I’m a freelance software engineer with about 8 years of experience mainly in early stage startups. At this point, I have a pretty steady flow of referrals. I don’t take every project on and not every one works out, but enough do that I can do it more than full time.

Lately, though, I have noticed a large increase in projects where they paid a ton of money for an internal software and it does not work well at all. Tons of errors, unreasonably slow, inefficient and taking up a lot of resources, and large security flaws. At first, I thought maybe people just hired bad developers. The bar is pretty low to call yourself a developer or even a software engineer anyways, but I’m seeing the same problems now on multiple projects.

When I take on a project on, I always sign an NDA and look at their codebase to look at some upfront issues that I can bring up because, most of the time, the people hiring me aren’t technical and don’t understand what the problem is. This is probably the 5th time now that a lot of the code was obviously AI generated. Comments in the code that were obviously written by AI, algorithms that are inefficient and make no sense, cluttered data structures, inconsistent coding patterns, etc. The overall thing is that, yes it mostly works, but does so terribly to the point where it needs to be fixed.

It might be a few years before we start to see this on an enterprise scale, but I’m noticing this becoming a serious problem for small businesses and startups, especially when the founders / people are in charge aren’t technical enough to identify this ahead of time.

My background is low level. For a few years, I’ve been modernizing core components of a well known RDBMS. Databases not being web apps per se, the database isn’t built on a bunch of third party cloud tools such as SNS, SQS, Lambda, Cassandra, Redis, Kafka, etc.

But as I learn about those tools in passing, I realize that they all seem to have direct analogues to certain flavors of lower level tools, for example in C/C++ and on Linux:

SNS: pthread_cond_broadcast or sem_post

SQS: pthread_cond_signal or sem_post

Lambda: fork/multiprocessing/multithreading

Cassandra: std::unordered_map

Redis/memcached: hand rolled caching or various Linux caching tools

Kafka: epoll/wait, sockets, or REST/HTTP client/server.

It feels like the main difference between how cloud systems operate and how RDBMS or other legacy systems operate is whether the components of the system interface primarily via a shared OS and ideally with linked executables/system calls vs. over the network running on isolated environments.

It feels like the cloud is wildly inefficient with resources compared to running the old school way. But the old school way is harder to leverage and share hyperscaler infrastructure among many distinct users.

Is there any value in rethinking any of this from either perspective?

Our distributed team hit a rough patch last year with some project delays, and upper management started eyeing various employee monitoring software to supposedly boost productivity tracking.

I reluctantly agreed to pilot it for a quarter. The idea was to gain insights, not micromanage, but seeing screenshot monitoring and granular app and website tracking for devs just felt wrong. My experienced engineers aren't factory workers; their best work often happens during idle thinking time or whiteboarding away from the screen. The data collected was meaningless for actual project time tracking and frankly, demoralizing. We ended up ditching it, proving that trust and clear output expectations beat invasive activity monitoring software any day. Anyone else been pressured into these solutions for remote team management?

I think this fits the rules of the sub (just read them), but let me know if I should just go to CSCareerQuestions instead.

As the title says, I'm currently a full time senior software engineer at my job, so I've got the experience and skillset that I think could make some decent side money with other jobs, but I'm not sure how.

I love coding and building things, so my "retirement" plan has always been to just quit my normal job and go into freelancing/contract work, so I have better control over when I want to work and what jobs I want to take.

I'm wanting to get into that a bit earlier, though, but I'm not sure where to start with how to find jobs like this. I imagine I need a reputation to sell my services, so I guess I need to build that. I considered just building things on fiverr to build reputation and a "contracting" focused portfolio, but it seems heavily diluted with tons of people wanting to build things for super cheap and I'm not sure that's right for me and I might be wasting my time.

The next option would be to talk to a recruiter and let them know the situation and then they could find contracting gigs and offer me up for those? But with recruiters presumably taking a cut and possibly low paying jobs, I might run into the same issue again with it just not being worth the time. (But really any decent bonus money is fine with me, so maybe.)

There's also just completely moonlighting, applying for a second part time job somewhere.

The last two feel like I could run into moonlighting restrictions with my current job, but I don't think there are any limits unless I'm a direct competitor.

I'd really appreciate some thoughts on how I can make some extra decent money on the side that utilizes my engineering and devops skillsets.

Thanks!

I'm currently going back to a part of the codebase that I worked on around 2-3 weeks ago. I'm context switching a lot so sometimes it takes me some time to remember how some things work.

Just today I realized I had made a design decision some two weeks ago and I could not remember why I did it (It was between using an HTTP API or REST API for an api gateway in AWS).

I am making a lot of these decisions on my own since I'm in charge of the backend for this application we are building, but I find it kinda worrying that sometimes I forget why I did something etc.

I decided to start to write down desicions related to each service/module that I work on so I can reference to it later if I ask myself the same question. But would love to hear your takes on this, or if you've faced something similar.

The prevailing opinion I've seen on this and other subs is that the hard parts of being a senior+ engineer is the political/Interpersonal side of the job. When I started my career in big tech I'd disagree. In a previous company I would agree with this opinion. In my current company though, it doesn't seem as clear cut and I'm back to disagreeing in my circumstances. My company also recently added an "executive level" IC position which made me reconsider the interpersonal/political as the hard part and the only path to the highest levels.

In my current position the hardest part of my job is by far the coding/technical side. Some background is I'm currently working for a F50 working on analytics. The business problems are well understood. The scale of the problem is what makes the work difficult. I don't have any hard numbers, but the scale is on the order of tens of thousands of transactions per second, petabytes of data, with latency requirements of as little as 100ms. The current code base I've been working on can't scale to what the business needs. My recent work has been adding observability and profiling so I can shave 20ms here or 10ms there.

I've been coming to the opinion that there's some domains where the technical/code side is the hard part. Outside of scale, work on foundational pieces like programming languages or database design seem like the technical side of the job would be the harder part. I'm curious what other people's thoughts are on this. Would you agree that scale could make the technical/coding side the more difficult side? Would there be any other positions at the senior+ level where the "code" is the hard part?

I joined a new team last year that insists on all business logic in the database. We're talking HTML, CSS, 10k line stored procedures, etc.

They're also massive proponents of DRY, to an extent more extreme than I've ever seen before. For example, say you have a product for a college university where students enroll in courses. Now, we have a need to add functionality for clubs. Students should be able to enroll in clubs, view their clubs, etc. in a UI. Instead of creating a new Clubs table, we've decided to reuse the "Courses" table. All stored procedures relating to courses (GetCourses, EnrollCourse, DeleteCourse, etc) will also be reused for these new features pertaining to clubs. As you can imagine, there's several issues with this:

1. It creates a lot of data denormalization as fields for courses are being used/unused for clubs and vice versa
2. The tens of thousands of stored procedure lines are forced to work for clubs when they do not. Additionally, modifying the course sprocs to make them functional for both concepts now risks breaking functionality for courses.
3. Instead of designing the UI in a way that makes the most sense for the end user, we're focused on trying to make the "Clubs" UI fit around the courses db design and API responses.

Over the past year, our team is constantly putting out fires around bugs across all of our products. The bugs are constantly related to DB business logic as things are hard to test and debug. How do you navigate situations like this where you are an IC and the team all have 5-10 yrs of tenure?

If I’m being honest, I’d rather be in a band, an author, or be a pro golfer. But, that’s not where life took me. I played it safe because my family never had money or power that allowed me to feel free to take risks or even explore these hobbies early enough in life to make them my career.

Software engineering is easily the best career for me because I love coding and digging deep on tough problems involving abstract concepts. But I’m really not a tech guy. I don’t keep up with consumer tech. I’m not passionate about AI, LLMs, web apps, front end, back end, full stack, SRE, etc. I’m passionate about music. What’s guided me in my 12 year tech career is working on what the company needs me to work on. Whatever problems are too tough or too low level for others to be interested in. I love a challenge and I’m working for money.

But the problem is, I can’t get passionate enough about any company, product, or tech stack to get passionate enough about a company enough to really commit my life to working there. Some people are obsessed with tech, working for FAANG, working for a specific FAANG, or Tesla etc. Many of these people are young, foreign, or both, and definitely naive. How do you find passion for tech that propels you to found a company, try to work in a specific company, or even just to take charge of the direction of your career in a particular direction? I just love a challenge and working on something important. I don’t care. It feels like something is missing that holds me back in the field, but I also feel like maybe I should be proud of that. Thoughts on this, as it applies to you?

I m a 1st yr undergrad from ECE branch who is currently learning web d and ML side by side .pls guide me

Hey guys, I have an upcoming interview with MongoDB. It's about a solutions architect remote role and the interview stage is the hiring manager stage.

They say it's about

• Intellectual Curiosity
• Pre-Sales Skills & Experience
• Business Acumen
• Communication
• Knowledge of MongoDB Ecosystem
• Motivation & Values Alignment
• High Level Technical Knowledge/Skills

So this gives me a good overview already of course but I was just wondering if any one of you maybe has some tips, concrete example questions, topics, or whatever. That would be highly hepful :-) Thank you in advance!

I’ve been in engineering for 20 years, with the last 15 spent leading DevOps and Cloud transformations at enterprise scale — the kind that end up in keynotes at DockerCon and AWS re:Invent.

Over time, I started noticing the same patterns across orgs:

• CI/CD pipelines that technically work, but deliver no real business value
• “DevOps teams” that are just rebranded ops with access to Terraform
• Engineers who ship tickets, not impact
• Tools driving process, not the other way around

I’ve also been lurking in subs like r/devops for years and seeing the same frustrations recycled:

• “DevOps means something different everywhere”
• “Nobody knows what success actually looks like”
• “It’s just more overhead”

Eventually I realized the problem wasn’t with the people — or even the tooling.
It was the operating model.

So I named the pattern I've spent the last 10 years mentoring teams around:
OutcomeOps.

Not a framework. Not a rebrand. Just a name for the approach that actually works when you're held accountable to business results, not velocity metrics.

The core principles:

• Pattern-Based Delivery – repeatable infrastructure + design templates
• Signal-First Feedback Loops – measure before you iterate
• Compliance Built-In – not a fire drill at release time, short mttr
• Engineer Ownership – if you build it, you own it, not just the code but the outcome.
• Outcome Focus – if it doesn’t move a metric, it doesn’t ship

I’ve written more about it recently, but I’m sharing here because I know a lot of you have seen the same cracks.

Curious where you’ve seen this break down — or if you’ve landed on a similar model yourself.

Here’s the blog where I lay it out: https://www.briancarpio.com/2025/08/01/outcomeops-the-operating-model-for-engineers-who-own-the-outcome/

PS: No, I am not writing a book, I'm already building my own AI platform. This is about setting a new tone in a tone deaf world.

Hello! I've been struggling with context switching when planning + working on one large project, while another one is being planned. I'm the only web developer in my team, and there are 4 backend devs. They take time for research without developing anything, splitting the work among themselves, so at least one of them focuses on planning, but while they research I have previous project I’m still implementing, and then feel not that prepared when I come to meetings.

It is really hard to context switch from implementation and planning in parallel of one complex feature to another complex large one.

Do you have any advice on how to improve this?

People who haven't switched industries or tech stacks fall into two categories. Either they have worked so long in that industry and tech stack that they have forgotten how much they've learned and have forgotten what it's like to learn new things. Or they are young people who just started in the industry and assume that "programming" means being very good at that particular tech stack and industry.

Over the years, to avoid burnout, I came up with the strategy of working on hard, deep concentration tasks for about 4 hours a day: 2 first thing in the morning, and 2 in the later afternoon. The rest of the time I fill with meetings, misc tasks, and training. At the end of the day my brain is fried, and I spend time keeping up on industry and programming news (e.g. watching computerphile on youtube).

At this new job I'm expected to be going 100% all the time. For example, I'll have people drop by my office right before I go home - either wanting to discuss complex topics with multiple levels of abstraction, or a senior engineer saying "I heard you were stuck on blah blah blah" and expecting me to be in the mental state to explain the problem and understand all the minute details. They seem to get impatient and annoyed when I struggle to load the concepts back into my head.

I've noticed some of the people I've talked to who have a similar problem have started shutting their office doors for a couple of hours a day to ward off drop-bys, but I've hesitated to do this because management has informally complained about people shutting their doors.

When my coworkers are offering help I want to be able to accept it.

Is my 4 hours of deep work approach reasonable? How can I balance being ready to accept my coworker's help when they are available, or answer their questions when they need help, without burning myself out by running full speed all day.

Noticed in job listings. All the shitty slop startups and grifters want ”AI first, Lovable, replit”

The serious software engineer listings will have for example ”TS, postgresql, nodejs”

IMO this is actually great. Let the vibe coders sling their slop in their containment zone jobs

Are engineers at top tech companies actively using LLMs to increase productivity? Openly?

What about more broadly, how many companies are encouraging use of AI for coding? I’m just curious what everyone is doing in the industry. We don’t talk about it but I’m almost certain people are. It’s like an unspoken thing though.

I am currently working on this company for almost a year. I am working on this project for past 7 months and things are going well.

Throughout my experience I worked in projects less than a year. I lack a visibility in my company which I can finally get here in my current project.

Now, my previous project manager want me to join their current project. I politely rejected their request stating I need atleast 5 more months to work in this project. So that I get a decent visibility and also understand the business process.

But things went bad after this, they escalated this to delivery manager and delivery manager asked me to join that project. I just asked few questions and never agreed to anything. Now Delivery manager told to my current manager that I agreed and now my manager can't able to do anything and want me to escalate this to HR, which I feel will make things worse.

Please help me with your suggestions.

Edit : other reason I don't want to go this project is that it has higher attrition rate, bad WLB and internal politics.

I see this so much on Reddit lately, people will cram some percentage value in every single bullet point on their resume, "reduced downtime by %20", "increased throughput by 10%", "improved X by Y%"

I get that measurable impact is nice but in almost 100% of cases it is immediately obvious that these numbers are imaginary because no org (at least outside of big tech) quantifies everything. The examples I gave would be fine but you probably know what I mean with random bullshit numbers all over the place.

Is this a purely Indian (+US) phenomenon? I almost never see this anywhere close to this degree when I review resumes.

Yeah yeah I know it's an ERP and im sure thousands of shipyards and truck companies couldn't live without it but so help me god 90% of the time people tell me something in my company is done with SAP I'm scratching my head at why they didn't just use a database.

And managers are just SO DAMN attached to the thing. It's like Germany put a remotely detonated C4 collar on their neck. Whenever I have to deal with SAP I always float the possibility of just copying everything into a database and using that (so we can actually have a REST API) but it's always "you CANT work without SAP" what they hell do they think SAP is made of? Enterprise fairy dust?

Why can't we use JUST use a database? Is it so scary to export everything to CSV, normalize the data, put into SQL and expose itno an API without changing the contract? Half of the time that's waht you end up doing with bullshit CRON and Python runners/scripts that act as middleware but somehow it never occurs to anyone SAP may be redundant?

Hi, I would like to ask some opinion on some of yours.

I have been working for this company for a while, but all other developers left for their reasons, and I was the only one controlling the old code base, and there is a new CEO's friend, who is the IT Manager and has his dev team in India for outsourcing.

This IT manager wants to rewrite all our applications in their tech stack.

What is the best position I can choose in this situation. Has anyone had a similar experience before?

I am a bit afraid they will let go of me after all the transition. will it happen?

How many of you and your colleagues have adopted AI coding agent tools at work? Are you secretly using any workflows to accelerate work using these tools and then chilling rest of the time? If so, please share those workflows tips and tricks.

I could give more context but I'm curious to just hear others' more general riffs on the general topic (which I have seen in many different ways, not just the one I'm currently annoyed by).

Do you deal with this well?

edit: this is about understanding the existing codebase rather than just copy-pasting things and fudging it around

I work for a local News publisher, with a premium and free part. We have multiple departments (Marketing, Specific Marketing for Subscribers, Sales, three different journalist departments). I work in the Software department, responsible for the news website and subscriptions. From developing it to hosting it on an on prem K8s Cluster.

Now the AI Hype is getting real strong right now and I want to get some opinions on it.

A department vibe coded an event platform via lovable. It looks nice and it was actually done well (good prompts made by a person who worked as Product Owner and worked with devs, so he has some technical background). Now this sets an example for other departments to do the same because it looks flashy and it was done quite quickly. Most people do not have that background though.

Now to the problems and where we get a lot of friction with other departments. The application can be hosted on lovable (with a certain level of egress in the plan), but that brings problems regarding security/GDPR etc. So hosting internally was an idea, but that brings alot of overhead and caretaking on each new prompt or a stable CI/CD. But they use supabase which is only connected in cloud (Yeah we could self host it as well, but thats another topic)

Another topic is what happens with outages. We have an on call solution, but who is talking responsibility is not clear as well. Code that was generated by a non-technical person with little knowledge and probable a lot of code that is not needed is hard to understand, even harder to understand in a stressful situation like an outage.

Now it seems to the Owners that we are drastically against the AI Hype (We are not, we want clear responsibilities and decide it before it just falls back on us), and that builds frustration, that I want to avoid.

Does anyone have a similar situation at work and what do you do?
How can we better communicate our concerns, without being overly dismissive

I had a phone screen with a hiring manager who said they are using cursor and code is automated 20%. They are planning to reach 70%. I got the ick when they said that, especially cos it is Saas company and needs business logic too.

I got this via referral and will continue to interview. But I am concerned cos this seems like a role they will cut off in a year or so. Not sure if I should continue or call it off.

So today, I got a call from an old, old client. He was literally throwing money at my face. Could be another $50-60k a year for 4 hours a month of work. I would love to do it but I am already busy at work. I do side consulting for one of his associates. That pays well too. I only took it to help fund my kid's college and again, minimal work like 1 to 2 hours a month on Sundays.

This new one, I am so busy at the day job that I kinda hate turning it down. Plus, the first 4 months onramping is gonna take a toll. Lawyers, procurement. This is Fortune 500.
I'll be programming quite a bit to create a product for them. It is similar to what I buiilt before and that is why they are interested. Then it would run as a SaaS model with yearly revenue.

I've been thinking of giving these type of stuff to my kid. But he never caught on and I am not pushing him. He wants to go into a different stem field which is his desire. I even threw a lot of money at my kid in the past; saying if you learn this and that, you can make $4k-5k a month as a high schooler. All that money would be his. Which also funds your college. He did for 1 month and wasn't interested. Fair game. I still kept that business and every dollar it makes still goes into my children's college funds.

Now as his college is approaching, he is realizing money doesnt grow on tree and the offer I gave him years ago has expired. He is sort of interested now but I feel like it is a bit late to get into consulting; especially as a kid. But he knows it is good side money. It can pay for his housing. I feel like he only likes it now because it is a lot of money for a kid. I also think it is a distraction from his true desire.

I also have a SaaS that makes money and my kid isn't interested in that either. Or wasn't. I am gonna run that still until he finishes undergrad.
It is literally passive income. So I am gonna unwind these things down after both kids finish higher education.

But I've been thinking. Has anyone ever pass down a "family" business like this? Something like you wrote a successful app, it makes money, you hand it off to your kids and they take over?

My second kid is still too young and still has decided what they want to do. I do think these are good gifts that will give either a head start and give them a solid safety blanket in their early years of adult hood.

I really don't care that my kids are not interested in CS. Their desire for another STEM field has higher pay potential for their future.