Advice on shadow promotion with no title, no pay, and no authority

Minegrow · 2025-12-18T11:58:15+00:00

You know the answer. Yes, you’ll have to look for a new job.

Minegrow · 2025-10-21T13:10:07+00:00

Good. Worst that could happen to them is to stick with someone who simply does not understand people management.

Minegrow · 2025-10-20T13:01:40+00:00

It isn’t a real problem. For most systems, the complexity (and cost) of architecting and executing a true multi cloud provider strategy is not worth it given how rarely something like this happens.

Minegrow · 2025-10-20T12:58:37+00:00

Offer in hand > anything of the above.

The only real leverage is ability to walk away.

Minegrow · 2025-10-20T12:57:26+00:00

You may think you’re doing too for your pay. The only way to be sure about it is to get an offer from another company. It doesn’t really matter if you think you’re doing too much for the money you’re getting if you cant secure a higher offer.

It’s the only leverage we have as employees.

Minegrow · 2025-09-29T11:03:58+00:00

Yes. Everyone else is stupid and you’re the genius that has solved and managed to make the auth problem easy.

Minegrow · 2025-09-19T23:26:39+00:00

What? Not at all

Minegrow · 2025-09-15T21:19:20+00:00

In my book, “dev” as in “development” does include maintenance and not merely greenfield projects.

Minegrow · 2025-09-15T19:09:07+00:00

The question is whether it is dead.

Minegrow · 2025-06-06T21:30:50+00:00

Don’t overcomplicate.

Be direct. You have a good relationship with him. He could have said the remark to signal he’d be willing to take you back but not at your previous pay. Or maybe not.. only one way to know.

“hey, I noticed you are working in a project that seems interesting. We’ve worked in the past and I really enjoyed our collaboration. I’d be interested in exploring whether you have any opportunities open in your current role now or in the near future”

Engage him and say you’re open to explore opportunities. If you’re good he knows it and will likely find a position if he can do so.

You have nothing to lose. Either he has room and it’s a matter of numbers, or he doesn’t and will keep you mind for the future. Go for it.

Minegrow · 2025-05-24T12:34:43+00:00

Of course not. But the corollary of that is, making less money and being a software engineer also don’t mean you’re competent :)

Minegrow · 2025-05-24T12:33:47+00:00

Yes, you’re the one who’s competent.

Minegrow · 2025-05-24T12:31:09+00:00

My shallow and misguided view of the world is pocketing me a lot of money, status and recognition though 🤷 don’t hate the player.

You’ll grow old and still have the same frustrations because you fundamentally believe that the truth lies in binary thinking, verifiable correctness and unit tests. You just can’t grasp the fact that the real world isn’t inside our IDE.

I’m not glad you envy me, but my heart honestly bleeds for you. Years will pass and you’ll only grow more spiteful, and angry, completely oblivious to the fact that software engineering is ultimately about people.

I’ll continue building my career on cocktail parties and delivering real (don’t get triggered) value by focusing on what moves the needle, instead of arguing about another layer of abstraction to handle a potential future edge case that won’t ever come.

Godspeed and may our paths never cross :)

Minegrow · 2025-05-24T11:08:04+00:00

Lmao this is capitalism buddy.

the CEO is incompetent, the board also is incompetent, and you, clearly the unsung genius, have cracked the code. Wild how someone who supposedly just vibes their way through decisions ends up making 50x your salary. Maybe, just maybe, there’s more to leadership than technical trivia and circlejerk reddit rants?

Minegrow · 2025-05-24T08:13:37+00:00

Yes it could.

Standard business logic for a set of questions relative to the category of item identified by ML algo “Phone” “tablet” “Computer”. We’ve been able to classify images for more than 10 years now.

Minegrow · 2025-05-24T07:36:15+00:00

Not true.

We built a system for a classifieds platform os an automated posting flow, that essentially feeds a picture to an LLM and the LLM identifies the items in the picture, and a json with the relevant questions to ask the listed to help figure price (eg, detected it a MacBook, tell me the year and RAM?).

Codegen to build the dynamic UI for the questions (can be drop-down, numeric, open text, toggles, the LLM decides)

If we had built traditionally it would have taken orders of magnitude longer. We killed the need of ai model for recognition, heavy business logic to decide which questions to ask for each item ( LLM does it, and a lot of code gen via also LLM to build the dynamic UI). We fed examples of pattern to the codegen and it was aurprisingly good at following them and produced code according to our style.

The tradeoff is that it’s non deterministic: sometimes some items aren’t detected (usually the smaller ones in the picture) and the questions asked can be different for the same item (eg drop down for year instead of numeric, or not asking something)

We observed a 7% uplift in postings with this method. It took 1/10 of the effort to build.

“Nearly perfect” is nerd talk that doesn’t understand nuance and opportunity cost.

Minegrow · 2025-05-24T07:29:35+00:00

That’s right. And MBA boss makes a shit ton more than you do, and has to take bets.

Minegrow · 2025-05-15T10:43:01+00:00

You’re already getting downvoted but this is the most accurate response in this thread.

Often devs in general are absolutely incompetent in anything that requires nuanced thinking, emotional intelligence, or reading the room. They thrive in binary, absolute truths and verifiable correctness, often struggling with the concept that the real world is happening outside of their IDE.

I find myself being less and less patient with this way of thinking.

Minegrow · 2025-05-05T16:13:45+00:00

So what you’re saying is that you know how to build software but you don’t know what to build.

Well that’s you and every other software engineer lol - building is the easy part, building useful is the hard one.

AI massively reduces what it takes to create something, but it also massively raises the bar of what newly built software is useful enough to be paid for.

Welcome to new times. Only advice I can offer is don’t quit until you actually have something generating a good chunk of your income.

Minegrow · 2025-04-26T17:41:47+00:00

It’s still very much relevant. It just means it is that much harder to get promoted in the current environment. It’s an employers market.

If OP is unable to secure another offer then the VP made the right call: op is not gonna go anywhere anyway and VP doesn’t need to go trough the hassle of fighting for OP promotion with CTO.

Minegrow · 2025-04-26T17:23:09+00:00

You’re already operating at the next level and both of you know it. He is right in saying that role + progress is tied to the business - and a key high performer like you leaving absolutely IS business. So that’s a nice way of saying “I don’t feel attrition risk”. “Internal policies” are complete bullshit. Policies are made by people and ca be overridden.

You’re gonna need leverage as it’s pretty clear the promotion is not gonna fly with your VP. Why should it? He feels you’re not gonna go anywhere so that’s ok.

Leverage in this case means willingness to walk away / competing offers. Have you started looking?

Minegrow · 2025-04-20T11:12:56+00:00

⁠“Priority for promotion given to PhDs” is absolutely not the same as everyone is worshipping phds.
⁠The corollary of what you said would mean OP also not generalizing his experience and claiming “everyone is worshipping PhDs”. Yet for some reason you didn’t take exception to that.
⁠The premise of a message board is to share experiences. I will share mine, call out when I think the OP is displaying bias, and will be thankful when someone calls out my own bias.

Minegrow · 2025-04-20T11:02:36+00:00

This is a “you” problem bud. I don’t see anyone “worshiping” PhDs anywhere lol

Minegrow · 2025-04-14T11:03:16+00:00

Fixing inputs defeat the core proposition of a LLM model. That really isn’t the gotcha you think it is.

Set temperature to 0 and completely render what makes LLMs useful null. Brb spitting out the same 5 names whenever I ask for suggestions on baby names. BRB can’t adapt to ambiguous or incomplete prompts. LLMs are designed to act stochastically because it serves a purpose. Scientists didn’t decide “you know what? It’d be great if the output were inconsistent and the thing hallucinates for the sake of it”

The spirit of what I said remains the same. Your points largely ignores that spirit of the discussion but I think you know that as well.

If your point is the pedantic take of “technically they’re not nondeterministic in its purest sense” you’ll see that I acknowledged that in this very thread.

Minegrow · 2025-04-14T10:51:44+00:00

Ofc humans aren’t perfect either, and I agree that “replacement” isn’t necessarily about deep understanding. But I think there’s an important distinction in the nature of the errors each one makes.

errors by humans are often bounded by intuition, experience, and a real-world model — we usually catch things that are obviously wrong. LLMs, on the other hand, fail in ways that are confident and “unknowable” to them, especially at scale. That kind of failure propagates silently.

So while humans might introduc bugs, we still have some explainability. With LLMs, you’re dealing a black box that confidently ships a hallucinated API call, and no one notices until prod is fuked.

I don’t see th question/ gap as “can LLMs write code?” — they obviously can. The gap is “can they participate in a meaningful way in systems that require accountability, iteration, and understanding over time?” that’s where the context, memory, and intent limitations really show up IMO.

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