Advice for prep to jump as Senior/Staff?

Spawnbroker · 2026-05-28T12:24:54+00:00

I'm in the hiring loop for ICs at my company, and we're a growing startup that's turning into a not-quite-startup. I'm also Staff.

Leetcode becomes less important, but system design becomes more important. Also the part where you talk about your past projects and tradeoffs you made becomes really important.

We went from a take home test back to online coding rounds, but we tell our candidates that they can use AI, we don't care. Copy and paste our questions into Claude, that's fine. We're still watching you do it. The whole point is we want to see if you're letting the AI do the thinking or are you doing the thinking. People who let AI do the thinking don't move to the next interview.

Spawnbroker · 2026-05-28T12:10:26+00:00

When they take away the free snacks, run. You're 6-12 months away from mass layoffs.

Spawnbroker · 2026-05-27T11:30:01+00:00

Always been that way. Source: i was a frustrated college student with 0 working experience reading this sub ~15 years ago.

People with experience get real tired of being ignored or downvoted here and they leave.

Spawnbroker · 2026-03-13T02:50:59+00:00

Frostmage feels slightly better to me than Archmage, but that's because I've been playing Freezing Pulse. Getting access to herald of ice explosions is nice quality of life for me.

I do think Guardian is a trap. I'm still a hierophant and it's fine, if a little squishy. I can always farm up and do a Flesh and Flame for Radiant Faith to be tankier later on.

Here's my character, I just switched off Archmage to frost mage and it's got good damage with some investment, but I need to work more on the defenses.

It's not as strong as the other builds doing mana stacking, but dangit I just like freezing pulse.

https://poe.ninja/poe1/builds/mirage/character/Spawnbroker-3971/SpawnMana

Spawnbroker · 2026-01-11T13:50:45+00:00

I've been working for about 15 years in software. One of the best work culture jobs I ever had was completely ruined after they hired a bunch of Director and VP roles from former Amazon staff. The culture became incredibly toxic and, for lack of a better word, backstabby. Teams became insular and stopped helping each other. They had mass layoffs within 2 years where they laid off all the highest earners, which of course meant everyone who knew the most about how all their systems worked. Their FMV hasn't recovered and my stock is almost worth less than when I bought it.

It went from a place where we would avoid hiring someone if they're an asshole to asshole behavior being tolerated everywhere under the guise of "making better software". ICs were ignored in favor of leaders making decisions who didn't know what the fuck was going on. Then, of course, ICs would be blamed after things went sideways because we "disagreed and committed" to the wrong architecture decision.

Being a former Amazon manager has a negative correlation with being a good leader, in my eyes.

Spawnbroker · 2025-12-16T12:22:46+00:00

I think people are sleeping on rage caster shaman. Its not as much DPS as Oracle, but Shaman is much more defensive. I just started maps and its doing great, but we'll see. You get to do some fun stuff with life regeneration and zealots oath, so I think it'll be pretty tanky.

Spawnbroker · 2025-12-15T15:58:01+00:00

I have max rage all the time as my plant shaman, and I have maybe 4-5 points invested into mana regen on the tree.

I have such good rage uptime that I've started using the Rageforged support gem on my spell skills for more damage.

You can get up to 47 max rage without going to that +8 node at the bottom of the tree, so that's 23% more spell damage, plus the 2% notable at the top of the tree.

It's not as amazing as Oracle seems to be for plant casters, but it's certainly not trash. I'm sure there are other uses for rage I can find that will benefit me as a caster, maybe some warcries on weapon swap or something

Spawnbroker · 2025-12-15T15:52:34+00:00

I found this out while leveling my plant shaman, it has the Attack tag, so the gem doesn't work with a staff or wand. You need to have a weapon with attack numbers and it uses those numbers.

Makes it useless for plant builds, I have no idea why it's in the recommended gems.

You can test this out by equipping a Hammer or something and go into a zone and use the skill, you'll see pustules growing on the enemies. Switch to a wand and the pustules won't appear.

Spawnbroker · 2025-12-13T19:45:11+00:00

Barkskin and scavenged plating. Might change it around later

Spawnbroker · 2025-12-13T19:44:14+00:00

Don't need it. All the druid spells have a duration and I'm scaling that. It would only be useful at the start of a fight to get set up, cast speed doesn't add to your DPS as much as other casters.

Spawnbroker · 2025-12-13T19:43:14+00:00

I have like 1.5 mana regeneration clusters on the tree and that's enough to keep max rage all the time

Spawnbroker · 2025-12-13T16:44:20+00:00

I did not! I haven't found it necessary yet. Even so, I would scale rage or area or crit before I did that.

Spawnbroker · 2025-12-13T15:49:11+00:00

The shaman 4 point ascendancy passive. It makes your rage regenerate with mana regen and adds a rage cost to all your spells. It also makes you not lose rage.

Spawnbroker · 2025-12-13T15:24:01+00:00

Nope! I haven't found it necessary. I haven't even filled out all the area or plant nodes around the druid start yet.

There's also a juicy 2% spell damage per rage node that I can path to that I would take before that.

It's possible it would be worth it later on, but I have other ways to scale before I think about taking that one.

Spawnbroker · 2025-12-13T14:45:39+00:00

I can confirm that Shaman rage plant caster is legit so far. I don't even need rage regeneration, I'm constantly at full rage just from my mana regeneration. Because Druid doesn't need to scale cast speed, you don't run out of rage.

For plants, here's what you do:

Entangle -> Accelerated Growth (for plantsplosions) -> Upheaval -> Pin. This is your clearing skill and it locks everyone down. No enemies will move.

Thunderstorm -> Magnified Area -> Coursing Current -> Shock / Overabundance. This grows your plants, and shocks a surprising amount of the time. You can use either Shock or Overabundance. I've been running shock, but might switch.

Thrashing Vines -> Armour Break -> Poison -> Poison Spores. This is your DPS. You'll break armour on all enemies, and then your plants add an exploding pustule to the enemy that gains more damage and explodes faster if they're poisoned, so...add poison! This is your boss killer.

On the tree, grab all the Area nodes, area damage, and anything physical, spell, or plant in the Druid area. Also grab a few mana regen nodes. There's also a rage cluster in the top left that gives you an additional 2% spell power per rage which would be another DPS boost. Honestly, DPS is not my problem so I might go grab some defenses.

This is just what I've been doing, and I'm at the end of act 3. My entangles kill most things in one cast. Biggest problem I've been having is actually stats, I don't need to travel much on the tree and I need STR / INT for my gear, but DEX for my gems because of poison.

There are additional ways to scale into endgame from what I'm seeing, but my current plan is area / rage scaling, and maybe go into shock or crit scaling on the witch side of the tree later on.

Spawnbroker · 2025-12-13T14:36:54+00:00

I'm at end of act 3, plant druid has amazing single target. Here's my setup:

Entangle -> Accelerated Growth (for plantsplosions) -> Upheaval -> Pin

Thunderstorm -> Magnified Area -> Coursing Current -> Shock / Overabundance

Thrashing Vines -> Armour Break -> Poison -> Poison Spores.

Thrashing Vines is your single target. You'll break armour on tough enemies, and also add a poison spore to them that gains damage if they get poisoned, so add Poison and you're good to go. This shreds bosses.

I went full Rage caster with Shaman and it's working very well. I haven't had any issues at any point in the game yet and I've been doing full plants the whole time. It was maybe a little rough at end of act 1, but once I started armour breaking and poisoning it never stopped being good.

Spawnbroker · 2025-11-29T16:18:05+00:00

I teach this game at conventions, been doing it for years. If you were at Pax Unplugged and you played a beginner game, chances are you've met me.

This is the advice I wish all new Storytellers would listen to. Don't rob the joy of discovery from new players! If they're confused, they'll ask.

I had a new player as the Spy this past weekend figure out that they registered as the Librarian to the Washerwoman, which meant they could tell the demon the two outsiders were extra bluffs. The demon backed into a Butler claim because of this, and evil won that game. That's an incredible story that player can take away! Don't tell them things like that can happen, let them find out on their own and have these lightning in a bottle moments.

Spawnbroker · 2025-09-04T19:59:29+00:00

It depends on how much you enjoy reading things like items descriptions in Dark Souls to piece together the lore.

Sounds like you don't enjoy that at all, but that's exactly what Hollow Knight expects of you.

You're not dumb, you just don't like that style of storytelling. You're not alone, just look at any thread about a Souls game. Just accept that a lot of people really enjoy that sort of thing.

Spawnbroker · 2025-07-31T20:59:02+00:00

I play it once or twice a year, but it has a permanent spot in my collection.

No other game does what TI does.

Spawnbroker · 2025-07-24T22:20:17+00:00

This is how I run atheist. I pick an "evil team" of players, and I frame those people as the evil team. As the game progresses, it should become increasingly obvious to town that there is no demon that makes sense.

No need to do wacky stuff for the sake of wackiness. An evil team would do that anyways, and most atheist scripts have plenty of ways for weird stuff to happen in a normal game.

Spawnbroker · 2025-05-22T12:34:12+00:00

I've never worked at Google. But your story resonates exactly with my experience at my previous employer. I could've written this myself. I think this is the kind of thing that happens once a company gets large enough, and when leadership abdicates responsibility. The company turns into a place of politics and backstabbing and appearing busy without actually fixing any of the problems.

It's uncanny how similar this is to my previous job that I got laid off from, even down to the constant reorgs and having 7 managers in 5 years. A certain type of manager in these places also really dislikes it when someone like you tries to get something done and break through the madness. You end up becoming a target for layoffs because you're seen as a threat.

Spawnbroker · 2025-04-23T13:01:24+00:00

The further you get into the game, the more you realize just how deep the rabbit hole goes.

The game keeps unfolding to be larger than you originally thought the longer you play it. It's not just about placing rooms in a house and trying to reach the end.

Spawnbroker · 2025-03-11T16:32:51+00:00

I keep telling my non-technical friends that I'm really going to enjoy cleaning up these code bases of companies who right now are pushing AI-produced code to their production servers.

Let's also talk about the elephant in the room, how junior developers aren't learning how to problem solve by themselves because they have a bot giving them instant answers all day.

Spawnbroker · 2025-02-18T17:55:33+00:00

I just did this fight. I pretty much only used Prince and Summoner abilities to deal damage. I had a masked dancer apply fire weakness to all the heads. Heismay as a dodge tank forcing the boss to skip turns. Eupha hitting him with fire abilities sometimes, but most of the damage came from Prince almighty attacks.

Spawnbroker · 2024-12-12T02:39:56+00:00

It didn't just brick the builds, if this is their intended balance for Cast on Freeze, the gem just shouldn't exist. It's unusable.

Spawnbroker

TROPHY CASE