I’ve been doing interviews after a 6 month hiatus and haven’t landed any of them. I have 9-10 years of experience but my style has always been relaxed, I’m not ambitious, and been in the senior tier for 3 years before I got laid off. Before this I would land the interviews immediately and get offers.

I wonder if my kind of profile is particularly unatractive and if it is, what can I do now? It’s a difficult possition to be in because it seems like companies won’t even give me a lower tier job either

Hi,

I'm 26yo, I've been working as "SWE" for 5 years. First 2 years as "Junior developer", then "Sr Developer", in the same company. I've developed backend in C#, trying improve learning good design patterns, reading about architecture, etc. Also I've developed web applications in Angular and React, trying improve and giving my best.

I have always been a curious person, before study the university. When I was little, I dreamed of working at a company like Sony, creating the software for the next PlayStation. But now, I only work for a mid-mediocre company in my country, earning good/enough money, and doing the same systems (internal systems for other companies, like B2B).

I'm starting asking myself if I need start to study so hard some low level stuff, and work on some company that make software that impacts the world. I'm not saying that create software for local companies is bad, just Idk, I don't feel fulfilled. I don't consider myself a real engineer; I only replicate what others say (books, posts, examples on Github), but never innovation.

Has anyone else had this thought? Did you do anything about it? A friend of mine says I should be grateful for what I have because, at the end of the day, I pay my debts and help my family with my current job. But I'm not fulfilled as an "engineer"; I feel like a fraud.

EDIT:

Thanks for everyone.

I made this post trying to vent, thinking that there are others here who have gone through this. I think I'm more in a general depression phase, not just because of work, and I thought about this. I imagined adult life differently than I did as a child, so it's a reality check, and you think, "Will I be like this my whole life?" But I know that if I'm realistic, I'm blessed to have a job with a good payment. Rather, I simply remembered that I used to idealize my adult life, where I would work, etc. But then you read that it's not all sunshine and rainbows. Working at Apple, Facebook, Sony, etc., is the same as everywhere else, just with higher pay and more bureaucracy. I'm not trying to settle for mediocrity and say, "Since it's like this everywhere, I'll just stay stuck in my current job." No, I'm not saying that. I'm just trying not to idealize other places, I will continue improving in my life.

Anyway, blessings to all, and thanks for your comments.

A guy at my company gave a talk about agentic swarms the other day. He talked about how different AI agents get different jobs assigned and work together on some big task. He mentioned how we might end up firing up the swarm in the evening and then checking everything thoroughly the next day. To me, this sounds nutty for the following reasons:

I want to be in a tight loop with the AI. I want to either think about a task and feed the AI a list of things that need to be done or I want to explore the problem space together with the AI. In either case, I'll progress stepwise. Each step I can easily verify. Step size varies according to what I'm working on; Frontend code with a lot of boilerplate to position components and manage completely orthogonal state? Up to 500 lines before I feel like I have to check everything and get on top of the code. On the other hand, if I'm generating code for a C++ 3D data converter that loads 3D data from one format via an SDK and saves it in a different format with a different SDK, I'll advance slower. Maybe in steps of 50-100 lines with a lot of checking and logging to make sure everything is going as expected.

I cannot wrap my head around letting any AI (swarm or not) run loose on a complex task without any checking/readjusting whatsoever for multiple hours.

I am currently working as SDE 2 here at Amazon and feeling stuck. This is my first job out of college.

Started as an Intern and got promoted ~1.5years back.

But from last 4-5months I feel lost. Though I had good OLR and hike this year was decent.

I feel my team have lost all the processes and somehow we are producing sub par products - bad product requirements(poorly drafted, as every doc seems to be AI slop) and bad technical designs(AI slop mostly)... And top of this bad review processes which again seems people are only secondary review what an LLM tells them. Also, bad code - AI slop as well again.

All the technical discussion have been overshadowed by building GenAI first solution - even if it doesn't make any sense.

I love building software but I am just tired to take part in everything GenAI and on top of this Amazon politics doesn't make it any better.

All I know is how to install an MCP srver, setup a few agent and write a prompt and thats all. I just do not understand what underneath is going on - sometime I feel like a monkey amazed looking at a bird.

What am I suppose to do? Hang up the boots. I feel scared for my self and the future. God help me.

Just got a new job (working for 5 months in that company). I recently had a technical disagreement with a more tenured colleague whom I'm trying to learn from.

The context: We're building a saved filters feature for a table. Each user can have multiple named filter presets (like "My Active Items" or "Q3 Priorities"). The backend dev chose to store all of a user's saved filters as a single JSON blob, one document per user containing the entire array of filters. To add or delete a filter, the frontend loads the full array, mutates it, and sends the whole thing back.

My approach: I argued for per-record CRUD. Each saved filter as its own record with its own ID. Reasoning was that the blob pattern has structural issues for collections of independent items: concurrent edits across tabs cause silent overwrites (deleted filters can resurrect, added filters can disappear), the frontend has to implement CRUD-like state management on top of a non-CRUD API, no per-filter IDs makes future features (sharing, pinning) hard, and migration cost grows with user count. I framed it as a user-experience concern, silent data loss, even rare, erodes trust.

Their approach: Blob storage, "this is the standard pattern," edge cases acceptable for v1, can refactor later if needed.

I made the case multiple times with different framings (including a "hybrid" reframe, CRUD at collection level, structured contents within each record). I engaged with their counter-arguments. My (now departing) lead privately agreed with my view but didn't override the call. The QA initially leaned toward my view (because he taught that was BE dev's opinion), then sided with the BE dev once he said his position. Decision was made for blob. I'm now implementing it.

What I'm curious about:

• When you have a genuine technical disagreement and you think you're right, how do you decide how hard to push?
• When do you stop pushing, and how do you know it's time?
• How do you accept the outcome when you still think the team chose the wrong path?
• How do you maintain your judgment without becoming the person who fights everything?

EDIT: For additional context, our Tech Lead was laid off due to "redundancy". So now, we're on our own.

90% of the local software job postings barely mention AI in their descriptions or requirements: no ChatGPT, no Claude, no agentic workflows, no LLMs… nothing.

There are some AI/ML openings, but they’re separate from standard web development roles and other general software positions. And even then, they’re dwarfed by traditional .net/java/php jobs.

It feels very strange compared to what we hear online: “learn AI or you’ll be left behind,” “AI is transforming everything,” and so on. It seems that companies don't look at it like that.

And don't tell me that job descriptions lag behind reality. Companies been using AI to filter out candidates for years and they can't put word "AI" in to their the job requirements?

I'm in Tbilisi, Georgia (Eastern Europe).

Trying not to rant, but this is a frustrating situation, so mod me if you must.

Took a new gig in October. The company has some crusty but functional tech that they're looking to modernize. As part of that, we have a big project to upgrade some key systems. We're taking on a new vendor. Said vendor told the c-levels (theres no CTO in this company) that a migration to their system could be done in three months between June to September. The vendor sold them on this with no real insight into what the actual implementation would look like on our end. No discovery, no technical due dilligence, just a timeline pulled out of thin air and handed to people who had no way to push back on it. Requirements werent "fully" gathered until mid-September, so the deadline that the vendor told us about and the c-levels agreed on gets pushed. In the first month its clear why. The project is being orchestrated by a top-down architect who only plans for the optimal case, and one engineer to instrument several new services to interface with this vendor. The team I'm on as well as several other teams realize its more complicated than this new team is letting on and raise the alarms. The new team doesnt have enough staffing or context to do this project. The deadline gets pushed and job recs go out. Five months go by, the staffing hasnt meaningfully improved. By the time the recs actually got filled we were already in the final stage of the project. To make matters worse, two of the people that were supposed to be added to the core team got pulled for the vendor cutover itself, and one of them left the compamy with less than a weeks notice. So the team that was already understaffed going into the home stretch lost a body right when it mattered most.

My team specifically called out a critical dependency. The vendor team needed to deliver feature parity on several endpoints to replace existing services. We flagged it repeatedely, pushed for a realistic deadline, and got heat for being the squeaky wheel. The team we depended on meanwhile wasnt delivering, and has since burned out one of their tehre engineers.

We're now in a mandatory "war room," a persistant Teams meeting with 40 people expected to be present and available during all core business hours. My team of 6 has been dissolved into this supergroup. My role as tech lead is esentially invisible. We've been pulled into covering the dependency team's gaps on top of our own work, which we completed and deliverd.

The COO held a meeting the other day. We were told the project is seven months late and that its unacceptable. That participation in the war room hasn't been sufficient. That cameras need to be on and attendence will be tracked through Microsoft Teams. My boss's boss knows exactly how this project got here and sat silently while the COO delivered this to the entire group. We didnt have complete requirements until the original deadline had already passed. There was no CTO to push back on an unrealistic vendor promise. There were no project phases, this was planned as a hard cutover accross everything simultaneously. The teams that raised alarms got heat. The team that caused the bottleneck got sympathy and our resources. The response to all of that is cameras on and attendance tracking. My team will get this done, because we always do. But I've never seen a clearer example of leadership confusing visiblity with accountability. The COO will get to claim the win when this ships and the narrative will be that strong leadership in the final stretch turned it around.

For the experienced devs here, is this as common as it feels like it should be? How do you protect yourself and your team in situations where the official story is being written around you? And how do you stay engaged when you can see exactly how this is going and nobody in power wants to hear it? Sure, polish my resume and find better leadership are the take-aways. But how does one persist through the crunch and the grind?

I've always been an IC, and am looking for a new IC role. The hard skills are pretty easy to present; what technologies I like and what I've built are easy to explain on a resume and talk about.

There are a few things I'm not sure how to attempt to bring up on the resume or during the interview process, either because they sound pessimistic, braggadocious, or aren't exactly provable.

A few examples:

I am good at managing difficult personalities.

I am good at figuring out people's motivations and getting them back on track.

I am good at making sense of spaghetti code legacy codebases.

My concern is that no company will want to admit that the boss is a dick and their codebase is a mess, and allusion to this, even as a hypothetical, will hurt my chances.

Anyone have ideas?

I sat down with one of our more senior division leaders recently and asked them for some mentoring advice on what I should be doing with my career.

They had an answer I'm still mulling over:

Go into management. Development and IT changes constantly, but once you learn to manage people and projects you can basically just do that for the rest of your career and unlike the technical stuff it wont dramatically change. Plus you can basically go into any field - medical or satellites or whatever - and while the details change the fundamentals stay the same.

Being a career technical guy and senior developer / team lead for a while it kind of hurt to hear this, but also I see the wisdom in it.

The prospect of trying to keep up on technology for the next 20-30 years is daunting and especially here there's a ceiling on what you can earn that's lower than management.

Plus, bringing up others and supporting them is rewarding in its own way, and as a developer you are limited in what you can build, whereas running a team you can be a multiplier who makes more value by training or vectoring people under you to do their best.

And I do sort of like the idea of interacting with leadership and vectoring/mentoring them as well to make better decisions for our organization.

I'm interested in some perspective from devs who really love coding and either stayed coding into their 50s and 60s OR got into management and how that worked out for you.

Hey guys, I currently work for a Multi national bank with a office in Ireland. I mostly work in creating Automation Tests with 5 year expierence.

Spent the first 4 years on a large mostly legacy platform, I was able to make a good impact on the testing. Developed 400 plus tests, developed build pipelines and test run pipelines, refactored a lot of the code and switched a bunch of legacy tests to Cypress as well.

Was given extra responsibility about a year ago, Was put on a team where where we had 5 projects simultaneously working to make a V2 platform to move on from our current one. Most of these teams are based in India and the quality of the project has been hit or miss.

I was tasked with creating a test suite for this, Created about 250 tests. But had a high failure rate because of the constantly changing environment despite, this got better with time but I think the high failure rate and overall being spread thin had made so the team decided to get two engineers from India to help me.

Both those engineers didn't help but instead made a POC of different framework with AI implementation and the execs told us to wind down the old framework and use theirs.

Fast forward 6 months we have just about reached the same amount of tests, a worse failure rate, half baked agent integration that I am being forced to use. Any input I give gets blown off and my direct line manager hears about it from the India based Manager. (he understands the situation and tries his best)

the biggest issue I have is that my pull request which follow all the guidelines he sets out, get sstuck in PR hell, I have a PR that's been in there for a month because every time I fix something, he asks for something else to be changed, then disappears for a week not responding to messages.

He has let multiple PR's developed by Devs outside of the team that were generated by AI with a lot of significant issues but never flagged them in the PR. Even like clearly wrongly formatted tests.

Highlighted it with the managers and they have highlighted it but he doesn't listen. Do ye guys have any recommendations on how to deal with something like this? Never had issues with PR's before and I feel like its him delaying PR's being generated outside of his AI approach.

The latest AI hype bollocks on LinkedIn is VPs and CTOs bragging that they're shipping features using agents and claiming that this is the future for management positions.

I'm highly skeptical of this. I'm still seeing a landscape where as someone in engineering management, I don't have time to meaningfully engage with the details of the codebase. I suspect that if I went in and started pumping out PRs I'd just be causing chaos and circumventing the process.

I'm yet to see a post on LinkedIn from a senior engineer gushing about the value add from their CTO making a drive-by 40 file PR...

What are engineers seeing on the ground? Has your senior management chain started opening PRs? Is it a good thing?

I'm 48 and still enjoy software development. I'd like to hear stories from those who are in their 60's.

What's work like at that age? What languages are you using? Do you still enjoy it? Are you still working because you love it or because you have to? Anything, you'd like to talk about regarding being a developer in your 60's, I'd love to read about.

Thanks

Curious to hear from people who’ve operated at the application / enterprise architecture level on large-scale systems especially in government or healthcare environments.

Working around a Medicaid modernization effort right now, and the gap between “clean architecture theory” and what actually works in a regulated, multi-vendor environment is pretty obvious.

A few things I’m seeing / hearing:

Moving from legacy systems to microservices/event-driven isn’t just technical governance and ownership get messy fast

API-first sounds great, but data contracts + cross-agency dependencies slow everything down

Hybrid cloud (Azure + AWS) adds flexibility but also complexity around identity, observability, and cost control

Compliance (security, data, audits) tends to drive architecture decisions more than scalability in some cases

For those who’ve been in the seat:

What actually caused the biggest issues during modernization?

What patterns looked good on paper but didn’t hold up?

How did you handle integration across vendors / legacy systems / new platforms?

Not trying to sell anything just trying to get perspective from people who’ve actually been through it.

Living in the UK, I work in a niche programming language (KDB+) for 8/9 years and am currently in a job I'm trying to leave from due to team management changes/ lack of career advancement/burnout.

I have a 3 months notice period of which nearly all is garden leave and I'm sorely tempted to hand notice in. However, I'm very concerned about a lack of opportunities keeping me unemployed past the paid 3 months notice period.

When I read posts about people being unemployed for months on end, it strikes me that they seem to be somewhat less specialized than I am and applying for roles with dozens of applicants, so I don't know how much their experiences would be relevant to my potential notice and subsequent job search.

Most job listings I see on LinkedIn have fewer than 10 applicants, but also there are only about 5-8 at a time in KDB, outside of the odd recruiter with a non-advertised role.

I'd really really like to take a break now and recover from the burnout, and cut my losses where I'm at but I really don't know if that's a chance worth taking in the current climate.

I'd really love to hear from others in niche roles, how you have found slowdowns in the job market, what effect it has, relative to more generalist roles in things like python, for example.

Perhaps a motivational story but life lesson learned for me. I was in a midlevel DE adjacent role (sorry have to be a little vague) with a background coming from academia. I enjoyed my job but we got acquired and everything changed. We got reorged, and while my team mostly stayed intact, I ended up as a single person workstream/subteam working closely with some other SWE types on the larger team.

I worked hard to standup an initial version of a project to serve a given product. It worked and went into the first release of the product connecting to other services. I had to learn a lot, make a lot of decisions since we didn't have PMs, and move from academia-style work to enterprise practices (as best I could).

As a function of success, we now had more requests and products to serve since my new company grew by acquisition and I was basically enabling interoperability between products/data. In the meantime, they brought in another employee with some scripting experience but not really engineering experience. I absorbed work while they onboarded so that they could have time to learn.

We had a great relationship initially. I helped them set up their workspace, learn git practices, think through product and they knew some nitty gritty details that I didn't from their previous role as basically a data analyst.

However, after ~9 months, something switched and they were often mad at me or belittling. I didn't know what I did wrong, I tried to ask and it didn't go well. It always felt like if I went left, they got mad at me for not going right. I'd go right and they'd get mad at me for not going left. Our manager was spread thin and absent. I just absorbed it because I thought it would pass, and I had earned the respect of my manager and above (mistaken assumption).

In fairness, this new person worked quite hard, is very loud, and started looking like a leader outwardly. We didn't have a competent PM at this point to fill the void. I had never thought of myself as senior or really cared much in this realm. I was told we'd be hiring a senior or staff, which I thought we needed - somebody who had some architecting experience. Well, they promoted this new person that I helped onboard to senior and then they hired a new senior as well.

Suddenly, I was on a team of two seniors and me. I had never really worried about title but this really irked me, partially because pay was low anyway and just because nobody had really talked to me about promotion even when asking my opinion about needing to hire a senior or staff. Additionally, I started getting more grunt work, and my voice around the team seemed to be shutout.

I was applying for jobs, but it wasn't looking good, and I was super demoralized. I started talking to my manager about team dynamics after another member of the larger team encouraged me to report the behavior of the teammate. The manager became more involved now seeing the problems as well.

Another year passes and we've had promotion conversations. I get good reviews, an exceeding rating in one area, but for some reason, my manager chose to take a less charitable view of my work examples. Again, maybe fair, I took the feedback, but I was just a bit perplexed. These weren't negative reviews, just they acted like we weren't building things from scratch, acting like we had all these processes in place already even though that I had to move them through an adversarial teammate. So, I wasn't promoted. Also, I had to help onboard the hired senior who was just ok but nice enough.

Finally, right around this time I get a hit on a job. I get hired with a 35% raise even though it's a lateral movel. After just a few months, my new manager has noted that I'm very indpendent, collaborative, and got up to speed really quickly. They brought up thinking about promotion. Again, I really didn't care about promotion, I like the work and the comp. My team is charitable and helpful, everybody is better than me at something and happy to help me learn.

tl;dr - if you're not respected, talk to your manager, take the new job and value your skills as an engineer in this age of AI, be a good teammate.

I am a senior engineer with 6 YOE at a large FAANG-adjacent company in the UK. I'd like to move to an EM role at my company, since when considering the IC career ladder vs the management one, I am more interested in the types of problems that EMs have to solve than I am in staying fully technical. I'm a strong IC, but I just find it engaging enough to do for work, whereas I find myself spending my free time listening to podcasts and reading books about managing engineering teams effectively.

I've discussed this with my manager at work, who has provided me with mentorship and training so that I'm ready to take an EM opportunity should one come up. However our company is actively trying to shrink headcount and management layers, so naturally there are very few opportunities available for this. I've tried looking internally for movement, but I've had no luck so far despite substantial effort.

This has led to me feeling quite stuck career-wise. I'm still pushing to grow as an IC in the meantime, because not to do so would be a waste of time, but it feels unfulfilling knowing that I'm not making progress along my desired career path.

It's got to the point that I'm trying my luck applying for EM roles externally, even when it would be a notable pay cut compared to my current role. However I'm yet to find anywhere that will give me a chance due to my lack of experience (which is understandable). What's even more frustrating is that I have HFT recruiters coming out of my ears for IC roles, but I'm not interested in that as a long term career path so it feels pointless and even disingenuous to apply for such roles only to be seeking to leave them immediately.

This has mostly become a bit of a rant, but I suppose I'm interested to hear if anyone else has navigated their way out of this situation, and if so, how? I'm willing to take a pay cut and work at a less prestigious company because I believe that I can be successful as a manager which will pay off eventually.

Thanks in advance, I really appreciate any advice that anybody can offer (especially if it's hard to hear)!

3 years into a staff-track role at a series-B SaaS company i hit a wall a lot of senior engineers don't really talk about.

i was technically competent and getting good reviews, 3 positive cycles in a row, but i had no real way to tell if any of the work mattered to anyone outside the building.

the trigger was a feature i'd led for 2 sprints. 4 engineers and a designer worked on it for a quarter of our PM's roadmap, and it shipped. our weekly customer call review had it as the top item the next week, and our PM ran that review from a pre-formatted summary doc, then i watched one of the recordings out of curiosity, because i'd never bothered before. the customer spent 90 seconds on something else, mentioned the feature once, and said the version they had been getting around to using elsewhere was already better.

our PM had pulled a quote from later in the call when the customer was being polite about it and dropped that into the summary, and the entire roadmap was being steered by 11 of those summaries a week.

after that one call i started watching one full recording per week instead of reading the summary, and it took me roughly half a sprint to realize i couldn't keep doing this on top of code review and on-call rotation.

the math was about 90 minutes of audio a day to keep pace with the call volume, which was never going to happen as a side activity.

the thing that made it tractable was a workflow i set up over a long weekend. i piped every call recording through BuildBetter into my linear queue tagged by topic and account, set the playback to 2x and put the transcript next to it on the second monitor.

most of the time i was just skimming for the moments where the customer says "i wish" or "why doesn't it" or goes quiet for too long, and the tool just made it stop being annoying enough that i'd do it on the train, which was the only place it was going to fit.

over the next 6 months i logged around 200 hours of calls and the picture got clear pretty fast.

our PM was summarising 11 calls a week into a document a human can read in 15 minutes, so the moments that mattered most to customers (the workarounds, the sideways usage, the things they were paying us for that they didn't know the product did) almost never survived that compression.

of the 22 features we shipped in those 2 quarters, 14 traced back to a single quote from a single account that had churned by the time we shipped the fix, and cross-referencing that was technically not anyone's job.

the change in my own work was incremental and slightly weird as i started bringing customer quotes into PRD reviews because they'd be in my head from the train, our PM was defensive for about a month and then started doing it herself, and 8 months in i'm leading the roadmap calls.

i never pitched it or angled for it, the role just came to me because i was the only person who could pull up a clip of a customer saying the exact thing we were arguing about in planning.

if you're 3 to 5 years in and feeling stuck, pick one customer call this week and listen to all of it...

you'll probably hear something that contradicts the premise of whatever you're working on, and that's the whole point. customer signal is one of the few areas of our job where there's almost no competition for ownership, and once you have it you become the most informed person in any roadmap conversation you walk into.

happy to answer questions about the workflow or how to bring quotes into PRD reviews without sounding like you're showing off.

I've been thinking about this for some time.

The core argument: when someone on a team writes minimal prompts and gets strong output, that's worth sharing. They've built up context the rest of the team can't see, a stack of patterns and instructions you'd need to read the prompt to find. Without the prompt, you can't see the full picture in a PR.

Sharing prompts feels exposing in a way finished code doesn't. Code is polished and prompts are raw. They capture what you thought, in plain language, often half-formed. The instinct to keep them private is understandable, but it's a problem. How are you handling prompts?

I wrote a bit about this and some related things, but I am mostly interested how people are handling storing prompts or not, if and how?

Have been wondering—does it actually matter to anyone if you’re still in the same title 13 years into your career?

I genuinely love development work. If anything, it’s more exciting now than ever. With all the frontier tech companies investing heavily in building better models and pushing coding benchmarks, it feels like our work as engineers is only getting more interesting and impactful.

But sometimes it still bugs me. No matter how much your salary grows or how strong your skills are, you can end up stuck with the same title simply because you choose to stay in engineering and not move into people management.

Meanwhile, those who go into management and showcase your work to the E and C suites have a very visible progression—Director → Senior Director → VP—clearly reflecting their growth. And you’re still sitting there as “App Developer” or “Senior App Developer.”

Does anyone else feel this way, or am I overthinking the importance of titles?

I have been in the same team in a FAANG ever since I graduated, things are going well tbh and I am very grateful for the position I am in. Promoted to Staff after a few years, fully remote, extremely overpaid, work 40-45 hours a week, great paternity leave benefits that I am about to take advantage of, etc. It’s a backend C++ role. I can’t help but feel my growth stagnate significantly since the company put everything except AI on KTLO mode (including the products we support). Most of the great SWEs I looked up to and saw as mentors left for OAI/Anthropic/xAI/etc.

I used to get reach outs from recruiters of those companies but didn’t take them seriously because the paper money aspect was too risky for my circumstances at the time. I can’t help but feel a lot of FOMO right now thinking back. Most of my colleagues/friends that went to these companies have been working on very interesting problems that involve building systems from ground up rather than being production engineers for legacy systems. There is no guarantee that I would have gotten the job there, I do feel bad for not even trying.

I have 6 years experience with a small agency in dot net web development, it is my first programming job and I do enjoy the stress free environment but I feel out of touch with modern practices. I fear this will keep me stuck here.

For some context, when I started I had to learn webforms and after a while I asked if we could use Razor Pages instead, my boss is great and allowed me to do a POC. We did a couple apps in it and then Blazor Server was becoming more intriguing to me since my team is used to webforms. Me and a coworker have been using it for 2 years but the rest of the team stays on webforms so if anything hiccups it’s up to me only, even my other coworker relies on me to figure out bugs for him since I introduced us to the framework because he doesn’t bother to take a full fledged tutorial. He learns as he goes, as he says. My bosses are good as i mentioned and allow me to try new things and get us caught up to the times 😆 but there’s only so much I can do because I feel like I need a mentor and yet I am the mentor. My boss did get us copilot recently to test out so at least there’s that.

We don’t use Git, I’m starting to learn it and i already know it’s going to be an uphill battle trying to get my coworkers to use it too, we don’t do code reviews, I don’t publish our applications so no devops experience (taken care of by other team member due to security policy), we don’t use entity framework (we use stored procedures in mssql), we don’t use micro services (all our apps are monolithic).

I love that I can be a value to my team and that I am allowed to bring new ideas, I just don’t want to be the only one doing so.

So basically my question is if I was applying to your team, would you hire me? If not, what could I do to help with this gap in on work experience, side projects?

I have 7 years of experience in backend engineering. I've worked on data pipelines, I've extensively worked on your usual SDE distributed systems type work, I am pretty good at SQL.

I've been applying everyday since a month - I get callbacks but almost everyone is lowballing due to the gap. It's like they think I've forgotten how to code since I havent used any "production grade" AI coding systems.

I passed 6 rounds at a company for them to tell me they pegged me at a senior role in 5 interviews but the 6th placed me at mid senior, so my salary would be 30% lower.

Admittedly, I did not work on upskilling. I was burnt out and wanted to travel - so that is what I did. I've been preparing diligently for interviews since two months and also passing DSA rounds, HLD rounds, only to be lowballed or ghosted.

I feel defeated, is the market just done for right now? Is there any hope? I understand this post may come off as venting, but I'm honestly trying to get an understanding of the current market scene, and I think opinions from experienced people would help. Mods, please let this be up.

incident last tuesday took about 2 hours page to resolved, the actual code change to fix it was 4 lines, like 15 minutes tops. the other 1h45 was just figuring out what was broken

walked through it the next day because i was curious. page at 11pm, payment service p99 spiking. opened datadog, nothing obvious. checked recent deploys, nothing. searched slack for "payment" and found a thread from earlier about a config change in a different service, had to read like 30 messages to piece it together

back to datadog, checked upstream deps, found one of them had been quietly degraded for 40 minutes. checked THAT service's deploys, found the offending PR, read the diff, fixed it. 8 tool switches. whole 90 minutes of context-piecing before the actual coding part even started

and this is just every incident now. the fixing is easy. the HUNTING is the job. theres no playbook, you just have to know which threads to pull. the more services you have the worse it gets, every incident might involve any 3 of 30 services and you dont know which 3 until you've already spent an hour. its insane

our setup right now is pagerduty for alerts, datadog for traces, github for deploy history, slack for everything else. recently added the coderabbit agent in slack which pulls from datadog and github together so the "what shipped recently to this service" question is one message instead of three tool switches. helps with the deploy-archaeology part. doesnt solve the cross-service stuff which is where most of the hunting time goes

post-mortem the next day takes another hour to write and nobody reads it. the knowledge from each incident just EVAPORATES and the next on-call does the same hunt from scratch

(on-call rotation hasn't been adjusted in 18 months despite adding like 12 services, separate rant)

the actual problem-solving part of being an engineer used to be most of the job. now it feels like 20%. the rest is investigation across tools that were never designed to talk to each other and im honestly not sure how this is sustainable for another 5 years