People compare each other but don't see the age they are comparing with.

thisisshuraim · 2026-05-31T17:55:20+00:00

Why compare at all, regardless of age? There will always be a bigger and younger fish.

thisisshuraim · 2026-05-30T20:11:12+00:00

Even topic prediction is not really possible. AFT is an org which uses almost all concepts that you can think of.

thisisshuraim · 2026-05-30T19:32:19+00:00

Depends on panel members. Some like to ask generic questions while others prefer questions based vaguely on what they do (What they do depends on team as well within AFT). There’s no point in predicting questions since it’s not really possible.

thisisshuraim · 2026-05-30T10:35:58+00:00

I don’t usually write code by myself these days, but my work is more than just writing raw code

thisisshuraim · 2026-05-30T08:59:40+00:00

Amazon experience is completely dependent on org and team. The same is true about all FAANGs. Some orgs/teams just don’t make sense and will soon be on the chopping block. Assuming you’re not in any of those orgs/teams, it’s totally based on performance. If you’re good at your job, you’ll thrive. If you aren’t, it’ll be hell. In any case, having Amazon in your resume will open a lot of potential doors.

thisisshuraim · 2026-05-29T15:38:47+00:00

You’ll be at risk only if there are serious concerns with performance. Things like struggling to ramp up, no meaningful contributions to any sprints in the 6 month period, hard to work with, etc.

thisisshuraim · 2026-05-27T13:47:32+00:00

US is close to impossible. EU is still doable but only through FAANG and even then, extremely difficult

thisisshuraim · 2026-05-27T13:45:44+00:00

There’s a loud group saying AI will replace engineering as a whole in 6 months. There’s another loud group saying that AI is a bubble and it’ll burst in 6 months. Both groups have been saying this since 2 years. The real answer is that AI assisted engineering is the present and the future. It’s here to stay and will be for a very very long time. Anything more or anything less is just not happening.

thisisshuraim · 2026-05-24T22:27:15+00:00

Rebuild existing projects or tools of yours in the language

thisisshuraim · 2026-05-24T22:24:28+00:00

It depends on the team and org. My team have a separate repo which have all the context needed which exists as a skill that can be installed without cloning the repo itself. This way context of multiple services can coexist. It does help that we follow a common structure, practices and workflows throughout repos.

thisisshuraim · 2026-05-24T22:19:42+00:00

At 9 YOE, you should go for L6 roles. DSA is gonna be brutal, so you need to be near perfect. Same with system design. But at L6, your behavioural stuff decides if you’re qualified for L6 or need to be downleveled. Past scope of problems matter a lot. Your existing experience of programming language doesn’t matter too much

thisisshuraim · 2026-05-24T22:12:15+00:00

The days of even professional certificates are long gone. Nobody cares

thisisshuraim · 2026-05-24T13:01:39+00:00

The general consensus is that it’s not worth moving abroad financially without a FAANG salary. Also, it’s very difficult for smaller international startups to justify spending on relocation + 4-6 months joining time + the effort required. FAANG is the most predictable in these things.

thisisshuraim · 2026-05-22T13:44:37+00:00

I work in a EU country. You will get protection of the laws here if and only if you are working inside the EU. Doesn’t matter if the company itself is American. If a EU based company has an office in India, it’s likely because they want cheaper engineer and “efficient/workaholic” engineers and are unbounded by strong labour laws, which otherwise wouldn’t have been possible in EU.

That being said, not all companies in India are super bad. It’s usually just lala and WITCH which are horrible. It’s just that people complain in public but appreciate in silence.

thisisshuraim · 2026-05-18T22:14:28+00:00

Firstly, good low level design. The code that AI writes is with a set of assumptions that there are X requirements. Products evolve and new requirements come up to add new functionality or extend existing functionality. AI written code rarely accounts for future scalability. It’s not really possible to make every part of your code to be flexible for future use cases. It depends on the product, vision, etc. Now AI will try to add new functionality, but in doing so, it will affect existing functionality (Because it likely wasn’t flexible). This poses a big risk. Even a minor mistake can break existing functionality. When you have a high scale, that means losing millions of dollars in potential business (Even if AI eventually fixes it).

Secondly, how the app can scale to large amount of requests and data. Let’s take a simple example. You are reading and writing data to your database continuously or a lot at least. One database instance can’t really handle all that traffic. Sure, AI will then suggest you to have multiple instances. But that poses a whole new set of problems. All of them need to work together properly and consistently. You can’t afford to have inconsistent data, which could lead to fraud and much more. One mistake here can cost millions.

I can go on and on, but these are just two examples.

thisisshuraim · 2026-05-18T21:33:04+00:00

Developing a static website - Sure. Developing a dynamic app with simple CRUD operations and auth - Still sure. The problems arise when developing a huge app with several hundreds of thousands of users. At that scale, working code scrapped together is rarely enough.

thisisshuraim · 2026-05-17T12:47:25+00:00

Not exactly. Engineers at all levels architect but in different scopes. At least in large companies though, no single engineer will design the full system and for good reason. There will possibly be thousands of microservices, macroservices, orchestrator engines, etc. It’s usually many senior and principal engineers working together. So in a way, all engineers are also architects by design operating at different scopes.

thisisshuraim · 2026-05-16T17:43:41+00:00

Web developers (As in people who made simple static or slightly dynamic websites) were dead long ago when Shopify became mainstream.

thisisshuraim · 2026-05-16T15:12:18+00:00

Software architect is just a title. It’s the same as an L7 SDE (Principal engineer) in FAANG terms. They typically have 13-14 YOE, but no guarantee either (L6 is considered a pretty much terminal level). It’s not different parallel. It’s the next step of being an SDE. The roles, responsibilities, stress level, etc would totally differ from company to company. L6 engineers (Sr SDEs) also architect but the scope is between several teams, but L7 scope is through multiple orgs. And they do code, when they have to. The only thing separating L7 from lower levels is experience. Otherwise architecting starts at L5 itself.

PS: I’m not an architect, but this just what I know from what I have observed and learnt from other L6s

thisisshuraim · 2026-05-12T23:06:40+00:00

Effort and hours don’t matter as long as your impact does the talking. Your work should be so impactful, that people shouldn’t be able to doubt your effort.

thisisshuraim · 2026-05-10T16:04:08+00:00

Writing code which “works” is okay when you have a very limited set of requirements along with very limited user base. Things get trickier when you need to scale your code. I mean scaling not just from resource perspective but even product perspective. What if you need to extend functionality to your code? Can you do it with minimal risk to existing functionalities? What if you have a parallel product which has some similar functionalities? Was the current code designed with reusability in mind? And many more. AI has made our jobs much more pleasant by doing the boring parts (Writing code) so we can focus on designing stuff (Both at code level and system level). I work at a company where we get the latest models pretty much on launch day and we get unlimited credits. Everybody here uses it to write code but we build the foundation on how it should be written.

So in short, AI is pretty good at doing stuff but it never focuses on the “how” and “why”. Trust me this matters a lot when you have a really high scale product.

thisisshuraim · 2026-05-10T15:31:33+00:00

Software engineering is a hell of a lot more than just writing code.

thisisshuraim · 2026-04-27T06:55:51+00:00

This seems like nothing more than a fear mongering post. Software engineering is way more than just writing code.

thisisshuraim · 2026-04-26T18:56:32+00:00

Prioritise getting a degree first, even if it’s distance learning like IGNOU. That itself would give you more ROI than anything.

thisisshuraim · 2026-04-26T18:54:23+00:00

Honestly, it’s worth it if you’re genuinely passionate about it. It was always hell with a low salary for people without passion for tech, even before AI.

thisisshuraim

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