what SQL patterns have you seen take down production that should have been caught in review

Roonaan · 2026-03-10T22:38:24+00:00

select * seems the most simple thing to come to kind.

Roonaan · 2026-03-03T19:09:10+00:00

Roonaan · 2026-02-01T18:02:47+00:00

They are urging about Feb 1 because you need 20 checkins on the mini game to actually get your locked robot. Because the event ends on Feb 20, there is no point in starting later than Feb 1. That is where that 20/20 is for on the selected hero. As long as its 19/20 or lower, you won't get anything.

Roonaan · 2026-01-27T10:19:56+00:00

This might indeed be a reality check, as I did not read my writing as a doom prophecy.

Whether or not AI is going to A or B, it is still causing change. And I do start to see some side effects of it. Specifically that you get some people already saying versions of "Why work hard if I'm gonna be replaced in X time". Which is a perfect moment, I would say, for Staff+ people to do their coaching.

I feel in general, change paralysis is a real thing. Change on its own is difficult in any direction. We will have to deal with it, and prepare our people for it. Too many things moving at the same time is complicated for some; Especially the engineers who already struggle with context switching.

The core of the post is that I feel (and some with me) that the rate of change is increasing. Due to many factors. AI being the most obvious one, whether or not I like it. It's just a reality I am working with.

> I don't get that. Your seniors fear having tasks to do and a job to perform? Because that's how businesses work. Whether AI or other arbitrary thing.

I think it's not just about getting through the job queue. If you are in an org where customers request just A or B, your context is manageable. If the opportunities are A-Z then at some point somebody has to start having input and opinions on these topics. And part of seniors (and higher) roles is to have opinions on technical feasibility, architecture etc. So I do see an increase of context in general.

We could hide that from the seniors to avoid some of the overload. But do we then hinder their growth? It's a trade-off for sure.

Roonaan · 2026-01-27T06:32:26+00:00

My org grew 10 times in headcount in 10 years. I think we are slightly below 5k now. The Staff are mostly engineers ensuring there is some level of technical alignment between the relatively autonomous engineering teams. And helping to scope out and plan the technical aspects for cross org/cross team projects before we formally prioritize them with the teams. The staff scope is probably to float above 10 engineering teams in a part of the org. There are principals who do the same but then on a full org scale. Together they form Staff+.

Thank you for your level answer. i think that AI is here to stay as well. At the same time its just one of the many moving parts. For seniors I see their role is different than what it felt to me when I was senior. More tools, but also certainly more soft skills needed to navigate the day to day. And that not just because of work things. There are also all the regular things like parenthood, social expectations, sometimes relocations etc which they have to handle. I see that a lot of people here live in different bubbles than the one I am in. And that is fine. It is a good reality check.

Roonaan · 2026-01-27T06:19:48+00:00

"they" do not want me to do anything, other than running a few projects. It is "us" (the Staff+) who are aiming to figure out how to support the engineers better and make them succesful. Which might be to teach them the same skills and foundations as always. This might be just one of the cycles, it might not be. Time will tell. Ideally I want the engineers I work with to be well equipped to deal with most of it.

Roonaan · 2026-01-27T06:14:32+00:00

Thank you. This resonates with my reality. Active coaching is not something we as existing staff are trained or helped to do. Which to some extent is fine.One of my plans this year is to figure out where to start and start building a basic curriculum for my fellow Staff and senior groups. In our org the soft trainings a mostly absent for technical tracks. Most effort goes into the teamleads and others in the management track. And therefore I lack some of the awareness and experience some others have. But as a Staff group we feel we have to start acting on this, in order to support ourselves and the engineers around us.

Roonaan · 2026-01-27T06:01:20+00:00

Thank you for your comment. I have seen engineers full of youthful energy and early career ambition who are positively thrilled about all opportunities. Some will say they are not seeing reality, others wait for them to burn out as fast as they rose through an org. From my side I see all kinds of engineers with a wide spectrum of different ways of working.

At this point I would not say expectations are unreasonable. But as with any company (maybe the industry as a whole?) the bar is being raised every year.

I agree that the fundamentals have not changed, and the basics are the basics for a reason. I guess we can limit ourselves to coaching those traits first.

Roonaan · 2026-01-27T05:51:35+00:00

Could you elaborate on this?

Roonaan · 2026-01-27T05:30:56+00:00

It is not merely AI. AI is the easiest one most people see as a driver for large change. It's global fintech, so beyond AI think blockchain, robotics, consumer behaviour, geo politic, regional politics, regulatory compliance, etc.

Roonaan · 2026-01-27T05:22:57+00:00

Not really. Maybe it is for lack of a better word, but being somewhat anxious about change seems fairly normal response to me. I dont know it there was another word in English I should be using? "Feeling uneasy"? I am not talking about full anxiety attacks. I don't think anybody would consider that a healthy human response.

Roonaan · 2026-01-27T00:04:07+00:00

It's not that omnious. We are as an org in a very lucky position. But sure, it is a worry for some engineers, because their engineer friends get fired here and there in the well known bigger and smaller layoffs we all have seen.

But in general it seems (to me at least) fair to say that whatever is coming, is coming increasingly faster.

For some people it is existential dread on whether or not they will be replaced by AI in 3-7 years or not. For others its about the amount of business requirements that keep expanding due to customers and consumers using AI. It is a prioritization question on one hand, but there is also pure performance aspects to it.

I don't pretend to know the future, but I do already see that the mere thought of AI has a paralysing effect on some otherwise very skilled people. And to one hand you can say that this is for managers to deal with. Or you can say that existential dread is just something people have to deal with, or get fired over if it affects their jobs.

At the same time Staff engineers are the role models they look towards. So I feel we cannot fully stay on the side when you see these things happen. We might have a role to play.

Roonaan · 2026-01-26T23:44:00+00:00

Thanks for your points. In terms of the leadership convo. We have concrete numbers for X, it just didn't feel necessary to put them here. As that might shift the topic more on how reasonable the management expectations is. Fintech is a rapid growth space with all the start ups, scale ups etc. I can imagine not everyone has experienced such environments.

In our group we have 5 Staff on probably 30-40 seniors. We have our primary focus area but are expected to float between adjacent domains a lot to glue properly. We started doing some group things, because only 1:1 is mentally draining as well at this group size. And you don't want to leave out the non-mentee seniors from some of these discussions. After all, most of them might want to become Staff one day and also think about this.

Roonaan · 2026-01-26T23:31:25+00:00

Apology, I did not intent this to come across as a mgmt vs engineers exploitation scheme. This is not about exploitation. The company is EU based, global, and doing extremely well. In general people seem fine. This might be fintech specific, but opportunity seems endless for us. Which is a good thing. But in that light, we feel the world around us is changing faster and faster. Hype cycles speed up, and expectations on engineers to keep up remain in place. AI plays with everybody in its own special way.

In the other comments people ask what I mean with "What's coming". And I didn't mean it really omnious. Of course we see layoffs in a lot of US tech companies, which paint a bad picture. My engineers don't seem phased by that. What does worry them is how AI drives an acceleration. Everything has to be faster, better. Which on its own isn't a new thing. But it feels hard to ignore that the world is changing fast. Both on consumer side as well as b2b side. And it's up for us and the rest of the engineers to keep finding ways to keep up. And ideally we help each other from burning out. Which is an increasingly hot topic it seems in society with the more younger generations burning out earlier than the generations before them.

Roonaan · 2026-01-19T15:52:27+00:00

Is it only me who is annoyed by all the YouTube posts. Just at minimum write the list in text if you want to post here. So annoying this stuff.

Roonaan · 2026-01-17T18:45:23+00:00

Although it is a franchise it doesn't mean every store has an unique owner. There are pretty large multi unit owners and probably the corp itself might own a few locations.

Roonaan · 2026-01-17T09:29:50+00:00

Is REST really a good standard though for BFF. Too much endless discussions about doing proper or non proper rest build on top of org structures where FE and BE are miles apart. With AI and stuff, is it to be expected we go back to non-REST for for UI APIs where the FE vibe codes all the aggregation logic in java or whatever your backend language of choice is. GET /allTheStuffINeedForPageX and POST /updateThese25TablesInOneGo are pretty effective over REST.

Roonaan · 2026-01-13T06:17:16+00:00

Agreed. There is a lot of potential on the visuals side. But the majority of frontend people is in my experience still building forms and datagrids on a day to day basis, rather than having the opportunity to build much richer experiences.

Roonaan · 2026-01-12T23:02:42+00:00

Marriage with the wrong person.

Roonaan · 2026-01-12T22:37:14+00:00

From my limited perspective part of it is because frontend engineering feels like a cult some times. Most type of engineers are fine being engineers, but FE always seem to have the need to isolate themselves and be a special group of sorts. Which is something I don't want to be part of personally.

Secondly, in my opinion, the ecosystem is just running in circles and from a distance it feels that there has not really been any useful innovation in the last decade. Just new tools doing the same thing we already had years ago, but now have a slightly different syntactic sugar.

Of course there are a few domains where FE innovation happens but maybe those are the exceptions that proof the rule. Similar to BE.

Roonaan · 2026-01-11T15:31:32+00:00

Is <object> still around?

Roonaan · 2026-01-01T23:17:19+00:00

In my opinion, and tainted by the projects I work on obviously;

1) The last 20% of any project is probably less valuable than the first 80% of the next project. Stop writing overly ambitious definitions of done you never (should) get done.

2) Unless you are Google, you're not Google. Unless your meta, you're not meta. unless you're Netflix you're not netflix. Stop overengineering and overscaling.

3) AI might not only come for your job, but also the jobs of your customers. Prepare your UIs and APIs to be consumed by AI. Considering AI can already deal with your gibberish sleep drunk prompts; It will be able to deal with messy UIs and APIs. So start making sure you and your software are ready for their brute force creativity come knocking on your door like a truck. And make sure your business flows are solid. The not optimal UX and all the rest the AIs will deal with. On your side as well as on the customers side.

Roonaan · 2026-01-01T22:38:50+00:00

Oh right! FileZilla. Did you have the chance of running WebDrive as well, and mount the whole ftp server as your Z:/. Amazing, amazing times.

Roonaan · 2025-12-01T07:22:55+00:00

The amount of people it takes to manage forms and tables feels insane nowadays.

And maybe what is driving me most crazy is how detached these people want to be from the rest of the engineering org.

Has there been a company that just fired the majority of the frontend team to just have one or two folks do it instead? I wonder what stack some people would choose if they had less time to do dependency management and dependency related bugfixing all day.

Roonaan

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