vcool07

Hey everyone,

I'm a Senior Engineer at a large tech company with over 20 years of experience. For the last 5 years, my role has primarily revolved around devops, tech leadership (small teams), taking care of system architecture , feature design, security stuff, reviews etc, with much of the hands-on coding (mostly maintenance stuff) delegated to junior engineers. What's striking is that in my entire tenure here, I haven't encountered a single task that required implementing anything close to the Data Structures and Algorithms (DS/Algo) problems you'd find on LeetCode.

Now, with layoff rumors circulating in our organization, I'm actively exploring new opportunities. The challenge? Despite my extensive experience, it seems almost every company, even for senior roles, still kicks off the interview process with a DS/Algo screen.

This puts me at a crossroads. Should I dedicate valuable time to reskilling in DS/Algo, essentially studying just to pass an interview hurdle? Or is there a viable path to convince hiring managers to look past these skills and focus solely on my strengths in system design, architecture, and practical engineering leadership?

Honestly, it feels a bit absurd to spend time on "basic" DS/Algo questions after all these years, especially when current AI tools can make much of that work redundant.

Any insights or advice would be greatly appreciated!

PS: If it helps, I'm based in India, not US !

Taking some inputs here, is solo game dev (something of the scope of stardew valley) still a viable career option in 2025 to earn a decent revenue ? Or is it more of winning a lottery kind of situation ?

As for me, I've been a regular s/w developer and play video games as a hobby. Never built any games before as the learning curve was too steep (not to mention the various skillsets that needed to be learnt - art, music etc apart from programming). But with the advent of AI in almost all tools these days, I'm wondering if its more accessible now and building/publishing a game is easier than ever ?

I know the answer I would get if I ask chatgpt on what to do if you are stuck in a rut in your day job. But in reality, if you are in a day job which's mostly mundane work with little to no prospects of career growth / decent salary hikes, do you complement/compensate for it by investing extra time after work hours in creative side projects ? Do you prepare of interviews post work and be constantly on the lookout for something better ? Or are you just grateful that you've a steady source of income (considering all the job losses due to AI) and spend the rest of your time as usual (family needs/netflix etc) ?

Lately, I seem to see a lot of advise on side projects and having multiple income streams, but not really sure if such hustling is the only way to survive going forward! Also, feel a bit anxious wondering if everyone else with a 'stuck-in-a-rut' day job is hustling and I would be ultimately left behind !

Lately, I feel exhausted with all the late night meetings thats required of me at work. Discussed it with my manager few months ago and he offered to take me off on-call rotation and put me in a leadership role. While this was good initially, lately this has come up with its own set of challenges, where in I'm required to have nightly meetings with other teams who are outside of my timezone. Since I'm in a leadership role now, my manager says its inevitable as I've to be present in these meetings.

I feel so burned out and anxious all the time, not because of overwork, but due to a lack of formal structure in my work day.

I'm thinking of starting out on my own someday, but I wonder, is it even realistic to have a 9-5 kind of structure in IT/software dev field ? Whether i work for a big org / startup / myself, is it inevitable that I have to work round the clock and I've to accept it as a way of life ? Is there a sub-field in software dev where in I can login at a specific time / logout at a specific time and not have to worry about work after I log out.

PS: Honestly speaking, I used to work at IT service industry not too long ago (perhaps in mid 2000s), where I was working on a boxed software. Except for some crunch time during major releases, there was no pager duty expected, the pay was average at best and work was monotonous bug fixing, but I felt much more at peace since work was always predictable most of the time. With this on-call culture thanks to the 99.99 uptime thats become the de-facto industry standard for most companies, I wonder whether such companies exist anymore !

I'm employed at one of the big software giants as a senior engineer. Life has been good so far, except that a sense of job stagnancy is creeping in. I talked to my manager about promotion and moving up the ladder to take on more complex projects, and he said that moving from senior to upper levels is not easy, and irrespective of skillset it takes time and patience (plus the usual take ownership yada yada, most of which I'm already doing).

I'm almost 40 and there is like an ocean of people in the same boat as me (in my current company), many of them with half my experience. So, I feel like completely stuck on how to get ahead of the pack.

I've taken full ownership of decently sized projects (in terms of complexity/scale), with hands-on execution, leading the team all the way from design to the production deployment. I've tried giving team wide presentations on tech topics, took part in hiring drives and so on, but nothing seems to make any difference. I've also tried applying to other teams within the company, but they are ready to take me at my current level, but not for a higher level.

I often see people reaching the positions of architects/tech fellows at these large companies at just 10-12 years of experience, and I fail to understand what exactly did they do right. Is it all about luck/being in right place at the right time ?

There's the obvious solution of moving to a different (albeit much smaller) company, but I like the work life balance, tech stack we use and some other perks the company provides. So, trying to see what I can do here before giving up and moving on to a different company altogether.

Any/All helpful comments is highly appreciated. Thanks in advance !

Hi Guys, I've been reading a lot of articles about budding/full-time entrepreneurs and their successful ventures. I'm motivated to start a few side projects to see if I've that streak in me, but I need some clarity , and wanted your inputs on the below questions :

1. Is it possible to build and sustain a SaaS business as a solo founder ? For a medium sized project (say something like asana/trello), how long would it take from start->finish (MVP which can be monetized) if one spends around 20 hours in a week?

2. Does one have to be super smart in the algorithms/data structures/programming language and/or a domain expert to take care of both development / customer requirements/support etc ? A feature like adding a new way of auth take at-least 2-3 weeks to complete at large enterprises with multiple folks working full time. What chance can an individual have against these large companies?

3. Is it a good idea to spend 2-3 months on learning the tech, and then start on the side project ? I'm asking this, since with a full time job , one can only expect some 2 hours a day and around 8 hours on a weekend, if most of that is spent on stack overflow,then the progress would be really slow.

4. Since monetization is tricky and not guaranteed, is it a good idea to simply work on the side project to amplify job opportunities? Or is it best to give it all as if there's no plan-b ?

5. Lastly, what's the primary reason to go and start your company instead of say spending the same 20+ hours on getting better at your current job/seeking a better job in the same field at a better company ? Isn't the latter more secure/stable option ?

Sorry if some of the questions sound obvious / cliched. But I wanted a fresh take on some of the above questions that has been brewing in my head for a long time. Thanks in advance :)

Hi, I believe I'm a decent programmer, may not be a rockstar or anything. Recently I've changed my company to one of the "sought afters", and I've noticed that I've been getting some comments about the quality of work and some uncomfortable questions about my skills. I've been forced to change my design more than once during code review and there were other times when my PR was outright rejected as it did not meet the required standards.

Now I'm a little worried that if my situation doesn't change, my career would suffer. I've started to watch a few videos online about design. But I'm not sure if they're going to really help as they usually talk about very basics which doesn't help in real world coding.

I usually take 3-4 tries with some significant amount of testing to get my code to a working state. I refer to stack overflow or ask my colleagues if I get stuck on some design / technology feature which I haven't seen before. I feel the above contributes to reduction in my speed of delivery and the rush to complete the deliverable on time, compromises the quality.

Are there any good ideas to improve one's coding / design skills significantly ? The challenge here is to deliver good quality code, while maintaining a decent speed of delivery.

Hi, I've been teaching myself web dev. I'm looking at building something along the lines of trello/asana. But instead of building another clone, I thought of doing a bit of market research and make something that can be actually useful. Request you to let me know :

1) Do you have a pain point that the existing tools like asana/trello doesn't address, but you wished it did ? Would you pay for a Personal PM software that addresses the abovementioned issue(s) ?

2) Is a personal project management tool really useful when you are working on your own project ( as compared to using a simple whiteboard/todo list app/paper, pen) ?

3) What are the top 5 must have features in your opinion, that is required of any Personal PM software ?

4) Would you prefer the Personal PM software to be a desktop/mobile app that works offline as well instead of an online only SaaS app ?

Thanks in advance !