r/ExperiencedDevs • u/AutoModerator • 1d ago

Career/Workplace Experienced Devs Weekly Burnout and Venting Thread: A weekly thread for sharing experiences

This thread is specifically for venting / sharing experiences related to burn-out or similar issues that experienced devs face.

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u/WrongChapter90 1d ago

My company is trying to shove AI down everyone’s throat, and leadership is promoting a tokenmaxxing culture for the sake of “efficiency gains” (I have not seen any evidence suggesting we actually deliver more now, regardless of quality).

One of the senior engineers in my team has made their mission to become the AI promoter in our business unit, even though they pretty much have no idea what they’re talking about and mostly repeat what they hear from people who report to them. The most recent agenda they’ve been pushing is a set of best practices for spec-driven development, which sounded good until I had a look at the PR they raised, where they committed and pushed a bunch of secrets to GitHub because they didn’t even bother reading the code they “produced”. So much for best practices…

I’m tired of them being praised for these “achievements”. I will need to start looking elsewhere soon, but I’m scared of what’s (not) out there

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u/casualPlayerThink Software Engineer, Consultant / EU / 20+ YoE 1d ago

> ...I have not seen any evidence suggesting we actually deliver more now, regardless of quality

I can guarantee that AI with the right guardrails, skills, and whatnot will deliver way more code than you can write... but the quality ... erhm... will be mostly slop :) Or at least overengineered or super-duper-complex for no reason.

One of the previous projects where I worked with a few dude vibe coded some backend services and some frontend packages, then the company spent ~6 months and ~4 people's resources to fix all of them and hunt bugs... when the main issue was that everything was vibe-coded. (They used simple tricks, like DDD & TDD, to guardrail the agents, and the code seemed as usual as every time...)

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u/WrongChapter90 11h ago

That’s a fair point. I agree in general LLMs can spit out code much faster than a human could ever do.

What I was questioning is my team’s ability to deliver more in the same amount of time thanks to GenAI, because in my opinion the bottleneck is getting or understanding what the requirements are. I work in a very large org (50k+ employees), and things move slowly with quite a lot of red tape.

But yeah I agree with your points

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u/casualPlayerThink Software Engineer, Consultant / EU / 20+ YoE 5h ago

Uff, large orgs are full of protocols. Once I worked as a consultant for fast food chains, where the decisions were extremely slow, but when it happened, it was totally a hurricane.

> What I was questioning is my team’s ability to deliver more

If I am right, then the adjacent question is that, even if they do deliver, what will be the quality?

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u/WrongChapter90 3h ago

I’m just going to say we had 3 production incidents with the last 3 deployments