My new manager likes to randomly huddle with people throughout the day. It's gotten to the point where he does this 3-4 times randomly throughout the day, and the huddles stretch from 15 mins to 3 hours. It's highly disruptive. He does this to all of his direct reports and the stakeholders. He's a higher level person so he's not a regular manager. How can I gently decline to answer his calls?

I started a new role a few months ago and it's left me frustrated and feeling like a brand new dev. I have ~10YOE, mostly as a backend developer. I had been feeling like I was stagnating at my previous role so I started looking. I found a new role relatively quickly and the interview process was pretty painless.

I was excited to start with the new company. It felt like a fresh start. It was a tech stack I have worked in previously, although it's a little out of date now. I thought it wouldn't be a problem. I got my local environment up and running and I felt good.

Here's where things fell apart. Shortly after I got my local setup going, the team had a new internal release. Ever since then, I haven't been able to run things locally. I have tried everything to get my local environment running but I can't. I have reached out to my team and they have confirmed I'm doing all the steps correctly. They've escalated this to other teams and nobody knows what's going on. It's been weeks now and I am the only person having this issue.

I feel like I'm falling behind and I can't do anything about it. I dread my daily stand-up because I don't want to say that I'm still having problems. I feel just like I did when I got my first dev job out of college. I feel stupid and like I don't belong here. I don't know what to do anymore. Has anyone ever successfully dealt with a situation like this? The stress is really getting to me.

Hi guys, my company is running a agile style, but recently the management decided to bring in the idea of compliance the ISO standard so to prove our software is more reliable etc etc. up to a point we devs find it very annoying that we have to write a big documentation at the start, and keep updating it as we implement stuff. Our company has created a list of checkboxes that are directly from the standard: things like design characteristics, enabling system, interface etc. We feel like it is annoying and we follow the checklist for the sake of checking the checklist not to let us write better software, and in fact we might be writing poorer software because we spent less time coding. Has anyone had this kind of experience and how do different companies do it?

Edit: I said we find it annoying because we actually never really needed this document to code. We feel like we spend time writing stuff that no one cares about to just convince the manger that we check those checklist.

Principal Engineer 30+ YOE. I delivered a project on Node using Typescript and modern Javascript. I was told my code is old because I use Express and the node module pattern, stuff that has worked very well for me in the past, serving billions of requests. Anyway the CTO who's only got 10 YOE in a niche tells me this and refuses to accept my work and has reassigned it to a senior engineer a few years out of college. I'm likely on my way out of the company now. I'm too old.

Am I? Should I have used Koa or something new and sparkly? Ditched the module pattern for dependency injection? Or is this CTO a moron and I just need to get out?

I'm trying to decide if I should start looking for a new job so I'm trying to make a pros and cons list. On one hand, the pay is below what I should be making, and in this economy more pay would really help. But on the other hand, the job is relaxed and everyone is easy going. I feel like those two kinda balance each other out, so I'm looking at smaller details to see if I should stay or go. But the problem is that I don't know if these are specific to this company, or if they're something I can probably expect at other places too.

Here's my list of nitpicks:

1. Due to budget reasons, the dev and test systems don't have the integrations we connect with. Which means that if you're working on an integration, you just kind of have to pray that your changes work.
2. There is little testing or requirements checking done outside of the devs. This, combined with point 1, means that a lot of stuff is just tested and confirmed in prod.
3. We use git to backup our code, but not for version control or deployment. Updates and patches are done via FTP transfers
4. Everything is incredibly configurable, and the config is not managed well, leading to constant issues.
5. Whenever support has a problem they can't fix, they are supposed to create a jira and assign it to my manager so they can assign it to the right person to handle it. Instead, support just DMs devs and asks for fixes.
6. When support asks for help they do not ask the customer for details, and do not provide steps to reproduce or anything like that. This leaves devs to have to try to guess at what could be going wrong a lot of the time.
7. Communication is not great outside of the devs. For example, if there is a problem with one of our integrations that requires a fix on their side, I will detail what needs to be done to the person who reported it. Rarely does this info get passed on. Then, a few months later, I will get the same issue raised again by someone else, requiring me to explain it again. Repeat forever.
8. We do an on call shift every other month, and it's a always a disaster. I'll get a call every other day that week, requiring lots of support work. This means that for that week it's impossible for me to do anything aside from sitting at home waiting by the phone, which means I miss out on things like my kids sports and activities often.
9. We use very old technology. PHP with no framework for a backend, etc. There has been a push to change the front-end to react, but the person doing it is very slow and not keeping up to date with react updates, so by the time they're done that will be out of date too. This means the only learning I'm doing is outside of work.

I have pushed for changes in all these areas, but everytime I am told that we will get to it one day, but that day never comes. I've been here for years now, and I've given up hope for change.

I work for a non-FAANG company, but not a startup. If I got a new job it would likely be non-FAANG as well. So are any of these things worth adding to my cons list, or can I expect to see them at any company I work at? Thank you for taking the time to read all this, and for your help.

Context: 6 yoe, faang exp, senior title, current company 2 years.

I joined two years ago, but the current experience has been interesting to say the least. My tech lead doesn't do anything? Often, the engineers he manages will be discussing architecture via Slack or Teams he never once steps in to give his input. PRs will never be looked at by him or will he write code. Often major incidents spawn over the very little code he pushes after at best consulting one other person or just bypassing branch rules.

He will be directly @'d in Slack threads discussing technology or timelines around specific projects he manages and not answer until another engineer steps in to answer.

We will have major timelines and events about systems we manage not be given too us until a week before it's supposed to happen resulting in major crunch. Literally, he knew I would be gone for a week in July for my wedding and in the Retro he mentioned PTO events causing delays.

For example, he told his management that a project would be done in two months despite not even techplanning it or discussing it at all with his engineers. That project ended up taking over two years(just launched in prod).

What is a tech lead's role if not decisions about architecture, code review input, or even timelines and project timelines? I am often ghosted or have to ping multiple times a day for even a one word answer.

Like I understand life happens, he had a kid a couple years ago that is taking up a lot of time, but we need someone to lead our team or like talk to his team. There will be days I just see him at standup, I spy on his calendar and that's his only thing in it.

TLDr; Title, do I work around him? How do I get invited to the discussion meetings that matter with stakeholders

Basically I would like to know the types of organizations and processes you have in your FE Guild if you work in a multi-product/team company. Do you do design and implementation sprints alongside feature/KTLO work? What are the pros and cons of your structure and processes? How big is your FE Guild? Do you have a staff/team lead eng making decisions or you vote and decide as guild?

Also, what would really be helpful is, if you have any resources(books, videos, courses etc.) on this topic where I could look into this more, that would be amazing!

Thank you in advance!

Google has announced in an earnings call that 25% of its code is being generated by AI.

I suspect that the precise numerical value can be disputed .. but even if it is as high as say 10% the effects on employment could be significant, if other firms follow Googles direction.

Additionally, as AI improves that 10% (or that quoted 25%) will climb each and every year.

Are sw developers - both newbies and experienced - ready for these changes?

This issue has been bothering me for quite a while now, but again and again, I make sure to explain my thought process/takes/ideias/solutions to anything that pops up on any slack channel, jira ticket and so on… only to have the same small roster of people wanting to setup a meeting.

I work on a mostly remote org and while it feels that most people are ok with trying to read, understand and actually work asynchronously (the org is spread out over many states and countries) I do see the same people over and over trying to create meetings out of something that was/could/should’ve been an e-mail.

I’ve been dreading the idea of making some sort of ruckus out of the problem at work, so I want to check in with you.

Anyone else dealt with this problem (un)successfully? What happened?

20+ years experienced SWE here and I am currently unemployed and how I realized this type of work is so overrated. It pays more for your time, but it confines your world inside a very small box, the size of a 2x2x2 square feet box. Literally the size of you sitting in a cubicle , in front of a monitor all day. Work is not guaranteed. You may lose the job anytime and no guarantee of ever getting back on it again . You will be spending hundreds of hours learning a skill, practicing and preparing for interviews, doing some projects, certification exams, going for interviews, yet not get paid for all these hours you spent, and still no guarantee of a job. You are working literally 12 hours a day, including weekends, as even if you go home, you still need to come home the next day and face the same issue. So you will be thinking about work even if you are at home. The stress is horrible. it takes a toll on both your mental and physical health. I have seen colleagues who had heart attack, stroke, and everyone is in poor health. some cannot even walk anymore. And everyone is obese.

You are so engrossed and so focused on tech that keeps changing that you are literally like a cat trying to keep on chasing your own tail , and you never really gain much investment on skills that compounds because your investment knowledge goes to zero after a few years.

It's the first industry to get axed when the economy is bad.

And did I mention because your world is so confined is such a small space, with only you knowing what it is , you miss out on a lot of more important things ?

What are your thoughts about this?

I've been at a FAANG for 2.5 years now, and prior to that a small sized company. 8 YOE. In the org I'm in, there is a lot of work where teams will implement features for services other teams own.

I've had PR's that are just 20 lines of code to send a log to another service take a month to get approvals on from the owning team (all the while we're being asked to do tasks like write docs on the PR, re-write the doc, have back and forth discussions on the doc, reschedule the review on the doc, etc). I've seen engineers on other teams 180 on discussions during design reviews at the time a PR is raised to block implementation and work from being done, seemingly to stall for time. This has led to deadlines being missed, longer working hours, and just overall more stress among the engineers who want to deliver the project. The first several times things like this happened, I've given it a pass because I'm sure there's a lot happening behind the scenes that I'm not aware of. But now going on 2+ years and the pattern holding strong every time, it's just wearing me down. There is constant friction around every corner.

I understand the need to be protective of the services you own. You don't want someone coming in and causing incidents or creating long term tech debt from bad design. But I also get the sense that no one actually wants to cooperate either. They don't own the completion of the work, they have nothing to gain from it, so it's easier to block and stall. At my previous company, things were much more harmonious where everyone's agenda was in sync, but it was also a drastically smaller company.

Is this common in the industry or is it just my neck of the woods?

This is actually an inversion of the usual "is too much being expected of me" questions. I'm wondering if my expectations are too high.

For context, I've been in software in some capacity for my whole 20 year career, but I have always described myself as "pretty good". Most of that has been at startups, some at a bigger company, but it's always been pretty..."fast-paced" as they say in job descriptions. I've always managed to keep above the water-line, but not by much. It's allowed me to work with some of the smartest people I've ever met, on some really cool projects, but it took everything I had.

A burnout and nervous breakdown later, I'm now freelancing as an AWS specialist, which is much more sustainable. I do some devops, some serverless, some designing, some prototyping, a little of everything aws-cloud-related. I work part time for a lot of different companies, with a huge variance in size, maturity, industry etc. It's pretty fun, and much less stressful, cuz I don't have to answer my phone if they call me at 2am. The downside is it's sometimes hard to tailor my offerings to the needs of the individual company. Like, a brand new startup doesn't need me to architect a big CI/CD pipeline for a deployment in a HA, globally distributed, containerized environment...they need a server in the cloud with a dns address pointed to it.

So anyway, I think I got it wrong with one of my clients. And they are also starting to frustrate me with the caliber of developers they're hiring. And basically anything I do for them is "way too complicated" as one developer is fond of saying (we'll call him mr. grumpy pants). I'm trying to simplify and streamline, but I'm also wondering if I need to have a conversation with the CEO and CTO about their hiring process. Or just ending the contract (maybe it's just not a good fit; it happens).

In their defense, this is more of an academic company; they are basically running experiments on people and trying to build a product off it. They wanted a unified endpoint for experimenters all over the world to send results, securely (it's potentially sensitive health data). To me that screams API Gateway -> lambda -> RDS/S3. I've never worked in academia though; I may have over-engineered it.

Some pain points:

- Not understanding that if you get a new computer, you need to transfer your ssh key, or give me a new one, or you won't be able to get into the environment.

- Not knowing what a bastion/jump host is.

- Forget about ssh tunnels

- Turning my 10 line lambda handler into an 800 line monstrosity. Partly because it:

- Manually regexes the path and query params, with no protection against sql injection.

- Refusing any kind of boundaries between dev, stage and prod. All developers have read/write access to the "prod" database. No test data.

- 0 Tests. I spent several weeks putting together a really nice CI pipeline, but nobody wants to write any tests for it. So its just been burning money on every merge to main for the last 6 months.

And these are the "very senior developers". I would totally mentor a junior dev or a data analyst if he/she was having this much trouble, but I really don't want to babysit a senior developer through ssh-ing. Especially not mr. grumpy pants, who really gives me the "listen here you little whippersnapper" vibe. I'm in my 40s ffs.

So what's the deal? Is the skillset in academia really that different? Maybe they could blow my mind with big data analysis or something, but I think their code is meh, even by my own mediocre standards. Has my history with Super Smart Developers skewed my standards? Or am I just a cocky young whippersnapper who needs to stay in his own lane?

Or does this company have a problem, and I need to think about an exit strategy?

I’m a 4 YOE full stack engineer and an in-office employee with this company for 5 months.

Since day 1 I’ve supported a project by building the front and back end for a custom media server. All testing has been completed in house and the client is getting ready to install.

The company needs someone to go overseas for 2 weeks to help with the install. They are asking me to go because I know the system well. “If any bugs come up you’ll be right there to see it and fix it”.

But as a software engineer, what am I supposed to do on site for 2 weeks? That doesn’t feel like a normal thing for software engineers. At least in my previous roles that simply wasn’t a thing. Anyone else been in this boat?

I mostly do Spring or Express on the backend and Nextjs/a little Angular on the frontend. Interviews and OAs expect me to have memorized whole languages and frameworks and often asks about gotchas in intentionally poorly written code along with leetcode and system design. How do you remember all this (since OAs rarely tell you beforehand what they are testing on). Am I missing a standard question bank besides leetcode I can grind or do recruiters expect me to memorize a whole university programs's worth of knowledge? It doesn't seem to get better for IC roles that require some years of experience.

How do you all monitor your non prod environment - dev and stage. If you are in a platform team a stable dev environment is also mandatory as other product team could possibly rely on a stable dev for their day to day work.

The typical practice is to not page but use some other means of alerting like slack or email. How do you prevent alerting fatigue in these case leading to alarms being missed?

I’ve been with a hardware company for 8 years, where the entire engineering team (software and otherwise) consists of less than 10 people. Here’s what I appreciate about my current role:

• Work-Life Balance: Great flexibility in my schedule.
• Compensation: Reasonable/good pay for the work I do.
• Team Environment: My coworkers are intelligent, upbeat, and hard-working.
• Interesting Work: I find the projects I work on engaging--desktop applications focused on 3d printing and classical computer vision.

However, I have concerns about my long-term career prospects. The company has had a single private owner for the past 50 years, and many critical senior engineers are nearing or past retirement age. While I would love to stay here as long as they have, I recognize that these days are numbered.

The largest challenge I face is that, while I enjoy collaborating with my teammates, my work is incredibly siloed. Despite many attempts, I rarely share or work on a codebase other than my own. This has been a blessing and a curse, but ultimately, limiting to my growth, and I worry has made my approach esoteric and niche. When I look at job postings, I notice my skills somewhat align with the market, but I can't help but feel imposter syndrome despite having a great deal of pride in my work.

My question is: How can I prepare myself to successfully transition into the job market when the time comes?

• What specific skills should I focus on developing?
• How can I best spend my time at home to prepare?
• Are there strategies for networking or seeking mentorship that could help?

Has anyone else been in this situation before? How would you approach my situation? Thank you in advance for your insights!

3.5YOE I’ve been at the same medium sized healthcare company since graduating college. It’s been an interesting ride here, started out at a terribly low salary (made the mistake of saying a number to the recruiter), performed very well and quickly got an off-cycle adjustment that put me at the top of my salary band for my experience level.

Continued to perform well, started looking for another position about a year in, received a solid offer and they counter offered me 10k higher so I stayed. Moved across the country away from the office, they accommodated it and I’m 100% remote. For a bit I focused on some personal things and wasn’t performing at as high of a level but still got great feedback.

There was a disaster at the company earlier this year, things got toxic and all normal processes went out the window. Over 12 hours days and I pushed back on that after over two weeks of it, which caused tension with my old manager. Ultimately I did get compensated for this (additional bonus and extra PTO for the year).

I was supposed to get promoted in March, though the combination of not performing above and beyond for a bit and my push back on WLB is probably why I got passed over.

Since then there was a reorg (no layoffs) and my new team consists of the same people plus some additional resources from other teams. My new boss has been awesome and said his first priority for me is career progression. He mentioned I’m performing higher than mid-level already, is positioning me to be more involved in stakeholder meetings, communications across teams etc. I’m leading two projects right now, and delegating work/mentoring the new devs on our team. So far it’s been great and my work life balance is incredible right now.

My mindset is I’m going to continue putting my best into the work (within normal hours) and if I get promoted great, if not I’ll start looking for other positions next year and have some great higher level experience/responsibilities under my belt.

I’m looking for advice from others who moved to a senior role in terms of mentoring advice and generally taking on higher level responsibilities?

I want to include some work on my resume which is still work in progress. I want to include it because its good scope and establishes some experience with a new language, but I don't want to be misleading. I'm writing an SDK for one of our APIs. I've done a fair amount of ground work and implemented some of the methods but I have a big chunk left before its "finished." I'm paused on it ATM while working on other things.

I'm trying to use the X-Y-Z method for bullet points but think I need to forgo it here since it hasn't actually had an impact yet. "Reduced barrier to entry by ...", or "Improved developer experience ...".

Would something like this be too weird?

"Started initial development for a [LANGUAGE] SDK for OpenAPI based [API NAME] (work in progress)"

Or what about baking in the work-in-progressness of it into what I made (ie, its a "prototype"). Like:

"Created prototype for a [LANGUAGE] SDK for OpenAPI based [API NAME] (work in progress)"

Kinda sounds better but this isn't how I'd normally talk about it outside this context.

I'm at a weird point in my career and I'm wondering how other people are dealing with this type of situation. I have about 15 years of experience, mostly in Rails but using plenty of other technologies along the way. I'm getting hired at a level where I'm supposed to be making "org-wide" impact.

At this point, I am very good at identifying the root-cause architectural problems within a codebase, and I am also good at making changes which incrementally will bring us to a place where the toil/pain is greatly reduced.

The challenge comes from joining companies who are risk-averse and do not want to touch any of the "foundational" parts of the code. Or, joining companies who simply cannot make the investment that's required to actually fix things.

So, I feel like when I get hired, I'm in a bind. The work that I'm technically supposed to be doing, day to day, is very narrow. Meanwhile I'm supposed to be making org-wide impact. Sometimes I can get around this by sorta taking initiative and doing system-improvements on top of (or as part of) my day to day work. But the tension is always there - I'm going to be evaluated on my org-wide impact, in an org that is resistant to being impacted.

And this was fine earlier in my career, when it wasn't an expectation for me to improve things. But today, it feels like I really have to vet any new companies, so that I don't join another place where the expectations are going to exceed what I'm allowed to do.

developers who likes to read - what blogs actually make you a better programmer? I want to read some super interesting blogs and interesting technical articles but I am having a hard time filtering out the good ones and google is filled with a lot of junk and AI content. So in short, what are some of your favorite blogs that you read? do we even have some good blogs who don't use AI?

I have about 7 years of experience, spread over three companies. In the first one, I was promoted to Senior engineer - but in reality I stopped 'developing' myself there because the lack of interesting projects to work on.

Then I went to another company, who only had a non-senior opening, and I decided to take it. In this company I have honed my skills a lot, but management wasn't able to promote me due to lack of investments.

Now I'm at another company, and again they didn't have a senior opening.

In retrospect, I probably should've been more stern in keeping my titles, but I cannot retroactively change it.

Now, the promotion process in my current company is a difficult and subjective one. My peer reviews are all overwhelmingly positive, my direct manager and team lead are as well. They all claim that I am working on a 'senior level', and management keeps assuring me that I'm compensated like one. They see that I'm adding a lot of value, I just don't fit the 'mold'.

To get my promotion in will take half a year more or less. The thing is; it involves a lot of ceremonial tasks that even the already-seniors never do, a lot of politics to get 'stakeholders' from different areas where I rarely work, and even then it is still at the mercy of some people whose personal opinion supersedes any written standards or general knowledge.

In my opinion, that's a lot of effort just to get a title. It doesn't make me better at my job either, it just makes the higher ups able to tick their boxes. Management said that if I get promoted, the compensation won't automatically be raised until late next year.

I've been tired of this company's ways (or lack of) and endless bureaucracy. I don't want to stay that much longer.

I'm torn whether I should

• Stay, do the 'dance' of trying to get promoted (even if I think it degrades my actual contributions to the company), and hope that the new title will help me in finding a new company
• Start preparing for interviews, do my job as expected, and hope that I can get a senior title somewhere else

How 'heavy' do hiring companies generally put the weight of current job title?

Can it be seen as a red flag that I went from senior to medior through companies?

This is definitely a new experience for me.

I recently joined a team with some pretty obvious operational issues—issues that could seriously impact the business. There are monthly reports outlining the root causes of critical failures.

Here’s the strange part: no one seems interested in fixing it. And it’s not just that—they won’t even answer questions about the product. Teammates dodge messages and calls, skip meetings without a heads-up, and generally refuse to help me help them. They hold onto key information unless my manager steps in and tells them to take my requests seriously. I don’t get access to documents unless I say, “Your manager wants you to share that document with me.” There’s constant finger-pointing, too. Instead of saying, “The X system is having issues,” they’ll say, “X person’s changes are causing issues” and, believe it or not, even express their disappointment publicly in the chat.

I joined because my skip-level manager thought the team needed my help, but this is way more difficult than I expected. I can’t really help people who don’t seem to respect my time—or each other, for that matter.

Before I jump to conclusions and write this off as a “everyone for themselves” culture, is there something I might be missing? I know people are busy, but I’ve never been in a situation where people are actively avoiding me. It’s a pretty weird experience, and I’m not sure how to bring this up with my manager in a productive way. Right now, my take is just that the team dynamic is plain toxic, and I don’t know how to fix it if they don’t want to. My manager seems just as puzzled—he hinted at some of these issues before, but I think he wanted me to get my own read on things first.

Edit: I was the dev lead on my previous team. My new team is under the same skip level manager, but I was transferred to the new team’s manager. The goal for me was to expand my scope and take my experience to the next team, which I was told needed some more hands on technical leadership due to the incident reports that were becoming more frequent. The tech is the least of my problems now. My skip knows that I lead with kindness first, so I don’t imagine he would tell me if his intention is to fire people on this team, because he knows I would usually take the blame on myself first. However, some of these comments have me thinking that he wanted me to grow in non-technical ways, or see if my usually positive attitude could rub off on them. Or maybe he just hates me, I don’t know.

I am wondering what is it like for experienced devs to be hired to work a couple of hours a week to full time on open source projects.

I approached management about open sourcing things I think will be beneficial to the community as a whole. Thankfully they accepted and now I'm wondering if someone here was/is in a similiar situation and like/able to share their experience.

Did it get hairy between you and management? Was it really helpful and beneficial as you had hoped for?

I’m a full stack developer with experience in Rails, and I have some familiarity with Node and Python. Lately, I’ve been thinking about exploring new opportunities and potentially joining a company that uses a backend stack like Java or C# but I'm not familiar with the languages at all.

How hard would it be to find a role like that? Would I be starting from scratch?

I've been practicing systems design using this github and Neetcode's beginner class, are there other things I should be doing to help my odds?
https://github.com/donnemartin/system-design-primer?tab=readme-ov-file#availability-vs-consistency

Hopefully I can be consise with this one and not blather on! I'm one of the lucky ones who hired on to a large global corporation right out of college. (Thank you on-campus job fairs!) Full-time, salary, great benefits. Not a tech company but FANG sized in its field. Been here and only here for going on 10 years now. I worked my way from entry level to dev lead and recently promoted up to senior dev lead.

I'm not staff but I do all scrum stand-ups backlogs burndowns retros etc, requirements w/ business, software architecture design, release management and cloud orchestration, code reviews, mentoring, you name it. All while still writing code on the more complex features.

My point is, I do all this and I know I could be making more elsewhere. I've been applying around at FANG companies and other similarly sized titans of their respective industries. Got an offer recently that would have been a nice bump up but not enough to justify losing my tenure/job security, and the unknowns of their benefits package vs my existing one which I like.

While I personally have never been a contract employee in the software industry, I had the idea that I might like to stay in the company/position I'm in, but augment my pay with an off-hours contract position. I'm just not sure how normal/feasible a setup like that is.

Is it common (or at least not unheard of) to have a contract position that doesn't explicitly require me to be working for them during M-F 9-5? Are they always hourly or are contracts salaried sometimes? Am I thinking about this all wrong? Or are there some of you who do/have done something like this?

Just eager to put my "free" time to better use.

I'm currently serving as the defacto (unofficial) team lead on my team (big tech).

Interviewing for an official team eng lead role soon and am looking for ideas on how to beat show my accomplishments in the light as a team lead vs a senior IC who has been leading projects (if that makes sense)?

More context on the role: The role will probably be little coding, which will be an interesting change, but I'll be the primary POC for product design and leadership for the team.

Post interview edit:

So the interviews were more technical than experience focused.

One was how I would go about implementing a certain flow, technologies, trade offs, how to handle edge cases. High level and no drawings.

Second one was more frontend eng focused. Question around monolith vs microfrontends, testing philosophy, and then explain how you'd implement some designs.

Also, got the offer!! Will definitely be back with more questions on how to be an effective lead soon haha

tl;dr best way to automate deployments to a VPS you don't have admin rights on?

I work for a big old non-software company with lots of red tape. Miraculously, I work on a special team that has somehow gotten to deploy our internal software on an IIS server that we somewhat control. Issue is all admin management has to go through IT (true owners).

Current deployment process:

1. Build all the microservices that are in the manually updated deployment spreadsheet this sprint
2. Copy publish directory to shared network folder
3. Windows RDP through a Linux SSH tunnel into the prod IIS server
4. Turn off IIS
5. Copy paste publish folders over
6. Manually paste in DB changes from spreadsheet (I'm pushing hard for DB migrations)
7. Turn on IIS and manually test changes

I want 1 click deployments. My proposed short term solution is to put the build directory into Git and write a PowerShell script to bring down IIS, git pull all repos, put up IIS (already wrote it actually works fine), but the team doesn't want to see build folders in the diff in code review, and I don't want to manage a separate build-only repo that just moves the leg work around instead of removing it. I know this is a hacky solution tho.

Any advice on if this is a good idea or other solutions?

IT is difficult to work with and getting them to facilitate connecting to Github hooks or install Jenkins or whatever for us or what have you may or may not be worth it, and I have no idea if they could be proxied through that SSH tunnel or not.

I recently joined a company with circa 20 employees.

The business model is solid, without giving too much away... it is a platform connecting X(Business and Y(Business) so B2B. It offers a marketplace model where companies can discover 1, 2, and 3. It might have SaaS elements in its platform services, such as subscription models for accessing innovation databases, but it's not purely categorized as SaaS.

Paint points:

• Almost all platform development is outsourced, with no in-house development team.
• The last in-house developer left two years ago.
• The outsourced company manages the entire tech stack (cloud, backend, frontend, SSO).
• There is one full-time developer on retainer from the outsourced company.
• No ticketing system; communication happens via Slack or email.
• New features are handled through email requests, quotes, and payments, with no product owner, ticket management, or detailed statements of work.
• Technical documentation is almost nonexistent.
• No bug tracking or issue tracking (possibly managed by the outsourced company, but I’m not informed).
• Spreadsheets with bugs and optimizations logged by team members exist, but little action is taken.
• Front-end issues are abundant (e.g., typos), suggesting no one with a UI/UX focus has conducted QA testing.
• Analytics (GA4) is partially integrated but underutilized, preventing us from assessing feature impact and value.

The majority of the people in the platform are Customer Facing, Sales people, Marketing wizards, and so forth. However, there’s been a lack of technical competency, which I’ve been brought in to address and optimize for scalability.

Next Steps:

I should mention at this point that, we aim to automate significant processes using AI/LLMs by 2025, eliminating manual effort and waste.However, I believe we need to optimize, fix, and clean the platform and outsourcing issues first. Developing AI for a lagging process is risky.

I need to build a strategy, technical strategy interwoven with the Business Goals, while fixing/cleaning/optimizing what is already there. This gets overwhelming.
What to optimize? What to do first? What's the lowest hanging fruit?

Proposals (unordered list):

• Bring all DEV in house - completely remove the overpriced reliance on outsourcing company. Take that budget (which is quite meaty) and use it to a hire a Mid-Senior to support.

• Improve technical documentation.

• Fix front-end/UI issues.

• Prioritize and implement key features.

• Implement bug and issue tracking systems for the entire team.

• Leverage platform data to quantify business objectives.

• I'm sure there's more you could think, these are just a few.

Apologies for the essay - I'm try to be as transparent as possible.

I’m looking for advice, guidance, or mentorship on building a strategy that aligns technical improvements with business goals. What should I prioritize? Is there a framework I could use?

Many thanks.

Hello, experienced folks!

I've been an engineer for a relatively short time (5 years), but I've been burning the midnight oil having joined as a founding member of a startup straight out of college. My primary skillset is applied AI and software engineering.

Due to this, I've had to wear many hats apart from being an SWE: data analyst, QC, data scientist, hiring manager, product owner, scrum master and even software architect!

Some background about me: I've built my team from the ground up, every single engineer chosen and interviewed by me personally. They're as good as can be for the number of years they've been doing this, and I would genuinely put them as one of the best teams from all the startups I've networked with. I report to the CIO and occasionally the CEO.

However, recently, there is a definite shift in the business -- my team is being pushed in the name of "ownership/accountability" to come up with better product roadmaps, which has caused most of us (including me!) to become despondent. I have radically different ideas about what the direction of our business should be, and I feel like I'm at crossroads.

I've got an exciting opportunity at big tech, which offers almost ~2.5x my current TC, but I don't get to utilise any social aspect of my background -- i.e. I'm limited to being a mid level/senior engineer on a potentially non-priority product line. This would also mean I leave my team in deep waters, without an effective handover.

On the other hand, I feel like it's a good time to put my money where my head is, and run my own ship for what I want to build. I'd start from a consulting business and then move into the direction I believe in.

Here is what I'm considering:

• take the bigtech job but understand that my visibility and freedom for input/feedback will be limited due to enterprise org

OR

• approach management and talk about changing my contract from "employee" to "consultant", take a 50% paycut but have a strict 20 hour week policy.
• run a consultancy shop and potentially take on multiple clients (which I can't do right now), eventually move into (yet another) AI tech shop

P.S.: my current finances allow me to burn through 6 months without any pay, and even at a 50% pay cut I can definitely make do for a year or more without significant lifestyle changes.

Thank you in advance for your insights and comments!

Aree there any QA tools out there that really makes use of generative AI? I can find a bunch of shoddy marketing white papers trying to push products but nothing concrete.

Ideally I'm imagining something where you give an AI engine a login to your system, point it at the test environment and your user documentation and just let it go. Sure it will pull up some false positives but it would test that the user documentation is correct and up to date and pick up weird quirks which QAs who use the system everyday gloss over. I doubt anything this advanced exists yet but the best I'm seeing so far is NLP to create jQuery selectors for UI testing and I feel things should have advanced beyond that by now.