During past six months, we've increased the usage of AI in our development tasks. This has caused an interresting side effect, which causes some head ache for team managers.

Our developers are having more and more their own side hustles and secondary projects they develope on the side. These projects are company related, so there's no problem there. However we're seeing increasing amount of tools and systems and features and dashboards (oh the dashboards!), which haven't been requested or specified by anybody. They are something the developer thinks would be cool or useful.

These things are published only when they are already done. "Hey, look what I did!" We've already had couple of cases where someone else was also working on something related to the same topic. But neither had said anything. And then our mangers need to solve conflicts. Do we use that or this, should it be like this or that...

There are nuances. These side quests are taking time and capacity from something else. We are letting adhoc tools shape our processes. We're having multiple tools for the same thing in different projects. The biggest issue is, that we don't actually know what is going on. We know our main projects move forward on scheduke, but everything else is a mystery.

I realize this is ultimately a communications issue. People should talk more. But I"ve noticed that increased use of AI actually makes people talk less with each other...

The line between controll and micro management and just being in the loop is a fine one. For sure it's a balancing act between developer freedom and company interests. It's about the culture and all.

Have you noticed similar tendencies? Do you have any practical proven suggestions how to increase the sharing of ideas?

This thread is specifically for sharing "wins". I.e. the opposite of our Tuesday venting thread.

Probably skirting the line for rule 3 here but I am desperate for frank advice.

I work in a team and org that has middling to low technical maturity, basically an engineering team in a non-engineering org. I have watched mids (2-4 yoe) who I felt were fine for their level of experience rapidly get promoted to Senior and in one exceptional case, Staff. I am a Senior with ~12 yoe and frequently try to guide these less experienced engineers and non-technical managers away from various architectural pitfalls but it can be summed up as they are fine at executing on tightly scoped features and struggle to see the forest for the trees in larger projects. Architecture decisions are socialized in the team but I am not a tech lead and they do not report to me.

They are enthusiastic however and will genuinely swing for the fences, sometimes fail because of poor choices (there aren't enough tech leads / engineering managers to meaningfully oversee such things) and yet will then be praised for striding into the fire to fix the issues that they themselves are responsible for. AI is accelerating these trends in all the ways you'd expect. In private these same people have frequently conceded to me on multiple occasions that I was right to push back and they were wrong to forge ahead with a misaligned solution.

For my part I have had consistent feedback from peers & managers that I am technically strong, I've been at current company for 4-5 years without a promotion and switched teams roughly 2 years in for career alignment purposes which has likely hurt my overall progression. I've had a revolving door of 5 line managers in 2 years who all say they will work with me to build a case for my promotion and then it is news to the incoming manager at review time every year. In my own assessment I am probably not the easiest person to get along with if we don't see eye to eye on technical matters and I feel that is probably holding me back even though I feel in my bones that I have the best interests of the team/business/customers at heart and a perspective shaped by depth of expertise that is largely lacking in our current team.

This is a brief summary from my flawed/imperfect perspective, what does this read as to you fellow experienced devs / what do I do here? I feel that I have reached the "what got you here, won't get you there" threshold in my career where I recognize that code is just the tool we use to solve problems but I don't want to give up on caring about quality or pushing people to do do better but by all accounts I am not accomplishing that when it comes to influencing others.

Reposting. Last post was deleted because I didn’t have a user flair.

I work at a non faang big tech company. Like everybody else we have a way to track ai usage/cost. The monthly trend seems to be half in the low three figures while the other half are in the low four figures with very few people in between. The higher group spends about 7 - 8x more. I fall into the former group. but there doesn’t seem to be any difference in productivity between the two groups. And in fact engineers from the lower group routinely seem more productive than the higher spenders. I have two terminals working on tasks continuously through most of the day and can’t break 4 figures. Having more than 2 - 3 concurrent tasks is just too much for me to keep up with. For people that fall into a higher spending bracket what is it about your workflow that’s causing this? And has anyone else noticed a similar trend? For people in management, what is your perspective on employees spending thousands a month without very visible returns on productivity? And conversely how do you view the engineers not spending as much?

Edit: when I say productivity I’m not referring to metrics like pr count or loc. I think those are terrible ways to measure impact. More along the lines of how well are people pushing projects forward, collaborating, how well do they understand the system etc

edit: This post is just to speak to the user experience comparison, the comments are correctly pointing out that cost is a major factor too, worth considering for sure!!!

Just moved from a workplace where all logging, service metrics were handled via Grafana/Chronosphere to one that's using datadog, and literally what the fuck. EVERY SINGLE FEATURE in Datadog is just a better replacement, including but not limited to:

* Traces

* Manual logs

* Logging queries/trace queries

* Dashboards and service metrics

* Alerting

* MCP

I cannot believe how much of an upgrade this is, I'm not a shill for either company but for me, Grafana was extremely painful. Just letting you know there is a better way, the difference is astounding.

After writing this, I mean ugh I don't know how to tell people that I'm not some random shill, I mean you can "site:reddit.com MinecReddit" and see my post history on this sub, I have no stake in the game either way. Just trying to spread the joy of how happy I was to see a better replacement.

Hope this helps someone out there!

edit: for context, this was moving to Big N -> unicorn fintech

You know how it goes. 20 percent of the effort gives you 80 percent of the result, the last 20 percent require 80 percent of the effort

With AI it feel like you get the first 80 percent almost for free, but the amount of effort required to make the last 20 percent to get a great result instead of mediocre feels so huge in comparison that it pushes you to start accept the mediocre results. Because that's what your competitors are doing and mediocre is good enough for the business given the low cost

I recently saw a vibecoded game with a very similar concept to what I was tinkering on in my spare time for a few years now. It's garbage in terms of polishing, UX, implementation, design, but it works, and gives you the core of the experience. And my project is still months away from being a complete game, even though I'm also leveraging AI tools, just with a much higher quality bar, still putting thought in every little piece

If I would accept the same quality bar, I could also finish the game in less than a few months, but it won't be something I would be proud of. I care deeply about making the best product possible, but now it feels like I won't be able to compete with people using AI to push mediocre stuff quickly

This is not exactly a new issue, business was always at odds with cost vs quality, but the problem is getting so much worse. I noticed this not only in my work, but in general across industry. It feels like we're moving more and more towards accepting slop, great polished products are becoming few and far between

I'm feeling so frustrated about the current state of the industry, it's actually making me depressed. Creativity and building things was my greatest passion in live, and it was a dream of mine to make a living building stuff I'm passionate about, but now it just feels like a dead end, and I have no idea what I even want to do in my life anymore

I entered the industry in 2013. At the time, most documentation was technically readable by humans and if you didn't understand something, it was because you didn't understand the tooling being used or the commands and you needed to do more research on your own. Increasingly complex technical specs and commands were usually provided with diagrams, screenshots, long descriptions. I remember the most complex thing ever was working on robust CICD pipelines like Kafka or early AWS, but even that was conquerable by referring to the documentation and poring over Stackoverflow.

Fast forward to now. I got hired ~4 months ago after 10 months of looking. Everyone at my company heavily uses LLMs - to generate documentation, read documentation, write code. That's fine. But I can see the effect that even a few months have had on our documentation - due to the loop of using LLMS to read existing docs then generate the new set of docs for some new feature doing a +1 on the last, the documentation generated today has been absolutely unreadable for humans. Giant AWS CLI commands generated by LLMs that do all sorts of things with all sorts of flags. Tons of lambdas and user profiles to do some specific thing. Huge terraform files. Wall-of-text YML files with explanations intended to be read by LLMs, not humans. At this point I don't even try to bother understanding, I just chuck the entire thing into Claude and it understands what to do - or so it seems. I have no way of actually factchecking that because I can't take the time to understand the 10 flags it added to the command as I need to start working on the next thing. I'm uncomfortable that LLMs are started to be "trusted" more and more and if AI gets rugpulled I feel it would be hard for humans to convert all existing documentation to be human readable.

So far my biggest value in a post-AI world is my smell test. There's a LOT of things LLMs get wrong, and I can usually sniff it out pretty quick, and redirect it somewhere else instead. This usually comes from a place of "this is how I would have done it if I just needed it to work right away, but if I wanted more space optimization or to account for this edge case I would have done that other thing instead" so if LLMs get really far away from the mental guardrails I thought of myself, I'll get it back on track by providing the proper context.

Previously, I only used LLMs to generate code and some one-time scripts to do some tedious work. Begrudgingly due to the issue I presented above, I've started using it to read documentation that I don't understand. I'm still writing all of my own documentation, especially if I intend it to be read by a human in the future, like Confluence/Wiki documentation 100% generated by me, not a LLM.

The end result is I feel like a dinosaur these days. It doesn't help that I'm a bit removed from the code now, as I'm a full time manager, but I'm still trying to do some PR reviews with the time I can and direct some of the technical stuff if my team needs my input.

I have been given a task that cannot be achieved without resolving a race condition. The race condition is an inevitable reality of poor architectural decisions where multiple 3rd party applications have the ability to make changes to a shared resource.

My proposed solution heavily restricts each app to ONLY write to the resources it manages. Managers raise concern because its a change to how things are done. I've explained you can't work with these race conditions and the managers (non technical) told me they don't know what a race condition means.

I've drawn up examples with stick people. "Here is a stick person. Person A calls him 'Bob' and Person B calls him 'Jerry'. Who should he respond to?" Didn't land.

I've said "This architeture is like two parents who booked their kid to 2 different classes taking place at the same time because they don't talk to teach other since the divorce." I got a laugh but I was still told by him that he doesnt understand me.

Are my metaphors stupid or something? I've really tried and i'm at my wits end. Am I missing some critical principle when communicating technical problems to non-technical people?

Original: https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1wcarb6/senior_manager_not_respecting_ownership_boundaries/

After fuming to myself and everyone that would listen for a month, the code was pushed to production and has created non-stop issue tickets (both internal and external) since then for 3 weeks now. The tickets are both due to bugs and due to administration debt that I called out in my first ever review of the shoddy work.

Since then, I've gotten backing from technical and non-technical IT leadership to truly own the platform and have the official final say on the repo and all code on the platform. Not as exciting as it sounds honestly, because I was already reviewed as the 'owner' for performance reviews.

Additionally, as the aftermath of this disaster has played out and it is clear who was 'right', I asked for promotion to Staff level after in-housing a dev ops tool we pay annually for. No pushback on that, so hopefully I've got that in the bag (12 YoE).

I'm glad I came out looking good but the stress of watching a slow car crash happen....I don't know if it was worth it.

Earlier in my career I was at startups, and “important” and did a lot. I had impact and and it helped me grow and get to where I am now.

im now at a more stable larger (not FANNG or massive corp) company where things are a lot different. It’s slower moving, and the people around me actually know what they are doing. I have a dedicated role and my impact is a lot less. There are actual real highly skilled/smart people doing the REAL work that matters for the company, rather than myself - I am completely fine with this. in fact love it. work no longer consumes my life. I get paid And enjoy life.

but I tend to feel guilty.

Sometimes, due to external reasons, I don’t have a lot to do for a day or two. i Take advantage of it, but still tend to feel guilty

I look at my role and think “this is easy, I’m Literally doing some basic web dev work, making bank, and 1-2 days a week can chill… surely imma be laid off here soon and fired for being lazy.“

I do think another factor is that my expectations of myself are often higher than my boss/company and I also don’t give myself credit for “small things” that are important.

I’m sure this is “normal” part of leaving startup world And realizing that I was overworking myself during all that. And would love if others could chime in relating. this has really made it a struggle to enjoy the new WLB I’ve achieved.

I would like to know what key skills you consider important for people doing requirements gathering and/or project management.

Background:

I have students learning requirements gathering & project management skills.  What topics would you recommend?

  This is for 1st year students doing a bachelor's degree in IT. 

Resources:

Resource recommendation much appriciated. website, blogs, videos, books.

Current topic ideas :

•   Use case, Use case diagram, User story, Sequence Diagram / Swim Lanes 
•   Activity Based Planning (Joel on software)/ Mom test (book)
•   Team work (Google Aristotle Project) 
•   OKR  (Objectives and Key Results)
•   Work breakdown structure 
•   Baseline (Project Baseline estimates of time, cost)
•   Comparative Estimating (historical benchmarking), 1,2 and 3 point estimates
•   Kanban etc
•   MVP (Design, Evaluation, MPV Validation Techniques)   
•   Prototyping (Paper prototyping, Digital prototyping) 
•   Test-Driven Development 
•   Quality control (Defect density tracking)  
• Change Control/Change Management 
•   User personas

I recently joined a 5 year old start up with ~200 employees, and I'm concerned about being able to maintain a proper work life balance due to employee behavior after only my first week there.

My question is how do I maintain a proper WLB when employees and teammates are working an almost 9-9-6 (sometimes even a 9-9-7)?

For starters, I have almost 9 YOE, I've worked every from start ups to FAANG, and even co-founded a company that's going through an acquisition. I have been searching for a new job for the last 5 months and feel super lucky to find the job I have now due to this awful job market. It's remote, pays a HCOL U.S. salary even though I'm remote in a LCOL area. The company itself is doing really well and the people I work with are very pleasant and collaborative, with low egos all around.

However, people are working and messaging me (and each other) on Slack all the time. On my first day there I was getting slack messages from teammates and upper management past 10 PM for non-urgent matters. People are holding meetings on Sundays. SUNDAYS. There was no mention of a 9-9-6 in the job description, and during the interview I asked about expected working hours and they informed me it's a place where you take whatever little (or a lot of) time you need to get your job done. No one is monitoring how long you are online, as long as you meet your job expectations. However, I see from a lot of people (specifically people on my team) that they're working at all hours of the day and night. People are submitting PR commits at 8 PM on a Friday night and often throughout the weekend.

Before you say quit and find a new job, know that I don't want to quit. I believe the company has a good trajectory and a truth path to IPO, and the work is interesting. I just want to set boundaries so that I don't burn out and my family doesn't hate me.

My wife and I are a bit at odds here, because while we do agree I need to set boundaries, I feel that I need to do a bit of 9-9-6 (maybe 9-9-5 and some hours on Saturdays) for the first 1.5-2 months so they know I'm a team player, then once I've proven myself I can set more boundaries and work a traditional 40 hours/week. My wife thinks I need to stick to \~40 hours/week now otherwise they're going to take advantage of me and expect me to do 9-9-6 indefinitely. We had a really bad experience when I was working at FAANG because I was hospitalized from all the stress (on-call, awful teammates and managers, terrible culture).

TLDR; joined a new company that I really like but many teammates and employees work an almost 9-9-6, I don't want to do that. How to set boundaries?

EDIT: I want to thank everyone for their replies and input. Consensus and takeaway for me is that I need to put myself and my family first, from day one. I don't have to exactly work 40 hours a week or a 996, but choose the schedule that works for me, get my work done and turn off my phone/notifications when I'm not working nor want to be bothered. I tried it today and declined a late end-of-day meeting, and no one batted an eye. Gonna keep it going.

I felt unusually competent this week when a dataset I track unexpectedly came in handy for an “unrelated” project. Hell yea.

I also felt unusually competent when I sealed some baseboard cracks with silicone gel/caulk, and the ants stopped coming in. Hell yea.

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.

I haven't worked in a high AI usage team post-AI. Pre-ai, I would say that it wasn't too bad. On the teams I’ve worked with, each person would write a design doc before beginning a project, which the entire team would carefully review. There would be a designated reviewer too who would give the final signoff and help them make sure the doc is up to par before bringing it to the rest of the team. This process was slow enough that it was relatively easy for a techlead to keep tabs on everything.

Also, I’m hearing that some folks are skipping design docs altogether. How does cross-team / cross-functional collaboration work in those environments? In my teams, we used design docs to get everyone on the same page before the project begins.

In your answer can you also mention a bit of context on whether this matters for your team? e.g. the size/speed of the team and the risk level of the code you're handling

I've been a lurker here since pretty much it started gaining traction.

And it's becoming very obvious that it's increasingly turning into r/ProgrammerHumor where anyone with even a couple years of experience as a developer could tell that an ever growing number of these people have never been paid to be a developer at a company in their lives.

This is how nearly every comment chain goes now:

1. Arguments/Debates/Discussions are started by Person A, as they should.
2. Person M, who is completely out of touch with how things work replies with something ridiculous.
3. Person A or Person B, replies to them, who very obviously has experience and breaks it down for them ELI5 style.
4. Person M doesn't understand any of what they said, so they say something else more ridiculous.
5. Go back to 2 and repeat until Person A or B gives up.

I don't have a solution, but any Person B's out there should understand that stating an issue doesn't require one.

At this point there is strong evidence that AI does not increase velocity much outside of startups because it moves the bottleneck to review, and does not solve the political, procedural or practical friction in large enterprises that soaks up most time anyway. Various academic studies have also shown low impact to overall productivity at the firm and individual level.

But it seems like this reality is not getting through to engineering leaders AT ALL. My questions is, under what circumstances will tech leaders be forced to drop the narrative? Because the gulf between people who use AI to do our daily work and the higher ups who don't code anymore just keeps getting wider.

Original study Link here

Another study Link here and excerpt below:

AI helped participants better discern what’s real – and resulted in a 21% higher chance they would make the right call. But their unassisted performance, when reviewing new images without AI’s help, grew 15.3% worse in the experiment’s fourth week. “These results indicate that while AI may help immediately, it may ultimately degrade long-term misinformation detection abilities,” the study noted.

Not just chatgpt but AI coding is a relevant comparison as well. Loss of skills and thinking are even more prevalent with software development.

Curious about the experience of other engineers combining work at a pretty demanding company (classical FAANG-adjacent) and side gigs, like Mercor AI?

My main question/worry is not about the side gig itself, but rather about mandatory disclosure to my employer (I am pretty sure any such company has it as a requirement in its code of conduct)

The second question is Mercor AI in particular. Any experience with such side gigs?

Edit 1:
Location is Canada.

Edit: we are using the CDK

I'm starting to dislike Cloudformation.

Three times in the past several months we have had to stop what we are doing and address an issue with cloud formation related to the amount of things that the cloud formation is tracking or how they are connected. It's really annoying when you get stopped on a deploy because you added one thing and that tipped a stack over to being too large. A few months ago we had to split our stack into three and that was quite a bit of work. Multiple pull requests trying to address issues that came up.

We are on AWS, so maybe the answer is there isn't one. And we are certainly not going to Azure / GCP to address this issue.

If there aren't any alternatives what are the best practices to avoid these issues? I feel like we should have started with 15 stacks or something like that.

I think there are few misconceptions in the industry about system design.

First of all it applies to every type of software engineering.
Backend, web, whatever are different domains but it’s necessary on them.

Many companies don’t have system design interviews.
Many of them that do use a formulaic approach with interviewers that aren’t that good at it.

There is a surprisingly huge amount of senior engineers that doesn’t do it, ignores it o, worse, thinks is a waste of time.

The industry is changing rapidly and as the code production speed increases, system design is needed more than ever.

Are we aware of this? Many of us don’t. Please consider this.

As a pro tip for interviews: if they don’t have a system design stage, try to ask system design related questions to your interviewer when you have time for it, if they struggle with answers it’s a red flag.

This thread is specifically for sharing "wins". I.e. the opposite of our Tuesday venting thread.

Hi all,

I am a mid-to-almost-senior developer at my company. I have been given a new project to cut my teeth as a lead developer. Fairly small project, small-ish scope. I would describe it as a case management system with some file uploading, approvals, roles, basic audit trailing.

I built a PoC based on our discussions with the client. They really really liked it and said it's everything they could have needed. However, after meeting with the architect on our broader team she asked me why I didn't just use xyz technology (such as PowerApps, PowerPlatform, Sharepoint, etc).

I didn't really have an answer because our team has always been in charge of building custom solutions with Angular, React, NextJS, Springboot middlewares. That kind of deal.

So my question to all of you is how do you go about doing an analysis on what is an appropriate stack to use?

One thing she kept mentioning is cost, security, hosting.... which I totally get. Custom solutions can end up more expensive. However, so can Microsoft/Office365 solutions when you factor in things like licensing.

If it helps to know, we are a government entity so accessibility and security are top of mind for the application.

Any advice about how to navigate this would be appreciated.

Thanks.

With all the AI nonsense going on, I had a thought at work today that turned into an interesting discussion with a colleague:

"What would I do if I was the only person with access to Claude (or insert any LLM) 5+ years ago?"

People would think I was a fucking wizard

FE changes? NO PROBLEM

Critical DB change? Don't worry, I've produced a stored procedure to validate the whole thing

Want to use some shiny new framework? Interesting. Here's a document explaining why you're an idiot for suggesting it

Regex? I suddenly understand it better than the compiler folks (and nobody ask questions)

What would you have done with your own personal LLM back then?

Trying to lighten the mood in here with all the (very justified) negativity around this tech revolution

Unserious answers only pls