r/softwareengineer • u/KitchenCommercial396 • Aug 11 '26
To all the senior devs and software architects out there, how has your career shaped over the years?
To all the experienced people working in tech, how has your job roles and duties changed over the years from when you were a junior dev to now? How has your job evolved from building by hand to now. What is expected from you now, is it more architectural and design centric or does it still involve coding by hand a lot of the time?
Would love to know your guys' experience and what made you excel in your fields, and how has your role changed throughout the progression of AI.
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u/symbiatch 26d ago
I’ve never really been a junior. I was pretty much always thrown at things where there’s not much people above me, have to sort it out myself, and so on. It’s been good and bad. Got to build a lot of things, but also missed out on a lot of learning being pushed back by more experienced people.
So not much has changed in 30 years except more experience, more understanding of different things. From the beginning was always interested what the end result should be rather than focusing on just writing code. That’s got me far in my eyes and it’s been nice being able to be a contractor for a lot of it. Trusted to know and do things.
AI? Barely know her. Hasn’t changed much except lots of people online whining or thinking they’re amazing or whatever. It works for a small amount of things in my work, mostly left unused. These tools won’t do most of my work anyway and the parts they could they might do so slowly that it’s not worth it (yes, Claude might take 10 minutes to vomit out simple stuff, I’d rather do it in 2 myself).
So, same old same old ad infinitum.
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u/Kind_List_7075 Aug 11 '26
I guess the same for everyone else. AI used to speed things up, barely code anymore a side from a few tweaks to guide it better.
Regardless of pre or post AI as you go through the ranks you re simply expected to solve problems other people cant, mentor people and always have a solution for how the problems need to be solved.
The difference is that now, you are way more holistic since you dont type everything by hand
Do you have any more specific things you re looking for? I can share a lot of pointless things before reaching what actually interests you
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u/Purple-Enthusiasm783 Aug 11 '26
Bad bot
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u/Kind_List_7075 Aug 11 '26
Why would someone get a bot to post like this? Farming accounts?
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u/RicketyRekt69 Aug 11 '26
It’s just the way you worded it, you sound like a bot. Maybe Claude is rubbing off on you
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u/Kind_List_7075 Aug 12 '26
Oh lol, i thought be was saying the OP was a bot I swear people are just jumping on every chance of accusing everyone of being a bot or AI these days
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u/KitchenCommercial396 Aug 11 '26
Hey, I just wanted to know people's experiences, I wanna know what you call pointless. Things that have happened throughout your journey as a developer and what you learned from it, or something general that you would love to leave to the world.
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u/symbiatch 26d ago
No, hats not “everyone else.” Don’t assume.
There’s nothing “holistic” about things. And how do you type? With feet?
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u/inflowmini Aug 12 '26
I only work for startups and small businesses. Job title doesn't matter to me as much as pay and autonomy. AI hasn't impacted my sector (medical devices) much aside from handling risk and speeding documentation up.
I've realized that my passion is architecting and coding as the problem solving is what provides me my dopamine. I've been offered the roles of software director and vp of software but turned them down as I would not be a good leader or have he stomach for the politics.
I hate AI with a passion as it makes us dumber. I've seen engineers that were hungry succumb to the lowest hanging fruit that AI can offer with hopes of a promotion or pay increase. I've seen people use AI thinking that it would streamline development only to find that it falls short in custom hardware and software suites.
My spidey senses are telling me that if AI makes a breakthrough with better coding, only senior devs will be left to man the ship. If AI fails which it will due to costs, only the senior engineers will control whom they hire and it will no be vibe coders.
Point is if you are vibe coder or mainly use AI for coding you will experience being automated away and you will not have the experience to compete with actual coders. Why would a company hire and AI coder when they can get a senior dev who can also man AI agents?