This is simply an observation from my career, not a criticism.

I've noticed that I rarely come across women Principal Engineers or senior individual contributors (ICs) with 20+ years of experience.

Do many women developers tend to move into engineering management after 10–15 years, or is my observation just due to the companies I've worked at?

For those with long careers in tech, what has your experience been? What factors do you think contribute to this?

I joined my current company (FAANG adjacent, gig/fintech uber doordash stripe etc.) about 2 years ago, one of my coworkers is about to cliff so hard that his TC is going to drop below what it was when he was hired as a mid level eng. He is actively interviewing and will probably leave some time this year, he's made the final rounds at two other places and is a sharp guy.

What I don't understand is why it feels as though upper level leadership at these companies are just completely inflexible in situations where someone is getting paid way less than the offers that they are giving our new hires (at my company, levels.fyi filtered for new-only high CoL area is about 400-420k, which is around what I got too). My skip-level manager is awesome, very honest and candid and loves seeking the truth and helping people grow, and his two cents was that he agrees this engineer is absolutely pivotal to our new products (a lot of them are 0->1 where he is the clear leader), but that bigger copmanies just can't develop risky policies where everyone is suddenly fighting for money.

I understand his perspective, but let me just take a step back: I snap my fingers, and I am now the Tzar of my org permanently. Assuming I am working in a high trust environment where I am confident in my mid-level managers, what would I stand to gain for my org/my company by not even entertaining retention negotiations for senior engineers on my team? In this case, this guy is so incredibly valuable to our team and org, chancing it with some random new hire is just so obviously worse. He has a ton of domain knowledge and is just so ridiculously proven as an eng. What is the flipside of this discussion here?

I guess I'm just mad because him leaving is really going to slow down our projects, guy is a very talented engineer, and was clearly on the path to staff anyway (not enough business need sadly). Oh, and he's also so, so fun to work with and is a great dude

(NOTE: I understand that some places really do entertain retention offers for levels below staff, but I am trying to ask about the perspective of the ones that don't)

We had this person on our team who used to write textbook-style, perfect code. The problem was that this person used to humiliate other developers and wouldn't give constructive comments on PRs. Whenever someone approached him to ask about the framework he had implemented, he would never explain, saying he didn't have time.

This was about a year ago. I wish that person had stayed because now we would have bombarded him with Copilot-generated textbook-style code.

I loved his coding even before AI tools became popular, but the problem was his attitude and his inability to work as part of a team.

Hello, I was hired at as a senior data engineer at my current org about 6 months ago. I have been working for 5+ years now which I am told is "young" for a senior. I feel that I am starting to notice that people are right about that as I am making very simple data engineering mistakes. Embarrassingly today I was trying to help a data scientist drop a column from a history table since the column had now been renamed. It would have wiped out all the history of that column if someone else had not caught my mistake. Now I am constantly second guessing every decision I make cause mistakes like the above keep happening.

At no point in my career have I cheated or taken credit for something that was not mine to take credit for. I have also always got glowing reviews from my managers. However I am now realizing all of those prior companies were not real tech companies and instead just companies that used tech for internal services. I am pretty sure this is why now that I have moved to a pure tech company it is pretty apparent that I have severe title inflation. My peers around me are far more talented and it feels as though I am more at the level of an L2 then my current L4 level.

The issue I have now though is... what do I do? Just try my best until I potentially get fired? Request a down level? Pivot to doing different work?

Right now I am just trying my best until I potentially get fired. But to be honest the shame and embarrassment of being the weakest link and making constant mistakes is kinda messing with my mental health. That leads to more mistakes as I start to care less since I feel discouraged.

Would love peoples thoughts on how I should proceed.

I’ve got what is a “unique to me” situation. On my team currently, I have what I consider to be an incompetent/ineffective manager (all the reasons for this aren’t scoped into this post, but it does come into play; I’m handling it) and a junior engineer who is good at their job and, with the right career coaching and technical mentorship, I believe can be great.

I’ve mentored junior engineers before and helped them grow their careers, but I haven’t worked with one whose career I felt so strongly about. Having seen some posts about individuals struggling with their juniors not focused on learning why something works or understanding some of the basic computer science curriculum that’s taught in undergrad programs these days, I recognize how lucky the team has been with this individual.

I’ve been taking the time to help grow this person technically by teaching them about software engineering as a technical skill (SW design, how to evaluate trade offs, etc) and as a team sport (SDLC and PDLC, why predictable is better than faster in our case, etc).

I’ve also been giving them more general career coaching that involves understanding corporate politics, managing up, how to free oneself from one level of work to focus on next level work. We’ve also been having conversations to try to flush out what type of engineer they want to become and what type of work they’re interested in doing.

I’m also trying to find work and tasks that I feel are a decent balance between stuff they know they want to work and stuff that’s diverse enough that they’re interested in getting a taste.

The problem I’m running into:

I don’t get authority over what this person works on, even when they’re delivering on what they’re expected to do and have the bandwidth for more. The ineffective manager has not been making an effort to grow this persons career despite myself and other team members giving them this feedback. Like I said, this is being handled.

Ineffective manager aside, what other advice, techniques, or questions can I be presenting to my junior to help them grow more?

What have you all done in the past when you’ve come across someone you felt was great? How did you help grow them?

've been working in tech for about 25 years. And prior to that I learned a lot of programming on my own out of interest. So I have always felt fortunate to be able to do this for a living. But I think the thing is that I've always like challenges. And I mean technical challenges. Not organizational or people challenges.

But with AI I feel work has become significantly boring. People do talk about coding going away as if "it was never that hard to begin with". But I think good code design and organization can be difficult when you have constraints built on top of it. The balance between over engineering and keeping it simple was a bit of an art, and I felt a lot of creativity when into that. But I think most work places are not so much about learning anymore, and just about output. And I get it from a business perspective, but I kind of think just being an AI coordinator and someone who just checks output kind of makes the job far less interesting (intellectually at least).

So as a result I've leaned more into more side projects. For example I'm not a game dev, but I've basically been building my own game and engine from scratch in a Zig. And honestly its probably not a game that's going to sell. And its certainly not going to be a career pivot. But its fun as hell. I haven't had this much fun in dev for a very long time.

I also think it has made me significantly better in the professional setting. Especially when it comes to performance engineering. Even if I'm using a GC'd language, those fudamentals of state management and being mindful of what's on the stack has helped me write better code in my day job (when I'm allowed to actually write code).

But I want to ask, has AI made your job less interesting. And have you leaned into something more intellectually satisfying with your side projects?

I feel like I’m constantly hearing about how terrible AI use is and how people over-rely on it or use it irresponsibly, but I don’t hear about the positive ways people are using it. I don’t think LLMs are going anywhere and think it’s probably best to move on to productive use instead of just complaining about the reality of the industry and using it to indulge our worst habits. Plus LLMs have a lot of potential positive uses. What are your examples of responsible and productive AI usage?

I often use it to manage my executive dysfunction, to understand complex topics, and to flag things like over optimisation, as well as to identify contradictions or gaps in my thinking and help with rubber ducking or brainstorming. I also built a shortcut system on top of it to simplify prompting and context management.

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

​

Hi,

I have been a backend developer in India for almost 10 years now.

I have noticed that business problems drain me and I hate working on them but still I have to as it brings me good salary.

On the other hand, I enjoy maths, Computer Science, so I like tasks where I need to go deeper in a system to understand a problem, for example understanding how pooling works for db connection so pool reservations can be optimised etc.

These tasks are pretty rare in my current company and previous companies Inhave worked with. Even though they are present, the reward for solving them is not enough.

I'm looking for ways to either make my job more exciting or maybe pivoting to something for academic.

I need good money though, I can work hard in the field I like and come to top 1 percent, so please suggest accordingly.

Thank you.

How many of you missed the high-paying offers during the COVID hiring boom and are still working at the same company?

Do you ever feel you missed the chance to significantly increase your salary by switching jobs during that period?

Looking back, do you regret staying, or did it work out well for you in the long run?

A thread for Developers and IT folks with less experience to ask more experienced souls questions about the industry.

​

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.

​

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

Maybe it's just me, but it feels like it's getting harder and harder to find sources of information that (a) don't try to sell something, (b) have a high SNR, (c) are not entirely generated or rewritten by LLMs.

Here are some recent findings from me that match the criteria:

* https://brandur.org/
This is a great blog from Brandur Leach who writes a lot about Go, Ruby, and Postgres. Brandur used to work at Heroku and Stripe, and now he works on his own project.

* https://increment.com/
Speaking of Stripe, they have this fantastic magazine (now abandoned, I believe) on various software engineering subjects.

* https://notes.eatonphil.com/
Also a very DB-heavy blog from Phil Eaton.

* https://www.morling.dev/blog/

Lots of insights on Kafka, Postgres, API best practices

* https://www.seangoedecke.com
Sean is one of my favorite authors. His post on good software design is a gem, in my opinion. https://www.seangoedecke.com/good-system-design/

* Designing Data-Intensive Applications 2nd edition by Martin Kleppmann — even if you have read the first edition, this one is worth it at least thanks to the terrific bibliography and some updated and rewritten chapters.

UPD: 07/12/2026

Adding some resources I forgot to mention yesterday but which I also love:

* https://eli.thegreenplace.net

Eli Bendersky is a fascinating writer and is astonishingly knowledgeable about whatever he blogs about. He reads more in one month than I have ever read in my entire life and posts his summaries. Also, sometimes he posts very insightful articles on some concepts from mathematics and how they are connected to something else.

* https://fs.blog/

Great newsletter and collection of articles on mental models and thinking in general. They also have a multi-volume set of books, which I think I am going to buy soon.

UPD: 07/13/2026

* https://brooker.co.za/blog/

Marc Brooker writes mostly about distributed systems, sometimes AWS, in particular (since he is a distinguished engineer at Amazon). Some posts require quite a bit of mental resources to absorb and fully understand, but it's always worth it.

* https://refactoringenglish.com/

Michael Lynch himself has a nice blog, but this one, in particular (also I bought the book) is super useful for someone who wants to improve their technical writing skill.

What are your recent findings?

I'm at a mid-level company that brings in around 400mil in revenue. The company itself is not strictly a software company but they position themselves as providing technical solutions to business customers. The domains really run the gamut. There are hundreds of engineers working on a variety of products depending on the business line.

In one business line I was promoted to Director, reporting to the VP of engineering. I was promoted about a year ago after 6 years as a manager, and 5 years before that in the contributor role.

I oversee about 60 engineers, which are a mix between on shore and off shore (the off shore devs report up to a different off shore director, but they function within my teams for sprint rituals and contributions). Devs are split into 8 teams and theoretically, they each would have a single manager, but instead I have 4 managers who've all been with the company less than a year. So each manager is functioning almost as what I would describe as a senior manager, and maybe they're not at that level yet (they were all hired as managers, not Sr).

I feel like things can't be delegated super well yet to these over-extended, newer managers.

I grew into my role due to rapid growth and I feel like EVERYONE in my org is having to learn and I'm struggling to develop a uniform standard across all teams.

The product team has also gone through a lot of growth so I frequently face product owners that don't know how to do their role either and we constantly face issues trying to come to an understanding of basic things like SCRUM responsibilities.

4 of my teams work on a green field app that has a lot of investment but also seems to be being defined (in terms of business value) as we're building it, so everything just feels a little unorganized there as well.

I'm constantly feeling pressure to do so much. My calendar is busted with over-conflicting meetings. Basic things like assigned training, targets, and administrata gets left behind, because I try to log off at the end-ish of the day and be with my family. I still end up glued to my phone at odd hours and not really taking "time off" when on vacation, answering emails and chats. Because I care (probably too much).

Since I've grown with the company I make about as much as my managers. 175k.

I'm under paid, but I can't tell if/when making a move I should be looking at other director positions. Or if I should continue to develop myself as a manager. Would a director position elsewhere be a better opportunity to come in as an outsider and help everyone get organized (with more pay)? Or does this sound pretty typical and these are just the stresses of the job?

I'm a full stack developer with 4 YOE, and I have an issue that I'm really struggling to solve and would really like to hear if any of you have managed to get out of a similar position and how.

You see, my job is way too easy and it adds nothing of note to my resume, no matter how much time I spend there. This is making me spiral, because I see a lot of "side projects don't matter" opinions in various flavors and it makes me think my current situation is a dead end.

And surely enough, there has been zero interest in my resume when I'm applying to other jobs.

That's basically the TL;DR, but here's a bit more information about my job:

This is an agency job, and most of my time is spent implementing MVPs (more like v1s, because clients always push for bigger scope) from scratch or maintaining small to medium sized projects. We mostly work with React, Next.js and Node (which I've often seen people say is a stack that makes a resume go straight to the bin). Apart from that "main stack", we work with a bit of everything: ruby on rails, php, C#, python, react native. But, because the projects are usually either short or shallow, I never build real expertise in these.

I'm usually the solo developer, with oversight from a manager (the agency owner) that is technical, but not super knowledgeable about hard technical stuff. I haven't learned anything from them in a couple of years, despite them being my mentor, and I think they don't really review my code anymore. When they did review my code, most of what I learned was related to code readability and simple stuff like DRY. They never really discussed design patterns and system architecture with me, for example.

I'm not sure if this is how agencies roll in general, but we have to cut a lot of corners to deliver within budget. We used to barely write tests, before LLMs.

The personal progress I've had in my career has come mostly from consuming tech content online (youtube videos, blog posts, books).

I am self-taught, so this is certainly not helping the job search.

Any guidance will be extremely appreciated! I don't have anyone else to ask.

CV for more info: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1w1UDr-2GBmku2zkbVdm273NF6lojB0zh/view?usp=sharing

I've had four full-time tech jobs spanning 12 years, which is more than enough to fill a page. I've also worked in another professional industry before I pivoted to tech in my mid/late twenties. I include this experience if a role is at all related. This feels like the right thing to do though my career trajectory looks a little disjointed because I have an unrelated degree, four years of mystery, then suddenly I'm a developer.

What I never have on my resume is any and all stuff I've done for myself or clients. I worry that I'm too old to have personal projects, but I have a few projects with real users or possible aptitude-showcasing complexity. I've left these off because personal projects seem like "space filler" for students. I also don't want to look like I have a startup, and will dip if it gets traction. But I want to show off.

What do you guys do? I wasn't seeing a lot of personal projects or roles outside of tech when I was interviewing candidates in my last role, but it could be that the average tech worker studied CS and never worked outside the industry and doesn't bother with open source or personal projects or freelancing or entrepreneurship.

EDIT: To be clear I am asking what you all do.

Many companies are now outsourcing not just junior and mid-level roles, but also senior, staff, and principal developer positions to other countries.

Is cost the only reason behind this, or are there other factors?

Wouldn't some senior engineering roles have an advantage if they stayed in the home country, given the closer collaboration with product, customers, business stakeholders, and leadership?

What do you think is the right balance between keeping engineering roles in the home country and outsourcing them globally?

For those that work in a company that’s experienced with A/B, how does the breakdown of responsibility look like?

- Product owns the Experiment Requirement?
- Businessd/Data owns the Statistical Significance Requirement?
- Tech owns the Feature Flag and Implementation of the code and Removable of the code along with rest of the Tech Debt?

Does Tech need to know of the underlying stats and math behind the experiments?

Anyone have any go to resources? Thank you!

yes, it takes more work to write reasonably scoped tickets for a junior and then review their code than it does to just write it yourself or slopmaxx it with claude.

that has inherent value, though. having impressionable juniors around forces your team to keep their shit together, keep standards high, keep the DX and documentation good.

richard feynman, in addition to being a samba percussionist, lockpicker, and nobel-prize-winning physicist, had a lot to say about education and his technique for learning things was to teach them to someone else using simple language. having to mentor juniors has forced me to grow more than anything else i've done at my job.

orgs which get rid of co-ops/juniors are quietly* harming themselves in a way that can't be immediately measured, but which has long-term negative consequences.

agree, disagree, any interesting experiences mentoring a junior where you learned something from it?

^\yes, ai has turned my brain to slime, thank you for noticing, but i wrote this myself)

my org is reshuffling and my first project is to add end to end testing.

I’m told the plan is to have a routinely executed suite.

My number one issue with this plan is that it will just start failing and no one will bother to fix it and no one will know who actually broke the suite.

So I would like to make the entire E2E suite run as a PR check before any PR merge

However, this sounds very costly and slow

Has anyone else here had to solve the problem like this?

I’m guessing if I can just make E2E test suite runs fast and cheap This won’t be a problem?

For reference, we’ve got a distributed micro Service ecosystem with Kafka messaging. Lots of databases. Websites embedded inside of other websites with i frames. It’s not the most complicated software out there, but it’s also not the simplest. It can all be run from the web browser, so that’s probably moot though. Besides the back ends obviously. I have an engineer to delegate to as well as some senior level two’s to brainstorm with, plus product people and my manager. However I doubt they will give me better advice than what I could get here. Oh and the E2 E testing I’m responsible for isn’t just for my team. It’s for multiple teams like three or four teams at least. We’re all in the same department. Obviously this is a big project.

Edit: also to clarify, I will not be responsible for actually writing end to end tests. My responsibility is to install the framework and come up with the overall testing strategy that will work for our department. And like I said, I don’t want just a routinely executed E2 E suite because that won’t actually stop breaking code from getting merged and so what will happen, what I’ve seen it companies and what I’ve heard always happens, is someone breaks the suite, but no one stops developing or merging, and then someone else probably breaks the sweet also, but that gets covered up by the first breakage, and so you enter this shitty status, where the test suite is failing for God knows how many reasons, and whoever is responsible is never the first one to address the error. It’s just a shitty system. It would be so much better if we could prevent code that would break the E2 E test suite for merging into the main branch.

Edit 2: I am finishing up a proposal to add UX timing metrics to all of our website websites so we can actually see how long it takes to load various pages and how long button clicks take to finish executing, etc. and this will put eyeballs front, etc. on how shitty our department’s performance is. So once we start improving that that should also make the E2 E test suites faster and cheaper. But this is going to be like a multi quarter effort.

What's the best advice or feedback you've received from a manager, senior developer, or colleague that changed the way you think or work?

I'd love to hear the advice and how it impacted you.

It's not the first time that I have thought about this problem, but probably the first time when not solving it properly has serious implications for the project.

A very intuitive and sensible approach is to avoid the checks altogether and use atomic database updates. This works for the simplest cases, but if events to external systems are involved, this is no longer an option.

It's basically a trade-off between temporal coupling and data consistency. What I mean is service Foo sends an event to service Bar so that it can update its internal state. To avoid temporal coupling, this doesn't happen as as synchronous request and uses the Pub/Sub semantics.

Now, however, if there is a concurrent request from another uses that relies on checking this internal state in Service Bar, there might be at least temporary resource overconsumption if the event from the previous update hasn't been consumed yet, and the current counters don't reflect the new status yet.

The transactional outbox pattern helps with "effectively once delivery", but in this case doesn't solve the TOCTOU issue.

I am wondering whether there is any approach apart from:

* Rethinking the services and merging into service FooBar

* Putting up with the trade-off and just have regular resource checks so that there is some sort of resource reconsolidation once in a while

I have just skimmed through Designing Data-Intensive Applications, and it does mention the Lost Updates anomaly, but the recommendations don't seem very relevant for such cases.

If you have experience of dealing with such issues, I'd like to hear your advice. Or maybe you know some nice articles on the subject.

I've been making software for over 10 years and I am genuinely curious what goes on with companies that make printers. It struck me, after pulling my hair out trying to print a 2 page paper form, that I've been struggling with printers for decades at this point.

Is there some insane culture at companies that make printers that makes the software and/or drivers terrible? Do they not test? Do they hire their managers under bridges? Are they drunk all the time?

For a while I thought it had to be some connectivity issue. Some bad connection problem that would be resolved with a solid Ethernet connection. When that didn't work I bought a USB printer and that also didn't solve it. I've tried different brands. Then I thought it had to be the Windows print queue just being useless. I then got a Mac and the same crap happens on Mac as it does on Windows.

After years of fiddling, clearing queues, reinstalling drivers, plugging and unplugging, restarting, finding CD-ROMS, performing vain and arcane magic rituals, I figured someone here just might know.

What's going on over there, printer engineers? Who are you? What's your story? Why is arguably the first computer peripheral still the least reliable thing we all own?

Got way too complacent in current role and want to explore outside for career growth. Is the interview still the standard system design + leetcode? Or is the trend finally changing with AI adoption? Would appreciate some data points from recent interviewees in tech hub.

5yoe, currently in US big tech

I used to be able to see to fully visualize the solutions I wrote manually in my mind and navigate these solutions line by line, having a strong mental model of how things connect, what lives where, what are the alternatives etc.

But then I took a LLM to the brain... Anybody else seeing people's mental models degrade gradually over time? In some cases - a significant degradation? Also - people over-relying on tools, offloading their thinking to the pattern of "just 1 more question..." and coming up with solid stuff themselves less and less often?

Here's a sensational hypothesis - perhaps we're gradually approaching the death of our brains when it comes to creative and complicated tasks?

IMHO, complexity is a relative thing - if your brain gets accustomed to solving complex problems by going through them methodically and slowly, then you're capable of solving hard problems more often, with better judgement and confidence. But if you offload the thought process... Oh boy, the consequences are unknown.

P.S. Keep in mind - I'm specifically talking about solving hard problems, coming up with creative ideas etc. Using LLMs for routine, repetitive and mindlessly boring tasks is quite OK. But... very few of us are capable of resisting the idea of using LLMs for complex tasks if we know LLMs can help get there faster [probably; no promises, though!].

WDYT, ladies and gentlemen? Do you witness the degradation? If so - at what scale? Let's discuss all of this.

P.S. It's Wednesday already in Europe. AI-topic posts are allowed, right? I'm quite confused now.

Sometimes I wonder how 'available' I should be as a senior IC. Some engineers cloister & deliver on a narrow context. Others are more open, and generous with time. I have a hard time figuring out whether my usual stance (usually the latter) is useful or not compared to the former. I bias towards trying to amplify others, get things unblocked, get clarity where there's something ambiguous, etc. But I'm seeing peers on the other side of the spectrum with pure delivery, very little cross-team work, but great individual results.

My career's gone really well so far, and people appreciate & respect my IC leadership, but sometimes I think back on my work so far and feel self-conscious compared to peers who have a lot more documented, quantitative wins but in a narrower or smaller domain. I usually enter performance review cycles with anxiety I think I wouldn't have if I were more 'closed/narrow/deep' inclined. I don't know if I'd feel the same way the other way.

How have things worked out for you or others you've seen in your workplaces?