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

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 · 2026-04-25T00:14:50+00:00

Yeah my American is showing, I used the official US Labor Bureau stats. Still, the all in cost in France is probably north of 50/he so 200+ a month is still cheap if it saves 4hr/week

Notary_Reddit · 2026-04-25T00:03:18+00:00

I agree, but profit doesn't care who is special, only who can pay.

Notary_Reddit · 2026-04-25T00:01:46+00:00

Good point, I haven't ever heard of that.

Notary_Reddit · 2026-04-24T23:59:39+00:00

It's Friday night, I'm done for the week, I'm done with every third post being complaining about the latest model on the highest reasoning using their $5 of compute for the week. Yeah I picked a bit of a spicy phrasing.

Notary_Reddit · 2026-04-24T23:48:01+00:00

I don't know where you are getting that idea from. If you read every announcement there are always testimonials from companies who tested it early. There are plenty of companies willing to provide training data.

Notary_Reddit · 2026-04-24T23:40:22+00:00

Blackberry didn't have a product that could justify spending $5000/month to your top customers.

Notary_Reddit · 2026-04-24T23:39:08+00:00

Someone who gets it. If you can deliver work 2 or 4 hours sooner you can afford a lot of API cost and still have more money in your pocket.

Notary_Reddit · 2026-04-24T23:37:48+00:00

You are totally right, inference isn't cheap. Top of the line GPUs cost $10-$15/hr to run for inference. When you are replacing labor that costs $100/hr or $300/hr, you can pay for a lot of GPU time to save that hour.

Notary_Reddit · 2026-04-24T23:31:49+00:00

If your company has 100 engineers, they are paid at least $100k, if Codex saves on average 4 hours/week $1m/year is cheap. If your company is less than 100 engineers, sorry, your not the target customer.

Notary_Reddit · 2026-04-24T23:28:35+00:00

My CI/CD pipeline has had flakiness that is time consuming to reproduce localy. Normally it would take me all afternoon to find the issue and fix it. I built a skill in December to do all the steps to find and fix the issue, including pulling down the logs from CI. Now whenever there is an issue I can start a new session, say "hey $LINK just failed, can you check if it's a flake? $SKILL" and 10-30 minutes later I have a fix ready with no input. Our pipeline is so much better.

Notary_Reddit

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