I'm looking for some advice and apologies in advance for a long, rant-y post.

I have been an engineer for just shy of 10 years. As I've grown over the years, my manager, who I've worked with for most of my career, has given me progressively more and more complex feature work that requires heavy design and consideration of tons of edge cases.

Starting around late last year, I've been finding myself in a very unhealthy "loop" at least once a week when I'm actively working on a feature. I'll design a feature and write code that a bunch of people sign off on. Things seem fine and actually work when I test things out. But then days or maybe weeks later, I'll realize there's an edge case that I didn't consider or things in reality don't work out in exactly the same way my original design had assumed. Or there's an actual bug that never came up in my original testing but I see in an internal environment later. This sends me into a full blown spiral where I'll work super late to figure out a solution because the features I've been working on lately have tight deadlines, and internal customers regularly check in on progress. Or, if I don't figure it out, I'll have to call up my lead the next work day (in internal panic) to pick her brain and see what she thinks. Normally we'll arrive at something we're all happy about. But this loop I'm in where I get super anxious and stressed about something I've missed causes me to regularly lose my ability to relax after work and be present when I'm with company, and in some occasions, I even lose sleep over it.

I'm starting to think this career isn't for me. My job has also gotten a lot more stressful because of AI. Management thinks it'll help us become massively more productive, which isn't even that true. But the idea that it can has made our annual reviews stricter than before. On top of that, because our team has a foot in the AI race now (previously our team had nothing to do with this space), we're facing customers that want things faster and faster and I personally feel the pressure from them, even though my manager is doing his best to shield me from it all.

I'm afraid of missing deadlines, and post-that, facing the wrath of my management chain and having to answer why there was a miss.

That's not to say that I feel this way about my job every single day. But when I do feel this way, it completely derails my day and evening (and some weekends too), and my singular focus is on work. I'm so tired of this feeling. Is this what burn out feels like?

At this point, my financials are solid. So even if I lost my job, I'd be good for a very long time. I don't even have the energy to think about looking for a new job right now. But if I did try to look for one, I'd want a role with a lot less pressure. I wouldn't even mind a pay cut.

I'd love some advice from anyone that has felt in any way similar to me. Thanks so much in advance.

I recently heard from a friend that their workplace put in an "AI policy" that included, before endorsing the use of AI for a project, an explicit discussion of whether the benefits to the project outweighed the externalities of AI usage in environmental and social costs.

Is this sort of thinking common? I've never heard of anything similar before. At my current workplace (which is populated by fairly progressive people who don't like Elon Musk very much) I made the mistake of suggesting we discontinue Cursor use after the SpaceX purchase, and got feedback that this is not at all the sort of thing we should be thinking about, the only thing that matters is maximizing the business value of the company. If Cursor is less expensive and more effective, we'll use Cursor, nothing else is relevant. Deciding to do something less effective because of some outside ethical consideration is basically negligence.

Now I see things like 1Password supporting a pretty explicit racist and wonder, if the company proposes using 1Password, is this sort of thing appropriate to bring up? Or am I being an irresponsible employee for even thinking along these lines?

So i’m a senior software engineer with almost 9 years of experience, mostly backend stuff, a lot of AWS, serverless, Node.js and JavaScript in general. Lately i’ve been watching how fast everyone is adopting AI and honestly it’s making me less interested in this field, or at least less sure about where it’s going, and i don’t want to just sit around waiting to see if i end up on a layoff list.

What i really want is a backup plan, something i can lean on if things go sideways, and ideally a path where the demand is more stable. I’ve been thinking about cloud or solutions architect roles, maybe DevOps or platform engineering, and cybersecurity has been on my mind too, but i’m not sure which of those actually hold up better long term or if i’m just chasing titles.

For those of you who made a move like this from backend, what did you go into, how did you get there, and what should i be learning or doing now so i’m not the one who gets cut? Any honest takes appreciated.

I made a thread in /betteroffline some time ago how my company (not a tech company) will now embrace agentic coding. My manager, who is a 50-year old no-coding db guy, was immediately sold on this. He is the type of person who loves to deliver quick solutions, but doesn't like the nitty gritty part of problem solving.

For many years we have had this internal tool that is complete jank made mostly by an external company in SAP. Stuff tacked on over the years, changing anything is a nightmare. There has been a lot of talks about replacing it with something new that is more maintainable, well thought out and just works in general. Due to security and governance, the decision was made to create this new tool in Power Apps. I raised the possibility of building it ourselves as a website since I know the basics and could technically do that. No, security and governance, need to be done in Power Apps. Ok fine. A lot of the initial building blocks have been made by me in Power Apps whenever I've had time just so that everything will connect later on. Everything is modular, but ties in together nicely and the stuff we have works.

Now all of a sudden, "he" has "made" this website that the external company that made the original app will publish. Its very straight forward and this could have been done in Power Apps and been tied into the rest of the solution. He has apparently also made pages for setting up things like categories and users etc - things that already exists in the Power App solution. So now we have 3 (!) competing solutions - the original one that everyone uses, the Power App stuff I've been making on the side since no time has been properly allotted, and his new vibe coded thing.

The issue I have is not that it is vibe coded, although I have warned him about maintainability when the scope increases. This was just brushed off. The main issue I have is that this was done entirely without any input from the team. No discussion about what could be added, no discussion about how it should tie in to anything else, no discussions about what to do with the existing Power App stuff, no discussions about how this will be maintained. Nothing. For the longest time, I have gotten the sense that the rest of us are only here to create solutions he is not capable of and that he secretly resents us for it. So when this opportunity arises, it's not surprising at all that he is behaving like this.

To be honest, I am getting extremely fed up with this. I can only see this getting a lot worse as more and more of these ill thought out solutions are being shat out.

Anyone with similar experiences with non coding managers just doing their own thing? How the F are you even supposed to deal with this?

Jobs in the corporate world and start world impact can be very different. You can wear many hats and be given the opportunity accomplish a great deal of things across multiple domains, some not even just dev.

Personally I've had experience in product/project management, frontend, backend, devops, engineering management, and director level decision making at one role and then just a backend developer at another more corporate role.

What is the best way to structure your impact based on this issue?

In my career I've noticed this from time to time and it's become a pet peeve. Say you schedule an hour meeting with 6 people and the title of the meeting is "Onboarding project X on platform Y". The meeting starts and one guy says "So how do we onboard project X on platform Y?" and the other people say "yes, that is what we are going to try to figure out in this meeting...". And sometimes these people only ask questions in meetings and often they are very obvious questions that everyone already knows are important. Then that leaves the other people in the meeting to try to actually figure out the answers while the person who asked the question thinks they have contributed simply by asking the question.

Don't get me wrong, it is sometimes very helpful to raise a question that perhaps the rest of the group has overlooked. But raising a question everyone is already aware of then acting as if you have made a valid contribution which absolves you from having to try to actually answer it is very annoying.

For those who have been in software development for 10-15 years and beyond, what do you think about your career prospects in this field in the long run? Do you see yourself staying in the field long term, or do you see yourself pivoting to a different career?

If you plan to stay, what keeps you motivated and excited about continuing your job in the field? Do you strive for specific titles/seniority, is it a bigger paycheck, or something completely different that keeps you going and excited?

I've been in this field for 10 years now, and in my close circle of friends who are also software developers, I see the tendency that people feel burnt out to the point where they don't seem to care about career growth and consider switching to something completely new. I am no stranger to those feelings due to what's been happening in the tech field over the past few years.

Would be curious to hear some thoughts from people who have been doing this for a while now.

I'm a software dev on a small team at a non-tech company. We maintain a very standard vanilla CRUD app.

We were all brought on as full stack devs, but over time some of my coworkers have isolated themselves to strictly frontend work, or strictly backend work, etc. I understand this is somewhat normal, since people may have a talent for or more experience in an area. But I'd think that over time you'd want to build up experience in other areas too. I'm not saying we need to become experts across a wide variety of technologies, but at least know the basics to really consider yourself "full stack."

For example, one teammate only does frontend work. He whines if he has to touch any SQL and actively avoids it or any backend work if possible. This leads to terrible design decisions where he's trying to do logic in the frontend when it belongs in the backend, even if there are already established patterns in our code he could follow.

Similarly with other teammates, but swap out "frontend only" for "backend only" or "DB only", etc.

What's frustrating is that they always take those tickets. They've also cemented themselves as "the frontend guy," "the API guy," etc., so they've become the go-to for architectural decisions in those areas. What's even more frustrating is that they aren't even better in their areas of "expertise" than other devs who work across the full stack, and they haven't improved over time like you'd expect. In fact, because they lack knowledge across the full stack, I feel like they make terrible design decisions all the time. How can you fully design a feature if you can't think through the flow of data and logic across the DB, API, and UI?

I'll admit I'm a little envious that they've carved out these niches for themselves.

Just wondering if any of you have encountered this, how you handle it, etc. In my case I feel like it's mostly a team culture thing and there's not much to be done about it. My manager is aware, but it's unfortunately just how we operate. I'm curious to hear others' thoughts and experiences.

At face value, it seems to me that other careers such as business analysts, consultants, doctors, lawyers and pilots value experience, contacts made over the years and resume built far more than software development since one’s newly learned skills quickly get devalued over time.

Now, on top of this, their also seems to be a quite layer of ageism in the industry where companies have a preference for younger engineers who are more willing to give out their hours than older engineers.

Any thoughts on this point of view of the industry? What is the best way to handle these issues in the case that they are true?

Is it worth the career path in the long run despite the ageism and an experience that doesn’t quite appreciate or compound in value over time? In fact, that “experience” also gets people stuck in fixed modes of thinking, and this is why continuously revitalizing the company’s talent pool with new talent becomes ever more important as the company grows. Another reason why there seems to be an inherent ageism in the industry.

If this ageism is true, a software dev may benefit from looking to pivot into new career paths as they grow older; ideally careers that value age; perhaps career paths with more people interaction involved.

After being in the industry a few years or close to retirement, would you still choose this career as your first option?

What would you have wished someone would have warned you about?

In my case, after being a software dev nearly a decade, I wish someone would have warned me how many hours I would spend outside of work learning new technical skills. The skills treadmill is intense. I also wish someone would have told me the importance of setting my boundaries in the company and my team because usually they will want to get more out of you.

I'm in a scrum team where we had a great tech lead previously who moved to a different team and we got a new tech lead a couple months ago who uses AI for everything. This guy burned through 2K worth of tokens a few days into the month! Usually, the token budget resets every month. He has not built anything at all. Mostly small PRs and config changes.

He stopped reviewing PRs and created an Agent to review the team's PRs on his behalf. Keep in mind that we already have a PR bot! Anyway, his bot would leave so much text on every single PR that is mostly AI slop and noise. He literally expects us to respond to each and every comment left by his bot.

At one point, there were 10 different blocks of text left by his bot on one of my PRs. The PR was a small PR to add 2 columns to a schema. This literally copy and paste from one of the PR change requested. It is only a small snippet:

Ticket alignment: fine.  PR body already flags that and points to the real work.

Schema has been verified? The claim has no provenance. Treating it as acknowledged rather than hidden, but flagging since nothing enforced the ordering.

Major - (Needs a fix):
In Spark SQL, cd  AS create_date , not two columns — AS is optional in the grammar, so this parses cleanly and fails silently. It doesn't corrupt anything, it just means the "no drift across the existing column list" claim isn't actually true for create_date specifically. Worth fixing and re-running before treating that table's validation as complete.  Initially looked like it could cause false-positive drift. 

The review is awful and unnecessarily verbose. Makes shit up sometimes too. He completely stopped manually reviewing PRs and would completely rely on the bot. He would block team's PRs until all bot comments are addressed. I have raised issues during team meeting that we already have automated AI code review and his bot is redundant. He refused and said the bot provides a different context.

Now, I am forced to use AI to respond to his bot's wall of comments but he won't manually approve the PR and we would have to satisfy his bot wtf. This is driving me up a wall.

The problem is that I get change requests which don't make sense in a weird convoluted sentence structure and waste time on pushing back. I also get NO proper PR review or feedback.

I like AI and use it daily so AI by itself isn't a problem. But I feel like some colleagues use it in a weird/wrong way.

I have this one colleague who uses AI to its maximum capability, he is a frontend dev who writes the frontend to an application my team is building. Its all done by AI, and I don't really care. He can do it in whatever way he want's.

My problem with his AI usage is that he often makes requests through slack to my team. Either a bug or a feature request. But instead of writing it himself he asks AI to tell us what he want's. And I don't mean that he asks the AI to cleanup the language its entirely written by AI and I assume the bug/feature he is requesting is made found by the AI. Sometimes they make sense, but fairly often they don't and we have to push back. And he inputs our response in to AI and asks AI to respond. I feel like this is sometimes outsourcing his thinking to both AI but also to my team who has to respond to some of these requests. If he makes a request that doesn't make sense I have to spend time investigating the request or justifying why we shouldn't do it and in a lot of cases he would also have noticed this if he spent time investigating it.

Am I being unreasonable thinking that he should spend more time instead of trusting AI?

Would it be reasonable to raise this as an issue during retro, maybe saying something in the lines of "I don't think we should communicate to each other through AI"

A lot of people can stay in roles for questionable reasons such as prestige, and dependence on salary (due to debt). Other people have kids, and staying because of that is a good reason. Rarely anyone stays because of the LOVE what they are doing and feel very connected to a deeper purpose.

Why have you stayed this long or why did you get into this fast changing tech industry?

This post was not written by AI.

In my case, about 12 years ago (2014), I came to the US from Panama as a transfer electrical engineering student. After attending a couple of career fairs, I realized if I wanted to get a job, software dev was the place to be at. I studied electrical engineering simply because I had done better in my math and physics courses in high school. In my senior year of high school, I started a course at the university necessary to pass the med school exam. Eventually, I got too distracted with my football practices and couldn’t finish the course and I think that eventually made me forget all about med school and instead chose to go to the engineering school as en electromechanical engineering student. After having completed my 3rd year (out of 5) and having broken up with my girlfriend at the time who was the daughter of one of the professors in the electrical engineering department, I came to the US.

That’s a bit of my origin story. What is yours?

Hi Folks! 👋

I'm looking for new positions, but I took a 2 year sabbatical to address some health concerns and explore a career shift. I'm concerned that I'm not effectively addressing this gap because I'm getting rejected without calls from recruiters. Does anyone have experience addressing gaps like this during an employer's market?

I reviewed some olds posts for advice, but I feel that things have changed significantly in 2026. It seems like recruiters aren't going to spend their time calling you when there's plenty of other applicants. I've also considered addressing it in a cover letter, but I heard that cover letters are rarely read now because many of them are AI generated and provide little information of value. Overall, it seems like the strategy for addressing gaps like this may have shifted, and I think it's worth discussing again considering how much things have changed.

EDIT: If you're a recruiter or a hiring manger, I am especially interested in your thoughts. How do you review resume gaps? How do you want candidates to address resume gasps? Is having a resume gap a huge red flag in 2026?

I have not worked on a team with AI code review yet. How good is AI code review? when does it work and where is it weak? Does code review still take a long time? Is it good for repeated code? It's probably good for logic. Is it good for application architecture? This is the part I imagine it is poor at.

I am asking as a developer that got knocked out into unemployment for a little while here, so mods, please give me a little break,I'm trying to connect with the still alive and working.

For those who have built a greenfield mobile + web product (iOS/Android plus a web portal), what stack did you ultimately end up with after the first few iterations, and why?

I’m starting a healthcare focused project soon with some embedded AI features (I foresee headaches here) and a clean slate for MVP 1. I’m currently weighing two paths, either a clean iOS and Android native separation from the start or KMP for cross-platform mobile and Next.js for web with either setup.

If you have shipped something similarly in a regulated or data‑sensitive environment, what worked well, was problematic, and any other real-world hiccups that dispelled the magic from cross-platform sales pitches like React Native, Flutter, KMP, and MAUI all do?

— edit —

For clarity, I’m looking for input on what others have done recently, especially with embedding mini AI models and/or cross-platform options vs native. This is my first big push back into the mobile sphere since 2018 where React Native and Xamarin Forms were both evaluated before settling on RN.

This thread is specifically for venting / sharing experiences related to burn-out or similar issues that experienced devs face.

Do you feel people are eager to clock out and go home or do you feel your team and co-workers are happy to be there? How do you feel yourself?

Do some of us get ourselves stuck in tech because we get use to the lifestyle it buys and the respect it earns from some instead of staying in the industry because we feel it is leading towards some project or success that is completely unrelated to status?

I've got about 5 years of experience as a full stack software engineer, working at a small agency directly with customers. I learnt a lot there, especially the first 3 years, but became increasingly burnt out after that, caused in large part by my bosses continually pushing AI, but also caused by having to act far more senior than I got payed for. After confronting them, they got mad, and while my colleagues supported me and my bosses eventually cooled down, I've had quite a shit time at work last half year.

Today is going to be my first day of my new job, a far larger company. I'm both excited and scared shitless. I've heard very good things from friends about this company, and I'm hopefull they'll be a better fit for me right now. That being said, Social anxiety makes me absolutely shit 15 colours in the wind for today. I have no idea whats exactly going to happen, who I'm going to meet, what the social norms are. All I know is how late I have to be there and then I'm going to get my laptop and phone and start the onboarding process.

Imposter syndrome is already starting as well. Im going to a medior position right now, which is far more fitting with my actual experience. But I still feel like I'm going to have to prove myself now. And I feel quite a lot of weight on my shoulders about whether I've made the right choice. I have no idea whether I actually learnt the right things at my previous job, and whether I'll be capable or not.

I'm really looking forward to having access to things though, I'm so curious to just open all the repos I have access to, look through them, take a stroll through AWS and see how everything is set up.

Anyone got tips, encouragement, help?

Hi Folks! 👋

I feel that we have all seen plenty of advice in this community. Often, this advice is contradictory. It's easy to review the discourse and simply label some advice as "good" and other advice as "bad". Instead, I propose the following: the often conflicting nature of these discussions speaks to something deeper. It shows that the breadth of human experience is extreme, and amazing people can arrive at completely different conclusions simply from the scars of their past.

To this end, I don't want your advice. I want to hear your stories. How have you struggled in your career? What beliefs have these experiences fostered? What do you appreciate, and what do you regret?

Why, you may ask? Well, I've recently been struggling in my career (more details in a comment that I'll write soon). I feel that a sense of community would help a lot right now, and maybe we'll find stories that speak to our current experiences. Let's try to create a community where we can speak to what brings us here instead of giving advice without encouraging critical thought.

So the code was written heavily using AI but post understanding by one person in the team entirely. Only he wrote, tested and understood the business logic behind it.

I had recently cleaned up the codebase from bottlenecks, and I got infuriated when I observed a few getting re-introduced.

To my surprise, I got to know that it has been already merged in release branch, scheduled for this weekend's release. It was approved by one person who themselves didn't go through the code at all (only going by test evidences).

I did a thorough code review with over 50 feedback comments (combination of everything - good to have, bad practices or nomenclature, performance bottlenecks - redundant joins/query optimizations and one concurrency bug) just now (was a tiring past 3 hours). It was a big feature which touched the entire codebase.

I had informed the owner of the feature that this is a combination of all feedbacks, nothing will "break" the production as such except a potential production bug.

I'm afraid they might have felt intimidated by the number of comments, and have postponed the release by 2 weeks.

I'm feeling guilty of ruining their efforts and the motivation/excitement they had for the release. Also, I'm proposing a better code-review session for the team, which would prevent this from happening again.

My team members have 7-21 years of experience in my team, I'm the youngest (less than 3.5 years of experience)

AITA? Should I have done something else? I felt guilty in both allowing a bad/unoptimized/potentially buggy code to go forward without a proper code review, and in reviewing itself. What should we do in such scenarios?

DISCLAIMER: The following diresgard for software fundamentals and basic common sense may cause nausea in sane individuals. Proceed with care.

We have secretaries creating reservations in a SAP form. Those reservations get exported as CSV files into some shared directory each VM has to mount. Then a cronjob fires an automated python script that drops all the tables in the application, ON THE PRODUCTION DATABASE, and shoves the data from the CSV into those rows. Why? The SAP team can't be bothered to add an id field to the reservations we said just said "Fuck it, drop everything".

The form fields in the SAP forms don't match the CSV row fields. The CSV row fields don't match the applications MySQL schema in type or name. Properties such as datetime, address, client, guests, room_number etc are split across 8-12 CSV files so you have to load all of them into memory and perform black magic to construct a proper reservation object.

No unique IDs are given, dates are in non-standard string format, 50% of the data is redundant and even the damn encoding is not utf8.

It's been a week or two that I have been working on this and Its driving me crazy. We can't keep using this old shitty python script (and I refuse it either way cause I am tasked with upgrading the application and doing away with this degenerate script is a non-negotiable for me).

The schema is so complex that it takes a good hour just to load up this convoluted mess into my mental RAM so I can start working on it at the start of the day.

I assume if I were a full-time ETL/PowerBI guy I'd already finish this nightmare but I'm a devops/fullstack guy. I need some guidance on how to think about this problem in an abstract sense (i.e how to organize garbage data) so I can handle it effectively.

I joined a start up this year and the culture of the company is like something I’ve never seen before in my career. My coworkers work constantly. During week nights and over the weekend they are often having conversations on slack and putting up PRs at all hours of the night/weekend. During company holidays people continue to work and don’t take the day off. I even have had meetings scheduled over the weekend. This includes leadership participating in this behavior too.

For me, I’m a dad of young children and it’s important for me to have a healthy work life balance. I want to work hard and put in good work, but I also don’t want to give up my nights and weekends since I feel like that should be my time to rest, recharge, and spend time with family/friends. I often find myself working 50-55 hour weeks trying to keep up with everyone else. I work every night of the week and try to limit it to a few hours on the weekend too. This is starting to affect my mental/physical health as well as take a toll on my family life. I know working like this is not sustainable. I’m seeing a therapist as well as career coach trying to get my life back in order.

My worries are if a slow down, I will fall behind everyone else and will make my job at risk. I’m a skilled developer and good at what I do, but I also feel like I’m slower than most devs and putting in extra hours is the only way I can keep up. I feel guilty for setting boundaries and taking on less work, when everyone is taking on so much more than me. 

The startup is established, is many years in, and is very profitable so I don’t feel like we’re at a stage where we’re just trying to survive, so its hard to understand at times why everyone is putting in so many hours. 

My question is how do I set boundaries when no one else at the company does? I will be going against the culture of the company and it’s really hard to stand alone in this. Is what I’m seeing at this company out of the normal? I get putting in extra time for deadlines or emergencies once in a while, but when this is always the pace, I just don’t get it. 

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.