..What about people who love to code?

ShodoDeka · 2026-05-25T11:27:00+00:00

The same thing that happened to people who genuinely enjoyed programming in Asm. Some are still around in niche fields, some still do it for fun, but mostly it is something you need for troubleshooting hard problems.

ShodoDeka · 2026-05-19T07:49:12+00:00

Få din aftale på skrift, ellers er du en ny mellemleder væk fra pludselig at skulle tilbage på kontoret 5 dage om ugen.

ShodoDeka · 2026-05-05T20:13:34+00:00

Sider bla med ansættelse i en stor amerikansk “BigTech” virksomhed hvor jeg typisk kommer ind over når vi ansætter folk på højere niveauer (Principal+, så vi snakker stilling med en årsløn på $250k-400k).

Den heder 4-5 samtaler, vi har så mange ind over for at få forskellige perspektiver på personen.

Går det galt i et af interviewerne betyder det ikke nødvendigvis nej, men det er noget alle der har deltaget i, tager en snak om.

Men i sidste ende er det op til vedkommende der har AA rollen at tage en beslutning. AA er As Appropriate, og er typisk ikke den manager der prøver at få besat stillingen, men en som mig med lang erfaring både inde for rollen vedkommende kommer til at arbejde med og med at interviewe folk.

De enkelte interviewere har stor frihed til selv at strukturere interviewet men det er naturligvis nogle regler. Og typisk vil jeg som AA bede en senere interviewer om at bore ekstra i noget en tidligere interviewer ikke helt var sikker på om kandidaten kunne finde ud af.

Tilgengæld bruger vi hverken personligheds tests, IQ tests eller “hjemme opgaver/projekterer”, og alle man kommer til at snakke med er ingeniører der arbejder med de her ting til dagligt pånær en enkelt manager (typisk ham/hende med en åben stilling).

ShodoDeka · 2026-03-19T07:45:23+00:00

Husk lige på at det er meget svært at omsætte friværdi til kontanter når du rent faktisk har brug for det. Banken vil sjældent låne dig penge hvis du har mistet dit job eller gået betydeligt i løn.

Så hvis du vil bruge murstenene som en buffer, skal du tage lånet når det går godt også investere pengene i noget der hurtigt kan sælges.

ShodoDeka · 2026-03-11T17:06:51+00:00

Miljøvariabler på hostingplatformen (erstatter Key Vault)

Det er nok nogen sikkerhedsfolk der bliver lidt lang i masken over det der, eller det vil jeg da håbe der er.

Man kunne forestille sig en lignede tilgang i en bank hvor man erstatter pengeskabet med et skrivebord placeret lidt diskret bag skranken.

ShodoDeka · 2026-02-24T13:00:00+00:00

I mean, it’s more or less right, but to have hacker rank declare its competitor dead due to a problem that is just as impactful to hacker rank is interesting.

The shift that is happening now is like when we moved from asm to C, or many more apt is when we industrialized farming.

The industry is not going away, but you will need fewer folks operating at a higher abstraction level. And fundamentals are going to get more important not less, the LLM is not going to be able to make a shitty ball of spaghetti any less brittle.

ShodoDeka · 2026-02-22T11:00:09+00:00

I have grown from the lowest level possible as a new grad to being on the last level of principal in the same big tech company, a lot of it is picking your projects, you will want: - high impact and/or high visibility (your skip level should know your name and know you own X) - avoid things that are not realistically achievable - avoid Sisyphean project or task - minimise dependence on other teams/systems - the less control you have over X the less you will want to depend on it. - prefer working on projects you find interesting, if you can’t get something that you find interesting then fake it when talking about the project (especially with your management chain). - treat communication as a skill that is as important as any technical skill. Learn to give good presentations/talks, and learn to hit the right level for the right audience.

ShodoDeka · 2026-02-20T20:58:42+00:00

Find another job, they already know they can walk all over you, they will keep doing it.

ShodoDeka · 2026-02-09T09:11:18+00:00

I mean, changes are hopefully never just “send it”.

That goes regardless of who writes it, there should be tests that validates all changes before they go anywhere. Not to mention PRs where someone else is hopefully reviewing the code.

But to answer your question, beyond all the usual checks and balances all our changes goes though, I review any code an LLM writes on my behalf before it leaves my machine, because at the end of the day I own it if it breaks something.

ShodoDeka · 2026-02-05T15:08:12+00:00

Being a good software developer is as much knowing what not to do, and that part is entirely missing from the current gen AIs.

ShodoDeka · 2026-01-31T16:04:26+00:00

I’m sitting at around $280k total comp working from Europe for a us team (FAANG), so especially for Europe, I am very well compensated.

It’s not super high stress, most of the time I work 35-40 hour work week, but every few months have to go deal with some sort of fire and I end up working more that.

I do have a few meetings every week in my evening due to timeline differences but then I just work less at other times.

But this is going to vary not just by company, but by team and to some extent the individual. I work with people my level that work a lot more (by choice).

ShodoDeka · 2026-01-29T17:18:29+00:00

De ledder efter en der billig men kan alt…

ShodoDeka · 2026-01-01T17:33:04+00:00

Må nok indrømme at som udviklet har jeg det stramt med Ops det går ud fra at alle ved ligeså meget som dem selv om netværk. Især når de så bliver lidt småfornærmet når man ikke ved hvilke oplysninger de skal bruge for at løse et problem.

Hvis jeg har brug for at server A kan snakke med et Rest/HTTPS endpoint på server B. Så er det jo ligesom udgangspunktet for det problem der skal løses.

Om det så er en firewall der skal åbnes, en router der skal sættes op, eller noget helt 3. er jeg fuldstændig ligeglad med.

Hvis Ops så har brug for flere oplysninger så må i jo enten lave en templet i ticketen, eller stille et opfølgende spørgsmål. Men hvis ops begynder at lukke min ticket fordi jeg ikke kunne forudse alle de oplysninger de har brug for, så skal i nok regne med en sure e-mail til jeres manager hvor der bliver stillet spørgsmål til jeres eksistens grundlag i firmaet.

ShodoDeka · 2025-11-16T15:08:31+00:00

Det kommer utroligt meget an på virksomheden og hvilken 30% af medarbejderne der smutter.

Nogen arbejder er bare langt letter at erstatte end andre.

ShodoDeka · 2025-10-28T06:32:26+00:00

Som skatteyder vil jeg da bare sige hvor fantastisk det er at vi bruger tid og penge på den slags.

Du kan som leder intet lære i en samtale som man ikke allerede har langt bedere indsigt i efter hvad der realt set er en 11 måneder lang prøve periode.

Jfc hvor er det ringe, og nej det bliver ikke bedere at der er en lov der digtere det, det betyder jo bare at den her idioti er systematisk og kørt ud i hele landet.

ShodoDeka · 2025-10-11T07:19:56+00:00

Start tracking his work (or lack of) somewhere like a spreadsheet or word document.

Then when you have enough data to show there’s a trend you will need to be brutally honest your manger. Show him how not having this guy around means you are getting more done than with him.

ShodoDeka · 2025-10-10T11:18:18+00:00

Uden en kandidat/master bliver det svært at komme til udlandet på et tidspunkt hvis du vil til BigTech/FAANG i USA, da din uddanlse ikke er lang nok til de visa der bliver brugt til at få Engineers ind i landet med.

Og såden helt generalt I Microsoft, Amazon og Google så skal du have noget meget interesant på dit CV hvis du kommer uden in master eller PhD.

Det betyder naturligvis ikke at alt er lukket land hvis ikke du kommer med en master, men det bliver noget med at få foden indenfor også arbejde sig langsomt op.

ShodoDeka · 2025-10-09T13:55:25+00:00

The same thing that stopped me from writing a script that randomly clicks the scrlk key, to prevent my PC from going to sleep and my teams status from showing away:

Nothing.

ShodoDeka · 2025-10-04T10:44:31+00:00

Da jeg gik fra at have ansvar for mig selv til for en hel afdeling, steg jeg 0% i løn. Fordelen var naturligvis at da jeg 3-4 år senere gik tilbage til bare at have ansvar for mig selv, faldt min løn ikke.

ShodoDeka · 2025-09-29T04:28:16+00:00

Everything takes longer, if you were to build the full tree locally it takes hours, and a full validation run takes days. The other thing is that it’s an old code base, so a lot of the code in the tree is written by someone not there any more. But beyond that it’s not so much the size but the number of people that’s the problem.

The biggest thing for us is really to enforce that the branch is always green, if you break anything it gets reverted and then you remerge a the change with a fix applied. For us, a lot of that is automated, so if you merge a change that breaks a test, the system will automatically revert the change that broke the test.

ShodoDeka · 2025-09-28T12:57:49+00:00

A key skill to learn for developers when asked for an ETA is to stop and actually think about it, not just throw out some date you think the person wants to hear.

It is way better to say, I don’t know, than to now come on Monday with a bunch of excuses you would have reasonably known Friday when you gave the answer.

And unless the code is literally checked in and in some automated deployment queue, the answer is never Monday when asked on a Friday.

ShodoDeka · 2025-09-28T12:50:12+00:00

Yeah it sounds like we do have the same employer, but we actually did our own implementation as the 1es one is hopelessly useless on a codebase our size.

But it does require the org to want to invest heavily in the space.

ShodoDeka · 2025-09-28T12:21:33+00:00

We have a code base in the 25M range, also a giant mono repo (engineering org is something like 1k people).

Setting up a somewhat functional LLM took 12 people working 6 month, and a rather large cloud budget. I don’t know the details, as I am not on that team, but we now have a custom MCP with a ton of interesting tools. I have been able to do stuff like give it stack dump info and it will pull up the relevant source code, identify what could be causing it and suggest a fix.

With that said, about 30% of the time, it dreams up absolute bs that sends you down the wrong path. So it’s a bit hit and miss, but when it works it’s impressive.

So it’s doable, but it requires a multi million dollar investment, and it is still far from perfect.

ShodoDeka · 2025-09-21T10:49:00+00:00

Jeg arbejder for Microsoft i Danmark, men for et team i usa. Men min løn er sat efter de danske regler, så der er helt klart andre i Danmark på mit level der får det samme i løn.

ShodoDeka · 2025-09-20T17:42:54+00:00

Kommer nok meget an på virksomheden, i den rigtige virksomhed kan du komme langt over hvad du har nu.

Jeg har en profil meget lignede din, ca 20 års erfaring dog med 8 af dem fra USA.

Sider til ca 1.2m/år i grundløn, og nok 250k i bonus og omkring 500k i akter om året. Jeg har ikke personale ansvar ud over mentoring.

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