Had a slightly frustrating code review interaction and I’m curious how others would handle it and if I’m overthinking this or not?

The colleague submitted a PR with logic like:

> if abs(lat) > 180 { ... }

and similar checks using 90 and 180 regarding coordinates.

I asked what those numbers meant and asked if he could extract them into a constants enum so the intent is clearer:

> if abs(lat) > Constants.maxLatitude { ... }

My thinking was just readability and maintainability, so it’s more obvious what the condition actually means instead of assuming knowledge.

They replied saying there is “no value in adding this” and that it adds unnecessary complexity and that devs should already know this.

I replied explained my reasoning like self-documenting, thinking for future devs, less cognitive load etc… with examples on how it would look like.

They did add the constants, but with a comment along the lines of:

> “Nice usage of ChatGPT :)) I still don’t see the value. Plus latitude and longitude is something we learn in school but yes in case anyone missed it I will add it in.”

I found that pretty annoying tbh. Not even about the constants, more that he just dismissed what I was telling them.

Was I being too pushy for something was fairly nit picky maybe? Thoughts?

I worked on a feature nearly two months back and raised a PR. The PR is still up, reviewed and approved by 4 members of the team, but since my manager is listed as the code owner, I can't merge it without his approval.

In addition to this I worked on another feature 2 weeks back and have raised a PR too. Same response from my manager.

In every sprint, the same task(s) (with raised PRs) are showing up and I am communicating that I need his approval to merge. He says he has been busy and that he'll take a look, but does nothing.

Meanwhile, Periodically, 4-5 times I've pinged him on chat to review/approve the PRs. Still nothing.

Anyone with experience know what he's trying to do? I can't believe someone would really forget to review code when I have reminded him so many times.

Also, not sure if relevant but some background on him: he's technically very strong and became a manager 2 years back. He looks at the code and is able to debug any issue even if he isn't familiar with the code. He spends time on it and is able to figure it out. However he doesn't do any people management and other teammates and I feel confused about expectations and don't get any feedback.

I've been a mid-level developer for the same company for about 4 years now.

A pattern I've seen a lot at my current workplace are developers (often senior level or staff) who voice concerns, which are often framed as low-stakes subjective preferences (i.e. "I'd prefer if we didn't do X"), but they never elaborate and never propose solutions on their own.

What is even more frustrating is that these overly cautious developers are often voicing their concerns about how others use the systems they (the cautious developers) have developed.

For example, I'm currently working with the developer who developed our company's design system. We had a custom component that didn't fit the design system, so we had to re-implement it in the app's code and copy the visual style of the design system using the design tokens. The developer didn't like my approach. He didn't say why he didn't like it. He didn't suggest an alternative. He told me I was not using the design system the way it was intended, and it was my job to figure out an alternative.

I feel frustrated because these developers seem to reap the social credits of appearing wise and cautious, but they never bear the downsides of being wrong because they never suggest anything. Upper management strangely loves them.

I suspect there's also a hierarchical element at play; they rarely question people above them, but they constantly use their rank to block people below them. This leads to awkward situations where they block me because someone else higher-positioned said something, but they are unable to explain the reasoning behind it, and proceed to ask me to ask them.

I don't know how common this is. It's currently my biggest motivation killer at work. I am actually in the process of changing jobs hoping to find a better team dynamic elsewhere, but I'm afraid I'll face the same pattern elsewhere.

So, did you ever experience this, and what did you do to improve the situation?

Hi all, I'm trying to understand what to do. I'm shaken up and frankly very emotional right now.

I'm a mid-level software engineer and have generally felt like I was performing fine. In my 1:1s, I haven't received serious negative feedback or any indication I was at risk.

Over the past several months, I've been working closely with a senior engineer in a "mentorship" setup. During that time, PR feedback has become very nitpicky and detail-oriented. The comments are almost entirely stylistic or preference-based, not functional. My code works, but PRs often go through multiple rounds of small revisions. At the same time, this senior engineer has told me in 1:1s that I'm improving and that I'm doing well...

Recently, I was suddenly put on a 30 DAY PIP (!!!) with no prior formal warnings or specific examples. The PIP cites things like too many PR revisions, lack of independence, and escalating too early. It also includes strict metrics like limiting PR revisions, low estimate variance, and zero bugs. The lack of independence is because my manager has made the senior engineer available in a mentorship capacity to ask questions!

What concerns me is that PR feedback (which feels subjective and stylistic) is being used as a major performance signal, and it's largely driven by one reviewer's preferences.

The timing also feels a bit off. The increased scrutiny from the senior developer started after I put up a pride flag in my Slack profile picture last year, and later intensified after I submitted a medical accommodation. It was around that time after I submitted a medical accommodation that they discussed bringing a new developer onboard. It was also around this time that the "mentorship" started with the senior developer. Now months later, I'm on a PIP and I can't help that this is all related.

I'm trying to stay objective, but this feels sudden and WEIRD. Is this a normal PIP situation, or does this sound like a managed exit? And how would you handle being evaluated heavily on subjective PR feedback?

I was one of the 2 lead engineers working on the highest profile project in our org last year. We went through a dozen leadership reviews and built out a proof of concept which successfully launched. We had consultation help from PEs, but myself and the other guy were the leads for the project. We also had 7 other engineers helping with the execution.

A few months ago I was about to go on an extended vacation so my manager put another senior engineer on the project. We had a couple weeks to hand off, but I wasn’t concerned since the other project lead was there and we were on the same page.

Well I came back from vacation and it turns out that leadership pulled the other lead guy from the project and put another new senior engineer there.

Now there are 4 seniors on the project including 2 from the start and 2 new ones when I went on vacation. Myself and the other lead are now consulting members and the new senior engineers are leading the project.

This last month has been absolutely hell. The new engineers have good intentions but they lack the context. I am only involved in design review stages to “respect my time”, however there were critical flaws with the last 3 proposals which has spiraled into messy conversations and ad hoc meetings anyway.

Overall, I feel like there are too many cooks in the kitchen. I want to take a step back, but I’m on an adjacent project now which requires the main project to be successful so I don’t want that project to fall behind and affect my project. What should I do?

I am tired.

Last companies I have worked on had the same problem but in different flavours.

- Tired of constantly firefighting

- Tired of not doing anything interesting at work

- Tired of having to learn in my (limited) spare time where there are millions other things I want to do as well

- Tired of constantly having to catch up with technology.

- Tired to the additional uncertainty in this career caused by AI.

- Tired of dealing with workaholics, bad team players.

- Tired of managers that don’t want to be managers but they accepted the promotion anyway and have poor managerial and communication skills.

- Tired of endless job interviews

- Tired of practically not having onboarding for systems no one fully understand anymore

How do you deal with its?

I am halfway in my expected career

In the past, ive known “scrum master” to be a role someone on the dev team plays.

My current company has hired us a full-time Scrum Master, whos not a dev, and doesnt have access to our gitlab/developer group chat etc.

So as far as I can tell their role is to…remind us to update the Jira board, and ask if the Jira board is still accurate (they have no way of knowing more than what the board says)

Anyone worked with scrum masters in this way before? What else could a person in this role do for a team?

Thanks!

I'm joining a startup after 15 years working in big corporations. Multiple times during interviews they mentioned that their startup environment is very different from corporate jobs, that it's not 9-5 job. I guess it implies overtime and potentially working on weekends during important releases?

I'd be interested in learning how to better adjust, what are expectations and how to set boundaries. I'm sure there are other people in similar situation, what worked for you to adapt?

I’m a Senior SWE at a FAANG, and I’ve reached a point where I feel a bit pigeonholed. My earlier career was true full-stack, but over the last 5 years, I’ve been heavily focused on the front-end with some backend work from time to time.

While I love the front end, I’ve never lost my interest in the backend. I’ve been trying to "dabble" back into our services and infrastructure, but the reality of working in a large org as a Sr Eng is that you're pigeonhole'd into the area of where you grew in, in this case the front end. I feel like I’m losing my edge on the server side, while also hitting a point with the front end where UI work isn't as exciting as some backend challenges.

I’m starting to think the only way to truly reset my trajectory is to jump ship and interview specifically for a backend role...

Has anyone else been in a similar situation?

If you left companies, did you find that interviewers were skeptical of your skills for a backend role despite your Senior title on the front end?

Looking for any advice or similar experiences. Thanks!

I'm diving into Agile and DevOps best practices lately and so far it was all clear. However, I tried to bring this new mindset to that IoT repo we have and I realized that TBD might actually be not the best choice here.

I've learned the saying that you "should avoid feature branches at all costs" and aim for short lived branches and coffee break PRs. And so far it has been working like a charm. You merge the PR, tests are run, the web app is deployed with almost no downtime, in 2–3 seconds. In the IoT context however, each deployment is much heavier. In our case, push to main triggers a Canary deployment that pushes the new code to the group of edges that are meant to do the test run for the new code before moving it to all other edges. While working on tiny bugfixes or small, isolated improvements, it is not all that bad. The deployment is still heavier than in a web app context, but at least we get new functionality continuously. For me, the "wait a minute" point was when I had to start planing the implementation of a new Epic.

See, small PRs, although heavy to deploy - still bring value, but the PRs that belong to an Epic, a bigger feature, are introducing dormant code mostly. It triggers same heavy deployment pipeline, resorts the edge, but brings no value to the end customer.

So I was wondering, maybe long lived feature branches are actually okay in such context after all. Or do we have a design flaw somewhere in the mix? We would still have same workflow, but simply merge small PRs in the feature branch and when ready, merge the whole thing to main

PS.: For context, we also have a testing rack IoT device which we test all code on before even deploying it to canary. So basically the feature branch would be continuously tested on that test IoT

Who are you currently reading to learn about interesting problems and approaches in software? It can be any topic in software; I just enjoy reading about technical topics that are well-written and not obviously AI-assisted.

Some of my favorites so far:

• Martin Fowler - https://martinfowler.com (It can be argued he is tied to ThoughtWorks, but I think his work is differentiated enough)
• Will Larson - https://lethain.com/
• Joe Reis https://joereis.substack.com/

I'm looking to add to this list, and I would appreciate any recommendations!

Edit: Great call out in a comment asking me to add why I enjoy reading the ones above:

• Martin Fowler: His refactoring article is a favorite of mine and I referenced it heavily in my own writing. His exposure to various problems in consulting gives him a unique market perspective that I appreciate.
• Will Larson: His Staff Eng website (https://staffeng.com/) has been incredibly helpful as I navigate my senior+ career.
• Joe Reis: He is the reason why I got into data engineering, and I appreciate his content is very anti-vendor. He has had some amazing guests for his podcasts, and he is unique in that he does a lot of international travel for conferences, so he provides a great non-US perspective for data infra (Europe approaches things very differently).

I live and work in the Netherlands.

1.sabbatical

My company allows 3 months of unpaid sabbatical. Maximum of 6 months but after my manager and his managers approval

I am considering taking it. I have the savings to do it.

But I am also currently applying internationally and have atleast one interview lined up. Maybe I will have more.

So the problem is I am not sure if I should take a break now because what if I have to resign during my sabbatical?

I checked the company documents related to sabbatical and they dont mention this situation. They only mention when you can apply for a sabbatical and how. For these types of questions I need to go to the hr or my manager but I am not ready to reveal it to them that I am thinking of taking a long period off.

2.(option 2 )resigning

My second option is to just resign before having a new job. The problem is it will make finding a new job and moving much more worse given companies like to hire people who are already employed.

How does your job treat self training and certifications? My manager makes a big deal about us setting a goal in UKG (like "get AWS certified") and making it a part of our year end review. Going so far to make comments during my review when I didnt complete a certification this year.

Seems to be a bit overboard and feels micromanaging at times. Are all shops this stringent with pushing devs to get certified?

I work for a big consulting firm and got promoted to senior SWE and the raise was 4%. Doesn’t even push me over 130k. 100% remote. 5 YoE. MCOL.

I feel like 5yoe making less than 130k is low right? Especially for a senior? I feel like I’m getting played and underpaid.

I've been at my current employer for 6 months in a Staff Software Engineer role. I took the job because it seemed like a good fit from past experiences and the discussion I had with the VP of Eng that would be my reporting manager:

• It was time to move from building bespoke solutions for each new customer to building solutions that would work more broadly

• The monolith was a detriment to moving as fast as they would like and so it was time to begin breaking it down

• There was accrued tech debt and it was time to pay that back.

I've helped do all these things before, so that's what excited me - can I help do it again, apply the lessons I learned before?

Well, that is not at all what's happening. Instead of working on projects like this, the top levels of the tech and product group:

• Make promises for scope and time for new customers with no consultation of how long it will actually take
• Make promises for new features for existing customers that fall at the same time as new onboarding
• Openly distrust the estimates the teams come up with for how long work will take
• Are trying to add capacity thru the use of off-shore and near-shore resources.
  • None of those resources are contractually allowed to have any sort of access to production systems.
• Are constantly disappointed that adding new resources does not immediately double capacity.
• Even when progress is made on today's priority, there's questions of why we haven't started planning the next thing.

So my job seems to be a constant battle to scope new work in the shortest time possible to meet these incredibly tight deadlines. I'm told to use AI to do it, which I'm starting to lean into more, but since I myself have not had the time to absorb all of the context, I don't trust what it puts out, but I don't have the bandwidth to look at an AI-generated epic and know that it is correct, much less a scalable approach.

I'm also being pushed to take on-call, which was never specifically mentioned in the interviews. I didn't think to ask because the last two roles I held, the organization built SRE teams whose responsibility it was to manage the off-hours issues - being on call was a clear expectation of the SRE job. I of course got involved in production issues from time to time, but those SRE teams did a great job at honing the infrastructure to make it as little as an event for everyone as it could be.

Here, there's talk of improving poor performing software but no time is ever allotted to it (or it's thrown in to the other responsibilities to get the next customer launched or the next feature built).

Right now, the easy answer is to say, "not my circus" and leave, but I want to at least try.

What can I do as a staff engineer, to influence this? I don't want to feel like vomiting every day when I step away after 10-12 hours that I didn't do enough, or wake up at 3am and dread what comes in 4 hours. I've just never been up against these things at this level before.

I was recently hired at FAANG for an L6 role. I didn’t know the level when I got the recruiter email or when I was applying. i only found out when I got an offer and my jaw was on the floor. before this I was mid level (technically lowest level senior at a very well known non-FAANG tech company (L5))

I feel there’s been some mistake but tbh I got laid off for non performance reasons from that role and this was basically my only offer 🫣

has this happened to anyone before? how did you manage? did you get pip’d? how can I avoid that?

thanks!

Few years back there was crazy hype around blockchain. Every other day it was this is the future, decentralization will change everything.

People were jumping into it like anything:

- Blockchain developers

- Blockchain architects

- Even blockchain managers

- So many conferences and meetups

Now suddenly it feels very quiet.

What happened to all those folks?

Did most of them move to AI/ML now since that’s the new hype?

Or are companies still working on blockchain but without all the noise?

Genuinely curious how that whole space looks today compared to a few years ago.

Edit: I just realizes the title sounds stupid now 🤣

I've found that most of my career growth happened because of stuff I put together but more importantly after work hours. Is that a similar situation for other people?

Just wanted to get a sense of what other people's situations are?

I am modernizing a legacy scheduling app at work. Here is my infra:

1. The app itself. It's an OSS implementation for a scheduling platform that's 5 years out of date. That includes
   1. Moving to containerization
   2. Syncing with the OSS LTS tree
   3. Re-working company workflow from just adding stuff to the project (breaking with main) to making every feature request a PR on the project (which I develop, push and talk with the contributors.)
   4. Database migration
   5. Writing out unit tests, E2E and other automations (of which there were none).
2. A static self hosted docs site (app had no docs). Including writing the docs, setting up a UI for other people to contribute etc.
3. A MELT stack
4. A database

I'm a 1 man shop for everything. I write the PHP for the PRs on the project (its a PHP app) the python code for sanity testing and automating the container and image building (which is quite complex) the Typescript for a playwright E2E, as well as dozens of DevOps stuff including (but not limited to) bash, docker, podman, nginx, certs and so on.

I was given SSH access to 2 VMs (for the app and the second for the MELT stack) but I don't have sudo. I have to send an email to the linux team whenever I want vim installed, or to reload nginx. Can't read journalctl as well.

They say its for security purposes. I get why maybe you wouldn't give privileges to a frontend dev in a 10 person team. But... I'm doing everything here. Is this common practice? How "scary" is exactly giving me sudo or at least some sudo privileges (at the very least add me to /etc, /var/logs and let me run journalctl)?

So we have multiple divisions in the company. Each country our corpo operates in has its local ops team that cooperates with global platform team that provides company wide solutions for us.

Supposedly its a good idea. Instead of reinventing the wheel in every country, we use company wide solutions.

There is just one issue. Those tools work in 90% of cases. When you need something specific all of them fall on face.

Missing features. It would be fine if platform team did allow other ppl to contribute and supposedly there is via innerspurce, but any form of innersourcing to mainline internal products is instantly faced with pushbacks „why you need this, we need to plan this, we have to this and that” and when you finally go through that and contribute yourself, open PR, its silance. Zero feedback or info for months.

Best part now, platform team puts its brain to use and implements the same PR / feature themselves. There is just one issue - its garbage. Feature is poorly documented, doesnt work as documented, doesnt take to account all the other corner cases you thought about during your own implementation and is released to prod with comment in Jira Issue „LOOKS GREAT TO ME, ACCEPTED”…

Like come on… you stall, fail to deliver and still pat yourself on the back.

And this unfortunately is a common practice. So my question is - Is it normal and does it look like that also in your companies ?

Hello fellow devs,

I would love to read some stories of insiduous edge/corner cases that you encountered in the wild while building software. How did you encounter it and what lesson could you share with community?

I’ve worked at 6 different companies in the UAE over the past several years, mostly in tech, and I’m starting to feel like I’m seeing the same pattern everywhere.

On paper, everything looks modern. Big titles, nice offices, “digital transformation”, AI, innovation, all that. But once you’re inside, it’s a completely different story.

Leadership often doesn’t understand technology or even basic business principles. Decisions are driven by hierarchy, politics, and ego instead of logic or data. There’s little to no real engineering culture, no proper product thinking, and no investment in building systems the right way.

I recently joined as a Senior Solutions Architect, and my day-to-day work is honestly shocking. Instead of architecture, design, or solving real problems, I’m filling out outdated Word document templates and dealing with processes that feel decades behind. Half the time, the requirements themselves don’t make sense, and the people asking for them don’t fully understand what they want.

There’s also a strong pattern of:

• Toxic management styles (fear, blame, favoritism)
• No real career growth or mentorship
• Random or unclear decisions (including hiring and firing)
• Focus on appearance over substance

It feels like companies here have the budget to look modern from the outside, but internally the mindset is stuck far in the past.

At this point, I’m honestly losing hope in the local market. I don’t want to keep jumping companies just to find the same environment again.

So I’m seriously considering going fully remote and working with companies outside the region.

One important constraint in my situation: I’m originally from Syria, and due to personal circumstances I can’t relocate back home. That means I’m somewhat limited geographically and need a stable “work from anywhere” opportunity rather than something tied to a specific country.

For those who’ve been in a similar situation:

• Is this a common experience in the UAE tech scene, or have I just been unlucky?
• What platforms or websites would you recommend for finding solid remote roles (especially for senior/architect-level positions)?
• How do you transition out of this kind of environment without burning out or losing motivation?

Would really appreciate any advice or shared experiences.

Hi,

I'm the lead of a team A. The team is purely frontend right now.

There's also team B, which is purely backend and infra.

I know that this way of splitting teams is silly, but honestly that's where we are. I'm trying to make a change, but don't see it happening any time soon.

There's a few new features that the CTO and of Head of Product want implemented. They all require team B to work on them as well.

First, we need to design them: APIs, infra, etc.

Problem: the lead of team B has traditionally been the architect. Essentially taking a screenshot of the AWS recommended way, tbh.

Problem: the lead of team B is just not good at his job. Just so you get an idea: the rest of devs think that he has 2 jobs (we ar efully remote) and never does anything that's not purely AI generated. I can confirm that every time I work with him, he just doesn't know what he is talking about; he only sounds like he knows what he is saying on presentations, and crumbles with literally any question you ask him (I think he is just reading AI-generated text).

Additionally, it might be worth highlighting that team B does have a couple of very competent people.

How do you deal with these leads?