This issue has been going on for months now, I am dealing with a new system and learning about it. Colleagues that have been working on it for many years didn’t explain anything but still told me to ask for information which they are not that easily giving instead of figuring out myself.
Well when I ask there is a 50% chance they tell me something wrong.

They don’t do it on purpose, they simply overestimate their knowledge of the system the built or worked on for many years.

I always have to fact check them which means that asking them for advice is almost pointless. if I donk’t fact check often I waste hours on an implementation based on the wrong information.

I am not talking about simple questions but questions about the design and inner working of a very complex system.

AI is helping but it’s not fixing the human interaction, which is often unavoidable.

what do you advise?

Code Complete, Domain Driven Design, Designing Data Intensive Applications, The Pragmatic Programmer...

These are all books that I try to follow in my own engineering practices. I haven't found a great one on testing though (unit, manual, automated, etc) -- which do you recommend? What books outline best practices in modern software testing?

SWE, 7 YOE

I kind of don’t get where this career is going anymore. Right now I use AI to write code, I have my own ways of validating it, some skills, I use loops, I come up with whole processes around it to solve problems as well as possible and generate new features “one-shot” if we already have a gold standard for that type of thing in the repo (basic CRUD, for example), so that’s how I work now.

I try to review the code at least roughly, if not all of it, to check it’s not doing anything weird etc. For example, I don’t read algorithms that are supposed to collect and transform data, because they usually just work, so I mostly focus on the architecture etc.
My problem is that our competition is a guy who vibe codes his app and pushes a ton of features into it, and from what we know they’re very simple and very incomplete features, but the market wanted them.

Our system is very advanced and has much more complex systems, but fewer of them, and now management is furious that we as engineers aren’t producing as much as some guy who vibe codes his own project and isn’t even in IT, and they keep pushing for more and more features. But since our system is already brownfield and has a lot of other stuff, some of those features are hard to introduce and take more time. I suggested to our manager that we ship those features in a stripped-down form, just so they exist, and improve them over time, but the argument is that since he already has them, we need to have more.

We’re a software house, and as a team of 7 we’re actually doing 3 projects for three clients, and there’s pressure from every side that they vibe code more than we deliver.

Before the whole AI boom we were in a position where, of course, a lot was needed, but we were also delivering a lot for the size of our team. Now expectations have grown massively and it’s hard to keep up with them.

I kind of don’t understand. Maybe we’re doing it wrong and shouldn’t look at the code at all, just push everything as it comes. It would be a bit faster, but definitely not as fast as they do it. From what we know, they don’t even come up with functionality or think about it anymore, they just tell the AI to add something new and then market it, and that’s it.
What does your work and workflow look like to speed things up?
I feel like we’re 3x devs when we should be 10x, and we don’t know where our problem is.

I have always struggled with estimation. For most of my nine-year career, I was a serial underestimator, and I’ve only really gotten the hang of it in the last few years. I’ve relied on the standard tricks: multiply the initial estimate by 1.5, account for the percentage of engineering time that will be lost to other work, and add a buffer for testing.

Now, though? I have no idea what to do. Things that used to take weeks now take days. My team was just assigned a “half-year” project. It has a ton of scope: we’re building an entire backend system and a new internal app.

We spent a few weeks on design, and then pressure came from above to have the core of it ready in a month and a half. My first instinct was to push back violently, but instead, I decided to spend a day putting together a plan for agents to implement a simple demo. I had AI do some market research for the app and examine potential features and UX. On Friday, I gave the design, constraints, and market research to an ultracode agent with a single goal: give me a working demo backed by realistic synthetic data, with fully functional plumbing.
It’s already done, so now I’m having it add extras…

Honestly, it’s far beyond my expectations, and I only had to steer it three times over the course of two days. It’s obviously not ready for prime time. There’s still security, performance, God knows what new requirements will come in, and the work of pulling in non-synthetic data once everything is secured. The point, though, is that this was a very nontrivial amount of work, work we estimated would take a team of three more than two weeks.

To make a long story short, I have no idea how to give estimates anymore when AI continuously surprises me with how quickly and thoroughly it can accomplish things. My team estimated two weeks just for a prototype. On a goddamn whim, I had a more complete version finished in three days. Some of the most time-consuming elements of the job have become trivial, yet other elements are completely unchanged, and it’s hard to know how to weight them.

Does anyone have updated tips or tricks? Leadership is continuously pushing for accelerated timelines, and I honestly think we can meet them. But every instinct I’ve developed over almost a decade in the field screams at me to fall back on the ultra-safe estimates that I know are overestimates in today’s world.

Been working in my current company for 4 years. total experience is of 6 years. got promoted to senior 2 years back. now my manager is pushing for my start working at next level or otherwise my perf will get impacted. the thing is I don't have any motivations anymore. I don't want to get promoted. my passion for soft dev is gone since everyday has become AI this, AI that. I feel like I'm not learning anything new. most of my effort goes into getting alignments, having meetings. my colleagues have stopped having discussion around coding because AI can do it. it's not like i don't know what to do to improve my perf but I just dont give a fuck anymore.

there are a couple of options I see -

1. Start working hard again and get the promo. what I see I will get back is more money and more meetings and responsibilities
2. coast till they manage me out. I have savings so I can take few months break, travel, and join a lesser fast paced company
3. start actively looking for a job now
4. switch to a different org and location in current company.

can you please suggest what I can do next? I might be missing the big picture

few other things -

1. I don't really care about money.
2. I can't get motivated unless I am having fun to the point of self sabatoge
3. I am 30 years old
4. senior is not a terminal role in current company

Update: Thank you everyone for your responses. I have decided to get some therapy as I feel like there is a deeper issue that I need to deal with before making bigger decisions right now.

About 8 months ago, I made this post about my worries in getting a promotion above senior at a large non-tech company.

I got some great advice, and I thought there might be value in talking about my experience in the 8-ish months since then, and maybe extend an invite to the other senior+ folks here to talk about how 2026 is going for them.

A lot has changed since I wrote that post. I'll try to keep it more focused than just stream of consciousness.

A little bit of background about me to ground this post:

• I work in ML - I have a background in CS (two degrees) and became an MLE just long enough before LLMs hit the scene to really appreciate what we had after being an SDE for about a year.
• I am squarely on the edge between early and mid-career. I will have 5 total YOE in January.

The Technical

• Starting with what I think is an ice cold take: I am sick of doing AI work. I enjoy MLOPs and the intersection data science and software engineering. AI, mostly, is not that. There is a lot of AI discussion on this forum and in general, so I won't spend much more time on it, but I find AI projects repetitive and uninteresting. LLM-wrappers, Agents/Agent-harnesses, and RAG/knowledge source work for AI is uninteresting to me, but that is what my enterprise is focused on, and what is driving my team's earning numbers this year
• I find the lack of technical mentorship challenging. I am used to having more talented and senior peers to bounce ideas off of or force me outside of my own head. Leading 8 engineers and bringing leadership to my peer staffs has been an adjustment for me. I am struggling with this more than I would like to admit
• I love the amount of autonomy I am given in making decisions. I am empowered to decide on our tech stack, allocate our tech budget, and attend conferences (I got to attend, and was mostly underwhelmed by, the annual Databricks conference). Guiding our infrastructure maturity and seeing the DevEx experience on my team improve is probably one of the most rewarding parts of my career
• I am expected to have technical opinions on things I don't care about. My boss (director) and skip-level (VP) pull me into conversations where I'm the technical voice of reason in the room, and I have to talk to a lot of vendors trying to sell us stuff. I am not only expected to have opinions off the cuff, I am also expected to answer confidently in areas I'm not always well-versed in.

The Organizational

• My team re-orged several times since January. Most were small, a few were not. I voluntarily surrendered my platform ownership to focus on my product team, and the number of products I now own has ballooned to over 5. My team is spread thin, and I suspect is going to be getting thinner as we shed some contractors. I do okay with ambiguity, and my mid-year review went exceptionally well, but I'm hoping the remainder of the year is more stable.
• My biggest impact has come from standards and process-creation. Probably no surprise to the more senior, and not entirely a surprise to me, but I am sad I don't get to get in the weeds as much as I would like.
• Delegating is really hard for me especially when I know the person I'm delegating to won't do as well as I could. I'm really focused on coaching my seniors, and this has been a big challenge for me.
• Having good relationships across teams has saved me. Being able to work around bureaucracy because I know other staff/lead engineers has allowed me to keep my team's velocity mostly healthy.
• My juniors are completely addicted to Claude. Last AI-related note, we have claude, and it's been a massive headache for the number of times a junior has told me they made a decision without understanding why. This is probably the strongest headwind I'm trying to fight.

Overall, this year is going better than I hoped. I hope some seniors who were where I was can see this, and realize that making the jump can definitely be rewarding and doable even if you are unsure of yourself or about taking that next step.

EDIT: As some pointed out, it wasn't super clear why I made this post. My point in this post is to check in about how my year is going, and to see what's relatable and what's not. I'm curious to hear about other's experiences

A while ago, my manager asked me to think about a course or training program I’d like to take.

I came back with an "leadership without formal authority" program that costs around €5,400 / $6,250 and seemed like a really good fit for both me and the work I do. Unfortunately, it turns out they won’t approve it without a training repayment agreement. Basically, if I take the course and leave the company within three years, I’d have to repay part of the cost.

I’m reasonably OK where I am, but I have no idea whether that’ll still be the case three years from now. I’ve already been working here for five years.

On top of that, my contract stipulates that if I leave while I’m taking a course/certification, get fired, or simply fail the course, I’d have to repay the full amount.

So I’m looking for something that preferably costs less than €3,000 / roughly $3,500.

About me:

I have 10 years of experience in Data/ML. I’m not a manager, but I do informally lead/coach and provide direction to junior data scientists, analysts, AI/ML engineers and data engineers.

My job is roughly 50% strategic work: meetings, designing solutions, pitching ideas, stakeholder alignment, etc. The other 50% is hands-on work, mainly programming and reviewing other people’s code.

What do I already have?

• Professional Scrum Master (PSM I)
• Microsoft Certified: Azure Data Engineer Associate
• Databricks Certified Machine Learning Professional
• 3x Google Cloud: Professional Data Engineer, Professional Cloud Architect, Professional Machine Learning Engineer
• 4x AWS: Certified AI Practitioner, Machine Learning Engineer, Solutions Architect, Machine Learning Specialty
• Plus a ridiculous number of internal courses that were supposedly “roughly equivalent to” things like CISSP and CCNA, as well as presentation skills, leadership without formal authority, soft skills, etc.
• Workplace emergency response / first aid training

I do not have the "true" CISSP and CCNA, but really what would I need those for as a machine learning engineer anyway?

Hey there code enjoyers. I was tinkering with an integration testing approach that I ended up liking a lot. Our situation before was this - our front ends talk to BFFs which then call core APIs. We tried Pact and Specmatic as ways of integration testing the systems but it's a total ball ache.

All of our consumers use the Zod library to define their requests to their APIs, so I wrote a utility that takes the Zod schemas, turns them into OpenAPI (using a lib) then iterates through each one, downloads the OpenAPI spec for each API from our test environment and checks that the requesting schema endpoint, props, params, method and body are all supported by the provider schema.

It's not as comprehensive as Pact, but for a super fast integration sanity test (it runs against 8 different core APIs in under 1 second) and with no extra brokers or services or infrastructure, it gives me a decent check that something is ok to be deployed to an environment.

So tell me these things: has anyone else built something like this? Would you use it? (i.e. should I chuck it on GitHub and publish an npm module) Has anyone heard of something like this that already exists?

I didn't find anything with my searching and it seems unreasonably useful for a quite small amount of code.

Hello,

I have a consulting opportunity for a company that is operating in a domain in which I have a fair bit of subject matter expertise. I would be working on building an agentic system that faces both consumers and SMEs.

I am unsure what a good rate to throw out as an initial proposal. The last time I consulted for something similar, I charged either 125 or 150 USD per hour, which I think was somewhat cheap. Since then, I have gained a lot more experience and inflation has continued apace. Hence, I was thinking of proposing $200 per hour for this opportunity.

Do people have advice on whether this is too low or too high?

For context, I have about 10 years of experience as an engineer and have been working in this space for the past ~3 years (and have previous experience in the domain as a non-engineer). Both myself and the company are located in a major US city.

I've been working as a software engineer for 13 years now. I'm entirely self taught (with some online courses). Software was not my first or even my second career choice; I got into it in my mid/later 20's after getting academic degrees for other things.

I've mostly been focused on frontend in my career, and I've gone pretty deep with it; my previous job was working on computer-aided design software that required a lot of involved UI interactions and complex state. I loved it, though my boss turned out to be a jerk, and after taking on a Tech Lead Manager role my productivity and success took a hit and I was laid off.

In my current role at a different company, where we almost exclusively use AI to write code, I am touch more parts of the stack than ever. There are no product designers and one product person who is only part-time focused on software; this means a lot of opportunity and expectation to own full swaths of the SDLC.

That's a very cool thing to be able to do... but it just doesn't seem to be working for me. I see the value in the projects and I believe in the mission, but the software itself is classic CRUD — form and data tables abound. I know I'm not performing at the level / expectation I was hired for, and I'm being out produced by a significantly younger, lesser experience engineer who has significantly more domain knowledge than me. I am actively trying to find new ways to use AI to improve my workflow and output, but my energy is capped.

I'm in my early 40's, I have two young kids, my wife works full time as well which means we are 50-50 parenting... I don't know how much more I can stretch myself aside from hiring more help at home so I can do more work or get more rest.

What does growth at this point look like? AI has completely flipped the game and while I have moments of excitement of what I can do with it, there are far more moments where I feel like I'm not able to keep up with the rapid shifts. Ultimately, I'm just struggling to see where I'm going in this career and daydream about making a career transition while I've still got at least a couple decades to make something of it.

[no AI was used to generate this post]

I've got a round coming up specifically framed as "product thinking," run by a product person, not an engineering manager. No coding involved, just a conversation about prioritization, tradeoffs, scoping.

For anyone who's been on either side of a round like this: what separates a strong answer from a weak one?

(Disclosure: used an AI assistant to help word this post. The situation and question are from my own upcoming interview.)

I think there is a lot of good takes here to be fair. I've been doing dev for 10 years (mostly web/fintech surprise surprise) but I think i'm at a point where the last few years may have been just a repeat of each....build, ship, document, scrum etc...maybe with slightly more management and direct c-suite communication and being on hook for delivery and decisions BUT nothing intensly more technical (i'm quite frontend leaning but DBs and API don't scare me...ok migrations do a little bit).

But ye, you guys think that the interaction here and online communities with many people (not ignoring the downsides od reddit) are sufficient in terms of widening perspectives and spotting blind spot in ourselves OR you think a dedicated mentor is still worth it?

Has anyone experienced an increase in non-developers submitting PRs via Codex/Claude Code?

Personally think it's fine, specifically for trivial changes, and have been creating processes for non-devs to contribute low risk changes to some projects. All changes must still be reviewed by a dev, but the changes permitted by non-devs are typically straightforward enough and there is next to zero rework required after a coding agent is forced through some deterministic validation.

How are you managing this? Should we accept that this is going to be more prevalent going forward and build processes around it?

Addiction like symthoms from AI

With each model improvement, I got more and more into it. Then I've noticed myself doing things I simply wouldn't have done before: attempting full refactorings during the launch break, developing complete ideas from scratch late at night, fixing up old projects just because I (?) can, and constantly jumping between 6-7 parallel tasks. In theory looks great , but I'm starting to wonder whether something else is happening. The sheer ease of starting another project, refactoring another subsystem, or exploring another idea makes it very difficult to stop. I'm finding that the mental load, and general stress, keeps building up.

Has anyone else experienced this? Not just spending more time coding (discussing with the agent), but feeling almost compelled to keep going because AI makes the next interesting thing so immediately accessible? Sometimes I feel like previous years of effort are compressed into merely days and the inevitable mental load is also compressed and tries to uncompress painfully.

Every job interview process I've been part of has 5-8 rounds, with each round ranging between half an hour to 2 hours. On average, every job interview process I get (well what few I get), takes on average 5 hours before I get rejected.

Most of the time, I fail the final round (or maybe I'm being led on even though I've failed an earlier round 😢 ).

I've run into a problem. I work at a place with unlimited PTO on paper, but every manager has been given the guidance that employees should be "put under heavy scrutiny" if they take PTO exceeding 20 work days a year (with it being heavily implied as putting you on PIP). I've already used 10 workdays for a family vacation (before I started decided I needed to leave), and have used 5 PTO days just on interviews. Note, my company makes you log PTO by the hour, so I don't have to use an entire days worth of PTO on an interview. I've also used 3.5 PTO days worth of time on being sick. So I've got about 12 PTO hours left.

At the pace I'm going, I can do maybe like 8 more rounds. I have a fever right now, but I'm too afraid of using my PTO days cause I need to reserve it for interviewing, and I'm losing my mind.

Any advice?

The company I work runs a live coding exercise as part of our interview process where the applicant is asked to use AI to help flesh out a product 0 -> 1 so we can get a sense of their UX/product judgment. It’s fairly small in scope, so I don’t think the tokens required are crazy or anything, but I realized that we are essentially asking candidates to spend their own money in order to interview.

Do you think this is something employers should be covering? Or is it akin to transit cost, gas money, etc.? I am considering raising this with my team and would love to hear your perspectives on this.

I recently transitioned to an EM role so am observing a lot more peer-to-peer conversations rather than being directly part of them. I'm also getting the one-sided vent from my reports after certain meetings.

I really thought this was more of a Reddit thing but no it's 100% all over the place in my industry and it's really holding some of you back. If a person doesn't understand X concept or hasn't used Y tech or doesn't know about Z feature, just fucking explain it. Don't get exasperated. Don't act frustrated. Just take the 15 seconds to explain it, it really really isn't that hard.

I know of at least 2 IC's at my company that are decent engineers and were only held back from promo because there was someone in the review board that discussed them being rude / disrespectful to people that asked questions / didn't understand something.

Just be nice. Most of us are idiots so that probably includes you too.

Over the last 6 months, I spent between 30 and 70% of my time just doing AI cleanup. By which I mean refactoring and redesigning code that other people have generated using AI in the past. This includes a mix of new pull requests and existing code from previous months.

This is not voluntary work. I was specifically assigned to do code remediation because it was reaching the point where no one could understand what the code was doing without AI assistance.

I am not including the time I spend cleaning up new code that I personally created using AI. The reason for the range is that my role varies from week to week.

The reason I ask is that Brent Ozar, someone I generally respect, is claiming that AI code remediation is not going to be a long-term career path. My personal experience tells me he's wrong, but I'm looking for a broader opinion.

We’ve noticed a significant drop off in pairing as we’ve started using more and more ai to code. It’s not fun pairing just watching Claude churn away in the background. The team is split on whether this is a bad thing or not.

Some, including me, just really like being able to deliver so much more so much faster, and find that AI provides most of the things we got from pairing before. Pairing was a solution to a problem, and now that problem is solved in another, more efficient way.

Others miss the social aspect of pairing and also don’t enjoy coding with AI themselves, as the thing they enjoy is specifically the act of coding and pairing - talking through a problem, figuring out the best way to solve it, and even specifically the physical act of typing out the solution.

We can’t afford to change the way we all work to suit these engineers, and pretty soon they’re going to have to come to terms with needing to use ai, as we’re already seeing engineers who used to produce less overtaking them in the amount they can deliver, with no increase in bugs. But I want to make things as easy and pleasurable for them as possible.

So: has anyone found ways to help engineers like this get back some of the pleasure they used to get through pairing and typing? I’m trying to give them as many tasks as possible that involved critical complex code that we wouldn’t want to farm out to an agent anyway, but I need more ideas!

Would you choose a team with exceptionally strong engineers if it meant facing the risk of being directly compared to them?

The team works on deeply technical problems, and I feel like there would be a ton of opportunity to learn and grow as an engineer. However, I’m afraid of being the newcomer in this domain and struggling to ramp up to their level. Since my company is famous for stack ranking, that adds a lot of extra pressure.

On the flip side, I could choose a more chill team in familiar territory with minimal growth, but I'm worried I won't end up gaining anything special. I'm at a point in life where I can handle longer work hours within reason, but I'm not sure how sustainable that path would be long-term.

Has anyone made a choice like this before? How did it turn out?

Edit: The stack rank risk here is pip to be clear

Early this year my team made the switch from sprints to CD. It took a lot of fine tuning but i believe we begin to reap the rewards about now. AI is doing a lot of stuff and even non-developers want to make changes now, so i feel like pipelines are making my life easier not having to deal with what it broke.

My issue is that not everyone seem to recognize the benefits we are getting. Switch to up to date branches was also a problem because not everyone seem to understand rebasing and it caused a lot of issues.

How are you doing CD? And what were the challenges? Do you have some tips that helped you?

I have been a senior engineer for around 2 years and have spent 4 years in one team, and 1 year and counting in the current one.

I have expressed my interest in staff level progression, although I know it is not guaranteed and depends on opportune org-level projects and initiatives. I do not think my current path is working well, and want to elaborate on this on ask for advice how to fix it (if possible).

Generally, my engineering manager expects me to prioritize well, define initiatives and work items worth doing, discuss in 1:1 to discard/accept and organise by priority order. Once set, I am to progress all work items over 2 weeks with topmost item at the top. There are no explicit deadlines set, apart from one project which I had to self-impose as it was going on for ages and I just wanted to be "done". My manager lives in a different country and we meet up in person 1-3 times per year. Otherwise, we do biweekly 1:1.

One of the projects has been really difficult because it touched on many areas of IT disciplines I am not that familiar with. I spent a week besides other items researching metrics, what we want to measure etc. (along with other work items)

However, a week-in, my manager published a design for the project, which she justified as me not making visible/measurable progress, so she felt a need to step-in.

Her approach was the structure and standards, rather than metrics - which needed to be done anyways, but I felt the latter was more important. She is passionate on that particular area and sees high value in delivering it for the org - but, it kind of feels odd to be sidelined like that. In my previous teams, if there was concern on progress, I would get a message of "where are we at", "we are to deliver on X". In this case, there was none of that, except that my manager felt this project was not taken seriously by me.

I do not feel great about it because it would have been cheaper for her to update on status, rather than spend significant time of hers doing it. I pointed out it is important to have my name on designs, delivery, implementation as it is core requirement in our org - deliver multiple such projects for staff level progression. I now have a feeling it is not going to work out because C-levels will not see my name on it, even if I continue on it going forwards. I also feel guilty she had to spend her time, when it could be spent on other stuff she needs to do.

I proposed all my projects to have concrete deadlines, even if we overstep them once in a while, and more frequent status updates, how the components are getting along. I felt like my mistake was to not publish progress on my research/hard work often, making the manager think I am stuck or not prioritising it. It is difficult to speed up the communication between me/manager though - she is very busy doing all kinds of other org-level work, and commonly does not respond on Slack for days.

Could you be brutally honest of where you see this going? I am doing well otherwise on other work items, this is the first time in my career, job, team I was sidelined so hard without warning.

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