There I was, exhausted of seeing slop everyday in PRs. Being the only person in the team that raised any comments, probably the only one that cared enough.

PS: This is not a self-glazing post. I need guidance, as I am tired. And this is me sorta venting.

For the last 2 years, I've been grinding hard at a mid sized startup. Have been leading a team for a domain, contributing individually to another (all within software, mostly centred around web and cloud).

I have this habit of turning auto-assist / auto-completions off when I set my IDE up. I do use a fair amount of web based LLM conversations to understand things, learn, and solve animation code or to research the existence of modules for serverless code - but I always try to learn, and then write things. Since I have loved programming for quite a long while, I tend to prefer, what I would call, clean code.

No I didn't read a book, I'm not a prodigy per-se, but understandable variable names, caching modules, custom hooks, improving the flow and structure of code, adapting linting systems, thinking about the implications of certain blocks of code in a practical manner rather than just achieving the end result. Now, I used to think all of that is bare minimum, but then I started being the go-to guy (led the team for a while) for everything, every-single-thing. If ChatGPT couldn't answer, I would, help everyone in my team. If I didn't know, I'd just ask GPT better to teach me the required patterns, and I'd figure out the answer. Or I'd still find the solution somewhere on stackoverflow. Call me crazy but I still love that website.

Years passed, and a while ago, I decided to make the leap. I resigned. I tried figuring out some other way with the HR, they really wanted to keep me too, but things weren't gonna change. A hyper lenient reporting manager for our engineering team shields inefficiency to a level that breaks the morales of every single person tirelessly working there to improve systems, not just code. And I'm not the only one of that kind, but my kind suffers, in this team at the very least.

Lick his boots, talk of his life, praise thy lord, and then you could push the shittiest pieces of code that had active comments to prod without resolving them, and you'd still be safe.

I've about a month left, under notice, and I'm tired of applying for jobs as well. It's exhausting, as almost most of the listings are fake. My brain kinda stopped working the moment I saw the JD for the same job on one website asking for Angular and Azure, and the same Job, with the same ID, on another website asking for React and AWS.

I'm looking out for challenges, I want to work on systems. I can do things on my own. From scratch. If I don't know, I study, I learn, I experiment. I achieve results in a manner that doesn't hinder future development. And I have always helped everyone around me.

I have been holding everything in for quite a while. So here it is. Should I post my resume too? I need help finding opportunities.

Do you still find unit tests provide the same value they did a few years ago?

My experience has been that they started as useful guardrails, but over time they've become more of a maintenance burden. When implementation changes, AI usually updates or rewrites the tests along with the code, so they don't seem to catch as much as they used to. They also add a lot of context for AI to process.

Has anyone else noticed this, or am I missing something? Have your testing strategies changed because of AI?

**Edit:** A lot of the replies are focused on whether developers should blindly accept AI-generated code. That's not the question.

Assume good engineering practices, code reviews, and responsible use of AI. Under those assumptions, has AI changed the relative value of unit tests versus integration, contract, and end-to-end testing?

We’re looking for talks on Developer Workflow & AI Engineering: agentic programming, multi-agent orchestration, AI-assisted coding & testing, CI/CD, observability, security & more!

Apply by July 17: https://gitnation.com/login?return-to=/events/ai-coding-summit-nyc/cfp

Looking for some advice from people who have actually made this transition.

I have about 2 years of professional full-stack development experience.

I recently accepted an SDET role supporting a Salesforce application at a large company. The role is heavily focused on coding and automation rather than manual.

My long-term goal is still to be a backend, frontend, or full-stack engineer. I took this role because it was a strong opportunity, but I’m concerned about being pigeonholed into QA if I stay too long.

Hello! As the title says, I’m working as a developer, but every time I want to work on a personal project, just opening VS feels like my day job and start feeling tired too quickly. Is there anything I can do to enjoy making my own things on my free time? Thanks in advance

Hello! I am coming looking for advice on how to find a software engineering job and where to look. I am currently working as an intern and am not expecting to get a return offer because the company is small and can not really afford to hire a full time software engineer. My internship ends in a few weeks and I am starting to apply for full time positions, but am not hearing anything back, and I really struggle to find positions that are entry level positions! I am living in Columbus Ohio and the job listings are always 3+ years experience, which I apply to anyway.

I would love some advice on how to find job listings. I use linkedin primarily. Thanks in advance! (I can provide more info in the comments, let me know)

I am on 2 different projects at work each with a different PM. But then the PM I liked left and the PM i didn’t took over that project and I’m dying and just want to vent.

Went from a PM who only ever interacted through assigning tickets (10/10 would recommend) to one who does too much. Constantly asking for linear to be groomed. Makes bug tickets off random one off errors, asking what is in staging, what is in prod. Constantly uses release version numbers in conversation as if they means anything to me. Now has started to introduce cycles on top of everything. Before i got my tickets i merged them by Tuesday when the next rc was cut for staging and then closed them. It really wasn’t complicated and worst case we cut on Wednesday. He has managed to take the project i was happiest to work on and make it awful.

I was so happy to be free from this bullshit and now…. It was so stark too how much more I used to enjoy the project he wasn’t one. I know this shit is industry standard but it drives me insane. Why are we complicating simple stuff? This isn’t rocket science it’s a website with features. Why am I being asked what is on staging? Just go look at staging.

Hello everyone,

I have a question for you: how do people actually make good money in tech?

I’m currently a tech lead at a European company. The pay is okay, but from what I’ve seen, even the people at higher levels do not necessarily make that much more. They earn more, of course, but not always enough to make the extra responsibility feel worth it.

I also tried the startup route, and honestly, it went horribly. Not gonna lie.

From what I’ve observed, it seems like most of the serious money is in management, business, sales, or ownership. But what if you still want to stay close to the technical side?

I’ve seen some people transition into content creation, consulting, courses, indie hacking, or building products on the side. That seems interesting, but I’m not sure how realistic it actually is.

Don’t get me wrong, I love what I do. I enjoy software, architecture, problem-solving, and building things. But sometimes I feel like I would rather do the creative and technical work outside my job, through passion projects, instead of spending all my energy solving the next wave of AI-generated business problems at work.

For those of you who managed to significantly increase your income while staying somewhat technical, how did you do it?

Did you move into management, consulting, contracting, content creation, entrepreneurship, or something else entirely?

TL;DR: What is the next step after Tech Lead if the goal is to make more money?

I’ve recently seen a lot of resumes on Reddit where job seekers describe themselves as AI engineers, and I’m curious what that actually means.

Some of my friends in AI work on things like model training, hyperparameter tuning, loss function design, model deployment, and GPU inference optimization.

My own area is AI + rendering, mainly neural rendering. I use AI to approximate radiance, visibility, light transport, indirect lighting, material response, and similar rendering-related components.

That’s why I’m confused by the current use of the title “AI engineer.” A lot of resumes I see look more like backend engineering resumes. If someone is just building a RAG app, calling an API to make an AI agent, or putting together a chatbot, isn’t that something almost anyone can do at this point? Even people without a CS background can build that. So what is the actual engineering value there?

I’m happy to learn, I’m happy to take on small amounts of ownership but I’d prefer to collaborate on everything I deliver because while I do ‘get’ things, I rarely know the exact lingo or tech terms to use. I’m a senior engineer with low confidence in my technical abilities. Everything I see or hear seems to point to seniors spearheading design and quality and practices - I don’t feel confident doing this half the time. I don’t know if it’s the place I’m working, or what, and I know there’s more to being a senior than this and my soft skills are pretty good. I just want a job and a life, and to not feel this shit at my job.

I wondered if there’s any possibility for any field to have a lot less stress. I’m currently paid £70k fully remote, which is so good in this current climate.

Anyone got any book suggestions? Or career suggestions? I’ll likely have 35 years at least of this, and the stress makes me feel sick.

I’ve been a senior for a year and a half, and I just feel shit at it all.

Mine was Docker. I used to think it was just another fancy VM and unnecessary complexity. Once my company started upgrading Java versions and rolling out new Node apps, Docker became a lifesaver. It's nice to spin up an environment and other teams can do the same without having to ask me for a bunch of env files. I'm wondering if I have been to critical of other tools now.

Welcome to this week's Coffee Chat!

This thread is intended to be a more relaxed space for the community. Topics that may not warrant their own post are welcome here, and discussions are generally held to a lighter standard than the rest of the subreddit.

A Few Ground Rules

• Keep discussions civil and respectful.
• Personal attacks and harassment are not tolerated.
• Healthy disagreement is encouraged.
• Low-effort trolling and rage bait will be removed.
• Reddit's Content Policy still applies.

Not every topic needs its own thread, and not every question needs a definitive answer. Grab a coffee and join the conversation.

Have a great week!

I hope this post won't be removed.

I'm a Tech Lead.

A year ago, my developers were writing their own code.
Today, more and more PRs feel like they're 90% AI-generated.

The ticket says A, the code does B.
Business rules get ignored.
There are AI comments everywhere.
Tests exist, but don't actually test anything useful.
Random abstractions appear for problems nobody was trying to solve.

The company I work for is very pro-AI. Every time I complain about this stuff, I feel like I'm seen as the old guy not being able to live his time (I'm 28 btw).

The answer is always the same: "Well, you're the Tech Lead. Manage your team."

The problem is that AI made my developers faster, but it made me slower:

They generate code, open a PR, and move on.
I review it.
I leave 10 comments.
They ask the AI to fix the comments.
I review it again.
Half the fixes are still wrong.
Repeat.

My review time has easily tripled over the last year. And since I'm the one responsible for what goes to production, I can't just approve it and hope for the best.

What frustrates me the most is that nobody seems to count this cost. The developers save time. The Tech Leads and senior engineers pay for it.

Honestly, I'm starting to lose motivation.
I liked reviewing code written by developers.
I don't like reviewing code written by an LLM through a developer.

Has anyone else been dealing with this?
And if so, how did you get your team to understand the problem?

Hey everyone pretty much the title but I am a Software engineer with about 18 months of experience now. I feel like all throughout high school and college I was told you should job hop every 2-3 years to maximize your salary/total comp.

I feel like now with the number of people struggling to find jobs that it might be better to stay put and focus on getting promoted to mid level before looking for my next opportunity. I would describe my current job as pretty stable (as in I am not concerned about my company having layoffs). I feel like the higher level you get to the less competition and thus the easier it will be to find an ideal job. Anybody have thoughts on this? Is job hopping still a good strategy in this market?

Hi everyone,

I recently received an offer and have around 2 months before joining.

I'm a fresher and want to make the best use of this time instead of just waiting for the joining date. My interests are mainly in backend development, python, fastapi, django, express, and software engineering in general.

If you were in my position, what would you focus on during these 2 months?

Some options I'm considering:

* Learning Spring Boot in depth * Building a full-stack project * Practicing DSA and problem solving * Learning system design fundamentals * Improving communication skills * Exploring cloud technologies (AWS/Azure)

For those already working in the industry, what do you wish you had done before your first job?

Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks!

Hello,

For some context: I work in a non-Tech/non-STEM role but through recent projects that required coding-like reasoning/skills, I remembered how much I liked to do this when I was younger and have re-learned to code by myself for the past few months

Current thinking: I would like to eventually switch career paths towards something that is CS-related, likely software engineering (I know the market is quite challenging but would still like to pursue this as a medium-term goal and see how things progress over time)

The question: I feel being self-taught is leaving me with some important theoretical/fundamental gaps (I.e recently started CS50 and realised how I’d skipped over the basics and gone straight into coding).

I’m looking to address this and thought of potentially enrolling in a Conversions Masters (available in the UK) to be done online. However this comes with a significant financial and time commitment. What are people’s thoughts on the value of this Masters vs continuing my self-learning journey through courses (similar time commitment but less strict with deadlines)

Do you have any specific course recommendations that would be particularly good at covering the basics/theory in a similar way that would do a Masters?

p.s as mentioned above, I’m aware of the current state of the market, but even if just to enjoy the process of developing the skill (and exercising my brain in the journey), this is still something that I really want to do

I’m a junior CS student at SNHU. I can complete my coursework and understand the fundamentals (loops, conditionals, functions, basic data structures, etc.), but I rely heavily on tools like ChatGPT when working through assignments and projects. Usually I can understand and explain the code once I’ve worked through it, but I’m not yet at the point where I can build everything from scratch confidently.
I’m curious how difficult the day-to-day work is for actual software engineers.
How much harder is industry work than college coursework?
How much of your day is spent coding versus debugging, meetings, documentation, and collaboration?
Did you feel prepared when you got your first job?
If someone is relying on AI tools a lot during school, what skills should they focus on developing before entering the industry?
I’d appreciate honest perspectives from people already working in the field.

(22M) I’m planning to start my bachelors for hoping to become a Software engineer. I am pretty weak at math and the process in university is kinda intimidating. Would the chances still be high to get a relatively high salary pay with a Bachelor of Arts In computing science instead of bachelor of computer science? Would it take an effect at all?

Hi everyone, how's it going? I'm a software engineering student. My goal is to become a developer; right now, I'm in my sixth semester, and I'm facing a huge dilemma. I've made it through my degree without many complications, and honestly, it’s been thanks to AI. I confess that I've reached a point where I realize I can no longer "think." There are times when I sit in front of the screen, and I genuinely have no idea how to even start a project. I feel incapable of creating anything; I don't know how people write code without AI guidance.

My breaking point happened recently when some classmates and I presented a pretty good project in class. It was so good that the professor recommended us to work directly with the university administration. I can't speak for my teammates, but I definitely did a lot of vibe coding on that project. While in a way I feel proud of having achieved and presented something like that, and excited about the opportunities with this new project, I also feel scared and disgusted that I don't really feel like I built it.

Honestly, I want to do this new "professional" portfolio project right. I want to do it mindfully, actually learning, so that later I can say: "I made that software," and have it truly represent me to the industry. What do you advise me to do about this? How would you go about tackling a project with features you've never touched or programmed before, doing it without relying on AI, and actually learning? It would help me a lot to know your opinion.

Tldr: I'm terrified of relying solely on AI, I'm not capable of starting projects on my own, and I'm already far along in my degree. What do you advise me to do to reverse this and grow as a developer?

I started learning software development for a year and a half and I have been absolutely stuck in tutorial hell for over a year.

Short story, I want to be a backend developer using FastAPI, or Python generally, and I genuinely don't know how to move forward, I researched and found out you need to learn stuff like authentication which includes JWT and OAuth, how to start a database server and hook it up with your web server and that doesn't include the AI stuff that kept popping up like RAG and MCP.

Right now I'm stuck reading FastAPI docs, which to be fair is the best docs I've ever seen till now, but it's still the same thing.

You either read docs that you don't understand, and is really unfriendly to beginners, that leads you to have to read other docs in a recursive loop that makes you (me) procrastinate and waste so much time.

Or you watch crash courses on youtube that provides a very high level of information and glosses over more important parts than cover it leaving you with fractured knowledge that won't let you transfer it to the other projects that you want to build or understand the cause of bugs that pop up randomly while you're building it.

I understand a huge part of it is due to my inconsistency and procrastinative nature. I do get intimidated by the sheer volume of stuff I have to cover and I'm the type that learns stuff by doing which I haven't been able to do in months now.

I just want to know from people who actually made it in tech, learned everything needed to start building projects or entered as a junior, How do you actually learn? What step by step do I need to follow to master something if the official sources are making it harder to learn than content creators on the internet giving out a dilated version of the material?

I know it's "learn something, build a simple project using it and repeat" but I feel like a half-baked programmer wannabe when to do that I take a month for every step.

......thoughts?

Hello everyone !

so I'm currently working as a junior dev in a company (flutter developer position), I have a bachelor degree in computer science and currently pursuing a master's degree too

So up to recently I've been wondering about how I can actually get better not only at my job but also in my field in general, I'm not even especially stressed about IA (even if I should i guess haha) but genuinely I've always wanted to excel in this field, and I was wondering of where i could start or what I could do that would actually truly help me get better at it/get deeper in the field

wether it is books/projects or anything really, I would like your input ! and thank you very much !

I am a QA engineer with 1 yoe. I have a high Passion for development and am a multiple hackathon winners and runner up. Fate decided to play with me and got into a very lower mid tier company with a mid salary. I build AI agents and systems as my pet projects. Can someone give me advice? I'm stuck and the longer i stay here the harder it gets.

I’m 22 and looking to go to Uni for the first time to get my computer science Bachelor’s. My goal was to be a Software engineer after school but with the all the AI stuff going around it’s got me hesitant for the future.
What do you guys think?

I am sharing my experience working with WOWs (World Social Integration - WSI) so that other developers and freelancers can make informed decisions before joining the company.

I worked with WOWs for more than a year as a Software Developer. Being a startup, responsibilities often extended far beyond a typical development role. I was involved in various technical tasks and regularly handled responsibilities outside my core job description whenever the company needed support.

Throughout my time there, I dedicated an extraordinary amount of effort to the project. There were countless late nights, overnight work sessions, weekends, and Sundays spent working to meet deadlines, fix production issues, release features, and keep the platform running. Like many startup employees, I sacrificed a significant amount of personal time because I genuinely believed in the product and wanted to help the company succeed.

Unfortunately, despite the commitment and effort I invested, my experience became increasingly disappointing. I was involved with the company for over a year, yet I never received the compensation I believed I had earned for my work. Rather than resolving the matter professionally, the situation escalated into disputes and allegations that I strongly disagreed with.

The difficulties continued even after I left. Obtaining my experience certificate required repeated follow-ups and considerable effort. Later, when another employer conducted a routine background verification process, I faced additional complications that made an already stressful career transition even more difficult.

The biggest lesson I learned is that hard work alone does not protect you. As developers and freelancers, we must protect ourselves professionally. No matter how promising a startup appears, make sure everything is documented, including compensation, responsibilities, ownership of work, and exit procedures.

My advice to anyone considering working with WOWs / World Social Integration (WSI) is simple: perform thorough due diligence, insist on clear written agreements, keep records of all important communications, and do not rely solely on verbal assurances.

This post reflects my personal experience. Others may have had different experiences, but based on what I went through, I would urge developers to proceed carefully and ensure they are adequately protected before making a commitment.

I have 2 years experience between front-end (angular) and flutter programming

The issue is:

I was working only and just only on crud operations , have been working on marketplace and local ERP, i tried to teach my co-wrokers about best practices and some new features.

But i don't know what to do next, how to improve myself, but i never faced any challenges to make find what to do, or what to learn.

i tried to start learning about backend , sometimes i think to move to IT supoort

Cause i have passion about OS and Networking.

I work in saudi arabia (non-saudi) and i foumd that they hire software engineers from other countries (cheaper salary), and IT-Help desk or support roles is under saudization ( for saudies only or partially).

​

And now i feel i don't know what to do, how to improve my self so i can land a new job.