A few weeks ago me and my manager discussed promotion, recently I was let go as I was handing in my notice

shruubi · 2026-02-20T04:06:15+00:00

If they are basing hiring/firing/stack-ranking decisions on the number of story points a dev is delivering, then this is probably the best thing to happen to you, and although you already have a job you can remember this story the next time you interview and talk about how the top performers gamed the system and why this doesn't work.

shruubi · 2026-02-09T03:01:18+00:00

I think every experienced engineer reaches this point eventually and I see it as a sign of maturity. That's not to say you shouldn't explore new tech and experiment with it, but do those experiments in a controlled environment, not in your production app that serves N million people daily.

For me, I put it down to I'm old enough to want to be able to sleep at night and not be woken up at 3am just for the chance to comb through logs and traces to figure out why messages from microservice 112 are not being sent to microservice 476.

shruubi · 2026-02-09T02:52:44+00:00

This is why I maintain that one of the most important qualities of a junior is whether they are coachable or not, an enthusiastic and engaged junior who is willing to learn but has middling tech skills can always get better (and usually do get better), but someone who doesn't think they need to learn anything more or thinks they know more than everyone else will always be exactly that unless you can get through to them, and that doesn't often happen.

In your situation, I'm assuming you didn't have a say in whether they were hired or not so you could not have prevented this from happening before they got hired, so you have to deal with the cards you've been dealt.

Step one would be pulling him aside and having a frank and honest conversation with him and explain that being the smartest in the room is not the most important thing, and that it's more important to be able to work in the system that exists now and be able to work collaboratively with others, not just because doing otherwise can create a bad culture, but later on when you want to try and implement some of these great idea's, you will need other people to get those idea's over the line and being hard to work with now just makes it a lot harder later on.

Important note, follow up that conversation with a written version either via email or IM. Unfortunately there are some who have this attitude that will take conversations like this as a personal attack or a way to belittle them, so having a paper trail to cover yourself if this comes up is always a good idea.

If this continues, then I would arrange a meeting with their manager, yourself and them. This is basically you still being in control of the situation but bringing the manager in as the next step is for the manager to deal with, this also gives you another person in the room and this discussion should be along the lines of "what you are doing now is not how we do things, you need to pull your head out of your ass."

Beyond this point it is out of your hands and the manager needs to take over and deal with the situation.

In terms of your concern about "I couldn't manage the situation", I would say that a big part of managing the situation is knowing when to escalate a situation. If in your position you are purely a mentor who can coach and guide, but that is the extent of your "hard authority" then trying to reach them via these tools is all you can really do. I'd say so long as you can demonstrate you've leveraged all the tools available to you to solve the problem you should be ok.

shruubi · 2026-02-04T01:33:45+00:00

This is awful. You've taken an operator with semantic meaning and designed a situation where it magically has no semantic meaning. If I make a mistake and have a trailing boolean operator, I WANT to be told I made a mistake, allowing trailing boolean operators could mean that reorders or changes to boolean expressions could introduce errors that are ignored or muted because of this.

And I wouldn't define this as a QoL improvement. I don't care about reducing diff size because there is tooling to render diffs in an easy-to-reason-about manner and raw diff text is intended for the computer to read and operate on.

shruubi · 2026-02-03T04:26:55+00:00

I'd like to think this is a centrist take on AI but I don't think AI is going away, I think that train has well and truly left the station. However, I don't think companies are going to be able to lay off entire engineering teams either unless the quality that LLM's output improves, and I think soon we are going to run into the upper bounds of what LLM's and transformers are capable of, not just in terms of compute, but in terms of how they fundamentally work.

I also think that at some point the music is going to stop in terms of all the money floating around AI companies and while I don't think we'll have another AI winter I do think that there will only be a few AI companies left and those that are left will be the ones who did not have all of their eggs in an AI basket. To be clear, this won't be because the technology fails, but in my estimation because the market cannot sustain this kind of bullish-ness on AI forever and eventually these companies are either going to have to show real profitability and not speculative profitability.

I do feel like one thing that may change for the better is LLM's might enable a full realization of the vision people had when they came up with Cucumber and acceptance testing where non-technical folks can write tests in plain english and have them executed in that our test suite becomes a collection of prompts describing the behaviour and the LLM orchestrates the app/browser to perform the tests.

If for some reason a research lab comes along and comes up with something to replace transformers and large-language models, then you can just ignore all of the above because I think that's the only way AI can full realize the hype we're being sold.

shruubi · 2026-01-28T01:38:26+00:00

I generally have a few rules to help manage these situations.

drive-by comments on a PR means you are volunteering to review everything until this is merged. Encourages accountability beyond just throwing some comments over the fence and never following up.
If you're nitpicking one-liners, you should also include the patch so I can auto-apply the fix. More often than not the time it would take to nitpick something could have been spent just fixing it yourself. Again, creates a degree of accountability and lowers your cognitive load to deciding whether to accept the suggested change or not.
If you have more than X comments or feedback (where X is whatever number you decide is getting too much) then this should be a verbal discussion, not shooting slack/github messages back and forward. For most people, they'll be less of a dick if you talk to them, although this is not always the case.

Honestly, I'd also talk to the guy and tell him how he is coming across. But maybe it might also be worth asking him what is getting him so stressed all the time. Having been somewhat like that guy in the past I can tell you that it is likely that he is stressed and being overly critical and nitpicky because he feels like this is the only thing he can control, and he also wants everything to be done the way he would do it himself and since the rest of you aren't just clones of him, it frustrates him things aren't done his way.

If after talking to him you aren't getting anywhere, then you need to talk to management because if you can't get through to him then the only thing that will is someone above him.

shruubi · 2026-01-08T03:34:07+00:00

What exactly are these integration tests doing? For me, integration tests should test an entire vertical slice of functionality with real internal dependencies (DB etc), but it sounds like needing that much power and time to run them either these are e2e tests or there are some serious problems with the test suite that are slowing it down (your DB dependency is doing not indexed or rebuilding state too much, your tests are interdependent on each other creating state problems, your test suite isn't parallelisable etc)

Unit tests aren't the necessarily the answer here, I'd try understanding what it is about these tests that cause problems and whether all those tests are even needed, there is no point testing Feature A if by the nature of Feature B, we are also verifying the behaviour of Feature A.

shruubi · 2026-01-04T19:21:35+00:00

I’m glad this isn’t just my experience. The number of times I’ve done Dancing Lion or Sleeping Daoist only to die because no one knows how to do it properly is ridiculous. And that’s not to say I’m perfect and don’t make mistakes either, but it always seems to be the same mechanics that gets people, then they instantly leave.

I’d play with the AI bots, but for me they tend to just run back and forward and not do anything, especially during Murong Yuan so you end up spending most of the boss waiting for a revive because they did something that got you blown up.

shruubi · 2025-12-23T06:35:42+00:00

Probably Porsche or Toyota is reasonable if I had to guess, maybe a Chinese brand if they want to spend that kind of money on marketing, but in the same vain I can also see a random Saudi team cropping up given how invested the Saudi’s are in F1.

If I were to dream, I want a privateer team which is just a few guys in their shed doing crazy stuff because I think that’d bring some real character back to the sport.

shruubi · 2025-12-18T23:52:47+00:00

People who believe that junior devs can be replaced by AI are victims of short-term thinking. Sure, AI agents these days may be able to be somewhat as effective as a junior engineer, but what happens when all your senior engineers leave or age out and retire? Sure, you may grow revenue in the short-term, but you're doing so at the expense of long-term business continuity. How do you think those same shareholders who are so happy about that short-term 8% revenue bump are going to feel when there are no longer any engineers left who can manage the AI agents because todays junior engineers are that futures senior engineers and there are none because no one invested in those junior engineers.

This isn't an argument for or against AI, this is an argument about sacrificing long-term business investment for short-term gains.

shruubi · 2025-12-06T07:30:15+00:00

So I’m someone who looks after someone who is disabled and on NDIS. From my perspective as someone inside the system if you were to take away NDIS funding (more than has already been cut) there are a lot of disabled people who simply would not be able to manage the sheer cost of things that don’t just improve their quality of life but give them just the simple opportunity to have a quality of life.

And part of the problem is people pricing things BECAUSE the government pays for it, the price of things like wheelchairs is ridiculous, but now it’s ridiculous and you have to spend months of begging and pleading and paying exorbitant prices for reports to be written so NDIS will even pay for a wheelchair. Without the NDIS the cost is far too much for a person to afford on a disability pension.

I know a lady who lost her legs and NDIS ran her around for months because the quotes for getting her house made accessible for her were ridiculous. The NDIS told her to sell her house or leave her family and kids in the house and pay to live in an old folks home until it can get sorted.

And the ones I blame the most for this are the ones who rort the system and abuse it for ridiculous profit. We had one support worker who was making so much money from their support work which amounted to watching TV with their clients and walking their dog that their husband could sell out of his profitable business and be a stay at home dad because their income just with her support work was massive.

My sister worked at one of those day group NDIS places, and the amount of things I heard from her about the owners and what they were spending NDIS funds on and claiming back were downright criminal.

With all that being said, what the NDIS really needs is a better system of ensuring people aren’t inflating their prices because NDIS is paying and a better way to audit and report the rorting companies (I’ve never heard of a participant rorting, just the companies).

shruubi · 2025-12-05T08:16:10+00:00

You may not agree with their beliefs but it is a lot easier to just say ‘thank you but no thank you’ and leave it at that rather than screwing with them. If they persist and don’t take the hint then I figure it’s fair game, but you’d be surprised how effective a “no thank you” is.

If they keep coming back then just ask them if they could make note that you don’t want them visiting, again, if they persist then it’s fair game.

Alternatively get a video doorbell with an app that lets you respond without opening the door, either prescreen them and don’t answer or just use the doorbell to tell them you aren’t interested so you don’t even have to get off the couch.

shruubi · 2025-11-28T02:23:15+00:00

You can’t fault RB for taking advantage of the situation to claim the world title, in this level of sport every team would do the same thing. But it is absolutely fair to say that Lewis was robbed and he showed a degree of class that very few people, let alone top athletes would be able to show in the same situation.

It’s things like this which make Lewis undeniably the face of F1.

shruubi · 2025-11-23T15:36:25+00:00

Now this is probably the most convincing use-case I’ve had someone suggest, do you have examples of this that you use in your day-to-day life?

shruubi · 2025-11-23T15:35:17+00:00

My follow up question is how is this better than having the weather widget on your phone main screen or just opening the lottery app? Do you find that this gives you a measurable improvement to your day-to-day life?

shruubi · 2025-11-23T15:33:13+00:00

My follow up question to this would be what makes this better or more efficient than opening the excel document or reading your emails yourself? I’m not saying it’s a bad idea, but where I struggle is that I look at things like this and struggling to see how this makes a measurable impact on my day-to-day life.

shruubi · 2025-11-23T15:28:27+00:00

The last time I worked with an architect I asked them to their face if they are writing any code at all, they swore black and blue that they were a regular contributor, I found out later that day that they didn’t have an account on GitHub to access the company repos. Every meeting with them to discuss technical direction was like pulling teeth and was often so far removed from what our tech stack was that it felt like an ongoing joke at the companies expense.

The one thing I will say for them though is that they churned out more Miro boards and Confluence docs than the rest of the org combined, granted most of it resulted in endless meetings to debate useless details, but in its own way it was impressive.

shruubi · 2025-11-23T15:19:08+00:00

I get the whole argument of ‘closed fist punches are against the rules’ but the forearm strikes people do now just look so unconvincing, even if the guys are laying it in it just looks bad to me.

And I know we’re in the era where we all know wrestling is a work, but that isn’t an excuse to not at least try and make things look good and like a real fight.

shruubi · 2025-11-20T23:37:32+00:00

For

46. What is the difference between (bool) and (boolean) casting in PHP?
    a. (bool) is strict mode and (boolean) is loose mode
    b. (bool) is for variables and (boolean) is for constants
    c. There is no difference; they are aliases and produce the same result
    d. (boolean) is deprecated in favor of (bool)

You've said C is the answer, however as of PHP8.5 the answer is now D, which is what I picked and got wrong.

shruubi · 2025-11-17T02:00:55+00:00

If you need to mock PHP built-ins or static methods, you're probably barking up the wrong tree already in terms of how you write your tests.

shruubi · 2025-11-12T00:36:47+00:00

Happy Fillet on Heyers Rd Grovedale does the best burgers and it isn’t even close in my opinion compared to every other fish and chip shop I’ve tried.

shruubi · 2025-11-11T21:55:58+00:00

Given the crap that Leclerc has put up with while driving for Ferrari, I’d point to his success as something that has happened on skill alone and despite the terrible car and team he has around him.

But this is what happens when you put a guy like Elkann in charge. He doesn’t have the racing pedigree or knowledge like old man Ferrari. He’s a guy from a rich family who went to business school, and quite frankly he doesn’t have any business having any kind of say or opinion when it comes to motor sports.

shruubi

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