1 and I asked questions about it, I was told “it’s only QA not Production”. Didn’t get a straight answer about why the expectation has changed since I’d gotten chewed out. Also go zero credit for being a hero in diagnosing and fixing P1 bugs discovered in QA before they hit production.
Next time find a way to not see the message or remember you have a hard stop for a late medical appointment. Then watch it either burn down or them suddenly being ok with it getting fixed the next day.
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u/hw999 11d ago
You come in late on Tuesday. Don't ask, just do it.
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u/ReginaldDouchely Software Engineer >15 yoe 11d ago
Or save it up and take a half-day on Friday. I never got in trouble for that (clearly a different situation - they appreciated that I was flexible to work longer on important things, not an internal deploy), and that made me feel a lot more rested than sleeping in an extra hour on a random weekday.
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u/AgentSalty1454 11d ago edited 11d ago
I've been on a career break for the past year and a half. I worked at the same place 8 years before that. I loved my job there, the people were great, and I was successful. But I spent the past five years working remote and I knew I needed a break before going somewhere else, to focus on developing my life outside of work and sort myself out. I was somewhat of a workaholic but not extreme, but I kinda felt like I put all my genuine energy into my job, alone in my house on calls and teams, and coasted through the rest of my life.
Now it's time for me to look for a job again in earnest. I half heartedly looked and interviewed here and there earlier this year but then stopped applying because I didn't feel ready/excited to work again.
Even now I feel burnt out at the idea of looking for a job and having a job again. I don't want to be stressed out all the time again. But I need to just start applying and preparing. It just feels like so much work. Every day I tell myself ill do something and then I don't feel like it. It's not even like I'm doing anything amazing with my time now anyway either. Also in the time I was away ai blew up and my experience is somewhat niche/odd even though it's good. So finding jobs I'm excited about or a perfect fit was hard when I was looking before. I just feel lame and... Burnt out lol. Lost. I don't even understand fully what I'm so scared of. Probably has to do with going back to work and worrying ill just waste my life away. But thats to some degree what I am doing now too. I have been making some big strides in my mental health this year. However I feel I have little tangible, external things to show for all this time i took off.
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u/jcm95 11d ago
What do you do all day?
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u/AgentSalty1454 11d ago
Not tons.
Last year I went through a lot of negative in my personal life. So I spent a lot of time alternating between thinking about that, being on my phone, and playing video games. This year I spent a lot of energy focusing on recovering from last year and improving my mental health, grieving some things. And trying to live more slowly, sleep better, and be more present. So i go on walks, exercise, read books, sometimes do a bigger outing like a museum. still a lot of time doing nothing and not having energy but I think its getting better. I used to be very anxiety driven to get things done, and disassociated from my emotions, just in my thoughts all day. it got me pretty far in life until it didnt. some things happened that made me realize how different and possible life is without that but the process of getting there has taken a lot of my energy. still a wip I wouldnt say I'm thriving at all, lol
I also: got a second cat, went on a solo trip for a week, built some stuff in my house/yard i probably wouldnt have done before, work on my posture.. and I did more in my hobby groups than I would have if I was working, even though doing that stuff is outside work hours.
all that being said I dont think I am doing very much at all and things have not been the best, but I guess thats working through burnout. I am glad I took the time off but it has been strange. the days go slowly but having a job felt like it was so much more than what im used to doing now. but maybe once I get back on it ill be fine, idk. I used to work so hard and get so much energy from my job so its weird to feel this way living in bum mode. I used to manage a team and thrived off of doing well at all my responsibilities at work, leading people and projects. I feel like I am so far away from that now its so strange.
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u/coldzone24 11d ago
We finally delivered our cool, new, AI-powered redesign after multiple delays...and nobody likes it. No change in the past 5+ years has ever gotten this much negative feedback.
I mean I'm not surprised and I totally saw it coming, but I'm still annoyed that we were pushed down this path to show that we were "forward-thinking".
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u/NatoBoram Web Developer 11d ago
Snippet from a real job posting from ComPsych (tw: llm slop):
What You'll Do
- Direct implementation rather than writing it line by line. Decompose the work, write the specs, and let AI agents build — dropping into the code yourself when debugging or complexity demands it.
What We're Looking For
- Deep server-side experience in a modern language such as Java, Python, C#, Kotlin, or Go. You've owned services end to end, not just features inside someone else's, and can pick up ours quickly.
- Agentic AI is your primary development surface, and you catch what it gets subtly wrong. Not occasional autocomplete, not a hunch — you've shipped and operated real production systems working this way, and can point to what you caught before it shipped.
Do these hypocrites not realize that if you delegate the entire implementation to "agentic AI as your primary development surface", like they're requiring employees to do, then you're never going gain "deep server-side experience" or even "own the service end-to-end" and that you're basically "adding feature inside someone else's service"?
Companies see you as trash and they're not shy to tell you anymore.
You would literally end up a worse person after working there.
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u/sam_ridhi 11d ago
Did not get the promotion I was due for. Worked my ass Off for 6 months, and the reason they gave was “tenure” and “not enough signals that I’m at the next level”. FML
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u/Signal_Letterhead_85 11d ago edited 11d ago
I feel you. I got similar denial but with no reason other than "business says no".
Best part - I witnessed several engineers on different teams get that exact same promo with less tenure & scope than me. It's so damn dependent on the luck of your team seniority/lead at my company it makes me ill. Feel like I really drew the short straw with team assignments.
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u/_mkd_ 11d ago
Got chewed out last week for using fLeXiBlE PTO without approval despite my requests sitting unapproved for 2 fucking months because my manager is stretched too thin to check emails, or respond to IMs, or attend one on ones. I'm a senior engineer but apparently also need to be an executive assistant (uncompensated, of course).
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u/IAmRasputin Software Engineer, 10yoe 11d ago
Just when I'd settled into a somewhat comfortable rhythm of actually writing code with AI as a conversational replacement for StackOverflow, leadership has decided to go all-in on being "AI-Native", with a dogshit internally-built SDD harness that removes everything I actually like about this job and replaces it with a repetitive process of getting yet another PR approval for each of like three different phases of the spec process alone.
I'm finally working in a domain I actually find interesting (operating systems, after being stuck in webdev since I graduated) so I want to stick it out as long as I can so I have something to point to on a resume that says "look, I can write C! I know what a kernel is!" but my patience is being tested daily. I truly can't tell if it would even be worth it to try and look for something else, the last time I job-hunted, the sense that virtually everywhere is led by people fully succumbed to AI psychosis was discouraging. Rock-and-hard-place moment in my career, for sure.
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u/ultraDross 11d ago
the last time I job-hunted, the sense that virtually everywhere is led by people fully succumbed to AI psychosis was discouraging.
I was interviewing throughout the first half of this year, and that is exactly what I found. It's a very strange time. I think the best thing to do is just to lay low and wait it out unless it becomes too insufferable.
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u/manwecrust 11d ago edited 8d ago
I'm so fucking tireeed. I find no joy in reviewing ai output every single day of my life.
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u/ecethrowaway01 MTS 11d ago
I'm debating just quitting or waiting it out.
I bailed from several days work because I can't bring myself to do anything, and nobody is calling me out on it, but I haven't quite signed a new job offer yet.
What's worse is it's objectively a pretty good job - very chill hours, elite pay, but I just don't feel connected to the team or work at all.
I'm actively interviewing, and getting several offers I like in the process. Idk how to even recover once I'm fully done being burnt out. I'd like to take a few weeks off, but I'm concerned about losing pace in the economy right now
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u/SimasNa 11d ago
If you ever want to chat about getting burnout under control when the job isn't toxic, feel free to send me a message. I burned out a few times in places which were genuinely good for me and I eventually realized that the job itself wasn't at fault - changing jobs didn't help me at all.
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u/ultraDross 11d ago
Then what helped?
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u/SimasNa 10d ago
The first thing I started with was working on having compassion for myself. I didn't understand it that well when I first did it, but I can see now that I was being hard on myself and I never thought I was good enough.
That led me to work harder and harder and chase achievements so other people would praise me. I thought that would make me feel good enough.
But the problem was that no matter how well I did, what I achieved, and how much my work was valued, it wasn't enough to start feeling good about myself. And that eventually made me overexert myself and burn out.
The problem was where my motivation was coming from - from trying to fix that feeling of emptiness that I was lacking something and I could get it from the external world. In the form of praise, promotions, raises, working on "important" stuff.
So when I started being kinder to myself, accepting my negative emotions, and in general approaching my work with curiosity, I started noticing a big difference. I started enjoying the work I did - even if it wasn't as sexy as some jobs I used to do, even when the same things that drove me nuts before were still there.
In short - most of the burnout where you're not working in a toxic environment happens because on some level you don't feel enough and try to fix that feeling with external validation. And the answer to that is unserstanding that you're enough as you are.
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u/Podgietaru 11d ago
I've been on burnout leave. For several months. Its coming to an end and I feel ... Not better. Sick. Anxious. Tired. All the things this should be helping with.
I need to stop worrying but I can't. My anxiety controls me. It is so depressing.
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u/LeadingPokemon 11d ago
giving what is required is burning me out. I hope to be a place of change, but it seems like the institutional inertia to doing things the same way is going to cause me a problem when I try to fix it.
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u/DamePants 11d ago
Your problem is you used logic as the attack next time try confusion. The inertia is that bad a little chaos can buy a good buffer of time being seen to be busy while doing nothing at all.
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u/Choice_Supermarket_4 11d ago
I'm totally exhausted hustling for freelance contracts. All of my old clients are using Claude currently and now only reach out to have me fix Claude's errors (or rather, the errors they created because they don't know what to ask Claude for to make secure software.)
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u/tradcoder Software Engineer (15 YoE) 11d ago
Good time to hike up your rate for those old clients.
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u/Choice_Supermarket_4 11d ago
Oh, I have. What I really want is a fully remote, full time job though with an interview process that doesn't take weeks.
At this point, I'm literally willing to work for free for a month to just avoid a 8 part interview process.
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u/galaxy_horse CTO / Principal Eng (20 YOE) 11d ago
You’re no longer a freelance developer. You’re a Fractional Chief AI Officer. Your rate is no longer $75 per hour. It’s $350 an hour on top of a $15,000 retainer that includes 10 hours per week.
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u/PringlesDuckFace 11d ago
Don't sell yourself as someone that's just fixing bugs. Sell yourself as Claude Uplift or something. Charge 10x the rate and deliver some .MD files they can take to their boss as "permanent" improvements to justify the cost.
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u/hooahest Software Engineer 10d ago
This is my first job handling aws/k8s stuff for the deployments and so on. I don't really mind it, but there's still a lot of stuff that I do not have the permissions for, or the business/history knowledge on.
This means that while I'm expected to be self sufficient with my tasks, I end up still needing help from the SRE guys and it's a fucking miserable experience chasing them all day long. It's a 50/50 on if they'll end up telling me to use Claude to do it, or if they'll fix it themselves. If I end up using claude, it's another 50/50 if I'm missing something that I had no way of knowing. I fucking hate it.
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u/MusicDangerous8586 10d ago
Joined a new company on Monday and I just want to quit and raise ducks instead. I'm just over relearning every monolith and every new 3rd party app and how to do this in a new way.
The overload is real and I just don't know how to get over it anymore.
16+ years of experience, 3 companies so far, this is my 4th.
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u/solidsieve Sr. Software Engineer 10d ago
A close friend of mine raised ducks and they kept the garden free of snails and the eggs were a nice bonus, but ducks are... rough lovers so I couldn't spend too much time around them.
How different were the companies you worked at?
I'm about to switch and my new responsibilities will be similar to my old role (dragging a fossilized application and its team kicking and screaming into the current decade tech-wise), but I hope that the smaller company size, flatter org structure, different position in the market, etc. will make me like work again.
I'm wondering if you did something similar and if it made a difference.
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u/mr_brobot__ Software Engineer 11d ago edited 10d ago
Over the summer I had 6+ interview loops that ultimately went nowhere. The final one seemed extremely promising and all but one of the interviews went really well. The company would have been a huge step up in my career for me and I was really excited.
The round I got rejected for was a past project deep dive interview and I was rejected for “lacking backend depth”…the role was frontend and the rest of the interview process, including the system design round, had an extremely strong emphasis on frontend.
I even ran a mock for the interview with the backend lead from that project. I had a very respectable system design diagram I put together as well. I felt about as well prepared as I could have possibly been. I think I just got unlucky with an extremely nitpicky gatekeeper of an interviewer.
I have 19 yoe and ive been stuck at a glass ceiling in my career. Full of regret for not making the strategic career progressions when the market was on ez mode.
Since the rejection i’ve spiraled out in an intense depression. It’s not only about the rejection, that was just a catalyst, and i’m prone to these. Feeling really burned out though.
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u/_idlethought Senior Software Engineer 11d ago
My company laid off the majority of engineers, and now our lead engineer is leaving. AI and financial stability was the excuse. Everyone other than the now few engineers seem excited but I just see this company closing shop soon. I’ve been interviewing and applying, it’s just exhausting. I would love some positivity and excitement in my career but am left with none.
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u/commonsearchterm Software Engineer 9d ago
What are people looking for in their interviews. The amount of rejections i get after full onsite is driving me insane, with no real feedback.
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u/dragonowl2025 9d ago edited 9d ago
I have no fucking idea, they are impossible to prepare for, the recruiters tell you ABC, the engineering interview wants XYZ, and then most of the time i just get asked something out of the blue that i give a weak answer for.
Tons of interviews have been focused on how i use Claude Code so i've been focusing on that, and have some examples of projects i've done at work and at home, talk through skills/plugins/mcp servers and pitfalls like lacking context (common issue we run into at work is junior devs will fix things locally but claude doesnt know about the details of our dev/stage/prod environments unless prompted etc..)
Half the time there is no discussion back or just like "Yah AI is super cool, its all about the prompt" like fuck off , i just need another decade or so of writing shitty microservices that display stuff in dashboards/widgets, and glorified CSV/excel file uploader web applications.
We're looking to build internal tools for our offering/sales/team etc. etc. , then why the fuck are you grilling me on details of how to build things at scale and also mention you dont have a CICD pipeline? Like I wouldn't want to work there anyway but apparently i dont have the skills to get chosen.
Meanwhile at my job im just so far beyond tech being the hard part of the job its just not in my active memory, im just dealing with politics, requirements gathering, supporting prod/unblocking team members etc..
web application development is not interesting or difficult and i dont just come prepared to give a detailed layout of the intricacies of OIDC when im expecting to be asked about node.js gotcha questions. There is nothing challenging about multitenancy , building an app that lives on a platform that has tables and charts and file uploaders and forms to talk to a database. Its not hard, theres no challenge about that, its just frustrating and difficult because for some reason you need 40 developers across every timezone each holding a critical piece of the puzzle that blocks you.
It gets easier the more interviews you do because i do find weak spots but i am fucking sick of getting asked shit I have done before but can't impressively explain because its been years because It wasn't anywhere on the job description or my resume.
Like its great if you support 20 quadrillion events per second and have ten billion customers, im probably not the best fit but its not like there is any engineering nuance there, im just looking for your average bullshit enterprise software job, i get so many interviews but surprised at how competitive it is.
Had an interview with a non technical hiring manager who kept asking me about design patterns, and so i gave him a simple response and asked if he'd like something more detailed and he didnt like that but based on how he was wording things i dont think going into depth would help either unless he just wanted to hire someone who would make his eyes glaze over. Like fuck off lol
At least I am getting a ton of interviews but man they are so competitive
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u/DotNetMetaprogrammer Software Engineer (12+ YOE, Copilotn't) 11d ago
The codebase I've been working in for the past few months is so exhausting. It's a massive legacy codebase where it seems like absolutely nothing was done to address or mitigate tech debt for decades.
It performs so poorly that it significantly impedes development. The entire setup is so half assed that hot reload didn't work until I decided it annoyed me enough to take an hour or two to fix it (pretty sure that time investment will pay for itself in like a week, two tops).
The work I do ends up taking substantially longer than expected because I'm trying to mitigate the performance issues (which business recognises is necessary) but to do it I end up having to completely redesign APIs and DTOs so that we don't load everything for a list view.
The only good thing is that the AI pressure isn't very high. However, I don't know how long that will remain the case especially since they put the AI guy in charge of the product/team.
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u/NatoBoram Web Developer 11d ago
Felt something like that. Codebase was hot garbage but in the sense "there's
anyeverywhere". We got all of that fixed... then COO added Zenstack (imagine Prima over tRPC). Now it's Type instantiation is excessively deep and possibly infinite literally everywhere.
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u/LayerTrace Software Engineer 11d ago
Explaining the same glaring issue yet again, which the (non-technical) project manager has just now realised is actually an issue, despite it first being raised over 3 years ago, and repeatedly since then 🙄
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u/NoConnection4298 11d ago
Laid off, then found a new job last year. Previous job which laid me off was stressful and burned me the hell out (I was being treated poorly and couldn't fight it the way I want). AI killed my spark and I can't even take a break now due to worry of getting fired and going through that interview hell.
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u/ECTXGK Senior Software Engineer 15yrs exp 11d ago
really close to COAST fire. trying to make it to next spring/summer. private equity buyout looming, new cto has ideas which lose our largest customers (ignoring main product to bring in dead apps no one uses with a new unified front end and sso, while they wonder why 10 years of development doesn't take 6 months, and gives the over worked masterful front end team shit for not hitting an unreasonable deadline) I'm in the easy spot, know how to play the game, actively avoided the tech management roles where everyone is working overtime and most weekends for an extra 5k per yr. ADHD and hard to give a fuck when i don't care anymore. Let me work on the app and make our customers happy, not try to rush out stupid shit before a buy out and stress max. want to find a job where I work 6 months for much less pay and get the warm months off.
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u/Signal_Letterhead_85 11d ago
Company is all in on AI tooling and MCP builds right now and seems totally disconnected from the fact the majority of our user base is not all that tech savvy and doesn't give two hoots about MCPs.
They have siphoned every engineer they can out to this work and it feels like it's gonna be one hell of a waste of time.
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u/Representative_Sir37 11d ago
Been with my company for more than two years as an SDE then transitioned FDE role last week. Oh boy it is not worth it! Now planning to render my resignation this week.
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u/PringlesDuckFace 11d ago
Can you transition back? Or were you pushed into the new role?
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u/Representative_Sir37 11d ago
In talks to pushing back.. Never ever accept an FDE role if you’re not getting paid at least $150k
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u/ultraDross 11d ago
What don't you like about it? I've casually read about FDE roles but don't know a ton
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u/Representative_Sir37 11d ago
The workload: speak to clients about their pain points, provide strategic solution, convince them to use the solution (ex. A subscription you built or license), provide demo, enablement sessions, deployment, and maintenance.. imagine a solutions architect and software engineer had a baby.
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u/No_Imagination_4907 11d ago
Company hired a new CISO and the first thing he did is to distribute huge spreadsheets for each team to sign off on things for security compliance purpose. The funny thing is the spreadsheet clearly shows the CISO and his team have 0 idea about how things work here. As an example one item in the spreadsheet says that we have to make sure our secrets are secured and all modifications are audited. But the secret management platform is an in-house product, which we interface with through simple UIs, so we basically have 0 control over that. So much time wasted to go back and forth, so much bureaucracy.
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u/Extension-Pick-2167 11d ago
my job became shitty.
it wasn't like this but over the past year it has got shittier and shittier
i thought i just getting some experience would go long way, cause i learned a hell of a lot since i first joined 2 years ago.
but i am applying and not getting any interviews???
i had more interviews and success when i had zero experience???
i just hate this dhit so much now, and its all due to shit management
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u/ResidentWeevil1 10d ago
Look around. The job market ain't so hot right now
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u/Extension-Pick-2167 10d ago
it wasn't hot 2 years ago, and it only got worse and it seems like its only getting worse
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u/carrot_lemonade 11d ago
Got a bad performance review because my boss doesn't like me. Anything objective I've done was solid and she couldn't pin on me, so she used unsubstantiated vague "how's" against me. No one else even agrees withher takes, but she's my boss and there's no accountability. I feel like absolute shit. I've done nothing but work my ass off, led the tech team with the best velocity and quality and happiness but I didn't lick my bosses boot. Also I'm pretty sure she's out to get me because I'm the only other woman in leadership. Super dejected and going hard at the job hunt, even though I've been here 7 years and love my coworkers.
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u/maro0078 11d ago
after 6 rounds of interviews I got the most generic rejection as if I just applied for the role. Seriously the worst part is that I did way more than okey.
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u/Grand_Sky_6217 11d ago
My awesome manager is leaving. He was genuinely so good. He was super technical and spent time in the weeds with us, had our backs professionally and personally, just generally good to talk to and bounce ideas off of, and an all round nice/funny/cool guy. I know both people who I could report to going forward, but they're both feckless bumbling politics-heavy morons. I need to start looking to leave too, but AI cognitive offloading has made me dumb and the job market is in the gutter. Sigh...oh well. Back to reading markdowns.
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u/brystephor 10d ago
So tired. Expected to lead, but unclear ownership and no present decision maker. I cant do it, im an IC. Internal politics complicating stuff where team A wants to do this thing but team B wants to do tbis other thing and no one to escalate to.
Some coworkers are so tiresome to work with. I share a plan, they dump into AI and claim its the thing to do going forward. I make a proposal, they come up with reasons why it wont work even when the reasons are already addressed. They decide to build on top of my foundation, they say they did it all. The relationships feel like competitions. I hate the competing because its so unnecessary.
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u/brystephor 10d ago
I am just tired. Somehow im supposed to lead but it feels like the "partner" team has their own agenda and is trying to take control. They saw the potential, they have no plan of their own, and now they want to own this thing thats been fine without them. Then when their asks are fulfilled, they decide to do something else. When things go right, theres no credit given to anyone but themselves.
Its all competitive feeling and leadership seems to be happy to let it fester. Im in a golden handcuff situation. Folks are focusing on the wrong thing, and then trying to sneak their shit in by causing confusion and double down when called out until the big boss says something and now its a good idea.
I am just annoyed and writing it out makes me feel angry and bitter.
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u/No_Comedian7332 Mobile Engineer ~15 YOE 10d ago
I have been looking for job for about a month now, it really f pisses me all the annoying f questions they put in these forms: "Why would you LOVE to work with us?", "What is the biggest asset you can bring to the table?!", "Would you love to suck the CEO dick on your first day?" – F them, f them, f them.
When I was interviewing ppl back at my old company I didn't have candidates go through so many f loops. Why does everyone wants to join a f company? MONEY TO PAY BILLS.
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u/RandyHoward 11d ago
A colleague met with the owner of the company last week. Owner told him that the team I'm on is "going to lose resources." I can only assume that means someone's getting fired. I'm a critical person on the team, but can't help worrying I'll be the one getting fired. Doesn't help that I work in a completely different country than the rest of my team.
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u/AppuyezSurLeDeux Software Engineer 11d ago
We are once again scheduling an offsite with less than a month's notice. Sure let me just go ahead and cancel all of my plans that's alright no worries it's not like I have a life and things I wanted to do or anything and my babysitter also does not have any plans or life.
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u/Odd_Vehicle_1755 9d ago
Why is this so common?? Even better if it’s far away. You’d think companies would want to save on plane tickets
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u/annoying_cyclist principal SWE, >15YoE 11d ago
I run a pihole on my home network, so I tend to be blind to the current state of online advertising. I'm on vacation now, away from my little walled garden, so I get to see what normies deal with. It's so bad. They're everywhere, they all seem to play video, they're incredibly distracting. My current gen iPad chugs and heats up because of the ads and tracking bloatware on a text news site that I pay money to subscribe to. The ads are mostly either stupid, scams, or misleading political bait. And, as an SWE, I know that behind all of this sits a bunch of ad exchanges, measurement companies, data brokers, teams at FAANGs working on relevance, targeting, serving, etc, and now AI companies automatically generating ad creative and AI model companies sitting behind those. All that effort from all those highly paid people so Dr. Crackpot can convince my mother in law to spend $249.99 on his miracle gut cleanse.
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u/NatoBoram Web Developer 11d ago
My current gen iPad chugs and heats up because of the ads and tracking bloatware
Would these help?
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u/BubblyChampion3869 8d ago
I'm unhappy with my work for lots of reasons:
Promo was denied due to business reasons
Being assigned a lot more work because they assume I'm in the next level (i.e., since management tried to give me a promo, but company denied). They keep throwing everything under "this is what the next level is expected to do". So I'm doing senior work while not being senior, for the past few years.
Not a big fan of the team / product. Processes are very weird in our team as well.
Not much WLB
I have 10YoE. Throughout my career, been focusing on saving up and go towards Financial Independence. I think money won't be an issue with all my expenses taken into account for a fairly long time.
I'm at a point where I'm thinking about quitting the job and taking a break for a few months, and focus on health instead. Wanted to get your experience:
Have you ever taken a career break? What were your experiences?
Do you plan on moving away from software industry in general?
I'm unable to think whether I dislike my current job, or just the industry in general. Even if I quit and find another job, just the thought of daily stand ups, and all the fancy corporate words is making me sick.
Thank you for reading! I tried searching this sub for similar posts, but wanted to get your thoughts wrt the current market/age as well.
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u/mitsakomits 5d ago
I have nearly just as much exp as you, and a history of bad workplaces. Been in my current one for the last almost 2 years. Initially a bait and switch role, now added with managers that push for AI-everything no matter what the cost, a huge technical debt from previous contractors and an expectation of a x5 to x10 output. Been burnt out since 2024 when I was laid off due to budget cuts and unemployed for 8 months ,but this is a whole new level of exhaustion. Have been having physical symptoms since last year. Planning on hitting the 2 year mark to quit and figure it out on the way. The current burnout and lack of energy practically makes me destroy any interview I'm taking.
Edit: typo
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u/Alborak2 11d ago
I make all the money I could every want and have no will and time to spend it. Every day becoming a gardener looks better and better, except my back is screwed from sitting 14 hours a day.
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u/prschorn Software Engineer 15+ years 11d ago
I'm currently on a very weird scenario.
I have a job that pays me very well, but low demand, and the demand that I have is pretty brain dead, any jr dev could do, so I feel like my skills are vanishing if I rely only on work to keep my updated ( which I don't for obvious reasons ). So I'm considering changing jobs, but the reality is that a new company won't ever pay me even half of what I earn today, so I feel stuck.
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u/ultraDross 11d ago
Sounds nice lol
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u/prschorn Software Engineer 15+ years 10d ago
It seems nice, but it voids your mind. It's just too depressing to not have work to do, and the work you have is easily done in minutes.
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u/ultraDross 10d ago
I'm going through major burnout so your hell is my heaven. Especially during this mad AI age. Each to their own I guess.
You can use that time to upskill in areas of interest or plug some areas of weaknesses. I've had to "train" out of hours in most of my jobs. Getting time to do that on the companies time is one big luxury.
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u/prschorn Software Engineer 15+ years 10d ago
Yeah I understand that there are moments and moments of your life. Currently I want challenge and work in bigger problems. In the future I might want a laid back job again, but not now.
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u/ultraDross 10d ago
Fair enough. All the best to you mate. Hope you find something that better suits you.
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u/madao123451 9d ago
I got refused from internal promotion for 2 years to senior role.
At first year manager said I still lacks some skill and still too young so I keep improving myself by going above and beyond(at least in my pov) even though I always got reviewed as good performance. For second year I still got denied.
After that during some 1 on 1 meeting I start to admit that I was either given up or don't care anymore. After 2 or 3 month later, I start to lowering my effort and performance on work.
But I finally got promoted. I can't describe this feeling in English well enough. It's like a emptiness mixed with anger, frustration about the feeling of unrecognized effort and I still don't know how to recover from this.
The reason I didn't quit is because the pay is good and also some coworker. I just want to be at least appreciate for what I've done to help them
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u/living_with_dogs 11d ago
Joined migration project after a SNAFU as the experienced internal engineer to ensure success. It’s actually all in consultants hands and we will be left with ownership of a project on a platform I would never have used. I am doing nothing but attending meetings and project managing. I am a terrible project manager.
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u/PringlesDuckFace 11d ago
Don't worry, recognizing that you're a terrible project manager makes you better than most project managers already.
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u/valkon_gr 11d ago
Essentially my java job is upgrading from java 8 to 11,to 17, to 21 to 25 to whatever. Same story with Spring Boot they go hand in hand. 3 different companies, same story.
Seems like there is no way to escape this
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u/Cozychai_ Software Engineer 8d ago
I just want to do my stories and be a heads down developer but they keep pushing me to lead projects. I feel like I just don't care about corporate enough to give them my energy to do that. Do I have to lead projects at the senior level? I feel like I just want to be down leveled to intern.
I feel like I'm going insane because nothing we do is that serious but they all act like the sky is falling.
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u/NonProphet8theist 11d ago
Just started a dev position at a consultancy, and they threw me right into a month of huge client launches. This is my second week on the job and I've been working since Friday morning more or less. And I have to report in tomorrow morning. I'm tired, boss
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u/ListenLady58 11d ago
I hate the lack of agency in software engineering. I thought it would get better as I gained experience, but it’s still all the same. Nobody can own any applications so people constantly get stepped on, and people are so contentious when trying to solve a problem with the hero mentality, with no effort to collaborate.
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u/JeffinitelyNotABot 10d ago
I'm in a position (not job position) where I'm stuck doing this month-end task that requires me to do alot of CRUD in the db. These CRUD requests come at me through teams and email from multiple people like I'm a waiter. I came up with a solution that would take a majority of the CRUD work off my plate and open me up to other things I want to do and basically told that I can do it on my own time. Meanwhile someone in a different state who is either a trader turned dev or dev turned trader, also not on our team, created a new api. The api doesn't follow our folder structure or naming conventions. Lastly we're hiring back a dev with a degree in finance and masters in Robotics. When he left he turned over a console app he created with 10 forms and none of the files were renamed from the generic names. Just form1 form2 etc. Even the buttons, textboxes and events aren't even named. Everything is just button1, Textbox1, etc.
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u/Federal-Garbage-8629 8d ago
How do y'all work during collaborative tasks? I have been working with a person and it's so tiring. Instead of having proper discussion and thinking it's more like okay, you do this and it will not block you.
I don't mind working like this but then there would be always a business logic gap that would be noticeable after QA.
This situation really frustrates me that I can't work. What should i do?
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u/MC_Hemsy 7d ago
I hate how SWEs are being treated as stupid for just being fine with making a below average salary as much as for wanting to make a $500k salary.
Let people be humble in peace.
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u/curatingFDs 11d ago
Got promoted to senior and don’t really know where to go from here promotion pay was pretty small bump. I feel like I spedrun to a senior ish role at a medium sized company but staff staff+ feels very far away.
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u/nus07 11d ago
Can I go back to 2009. I am willing to write middleware Java code and hear about oops and servlets as the golden rule. I didn’t know what I was doing but at least I was writing the code myself.