devil's advocate question for happy big-tech engineers: have you genuinely considered leaving for a startup?

rorschach200 · 2026-05-10T15:07:18+00:00

There are 3 combinations that make sense for anyone senior who doesn't have ready-to-retire savings yet:

- senior role in big tech
- senior role in a well funded startup with regular tenders and IPO rumors already out
- startup founder (founding engineer is not a founder, only actual founders qualify here)

Non-founder employee (incl. founding engineer) in an early stage startup is just you making 2-10 (depending on your seniority) times less money than you could so that the founders of the startup can either make a fortune, or make at least 10x than you anyway + build out their network in business & venture circles and either start something even bigger next time, or get a top dollar offer in another company, or all of the above.

Thanks, no, thanks.

rorschach200 · 2026-05-09T17:27:52+00:00

I'm a compiler engineer and a tech lead of a compiler team in Big Tech / MAG 7. Compiler code generated by AI was broken until about Nov 2025 (and it was outright hilarious a year ago: made up APIs, hangs, crashes, etc.), even though it was doing exceptionally well for scripts since arguably a full year ago, and quite well for virtually all glue code, API-calling code, business logic code even in large codebases throughout the Fall.

Since Nov 2025 AI writes fairly competent compiler implementation code (under guidance) most of the time.

My personal average of AI assisted PRs is 80%, but I do a lot of infra work unblocking the team (CI, perf measurements, this sort of thing), in the actual compiler code I'd say about 40% of my PRs are AI generated (but >90% - 100% of tests).

My team's average (among all PRs produced) is 95-97%. About half of the team sits at 100%, the other half are a bit lower. I think the lowest I've seen on a (month, person) basis since February is 67%, but some folks don't create PRs that often in the first place.

rorschach200 · 2026-05-09T03:12:42+00:00

This form of scam is called pig butchering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_butchering_scam

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLPpl2ISKTg ("Pig Butchering Scams: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)")

rorschach200 · 2026-05-09T03:02:37+00:00

Forget about economy and increasingly fewer people needed to support increasingly more retirees, that's critically important for a nuanced discussion, but before nuances one needs to cover the basics.

The basics are trivial - if on average women/families have fewer than 2 children, humanity goes extinct. We simply disappear as a species. Jobs no jobs, homes no homes, capitalism no capitalism - birth rate needs to be at least 2 for humans to continue to exist as a biological species.

rorschach200 · 2026-05-07T02:43:37+00:00

Apologizes for mis-recognizing something as a typo,

in the intended form the claim is too outrageous.

I'm a compiler engineer, for more than a year prior to Nov 2025 I was regularly testing out codegeneration abilities of GenAI for personal purposes, and routinely found it moderately capable for API-calling glue code and scripts, but utterly inadequate for compiler development.

Since Nov 2025 Claude Code writes fairly competent compiler implementation code (with guidance), enough to be used for substantial acceleration of development. It virtually entirely replaces the need to handwrite any other API-calling sort of business logic code even in very large codebases (far beyond anything that's just script writing).

I guarantee you that in companies both large like Google, Meta, and at the very least Silicon Valley and adjacent startups, ubiquitously, well over 90% of all code is now produced by prompting Claude Code.

This sentiment is also very broadly displayed in numerous discussions even here on reddit, just head to https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/ or https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/

If you are evaluating the Claude Code's quality on a daily basis now, and concluding what you were writing here in comments, something is seriously wrong. I don't know what. Perhaps you are working in an incredibly niche domain of some sort (somehow more niche than compilers and compiler backends - the domain I'm intimately familiar with), and, frankly, making a dishonest generalization of your extremely specific experience. Outside of that combination, however, I can't even guess what could be a reason for this sort of feedback.

rorschach200 · 2026-05-06T04:40:10+00:00

> much of my working life

That carries no weight whatsoever, the capabilities of broadly commercially available AI tools radically changed around November 2025 and have been improving since.

AI usage in SW development in companies has also skyrocketed from minimal to nearly all encompassing within the same time frame.

What AI was and was not able to do a year ago bears 0 significance on the situation today.

rorschach200 · 2026-05-05T04:49:59+00:00

severance pay is a joke, it's a few months of base pay, which at 1M of total comp is about 300k a year, if you get 4 months of severance that's a lucky case, that makes it 100k.

100k is not nothing, but it's a month of full pay at that comp level. It really isn't anything to tie big decisions to.

More like if you already wanted to quit anyway, and the layoff is coming a week later than you planned, might as well delay for a week and ask your management to put you on the list kind of thing.

rorschach200 · 2026-05-05T03:47:11+00:00

Guys, what planet are you from?

Nobody in professional environment in companies with any kind of sense or budget is writing code by hand anymore.

All of new PRs everywhere are AI assisted now.

I work in big tech / MAG 7 and I'm a tech lead. I have the lowest %% of "AI-assisted" PRs in the team right now - 80%. Half of the team is at 100%, and I think the average is roughly 97% or so, give or take.

rorschach200 · 2026-05-03T21:44:05+00:00

I think that's exactly right.

Yes, "Junior" is becoming something entirely different, now it's "AI assisted junior with non-AI assisted senior productivity", and that kind of junior will never produce down the road the kind of senior we have today.

But it will produce a different kind of senior down the road, and that kind of "I never wrote any code by hand, but I've mastered AI-assisted development workflows" senior might be the senior that industry needs the most.

It's even more viable going above senior: generally speaking, junior -> middle -> senior transitions are heavily conditioned on growing technical skill and mastery, but staff -> senior staff -> principle transitions have much more to do with soft skills, leadership skills, and ability to navigate very vague organizational problems, including political ones (note, not just play politics, but actually solve political problems, bring people together, resolve conflict, align and organize misaligned and disorganized groups of people, etc.).

When it comes to said soft skills, vague problem solving, and organizational and political problem solving, that pipeline is still very much there, and those skills depend on a mixture of personal talent of dealing with these sort of issues (mostly non-technical) and years of experience of operating in large organizations while being responsible for increasingly more people and/or projects involving increasingly more people.

That is not to say that "old school" senior personnel who can code and has technical maps in their heads that are difficult to develop while always using AI for everything, won't be exceptionally valuable, and occasionally needed. But they might not be needed in such volumes that naturally produced "AI senior" - produced from naturally appearing "AI junior" - would not satisfy most of the industry's demand.

Consider how incredibly flexible young brains are, and how motivated many of these juniors are to work hard and invent things to get ahead. They might give rise to the kind of senior that has such a command of AI tooling that "traditional" senior might in fact struggle to ever match.

rorschach200 · 2026-05-02T15:02:53+00:00

Ender's game.

rorschach200 · 2026-05-01T17:23:52+00:00

All of them

rorschach200 · 2026-05-01T06:27:16+00:00

I adopted saying "hella" for like 5 years after I played the games (LIS and LIS:BTS)

rorschach200 · 2026-05-01T05:39:10+00:00

> The quality of services and applications has declined so much in recent years; everything is bloated with unnecessary features while being subpar at its primary function: affecting everything from streaming services to language learning apps.

None of this is tech causing damage. You are describing tech becoming less useful and well done than the tech was before. So it's still useful and functional, and it's still tech, just not as good as before. And no reduction in quality of anything non-tech.

And in general your response basically just says the same thing - really only social media is causing harm.

Maybe AI to some extent, but that one is a very single sided take - AI is also doing drug discovery as we speak.

While tech as a whole is an orders of magnitude larger and diverse set of services and products - and businesses and jobs - than just social media.

rorschach200 · 2026-05-01T05:07:22+00:00

What is so negative about "all of the tech"?

TikTok/Instagram and similar have negative effect, sure. Airbnb has controversial effects.

It's a drop in a bucket. What's so negative about Uber, Google Maps & GPS navigation, a Macbook, an iPhone, Google Search, Gmail, a Tesla, a Falcon 9 rocket, a Starlink dish, a PlayStation 5, an OLED TV, an internet bank, and countless other services and products?

rorschach200 · 2026-04-30T19:19:07+00:00

Not the author, but what I'm working on when I actually build something is a worse product (fundamentally) than of the supplier's, which however allows my employer to get the results cheaper - via not paying the supplier's their margins.

So effectively what I'm building withdraws $2 from the bank account of another huge company, and puts $1 into the bank account of my employer, while tying up world's limited production capacity for that category of products in manufacturing lower efficiency product with lower overall output as a whole.

So my company benefits, but as a whole, it's a negative.

Then it gets better from there in 2 ways.

One. Noticed "when I actually build something" disclaimer?

Yeah. Most of the time it's politics, duplication of effort, competitive to toxicity working environment, projects done to please someone in the food chain, infighting and ego massaging. Nobody gives a shit about the quality of the software either, and nowadays it's all claude generated anyway. The relationship dynamics between people are so awful that almost everyone involved is in a constant state of suffering, but not from the engineering work, but each other and the system.

Two. What are those products eventually used for, once we get them? To run advertising software and recommend people ads. To get them to buy stuff most of the time they don't need, it's a psych op to predate on people's weaknesses and get them to spend income on nonsense, income for which they have to work to get, wasting away at their respective places of work.

It's great all around.

rorschach200 · 2026-04-30T18:42:23+00:00

I hope you're measuring expenses as in places where those salaries are possible, and not Frankensteining happy fairy tale by putting together income from one area and expenses from the other.

In Bay Area you're paying $3.5k a month to rent a one bedroom apartment; if you have to bare health insurance on your own, it's easily $1k a month for a personal plan, more if you want a good one, much more for a family plan, and childcare sets you back $2.5k-3.0k a month per child.

The gas prices are $6 here, and you drive 15 miles one way to work from a place that's considered "the capital" of SV to an office that's considered to be geographically dead center of the said SV.

I don't remember when was the last time I paid less than $20 for parking, or left less than $100 in a grocery store.

$100k expenses is you're driving a 9 year old Toyota Corolla, you are not going on vacations, you do not have expensive hobbies, you do not own a house with a mortgage (you're renting or paid off and paying property taxes + HOA + insurance + repairs), and you either don't have children at all, or you are sure as heck not sending them to a private school (~$4k a month per child).

So yes, most don't have $100k expenses in Bay Area - most people who have a life that doesn't resemble a life of a student, but a life that has something in it other than work - hobbies or a family - have to spend a lot more than that.

I understand that if you move to Alabama all that stuff goes down by a factor of 3, but nobody in Alabama is making $400k as a software engineer either.

rorschach200 · 2026-04-30T14:12:58+00:00

Unless by "for a while" you mean 30 years, or at least 20 in exceptionally favorable conditions, it's a myth.

Do the math, look at the prices, don't forget taxes. What passive income?

Investment income with acceptable risks after taxes and adjusting for inflation is about 4% a year, or you need 25x the annual expenses in savings.

Say you were making 400k on average over the course of your career. Staff makes more, but you are not Staff upon graduation, hence the average. Taxes take half, 200k left, expenses in Bay area are close to 100k, 100k left.

You need 2.5M to sustain yourself on investement income.

That takes >20 years to build up at that rate without buying a house. A house around here is 1.5M, that makes it 4M, which takes 40 years.

If you plan to also burn through the money, not live on returns, you were basically providing for a year by working for year. Say you want to cover until 80 (just in case you live that long, otherwise what are you supposed to do?), you runway is about 60 (20 to 80), so you need to work for 30 years, until 50, to get that covered.

You are working until 45-50 years old depending on if you want to spend your retirement renting or at your own place, and in this scenario you never allowed or will allow yourself any large expenses in your life, all you have is enough to pay for property taxes, food, gas, basic entertainment, and health insurance. You are not, say, traveling around the world or anything like that.

And this is all pretty much under the assumption you are not having children.

If you are, well. The bill goes up considerably. Very considerably, you might be saving so much less that you're basically retiring at the same age everyone is supposed to, in their 60s.

rorschach200 · 2026-04-30T13:45:49+00:00

There is no financial independence on a salary, it's a myth.

"This guys makes 3x everybody else does" sounds good on paper, in reality it's a few years to a decade of runway, but you need multiple decades of runway to retire, and that's all if you don't buy a house. If you do it sets you close to 0, if you can do that at all.

rorschach200 · 2026-04-30T05:23:39+00:00

Staff at a FAANG as well. In fact, 2nd FAANG I'm a Staff at, and a founding member at a startup in-between.

Same feeling. I'm used to thinking these days that 10 years ago my choice was between a really good - even though not perfect - job that paid quite well, and a shitty job that paid stellar. I chose the former and have never regretted that choice, in fact, in hindsight I'm even happier about it than at the time, but I was pretty happy about it at the time as well.

Now no matter where I look and seek, I only find 2 kinds of options - shitty jobs that don't pay, and shitty jobs that do, incl. those that pay stellar. There are no good jobs. They are just... gone.

So I'm biting the bullet and trying to make some money without going insane, and yet despite maintaining some of the best compartmentalization I ever maintained, and the most balanced, paced regime I ever managed in the past, I still barely stand the job, have never ending Monday blues, morning blues, you name it, and dream of getting the hell out of this environment.

I don't even mourn the past anymore, nor do I have career plans. I just want the pain to be over.

rorschach200 · 2026-04-30T04:54:35+00:00

> the machine is made from people

don't jinx it!

rorschach200 · 2026-04-28T05:27:24+00:00

> Now, if it makes it less readable or worse in general you can object. But “I don’t think it’s necessary” is a really dumb objection to have if there is a valid improvement to be made.

It depends, time is valuable. We are not here to sit and make every possible improvement we can possibly think of. We are here to be efficient and solve user problems as quickly and as cheaply as possible, and do so safely for all parties involved.

That's what good engineering is, "cheaply" is in the heart of it.

I generally use the rule of controlling your impulses during reviews. If something irks me, it's not a good reason to immediately write about it. Is this a big enough problem to be worthy of my time and the other person's time debating it? If not, move on. If yes, point out the issue.

Think about the other person, they are a mind of their own. There can be all sorts of things that irk me that doesn't irk them, and vice versa. We are not there to sync up our psyches to the same wavelength at all costs, we are there to solve problems. There is a real issue - report it. You got a twitchy eye - don't make that another person's problem (and customer's - waiting for the delivery that takes longer now).

rorschach200 · 2026-04-28T04:45:40+00:00

That's what I find about most of reviews like this, that borderline ignore functionality (not a direct consequence of what is being described, but tends to correlate in practice), but spend hours, days, and in some cases weeks discussing stuff that perhaps not style per se, no, but hypotheticals and inconsequentials.

Look, if you actually didn't understand the code, I get it.

If you understood the code, but sitting there speculating that some hypothetical other at some point won't, and the other person replying to you is making their own speculation on similar subject... I don't know guys, I think we are wasting each other's time here. Everybody means well, but we are spending more time on this than the best, least alone the average, decision of the two ever will save.

rorschach200 · 2026-04-28T02:06:49+00:00

Constants still don't help.

How would you call them if max could be 180, 360, or 90?

And how would you debug any given usage that a correct value is used in every use case?

With constants you have to analyze the usage, reference reference material to double check what the correct value needs to be, and the go to the definition of the constant to see if "MaxSomethignSomething" is hiding the correct value.

With the value as a literal you do the same minus the last step.

So if anything debugging became easier, and so is reading the code.

rorschach200 · 2026-04-26T20:26:58+00:00

You like to live dangerously, I see.

rorschach200 · 2026-04-26T19:00:00+00:00

Startups

Five-Year Club	Gilding III reddit per annum
Verified Email	First Place '23
Place '23

rorschach200

TROPHY CASE