The API call took 200ms. Measured it, verified it, fast as hell.

Three weeks after launch the client tells me users are complaining the results "don't feel right". Not wrong, not slow. Just don't feel right.

I spent two days looking for bugs. Nothing. Results were correct, latency was fine.

Then a user screenshot came through. The user had written: "It feels like it's just making something up. It comes back too fast."

The feature was a search over a knowledge base. In the user's mental model, that should take a second. When it came back instantly, it broke their model - they read it as "this didn't actually process anything."

I added a minimum display time of 1.2s with a loading animation. API still ran and returned in 200ms. User sees 1.2 seconds of "working".

Complaints stopped within a week.

The part I can't shake: the technically correct solution was perceived as broken. The technically dishonest solution fixed it. I explained it in my update as "improved feedback during result loading" which is... technically accurate.

Anyone else been here? Curious how others frame this to themselves - is fake latency just accepted UX practice or does it bother you the way it bothers me?

Thankfully I did not take any of this quietly. After opening up to many colleagues about what I was experiencing during and after the PIP, I received consistent feedback my situation was actually bonkers and that management was looking for scapegoats to terminate and save face with their own managers. I became aware of others dealing with the same sorts of nonsense.

Furthermore, apparently my manager took the zoom call to fire me at his desk. So now, in addition to knowing the BS I was dealing with, my former colleagues are aware that I was termed and did not leave voluntarily.

A short list of the ridiculousness I experienced:

- Going into the PIP I was explicitly told that normally what they are citing would not be a big deal, but upper management is panicking about project delays and so they are cracking down.

- Going into the PIP I was also explicitly told that I had already corrected the cited issues but that they had to proceed with the process anyway

- In the PIP I was accused of "abandoning" a project that I had been explicitly told by my manager to stop taking tasks for

- My PIP duration was extended by 20% to accommodate my manager's vacation schedule. I was explicitly told that my performance was not the reason for the extension

- My manager lied to HR about me blowing off a 1:1 with him

- My manager lied to HR about the circumstances around a troublesome sprint after the PIP.

- My manager cited a particular story as counting against me after the PIP because he "was forced to take it over." He wasn't forced. He and I discussed the move as the correct choice because I had zero experience with the changes needed and we were on a time crunch. Then his changes for that same story had to be reverted for three consecutive sprints.

Don't stay where you aren't wanted.

Been at my company 5 years.

Got promoted to Senior last year. My assumption was I’d now spend some time actually growing into the role properly. Not coasting, just gradually taking on more scope and moving from “new senior” to a more established senior over time.

Earlier this year I joined what was meant to be a one-week discovery sprint for a new internal initiative. I thought it would just be a short-term thing with product/design/engineering people from a few different areas.

Instead it turned into a much bigger initiative, pretty visible internally, with actual deadlines attached to it. Work got split into smaller streams and I ended up being assigned as the technical lead / lead engineer for one of them.

Since then I’ve been doing a lot more than I expected: architecture, scoping, estimation, phasing, cross-team coordination, stakeholder discussions, dependency stuff, figuring out ownership boundaries, all of that.

Part of me actually likes it. I do want stretch. I do want bigger responsibility. I can feel that it’s pushing me.

But the other part of me feels like I’ve been thrown into the deep end way too fast, and pretty much alone.

That’s the bit I’m struggling with. It’s not just “this is hard.” It’s more that there doesn’t seem to be much support structure around me while I’m doing it. No real lead-engineer-level backing on my side of the org, not much clarity on who the actual engineering owner is overall, not much clarity on whether I’m just temporarily filling a gap or whether I’m now expected to keep carrying this through launch and beyond.

I’ve already asked for more resourcing. My manager said he’s trying to pause other work and move people onto this initiative. That’s helpful, but to me that solves the capacity problem more than the leadership problem.

At my year-end review, my manager said:

• I’ve done strong work
• the discovery / groundwork / early shaping all looks good
• but since I was only promoted to Senior last year, I shouldn’t expect anything major recognition-wise this cycle
• and because nothing is in production yet, the real measurable impact is more likely next year

I’m not even mad at that, to be honest. I’m not sitting here saying “promote me again already.” I’m actually not in a rush to become a Lead. I’d be completely fine just continuing to grow within Senior.

What’s bothering me is more this feeling that I’m kind of speedrunning through a huge chunk of the senior-to-lead progression because the company needs someone to do it, and I don’t really have the support around me that would normally help you grow into that kind of responsibility.

And I’m also worried that if I raise this too much, I’ll just look like I’m overthinking things, talking too much, or “making it difficult” before I’ve actually shipped outcomes.

So I guess my question is:

Has anyone been in this kind of situation where a stretch opportunity was also kind of a lonely / under-supported one?

How did you figure out whether it was:

• a genuine growth opportunity or
• a leadership vacuum landing on you because you were the nearest capable person?

And how do you ask for clarity/support without sounding like you’re trying to dodge responsibility?

Would genuinely appreciate advice from people who’ve been through this.

Had a rough tech screen interview in a different specialty than my own, interviewers were giggling and scoffing at some of my answers and at one point one of them just refused to interact with me anymore or answer any of my questions. This was for a well known fintech company if it matters.

Obviously I’m keeping it pushing but mostly curious how do the rest of you handle this in the moment? I just acted as if everything is fine but definitely wanted to just leave the call when I felt they were rude. Normally I find interviewers very kind and patient and helpful so this really stood out.

Thanks!

I've worked at big and small companies before and right now I'm in a very small company. Which means that the bar for hiring is of the "you get shit done at any cost".

well, it turns out that one of the engineers in my team does not meet that bar, and my manager knows. he was hired before I joined.

we don't get projects hand plated to us, which is a good thing in my eyes because we get the freedom to decide what to work on next, and to write tickets.

so. right now we have two high priority projects in flight, and they are somewhat intertwined. there's a few other low priority, smaller, projects that need to be done too.

the problem I have is that this engineer needs to be assigned tickets specifically or he will not work on them. half the time I don't know what he's doing. he doesn't keep his tickets status up to date. he doesn't ask for reviews when his PR's have not gotten any comments.

I'm new in this role and I don't feel comfortable being a ticket police and asking for status updates regularly.

I also don't feel like I have the bandwidth or mental capacity to do that. I have tasks of my own to do, specifically so that they don't have to do them and they can focus on project work. (eg I deal with out of band requests)

I've had multiple talks about this with my superior and they suggested that I be more blunt about what I need him to do. the issue is that I hate being the police. have I really got to spell out "there is a backlog of tasks, pick one at random and do that."? this guy is more senior than me (in terms of age anyway)

the irony of all this is that on the one hand I want this engineer off my team but on the other I DON'T want to inherit the code they wrote and have to be on hook to get it to the finish line.

the other irony is that his bad performance means that my performance is bad too because I cannot manage him effectively.

anyway. end of story. do you have advice for me?

I can't go much deep into this but I'm constantly being monitored at my workplace. It's a small team and my senior keeps checking my activity and sends a message as soon as I don't seem to be active. This inactivity is me working on a module that doesn't register as activity.

Also, often times I've heard my teammate talking about something only me and my senior have knowledge about.

I've tried to find a new job but it's difficult.

How can I confront this person when I don't have any solid proof?

I've tried ignoring this but it keeps happening everyday.

I am a pretty "modern" software engineer but one of my passions is the original 1994 PlayStation. From time to time I've dabbled with PSX development but I'd like to hear what it was like from industry veterans

What I understand is

• most devs worked with devkit boards that would slot right into your PC. How did they work exactly? What was the process for building and playing the game?
• Most people were using GCC and plain C89. Were you ever aware of people using more exotic languages? How often did you have to write assembler?
• Could you "flash" the dev console with changes? was it easy to debug?
• From what I've read about the PSX's development, the Sony SDK was pretty bad. What was Sony's attitude to devs circumventing their SDK?
• With the PSX how much did the 2mb limit bite? That's quite a low amount of memory by the late 90s
• Did studios and projects share any code? How did that work back in that era? Did you officially license libraries or was it just, Bob shares a snippet of C on a bulletin board?
• Were you ever jealous of devs working on different systems? N64 etc?
• What were the IDEs like back then? Were they any good?

I have been doing some of my own homebrew largely as a way to learn C. But working with an emulator and modern tooling is a very different experience.

I have a reputation as a good interviewer. In general my approach is just ask questions about technical and non-technical problems I've struggled with in the past to see what they come up with, with one or two 'do you know how to actually implement this' relevant programming problems also taken from real world scenarios.

The thing in common is they were all Senior devs, which both has a huge effect on the baseline technical and industry knowledge I expect and also what level I expect to be able to converse and communicate with them on areas unfamiliar to me.

I've been asked to be part of the interview process for potential Junior hires, some straight out of college. I am not sure how well this approach will work. Any advice for how to interview devs for a Junior position, and how it differs for Senior positions?

I guess this is more about me writing it down to not keep it all in my head more than anything but if you have experience with this i'll gladly take your help.

In the last ~12 months I've changed jobs two times out of my own will. I was not forced to, or layed off. I should also add that I do not live in a big tech sector at all but there is good activity here, enough to make a good living.

I left my previous job where I was for 6 years, I had made a decent name for myself in the company and did the corporate ladder thing but felt stuck and wanted new challenges.

I interviewed somewhere where I was referred, still did all the grueling interview process but in the end I got in. I quickly became good in the team and got two rounds of very positive feedback. This job was 100% remote and it was really taking a toll on me.

About 4 month ago I got contacted by someone to join his new company, I knew him professionally and knew he was very smart, incredible engineer much smarter that I could ever be. I would be the first employee.

I took the plunge.

Even though in the interview process he told me it would be chill and mostly 9to5, I've been feeling immense pressure. I'd say i'm working 50-60hours a week if not more. For some of you this may not be a lot but for me it is.

We are working 100% with Claude Code and I haven't written a single line of code since then. It is really affecting me mentally.

Another team member joined shortly after. Both my boss and the other team member have massive experience in the business we are tackling and I do not. I'm feeling fraudulent and especially with AI I feel like I could easily be replaced. Every day I feel the pressure that I'm not fast enough and afraid I could be fired. It would be very humiliating because it is a small city and everyone knows each other.

I'm feeling weird when I'm not working. Others are working on weekends and national holidays. I can't, I have to take care of my young childs, and to be frank I don't really want to be working I prefer living.

Before AI I would have been very confident with my speed and execution, now, not so much.

I find it very hard to have my boss, be also my teammate. I'm never sure If I'm getting it straight or behind my back he's thinking I'm an idiot. With such a small team there is nowhere to hide. When there is a bug everyone in the team knows/sees it. There's no layers or managers to talk to.

So I'm not sure at this point If I try to grind it out to the finish line with this new job or quit of my own. Another option would be to really put limits for myself to 40h/week but we are a startup and I feel like that would just cause me to lose my job. I'm also afraid to ask for feedback, because it is my boss and also the same person paying me. I've never been in this spot and it's very awkward. I know I'm doing mostly well, but no ones telling me. It never has hapenned. I'm also not being told I'm not doing well so it's also that uncertainty thats messing with me.

I'm not even sure If I want to continue in this line of work, although I've been doing it for ~15 years now, I really don't see myself continuing on this path especially with AI sucking all the fun out of it.

I know I'm extremely privileged to even have work in this industry, and the pay is great, but my mental health is taking a toll, even if I reorient I can't know for sure I'd enjoy the job. Although I'm seriously starting to plan/think for an exit into another field.

I also have kids to feed and a roof to pay that's the hardest part I feel like.

I'm certain i'm not the first one to feel this, but with the paradigm shift to AI, it seems to accentuate everything ten fold.

sorry for my lackluster english, i'm sure you will prefer it to an AI written post

I’m a senior dev with 9 YOE. I’ve had a growth chat with my manager and he suggested that I bring forth a best practices doc and a presentation to present to the whole company to help me gain some recognition across the org. He wants me to come up with best practices in a topic (let’s say domain driven design) which I haven’t done before. There’s a project coming up where we’ll be doing some DDD and this is kind of in preparation for that project too. But, in order to write best practices, we should actively work on it, try things that succeed or fail, right? I’ve been postponing doing this until I’ve gained this context. But my manager asked me about my progress on this doc and he seems disappointed that I don’t have a working doc yet on it even though I told him what’s holding me back. Am I approaching this the wrong way?

I am a senior SE (7yoe), doing backend almost exclusively nowadays.

I've been with my current company for ~10 months now and quite enjoying it - it's a bit hectic with tight deadlines and a lot of legacy, but there are a lot of fun challenges and the company's product (dating site which tries to be wholesome, as contradictory as it sounds) is a lot of fun.

The work is organized in several streams (we currently have 3). Every stream is doing one or two major features at a time, and has a mix of FE and BE engineers and couple of QAs, totalling at about 7-10 people and changing shapes depending on what feature we are doing. No sprints, thankfully (but deadlines are quite tight).

Each of these streams has a "lead". I wouldn't call this position a "team lead" (although it might be?); lead's function is to coordinate work, answer "streammate's" questions, and generally try to maintain momentum. For most of organizational and "business-y" stuff we have a PM who is cross-team.

Recently I was offered a "trial run" of one of the streams and agreed; doing this for 2 months now. It's quite fun - I love helping people and the feeling of responsibility, having a (moderate) say at the decisions made regarding the feature we create, trying to keep momentum while not micromanaging, and communicating with PM and business to try and make my streammates' lives easier.

This is my first time doing this and I wonder - what does this role look like to you guys (and gals)? Is it a team lead, lead SE, or something else entirely? What do you expect of someone in this position? Do you have any advice on what mistakes to avoid?

Cheers!

I have about 3 years of experience, and now joining a new team. In my team we are responsible for client facing features, and we have superhero duties e.g. rotation of who first responds at outages/issues. But I am always afraid of it. It distracts me from what I am currently doing, I'm not sure whether I can figure out what's wrong, especially since I'm the only few backenders in the team so I feel I need to be able to solve it. I feel pressured somehow I don't know why. Perhaps since the impact is huge and the time pressure is high?

I now obsessive compulsively check our superhero duty channels for new messages, even if it is not my current duty. It is tiring to be honest. I am also gaining seniority so I feel like I am expected to respond and pick up these issues even before the person on duty does. I think this is also because in my team there's another person who is super proactive and does this, and he gains a lot of visibility; he is on track to becoming a staff engineer due to this. I feel now I need to be at that level to be able to progress in this place. That level of proactiveness and self-confidence, it's something I fear yet need and lack.

How can I handle this emotionally? I do like the job, the people are kind and friendly, and tech stack is very modern. I am learning new things everyday, especially AI related stuff. It's just this ad hoc aspect of the job that I can't seem to be at peace with. But I mean, whatever software dev job I do, this kind of issues will always be there right, especially as you gain seniority and expected to be more proactive? So whereever I go this will always be there and thus I need to grow up. Any advice would be appreciated.

Essentially I’ve been working on some shitty product for a while and due to the good work that we’ve done prior (me and a smaller team), we got a big project related to it. Essentially the project started out as shit and then some people like me were brought in to make it not shit. And now it’s not shit.

With the new project, it has tight deadlines, management brought in a bunch of people and new leads that don’t have any idea how it’s actually used, and IMO just devolved into a mess a couple months in.

I tried helping initially with past lessons learned but these people are set on fitting their square peg in a round hole to make everything amazingly better and the PRs are made without understanding anything about the customer with constant pushback that their way is better and uninformed leads just agree.

I’m sorta burnt out from this experience and don’t really care anymore, as long as I’m not sweeping up the mess. I essentially want my own assigned work to be good idgaf about the other people’s crap anymore

Is this feasible as a senior who still wants upward trajectory?

Hello everyone.

I am frontend developer with 5 years of professional experience. Right now I am working on purely technical tasks, without doing any changes to the UI.

During these 5 years I have noticed that I can think of various product ideas, that are actually good (increased conversation rate, reduced bounce rate etc.). I am constantly giving ideas to both PM and designer about UI: new features development, existing visual bugs, design improvements etc. I can naturally generate these ideas. Even tho I am trying really hard to work on the technical tasks, I naturally drawn to our product.

Do this type of frontend role exists in tech companies? What kind of carrier path I can follow? I am trying to utilise my strength here. I wish I was smarter to provide better technical solutions, but right now, my track record shows better results in product improvement.

1) Technical Screen

Started with a proctored CodeSignal round.

2) Full Loop

AI-Assisted Round

This round included a simple codebase with:

• 2 unit tests
• multiple data files inside the src directory

The problem was around recommending random friends/connections.

Approach used:

• first used Claude Opus to generate a rough technical blueprint
• then used that plan to solve the first unit test
• followed a similar approach for the second unit test

A follow-up question was around how to score recommendations.
One possible approach discussed was:

• number of mutual connections
• sorting candidates by score
• returning the top recommendations

The interviewer also asked a few additional questions. The discussion felt a bit mixed and it was hard to tell whether the direction was fully aligned with expectations.

DSA Round

This round had 2 LeetCode-tagged problems.

• For the first problem, an optimal solution was written. The interviewer then asked for a code review, which led to spotting and fixing a logical bug.
• For the second problem, an optimal solution was also written. After that, the interviewer asked for a dry run and then slightly modified the input to ask for the output.

Overall, this felt like a standard but detail-focused DSA round.

Behavioral Round

Mostly experience-based questions.
Answers were based on prior work and projects. Hard to judge afterward whether the depth/detail was enough.

3) Product Architecture / System Design

The system design question was around designing a multi-client messaging platform.

The discussion started with:

• functional requirements
• non-functional requirements

Then moved into a high-level microservices-based design:

Client → Edge (DNS, WAF) → EKS → Services / Infra → Database

More specifically:

• Client
• Edge layer: DNS, WAF
• EKS cluster
  • Chat service
  • Kafka
• Database: DynamoDB

Basic flow:

• Router → Chat Service → DB
• Kafka used for async events such as:
  • heartbeat / active status
  • seen-message updates

Interviewer Follow-up Questions

Some of the follow-ups included:

1. REST/HTTP vs WebSockets Why choose one over the other for chat?
2. How to update whether a message was seen or not One explanation discussed was:
   • seen events pushed through Kafka
   • a consumer updates DynamoDB
   • background sync jobs periodically reconcile message metadata if needed
3. Database design Proposed something along the lines of:
   • PK: sender#receiver
   • SK: timestamp
   • attributes like seen, etc.

Note: took AI help for fixing grammar

Just joined a new company last week and, while they did say they worked in-office 3 days per week, it only became apparent to me on my first day that:

1. They track office attendance by monitoring badge swipes at the office door.

2. They can fire me instantly without pay if I don't meet the quota of badge swipes. Regardless of the results I deliver for the company.

3. My entire team sits in a different part of the country. So all I do is waste an hour a day of my life going into a noisy, open plan office where it's really hard to focus, and sit on Zoom calls with my colleagues in the other part of the country.

What baffles me is just how people around me at this company are like: "yeah whatever it's just part of life." Do folks here feel the same? If so, I'd be curious to know more about why.

Why would one or more adults ever surveil the activities of another adult? (Outside of the surveilled adult being incarcerated). How did we become so complacent as a society as to allow this kind of abusive behaviour?

I have almost 4 YOE at Amazon.

At my current experience, I've been told my level of output is still strong mid level. However, my manager has told me my level of thinking (in terms of coming up with edge cases and product vision) is on senior.

I was told I was upper part of meets this quarter, so either HV2 or HV3.

I have a bit of imposter syndrome so I'm a bit nervous I won't be able to pass the senior bar at other companies. But after running my resume through ChatGPT (which is what I'm guessing is what will be reviewing my resume anyway), they suggested I remove by level of Mid level from my resume so that I can interview for senior. If that's what I'm trying to do (which I'm not sure yet), should I? Thoughts are appreciated.

Hi everyone,

I'm reaching out to this community in hopes of finding some guidance or support. I’m a Java/React full stack developer with 4.5 years of experience, currently based in India. Unfortunately, I’m facing a tough time as I’ll be laid off on the 9th, and I’ve been struggling both mentally and physically lately.

I’ve turned down several offers because they required in-office or hybrid work, which often meant being far from my family, who also aren’t in the best of health right now.

I’m ambitious and a quick learner, having received multiple awards throughout my career for my dedication and performance. I’m eager to find a remote position where I can contribute my skills while also taking care of my family's needs.

If anyone has advice or knows how to find opportunities, I would greatly appreciate your help. I've tried remotive and wwr but haven't got anything meaningful so far. Thank you so much for your time and support!

I got a late start to my career which has consisted of a year in Delphi and four years in C#. I got laid off last summer and I've been looking for (a) work in the nearest big city and (b) remote work. Last fall I impressively passed an assessment test where I had to use Java and they told me that if I could build some personal project in Java to show them, they'd interview me. (I didn't really want to work for them and some family stuff arose to eat my spare time over the following few months, preventing me from making anything anyway.) So now I'm trying to figure out if it's worth applying for roles with other languages like Java or Python, despite not having professional experience.

So in the most recent rendition, I ran into someone who feels that the only way to make good money in this industry is to subject yourself to companies that have required on-call.

Now if your company has stable platforms, and you rarely if ever need to actually login after hours to deal with an issue, this isn't for you.

However, if you're one of the many software engineers, where a required part of the job is that every week, multiple week nights, you're responsible for the cadence of some delivery or the system just goes down so much that you know damn sure you're going to be dealing with some shit after hours. This post is for you.

---

So let's get down to the nitty gritty. What are you doing when you agree to working around the clock to support systems outages and failures?

1. You're supporting a dev culture where outages are considered acceptable and someone will be around to clean up the mess.
2. You're devaluing your time. You're signaling to the company that they can squeeze more out of you.
3. You're setting yourself and the company up for failure. This way of operating isn't sustainable.

I don't know why people put up with this. I don't even know how it became a normal way of operating for a significant, sizable set of companies.

Don't do it. Instead push for operationalizing the company.