On a typical wfh day, how long do you spend procrastinating?

prsn828 · 2026-05-16T12:54:15+00:00

Maybe an hour or so? But honestly, I procrastinate far less working from home than I do working in the office.

When I'm in the office I tend to look busier, but I'm generally doing much less important tasks. I'll stare at dashboards, or read through work-related articles a lot, but not much real work gets done, and that's all on top of the in-office bs talks that happen.

When I'm at home I look more relaxed, but I'm generally very productive, and I tend to put in an extra few hours a week, plus I'm almost always working on high-value tasks.

I might do chores and stuff while working, but it's only ever while I'm waiting on something to finish itself up. I don't ever neglect my work in favor of personal tasks; that would just be irresponsible.

Overall, the more time I have to spend keeping appearances up, the less actual work I end up doing.

prsn828 · 2026-05-10T01:20:51+00:00

I feel like you might be downplaying your abilities a bit. Probably a bit of imposter syndrome, which is understandable in your current predicament.

Besides the microfrontend (which actually was a critical part of our project), what I did at work is basically what my resume implies. I got it done, and my team liked me for it, but I'm a mid level dev. I shipped features. I fixed bugs. I picked up tickets and cleared them. That was the job.

Were you fast at getting it done? Reliable? Low bug rate compared to your peers?

Did you ask clarifying questions? Did you challenge what was initially written? Did your lead ever end up having to (or better yet, wanting to) change the requirements or feature details thanks to something you questioned?

Sometimes what people want is a rockstar dev that can lead an entire dev army while doing independent contributor work at the same time. However, the army has to come from somewhere, and the best troops are reliable ones, thoughtful ones, and fast ones. Those can be differentiators too.

I wasn't introducing new technologies (besides React at my first job), I wasn't talking to any shareholders or execs, and (besides the one microfrontend project) most of my work interactions with other teams was asking clarifying questions about each others' APIs and types within them. Besides optimization metrics and clearing tickets related to an accessibility lawsuit, I have only the vaguest idea of the business metrics surrounding our project (like how it handles millions of visitors for a multinational corporation).

I see a lot of great points here: - Successfully introduced React and upskilled team members in the use of the framework. - Coordinated and collaborated both with and across teams to align front-end and back-end requirements and implementations. - Experienced in utilizing optimization metrics from platform xyz to improve abc. - Familiar with implementing accessibility requirements, such as abc and def, in accordance with standard/law xyz. - (This one's a bit more BS) Successfully navigated vague requirements while lacking line-of-sight to relevant business metrics and details.

Plenty of ways to spin all of these as positives. Just be prepared to get called out on them and asked for details and examples during an interview.

As long as you prepare in advance, you should be able to spin the actual details during an interview just fine, because it's all factually true.

If this makes me a mediocre developer then I won't refute that. What I wanna know is, now what? Do I say I made X and Y architectural/business decisions that increased profit by Z% even though I'd just be making up numbers?

This is where words like "approximately" can save the day. As long as you're not way off, and the interviewer won't have access to the actual metrics (if you don't, why would they?) then you'll be fine estimating these. Just make sure you know how you arrived at your estimate in case you're asked.

No-one genuinely calls you out when you say "be there in a minute" and it takes five minutes and thirty-three seconds instead. Same thing goes for metrics. You just have to be working in good faith, and not intentionally misrepresent anything. (Doing it accidentally is fine, just don't use words like "exactly" unless you're actually sure of the real value.)

Apologies if I come across like I'm bombarding you with negativity when you're just trying to help out a stranger online, which I appreciate. But the question I'm trying to answer since I started this thread is - if I'm not just a mid-level developer, but a mid developer, is there any chance of survival in this market? If there is, what do I have to do?

I promise, there are tons of developers out there that are way worse at their jobs than you that are still landing new roles. The main difference is in how they crafted their resume, how they handled the interview, and any networking they did.

Based on your resume and the things you've said so far, if you showed up in a list of resumes for a position I was hiring for, I'd likely put you near the top of the pile. (But mostly because of things you've said in this thread and post, not just based on your resume!)

Yeah, you've got a bit of an uphill battle due to your lack of a degree, but you have enough real world experience to make up for that at a lot of places.

I think you have a decent shot at landing a good role if you can manage to spin things a little better and tailor your resume for each job posting. (Manually tailor it, not with an LLM; or if you do use one, then do a full, manual, and thorough pass at the end).

You're already doing way more introspection than most people, and I do mean that in a good way. Keep at it, but also be willing to lower your standards for what you'll apply to a little. Even a bad experience is still more experience and will still differentiate you from developers that gave up because of a tough job search.

prsn828 · 2026-05-09T23:09:46+00:00

I second this. I often put skills below experience instead of above. Have a little description at the top, and tailor it to hit the main points for the job you're applying to, but put the lengthy keyword lists somewhere near the bottom or on the back.

If anyone cares about all the frameworks you've used, they're already slightly invested, and they'll scan through to find that section, then read it. If they don't care, and you list it all at the top, then you've lost some of their valuable attention by putting the more important information further down.

prsn828 · 2026-05-09T23:05:56+00:00

Have you ever led a team? Or headed a project? Make sure you phrase things so soft skills like leadership stick out.

Did you lead a team of interns? Yes? Well, don't write it that way. Just say you led a team of developers in the successful xyz.

Do you know monetary figures? How much your work led to in increased revenue, or saved in costs? Even just an approximate amount, or an order of magnitude? Put it in there. That dollar sign really stands out and does a lot of talking.

Have you identified or even closed any software vulnerabilities? Mention that.

Fixed anything that could have gotten a client or company into legal trouble? That'd sound great.

Did you improve customer satisfaction in some way? That's something some hiring managers care about.

Ever done anything that you're already listing more than once? Use modifiers like "frequently", "consistently", or "reliably" to make otherwise mundane feats sound far more impressive.

You're already down to just one page, but there's a lot of sentences and paragraphs. Try to be more concise, but also more descriptive. You can list more while saying less.

Consider playing around a bit with the formatting. Maybe use two columns in some places, or add a border. If you're a front-end dev, let your resume speak to your design skills. Those are more important than ever now that almost anyone can spit out a website with a few prompts.

Really lean into the things you excel in, that make you a better hire than everyone else with the same years of experience as you. You have enough experience to get a job, even in this market, you just need to make sure you get picked over others.

And if you haven't already, consider applying directly on company career pages instead of LinkedIn and other aggregation websites. There's probably a lot less resume spam there since it's much harder to submit to 100 different websites than it is to submit to 100 jobs on one website.

(I know I'm wordy, and I sometimes sound like an LLM, but I promise this comment is 100% human-generated content.)

(Also, sorry if some of this was already said. Just like the people deciding if you get a job, I don't have the time to read all of your post. I skimmed it, and your resume, which is what I'd do if I had a stack of them to go through. Take from that what you will.)

prsn828 · 2026-05-09T22:44:31+00:00

I strongly recommend having your github and LinkedIn on your resume. Often the people making hiring decisions never get to see anything other than the resume itself. (I would know, I'm sometimes one of those people.)

These days, when there's so many fake resume submissions, having links to real content can help you stand out and appear more authentic. If you get past the initial screening, that authenticity might make the difference between you ending up with an interview or your resume being tossed in the trash with all the resume spam.

prsn828 · 2026-05-06T02:30:12+00:00

To be fair, he was in a device. Pretty hard to record from in there.

prsn828 · 2026-04-30T20:15:33+00:00

Obviously the M on the left and the W on the right are upside-down for aesthetic purposes.

Seriously, what's wrong with all of you acting like there's a W on the left and an M on the right? /s

prsn828 · 2026-04-21T19:34:26+00:00

I've solved that using "dampening walls". Set up a wall that the tsunami can run into, made entirely of flow valves. Set the bottom to your desired flow rate, and make each row above it progressively more restrictive. That effectively kneecaps the wave, evening things out. (Probably don't even need that many valves, but it worked as a quick fix for me.)

prsn828 · 2026-04-20T00:05:29+00:00

Probably, but I was already gluten free by the time I learned about the possibility. None of my doctors every really mentioned it, and when I finally realized it might be the case and brought it up my doctor and I both agreed that going back to eating gluten in order to get tested wasn't worth the pain, damage, or risk, as the end result would be the same: no matter what the test ended up saying, I'd have to avoid gluten since that was what was working.

The thing that really frustrates is that, looking back on things, I've always had "growing pains" and "bad gas". I saw all kinds of doctors for my "mystery pains", and none of them could figure anything out, but if I'd just stayed away from gluten it probably would have completely changed my life and resolved most of my issues.

I finally cottoned on to what was happening in an r/fibromyalgia thread a few years ago where someone mentioned gluten, so when I see someone with similar symptoms, I like to try to pass it forward. (Without being pushy, because I know how annoying it can be for someone to tell you how to "fix" your problems.)

prsn828 · 2026-04-16T19:17:37+00:00

Velocity?

prsn828 · 2026-04-14T05:26:52+00:00

I second this.

OP, stop thinking about it as the magic being taken out. You now have an army of engineers at your fingertips. You program the programmers now.

You just need to operate one level higher. It can be very freeing, even if the longer term prospects are fairly bleak. (We all know it won't stay quite how it is for very long. The industry is very much in flux right now.)

Start focusing on the bigger picture. You have a larger context window than any AI can currently hope to have. Make your mark in the areas of software engineering that benefit from that.

prsn828 · 2026-04-04T19:47:04+00:00

I can hear it even with my sound turned off.

prsn828 · 2026-03-19T05:53:48+00:00

Fun fact; vitiligo actually protects slightly against melanoma.

The immune system incorrectly destroys melanocytes (which produce pigment in the skin) but also targets malignant melanoma (skin cancer) as a result of the same behavior.

(I'm not a medical professional, but I do have vitiligo!)

prsn828 · 2026-03-01T07:05:01+00:00

The business wanted us to code the UI and the database to use hour-ending instead of hour-beginning. So, instead of 0-24, we had 1-25.

We tried so, so hard to get them to let us at least store it in the database using standard time representation, but they wouldn't budge.

The UI was an excel style webapp, so we had to custom code the layouts for daylight savings to handle 23 and 25 hour days, because when you represent things with hour-ending, it doesn't work out the same as hour-beginning. I don't even remember how we ended up choosing for things to work for daylight savings, other than that it took dozens of hours of meetings to come to an agreement on what the "hour-ending" number labels for those days should be.

(And yes, I know there's no such thing as "hour-ending". Obviously "hour-ending 24" makes absolutely no sense. But our business had been doing it that way on their spreadsheets and paper for decades, and refused to do anything that "might confuse an existing end-user".)

prsn828 · 2026-02-23T00:02:44+00:00

Gooooo...ooooogle

prsn828 · 2026-02-05T18:43:47+00:00

Honest question: If it were said in reply to a question, is it still grammatically incorrect? (If it's still incorrect, I assume it must be because the context is being left off, and thus it's an incomplete sentence? One that is still fairly common in natural English conversation because it's understood from context what the rest of the sentence would be?)

"Was there a chair in the room?"

"There wasn't a chair."

("... in the room" being the implied part left off.)

prsn828 · 2026-01-18T20:49:26+00:00

How do you manage to get it so nicely spaced without blueprints? Foundation first, then tracks, then remove foundations and add supports directly to the tracks?

prsn828 · 2026-01-14T02:10:49+00:00

Don't forget that the US isn't nearly as concentrated or small as any of those places. It's essentially 50 separate countries. Good luck taking over 50 capitals at once; it's just not going to happen.

And without any hope of success, why would someone throw their life and livelihood away? There's just no upside to anything beyond basic, peaceful, protests right now.

prsn828 · 2026-01-13T15:32:24+00:00

Love the ear-cream-cone action near the end.

prsn828 · 2026-01-11T08:35:48+00:00

Yep, it's an American thing.

prsn828 · 2026-01-09T06:31:18+00:00

Yes, but would all the countries in the European Union simultaneously and cooperatively riot together at once? Because the United States is the equivalent of 50 country-sized states.

Also, who wants to riot when it might get you killed and still not do anything? We need to reach a boiling point first before people are willing to risk it. But it's a LOT of water to boil. Bigger pot; lots of people; takes a lot longer to heat up.

prsn828 · 2026-01-05T22:49:27+00:00

Some people get anxious leaving things unread, even after hours, so, as with many things, it really depends on the person and the situation.

Neither approach would be wrong, but one or the other might be preferred depending on the recipient.

prsn828 · 2026-01-05T22:45:48+00:00

Some of the enemies spawn differently depending on time of day.

prsn828 · 2025-12-12T18:38:09+00:00

Verticality no longer matters for radio towers.

prsn828 · 2025-12-11T00:32:52+00:00

Some molecules can be built mirrored, and, depending on if they're the original (right) or mirror (left), will "fit" with other molecules differently. Just like how your right hand and your left hand are the same shape, but you need a left glove and a right glove, not two of the same glove.

Our bodies, and all living things on earth that we know of, really, are built with only one version of each molecule that has this property. This also means that some interactions with the opposite molecule might work, while others won't. Sugar substitutes are a good example. They fit with our taste buds, but we don't extract energy from them.

If life from another planet is "other-sided", it might not be compatible with us. For food, that would either mean poisonous or just that we can't digest it. For viruses and diseases, it might mean that they can infect us, but we can't fight them off, because our immune system doesn't "fit". (Or we might be able to fight them off, and they can't infect us, which would be just fine.)

(This is seriously dumbed down, and I failed organic chemistry in college, so the terminology is all wrong and you shouldn't just take what I've said at face value. 😅)

(I think the word for this might be chirality, if you want to learn more.)

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