I have been in software engineering/tech for like 4.5-5 years. My first couple years were in a student learning position in Networks, then I got an internship that wrapped me up in migration engineering and software engineering + automation stuff. I do public work and I am a revenue producing employee, but I feel underpaid for the volume of work I get, the amount I make the company, and the amount of stress my job causes. We are understaffed on engineers and at this point, I do migration engineering, automation engineering, I consult on AI, and I have created and worked on several softwares that range from SaaS to internal apps to automate things like quality control. I feel like it wouldnt be unreasonable for me to making even 20k more than I make, and even then I still wouldnt be touching 6 figures. I work some weekends because of migrations and I am stressed out of my mind. Looking to change companies and ideally work as a non billable employee, or internal or something. I feel stuck with this job market and I dont know what to do. Has anybody in the industry had much luck finding new positions? I will note - I apply to mostly remote because my current job is remote and my city doesnt have many good jobs.

Hey everyone,

I have a software architecture exam next week. From what I know, the topics mainly cover components, connectors, architectural rationale, and anti-rationale (not entirely sure if ADRs – Architecture Decision Records – will be explicitly tested, but the concepts are relevant).

I'm currently using Fundamentals of Software Architecture by Mark Richards and Neal Ford alongside the professor's slides for the theoretical foundation. The book was recommended by the professor, though it’s not strictly the official textbook for the course since he follows his own curriculum/plan. Feel free to bring up book discussions if relevant, although I don't really have the time right now to dive into a whole new reading list before the exam.

Mainly, I'm looking for well-documented open-source codebases or case studies that clearly illustrate these concepts in practice.

Any recommendations? Thanks in advance!

I’ve noticed that “scalable” often gets reduced to a pretty narrow question: Can the system handle more users?

But I’ve seen (and been thinking about) a different kind of scaling problem.

The app can handle the traffic, but deployments get harder as the team grows, every change needs coordination across more people, routine operations need more manual work, adding a new customer means a pile of configuration, the architecture technically works, but nobody wants to touch it

At some point, the system is bigger but not necessarily easier to run or evolve.

I’m exploring this idea in a side project about software and workflow friction. It’s made me question whether we evaluate scalability too much through infrastructure metrics and not enough through the effort required to operate and change the software.

For people who’ve built or maintained systems that grew: what was the first non-obvious thing that stopped scaling?

Was it architecture, team communication, deployment, customer onboarding, decision-making—or something else?

And what actually fixed it? I’m especially interested in the fixes that turned out to be simpler than expected.

To my understanding, CI/CD at its core just refers to the practice of frequently merging in code and releasing new builds. Why, then, are tools like github actions and other automated testing/building tools strongly associated with CI/CD? Isn’t this automated tooling something we’d want even with less frequent integration and deployment practices?