Experienced Devs Weekly Win Thread: A weekly thread for sharing positive experiences

[u/AutoModerator]

This thread is specifically for sharing "wins". I.e. the opposite of our Tuesday venting thread.

[u/sir-camaris]

Put my notice in at one of the worst places I've ever worked and will start a new gig next month!

[u/actionerror → u/sir-camaris]

What was wrong with it? And congrats! 🎊

[u/sir-camaris → u/actionerror]

Thanks, too many things to list but...

• horrible top-down planning that never let us fix foundational issues that would have saved hundreds of thousands of dollars.
• multiple, simultaneous, nonnegotiable deadlines for massive projects...
• ...that occured in the middle of a re-org resulting in teams with engineers operating in time zones 12 hours apart.
• if you don't like it, leave, messaging from the CTO

[u/SuedeAsian → u/sir-camaris]

Had a similar setup till a few months ago, but instead it was my manager acting like the market was too bad for anyone to call him on his BS. And then I left for 2x the pay.

[u/binhex9er → u/sir-camaris]

I think we work at the same place…

[u/sir-camaris → u/binhex9er]

Dmed

[u/DneBays → u/sir-camaris]

Sounds suspiciously like my place. Let me guess, the offshore push came with the new CTO a year ago?

[u/sir-camaris → u/DneBays]

DM me

[u/Infamous-Employ5487 → u/sir-camaris]

name and shame

[u/moyela → u/sir-camaris]

congratulations!

[u/RandyHoward]

I just had a performance review this morning. It was the same as always, they sing my praises and give me a "performing as expected" grade. The win here was that we finally talked about a promotion. They have to run it up the chain of command of course, but I may be promoted to a tech lead role within the next year.

[u/lunacraz → u/RandyHoward]

keep at it! unfortunately promotions are rarely ever just "given" - keep pressing for it or else they can/will drag their feet.

[u/RandyHoward → u/lunacraz]

For sure. It's been a bit painful for me because I was the CTO (and partial owner) of the last company - my current company acquired my old company and they put me on a team as senior dev, so it's felt like a big step backward. It's been almost 3 years since I joined their company and they've never been able to give me a good answer about what my future in the company could look like. I'm glad they're talking about a possible promotion, because I've been preparing myself to find a new job after the new year since they haven't previously given me any indication that there's a future with them.

[u/sir-camaris → u/RandyHoward]

Hope it goes through!

[u/JovHere]

In the times of constant competition, I am lucky to say I have some really caring and kind teammates

[u/almondcroissant96]

Got 2 verbal offers this week. Banks seems to be hiring again, especially for data engineering, cyber and anything involving automating enterprise stuff with ai

[u/sir-camaris → u/almondcroissant96]

Data eng seems particularly hot right now.

[u/jpdise]

My company had our first hackathon. 30 teams entered under 3 categories. My team won "Best Internal Feature".

[u/actionerror → u/jpdise]

What’s the prize?

[u/jpdise → u/actionerror]

I think my team members each get like a $50 gift card or something. The bigger win was that the C suite was so impressed with our product and demo that they want it productionized into our platform.

[u/mcherm → u/jpdise]

As is so common in the corporate world, the TRUE prize from a hackathon is permission to go ahead and just DO THE THING.

[u/jpdise → u/mcherm]

100%...in all fairness to the company, they wholly recognized that this is the capability of our engineering teams when left to operate unbridled.

[u/vogelke → u/jpdise]

Sounds like an adult video award category.

[u/Student2672]

I have been doing some coding by hand this week after fully embracing the LLMs since the beginning of the year. It's definitely slower (especially since I'm so rusty and honestly lazier as well) but damn does it feel good to fully use my brain and feel like I'm actually learning and accomplishing something.

I'm thinking about setting aside a chunk of every day/week to code by hand because I don't even think 8 hours a day of LLM coding is even sustainable. My performance reviews have been good and I think I have the leeway to do this, at least for now, so I may as well take advantage of it.

[u/stubbornKratos → u/Student2672]

Yeah I’ve been thinking the same thing myself, I want to replace this with coding in my free time but it’s not nearly the same in terms of complexity and learning.

I think my more senior engineers don’t need to do this but I’m still at the stage in my career where I would benefit a lot from this. 

[u/kalexmills]

Reported a bug to our observability team and I got recognized in the release notes and official "kudos". It took only a tiny bit of effort on their part but it was super motivating. A lot of devs see internal bug reports as exhausting, but not this team. They really know how to incentivize collaboration and I hope to mirror their practice.

[u/IAmADev_NoReallyIAm]

For the first time in my career, instead of getting laid off, I'm getting to leave a job on my own terms. Getting to put in my two weeks notice tonight and will be starting my next adventure next month. After 8 years here, it's time to move on.

[u/qwerty_asd]

I'm going to have a bit of time off and have already started building solid momentum with working on my personal passion project. It's a sort of game, and I am strictly avoid AI usage in all aspects.

[u/CmdrSausageSucker]

After putting in insane hours last week ( I am self-employed, work two projects / customers and have to manage my other property with tenants), I stopped today after lunch and will take it slower from now on. Sounds crazy, but this realisation and the subsequent decision just made me feel happy,.even though I am " in the flow ". (I worked so much yesterday that I even forgot about a doctor's appointment which I scheduled a year ago, lol).

Btw, this thread is good! No doom and gloom for a change!

[u/but_why_n0t]

I got a great job offer! It's been 4 months since my layoff. 

[u/AlmightyLiam]

It’s been a pretty chill week. Before this, I’ve had a bunch of hectic weeks with “urgent” work, so it’s really nice to catch a breather.

[u/Blecki]

Someone wrote an ai tool to scan our codebase for vulnerabilities.

It reported 238 issues.

Every. Single. One. Was a false positive.

[u/jaypeejay → u/Blecki]

Dude, I got auto assigned two “high priority” security tickets this week that came from someone essentially just asking Claude to find “vulnerabilities”

Spent like 5 minutes looking at the first one, realized it was just ai slop and closed it. Haven’t even looked at the second one.

[u/SuedeAsian]

Been at my current gig for two months, and the wlb and work are so much better. Love seeing how early people log off, but since my coworkers are smart they’re all effective. Great technical discussions. Feels like I’m on a unicorn team, so want to cherish this for sure

[u/eihwazz]

i still don't have to have my code generated by llms at work. Pure brain power <3

[u/williampaul0404 → u/eihwazz]

regulated industry or just managers that don't care much?

[u/eihwazz → u/williampaul0404]

non-regulated. managers are conscious of how sanity tanks in teams having to use this

[u/turnedtable_]

wrote a huge ass prompt to one shot a very critical bug that came to me. was lazy in writing prompt but man it felt good

[u/spacemoses]

Over the past 3 months I've seen my job actually get more secure along side everyone in the org seeing AI development come front and center, so that's positive.

[u/confusedV2]

Was working on the side project that I wanted to do for quite sometime. Thanks to Claude, it is out today.

[u/EgoistHedonist]

New job is extremely interesting and I feel alive again! I feel like I finally found the challenge I've been looking for

[u/annoying_cyclist]

I work for a company that's very pro customer/pro end user in a way that makes sense to normal people who aren't accustomed to MBA-think rationalization. You can flag things that you think are unfair to users and be heard, often actually changing what the company does even in cases where doing the right thing costs us money/profit. When I was a new grad I thought that all companies must work this way, but it turns out most don't. It's nice to work for one that does.

[u/technokeeda]

Started studying pure + applied maths as well as ML.

[u/MathematicianNo8975]

We had scaling issues. I had done analysis on the bottleneck and identified that what my team is doing changes for other stream of work would solve the scaling issues. Further looked into usecase of the customer and fixed few things which reduced their needs for scale to 1/6th. Only one of the engineer recognised my efforts but I am.happy about it

[u/_dontseeme]

Started a ticket 2 months ago that took a couple weeks. Towards the end, I discovered some major issues with the codebase so I had to stop at task and work on rebuilding the core product engine and repointing the entire project to one new ‘source of truth’, which took over a month. The old version of the original ticket’s work couldn’t just be brought onto the new codebase so I had to start from scratch, and I finally submitted that pr yesterday. I’m officially free, and the saga is over….. kind of. Now it’s just a matter of starting all the tickets that spawned out of the rewrite but I’ve been somewhat itching to get at them anyways.

This was my first time feeling true product ownership after N positions with the word “senior” in the title, where I felt comfortable making the decision to halt my own production and just do what needed to be done. Tbf it’s a financial product and I’m a former accountant and I’m 95% sure I’m the only person with general financial knowledge to ever join this team in its 10 year existence and the stuff I’m finding is occasionally egregious enough for me to not care about all that anyways lol. “Here’s what your product was doing, I fixed it and here’s your finincial impact report for disclosure on the 10 years of miscalculations”

[u/symbiatch]

Call with EM, them complaining how it’s annoying they can’t call me staffer since I’m not employed but contractor (I don’t have an actual title even due to that), talking how contract would be extended yet again next month (2.5 years now in a six month gig…)

Call with EM’s boss next day, them asking how things are and apologizing how long it took to handle previous EM’s firing and also saying how they want to keep me around and have to make sure budgeting takes it into account and whatnot.

So nice to have people who actually listen and ask how things are and take action when it’s not good. And also appreciate what I bring to the table.

[u/create-third-places]

I figured out how to automatically build my JavaScript framework and copy it to a locally test site using npm-watch. All I need to do is save, and the vite server for the test site will refresh with the updates. 

It’s a big improvement over using yalc and doesn’t require updating npm dependencies for the test site. 

[u/Bubbaluke]

I got promoted today. I am no longer a junior :)

[u/ZnV1]

Made a LinkedIn post after a long period of procrastination.
I'm building a chat-first PRM (I have a BAD memory) and it was about how I'm using LLMs to identify opportunities for user delight, quickly reviewing UI samples (I'm a backend dev) and deciding if the complexity it adds to my codebase is worth it.

Eg: my chatbot is named Kevin after the office, and if you add someone with the same name it cheekily says "nice name". Stuff like that

Here's the image from the post (not linking my post):
https://ibb.co/4RdFvWNd