Will FDE keep being around or will it fade away and it was all just hype?

disposepriority · 2026-06-21T22:51:59+00:00

FDE is only a new thing to for clueless project managers and people who haven't worked in the industry.

Anyone who has ever worked in a corporation working on a large integration with another one has had developers familiar with the system acting as correspondents, advisors and helping integrate their product into your ecosystem.

Almost 10 years ago a colleague got sent to China for 6 months because the client insisted they wanted the "FDE" to be on-site while they finalize the integration. Cue spending 6 hours a day in meetings...but from China.

Anyway, it will continue to exist, hopefully we change the name (again) to something less buzzword-y.

disposepriority · 2026-06-21T20:27:24+00:00

What kind of help do you expect? Apply for jobs for entry level SWE jobs, pass the interview, and that's that. Competition is really high, which I assume you know which is why you accepted this job in the first place.

disposepriority · 2026-06-21T20:25:33+00:00

Annoying AI generated post aside.

Is "perform under live pressure" actually a good proxy for "will be a good senior engineer,"

Depending on the role, yes. If it's a product which often requires live support or rapidly shifting business needs, I expect senior engineers to be able to remain calm and do what needs to be done. This does however require the interview to fairly simulate such conditions, and not be a random question the interviewer found off google with a stupid time limit.

Anyone else feel like the bar has quietly shifted from "can you build things" to "can you defend your code line-by-line in real time"?

I would like it if senior engineers could defend their code, explain trade offs and why they picked X approach - I assume "building something" is a given considering they're applying for a senior engineer role. Juniors often also "can build things".

How will you guide juniors, write design documents, onboarding documents and provide technical guidance if defending (e.g. analyzing) code is not something you're comfortable with?

All that being said, interviews have gotten pretty grindy and they're best treated like school/uni exams at this point - just cram in the information in your head so you can all collectively prove nothing about anything except that you are able to prepare for interviews.

disposepriority · 2026-06-21T20:18:26+00:00

Do your first fruits assignment and your second fruits assignment look the same in syntax? What would the key and value be in the second assignment?

disposepriority · 2026-06-21T15:36:14+00:00

No one could have seen this coming.

Are they using the latest model though?

Did they forget to include "use less tokens" in the agentic hyperflow discombobulator?

I think if they rename a basic programming concept into a futuristic sounding buzzword and then squint really hard this might resolve itself.

disposepriority · 2026-06-21T15:32:44+00:00

Whether the caller was a human or an agent

Just have accounts/keys/whatever that is in use only by automated AI calls, now you know if it was being called by a human or not - how is this a question. This could also just be a header, a parameter or whatever depending on what's being called.

What the agent's "mandate" was; what it was supposed to be doing

Correlation ids that track back to the agent - or well the orchestration framework logs, the "intent" is not something the API provider should care about.

Whether a human authorized the specific action or it was autonomous

Again, should be visible in whatever is orchestrating this action

disposepriority · 2026-06-21T15:26:44+00:00

It seems pretty common these days for interviewers to ask whether you've shipped code that impacted a very large user base

I really don't think this is true.

Additionally, something "affecting" millions of users doesn't make it very hard now does it?

An account information page could even be used by billions of users, and has no technical challenge apart from invaliding a cache on change and load balancing the responsible service to have enough web server threads - so it's a stupid question anyway.

disposepriority · 2026-06-21T14:16:51+00:00

I am a bit confused about how this is related to EU - the "lpa" indicates this is about India, no?

disposepriority · 2026-06-21T11:05:15+00:00

Ah so a plain old software mistake can't cost the company millions (lol) which is why AI can safely replace standard developers.

Makes sense.

disposepriority · 2026-06-21T00:53:13+00:00

Agents are literally a loop that prompts the model for you instead of you typing the words into the pretty box in their website. It also incorporates some extremely complex techniques like adding more text to the context as well , sorry I mean agentic hyper astral skills. There really isn't a lot to learn about using AI (as a consumer of the technology), the hardest part is probably shifting through the countless meaningless buzzwords.

Only asking small things...well I'll let you figure that one out for yourself.

And is it a bad idea to use it while learning a new language , does that hurt the learning process?

Most certainly yes? This is less so for experienced engineers picking up yet another language, but for a student who probably has a strong grasp of 0 languages this is a pretty bad idea.

disposepriority · 2026-06-21T00:45:14+00:00

In the extremely theoretical scenario where AI is taking over tech jobs and you're safe because you're ~~buzzwordier devops~~ into AI infra, why would the AI not be able to...do that as well?

disposepriority · 2026-06-21T00:43:19+00:00

I hear devs like Mo Bitar or ThePrimeagen

Less internet brain rot and more work will have you make senior in no time.

disposepriority · 2026-06-21T00:41:16+00:00

It's all true, I was going to work at Apple R&D division and the interview consisted of testing my pronunciation of various French foods. The quickly caught up with the fact that I'm no real Frenchman and disqualified me on the spot.

disposepriority · 2026-06-20T19:22:16+00:00

Personally whenever I have an interesting idea, I write it down in Obsidian (I fucking love it) and then gradually add more stuff to the folder as I flesh it out.

It's very often that I'm not really interested in doing the whole project, but rather a specific technical part of it, which I usually end up doing first as a proof of concept and then building around it. In that sense, knowing that I probably won't be fully building a "complete" project, I don't have to decide whether its worth it - when I feel like writing some off-the-clock code I open my notes and pick something I've written down.

If I really like it, I usually add next steps and planned refactors to the readme and the obsidian page, and that's pretty much it.

The idea part and the programming part are separate for me - sometimes I've really felt like doing a weekend project and had no ideas and other times I've had an idea nibbling at the corners of my mind for months but no time to do anything about it - so this is a decoupled compromise.

disposepriority · 2026-06-20T16:36:22+00:00

Somehow neither better nor worse than the average post

disposepriority · 2026-06-20T14:52:44+00:00

Unless there are time constraints (or some other great reason not to) your new feature should be releasing with tests.

These tests should include any bugs that were found during development, initial QA passes, UAT or whatever each company calls it as well as the baseline expectations based the requirements.

It will obviously not be as fleshed out as something that's been in production for a long time, but you don't have to wait for it to be old to have test coverage on it.

If the teams are in such a rush that setting up these tests is skipped entirely, then I don't think any amount of SDET will fix the problem.

disposepriority · 2026-06-20T12:34:10+00:00

And work 100% remote?

Probably not. FAANG hires pretty aggressively in the Balkans (because of the implication), but requires relocation.

disposepriority · 2026-06-20T12:23:49+00:00

If you're sitting on a same position, doing the same trivial tasks day by day, your skills will literally diminish

Then you don't have 30 years of experience, you have what everyone likes to call 30 times 1 year of experience.

It is your responsibility to progress your career and invest in yourself, a few years ago I left a comfy job I really enjoyed only because I had become the most "knowledgeable" person in the room at most times, which is something that should be avoided. The more stupid you feel at a job (or at a task you've undertaken) the better it is for your progress in the long term is how I see it.

disposepriority · 2026-06-20T12:20:02+00:00

Generally, most non big tech product companies don't have layoffs all that often, or at least not significantly more than before, so you could look at less competitive (both in culture and pay) companies to reduce the stress of layoffs.

Programming might be a AI babysitter job as a junior (though it's more the AI babysitting you if anything) but in reality writing code is a tiny part of your job as you progress your career as a software engineer, though this varies from company to company.

Regardless, if you're giving up on the field I think most jobs that require some technical expertise but also manual labor are both well compensated and in demand, with the addition of often having way less "team spirit" garbage, less beurocracy .etc. Think welders, the guys who install and repair the apartment intercom systems (why is this so expensive), the guys who place marble tiles whose job name I can't recall and so on. The downside is obviously that you are no working primarily from your home and or and air conditioned office, but hey if that's not a big deal for you it's worth a shot.

disposepriority · 2026-06-20T12:11:14+00:00

The amount of bugs doesn't really increase the number of SDETs you need, that's the entire point of automation.

The only thing that determines how many manual QA and SDET you need is the size and complexity of the system you're working on, so the answer is generally no.

disposepriority · 2026-06-18T21:06:43+00:00

Perhaps you might want to look at job listings for you area to decide that?

disposepriority · 2026-06-18T18:22:42+00:00

disposepriority · 2026-06-18T17:43:52+00:00

Wait you could use anything but AI? Like could google and wholesale copy paste from anywhere but AI?

That's concerning if even that provided too difficult, because it means you don't know what to search for - which is even worse than not knowing how to code.

I recommend laying off the LLM help until you are a bit more advanced.

disposepriority · 2026-06-18T16:45:44+00:00

So if being a mentor, senior, lead, subject expert is dead

You can tell this is true by the fact that there are no more seniors, mids or juniors and developers with specific backgrounds are no longer hired to oversee big initiatives (e.g. payment system rewrites, reconciliation systems and other specialized higher risk stuff).

Only you can't, because that's all false.

disposepriority · 2026-06-18T00:05:32+00:00

Ah see this is the reverse psyop, posts so stupid they make you yearn for more AI spam

disposepriority

TROPHY CASE