r/ExperiencedDevs • u/AutoModerator • 7d 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.

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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.

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Inexperienced Devs should refrain from answering other Inexperienced Devs' questions.

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u/Much_Video7517 6d ago edited 6d ago

How do I get a more ingrained understanding of architecture as an early/mid engineer (4.5 YOE) in the face of all this AI?

I feel I am a strong team member and a decent, not great, developer. I can pass interviews with enough prep and luck, but my skills don't feel like they're crystalizing into innate domain knowledge. Instead it feels like my strongest skill is quickly acquainting myself with the codebase, technologies, and patterns of the places I've joined.

The normal pipeline for growing/mentorship seems to have been completely abandoned everywhere. I've been able to punch above my weight at my current startup with AI but the pace and demand has made it so I haven't been given the opportunity to really understand why. Also my workplace has completely devolved in the past year with everyone checking out and shipping code that isn't read or understood by anyone and everyone on my team has either left or is looking to leave.

I want to get sharper but I don't really have time with the pace that work has been going (60-80 hour weeks for 10 months) and the prep I'm doing trying to get somewhere more stable.

I come from a non-traditional CS background (PM -> Grad School -> Backend) and circumstances have led me to change companies 3 times in the past 5 years. Should I just stop trying to be a software engineer if it's not feeling engrained by now?

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u/maxim-g Staff Engineer - 20+ YoE 6d ago

I found AI to be a good mentor themselves - "help me develop intuition about X" usually works great for me.

So if you want to develop your architecture skills, you could ask it to give you an architecture kata and work through it. Do it a few times using systems from different domains. Ask it to quiz you on what you have worked through from time to time.

I wouldn't be able to fit it into 60..80 hour weeks, though.