In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. Hi Jamison and Dave. Eight years into my software engineering career, all of it at Series B and C startups, I’ve been craving two things: a recognizable brand name on my resume and the chance to work on real scale problems. After a long search, I finally got both. The catch? I got them in the wrong order.

   I accepted an offer at one of the hottest and fastest-growing AI companies in the application layer space. Exciting work, smart people, real momentum, but not quite a household name yet, and not quite facing the kind of scaling challenges that come with a billion users yet either. Two weeks later, I finally heard that I cleared the interviews from a big brand name tech company. I’ll be honest: it wasn’t my first choice brand name. I bombed interviews at a few others and this was basically my consolation prize.

   Here’s the thing about this mega tech company right now: the culture has … shifted. It feels less like a tech company and more like a social experiment with a $1.5 trillion market cap.

   So now I’m torn and the clock is ticking. My start date at the AI company is in a few weeks and I’m currently in team matching at the mega tech co. Do I renege before I even badge in? Do I start, survive team matching, and then quit? Or do I just honor my commitment and forget about the brand name for now?

   More broadly: under what circumstances is it ever okay to renege or quit shortly after starting? Have either of you been in this situation or been on the receiving end? I need stories, I need wisdom, and honestly I need someone to just tell me what to do.

2. I’ve changed from a java developer role to OIC integration on oracle cloud. I’m not sure if that was a good move as it doesn’t feel like I’m doing much coding but lots of clicking. I was thinking that having cloud experience would benefit me but now I’m not sure. I’m not sure if I should run back to a java developer job or give it a chance and how much time would be a fair chance?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. I’m a software developer with about 15 years in the industry, and I am soon starting as the CTO of a robotics company with about 50 employees.

   Though I have years of experience and an academic background within the field of robotics, I have always been focused on the software side of things. In my new role, I am ultimately responsible for the hardware team as well.

   How do I go about earning the respect, and becoming an effective leader, of my new colleagues working in a field in which I am not an expert myself?

2. Hi, I’m meowmeow, and I’ve enjoyed your podcast for a long time.

   I’m working at a small engineering company which don’t have lots of profit.

   Recently, the PMs at my company(including the CEO) have started “vibe coding” directly on our product. They’ve even added PMs to the project planning list as contributors.

   Whenever they open a PR, the code is AI-generated and reflects their personal working style. The code quality is fairly low and engineers end up spending a lot of time reviewing and fixing it, even though we’re already under a heavy workload.

   Our CEO comes from a product management background. He believes PMs should write code and deploy their own implementations, and that engineers are not fast enough and should simply move faster.

   I’ve already been feeling stressed due to the workload, and this situation seems to be making it worse. Engineering leadership doesn’t seem able to push back effectively.

   What should I do?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. Hi, thank you for the podcast, I am long time listener, first time asker. Something weird is going on at my company. A colleague of my always wanted to get promoted to management, he got the opportunity, but after multiple preparatory meeting for this new promotion, HE QUIT! He did not tell what happened there, only that “it was time for something new”. Now several months later my skip level declared that he wants to be a developer again. Another manager was offered his position, which is a significant promotion (basically head of engineering), which he accepted, but after being included into high level meetings he declared that he is also QUITTING! We now have an interim Head of engineering, who declared that he is only doing this until a replacement is found. Why does no one wants to be in the management? What is happening at these meetings that people leave? Btw. the financial state of the company is not great, but not horrible, the CEO even declared that there won’t be layoffs this year. So what’s going on? I really like working at this company, but I can’t shake the feeling after these events that I am up for a big surprise soon.

2. Hi,

   I’m a senior dev at a megacorp. I’m struggling with AI. We’ve got a lot of initiatives around it and are expected to be using it with our work. The problem is every time I try to use it I get really frustrated. It feels like working with a junior dev who doesn’t know the codebase well but knows lots of language/framework trivia. I also feel displeasure in my work turning into just reviewing some generated code and fixing it up. Especially, when you have to be very thorough because we all know that a single line of code can cause an outage. I just find no joy in this kind of work and am starting to have an aversion to it even when I just try to learn more about it.

   I’m also having a hard time teasing apart the hype from the reality. I’m either hearing that “the models are so great, this is the future, coding isn’t a career anymore” or “this is hype, the bubble will burst soon and ruin everything.” Both of these outcomes seem kinda catastrophic but I have no idea which one to believe in (or maybe there’s a 3rd option?).

   So, how do I overcome this aversion? How do I make sense of the hype vs. reality? How do I learn to stop worrying and love the slop?

   Thanks, Dr. Strangecode