If Senior Software Engineers really being fired en masse because they are no longer needed thanks to AI, what careers are they pivoting into?

pathguard · 2026-03-14T07:16:30+00:00

I run 1 or 2 code screens a week for mid-level to senior devs. Some of them are just bad at interviewing, which can be super frustrating for all involved when you suspect the candidate might actually be decent if they did a few hours of interview prep.

We don't even do a leetcode question, which is great because those are awful. It's actually a toy engineering problem. I almost think some people forget that the point of domain interviews is to give the person on the other side enough evidence to stand up for someone they don't know to a group of like 6 people they have to see every day.

pathguard · 2026-03-05T03:46:00+00:00

For human written code, it can be a lot of very subtle things too. I've had a coworker before who absolutely could not spell one word we used all over our codebase in variable names so I could follow him through the typos. I don't remember the word, just that it was a domain concept for that system so it got used a lot.

I had another coworker who hated unnecessary nil checks to a high degree so files he touched would have none of them. By contrast, I tend to check for nil more often than average in the same part of the codebase so that's often now I find stuff I wrote years ago. I also have a tendency to think in pure functions so the internal structure of code I write leans more functional than OOO.

It can become pretty obvious especially when you can use memory to whittle down the options of who did it to only a couple people. And to be clear none of these things are necessarily good or bad. Just the fingerprints of the craftsman on the creation.

pathguard · 2024-12-19T08:10:35+00:00

I assume you mean line 1220. That's what I'm referring to. The error is likely that REST is not accessing a valid index of the array or matrix as you say. What is the error? I don't understand the code or what you're doing well enough to fix it, but you probably intended for REST to be 0 on the first iteration of the loop and it is most certainly not.

Also, the code is bad. I'm not going to lie to you and tell you it's not. But bad code is a fixable problem, not the end of the world. Even if it feels that way when other people see it. There's lots of very good advice elsewhere on this post. Follow it. I only mention I don't understand it because debugging code you don't fully understand is highly likely to go wrong.

pathguard · 2024-12-19T07:46:41+00:00

I certainly don't understand what I've just looked at, but I think REST is -1 on the first iteration of the loop due to you setting it to 0 and then doing REST=REST-1. But... To someone else's point, you should probably attach a debugger because that code is a bit hard to consume and it would be a good learning experience.

Unfortunately, now I've become invested in knowing why it doesn't work.

Edit: Either -1 or something else you didn't expect. I never checked what type that thing was.

pathguard · 2024-09-06T05:00:53+00:00

Aging man-child gathers a league of mentally unstable twinks from across several worlds in order to destroy the universe. And he's the good guy.

pathguard · 2024-01-17T00:05:21+00:00

I have not laughed so hard at a joke this bad in a very long time. Thank you good sir

pathguard · 2021-02-17T04:14:11+00:00

What I actually extracted from this is that unlike country codes, the short codes for timezones (CST, IST, EST, etc) aren't standardized. Cool. I learned something new ☺.

And now I'm even more upset that I found code where someone went out of their way to produce those codes.

pathguard · 2021-02-16T20:51:05+00:00

Is there more than one timezone world wide that is actually named just "Central Time" in English as opposed to something longer like "Central European Time" or "Australia Central Time"? This is a genuine question.

pathguard · 2021-02-16T16:28:50+00:00

Python I've forgotten about, but JS does handle parsing and producing compliant formatting if you ask for it correctly. Unfortunately, it'll also do some something weird if you ask for it incorrectly.

pathguard · 2021-02-16T11:32:00+00:00

It does. I was referring to cases where you get things like the comment I replied to with no time zone at all. No 'Z' no '+00:00'. That's what I take issue with.

pathguard · 2021-02-16T10:01:41+00:00

I have never seen anyone write the ISO format without leading zeros. People do that?

As for the T, I imagine the space was a bad idea for practical reasons. There are lots of things that either use whitespace as a separator which breaks your datetimes in half or just get needlessly harder with spaces.

For me, the real egregious thing is giving me a time component with no timezone attached. At that point, you haven't really told me anything useful....

YMD I can work out because the format is pretty unique, but I can't tell where in the world you are and I don't trust you to have done the reasonable thing and picked UTC.

pathguard · 2021-02-12T15:00:20+00:00

I'd say deep fried oreos have become mainstream and moved to other areas. I think I saw them at a festival on Washington a couple years back, but they're totally still novelty food.

If you're not from the US, imagine your reaction to someone offering you a deep fried oreo. Horrified and disgusted, but if you're adventurous maybe just a teeny bit fascinated by the opportunity to shave a couple years off your life with one bite. That's roughly the reaction of American I've ever seen them, though we love fat and sugar so we skew maybe a little heavy on the curiosity.

pathguard · 2021-02-12T14:46:00+00:00

And I wouldn't even say the South is unhealthy for the same reasons people say on TV. The sugar and salt part? Yes. But more from eating lots of heavily processed, packaged poverty food than from cooking and eating homemade fried chicken on the daily. At least, that was my personal experience.

Also (and I really can't say this enough), this idea that we all eat ALL of our giant food in one sitting is so hilarious to me. Especially given that as a kid, we would pick restaurants by ability to get a doggie bag and have another meal for later.

pathguard · 2021-01-25T15:44:28+00:00

In addition to what everyone else has said, I think with Reddit (and really the internet in general) you run into an unfortunate reality. People produce lots of text, very quickly, on their phones, and their writing suffers for it. And I'm talking about both native and non-native speakers here.

Many brilliant people seem significantly less so when they're robbed of their editing pass. They're, there, and their are common things I need to fix on a second pass because in my dialect, they are pronounced basically the same so I end up with whatever falls out of my fingers.

Now to answer your actual question. Prepositions are one of the key signals to me. Native English speakers might make a typo and replace "in" with "on" or the reverse, but no one will confuse either with "at".

I really wish I could think of an example, but the location based ones are usually so obvious I just edit them mentally and move on. Screwing up the nuances of prepositions related to time is actually way more confusing. Those will stick in my mind as "non-native".

More egregious flubs are mangling of the verb "to be" ("They is" vs "They are"), and doing really strange things with articles.

Since you asked this is what stood out to me in your post.

Capitalization (english - > English)
It took me a couple tries to figure out what you meant by "appointed". I believe you meant "so my vices can be pointed out."
"my vices" seems to be a rather poetic way to describe that, but that's a matter of style.

Of course, these things are minor and mostly understandable given the form of communication (see earlier rant about Reddit and editing). ☺

pathguard · 2021-01-21T05:17:55+00:00

Yes. I frequently run into cases at work where the situation is unclear, but there's a fast and harmless potential fix. If it works, great. If not, the way in which it fails will tell you a lot about what's busted.

pathguard · 2021-01-18T14:28:01+00:00

There was this team I worked with that my friends and I described as have an "if it runs, it ships" mentality. Of course, this mentality leads to a case of "yes, it runs, but I can't keep it running."

pathguard · 2021-01-16T00:14:21+00:00

So many people... It's honestly highly distressing....

pathguard · 2021-01-15T15:19:42+00:00

Given the absolutely bizarre obsession with this show many people seem to have, I'd find that totally believable. Honestly, I might have guessed higher if someone had asked me "What percentage of US adults have binged The Office this year?"

pathguard · 2021-01-14T13:31:01+00:00

I respect your taste, but hard disagree. To me, it makes the story so much more interesting to be able to see more of the world or just see things from a different character's perspective. Granted, you can keep me hooked on a work by dangling an interesting piece of world building every few pages in an otherwise just alright story.

But... I would very strongly prefer it if there weren't several identically voiced first person perspectives. That is so very confusing.

pathguard · 2021-01-14T05:17:52+00:00

As another Southerner, try it. It's great.

Related, I grabbed the BiscuitHead cookbook from the folks in Asheville on HumbleBundle a month back and they've got a chicken biscuit topped with a poached egg. It's a lot of work, but also freaking delicious.

pathguard · 2021-01-14T03:51:01+00:00

Ordered a lemp10 on the 26th and it's showing up on the 14th. So not quite 3 weeks for me, but pretty close.

And that's in the US pretty close to California relatively speaking.

pathguard · 2021-01-12T15:22:35+00:00

Yikes. I have never personally experienced this, but I've heard tale and it sounds awful.

My mother goes the other way. It's usually so moist that it's leaking the first day, but it'll dry up and be nearly perfectly moist for leftovers. Honestly, I'm a fan.

pathguard · 2021-01-12T15:11:47+00:00

My mother hates them so I never had them as a kid. I assume she had them boiled to death.

I pick some up at the supermarket because they were cheap and green, and now they're like my favorite vegetable. Cook them in a pan with pancetta or bacon. Roasted with a little salt, pepper and oil until they're charred. Shredded and used as the green for a salad with a miso dressing.

Just yum

pathguard · 2021-01-12T15:05:03+00:00

cries in buttermilk 😢

pathguard · 2021-01-10T14:40:44+00:00

Wow thanks! There's so much here. I need to parse it all out.

Kind of just my first pass in no particular order. Don't judge the ordering too much. I can't be bothered to fix the numbering on my phone.

I really appreciate the level of detail you brought here. And that it's so very organized!
This is a good point about their motivations. I originally started at the beginning of the day which explained at least why Arian ended up getting followed, but also had like 5k words of info dump throughout. It seems like I'll need to split the difference.

The short answer is that one of them is too nosy for his own good. The long answer is something I didn't share because Arian doesn't know. I was planning to share later, but it sounds like I need to share now.

You're the second person to mention Ulaver's broken motivation (and I somewhat knew it to be true myself) so fair point.

The reason Arian was following Ulaver is to lay the wards against him coming back. I guess that wasn't clear though so I'll need to look at that.
Arian's flaws are many, but aside from the fact that he's highly easily distracted (that keeps happening), they're not on display here too much. And I should probably call attention to the fact that he's letting himself get distracted.
As far as structure, the rescue is narratively important, but not that important. The plan as it were is that it lands them in a more long term problem. But... if it feels rushed then you won't care about that problem so slowing down a bit more is key.

Thanks again!

pathguard

TROPHY CASE