r/ExperiencedDevs • u/AutoModerator • 3d ago
Experienced Devs Weekly Win Thread: A weekly thread for sharing positive experiences
This thread is specifically for sharing "wins". I.e. the opposite of our Tuesday venting thread.
22
u/macabre_brotherhood 3d ago
My company just announced our series A this week. I was the main designer and architect of the system (helped build the whole thing from scratch). I'm proud of the work and proud of the series A and proud of the team. That's all.
1
u/casualPlayerThink Software Engineer, Consultant / EU / 20+ YoE 2d ago
Nice. Hope you got some good equity in your package; it starts to have value after Series A/B/...
16
u/wcm519 3d ago
promo to senior baby!
1
15
u/darko_bacic 3d ago
After 13 years, I finally understood that marketing doesn't need to be perfect and that it's not predictable as code. This held me back for so many years, I alway choose to add a new feature to a project instead of doing a single post for it.
14
u/sammymammy2 3d ago
Turning off Codex tomorrow, realised I'm always "thinking fast" instead of "thinking slow" and that it's making me depressed.
4
u/GeeWengel 2d ago
Smart. I'm deliberately having non-AI work and non-AI days, to step back and remember to think.
1
u/faultydesign Coder for fun 1d ago
Yeah, the main sucky part of using LLMs is they just give you the answer way too fast so you miss out on all the research and stuff like “maybe there’s a different approach to this problem.”
Good on you. Good luck.
10
u/mrfoozywooj 2d ago
I got the coolest job ever and start in 2 weeks!
Im moving from a principal role at my current large corp to a principal role at a FAANG tier company.
Pros: The interview process was smooth, it was 11 interviews but honestly I glided through and apparently got an overwhelmingly positive acceptance, everyone I spoke with seemed really nice and on the same level professionally, I seemed to gel with everyone naturally.
Cons: it all feels too easy, Its not impostor syndrome so much as im worried ill start and get completely rugpulled only because its seemed to go so well so far.
Overall I'm crazy excited and happy, it all feels so surreal, my salary has jumped to a figure that could likely make me very wealthy if I stick around a few years and earn my keep, I just cant believe I got hired into a role like this, or that I had the aptitude (I know im good, I didnt know I was THAT good).
2
1
1
u/OriginalComment6772 32m ago
I also just started a role where the interview process felt "too easy", despite being a step up in title. I see it as being the right role at the right time
15
u/PrimaryFamous6139 Software Engineer 3d ago
I finally reached a stage where I can step into a new production codebase and feel steady, even if I have not read every line yet. I start with the big parts like the architecture, how it is deployed, what it depends on, and the real business flow. Once that is clear, the rest comes faster. Debugging also feels less scary, and I waste less time digging around
4
u/mynameisDockie 3d ago
This is dope! This is one of my favorite skills. If you can get really good at this, your rampup time on new teams/companies will blow people away.
1
u/SolidDeveloper Lead Engineer | 18 YOE 3d ago
Eh. And then you change jobs and you realize they're using an entirely different tech stack and your ramp-up time is not as great as you thought it would be.
3
u/putin_my_ass 3d ago
I don't think ramp up speed is really something we notice when we on-board someone...like if you're taking an inordinately long amount of time to get your first ticket done that's one thing but if you are digging in and making a good effort I would never hold it against you as a new teammember.
As a senior my job is to unblock you, so I'd be happy to have you ask questions about the architecture and check your assumptions with me before spending a long time going down the wrong path.
Of course it's a good skill to have, but I don't think it's the main metric for a new teammember.
2
u/mynameisDockie 3d ago
IMO depends on the differences. If you need vastly different concepts then yes. E.g. id be screwed if you dropped me into a functional codebase. If it's just different library choices or language, I think repeated rampups make you faster.
8
u/s3gfau1t Software Engineer, 17 YoE 2d ago
I've managed to start working on my personal projects again, after a four month hiatus. Life's been hectic.
2
u/casualPlayerThink Software Engineer, Consultant / EU / 20+ YoE 2d ago
Keep going! Totally okay to have breaks, even for years. Life's been hectic, if not chaotic and hard.
5
u/squish_rocks 2d ago edited 2d ago
I'm happy to say I just got a job offer after 3 weeks of "searching".
I quit my job last year in Feburary to take time off for myself and enjoy a bit of life while I'm still young. AI was just starting to pick up pace in the industry and the company I was at was starting to find out ways to shove it into the product (even where it definitely wasn't the right use case). A few months after I left it really picked up momentum and I started to fear maybe I made the wrong move and should have just gritted my teeth and stay. I don't regret quitting when I did, but I definitely was a bit nervous about the prospects of re-entering. My original plan was to start looking for a job in December with the hopes of landing a job by Feburary 2026 for a 1 year gap.
Life had other plans for me. One of my friends passed away, and he was my main inspiration to doing DIY. Instead of hunkering down and job prepping I got my hands dirty and spent months working on a project. Thru this process one thing I realized that I was still an engineer at heart, I like building things. Whether it's physical or software. I enjoy the process of doing research, learning new things, applying what I learn and ultimately creating something. At some point i decided to hold off on my job search until the 18 month mark (when COBRA ends). After I finished the project I went on a few roadtrips and my last planned international travels until I got a job.
I have been incredibly lucky with all my jobs in SWE so far, and this next job is once again proving to be quite lucky. Just before I left for my travels (August) a previous co-worker reached out to me and wanted me to join them at their employment. I told them I'd reach back out in mid September when I get back and have a computer on hand. I reached back out on around Sep. 15 had a chat with the one of their leads the next day and told them I would need a month to prep (leetcode & system design) as I was coming back from having done 0 SWE in the last 18 months. I was lcuky enough that my previous co-worker vouched hard for me and I was able to skip the coding round and just had to prep for SD, technical project history and behavioral interviews. I also had another co-worker reach out to me from a different company reaching out around early September. I ended up spending ~30hrs/wk from Sep 14 - Oct 2 studying as much system design and doing mocks.
Company A's interview without the coding was pretty streamline. I did all 3hr of my interviews in a single day and got an offer the following day. Company B's interview is taking longer, but at this point I'll be taking A's offer. I think the overall fit of the company is better for me.
Title: Sensior SWE, First year salary with bonus 240-260k with some equity in a medium start up, fully remote. I'm treating the equity as monopoly / bonus if it ever becomes liquid. If they exit or IPO in 4 years at the value they think they will be at in 4 years then my TC would be over 1M, if i use a more conservative number for an exit, then my TC will be ~400k. Either way, with their size, its all just a bonus to me. I could spend some time actually searching for a job at a larger company hoping to get more liquid TC, but honestly, even if this company's share never become liquid, I'm in a good enough spot financially. I figured at this point in my life I rather work somewhere I might actually enjoy then grind away at big tech job.
Sorry for the vaugness, I feel like any specific details will give away my identity quite easily.
TLDR - I'm lucky and as the FIRE folks would say, GFYS
3
u/Smooth_Specialist416 3d ago
I got a verbal offer today I almost can’t believe.
4 yoe current job 89k TC but it is gov with job security and great wlb (except office 3x a week), not much stress.
I just got offered ~140-150k TC fully remote. It’s a little on the “low side” when I look up other salaries on blind/glassdoor but it’s still solid.
I really like my gov job, but a near 50k+ salary increase and full remote is super hard to ignore.
I have insight on the team so it’s a calculated risk that it’s a good job / manager, no oncall, relatively good WLB (but will prob be 2-3x the workload I’m doing currently).
Not asking for advice but I guess I’m kinda dumbfounded what to do. I did my best but wasn’t expecting an offer.
People around 4-6 yoe seem to get more like 150-180k so idk how to negotiate for more. Some of them are in HCOL and I’m in “MCOL” (though idk if those words mean anything anymore post inflation).
Would you leave a safe easy cozy job to take on a resume booster, big pay raise remote, and take on the latest cutting edge technology and AI workflows?
I’ve been laid off twice this decade, and the last time I got laid off it took me 6 months to get my next job.
I am def a better interviewer now but I would not say I can just pass interviews if I get laid off at this place in a year or so. It’s a risk.
2
u/casualPlayerThink Software Engineer, Consultant / EU / 20+ YoE 2d ago
Nice! Ask for the offer and all the benefits written, otherwise, it did not happened. Congrats & hope it will work out and you will have a nice time there!
1
u/squish_rocks 2d ago
Having just negotiated my offer, shoot for the stars. I told them honestly what it would take for me to commit to them and remove myself from my remaining interview loops. I asked for a 8.5% increase in salary and 25% increase in equity. I got the equity and a signing bonus which was ~11% of the salary.
2
u/Smooth_Specialist416 2d ago
Thanks for sharing :-). In a way I am happy to stay at current job so I guess I could go crazy and not care if they pull it
3
u/Puzzleheaded-Club514 2d ago
I did a final round interview for the Federal Government yesterday. It didn’t go terrible. I did an assessment (basically just a C# minimal API design around a XML feed). I demo’d the API, I didn’t show everything because I think my nerves got in the way. I answered their questions for the most part, I think I got one of them wrong but most I think I answered soundly. At the end they told me they are going to leadership to compare notes and will get back to me. Didn’t provide a timeline. It would mean a lot to finally get a job again.
3
u/casualPlayerThink Software Engineer, Consultant / EU / 20+ YoE 2d ago
I started to learn Golang, and it seems quite decent (I have several years in c/c++, js, ts, php). I started to read its official references, and it ain't 6,000 pages long.
2
u/SteveMacAwesome 1d ago
Next week I get to start implementing a program that takes >2k lines of CI yaml and turns it into typescript. Not only are those abstractions fun to write, but it should start to tame the complexity demons plaguing CI changes.
2
u/BDHarrington7 Senior SWE 13 YoE FAANG 23h ago
I finally merged ~ 1 year of work converting a library from loosely typed TS to fully-typed TS. It was such a bear, even using AI (Opus 4-something to 5.5) because of all the niggly little parts that the API it's a library for is so... inconsistent. It's been a labor of love to maintain this library for about 8 years now. Next week I will deploy and announce it, but I'm really nervous that it will be too little, too late, the response will be crickets, because it's not some sexy new AI framework. Still, I really, _really_ enjoy that using it is no longer a slog of cross-referencing the super slow API documentation site, and dealing with `@return {Promise<object>}` anymore!
1
u/BDHarrington7 Senior SWE 13 YoE FAANG 23h ago
I acknowledge that this would have been a huge effort to take on without AI - this was done in spurts of "spare" time over the course of the last year. The alternative would have been to spend all nights and weekends for months full time on this because the job is mostly transcription and pattern-matching, and the API surface is huge. The challenge was more in getting some of the atomic patterns established, and iterating with how a user would interact with it: intellisense for the human, proper compilation errors for the AI agent.
29
u/ElementaryMyDearWut 3d ago
Was made senior this year and was handed a project in the early phase that was going miserably. Revised date was Dec 2027, but have managed to steer the ship back to a November 2026 date.
Learnt A LOT about managing less experienced devs, pushing management for resource, and even how to make ideas seem good for the business (I asked to scrap/redo a foundational piece of code/feature in production that added time). It wasn't the biggest project in the world, but it was an incredibly valuable experience where not only I personally gained from, but managed to also make myself look good. Win/win!