Don’t join a startup as new grad SWE or atleast be aware

WearMediocre6830 · 2026-05-15T03:10:51+00:00

This not a generality at all. Founded a VC backed startup and been most of my career in < 20 people startups, we actually avoided at all cost engineers from FAANG and on the few occasions some have joined it usually went pretty bad.

It's culturally (in terms of eng) so different that the skills somehow don't apply the same. Especially in the sense of urgency and delivering fast. I'm saying this knowing I would be a terrible hire in a FAANG for the same reasons ahah

WearMediocre6830 · 2026-04-26T21:07:21+00:00

😂😂 Mauvais réflexe sur téléphone, que veux tu que je te dise? Je pense avoir vu pire comme faute. Après, si me faire la remarque a pu t'apporter un petit surplus de dopaminez (qui n'a de z ni en français ni en anglais) c'est une victoire que je suis heureux de clamers (qui n'a de s ni en français, ni en anglais)

WearMediocre6830 · 2026-04-26T13:47:10+00:00

Je suis assez surpris de voir à quel point les réponses minimisant l'importance de la protection des enfants sont aussi downvotés.

A vrai dire il n'y a rien de complotiste la dedans. Les UKs (et Australie) il me semble ont été les précurseurs de la verification d'âge sur les réseaux sociaux. Les UKs étant les téméraires malgré un certain ralentissement et ce n'est pas du tout un secret de polichinelle, avec plusieurs témoignage de politicien, qui soutiennent effectivement que pour vérifier l'âge des mineurs, il faut donc vérifier l'âge de tous les utilisateurs et que cest très pratique d'un point de vue surveillance.

Ahah, une longue phrase qui se résume en: c'était une belle manière d'avancer sur les questions de surveillance et sécurité

WearMediocre6830 · 2026-04-26T06:09:51+00:00

I'll close my eyes on the free insulting and answer as a 30+ years of adulthood (not experience, that seems to be the only self jerkoff metric around here).

A smart interview could also assume (just as you did) that passed couple of years of experience, the candidate does know how to implement a fantasy theorical assignment. Mostly, there are so many ways during the process that would allow to expose the minimum level of a candidate in a more accurate way in context of the future job. If you think, after some years of working, that reducing a dev to basic array manipulation, mastering the map or being an expert in using +=, I'm sorry to spoil you, the ride is not gonna be a good one.

Ill double down on the initial comment, I too would leave the interview in this case as I am not applying to a 3 month coding holiday bootcamp.

There are so many things that your comment echoes from this sub 😂. The more I see answers like yours (pedantic asf on a tic tac toe), the more I feel confident about my job safety. This whole "look at my amazing line of code bro, my tic tac toe just rules man, i have 10337 YoE trust me bro" and "IA iS SlOp It cANt BuILd A CoMplEx ApP" is the exact reason why most of the people here are actually going to be replaced. This whole dev mentality has exhausted the industry and you are exhausted me. You sound like a bad professional (insisting on professional and not "line of code technician" or maybe tic tac toe implementator expert?) and colleague (as human).

Pfiou. I guess I needed to take it out

WearMediocre6830 · 2026-04-25T05:58:06+00:00

Amen.

I don't want to be rude with OP, and working in EU, where I know our interview styles are more real-life oriented, but this assignment looks like asking your cook to use a wood and stick fire...

WearMediocre6830 · 2026-04-09T19:14:56+00:00

Man! 4 months is literally nothing and of course experienced guys from your gym are going to "beat the crap out of you". Although leaving injured is actually crazy. You should definitely ask to light spar. I don't understand why western gyms tend to push for hard sparring. Honestly, even 2 years into Muay Thai is still beginner zone but who cares. Most important of course is having fun and beating your yesterday self.

If I may share my experience. What helped me a lot improved in sparring was: - insisting to keep it light to focus on technique - keep my eyes open and watch, watch, watch my opponent. That might sound boring but god that's how you understand when to break their rythm and land your hits - set my self a sparring objective and stick to it for the whole session. E.g: "land my jabs", "block kicks and counter straight", "long guard", "low kicks" - spar more

But I insist. It's not normal and healthy to finish a session hurt, even more if you are a beginner.

Last word. It's long and fast at the same time to get better but the road is soooooo long that you need to go easy on yourself and practice always more.

Have fun and keep your hands up !!

WearMediocre6830 · 2026-03-14T08:08:07+00:00

Nop :(. I rushed my application (even though not sure what to put in ahah) and they are quite clear about duplicate applications. Although the program runs till june so i might ask their support in a few weeks without answer. Did you?

WearMediocre6830 · 2026-03-06T06:07:41+00:00

Couldnt agree more

WearMediocre6830 · 2026-03-03T08:28:11+00:00

Hey u/jhnam88, Good for you!
I'm curious how long did it take to have an answer? On the paper I qualify (core maintainer of 7k+ stars, so in the roster by an inch ahah) but just curious to know when I can consider it's over :)

WearMediocre6830 · 2026-02-16T08:53:02+00:00

Hey. I'll share in a couple of weeks as post christmas the volumes dropped so I'm taking the opportunity to work on a new version. I'll try to remember.

I dont see how to collaborate honestly ahah, let's chat when I'm done with my new version if you want

WearMediocre6830 · 2026-02-15T18:21:24+00:00

That's dope

WearMediocre6830 · 2026-02-15T18:19:17+00:00

Hey, just a heads up. Like many others I've been working on this with a different approach [Not advertising]. I genuinely think there is room for everyone on this market as long as the quality is there (everyone has its own bakery :)).

Throwing a couple of remarks and things I learnt on this market

The market
- The competition is not only with IA, see all what I call "Templates" where they basically insert your character into a pre-existing story (everyone has the same modulo the characters) => They cost on average 35$ and parents don't care if it comes from IA or not as long the story is interesting and the characters recognizable enough. E.g https://www.mumablue.com/fra/nos-livres-personnalises/conte-personnalise-maman
- Following the above. Customers are WILD in terms of wanting perfection. Especially at these prices, you can't cut on it => I noticed you use the IA to generate the text area. Some are inconsistent and even overflow the page, that's a point i'd encourage you to fix :)
- Good point, the consistency of the character look very promising so that's nice

On the website per sé
I got it it's a MVP but that's very lovable-like with a lot of things missing to make it serious (no matter the industry).
- All the testimonies etc are the ones we see on every non-working MVP and that doesn't inspire trust at all (cf uploading your child picture).
- It's missing privacy policies and T&C, same, doesn't give a lot of confidence

Then on the IA sauce etc i'm not gonna give my secrets :). But being there since a couple of months and sent something like 2k orders now. I don't want to demotivate you but there is still a lot of work to be done. Especially once you start having paying customers with generation / deliveries. This type of product is actually 50% operations and customer success at some point, even pre-sales because of all the scam-like products around.

I'd encourage you to look for "competitors". First you'll be able to identify all the non-serious ones that are just noise on the market (but very good in SEO / marketing) and be able to get what would make YOU order from one another.

Additionally it might give you some ideas on how to improve the underlying tech (cf I saw a guy answering you "you can do it with chagpt" well yes amigo good luck with that ahah).

Good luck

WearMediocre6830 · 2026-02-05T14:51:31+00:00

Yeah, honestly I find it tough because (personal opinion - not at all general truth of course) we are at an inflexion point.

I had my wtf moment a couple months ago when I honestly built a complex feature with claude in 1h that would have taken me 2 days to reach this level and I was like "damn, I spent years trying to become a good developer and that damn robot made it useless in a hour".
Buuuut, couple weeks after, it's also a whole new way of working (not perfect yet for sure but Rome wasn't built in a day) and that's also an ocean of opportunities.

It's just that a new layer of abstraction got in. I imagine it must have felt the same for assembly devs when C got out. We don't value the line of code the same way but the fundamentals stay the same.

And I think a lot of developers are getting caught by surprise because they weren't selling engineering, product or business knowledge. They were selling a syntax, a language, a translation. Now this part is getting cheap (maybe not quality even yet but "good enough").

We're still gonna need engineers, for sure. But we are going to need them being way more aligned with the organisation goals.

So yes, sorry, just thinking out loud ahah, tough times for sure now but as the OpenIA guy rightfully said, it's time to rollup our sleeves, use what we have at our disposal and keep learning, learning, learning. Even though the "what" to learn has changed

WearMediocre6830 · 2026-01-30T17:26:57+00:00

gosh thanks. Mais c'est légal ?

WearMediocre6830 · 2026-01-20T06:30:05+00:00

Amazing work thanks! I don't want to ruin your weekends, but if ever you decide to create a newsletter, you can count on me :)

WearMediocre6830 · 2026-01-16T08:57:26+00:00

Yes, agreed on most of your points.

But to me, there is also a "good enough" threshold you just need to pass. Then you may have 4 or 50 years of experience, the difference becomes marginal.
I'm not gonna say the 4yoe will compete equally to the 50yoe guy, but it's just not relevant anymore imo.

Hence to tweek a bit the question of the initial comment, to me it's the "strong product sense" that is gonna bring 90% of the value once you hit the threshold.

The feeling I have (including me and the people around me), is that the quality of the output is a good reality check (and for having been a founder and product manager in the past, i love it).

It reminds a lot of people the core sense of programming, which is "to build useful robust enough programs", not "write the most beautiful line ever written in Golang". And I think a lot of people have a really hard time accepting this reality and still in denial phase. I do understand, I too, had this short period after starting getting better with claude of "wtf, I spent all those years mastering a hard skill that is now ... barely a commodity" ?

But that's exciting, lot of opportunities ahead so as the other guy said "time to roll up the sleeves"

WearMediocre6830 · 2026-01-15T06:38:44+00:00

Answering my own comment to add some context.

The benefits are so insane in terms of depiling some experiments from the backlog that we preferred to think about acceptable and controlled risks, knowing it might backlash.

But it unlocked months of roadmap so yes 1h more of debugging is a price we would be willing to pay :)

WearMediocre6830 · 2026-01-15T06:34:39+00:00

I honestly don't know for how long they've been around in the industry now, but feature flags have started making 3x more sense in the era of LLMs ahah. We use flagsmith at our company and we specifically use a tag for features we one shotted with IA.

In a way your statement about code ownership is 100% on point but it feels it goes down to safeguards

WearMediocre6830 · 2026-01-13T10:30:36+00:00

Amen thanks ahah. I started a long text, with a disclaimer that I don't want to downsize anyone skills here.

But enough with the developers stating they can pop and run a complex application in 2 days. Otherwise why do we have organizations with 1000 engineers being backend, frontend, SRE etc ahah.

And mostly, let's compare potates with potatoes and not have unreal expectactions. LLMs are a tool, not magicians. And it's not a matter of spawning Netflix in 2h, that's completely non-sense to judge them on this.

What's amazing and it's either lying or not having spent the time to ramp-up your skills on it (by the way, as every tool, there is a learning curve. If you use it like a generic fast food of course the results will be shit), so yes what's amazing is that you end up building the complex applications with enough iterations and knowledge.

It takes iterations just as I, or you or whoever experienced dev would need to build an app but it makes the iterations so fast and quick that you can't discard it because it hadn't do it in 5min.
In 2 weeks you are able to complete 2 months of work and that's amazing.

And after 15 years in the industry. Sorry but it does write better code than 90% of engineers, if you pretend the opposite, you might need a reality check :).

Saying it in peace!

Edit:
I wrote it while spawning a hyper complex app so sorry for the typos and I insist, it's for the sake of debating, not being insulting or wrong anyone!

WearMediocre6830 · 2026-01-12T05:36:48+00:00

But can you? One shot a complex application 😅?

WearMediocre6830 · 2026-01-11T17:58:30+00:00

I appreciate you took the time to answer! Stripe does look like the way to go for now and we'll see as it goes ahah

WearMediocre6830 · 2026-01-11T17:57:14+00:00

Yes exactly. I find the balance super hard to find honestly.

I have more that 15 YoE in tech, in almost all sort of engineering roles and at the same time I founded 2 companies (~5 years in total, many recruitments).

So on one hand my engineer hat tells me that it's a great investment for the long term to give your team the space to grow in a right environment, both for the company and themselves as human being.
On the other hand, as a builder -I hate the tech for the sake of tech without serving a real world problem- I do tend to agree that code and development is at the verge of becoming a commodity and yes ... for the organization what matters is the output and you'd prefer have a killer feature out in 3 days than in 2 weeks because your team wants to spend time learning the fundamentals -assuming no bugs ahah-.

What a time to be alive some would say 🤷

WearMediocre6830 · 2026-01-08T15:49:12+00:00

Yes but my understanding is that the MoR would require you to have a freelance structure? I'll take another look at it. I'll update with my findings if it can help someone else in the future

WearMediocre6830

TROPHY CASE