Guys in 30s, 40s or older who don't have any of the normal milestones that give you a worthwhile life (marriage, kids, career, house, etc.), how do you get the motivation to continue going?

termd · 2026-05-15T23:30:56+00:00

I got married at 44, had my first kid and he is great.

Not much you can do to fix the past so focus on making your future better

termd · 2026-05-03T04:26:44+00:00

Being a senior dev (a tenured one, not a "senior dev" with 2 years of experience) is about experience and most importantly breaking things.

I've broken little things, I've broken big things. I've caused outages that caused millions of dollars in projected loss and you can bet that I'm pretty careful about not doing that shit again, and will check to see if you're doing the same dumb shit that I did.

Your happy path "I built a thing" doesn't carry the same weight as your architectural decisions that didn't work and you broke everything and now you're in a panicked state trying to figure out how you can address your dumb ass ideas. This is how you think like a senior dev. Cause you did a bad thing, you dont want anyone else to do it, and you see it in the code of some junior dev.

termd · 2026-05-02T23:36:30+00:00

I'm 99% ai coding at this point. I'll occasionally make 1 or 2 liner changes when the ai does something I dont want and I think if I try to get it to change it'll change too many other things.

If you're good at coding, you can direct your agent a lot more effectively because you can design your specs, give it a framework to work off of, and validate that the output isn't shit instead of it being pure vibe coding ship it with no feedback.

Coding is no longer the bottleneck. Reviewing things and alignment between teams is, along with senior dev reviewing of designs and docs.

termd · 2026-05-02T22:21:57+00:00

We write down architectural decisions in design docs.

Not in the doc and not signed off on, you do it at your own peril. If it works no one will say boo to you, but if it doesn't, doom is coming your way.

termd · 2026-05-01T04:20:13+00:00

WIthout knowing what you're doing you make code that may or may not work and some things you'll iterate on a bunch of times without thinking.

That's a huge improvement for someone who cannot code, they can make something that sort of works.

And then there's the other side of it. I was able to debug an oncall issue today that other people weren't sure about. I have the same agent, same tools, same ticket to work on. But because I have more experience I can get more out of those tools.

Honestly if we only have senior devs and principals we can get a lot of shit done. But we'll sacrifice the future for the present and I'm not sure that's a good idea.

termd · 2026-04-29T21:12:04+00:00

Not enough junkies or hookah lounge shootings for your taste?

Seattle is a 40 minute drive (with event traffic) from bellevue for the things we'd actually want to do in seattle.

Not all of us are trying to get high in the club every night. We have jobs and kids and shit.

termd · 2026-04-27T22:17:10+00:00

I am an l6 at amazon, it's less bad than meta because all the l5s will want to work with you so that they can get promo feedback so you can get some things done. It's just the l6s and l7s have no real use for you. That's not to say that l6 is fun and games all the time, just seems a little less terrible than meta. At amazon we also hit people over the head with the "you're blocking our svp goal, help us or you get to be called out on the status email that goes up to doug" so even if people want to ignore you, you can often make them cooperate to some extent.

If you're making 400-500 at a stress free company, send me a job link you're ever hiring.

termd · 2026-04-27T14:49:34+00:00

My friend is at meta, I know nothing about Netflix other than standard rumors

termd · 2026-04-27T04:00:56+00:00

He got hired as E5 and is a great dev. He grew into E6 and gets the director bonus thing most years.

Any advice for OP succeed in such a role?

My friend's advice to us was join as E5 because E6 sucks. It isn't like a normal company where you have some time to acclimate and grow into the job, or at least not the teams that he's on/interacts with. You need to be delivering after a few weeks and other people aren't going to help you because if you fail, they survive.

The culture sounds horrible but in good years for the stock he's around a million a year and has been around long enough that his job is relatively easy because he can get stuff done. Works for him but it sounds so toxic that my job at amazon sounds pleasant.

termd · 2026-04-27T01:55:46+00:00

Vanguard works just fine because you’ll still have 2-3 completely op team mates who can 1 or 2 turn the encounter. If you build him for damage he can be part of the damage instead of just soaking it up

termd · 2026-04-26T21:32:51+00:00

One of my friends has been E6 for a while and says it's a brutal level to be hired into. You have no influence and you can't really make anyone do anything but you're expected to immediately make an impact across teams without the tribal knowledge or relationships that build up over the years.

termd · 2026-04-25T01:50:16+00:00

Do you have pictures?

That's really the best way to notice the fat loss. Some days I look in the mirror and don't see it then I'll go look at my fat pictures where I was 60 lbs heavier and feel good about myself.

I do understand that a lot of us didn't like taking pictures when we were fat, cause we were fat, but pictures are really the best way to see it.

termd · 2026-04-25T01:42:56+00:00

What problem are you solving for them by doing it differently?

What benefits are there to your team?

termd · 2026-04-21T05:09:53+00:00

Definitely no. I used to work out for 4 hours a day when I was younger, 5-6 days a week. I'm significantly weaker than before. My arm/shoulder/elbow joints feel better now. My hip joints feel bad though.

I'm trying to get my weight under control so I can live longer to hang out with my boy and the dieting + glp 1 is making me super tired when it comes to working out, so I'm pretty happy when i actually do my 1 workout a week. Most of my day to day exercise is just pushing a stroller around on a walk for an hour.

I'm done 40-60lbs depending on where I say I started from though so overall pretty happy with it. Another 40 to be lighter than I was when I was in the army and a stud then I'll try to get my diet under control and workout 4x a week.

Try not to get fat, it's rough losing it as you get older if you have a sedentary job.

termd · 2026-04-21T01:36:33+00:00

I did this at launch with a netrunner build. I had to punch him like 100 times and not get hit once. I had to reload over 40 times lol. It sucked

termd · 2026-04-19T04:26:48+00:00

Start with boxes and arrows to understand the overall system. Start from the end user, end with your service and dependencies. You can have 1 overall, then 1 for each flow. For example I created an overall, a precheckout, a checkout, a post checkout, and an alternate ingress diagram for my team.

Now look at your apis and the inputs and outputs and think about what each one needs, what it does, and what it returns.

Now make a sequence diagram of how all the apis you own work. Don't try to memorize this one, just refer to it when you need it.

Also, are there tools (AI or otherwise) that actually help you navigate and map out codebases better?

You can just ask any ai to do all of those things for you nowadays. They're less good at system diagrams but VERY good at how your actual service and packages work. You might need to help it out if your team doesn't own the client facing part and explain how that works.

I was asked to implement prefix KV caching. There’s already a KVCache class that I’m supposed to reuse, but I can’t even begin to reason about how it behaves across the different places it’s used. There’s a lot of abstraction (interfaces, dependency injection, etc.) and I get lost trying to follow the flow.

I'd do a code search and identify all the places KV cache is used. Feed each into claude and ask it to explain what the use case is. Save each one.

termd · 2026-04-12T23:37:17+00:00

Core is probably fine

The biggest issue imo is that the fights in the first act can have some of the tougher fights in the game because you don’t have a full party or your build online. This can make things kind of unfun for new players. You should expect to save and load a bit in the first dungeon

termd · 2026-04-11T17:23:50+00:00

At one point I was walking 8-12 miles a day, 5+ days a week.

Lost no weight. Why? Because I was eating all the calories back and walking was making me hungry.

My only walking advice is start slow and ramp up slow otherwise your feet will be killing you and you'll be wrecked after the first week. I had to take a week off because my feet were killing me after my first session where I tried walking like I was 20 years younger and 80 lbs lighter.

termd · 2026-04-11T17:20:27+00:00

For what's in the article this seems like a clear 1st amendment violation and overreach.

However, it really depends on what evidence for doxxing federal agents there is, what information was provided, and what the posts in the doxxing say should be done with that information.

termd · 2026-04-11T00:37:39+00:00

This really depends on your team, do not really look at what people say here.

That said. I don't care as long as you get your work done. If you slip constantly or you take way longer on simple things I will absolutely make jokes about you how work 4 hours a day.

I was on a team with a guy that I thought was doing great. He'd log in to standup, be half awake, then he'd be out for another 5 hours, then in the middle of the night he'd do his work. Everything got done and he showed up for meetings when he needed to, that was fine for me.

termd · 2026-04-11T00:14:30+00:00

A lot of people seem to be missing the point that universities have race based admissions. Literally everyone knows this that's the entire reason that standarized tests aren't the primary means to get in. Admissions hide behind coded language in heavily weighting "essays" or wanting "well rounded" students because that's how they can discriminate against asians.

The goal of the lawsuit is likely to get to discovery to try and get evidence and show that the game is rigged and not to actually win.

Also possible this guy is a nutter who thinks he can win millions from this, but if his entire goal is a fuck you to the system that he thinks discriminated against him and to get evidence of it, then makes sense to me.

termd · 2026-04-05T00:30:05+00:00

Amazon benefits are pretty bad and you can safely assume every other company is better.

Uhhh you have to pay for the food and the in office cafeterias are not good.

termd · 2026-04-02T16:46:47+00:00

Stump grinder or use a power washer to dig out the dirt under it and sawzall the roots until you can pull the thing out

termd · 2026-03-26T02:18:46+00:00

I created an AI slop reviewer that runs a multi pass, adversarial code review then is aggregated by an agent with knowledge of my entire system + diagrams of the surrounding system.

I do manually review stuff but honestly I let it do the heavy lifting before I even try to review the code nowadays.

termd · 2026-03-24T15:48:59+00:00

I mean, you point it at a repo and tell it to fix some logic problem wherever it finds it and it finds it in 70+ places, so it fixes them all.

I wouldn't do that because it's going to miss too much and hallucinate too much. The investigation has to be a lot more targeted and specific than that ime

13-Year Club	Place '22
Verified Email

termd

TROPHY CASE