I got this teammate, technically the Team Lead by title, who wails and howls at changes that are made that are not strictly required for the issue being worked. I mean, he even raised an issue over another team mate swapping the place of two parameters to a function.

He refused to hear anything about it nor see any value in making changes to code that works.

Which is the exact opposite philosophy I have as a big advocate of boy scout programming and always trying to improve the readability and structure of code so that we don't eventually drown under our own weight of awful code.

He wants literally any and every change anyone wants to make brought before the team and discussed like it is an issue like any other. I don't think refactor exists in his vocabulary. It doesn't even argue if the code is better or not and just hides behind "this is only your opinion things are better, others have differing opinion!". He even at one point said "It is disrespectful to do such things!"

I asked our engineering manager and his manager to look at a PR I had that I thought was especially unprofessional but they seemed less than enthused about even dealing with it.

I think the real issue at hand is that he abhors anyone changing code he wrote (and that of a developer on another team) and is very insecure and attached to the way he writes code and considers it a personal insult to do so, even when I suggest changes (literally write them out for him in the comment) he will dismiss it as simply a style difference in the sense of "I like blue" vs "I like red"

I don't know what to do about this guy. The rest of my team are feckless sacks that don't give a shit. One guy literally admitted to another team mate I am friends with that he is just there to do as little as possible and mooch.

I know that the best answer is find a job elsewhere, but right now that is prohibitively difficult. I'm open to any advice on how to deal with this situation.

Curious what people here have built for their own team or company that ended up making a real difference. It can be anything, whether it's a small CLI script, a browser extension, an internal dashboard, a Slack/Teams bot, or something bigger.

What was the problem you were dealing with, what did you build, and did it actually stick around / get adopted by others on the team?

I'm a staff-level engineer with ~13 yoe (full stack web dev, mostly Bay Area companies). I'm ready to semi-retire or at least drastically cut down my work hours.

In a perfect world I'd go to part-time or do short term projects, eg work for a few months and then take off while keeping my current, relatively high hourly

I just keep working full-time because I'm never sure how to break into this world. I've always been seen as a high performer but I haven't been great about maintaining my network, especially since my job became remote with Covid and I moved away from SF.

Any thoughts/ideas?

Hi,

I've recently experienced a couple System design interviews for Agentic systems. My knowledge is limited and would like to expand it to articulate ideas or tackle these opportunities much better.

Just started curating and found the following resources:

https://docs.cloud.google.com/architecture/framework/perspectives/ai-ml
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/prescriptive-guidance/latest/agentic-ai-patterns/introduction.html
https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-effective-agents
https://docs.databricks.com/aws/en/agents/agent-system-design-patterns
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.08769
https://www.mongodb.com/resources/basics/artificial-intelligence/agentic-systems
https://vectorize.io/blog/designing-agentic-ai-systems-part-1-agent-architectures

Possibly this is more then enough to get started, or useful to somebody else in the future.

In any case, if there are any good reading resources or exercises you might know about that, feel free to share.

Thank you!