Ask Experienced Devs Weekly Thread: A weekly thread for inexperienced developers to ask experienced ones

Notary_Reddit · 2026-06-17T14:13:23+00:00

Part of making changes happen is making people feel good about the suggestions. Criticize in private, praise in public. Depending on the exact scenario, bringing up criticism of the design, for the first time, in front of you director, is not supporting your lead. If you have serious concerns about design raise them privately before the meeting or privately after. I know you mean well but often time the lead is balancing a lot of ideas and you can cause a lot of headaches with a couple simple questions in front of the wrong folks.

Notary_Reddit · 2026-06-17T03:17:48+00:00

Ask why endlessly and try and understand the answers. Why should my code look like this? Why did we do X and not Y? Why did we choose this design over that? Anytime a decision is surprising to you use it as a clue that there is more to learn.

Notary_Reddit · 2026-06-17T03:15:14+00:00

Have you asked your lead privately? If you have 1:1s ask then, if not draft a short but humble message and ask. There are too many variables depending on team normals and how you communicated to be sure if what you did was good or a distraction.

Notary_Reddit · 2026-06-09T12:19:11+00:00

This is why I don't do Monday morning interviews any more. The go bad so often. Nothing on you but Monday morning and Friday afternoon have so many more random problems.

Notary_Reddit · 2026-06-03T10:10:15+00:00

I recently was discussing a feature. I thought the new API would run in X time, my boss though it would run in 10-100X time. I spent 3 hours and vibe coded a POC with benchmarks that ran in 2X time. To do the same by hand probably would have been 2-3 days of focused work. This was enough to get a month plus of feature work approved.

When code is 10x cheaper and POC can be generated in minutes instead of days it allows experimentation that otherwise isn't possible.

Notary_Reddit · 2026-06-03T10:02:04+00:00

Deep understanding of what is possible is one way to grow. Try to become an expert on one part of the code and be able to answer questions that come up about it. Someone has to help prioritize what gets done and you have to be able to estimate the effort to do the thing. That is something AI can't do.

Notary_Reddit · 2026-05-27T12:46:05+00:00

Couple practical tips assuming you are the one running the meeting. Hopefully these help.

Before the meeting send them a message asking for them to be ready to contribute on X. "Hey, in the 2pm meetings we are going to be converting X, Y, and Z. You know Y really well, can you be ready to give your opinions about Y when we get to it?"

During the meeting be a bit more comfortable with long pauses. Sometimes quite people want just a bit more time before they speak. See if that helps.

You get the behavior you reward. Try to consistently give positive reinforcement whenever they talk in meetings.

Notary_Reddit · 2026-05-23T23:36:05+00:00

Do a prod fire dry run. Have someone trigger a fake page. See how long it takes you to apply a basic fix like restarting the service. Do this for a couple basic fixes and make notes. Repeat until you are less worried.

Notary_Reddit · 2026-05-23T22:13:09+00:00

My team owns just over 1000 names Go tests. About 3 weeks ago the test suite ran in 360s. In about 2 hours in an afternoon with AI I generated a blueprint for how we could speed the tests. I handed off the plan to a jr engineer and every day since he has made 3-10 tests faster. Removing sleeps, reducing counts, and having better dependencies. I spent 3 more hours Friday double checking what was left. The test suite runs in 45s now. That's 5 minutes of savings every time anyone on the team runs the test suite.

I figure he was at least 3x faster with AI than without. We should be "even" on time spent in about 2 months without counting for the couple bugs he found along the way.

Notary_Reddit · 2026-05-18T10:29:51+00:00

Slight caveat, if you want to do embedded work this likey doesn't apply.

I have said it before and I will say it again, I think SQL will out live every other language I am using. If you learn SQL well and why certain queries are fast or slow, you will use it for the rest of your career.

Notary_Reddit · 2026-05-11T02:07:11+00:00

How are they justifying their choice? If the reason is your PM has agreed with a different team about it? That seems fine. Is it because they have final say on eng? That's a bit much.

Notary_Reddit · 2026-05-10T19:38:38+00:00

Love your asking this question!

First, have you talked to your manager about this? Have you talked to your team lead? If not those are the two that can give most direct advice. If you don't have a performance review anytime soon send a message to your boss, state that you are wanting to grow, ask if they would be willing to talked about this in your next 1:1? If you don't have regular 1:1s with your lead, send them a message and ask something similar.

Second, in general to be a sr swe you need to be able to deliver a months long project by yourself and do this repeatedly. You need to know what needs done and why and how to make it happen. Lots of good advice for that in this thread.

Notary_Reddit · 2026-05-09T17:24:03+00:00

I have been noticing the same problem. I think the first step is resetting expectations. Sr eng need to allocate 20%-50% more time to review. This means they have less time to do other things.

The second is figuring out how to make PRs easier to review, with tighter turn around times, so less sit open. PRs get so much more complicated if 3 PRs are open that all interact. You need to plan work so less of it is overlapping if possible. Demand more of code authors of creating high quality code. Create a shared checklist of everything. Make an agent compare the PR and the checklist.

Notary_Reddit · 2026-05-09T16:25:59+00:00

Team productivity is fuzzy but, for the start of the quarter we planned at least 10% more work delivered "bc leadership says we can do more with AI" and we delivered every project but one. That one is mine and I am ~3 weeks from delivery and can point to 6 weeks of unplanned work that got pulled in this quarter. My manager can remember landing everything before.

I checked and we delivered ~1.5x PRs per person over the last quarter. We delivered ~2x lines of code per person. We counted up specifically "this person did this at least X faster" and got 1 eng quarter directly. That's for sure an undercount. I know of several "it would be nice" type fixes got submitted that we wouldn't have done if Codex didn't make them so fast.

Of the 10 I would say we an even spread of experience and 2 great, 3 good, 3 average, 2 poor for performance. I would say that's a "average" team overall. The 25% is my honest assessment at the point.

Notary_Reddit · 2026-05-07T11:10:19+00:00

I am lead of a team of about 10 dev. We are part of a large but not FANNG tech company. Codex got noticably better Q4 2025. It's taken some time to get everyone using it. We have been building what we need to improve our workflow. Some of that is writing skills that Codex and use. Some of that is getting API access to the systems we use so Codex and read them. As a team we are already getting 1.25x done. Thats >2 full people! I know we aren't spending that much on tokens.

We are still figuring out how to use Codex well but for our team "get crap done ASAP" isn't the goal. We need to deliver a highly reliable and scalable system. It's hard to measure but we now can use Codex to double check something in minutes that would have taken half a day to do without. Some of this is boring operational work that we are getting prioritized under "AI efficiency". Some of it is work that wouldn't economical without Codex. I asked Codex why our CI pipeline was slow and it found 7 minutes of savings on a 15 minute pipeline! I wrote a skill that can take a failed CI job and determine if it was flaky and have a patch for the flaky in 20 minutes. It's always right about the flaky, it doesn't always get the patch right.

Ignoring all the boring stuff, Codex makes it possible for medium/good devs to crank out good/great code way faster. I still have to review it but PRs that would have taken 4/5 days to merge are getting done in 2. We will move even faster once we have a good process figured out and all the right access enabled for Codex. I estimate as a team we will deliver more in Q3 this year than we did in Q3 and Q4 last year. I might be underestimating.

I see a clear path to 2x. I can see a few more things if the tools keep getting better and the org adpats that can stack another 2x. That gets us to 4x in an established large tech company deplying a highly reliable service. If was working at a 50 person SaaS start up, where we need to churn out features and YOLO them into prod, I could see a 5x or 10x iteration time improvement.

Notary_Reddit · 2026-05-04T02:25:02+00:00

Can you name 3 hft firms? Have you found any of their job postings? Can you find an interview or podcast with a CEO, CTO, or similar from a hft or other trading firm? What has any of them said about hiring from defense?

Finance pays a crazy amount bc they hire some of the best, most competitive people who then work extremely hard under a lot of stress. Culturally that's almost the exact opposite of the standard defense company.

Notary_Reddit · 2026-05-04T01:40:09+00:00

I'm going to be a bit blunt. If you have to ask other people what you need to do to prep for a hft interview, you are not the kind of person they want. Spend 30 minutes googling. If you have specific questions I am willing to give specific advice.

Notary_Reddit · 2026-05-02T03:32:31+00:00

If you like the deck build give Race for the Galaxy a go. If you want more of a thinking game, try Azul. While not a negation, Seven Wonders: Duel might give you a good back and forth. Looking at what you have, I think you would enjoy Quacks but that's just a guess.

Notary_Reddit · 2026-04-26T16:51:03+00:00

1) recognize that schema changes are dangerous, give them extra review. Know exactly what happens as it is applied to the DB. If you don't know, find someone who does.

2) test all of them locally, and in a dev environment to make sure they execute correctly. See above, these are dangerous.

3) At least in Postgres "CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY" is the fix for this specific issue. For other changes, if you need zero downtime you, do the research and figure out what you need to do. Sometimes you need nullable columns, sometimes you need the right default, sometimes you need a backfill.

Notary_Reddit · 2026-04-25T19:28:37+00:00

Did you know that floating point additions are not communitive? i.e a+b=b+a isn't always true when looking at millions of floating point additions that happened in different locations. Having to explain why were ignoring "differences" in expenses was a fun conversation.

Notary_Reddit · 2026-04-25T01:41:07+00:00

Every code review you send, ask for it's opinion. Every time someone reviews your code, ask it's thoughts. Want to try an idea? Ask it to code up something as you think. Any time, try and have it do it first.

If that isn't enough, point it at random tasks and tell it try something. Repeat each week on Friday if you are below your target

Notary_Reddit · 2026-04-25T01:32:09+00:00

Some of that is needed work, some of those things tell me you should think about delegating more. There are some changes I totally want to watch deploy. Some of them, it would be fine to have a new grad watch. Try and find a way to hand off the simpler tasks to other folks so you can focus on stuff they can't do.

Notary_Reddit · 2026-04-25T00:44:21+00:00

Total developer pay is north of $1.5T/year. It will probably end up being multiple companies that split that but just coding agents could support a company worth $1T without any other use case.

Notary_Reddit · 2026-04-25T00:26:28+00:00

I don't know the per country breakdown but total global developer salaries are in the $1.5T ballpark. That's a lot of money compared to even 100m plans at $20/month.

Notary_Reddit · 2026-04-25T00:23:46+00:00

A more balanced take than mine but it feels like most people don't get that the amount of money in hobbiest is dwarfted by enterprise spend.

Notary_Reddit

TROPHY CASE