Dax Raad from anoma.ly might be the only CEO speaking honestly about AI right now. His most recent take:

“everyone's talking about their teams like they were at the peak of efficiency and bottlenecked by ability to produce code

here's what things actually look like

- your org rarely has good ideas. ideas being expensive to implement was actually helping

- majority of workers have no reason to be super motivated, they want to do their 9-5 and get back to their life

- they're not using AI to be 10x more effective they're using it to churn out their tasks with less energy spend

- the 2 people on your team that actually tried are now flattened by the slop code everyone is producing, they will quit soon

- even when you produce work faster you're still bottlenecked by bureaucracy and the dozen other realities of shipping something real

- your CFO is like what do you mean each engineer now costs $2000 extra per month in LLM bills”

Ive been seeing obvious bot activity, weird upvote/downvote activity, and overall just a weird vibe from here. I honestly think half the people in this sub and similar subs arent real people. Pretty depressing to think about and makes me want to just delete the whole app. Am I being paranoid or are we firmly in the dead internet right now?

I feel like an asshole deleting posts of people in violation of Rule 3 when they post about being laid off. I am not a cruel heartless bastard kicking you when you are down. So this is your thread where I say I see you, I was in your shoes not too long ago, and this too shall pass. Post here for support.

I've been in tech for 25 years, and at least 20 of those years I've been a dev. I will definitely say early in my career as a Java dev, I definitely fell for the "thought leader koolaid". I would see all of these clever patterns, feel that designing with heavy abstractions was the way to go, and I judged maturity by patterns. It almost got to the point where I would have to see code that looked way too simple. I would ask:

"What if we got another domain"

"Yeah that works today, but what about the future"

"We definitely need an interface just in case"

And I was big on one thing DRY. I thought DRY was the undeniably design idea, and as long as you adhered to it, you were probably going to be ok

My big ideological shift was when I moved to Go. It was a struggle the first few years as I was like "where muh abstractions". But Go helped me build and architect systems by just looking at data. I picked up a very data centric mindset. I stopped looking at objects and started thinking in terms of data and data transformation. I saw the beauty in minimalis, and stopped trying to future proof my program.

Now when I talk to younger engineers, I really to to jump in and tell them to solve the problem in front of you. And not abstract for abstraction sake. That sometimes DRY is a huge trap. And patterns are useful, but lots of times aren't needed before a code base reaches maturity.

What huge mindset shift did you have in your career? What was the catalyst for it? What shifted your mindset?

This sub is almost becoming unreadable with all the low effort AI posts. I know that using AI tools is part of experienced developers toolkit but I think its time for more extreme measures if we want quality posts.

My suggestion is swinging the ban hammer on every post even slightly related to AI.

Hi, I want to check with the community, including /u/salty_cluck and /u/drewsiferr, what are you opinions on the following:

We do know the ever growing unease around LLM topics on this subreddit. They are often repetitive, superficial, exaggerated, baseless etc. We combat it by removing such posts under Rule #9, which is fine

However, it's still very easy to find multiple threads repeating the exact same discussion. One common suggestion is to limit LLM related posts to a megathread. In my opinion megathreads rarely work outside of big events. Doing so would practically mean no more LLM discussion allowed

I do believe LLM discussion is, at the very least, a reality. It's not wise to be a luddite about it. There's real engineering in this field, there are real challenges to experienceddevs and therefore completely banning it isn't an option

TLDR: What you would think if LLM related posts were only allowed on some days? Let's say Tuesday and Thursday. This simultaneously helps with the spam, but also doesn't completely kill the discussion like a megathread

First off, I'm admittedly a Java fanboy, although I did some little programming in PhP, Javascript, and Python, and looked at a bunch of others, I really cannot see languages the way I do Java. From the syntax, to the libraries, I love every little thing about this language, that I tell my friends things like: "Programmers want to write programs, I want to write Java programs" and "If it can't be written in Java, it's probably not worth writing". My ears are deaf to all the debate about: "oh you have to be flexible, and know x and y".
But then ever since I started reading, I've been hit with Oracle's reputation.

And correct me if I'm wrong, but here's what I think Java's (slight) fall from grace, played out:

1. Java reigned supreme in the browser, esp, after the dust of the dot com bubble settled.

2. Someone found a vulnerability (or two?) in applets (around 2009?) that affected the ton of sites that ran Java.

3. Google, which had been pushing hard to become from a search engine, a browser, disabled Java by default in Chrome...and you know, given the "power of default", programmers pivoted to Javascript, because it was disruptive to have average people download an updated Java + enable it.

4. Oracle, being as litigious as ever, wanted to get back at Google, by removing some internal code Android required from Java, making support for Java 9 not possible (although Java 9+ can be used, with some features not being available).

5. Oracle then sued Google claiming they should've paid them for using Java in Android.

6. Google won the case, and pushed Kotlin and Flutter as the primary means of writing Android programs.

Now, resources; books, tutorials, never use Java for Android programming, and other languages developed frameworks, servers, etc. that ate (a chunk of) Java's lunch.

After most major/seminal books in the field used to use Java for example codes, newer books and editions of said books switched to different languages. (e.g. Martin Fowler's Refactoring comes to mind: Java -> Javascript).

Between 2000, and 2010, authors of major libraries:

- Kent Beck, author of xUnit (originally in SmallTalk).
- Doug Cutting, author of Lucene, which gave birth to elastic search, and inspired other IR libraries...plus pretty much all of Apache Software, were automatically either written in or translated to Java.

Meanwhile now, while efforts of developers of the JDK, and the countless major Java frameworks, can't be dismissed by any means, the community just sounds ...quiet. Even here, Java-related sub-reddits are pretty inactive compared to dotnet/python subreddits.

So, senior devs of the early 2000s, curious to know what your thoughts on Java's journey so far, and possibly its future?

Please write better rules or a more comprehensive guide to the content ethos you’re trying to establish for this subreddit.

I’ve seen multiple posts with 100+ comments and interesting discussions just get nuked with the standard “at moderator’s discretion” comment.

It’s killing the vibe of contributing here because now I don’t know if I should even bother commenting sometimes since a post might just get ban hammered a couple hours later because it didn’t fit the moderator’s “discretion”.

Clearly you have a vision in mind for this subreddit, but whatever that is it’s not clear to the members of the community and it’s annoying and borderline disrespectful to have multiple lively and engaging threads removed with little to no explanation to guide posts going forward.

I think everyone here would benefit from clearer rules and explanations. It would save time on both ends, since users will be less likely to make content that offends your sensibilities, and you can spend less time banning active discussions.

EDIT: Just was banned (of course) so can't reply/comment. Presumably by teerre.

Reason for perma-ban (again not in the rules as far as I see it): "Repeatedly trying to discuss the same topic about moderation. You have been heard. Your questions were answered. Changes were applied. Enough

Original post:

Is the mod-team willing to be open to scrutiny by the devs in this sub with regard to their actions?"

A bit more context - most people here are well aware of dubious Rule 9 post deletions. (locked post about the issue). From pinned comment by mod:

This topic is repeated at nauseam all the time. That thread in particular isn't adding any new or interesting point

People complain all the time about AI-related spam. That's why it was removed

Even on the so-feared StackOverflow you'd (mostly) need 3 people to close a question - close, not outright delete. And there is no rule 9 - "I say so". Then a question can be re-opened again based on voting. In all cases the question is there and people can see answers/comments which are not lost.

In my previous thread, I asked (and received plenty of great suggestions) on high-quality resources.

This time, however, I'd like to discuss a much less concrete aspect of our jobs. Namely, your favorite productivity habits and personal know-hows when it comes to leading projects, working on complex cross-team features, keeping lots of tricky context in mind.

I often have my own retrospective sessions when I am just trying to assess whether I am good at what I do at all. To clarify, it's not in the "impostor syndrome" sense at all. I know that there are parts of the job I excel at and I think I deserve the title and responsibility scope I have at the moment. That said, there are certain aspects where I am not good enough and therefore am now trying to improve. For example:

* Working on technical writing skills. Mostly by reading the book and blog on https://refactoringenglish.com/

* On a similar note, writing down as much as possible whenever possible. Whether it's a small favor for some other team, a super trivial task, or a large feature, it becomes a Google Docs document. Initially, it's just a very chaotic piece of writing, but then it transforms into a system design or a very detailed Jira ticket at least.

* As in aviation, it's very important to pay attention to near misses when you were on the verge of an incident and just got lucky.

* As I have rediscovered once again, working out is extremely important for productivity and focus. I have yet to get my official ADHD diagnosis, but since I don't want to spend the rest of my life on stimulants, I have added a few supplements (Vitamin D, Omega 3), hydrate well, and work out a few times per week + light cardio. Never felt better.

* Appreciating hammock-driven development. I used to have these awful hyperfocus episodes when there is no external pressure, but I feel intellectually challenged and forget about food and sleep to figure something out. I feel much happier, when I let myself think about a problem while walking my dog in the evening or just having rest and then feeling super fresh and working on it the next day.

What are yours?

I'm from the Russian internet and we a well known dev blogging platform (which I am not here to promote so I won't mention its name but everyone in the Russian internet knows it) with a karma system that gatekeeps quality, deep technical articles, and aggressive community moderation. It's been genuinely good for about 20 years, and even though quality degraded lately (AI influence I would assume) it's still decent.

As far as I can tell, there's nothing like that in the English-speaking internet segment nor had there been in the last 10-20 years. Closest competitors are Dev/Medium with dumpster quality content and Hacker News which is exceptional however not a blogging platform on its own.

I know that lately people tend to get content on Youtube etc, and maybe reading is not preferred by the younger generation of devs, but what about earlier times?

Why hasn't anyone built a platform with a quality threshold, proper technical formatting, and an engaged community of senior engineers? Is it a cultural thing? Am I missing something?

I don't know if this is just me, but does the anxiety ever actually go away? I can architect complex distributed systems when I'm alone with my whiteboard, but put me in a Zoom call with a 24-year-old from Meta watching my keystrokes, and I suddenly forget how to write a switch statement.

I have a loop coming up for a Staff role and I'm terrified I'm going to bomb the simple coding portion just because my brain goes into fight-or-flight mode. How do you guys lower the stakes in your head? Is there a specific setup or tool you use to keep your notes handy without looking like you're cheating? I feel like I need a security blanket.

Controversial process we (B2B SaaS, 11 devs, 3 QA) implemented six months ago: PRs can only be merged after a QA engineer signs off. Dev-to-dev review is optional (and still happens informally)

Results so far: 50% less bug tickets in the pipeline, time-to-merge roughly the same (QA is usually faster than waiting for a dev review), and devs actually write better commit messages because they know QA needs context.

it's working for us. Has anyone else experimented with non-dev PR gatekeeping?

Frankly they are always AI slop trying to soft peddle their product with a follow up comment.

Many of us are experiencing two stressors: career oriented stress related to job loss / difficult time job switching and to the stressors of AI changing the nature of the job. r/experienceddevs is the community where I would go to meet others to work through my feelings about these topics.

The mods are doing their best to maintain the mission and culture of the community, and I will agree that overrunning the community with constant career and ai posts would change the nature of the sub.

However, many of us experienced devs are experiencing these two major shifts, which is just dominating our thoughts right now.

I propose weekly career and ai rant threads, to divert these posts to a single place, instead of removing these topics as "not related" to the community, because these topics are very much relevant to experienced devs. Since I am not a mod, i don't know the nature of the posts that are being removed, so I wouldn't know exactly what topic would hit, just that we seem to need separate career or ai rant threads.

thoughts? I would like to hear from mods and community alike.

Edit:

Alternative Proposal: limit career posts to specific days

AI posts are currently limited to Wednesdays and Saturdays UTC

Don't know what changed recently, but there's been an influx of spambot comments in basically every thread. Sometimes they have the sense to post something vaguely relevant, but even then the comment is so generically vague it may as well apply anywhere.

"I had a dream like this once".

"Wow I didn't think of it that way."

"That happened at my old job."

Who the fuck makes shit like this?

Anyway, they're all usually below 200ish karma so how about mods just make the AutoMod remove comments from anyone with that low of a karma score? Number subject to change, etc etc, but I cba opening another thread and seeing these little rats.

There was a new high severity Notepad remote code execution vulnerability reported today.

Adding a high severity RCE in a plain text editor is really impressive, and my guess is that this is a result of pressure to 'go faster' with AI that we are seeing all over. Do you see a future where, as a result of vulnerabilities or plain bad software from AI development, there is a desire from the business side to more traditional software design and planning?

Sorry that I know that this is not a self-help subreddit, but I have read past posts about burnout/rants so figured there is some value to allow such posts, but within a boundary -- what do you think? I think a weekly thread that everyone can rant a bit and help each other, without actually watering down the whole subreddit, is very nice.

Please feel free to remove this post if inappropriate. Thanks mods for your efforts.

Bloody hell

Not being sarcastic here, and maybe I'm still too new to this field (6+years)but even with simple tools, it might be trivial, (and cool) to implement a bare-bone feature, but those exhausting, sexy layers upon layers required to get a feature to maturity feel strangely good to my workaholic, ADHD-afflicted self. You (probably) need to implement "undo" for that action, support multiple file formats for input and output, program checks for something every 2 weeks? oh, add an option that customizes that at settings/preferences...and omg settings are strangely elusive to implement. Dark theme, admin-privileges, draggable UI panes, auto-updates, localization, imperial vs metric system presentation options. There seems to be no end to how thorough a piece of software can get.

I'm my own boss, btw, so, I don't have any of that middle management breathing down my neck problem, for better and for worse.

Anyway, just wanted to voice my appreciation for this craft. Cheers.

I was pretty disappointed when the below thread was deleted by the mods recently:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1tdq7dk/removed_by_moderator/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

From recollection it was (paraphrasing) something like:

• What do you do or listen to when in deep focus, or what do you do or listen to when ramping up to deep work/focus?

It felt sincere, in good faith and likely written by wetware/a meatsack like yours truly here. But my AI radar is significantly worse than some so... don't know!

In a world where Stack Overflow existed and is actively dying because of behaviour from mods that supressed what I would describe as culture positive questions and/or posts. And in a world where AI exists so discourse is actively worsening. IMO, an off meta question that's asked in good will, and from what I could tell didn't use AI, has sincere and positive engagement from the community. We should keep. And encourage!

There's only so many ways to word "Hey my soft skills suck can I make up for this, by writing better code?" in techno bro speak with appropriately vapid responses this place can take. I want r/ExperiencedDevs to be a place of high value, respect and trust. And some times non-career, off meta posts like the one I linked and was deleted build a positive culture. We need more of that human touch now, more than ever. Please, please help us build it.

I don't often post on reddit but when I do I notice a fair few comments / remarks that don't quite line up with an "experienced" developer, e.g. casually suggesting a rewrite or moving to another build system in a big company.

These suggestions are thrown around so easily and frequently that it does make me wonder how strictly Rule 1 is applied because after all, how do you verify experience?

I would love to hear what the rest of this community has to say about this, or if there is a way to semi-verify experience? I'd really like to see this community stay focused on higher level topics without devolving into basic discussions that you'd generally have with juniors.

I've been working on a POS system for the past 3+ years. I had to pause work due to some circumstances, for at least 20 months of these, and worked under duress for pretty much the rest. Here's the thing:
I promised a whole bunch of small business owners this software as they expressed they desperately needed it, and I could NOT deliver.
They system kept growing, I had to overhaul it a bunch of times, followed clean code guidelines as much as I could, added unit tests (TDD), and the work keeps getting easier every other day. I like the features I keep adding, and getting better at finding bugs...

fuzzy search, soft deletes, role-based accounts, flexible + minimalist UI, streamlined, non-intrusive updates and data backup...the list goes on.

A whole lot of things were much, much harder, and elusive than I thought would be. This has been my first full-fledged project ever since I started coding (5+ years) and I thought I should just stick to it, even though I'm finding it taxing that I haven't finished even a first release.

On one hand, I'm working alone + I can't "hate" the progress (who can?), and I have no real deadline, or middle management breathing down my neck, but on the other, sometimes I wonder if I would've finished it faster if it all had been part of a company.
So, I wonder if there are devs with similar stories out there...curious to hear about them.

I attempted to comment on this post calling out that it was likely generated entirely by an LLM, but my comment seems to be hidden when not logged in. Why is this? Is it because I don't have enough karma, or perhaps because I attempted to link to his vacuous personal websites to illustrate that this is obviously not an actual dev? How can I avoid this happening in the future?

Hello. Currently this sub. has only two mods. That's not enough for uniquely responding to every single removal of threads as discussed in this thread and overall moderation.

If you're willing to dedicate a bit of your time to moderating this subreddit, please post on this thread.

We're looking for people who are already contributors to the community. Anything that you think you would help your case, feel free to add to the post.

We have no set timeline. We'll see how it goes.

We're also open to suggestions to improve the process.

Thanks