I work way too much. Technically I’m supposed to have a 36h work week, but I have already accumulated 120h of overtime this year. I had a diagnosed burnout two years ago that wasn’t entirely work related (lots of stress from family drama), but it hasn’t really gotten much better since then.

What are your responsibilities ?

On paper I’m just a regular-level developer in a DevSecOps-flavoured Scrum Team of 13 (9 of which are devs, it’s a pretty big team). But since I’ve been there since the start of our current main product, I have accumulated a lot of stupid side roles. I’m the main Frontend person, so I go to all the Frontend meetings and talk to the UX/UI Team. I’m the main onboarding person, so I do all the setup and introductions when a new colleague or intern joins in, as well as the tech support when colleagues have problems with their IDEs or other parts of their dev environments. I’m the designated Security Engineer so I have to go to all the Security meetings as well as be the one who turns all the new security regulations into actionable tickets, as well as monitor that they are actually implemented. Absolutely hate that role, so I talked to my manager about it a year ago and he assigned me a Junior dev that I could train to take over my Security duties. That manager fired that Junior last October, so all the tasks are back on my shoulders. He did assign a replacement, but that person is not a developer so they can’t do anything that involves actual implementation. Meaning that my workload has actually increased because now I not only have to teach them about Security Engineering things but also explain Software Dev and how our codebases work.

Ugh, and reviewing Pull Requests has gotten so rough since my company started hard-pushing Claude Code on everyone. All the devs that use it heavily report awesome time saves, but they all ignore that that saved time just comes from them not properly checking the code. So all the shit floats to the top during PRs. Reviews have been taking around 4x as long as they used to, especially when I have to re-check everything because Claude Code fucking changes half of the already reviewed code every time it’s used to “fix” something I marked during the review. Which introduces even more problems so it changes even more code during the next iteration. I spend like 1.5 MONTHS going back and forth with a guy from another team while reviewing his PR. He was just extracting a feature I had build into a more centralized repository so that other teams can use it. I built that feature in two days, making the changes to make it more generic would have taken me two more days at most. Nah, instead we got a PR with over 100 threads and like 50 commits. ughhh

Do you do application deployments ?

Luckily we’re fully Cloud-based with proper CI/CD pipelines, so deployment is pretty easy. But yeah, if I ever find the time to build a feature I’m also the one deploying it, naturally.

What does the ownership look like in your compan. Do devs own everything and perform all tasks for the application to function? ( server management, server user profile management, application hosting, etc )

My department has like 100 devs and we’re all working on products within the same AWS-based ecosystem. So there’s a team that handles core functions, aws accounts and central dependencies, and the product teams can just focus on developing their specific products. It’s a pretty chill system all things considered. Ownership for the products lies broadly with the teams that maintain them.

Do you work off hours ? I don’t work on weekends, but since the job has “flexible work hours” I can work whenever I want/have to. Sometimes starting at 5am, sometimes ending at 10pm. Whatever is needed, I guess 🤷

Do you make the industry standard or are you paid less ?

When I got picked up as Junior in early 2023 I made 44k before taxes, which was more than most of the people in my graduation class. But the salary hasn’t really grown with the amount of shit I have to deal with, so I feel pretty severely underpaid right now. I make just a bit under 50k (would be 55k if I worked a 40h week). Technically the yearly raises are coming up next month, but last year was just 3.8%, so I don’t think this year would be much better. Either way, I’m handing in my notice of resignation next Thursday 🥳 The new job I have lined up starting in October pays 62k with a lot less responsibilities. I probably could have gotten more if I kept looking, but I really just wanted out. I might look again once I have started that new job, since I can leave with a notice of just 2 weeks in my first 6 months there. Apparently I’m pretty decent at job interviews. I only applied to like 60-ish places during my job hunt, refusing to write any cover letters and never touching anything AI-related during the whole process out of principle. Had only 3 companies offer me an interview, but all 3 interviews led to them offering me the job.

huh, so they’ve never used npm?

Like, if I’m doing something for myself, that’s exactly the place where I wanna do something amazing,

That’s always my intention with my personal projects too! But that always results in “Wow I just learned how to do this thing much better, let me refactor the whole project to do it perfectly everywhere” followed by my Adderall running out. So there’s just so many half-done refactors I either forget about or abandon because I get a new idea the next day, but that’s totally just a skill issue.

You’re right though, the code I write at work is much worse, but my Company hosts their own GitLab instance so the code we write can’t even be used to poison Copilot :(

you literally have access to all the code in the world

I’d like to believe that they were honorable enough to not secretly train on code without people’s permission. But realistically they totally did exactly that, but just made the AI Model this incompetent through some other engineering blunder.

Also, random side thought - training only on public repos probably yields you way higher code quality as opposed to training on both public and private repos? I assume we all have some very messy private repos that we’re too embarrassed to publish because the code quality is absolute shit … right?

Nope, no other reason! I’m just getting a decent deal on PC parts when I let my employer buy them for me so I have a tendency to splurge on tech without really double-checking the specs. Can’t justify that with the current RAM prices though haha

But thanks for the tip! I’ll keep it in mind when I do actually decide to upgrade sometime

I built my first PC last November and because RAM was about 2-3 times the price that it should have been I passed on it. Now it’s like 5x the price and it’s not even a choice anymore, but I think I still made the right decision by not financially supporting those prices. Got 16GB of second hand SODIMM and some Sodimm to Dimm adapters and honestly the PC is fine. In my original parts list I had planned to get 128GB just to max out the board and not think about it ever again (would have been a reasonable 550€ back in September) but now I think I’ll actually coast a bit longer with my 16GB. It should be fine for the next few years at least, especially since there’s no overhead from Windows BS on my machine.

This is the sign I needed to call in sick for the next few days. This shit is so tiring.

great, thanks! Confirmed slop, the guy accidentally commited the markdown file he generated for his “social media launch strategy” 💀

Your Code → Acorn Parser → AST → Custom Interpreter → Step Array → Visualizer

Where’s the open source tho?? I can’t find a git link anywhere, and looking up “Vivix Git” just turns up some AI project. Calling slop on this until I see the actual source code. But hey, at least the website uses Svelte instead of React, I guess

Print that header onto the dial in a monospace font and you’ve got yourself an extremely marketable product. Perfect thing to bring to a white elephant gift exchange at an IT Company!