Software Developers

[Breaking] AWS Cloud Chief says "replacing junior employees with AI is one of the dumbest things I've ever heard". The tide is shifting back.

>Matt Garman, Amazon's cloud boss, has a warning for business leaders rushing to swap workers for AI: Don't ditch your junior employees. ... The Amazon Web Services CEO said on an episode of the "Matthew Berman" podcast published Tuesday that replacing entry-level staff with AI tools is "one of the dumbest things I've ever heard." ... "They're probably the least expensive employees you have. They're the most leaned into your AI tools," he said. ... "How's that going to work when you go like 10 years in the future and you have no one that has built up or learned anything?" [https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-cloud-chief-replacing-junior-staff-ai-matt-garman-2025-8](https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-cloud-chief-replacing-junior-staff-ai-matt-garman-2025-8) Slowly, day by day, the AI hype is dying out as companies realize it's basically just a faster google search. What are your thoughts?

This is how Steam can ruin more than 10 years of your work

More than 10 years ago we started creating Planet Centauri, a 2D sandbox with terraria as main inspiration. We released the EA many years ago and this is our start just before the 1.0 release : 103 400 units solds 138 675 Wishlist the sells seem incredible but it's not with so many years behind, when you work for 10 years and have to paid many people helping you with the ten of thousands of monsters frames animations and thousands of pixel art items, you don't have much left on your wallet at the end. So we were eager for the release of 1.0 because with so many wishlists, the game's visibility would be good, we would appear in the new and trending categories due to sales, etc... The 1.0 happen in december 2024... we sold... 581 units in 5 days. The game didn't even appear on page 2; we were invisible; the release was a total flop. And we never understood why until today. We just received this mail from Steam \------------------------------------------ Steam Launch Wishlist Email Issue Hi there, We found a bug that impacted a very small number of game releases (less than 100 since 2015) where wishlist email notifications for the launch of a game were not sent. Unfortunately your game Planet Centauri was among those included. We intend for this feature to work for every game and we’re inviting you to a Daily Deal as a way to help make up for lost visibility from your launch day. \------------------------------------------ It's incredible to win the lottery like this: 100 games impacted in 10 years out of the 86,000 games on Steam. And to reward you, we're giving you 24-hour visibility (which is nothing special; there are 6 slots available for this visibility every day of the year for various Steam invitations). I don't even have the strength to be angry. We've been so frustrated, disgusted, and in total confusion . Now we know, we understand better, it's unfair, and we can't change anything. We've started a second project because it's financially impossible to continue patching our game, and we're moving forward, because it's the only thing to do. This article was my way of expressing my anger, I guess, but also to see all the problems that a platform holding 99% of the PC gaming market can cause when the cogs don't work as they should. Have a nice day everyone, may luck be better to you

Reminder: If you're in a stable software engineering job right now, STAY PUT!!!!!!!

I'm honestly amazed this even needs to be said but if you're currently in a stable, low-drama, job especially outside of FAANG, just stay put because the grass that looks greener right now might actually be hiding a sinkhole Let me tell you about my buddy. Until a few months ago, he had a job as a software engineer at an insurance company. The benefits were fantastic.. he would work 10-20 hours a week at most, work was very chill and relaxing. His coworkers and management were nice and welcoming, and the company was very stable and recession proof. He also only had to go into the office once a week. He had time to go to the gym, spend time with family, and even work on side projects if he felt like it But then he got tempted by the FAANG name and the idea of a shiny new title and what looked like better pay and more exciting projects, so he made the jump, thinking he was leveling up, thinking he was finally joining the big leagues From day one it was a completely different world, the job was fully on-site so he was back to commuting every day, the hours were brutal, and even though nobody said it out loud there was a very clear expectation to be constantly online, constantly responsive, and always pushing for more He went from having quiet mornings and freedom to structure his day to 8 a.m. standups, nonstop back-to-back meetings, toxic coworkers who acted like they were in some competition for who could look the busiest, and managers who micromanaged every last detail while pretending to be laid-back He was putting in 50 to 60 hours a week just trying to stay afloat and it was draining the life out of him, but he kept telling himself it was worth it for the resume boost and the name recognition and then just three months in, he got the layoff email No warning, no internal transfer, no fallback plan, just a cold goodbye and a severance package, and now he’s sitting at home unemployed in a terrible market, completely burned out, regretting ever leaving that insurance job where people actually treated each other like human beings And the worst part is I watched him change during those months, it was like the light in him dimmed a little every week, he started looking tired all the time, less present, shorter on the phone, always distracted, talking about how he felt like he was constantly behind, constantly proving himself to people who didn’t even know his name He used to be one of the most relaxed, easygoing guys I knew, always down for a beer or a pickup game or just to chill and talk about life, but during those months it felt like he aged five years, and when he finally called me after the layoff it wasn’t just that he lost the job, it was like he’d lost a piece of himself in the process To make it worse, his old role was already filled, and it’s not like you can just snap your fingers and go back, that bridge is gone, and now he’s in this weird limbo where he’s applying like crazy but everything is frozen or competitive or worse, fake listings meant to fish for resumes I’ve seen this happen to more than one person lately and I’m telling you, if you’re in a solid job right now with decent pay, decent hours, and a company that isn’t on fire, you don’t need to chase the dream of some big tech title especially not in a market like this Right now, surviving and keeping your sanity is the real win, and that “boring” job might be the safest bet you’ve got Be careful out there

[BREAKING] Amazon to layoff 30,000 corporate employees in one of the largest layoffs in its history

>Amazon is planning to cut as many as 30,000 corporate jobs beginning Tuesday, as the company works to pare expenses and compensate for overhiring during the peak demand of the pandemic, according to three people familiar with the matter. >The figure represents a small percentage of Amazon’s 1.55 million total employees, but nearly 10% of the company’s roughly 350,000 corporate employees. This would represent the largest job cut at Amazon since around 27,000 jobs were eliminated starting in late 2022. >Managers of impacted teams were asked to undergo training on Monday for how to communicate with staff following notifications that will start going out via email tomorrow morning > [https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/amazon-targets-many-30000-corporate-job-cuts-sources-say-2025-10-27/](https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/amazon-targets-many-30000-corporate-job-cuts-sources-say-2025-10-27/) What are your thoughts on this?

4 years at Big tech. Being likeable beats being productive every single time

**TL;DR: Grinding harder made me less productive AND less likeable. Being calm is the actual cheat code.** I'm 4 years deep at a big tech company, and work-life balance has been absolutely brutal lately. For the past year, I went full psycho mode—trying to crush every single task, racing through my backlog, saying yes to everything. **Plot twist: It made me objectively worse at my job.** Here's what I didn't expect: When you're constantly in panic mode, your nervous system goes haywire. You become that coworker who's stressed, short with people, and honestly just not fun to be around. **And here's the kicker—being pleasant to work with is literally the most important skill in Big Tech.** Think about it: The people who get shit done aren't grinding alone in a corner. They're the ones other people WANT to help. They get faster code reviews. They get invited to the important meetings. They get context shared with them freely. When you're stressed and snappy? People avoid you. Your PRs sit in review hell. You get excluded from decisions. You end up working 2x harder for half the impact. **The counterintuitive solution: Embrace strategic calm.** I started doing less. I stopped panic-working. I took actual lunch breaks. I said "I'll get back to you tomorrow" instead of dropping everything. Result? My productivity went UP. My relationships improved. My manager started praising my "executive presence." **In Big Tech, your nervous system IS your competitive advantage.** Stay calm, stay likeable, and watch opportunities come to you instead of chasing them down like a maniac. Anyone else discover this the hard way?

I just watched an AI agent take a Jira ticket, understand our codebase, and push a PR in minutes and I’m genuinely scared

I’m a professional software engineer, and today something happened that honestly shook me. I watched an AI agent, part of an internally built tool our company is piloting, take in a small Jira ticket. It was the kind of task that would usually take me or a teammate about an hour. Mostly writing a SQL query and making a small change to some backend code. The AI read through our codebase, figured out the context, wrote the query, updated the code, created a PR with a clear diff and a well-written description, and pushed it for review. All in just a few minutes. This wasn’t boilerplate. It followed our naming conventions, made logical decisions, and even updated a test. One of our senior engineers reviewed the PR and said it looked solid and accurate. They would have done it the same way. What really hit me is that this isn’t some future concept. This AI tool is being gradually rolled out across teams in our org as part of a pilot program. And it’s already producing results like this. I’ve been following AI developments, but watching it do my job in my codebase made everything feel real in a way headlines never could. It was a ticket I would have knocked out before lunch, and now it’s being done faster and with less effort by a machine. I’m not saying engineers will be out of jobs tomorrow. But if an AI can already handle these kinds of everyday tickets, we’re looking at serious changes in the near future. Maybe not in years, but in months. Has anyone else experienced something similar? What are you doing to adapt? How are you thinking about the future of our field?

I quit CS and I’m 300% happier.

I slaved 2 years in a IT dev program. 3 internships, hired full time as dev (then canned for being too junior), personal projects with real users, networking 2x per month at meetups, building a personal brand. Interviewing at some companies 5x times and getting rejected for another guy, 100’s of rejections, tons of ghost jobs and interviews with BS companies, interned for free at startups to get experience 75% which are bankrupt now, sent my personal information out to companies who probably just harvested my data now I get a ton of spam calls. Forced to grind Leetcode for interviews, and when I ask the senior if he had to do this he said “ nah I never had to grind Leetcode to start in 2010. Then one day I put together a soft skill resume with my content/sales/communications skills and got 5 interviews in the first week. I took one company for 4 rounds for a sales guy job 100% commission selling boats and jet ski’s. They were genuinely excited about my tech and content and communication skills. They offered me a job and have a proper mentorship pipeline. I was hanging out with family this last week and my little 3 year old nephew was having a blast. And I just got to thinking… This little guy doesn’t give 2 shits how hard I am grinding to break into tech. Life moves in mysterious ways. I stopped giving a shit and then a bunch of opportunities came my way which may be better suited for me in this economy. Life is so much better when you give up on this BS industry. To think I wanted to grind my way into tech just to have some non-technical PM dipshit come up with some stupid app idea management wants to build. Fuck around and find out. That’s what I always say. Edit *** I woke up to 1 million views on this. I’m surprised at the negative comments lol. Life is short lads. It takes more energy to be pressed than to be stoic. Thanks to everyone who commented positively writing how they could relate to my story. Have a great day 👍

I joined PirateSoftware's recent game jam, and I highly recommend against participating in future ones

about 3 weeks ago, I thought "fuck it, why not join the pirate jam 17". yeah, the drama wasn't great, but it's a jam, so I may as well. oh boy. what a mistake. Firstly, community voting was turned off. This is standard for game jams - members of the community play and rank games, and in return they get a boost in visibility. Not so in pirate software's community. This feature was entirely disabled - nobody was able to decide community ranking except for the mods. Judging was entirely decided by pirate's mod team. and oh boy, they made a *very* strange set of decisions. They admitted to spending only 5 minutes per game, and selected a list comprised of many amateurish games. **PirateJam 17 Winners!** 1. https://mauiimakesgames.itch.io/one-pop-planet 2. https://scheifen.itch.io/bright-veil 3. https://malfet.itch.io/square-one 4. https://neqdos.itch.io/world-break 5. https://jcanabal.itch.io/only-one-dollar 6. https://moonkey1.itch.io/staff-only-2 7. https://voirax.itch.io/press-one-to-confirm 8. https://yourfavoritedm.itch.io/one-last-job 9. https://fechobab.itch.io/just-one-1-bit-game 10. https://gogoio123.itch.io/one-hp Of the top-10, several of these games were *very poor*, Inarguably undeserving if the position. #2, 5, and 9 are all barely playable, and #1 and 8 are middling. Much better games were snubbed to promote these low quality entries; the jam had no shortage of talent, but the the top-10 certainly did. Furthermore, when I left my post-jam writeups on game #2, it was deleted by the moderators of the jam and I was permanently banned from all pirate software spaces. The review is gone, but the reply from the developer remains, and it seemed anything but offended. you can see for yourself. The jam is corrupt. I don't know what metrics were used to determine the winners, but they are completely incomprehensible. TL:DR - pirate software's game jam was poorly run - all games were only played for 5 minutes - the majority of winners spots were taken by *very* weak games - significantly better games got no recognition - all of this was decided by the mods without transparency - any criticism of the winners results in a ban EDIT: there seems to be some fuckery with linking to games I actually liked. I haven't played every game in the jam, but some of my favourite entries were probably https://itch.io/jam/pirate/rate/3746553 (number 6 best game, my pick for #1) https://itch.io/jam/pirate/rate/3758456 https://itch.io/jam/pirate/rate/3765454 https://itch.io/jam/pirate/rate/3737529 https://itch.io/jam/pirate/rate/3747515

Do not, i repeat !!DO NOT!! use Arial in your projects. It can become very nasty for you

So we received this official memo: > We’ve just received formal communication from Monotype Limited regarding the licensing of several fonts, including but not limited to: >* Agency FB, >* Agency FB Bold, >* **Arial**, >* Constantia (Regular, Bold, Italic, Bold Italic), >* Digital Dream Fat, >* Farao / Farao Bold, >* HemiHeadRg-BoldItalic, >Important: While fonts like Arial may be bundled with Windows, they are not considered native fonts within Unreal Engine or Unity. According to Monotype, even using Arial in your project requires a paid license, with fees reportedly reaching ~€20,000 per year of usage for developers, publishers, or any party involved. So... yeah. If you like your project or your finances, DO NOT USE ARIAL IN YOUR PROJECTS. Unless you want to pay hefty licensing fees Edit: Dont make it personal. Im not affected by this in any way. Im always using free open fonts and checks my assets licences. This post was made for people who are using Arial in their projects. I just want people be aware about it and avoid possible unpleasant situations. Thank you

The era of AI slop cleanup has begun

I’m a freelance software engineer with about 8 years of experience mainly in early stage startups. At this point, I have a pretty steady flow of referrals. I don’t take every project on and not every one works out, but enough do that I can do it more than full time. Lately, though, I have noticed a large increase in projects where they paid a ton of money for an internal software and it does not work well at all. Tons of errors, unreasonably slow, inefficient and taking up a lot of resources, and large security flaws. At first, I thought maybe people just hired bad developers. The bar is pretty low to call yourself a developer or even a software engineer anyways, but I’m seeing the same problems now on multiple projects. When I take on a project on, I always sign an NDA and look at their codebase to look at some upfront issues that I can bring up because, most of the time, the people hiring me aren’t technical and don’t understand what the problem is. This is probably the 5th time now that a lot of the code was obviously AI generated. Comments in the code that were obviously written by AI, algorithms that are inefficient and make no sense, cluttered data structures, inconsistent coding patterns, etc. The overall thing is that, yes it mostly works, but does so terribly to the point where it needs to be fixed. It might be a few years before we start to see this on an enterprise scale, but I’m noticing this becoming a serious problem for small businesses and startups, especially when the founders / people are in charge aren’t technical enough to identify this ahead of time.

My friend just inherited a data infrastructure built by a guy who left 3 months ago… and it’s pure chaos

So this xyz company had a guy who built the entire data infrastructure on his own but with zero documentation, no version control, and he named tables like temp_2020, final_v3, and new_final_latest. Pipelines? All manually scheduled cron jobs spread across 3 different servers. Some scripts run in Python 2, some in Bash, some in SQL procedures. Nobody knows why. He eventually left the company… and now they hired my friend to take over. On his first week: He found a random ETL job that pulls data from an API… but the API was deprecated 3 years ago and somehow the job still runs. Half the queries are 300+ lines of nested joins, with zero comments. Data quality checks? Non-existent. The check is basically “if it fails, restart it and pray.” Every time he fixes one DAG, two more fail somewhere else. Now he spends his days staring at broken pipelines, trying to reverse-engineer this black box of a system. Lol

Op-Ed: The Same Fucks Who Fucked Steam Just Fucked Itch.io

TLDR Itch.io shadowbanned all NSFW games after pressure from payment processors triggered by anti-porn group Collective Shout. Another platform folds to moral panic and money threats… thousands of creators screwed, again. … Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. This time, the Fucks in question are Collective Shout, an Australian moralist outfit hellbent on policing what fucking adults can see, play, and create. They didn’t need to petition governments or weaponize law enforcement… they just went straight to the payment processors. Super Effective. They cried “rape games” (which, I mean... yeah) and “child abuse” (which… I guess… yeah) and aimed their sights at Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal… who immediately clutched their pearls and threatened to cut ties. Itch.io, bastion of weirdness and freedom (NSFW and otherwise), panicked and pulled the fucking plug. De-listings and shadow bans for every deviant. Adult content? Deindexed. Hidden from browse and search. One day it was there… the next, it wasn’t. No warning. No appeal. No nuance. Just "Fuck you people and your perverted creations, we can't lose Visa and Mastercard". You don’t need to ban content if you can just strangle the creators’ ability to get paid. You don't need to win the argument if you simply disrupt payment processing. Itch.io is obligated to "protect the platform" at the expense of the creators. “We must prioritize our relationship with payment partners… this is a time critical moment…” Translation: we bent the knee, hard because money trumps all. Itch.io isn't (or wasn't) just another store. It is (or was?) the space for messy, marginalized, experimental, erotic, queer, and transgressive game devs. Games about consent, kink, power, identity… all the things that won't fit neatly on a Nintendo eShop shelf. It was raw. It was weird. It was fucking alive. And now it’s been sanitized by a bunch of moralizing fucks Creators: YOU HAVE BEEN BETRAYED. Puritanical or Perverse, YOUR work built the ecosystem. They built their name and their position in the marketplace by literally using your work. Now your work has been deemed an inconvenience by a platform because interlopers injected themselves into a conversation and a commerce and a culture they have no part in, other than to moralize. Developers are being quietly shoved into a dark corner because some self-righteous fucks threw a tantrum. Itch.io just showed the world that the rebel indie storefront will literally betray an entire group of creators if some assholes game the system. Wake the fuck up. This won’t stop here. IT NEVER DOES. The weapons used to erased NSFW games today will be purposed tomorrow to erase whatever else the fucks decide is “inappropriate.” They don't have to be right. They don't have to be consistent. They don't even have to make sense. They just have to threaten the money. These FUCKS are just getting started.

Expedition 33 devs attempts to join the indie scene are harmful

I don't want this post to look like hate, especially after the TGA, but I think it's important to talk studios attempts to stick into the indie scene. It's actually hurts indie itself. Note: I played the game and I like it. And the devs are great for managing to build something like this, but... For the last few months there’s been constant praise of the people from Sandfall Interactive. I have no problem with that. The nuances appear when people start trying to turn this into a "lesson" or draw wrong conclusions from it. For example: - "Wow, a team of about 30 people made this game!". This has already been discussed a bunch of times. A lot of key people in terms of art and animation were outsourced. Pretending they don't exist is...questionable. - "They're true indie, they even recruited the team on Reddit!". Only 2 persons on the team came from Reddit. - "They've got a small indie publisher, Kepler Interactive". Yeah, if you conveniently forget at least $120 million in investment from NetEase. - The recent nonsense about how they "learned to code from YouTube" isn’t even worth commenting on. - "Their budget is only 10 million!". Well...that's because they didn't include actor fees in that number, since "the publisher covered that part" (and some other things). Handy, huh? I don't understand why they're playing this game of half-truths and omissions, given that people already like them without all that.

itch.io seems to have straight up wiped ALL adult games on the platform shadow banning them. Itch is a major traffic driver for us NSFW devs. More people lost their income today... :( First steam now itch

RIP NSFW DEVS :( UPDATE: We also noticed games getting completely removed now, not just shadow banned. Itch official update: https://itch.io/updates/update-on-nsfw-content

Where tf is this industry headed? Layoffs again.

Just had layoffs at the startup I work at. We’re valued at 3.8Bn. Grew close to 28% YoY. Had a great team. We were working well together. I could honestly see no issues. And yesterday? Layoffs. One of my closest friends and teammates was impacted. Maybe he wasn’t putting in crazy hours but was extremely capable and knew what he was doing. Are we gonna pip people for wanting a work life balance?! What hurts more is the manner in which it’s done. We were texting until 4 yesterday and at 5 - his slack is deactivated. Not even a farewell. Nothing. It’s like he just vanished into thin air. Fuck this industry and fuck this company. Fuck the “leaders” who reduce people to mere numbers on this excel sheets. Fuck this shit.

Why I left big tech and plan on never coming back.. EVER.

I used to think landing a job at a big tech company would be the peak of my career. Everyone made it sound like once you got in, your life was set. Prestige, money, smart people, meaningful work. I bought into the whole thing. I worked my ass off to get there. Leetcode, system design prep, referrals, rejection after rejection. And when I finally got the offer, I remember feeling like I had won the lottery. That feeling didn’t last long. What I stepped into was one of the most toxic, mentally draining environments I’ve ever experienced. It didn’t happen all at once. It crept in. The first few weeks were exciting, but then the cracks started to show. The pressure was insane. The deadlines were borderline delusional. There was this unspoken expectation to be available at all times. Messages late at night. Work bleeding into weekends. No one ever said it out loud, but if you wanted to be seen as serious, as someone who "got it," you had to sacrifice everything else. The culture was a constant performance. I couldn’t just do my job. I had to sell it. Everything I worked on needed a narrative. Every project had to be spun into something that could fit neatly into a promotion packet or a perf review. I wasn’t building software. I was building a case to not be forgotten. Because every quarter, someone got labeled as underperforming. It didn’t always make sense who it was. Sometimes it was the quietest person on the team. Sometimes it was someone who just had the wrong skip manager. Everyone smiled in meetings but no one felt safe. The politics were unbearable. Influence mattered more than clarity. Visibility mattered more than functionality. Everything had to be socialized in just the right way to just the right people. One wrong Slack message or a poorly timed piece of feedback could nuke months of work. And if you didn’t know how to play the game, it didn’t matter how smart or hardworking you were. You were dead in the water. Work-life balance was a joke. I was constantly anxious, constantly behind, constantly checking messages like something was going to blow up if I missed a ping. I stopped sleeping properly. I stopped seeing friends. I stopped caring about things I used to love. My weekends were spent recovering from the week and bracing for the next one. And the whole time I kept telling myself it was temporary. That it would get better. That if I just made it to the next level, it would all be worth it. But it never got better. The pressure just got worse. The bar kept moving. The layoffs started. The reorganizations. The endless leadership changes. Half my team vanished in one cycle. I remember joining a Zoom call one morning and realizing I didn’t even know who my manager reported to anymore. People were disappearing mid-project. Morale was a punchline. Everyone was scared but pretending they weren’t. Everyone was tired but still smiling in team standups. I started to feel like I was losing my grip. When I finally left, I didn’t feel free. I felt broken. It took months before I stopped checking my calendar every morning out of reflex. I still have dreams about unfinished sprints and last-minute roadmap changes. I still flinch when I see a Slack notification. People glamorize these jobs because of the compensation and the brand names. But no one talks about the cost. I gave that place everything and it chewed through me like I was nothing. Just another seat to fill. Just another cog in the machine. I left with more money, sure. But I also left with burnout, insomnia, and a genuine hatred for the industry I used to be passionate about. I don’t know if I’ll go back to big tech. Right now I’m just trying to feel like a human again.

A big scam company just stole my whole game from steam, ripped it and sold it as their own on Playstation and other consoles.

Hey guys, [UPDATE HERE](https://www.reddit.com/r/PS5/comments/1j3hbhv/a_big_scam_company_just_stole_my_whole_game_from) Hope everyone is doing well. I posted this also on r/PS5 and [Twitter](https://x.com/steelkrill/status/1895142098644746704) to hopefully bring more light to the situation. So recently I have released [The Backrooms 1998](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1985930/The_Backrooms_1998__Found_Footage_Survival_Horror_Game/) on Playstation, Xbox, Steam and Nintendo switch. I was pretty happy with myself and all that, you know? Been in development for quite a while and being a solo developer and having my game finally on consoles is always awesome to see haha. Anyway .. Someone commented on one of my videos and violently (big thanks to him!) asked me why am I releasing the same game with it's name changed on consoles and I got a little bit confused. I explained that this game was never on consoles before and I have just released it now and they provided a link to a video - and behold ... long story short this company called "COOL DEVS S.R.L" stole my whole game, ripped it, pasted some bad AI crap on it as a cover, literally made a BAD version of it and just published it on consoles and sold it to trick players into buying it. They stole the whole game as it is alongside the music, sounds, voice lines and everything else. They only changed the monster and the picture on the frame lol.. Video Link to the fake game: [https://youtu.be/VJr6rL-geTU?t=745](https://youtu.be/VJr6rL-geTU?t=745) Video Link to my game: [https://youtu.be/7tWYhFfXNBM?t=561](https://youtu.be/7tWYhFfXNBM?t=561) Also, this is a link to their Nintendo Page so you can see what kind of "games" they do: [https://www.nintendo.com/us/search/#cat=gme&f=softwarePublisher&softwarePublisher=COOL%20DEVS](https://www.nintendo.com/us/search/#cat=gme&f=softwarePublisher&softwarePublisher=COOL%20DEVS) **EDIT:** For anyone that's not seeing a difference, sorry I should have provided [these images comparation ](https://imgur.com/gallery/big-scam-company-just-stole-whole-game-from-steam-ripped-sold-as-own-on-playstation-other-consoles-MRjOZTN)a bit earlier. The reason it feels a bit different is because post processing, and because they made a worst version of it but everything is literally stolen. **EDIT 2:** Doing further research and it seems they have also a couple of posts [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/PS5/comments/1h4stst/worlds_shadiest_developer_strikes_yet_again/) and are known in the PS5 community. One mentioned is the company that actually approached me. I think they are all basically the same one, *but I am not going to point any fingers.* **EDIT 3 (Latest):** Thank you all for your kind comments, help and everything else. I am currently still seeing what can be done and in contact with my video game lawyer so I will try to keep you updated. We have already submitted a DMCA and working with my publisher on this one - and for now the game is taken down from PlayStation and Xbox but it's still up on Nintendo Switch. In the meantime ... If you can report [the fake game](https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/products/backrooms-horror-escape-switch/), that would be awesome. If you bought it by mistake, please see if you can refund it. If you can share this, that would be awesome as well so more people will know about this and not get tricked. I will try my best in posting this to other subreddits to make more people aware. From what I uncovered, this is a whole big scam where they open a bunch of companies (mostly around the S.R.L) and upload fake games/scam games in order to trick buyers to buy them. Heck, I don't even want the money they stole I just want them to refund them back to the buyers if we can somehow catch them. This ain't right and I think more people needs to be aware of this. It seems they have additional companies (4, 5 or maybe even 6+) that are maybe tied to this scam... This is not fair on developers and not fair on the players. I still can't believe that someone as big as Sony, Xbox and Nintendo are letting this slide. It's sad. The funny thing is I saw this game before on the store and I LITERALLY spoke about how these scam devs are mostly stealing popular games on steam and uploading them consoles .. and I had no idea it was one of my own game that they stole. I do not understand how consoles platforms allow these type of scams going on and rub it under the carpet. This is hurtful to smaller indie developers, and hurtful to players that gets scammed by buying these games thinking they are real games. Also, they are doing this with other games. We have already working on finding out more info about them, and submitted a DMCA request to remove the game off the stores, right now it's down from PlayStation and Xbox but still up on the Nintendo store unfortunately. Hopefully they will also remove it soon as well. **Another important detail that may have ties or not:** I got contacted last year by a VERY sketchy publisher wanting to publish my game on consoles. I declined. They were sketchy and after checking their games they had very similar games to this fake company. They are both registered in S.R.L and they got banned from consoles recently. Could this be the same guys? Stole the game right after I refused to publish it with them. Not sure, but hopefully we can find out.

Collective shout is trying to internationally destroy games and things classed as “NSFW”

As you may know or not know the collective shout organisation is an Australian “feminist” organisation that has pushed platforms like steam and itch.io to delist their nsfw games. In doing so itch.io completely delisted all their nsfw games which has pretty much ruined some devs livelihood and a way of income. I had been doing some digging and managed to find out the Collective Shout is linked to a organisation here in the Uk known as ceaseUK as they both signed to open payment process. Both Melinda Tankard Reist who is the movement director for Collective shout and Gemma Kelly who is the head of Policy and Public affairs for ceaseUK are both on the letter. Just recently ceaseUK managed to push a law into the uk which regulates all NSFW content on all platforms and has to have the user either take pictures or use a id to verify they are of age to access the NSFW content including subreddits on substance abuse help or sexual abuse help subreddit. If you are reading up until this point please know that this is no longer attack on only gamers or game devs, these people are trying to regulate the entire internet to their liking

STEM fields have the highest unemployment with new grads with comp sci and comp eng leading the pack with 6.1% and 7.5% unemployment rates. With 1/3 of comp sci grads pursuing master degrees.

[https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/college-majors-with-the-lowest-unemployment-rates-report/491781](https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/college-majors-with-the-lowest-unemployment-rates-report/491781) Sure it maybe skewed by the fact many of the humanities take lower paying jobs but $0 is still alot lower than $60k. With the influx of master degree holders I can see software engineering becomes more and more specialized into niches and movement outside of your niche closing without further education. Do you agree?

Reminder: The people on this sub who say that "AI will replace Software Engineers" are most likely unemployed new grads.

I've had this convo way too many times. **Person:** "AI is going to replace us! It can literally code new features in seconds" **Me:** "Oh, what kind of features are you talking about?" **Person:** "Well, I created a TODO app in 10 minutes with it" **Me:** "Oh.. what about a feature for a production-grade, enterprise level application used by real users?" **Person:** "Well considering it helped me in my TODO app so much, it could easily help there too" **Me:** "Oh.. do you have any experience with working on these kinds of systems?" **Person:** "No...." Please, for the love of god, if you don't have any actual experience as a software engineer, shut up about AI.

I Just Got Laid Off – But It Might Actually Be the Best Thing That’s Happened to Me!

Guys, I am absolutely freaking out right now, and I had to share. So, here's the deal: The last couple of months at my company have been *rough* – a ton of layoffs, and I was just waiting for the other shoe to drop. I had this sinking feeling I might be next, so I started job hunting in January (safety net, right?). Fast forward to last Friday, and I land this AMAZING job offer. Great pay, better benefits, the whole shebang. I was stoked, it felt like such a perfect fit, and I was already planning to resign today. But guess what just happened? My SVP called me *just now*. The conversation went something like this: "Tough decision, but we're having to let you go, and we want to part on good terms." And to add a little salt (or should I say sugar?) to the wound, they’re offering me *five months* severance pay. I’m literally screaming in excitement because not only did I dodge a bullet with the layoffs, but now I’ve got an even better opportunity lined up. It’s like the universe had my back! So yeah, I'm still processing all this, but I just wanted to share this wild, unexpected turn of events with you all. It’s crazy how things work out sometimes. Here's to new beginnings!

I gave up after 2 years and took the easy way out

I was laid off in May 2023. I have 10 YOE, CS degree, and am a US citizen. I spent 4 years in the startup world as a Frontend Developer and 6 years at a F500 as a Senior Fullstack Engineer. Over the last two years I made it to 18 final rounds. I lost count of the amount of applications and interviews total. I was always just a bit short on aligning perfectly with their stack, a year too short on a certain technology, wrong cloud platform, etc. I got a part-time job, lived frugally, stretched my emergency savings / severance and told myself that the next one would surely be the one. I was so close, third time must be the charm or fourth or fifth, etc. I hid my unemployment from my family out of shame for 2 years. Then when April came around I was staring down the barrel of my 2 year mark of employment with nothing left in my savings. I confessed to my father with humility and asked for help. I am now starting as a Systems Engineer at a family friend's company next month after 2 rounds of interviews. I didn't even have to solve algorithms or draw up system designs. I am a bit ashamed of taking advantage of nepotism. I didn't see a light at the end of the tunnel anymore. I was exhausted and saw a lifeline being thrown and took it. I guess I am sharing this on a throwaway just to confess and in case others would find my story interesting. Edit: To answer some comments - This is very much a nepo hire, not networking. The family friend is the CTO. - I did reach out to my network just not to my father because I didn't want to worry or disappoint my parents. - Yes it was a mistake to wait so long, I just always felt like the next one would be the one.

Genuinely what the HELL is going on?

The complete lack of ethics driving this entire AI push is absurd and I’m getting very scared. Is everyone in tech ghoul? Nobody cares about sustainability or even human decency anymore it seems. The work coming out of Google right now is so evil it’s hard to believe this is the same company from 2016. AI agents monitoring and censoring us based on whatever age they determine we are. The broader implications are mind numbing. There is no way engineers can be this detached from the social contract to make stuff like this what are y’all doing fr??????? I mean some of you work at palantir tho so. It’s all fun and games til it’s not. EDIT: This is not about YouTube but the industry as a whole. I’m 25 bear with me if I sound naive but the apathy over the last two years has lead me down a road of discovery. It genuinely just feels weird working with some of the most influential yet evil people on earth and like nobody says anything….even if not in the name of strangers, maybe their kids, their families, the planet. We all have more power than we like to believe. It’s hot and it’s only going to get hotter….. Edit: examples of nonsense https://x.com/culturecrave/status/1950636669507674366?s=46

Uncle Bob predicts a reverse bubble pop for CS jobs

AI is in a bubble just like the the dotcom bubble in the year 2000. Internet is one of the greatest technological advancements of all time - but it was in a bubble because tons of investment flowed into it, companies over hired, and most companies just didn't make it. the ones that did changed the world forever Same is happening with AI. Tons of investment flows in, but companies are doing the opposite with hiring. They are ***under hiring*** because of the expectation that AI will replace employees (it wont). So when pops, companies will rush to hire talent back up. I agree

Wiped my company's production DB last week.

**Preface**: 8 YoE, Big company (where I work) acquired a small but very successful product last year. I recently moved over to this product to help integrate it into our suite of software. **Story**: Unfortunately, this product lacked any sort of staff tooling, so support requests were more often than not accomplished by running SQL directly on the production database (💀). One of the most standard requests was updating product codes that were _specific_ to a user's account, i.e. a given product code for one user would not work for another user. The SQL boiled down to: UPDATE "users" SET "product_access_codes" = "..." WHERE "users"."id" = '289571032'; Last week, while on-call, I wake up to an "urgent" request to enable a user's product codes in time for a demo "very soon". Having done this countless times, I whip up and run the following: UPDATE "users" SET "product_access_codes" = "..."; WHERE "users"."id" = '289571032'; Notice anything? Well I didn't until I saw the dreaded "12857294 rows affected" result. There is truly no stronger stimulant than the realizing that you just bricked the production database by overwriting the user table with bad data. After coming to terms with the reality of my situation over the next 10 seconds (felt like 10 hours) I hit up our SRE team and give them the bad news. **Outcome:** Luckily for me, our SRE team had backups configured such that we were able to restore the database to the state ~2 minutes before my mishap. Total downtime ended up being ~20 minutes while we ran the restore. After the dust settled I'm glad to report I did not in fact lose my job. I _did_ feel incredibly embarrassed, but equally thankful for my coworkers being empathetic and understanding that mistakes can happen. My EM blamed the situation more on our lack of tooling, so we sliced up some time last week to write our first version of staff tools. **Takeaway**: Doesn't matter how many times you've done something or how long you've been in the game, fuck-ups do happen and often when you feel the most complacent. This was a query I'd written many times over; the early morning request plus the urgency led me to get complacent and cut corners. More importantly though, in retrospect, **always turn off autocommit in your production DB sessions**. I could have avoided the entire situation had my SQL instead been \set AUTOCOMMIT off BEGIN; UPDATE "users" SET "product_access_codes" = "..."; WHERE "users"."id" = '289571032'; Upon seeing the syntax error and rows affected output I could have just ran `ROLLBACK` and avoided the whole situation. I honestly wanted to write this post mainly just to call out the fact that anytime you run SQL in production it should be wrapped in an explicit transaction.

Just pushed my first PR for my new job at Azure after leaving AWS!

After ~~being asked to leave~~ **voluntarily** departing from AWS last week to search for new opportunities, I am happy to state that I found a new job at Azure!   I'm meeting my new team later this afternoon for onboarding, and I wanted to leave a good first impression before that meeting, so I coded my first PR and self-approved it a few minutes ago to show that I'm a go-getter who takes initiative! It was just a one-line change for some DNS settings and I ran it through chatGPT and everything checked out! They are going to be so impressed with me! There were some pipeline warnings that initially prevented me from releasing it to the higher environments, but I managed to find a workaround by borrowing the credentials from my coworker’s laptop! Do you have any other suggestions for what to do before my meeting? It feels good being part of an amazing team and help keep the internet alive!

Hacks to get hired at Amazon

Hey, I’m a software engineer at Amazon and want to share some hacks on getting hired. Couple points: 1) Please do not message me 2) I have participated in many interviews, this is my experience, the morals of these cheats or whether you have success is up to you. First, the coding rounds (not including OA) does not allow you to run your code, it’s basically a blank text editor. Many interviewers cannot really tell if your code will run, they just see if it “looks correct”. I’ve seen a lot of candidates get hired by borderline writing pseudocode. The lesson here is to waste zero time wondering about nit-picky details like if your loop is off by one, or what that built in method to convert an int to a string is… they care about SPEED and just that you have the right idea. Second, Amazon treats their LPs like the holy texts. But the only thing that really matters is delivering to please your superiors no matter what. This means put customer obsession, deliver results, and ownership above all else. These are the rules you live by. You tell these people that you skipped Christmas because you had to fix an open source dependency to unblock some random guy in Indian if you have to… Honestly I hate this company but if this helps you get hired I’m happy for you, just know that if you do get hired and you BS’d using my tried and true formula, you may get pipped.

How a friendly debate saved League of Legends millions in server costs

Hi everyone, I'm Robin, the tech director for League of Legends. I wanted to share a dev blog from one of Riot's principal software engineers, Tomasz Mozolewski, that might interest you all. This started as a casual debate between game tech (me) and services tech (Tomasz) over a pint of Guinness. We were discussing best server selection algorithms. What began as friendly banter ended up saving League millions of dollars annually—with just a few lines of code. The result? A simulation proved that neither of our initial assumptions were correct. If you’re curious about the technical details or have any questions, I’m happy to chat! [Riot Tech Blog: Improving performance by Streamlining League's server selection](https://www.riotgames.com/en/news/tech-blog-cpu-usage?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR0YsTeRilrLHYn29VUNRLaRkCPZtGxD0Q5gcEop0NKj2pvlMAGjiPV-KWs_aem_VkPwWmRsvWHwuh4nqxNKsg)

Someone stole our game from itch.io, renamed it, and now it’s #1 in the App Store - what can we do?

Hi everyone, We’re a small indie team, and we recently participated in Brackeys Game Jam 2025.1, where we made a game called Diapers, Please!. We released it on [itch.io](http://itch.io), and to our surprise, the game started getting some organic attention, especially from TikTok. But today, we discovered that someone literally stole our game, wrapped it in a WebView, uploaded it to the App Store under a fake name ("My Baby Or Not!"), and now it’s sitting at **#1 in the Casual category in several countries,** all without our permission. There’s already a TikTok with the fake game name that has over **1.4 million views**. * They didn’t change the assets or gameplay at all - it’s a direct copy from itch.io. * They’re making money from it, while we have zero control. * We’ve already filed a DMCA with Apple [here](https://www.apple.com/legal/intellectual-property/dispute-forms/index.html), but we’re wondering: **what else can we do and will Apple be on our side?** Has anyone here dealt with this kind of situation before? We’d appreciate any advice or insights. Also, if anyone’s curious, here’s the real game: [https://voltekplay.itch.io/diapers-please](https://voltekplay.itch.io/diapers-please) Thanks in advance for any advice and for letting us vent. **\[March 8 UPDATE\] Our Steam page is now live! If you’re interested in the game or want to support us, please consider adding it to your wishlist!** [https://store.steampowered.com/app/3572310/Ministry\_of\_Order](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3572310/Ministry_of_Order) \[UPDATE 1\] Thief made game paid at app store. Apple contacted me that they just sent my complaince directly to thief and "Apple encourages the parties to a dispute to work directly with one another to resolve the claim." \[UPDATE 2\] Thief's game page reached #1 in top paid games of appstore. Apple don't wont to respond to it. \[UPDATE 3\] Lawyers told us that there is no chance to pursue the thief in the court, the best result for us can be that apple will delete thiefs game and account. \[UPDATE 4\] Thief removed most popular paid clone from app store! Also, he remove illegal copy of Kiosk game too! But his account still online and apple haven't responded anything about deleting it. Bad news - more clones UP in app store, atm we have found 3 of them (thnx to you guys for sending me DMs). \[FINAL UPDATE\] All copies that we found so far was removed, Apple answered to me that "We can confirm that the following app was removed from all territories. We trust this resolves your concerns." But thiefs accounts is still alive and those who sold our game for 60k$ will receive that money, so I continue my dispute with Apple. Currently removed stolen copies: * [https://apps.apple.com/us/app/diapers-please-game/id6742812517](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/diapers-please-game/id6742812517) * [https://apps.apple.com/us/app/thats-my-baby-or-not-game-3d/id6738090723](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/thats-my-baby-or-not-game-3d/id6738090723) * [https://apps.apple.com/us/app/my-baby-or-not/id6742455066](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/my-baby-or-not/id6742455066) * [https://apps.apple.com/us/app/diapers-please/id6741484140](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/diapers-please/id6741484140) Thiefs accounts: * [https://apps.apple.com/lk/developer/marwane-benyssef/id1758988688](https://apps.apple.com/lk/developer/marwane-benyssef/id1758988688) * [https://apps.apple.com/us/developer/tasawar-hussain/id1667284631](https://apps.apple.com/us/developer/tasawar-hussain/id1667284631) * [https://apps.apple.com/us/developer/sawsan-andrew/id1779282000](https://apps.apple.com/us/developer/sawsan-andrew/id1779282000) * [https://apps.apple.com/us/developer/fouad-santhosh/id1800660851](https://apps.apple.com/us/developer/fouad-santhosh/id1800660851)

I watched someone play my game for 2 hours on Twitch

Just an absolutely surreal experience. First off, getting feedback from the streamer and the chat was super helpful (both positive and negative). It was also incredibly insightful to watch someone casually play the game while going in completely blind. But above all, it just feels *so validating* to know that someone chose to take two hours out of their day to engage with something that I made - even more so because I haven't really promoted my game (outside of some posts on Bluesky). I've barely cracked 300 wishlists, so the fact that a stranger saw the potential in my work based solely off the work itself - no marketing, no hype, just that first impression... just unreal. Sorry for the ramble. I know I'm not a professional developer, only some hobbyist, but the attention-craving artist within me really needed to do whatever the reverse of venting is edit: here's a link for the people asking about the game, I wasn't sure if it was against the rules or not: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2873860/

By pure luck, the first person to play my game was a huge twitch streamer and I sh*t my pants

Some time ago, I was working on my game while watching the stream of my favorite German Twitch streamer, Bonjwa, as I always do. There were about 7k live viewers. He had just finished a placement for Final Fantasy and had some downtime before the next one. I had just released an early demo for my Serious Sam-like shooter, so I casually wrote in the chat, "Hey, check out the game Slyders! :D" This is what happened next: [https://youtu.be/k-TgbNc\_9ps?t=79](https://youtu.be/k-TgbNc_9ps?t=79) By pure chance, he actually read my post and searched for the game on Steam. I think my heart stopped at that moment because no one, except for a few guys on r/DestroyMyGame, had played my game before. He watched just a couple of seconds of the trailer and burst out laughing. I wasn't sure if it was because he thought it looked trashy or genuinely fun. Then, to my absolute shock, he downloaded and started the game. At that moment, I was sitting on the edge of my seat, and then I ran out of my room, probably out of embarrassment. What if he finds a huge bug? What if he just laughs at the crappy game and at this delusional developer? Eventually, I stood in the doorway and watched the stream from about 4 meters away. Thankfully, everything worked fine at the beginning, and he started to enjoy the game. After a couple of minutes, he actually began laughing with joy, he was REALLY into it. He cheered as he blasted and shot his way through the map and even made comments about how much he loves the game. He played through the first map and even started another run, ultimately playing for about 40 minutes, even though the demo only had 15 minutes of actual playtime! He did encounter an annoying UI bug after some time, but it didn’t matter. I was so excited when the stream ended that I couldn't sleep that night. I ended up walking through the city until morning. In terms of wishlist numbers, it was a boost, though nothing super spectacular. It added about 350 wishlists. Anyway, for me, this was the first time someone played my game on stream and it wasn’t just anyone, it was my favorite streamer, and he loved my game. That meant a lot to me :D The Slyders demo looks a lot different now, I went into a more cartoonish so if you want to check it out, here you go: [Slyders on Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2607870/Slyders/)

After 4 years at Google, here's my honest take on why their work culture and processes didn't work for me.

I recently left Google after nearly four years. I wish I could say it lives up to all the hype, but it didn't. I honestly felt like I did some of the worst work of my career there. The environment, the processes, and team dynamics simply didn't align with my approach for how to collaborate and ship software. I've been reflecting on exactly why I wasn't able to make it work for me. Just to brace you, I know just how ranty this is going to sound. I'm not writing this as a condemnation of Google, because I know there are people that thrive and enjoy working there. This is just my own personal perspective on it. Take it with a grain of salt. # Agile is a Sin I come from companies that do agile processes. It's not perfect, but it's empowering and very adaptive to change. I've been told that agile processes do not scale. So when I joined Google, I was extremely interested in learning how and what Google does to ship software. They must be doing something slightly different or better to ship software at scale, right? Wrong. They quite literally don't have processes around collaboration. It's basically waterfall. Product writes up a doc. Gets buy-in from leadership. Tosses it at engineering. And then we never see them again, so we're left to implement it as we see fit. It is literally the most expensive and high risk software development I've seen in my entire career. They basically have blind faith they've hired super smart people that will just magically build the perfect product. Which to be fair, they do quite literally have a lot of *rock star* developers. But relying on purely heroics to ship software is a recipe for burn out and knowledge silos. Also, they don't ship software. Deadlines are arbitrary. There are so many times when we approach a deadline only for "X" feature needs to absolutely be there on release so we'll just push out the release. I think deadlines are stupid, so I don't want to pretend like I care about them. But I do care about shipping software. The sooner you ship, the sooner you can start to learn and prove that your core assumptions are right or wrong. So to ship sooner, you need to downscope. If your MVP (minimal viable product) requires several really difficult features to implement, maybe it's not an MVP anymore. But then again, I guess no one called it an MVP, but me, who is used to shipping software regularly. # The Doc Machine So, if you're not regularly shipping software, how can you possibly measure impact? Docs. Endless docs. Countless docs. So many docs that it can be impossible to find what doc says what you did. Google's mission is to "organize the world's information." Internally in Google, they generate a lot of information in docs, and it's very hard to search and find the information you're looking for. What's the point of docs no one reads? Well, since software doesn't get shipped, I assume it just acts as a laundry list of links when attempting to show impact for your performance reviews or promotions. You might not have shipped anything, but at least you left a paper trail of what you didn't ship. You want to know the worst part of it? They want you to write a doc on a system you don't understand. So you write it up, make some assumptions and send it out for approval. No one reads it to approve it. Let's say you get your single approver and start implementing. Guess what, your core assumption is wrong. The data isn't in the right place, or the data you thought had what you needed, doesn't. Now you need to rewrite the doc. What's the point of getting approval? What's the point of a doc that is wrong from the start? What's the point of upfront design that is wrong? Why not just implement and find out what actually is going on and make it work? The point is, it's just theater to make it look like we're doing our jobs. Why isn't the software the evidence we're doing our job? I'm not trying to say docs are bad, and everything should just be tribal knowledge. But I am saying docs that need to be rewritten from the get-go are a waste of time. # Bad docs Ironically, despite needing to write so many docs to implement things. When you read other people's docs, you might notice something. They're very high-level. They're more like a thesis, then like actual documentation on how to use an API. What is the point of docs that don't answer how to use an API? Focusing on the high-level philosophy of a service is honestly distracting and unhelpful. I think I understand why this happens. It's hard to keep docs up to date. So if you keep them high-level, they won't become obsolete or need to be updated. But I don't care about your thesis defense; I just want to use your software to solve my problem. And I know Google can write good docs. [Angular](https://angular.dev/overview) has fantastic documentation. [Proto Buffers](https://protobuf.dev/overview/) have great docs. Both of these are made by Google. I guess the difference is they're public facing and Google doesn't prioritize internal docs like they do their external facing ones. # A Culture of Silence So, there is a lot of lip service towards how open Google is. Say how they're trying to encourage employees in fireside chats to not ask anonymous questions so that leadership can follow up with the individual to gain more context. (This, by the way, does not prevent people from asking anonymously, which they do.) There is also a culture of no-blame retrospectives. They don't run regularly, even when I advocate for them. And worst of all, when we finally do run retrospectives, we don't discuss challenges and problems we are encountering. So, what's the point of a retrospective that doesn't talk about pain points and mitigation strategies? From my perspective, it just looks like theater and a way to paint a false view that everything is good and we have nothing to complain about. Or worse, that we are helpless and we really cannot change anything. Coming from companies with genuinely open cultures where we fostered candid and open discussions, it's baffling to me that no one seems willing to put in the minimal effort to improve everyone's lives. It is better to be positive about a broken system and keep the status quo than it is to ask people to put in a laughable small level of effort to make everyone's life better. Not everything is going smoothly all the time. And assuming we **want** it to run smoothly, we should probably discuss the pain points and workarounds or solutions to them. Knowledge silos are bad. More open discussions can reduce knowledge silos which reduces the burden on individuals and gives everyone a balance for job responsibilities. # A Culture of Bottom-Up (but only if it's top-down) So, in meetings with leadership. They emphasize that our *bottom-up culture* is how we do such great work. And by *bottom-up*, they apparently mean *top-down*. # When Bottom-Up Meets Brick Wall So, let's say our UXR (user experience research team) has come up with an obvious gap in our offerings. What would you do? Perhaps gather some people from multiple disciplines and brainstorm a solution. Or maybe you just get leadership and design in a room and iterate on who knows what behind closed doors for literal months, before you ever even involve engineering. And for those few months, you pull engineering off their current teams in a large-scale reorg and don't give them marching orders instead just give them a bunch of vague ideas of what they might want to build. Like...what is engineering supposed to do? Build against an invisible moving target? The answer is, that is exactly what we do. Not because it's a good use of our time, but because we have nothing better to do and we have no input into the vision of the product. So let's say, you're an engineer, like yours truly, and you think that process is stupid, and instead you really do want to try to implement a bottoms up initiative. So maybe, see a feature, we originally spec'd out but was dropped because they didn't see the current value in implementing it. But it sounds kind of cool, and shouldn't be that difficult to get an MVP for this feature. Maybe you go to reach out across teams, pull in people that own data you need, a team that works on Android and iOS, and try to get people from the backend team so you can make an e2e MVP to demonstrate this feature is doable. Also, act as a test bed to show smaller agile processes work and probably how we should handle work in the org. Sounds pretty encouraging, right? But here is the real problem, one of the teams is a no-show. Not only are they a no-show, they also refuse to work with you and ignore your messages. You escalate to your manager and tech lead, and that team also ignores them too. You work with the other teams and implement everything, but say the one thing to tie everything together and make it work e2e. Let's say a backend team refused to work with you. So, naturally, offer to do the work for them. And they tell you to not do that. Because it's not my code base, I'm not on call, and I don't have to maintain it. So what do you do? What I did was create a video demo that made it look like it should work and presented it to leadership. We were reorged before this demo was even presented, so the feature died on the vine. # The Only MVP Is Minimum Viable Plausible Deniability Let's say that you do still believe in the rhetoric that, *the organization really does believe in bottom-up*. So you take some time and write up a doc (which is an activity you don't enjoy but if that's how the game is played, and you want to play ball, you do it). The doc outlines an open source initiative that is coincidentally attempting to solve the space we just tried to fill. But since there's an open-source community trying to solve the same problem space, maybe we can just leverage that and even help them grow at the same time. Anyway, it was super nice to have leadership hear me out, but they didn't want to go with it, because it turns out that one of the reasons we hamstrung our last project was because we were attempting to skirt a legal definition that the open source project is tackling head on. Suddenly, it made more sense: The original project was destined to fail, not because it was a bad idea, but because they were trying to handicap the implementation to avoid legal scrutiny. Fundamentally, we're not trying to build good software or solve problems. We're just trying to do something without bringing legal scrutiny to Google. I understand getting sued sucks, and the law is often weaponized against Google. But why handicap ourselves? There are so many other ideas out there. Why not pursue things that are higher value and lower risk? I cynically believe it could just be virtue signaling to investors, to show Google is trying new things and still taking risks. But their risks seem high-risk, low-reward, compared to the normal practices I'm used to, which focus on mitigating risk and prioritizing high value. Taking risks here seems to be about signaling growth, but are they truly growing? Wouldn't the more obvious path be to take the calculated legal risk to solve a real problem and potentially achieve genuine growth? I don't know; I'm not in leadership. I just had a worm's-eye view of the machine. # Grassroots Agility, Stomped by Apathy Let's say you came from an agile background and you even believe it. Because you've seen it solve very obvious communication issues that you see arise in large organizations. You've experienced it firsthand, you know it works. You go and explain it to your manager, they say that there are organization issues and leadership is resistant to change. They don't discourage you from trying, but they kind of set the expectations that nothing will change. But, what else are you supposed to do? Nothing? So you have a meeting with your skip manager (your manager's manager) once again advocating to adopt agile processes and maybe get more stakeholder buy-in. And they give you the advice to do it locally with your team. You know, "bottom-up" kind of stuff. You present it to the team. They hate it. They don't want processes. They don't want collaboration or more communication. They say agile practices are dehumanizing and that we are not interchangeable cogs in the machine. A bit of a disservice towards agile processes. But they are willing to try some of the ceremonies. But literally, for any reason whatsoever, they cancel meetings, like retrospectives or stand-ups. Maybe we need more time to finish a feature, or maybe it's a holiday, or we get reorged. And we never start up the meeting again, at least until I ask for it. Followed by it once again being canceled at the drop of a hat. And no one cares. They don't see the value in it. And to be honest, the ceremonies are toothless because we don't discuss actual problems, we don't discuss work progress to reduce knowledge silos, and action items are never done and are also usually not meaningful anyway. The reason people don't see the value of agile processes is not that it's not a good framework to address communication gaps, but because just doing the ceremonies without the communication makes them pointless. There is value in the ceremonies if they're being used to address the problems. But actively ignoring the problems, even with ceremonies, means we're now just wasting people's time. # Bottom-Up, Top-Down, and Going Nowhere If there is a bottom-up culture at Google, it is self sabotaging. There is so much momentum for the status quo that actual process change is near impossible. The only change that appears to work is a top-down mandate, which they try every year with constant reorgs and get the same results. # There is No Team in I So, coming from an agile background (I know I sound like I'm in a cult, with how much I bring it up, but bear with me), I've come to the understanding that I as an individual do not necessarily matter. It's about putting aside ego and working together on a larger goal. This also comes with a nice benefit of distributing responsibility, and reducing burn out. That's pretty damn *ungoogley*. At Google, they're rugged cowboys. They pull themselves up by the bootstrap and don't care about your collaboration. You need to own everything. Your work, your feature, your project, your process, your career. No one is here to help you. You need to just do it yourself. Which is ironic, as [googley-ness](https://staffeng.medium.com/being-googly-62b75dd642df) should theoretically not embody it. But the performance evaluation surely doesn't emphasize trying to make teamwork work. [A bus factor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor) of 1 is seen as a positive thing. It means you've made yourself invaluable. You are the sole point of contact, and despite that sounding like a lot of annoying responsibility, it's perceived as good because you *own* it. I hate knowledge silos. I do not believe it makes anyone more valuable. I fought against the hoarding of knowledge. I'd include people into meetings to make sure I'm not the only one with context. I'd ask stupid questions and repeat talking points in meetings to make sure I understood and we were aligned. These are all considered negative things at Google. Because it is seen as wasting everyone's time in the meeting. It is better to repeat yourself with several dozen 1:1s (or I guess write yet another doc no one will read) than it is to talk it over in a group and make sure there is no ambiguity. It could just be me though. But it sure felt like it, when my manager said I was *"leaning on others too much."* How else am I supposed to read that? I've never seen such an environment that is literally so hostile to collaboration. # Performative Theater I hate 1:1s. I think they're a waste of time. I would even argue that most 1:1s are a waste of time in every context. I'm probably being hyperbolic, as I'm sure there must be cases where 1:1s are beneficial. But I'm struggling to think of one right now. 1:1s are a bottleneck to communication. And judging by how often my 1:1s were canceled with my managers, I'd have to say they don't value them either. So, I'm a huge advocate for openness and transparency. And after one reorg (I went through 5 reorgs in my 4 years at Google, and been through 7 managers, chaos is the norm) leadership was attempting to be more open and transparent and so allowed anyone to join their meetings. So, since I felt like I did not have enough context to understand their decisions, I joined those meetings. When they asked if everyone had context on a doc, I was the only person to raise my hand and said I did not. I guess this was a sin to acknowledge my own ignorance, because it turns out after the next meetings I was removed from the subsequent meetings. I asked my manager if I could be brought back to gain more context, and he told me I had enough context to do my job. While probably true, I had a suspicion that my work was not very high priority. Maybe we should work on something else. Anyway, this taught me that it's all optics. I think my manager wanted to control the narrative. If he wasn't there to be a middle man, what is his job? Like, seriously, what *is* his job? I still don't understand what value he brought. # Tech Debt Forever To say Google's code base is complex is an understatement. Not only is it complicated, it's also a mess. Not only is it a mess, but it's also poorly documented. And not only that, but it actively fights you as you make changes and try to understand it. Cryptic compile errors. Cryptic build errors. Cryptic run time errors. And just when you think you've finally got it working. There are blockers on merging the code because of invisible linting errors you didn't know you were violating. Or there is some weird test case that broke, but only after 3 hours of running tests in the CI pipeline. Or maybe, you just want to delete some code, but it turns out that the code you're trying to delete has a different release schedule, so it cannot be deleted with other code. And the other code is dependent on the first bit of code that you cannot delete being deleted. The code is constantly fighting you. And maybe if we could discuss these issues in a group, we could understand the problems quicker or come up with strategies to mitigate them...but it turns out talking about how much it sucks to write code is frowned upon. So you just need to keep it to yourself. And I'm left wondering, *am I the problem?* Is my career a lie? Do I have imposter syndrome if I don't actually know what I'm doing? It makes you question everything. So I talked with my director (the skip’s manager) about my challenges. And I was candid about it. And he said, "It sounds like you need mentorship." And I said, that's exactly what I need. And he said he'd help get me some. I messaged him every week for a few months. He offloaded this responsibility to my manager, who naturally, did nothing. By the time I left, I made the request 8 months prior. I was clearly not getting the mentorship I asked for. My manager's *wonderful* feedback was, "maybe you should find your own mentorship." And it does make me wonder, "what is *your* job if it is not to help me do *my* job better?" Anyway, I also was unable to find mentorship on my own. And it does make me wonder, does anyone truly understand the beast that is Google's complex internally built tech stack with poor documentation? Even the internal AI that is usually pretty good at explaining some of the code, will just straight-up hallucinate how the code works and then it becomes very hard to understand. The AI will tell you a very convincing lie, but you won't know it's a hallucination or how to possibly fix it, because the documentation is poor and the only way to learn how it really works is to reverse-engineer it by performing code archaeology. # I'm out So I left Google. It was amicable. This was, of course, also only my personal experience in my particular organization. I've been told different parts of the org and different teams are said to have different cultures. Heck, even some people might even thrive in the culture I described. But it's not for me. They gave me severance, which was honestly extremely nice. I tried so hard to bring cultural change to Google, but there is no willingness to change. Honestly, with the amount of money they're printing with ads and search, there is no pressure for them to make any changes. There is a clear cultural mismatch between what I value and what Google values. Even if Google pays lip service that they value the same things I value, their actions clearly show they do not. And so, I am honestly happy to be free from them and given the time to look for a place that values what I want. I used to believe I was *a mercenary for hire to the highest bidder*. But you know what? Apparently, within reason. I just want to work, collaborate, and iterate on software. Is that asking for too much? The one thing I can take away from my time at Google is that I now have a clearer understanding of what I'm looking for in my next step.

Big tech engineering culture has gotten significantly worse

Background - I'm a senior engineer with 10yrs+ experience that has worked at a few Big Tech companies and startups. I'm not sure why I'm writing this post, but I feel like all the tech "influencers" of 2021 glamorized this career to unrealistic expectations, and I need to correct some of the preconceived notions. The last 3 years have been absolutely brutal in terms of declining engineering culture. What's worse is that the toxicity is creating a feedback loops that exacerbates the declining culture. Some of the crazy things I've heard * "I want to you look at every one of your report and ask yourself, is this person producing enough value to justify their high compensations" (director to his managers) * "If that person doesn't have the right skills, get rid of them and we'll find someone that does" (VP to an entire organization after pivoting technology direction). * I.e. - It's not worth training people anymore, even if they're talented and can learn anything new. It's all sink or swim now * "If these candidates aren't willing to grind hundreds of leetcode questions, they don't have mental fortitude to handle this job" (engineers to other engineers) * To be fair, I felt like this was a defense mechanism. The amount of BS that you need to put up with to not get laid off has grown significantly. * "Working nights and weekends is expected" (manager to my coworker that was on PIP because he didn't work weekends). * I've always felt this pressure previously. But I've never heard it truly be verbalized until recently. Final thoughts * Software engineering in big tech feels more akin to investment banking now. Most companies expect this to be your life. You truly have to be "passionate" about making a bunch of money, or "passionate" about the product to survive. * Don't get too excited if your company stock skyrockets. The leaders of the company will continue to pinch every bit of value out of you because they're technically paying you more now (e.g. meta) and they know that the job market is harsh. * Prior to 2022, Amazon was considered the most toxic big tech company. But ironically, their multiple layers of bureaucracy and stagnating stock price likely prevented the the culture from getting too much worse, whereas many other companies have drastically exceeded Amazon in terms of toxicity in 2025. IMO, Amazon is solidly 50th percentile in terms of culture now. If you couldn't handle Amazon culture prior to 2022, then you definitely can't handle the type of culture that exists now.

The computer science dream has become a nightmare

https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/10/the-computer-science-dream-has-become-a-nightmare/ "The computer science dream has become a nightmare Well, the coding-equals-prosperity promise has officially collapsed. Fresh computer science graduates are facing unemployment rates of 6.1% to 7.5% — more than double what biology and art history majors are experiencing, according to a recent Federal Reserve Bank of New York study. A crushing New York Times piece highlights what’s happening on the ground. ...The alleged culprits? AI programming eliminating junior positions, while Amazon, Meta and Microsoft slash jobs. Students say they’re trapped in an “AI doom loop” — using AI to mass-apply while companies use AI to auto-reject them, sometimes within minutes."

Big Tech Isn’t the Dream Anymore. It’s a Trap

I used to believe that working at FAANG was the ultimate goal. Back in the day, getting an offer from one of these companies meant you had made it. It was a badge of honor, proof that you were one of the best engineers out there. And for a long time, FAANG jobs actually were amazing: good work, smart people, great stability. But that’s not the case anymore. In just the last couple of years, things have changed dramatically. If you’re still grinding Leetcode and dreaming of getting in, you should know that the FAANG people talk about online, the one from five or ten years ago, doesn’t exist anymore. What exists now is a toxic, cutthroat, anxiety-inducing mess that isn’t worth it. At first, I thought maybe it was just me. Maybe I had bad luck with teams or managers. But no, the more I talked to coworkers and friends at different FAANG companies, the clearer it became. Every company, every team, every engineer is feeling the same thing. The stress. The fear. The constant uncertainty. These companies used to be places where you could coast a little, focus on doing good work, and feel reasonably safe in your job. Now? It’s a pressure cooker, and it’s only getting worse. The layoffs are brutal. And they’re not just one-time events, they’re a constant, looming threat. It used to be that getting a job at FAANG meant you were set for years. Now, people get hired and fired within months. Teams are gutted overnight, sometimes with no warning at all. Engineers who have been working their asses off, doing great work, suddenly find themselves jobless for reasons that make no sense. It’s not about performance. It’s not about skill. It’s about whatever arbitrary cost-cutting measures leadership decides on to make the stock price look good that quarter. And if you’re not laid off? You’re stuck in a worse situation. The same amount of work or more now gets dumped on fewer people. Everyone is constantly in survival mode, trying to prove they deserve to stay because nobody knows when the next round of cuts is coming. It creates this suffocating environment where nobody trusts anyone. Engineers aren’t helping each other because doing so might mean the other person gets ahead of them in the next performance review. Managers are terrified because they know they’re just as disposable, so they push their teams harder and harder, hoping that if they hit all their metrics, they won’t be next. It used to be that you could work at FAANG and just do your job. You didn’t have to be a politician, you didn’t have to constantly justify your own existence, you didn’t have to be paranoid about everything you did. Now? It’s a game of survival, and the worst part is that you don’t even control whether you win or lose. Your project could be perfectly aligned with company goals one day, and the next, leadership decides to kill it and lay off half the people working on it. Nothing you do actually matters when decisions are being made at that level. And forget about work-life balance. A few years ago, FAANG companies actually cared about this, at least on the surface. They gave you flexibility, good benefits, and a culture that encouraged taking time off when you needed it. But now? It’s all out the window. The expectation is that you’re always online, always grinding, always proving your worth because if you don’t, you might not have a job tomorrow. And the worst part? It’s not even leading to better products. All this stress, all this pressure, and the companies aren’t even innovating like they used to. It’s just a mess of half-baked projects, short-term thinking, and leadership flailing around trying to look like they have a plan when they clearly don’t. I used to think the only way to have a good career in software was to get into FAANG. But the truth is, non-tech companies are a way better place to be right now. The best-kept secret in this industry is that banks, insurance companies, healthcare companies, and even old-school manufacturing firms need engineers just as much as FAANG does, but they actually treat them like human beings. The work is more stable, the expectations are lower, and the stress is way lower. People actually log off at 5. They actually take vacations. They actually have lives outside of work. If you’re still dreaming of FAANG, hoping that getting in will make your career perfect, wake up. It’s not the dream anymore. It’s a trap. And once you get in, you’ll realize just how quickly it can turn into a nightmare. The job security is gone. The work-life balance is gone. The collaboration and innovation are gone. If you want a career where you can actually enjoy your life, look somewhere else. FAANG isn’t worth it anymore. \----------- ***I also want to tell you WHY the reality in the real world does not match the fake narrative on this subreddit.*** Pay attention to the comments you’re about to see. You’ll hear a lot of people insisting that everything I’m saying is wrong. That Big Tech is still as great as it’s always been. That layoffs are rare, and work-life balance is just as good as it’s always been. But here’s the thing ask yourself, who are the people saying this? Who are the ones telling you that Big Tech is the dream? In nearly every case, these people are brand new to the industry. Fresh grads. People with barely a year or two of experience under their belts. The truth is, they don’t know any better. They’re still caught up in the honeymoon phase, believing in the myth because they haven’t experienced the grind, the stress, or the reality of Big Tech's toxic culture. They haven’t seen what it’s really like once the rose-colored glasses come off. They’ve been sold a dream a carefully crafted image of what life at Big Tech *should* be. And they’re happily buying into it, not realizing they’ve been fed a lie. These are the same people who’ve only had a glimpse of what working at Big Tech can be like. And that’s all they need to sing its praises they haven't had to stay long enough to experience the burnout, the layoffs, or the soul-crushing fear that comes with constantly being on the chopping block. They've been treated like royalty for a year or two, and they think they’ve made it. But let me tell you real experience, the kind that comes from working in this industry for several years, will open your eyes to the truth. And it’s not pretty. Look at the facts. Engineers leave Big Tech after just a year because the culture is unsustainable. They realize the stability they were promised doesn’t exist. The work-life balance they were sold is a lie. The so-called “innovation” is nothing more than endless churn, half-baked projects, and pressure to deliver results at any cost. It’s not the dream these new grads think it is it’s a pressure cooker where you’re just another cog in a machine that doesn’t care about you. And once you’re in, it’s hard to escape. So before you buy into the hype, take a step back. Consider the bigger picture. Why is it that so many experienced professionals are fleeing Big Tech? Why do they jump ship to industries like banking, healthcare, and manufacturing industries that don’t carry the same glamour but offer stability, work-life balance, and respect for their employees? They’ve seen the reality behind the curtain, and they know it’s not worth it anymore. Now, think about this: The new grads in the comments? They haven’t seen that yet. They haven’t lived it. They’re parroting what they’ve been told or what they wish was true. But when the layoffs hit, when the stress becomes unbearable, when they start working 60-70 hour weeks to keep their job, they’ll understand. Until then, they’ll continue to claim Big Tech is a dream, because they haven’t been there long enough to realize that it’s a nightmare. The numbers don’t lie. People leave. And when they leave, they don’t look back. They go to places where their work is valued, where they can actually *live* their lives. They leave because they know the truth Big Tech is a trap, a fleeting dream that turns into a nightmare as soon as you realize how disposable you really are. So, before you drink the Kool-Aid, ask yourself: Why do so many of these new grads stay only a year or two before they burn out? Why is the turnover rate so high? Why do they look for jobs outside Big Tech? These are all questions worth considering. The truth is staring us in the face, but too many people are too caught up in the shiny promises to see it. Don’t let yourself fall into the same trap. Don’t buy into the lies being sold to you. Because once you're in, it’s not so easy to get out. And when you’re stuck, it can feel like you’re fighting for your survival. Don’t let the dream blind you to the reality. Wake up. Look at what’s really going on, and make the choice that’s best for you.

[Breaking] Intel to layoff more than 20% of staff (22,000 employees)

>Intel Corp. is poised to announce plans this week to cut more than 20% of its staff, roughly 22,000 employees, aiming to eliminate bureaucracy at the struggling chipmaker >The cutbacks follow an effort last year to slash about 15,000 jobs — a round of layoffs announced in August. [https://finance.yahoo.com/news/intel-cut-over-20-workforce-004251026.html](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/intel-cut-over-20-workforce-004251026.html) What are your thoughts on this?

I GOT THE JOB!! F*** MY OLD MANAGER!!!

I’ve had to deal with an extremely toxic manager for months now who has used personal insults, made me work weekends, and put me on zombie projects, and I studied my ASS off just for interviews to finally get a job offer today for a role at a Big Tech job way more in line with what I actually want to do. F*** my old team, for so long I held back because I didn’t want to burn bridges but I could NOT care less anymore

A m a z o n is cheap

Was browsing around to keep tab on the job market and talked to a recruiter today about a senior engineer role. The role expects 5 days RTO, On call rotation 24/7 every 4-5 months for a week. I asked for flexibility to wfh at least during the on call week and the recruiter fumbled. I’ve been in industry for close to 10 years now and first time talking to Amazon. I thought faang paid more. Totally floored to find out I’m already making 13% more than the basic being offered for the role. And you’re also expecting me to go through a leetcode gauntlet? No thanks. I feel like our industry as a whole is getting enshittificated. If you already got a job and have good team/manager, focus on climbing the ladder and if you’re ever on the side of interviewing, stop the leetcode style stuffs and focus more on digging the experience of a person? That’s how I been interviewing and got really good candidates.

How to deal with a dev who works constantly?

I am a mid-level dev on a team and we recently hired another mid-level dev. He is really nice, but is constantly working. I am seeing him commit code at 2 am, 7am, 3pm, 10pm etc. And he is taking most the tickets in the backlog. He completed an entire epic in 3 days working overnight. It's starting to make what was once a great team environment feel hyper competitive and stressful, as I have to scramble just to get work before he gobbles up several more tickets. And now I'm spending more time just reviewing his work than doing my own. In standup he is getting praised as a 'superstar', but in my view he is making the work environment a bit toxic. I want to bring this up to my lead at my next 1:1, but I'm not really sure how to phrase it as I dont want to be viewed as petty or lazy. Any advice?

Itch.io is 'actively reaching out to other payment processors' after pressure from credit card companies to curtail NSFW content, and that compared to Valve, it has 'limited ability to push back'

Thanks to all the AI coders out there, im busier than i've been in years

I've been freelancing on the side for more than couple years now, mostly helping startups and smaller teams fix bugs, add features, the usual stuff. Used to be maybe 1 or 2 projects a month. Now I'm turning people away because there's too much work coming in. And I'm pretty sure I know why. About 70% of the requests I get now are basically "we built this with AI and it doesn't work, can you fix it?" tbh I'm not mad about it. The money's good and the issues are usually pretty straightforward once you dig in. Last few weeks alone I've seen zero input validation, hallucinated libraries that don't exist, payment logic that does the opposite of what the comments say. The security stuff is wild. Apparently 45% of AI-generated code has vulnerabilities and I believe it. Don't get me wrong, people hired me to clean up messy code before AI too. But it used to be like 1 in 10 projects. Now it's most of them. And the pattern is always the same, looks clean, runs fine once and then falls apart when complexity hits. My income's up like 40% from last year and I barely market myself anymore. People just find me when their vibe-coded MVP starts breaking under real use. So yeah, thanks AI. Best thing that happened to my side hustle. Hope this keeps up:)

FELLAS, AFTER A YEAR WE DID IT

I LANDED A SWE JOB AND ITS FOR A GREAT COMPANY WITH KILLER BENEFITS AND GREAT PAY FOR MY AREA, IVE BEEN UNEPMPLOYED FOR A YEAR AND HAVE EASILY PUT OUT LIKE 1000 APPLICATIONS AND WE GOT ONE LADS LETS GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

A Graybeard Dev's Guide to Coping With A.I.

As someone has seen a lot of tech trends come and go over my 20+ years in the field, I feel inspired to weigh in on my take on this trending question, and hopefully ground the discussion with actual hindsight, avoiding panic as well as dismissing it entirely. There are lots of things that used to be hand-coded that aren't anymore. CRUD queries? ORM and scaffolding tools came in. Simple blog site? Wordpress cornered the market. Even on the hardware side, you need a server? AWS got you covered. But somehow, we didn't end up working any less after these innovations. The needed expertise then just transferred from: \* People who handcoded queries -> people who write ORM code \* People who handcoded blog sites -> people who write Wordpress themes and plugins \* People who physically setup servers -> people who handle AWS \* People who washed clothes in a basin by hand -> people who can operate washing machines Every company needs a way to stand out from their competitors. They can't do it by simply using the same tools their competition does. Since their competition will have a budget to innovate, they'll need that budget, too. So, even if Company A can continue on their current track with AI tools, Company B is going to add engineers to go beyond what Company A is doing. And since the nature of technology is to innovate, and the nature of all business is to compete, there can never be a scenario where everyone just adopts the same tools and rests on their laurels. Learn how AI tools can help your velocity, and improve your code's reliability, readability, testability. Even ask it to explain chunks of code that are confusing! Push its limits, and use it to push your own. Because at the end of the day/sprint/PI/quarter or fiscal year, what will matter is how far YOU take it, not how far it goes by itself.

I hate gamedev youtubers

Not just any gamedev youtubers, but the ones who made like 3 games and a total revenue of like $10k. They be talking about how to find succes as a game developer and what the best genres are, like if you think all of this is actually good advice then why don't you use your own advice. I btw love small gamedev youtubers who share their journey regardless of how much money they have made. But if you're a gamedev youtuber talking about how to find succes and what to do, I better see you making at least money to pay basic living expenses.

The real cost of playing a video game isn't money, it's time.

I saw a post talking about how little people value the work that goes into video games, that a video game that took a whole team hundreds of hours of work costs as much as a coffee on sale, but people still are arguing about whether it's worth buying. But this is argument is a little misleading, I think I hear this quite often about games "it's so cheap, it's less than <this other thing you commonly buy>", but the thing is, price is often not what's actually causing people to avoid buying the game. It's time. Imagine you buy a cup of coffee, and it took you 5 hours to drink it, and at the end of it you felt more hungry/tired than when you started. that's what playing a bad video game is like. when you buy food you are guaranteed to get some value out of it, even a movie can be just passively consumed in the background, but video games *demand* your time. So the standards are always going to be way higher. But this also means that if a game is good and worth playing and has good word of mouth. You can probably get away with charging a decent price.

Top startups are hiring like crazy. Here's where to actually find them.

Well-funded startups/scaleups are hiring across the board. Sharing a bunch of (maybe) under-the-radar places to still find top startups building cool things. \- [**Welcome to the Jungle**](https://uk.welcometothejungle.com/) (fka Otta (good matchmaking, can choose remote, good UK/EU coverage) \- **Hacker News** [Who's Hiring](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43243024) (very high signal and usually can connect directly with founder/early team. Check out the March 2025 thread) \- [**GrepJob**](https://grepjob.com/) (mostly mid-stage and almost faang, filterable by stack/level)  \- [**Startups.Gallery**](http://startups.gallery/) (good directory of top startups/scaleups + job board) \- **Joining a** **VC's talent networks** / job boards ([Greylock](https://greylock.com/jobs/#talent-network-tab), [a16z](https://a16z-games.typeform.com/1337-talent?typeform-source=www.google.com), [SPC](https://jobs.southparkcommons.com/jobs), etc) \- [**Next Play**](https://nextplay.so/) (lots of founding/early team type roles, mostly SF/NY-centric tho) \- [**Communitech**](https://communitech.ca/) (mostly for Canadian tech) \- [**Hiring Cafe**](https://hiring.cafe/) (less curated, but literally millions of roles and good filtering) Hope this helps. Please add more

I've made over 1,280 input icons for use in your games! (public domain, CC0)

More than a year ago I started creating icons attempting to make the biggest and most up-to-date package available. After several updates my package now includes and covers; - Xbox 360, Xbox One & Xbox Series - PlayStation® 1 – 5 - Steam Deck - Steam Controller - Nintendo Switch - Nintendo Switch 2 - Nintendo Wii - Nintendo Wii U - Nintendo Gamecube - Playdate - Keyboard & mouse - Touch gestures - Generic controls - Flairs Each of the included icons come in SVG format, two PNG sizes, in two spritesheet sizes *(including XML)* and two fonts *(TTF and OTF)* with character map! The package also includes an overview, and best practices on using the icons. Best of all, it's completely free. No charge, no need to credit - just use them in your project without any worry. **Download:** <https://kenney.nl/assets/input-prompts> I'd love feedback, or ideas on how to make the package even better!

Don't let Collective Shout win !

A group of 10 Karens in Australia have just screwed up the whole gaming industry. Unbelievable... Next will be LGBT content, violent content... I imagine it's already ruined, even for GTA 6, with its sexual content... All NSFW content from steam and Itchio is removed. We need to put pressure on VISA and Mastercard too. Sign the petitions: [https://www.change.org/p/tell-mastercard-visa-activist-groups-stop-controlling-what-we-can-watch-read-or-play?recruiter=16654690&recruited\_by\_id=6f9b8fd0-a37f-0130-4829-3c764e044905&utm\_source=share\_petition&utm\_campaign=psf\_combo\_share\_initial&utm\_term=psf&utm\_medium=copylink&utm\_content=cl\_sharecopy\_490659394\_en-US%3A8](https://www.change.org/p/tell-mastercard-visa-activist-groups-stop-controlling-what-we-can-watch-read-or-play?recruiter=16654690&recruited_by_id=6f9b8fd0-a37f-0130-4829-3c764e044905&utm_source=share_petition&utm_campaign=psf_combo_share_initial&utm_term=psf&utm_medium=copylink&utm_content=cl_sharecopy_490659394_en-US%3A8) [https://action.aclu.org/petition/mastercard-sex-work-work-end-your-unjust-policy](https://action.aclu.org/petition/mastercard-sex-work-work-end-your-unjust-policy)

My laid-off 4 YOE former Microsoft SWE CS UMich grad friend has capitulated. He had to get a job as a bartender.

Homie was unemployed for around 5 or 6 months? Hundreds of apps later to no success. His resume was peer reviewed by former managers, Reddit, former professors etc. Tons of ghosting, tons of "we've hired candidates that better align with XYZ". Applying for any and all entry level roles, mid levels, senior, dozens of cities around the country etc. He even got rejected from simple local Help Desk roles. The only offer he got was a Help Desk job that would require him to move 2000 miles (remote bait and switch role) for less pay than a Costco cart pusher. His emergency fund is almost dry and he had to settle and get a job as a bartender in Santa Cruz, which he says he actually likes. Luckily he's not autistic or smells bad like most in this field so apparently he is bringing several hundred a night or something with tips. This market is fucked. I guess our emergency funds should be upped to 24 months instead of 6 months. EDIT: This subreddit is ridiculous. Everyone thinks they won't be the one down on their luck for 6 months until it happens to them.

Junior devs not interested in software engineering

My team currently has two junior devs both with 1 year old experience. Unlike all of the juniors I have met and mentored in my career, these two juniors startled me by their lack of interest in software engineering. The first junior who just joined our company- • ⁠When I talked with him about clean coding and modularizing the code (he wrote 2000+ lines in one single function), he merely responded, “Clean coding is not a real thing.” • ⁠When I tried to tell him I think AI is a great tool, but it’s not there yet to replace real engineers and AI generated codes need to be reviewed to avoid hallucinations. He responded, “that’s just what you think.” • ⁠His feedback to our daily stand up was, “Sorry, but I really don’t care about what other people are doing.” The second junior who has been with the company for a year- • ⁠When I told him that he should prioritize his own growth and take courses to acquire new skills, he just blanked out. I asked him if he knew any learning website such as Coursera or Udemy and he told me he had never heard of them before. • ⁠He constantly complains about the tickets he works on which is our legacy system, but when I offered to talk with our EM to assign him more exciting work which will expand his skill sets, he told me he was not interested in working on the new system which uses modern tech stacks. I supposed I am just disappointed with these junior devs not only because after all these years, software engineering still gets me excited, but also it’s a joy for me to see juniors grow. And in the past, all of the juniors I had were all so eager to seize the opportunities to learn. Edit: Both of them can code, but aren’t interested in software engineering.

I was threatened with legal action after forking an open source game

Hey guys, I’m the owner of [https://frontwars.io](https://frontwars.io) ( https://store.steampowered.com/app/4002270/FrontWars/ ) which is a fork of OpenFront.io. Recently this post was made [https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/s/SdmyOKuTKy](https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/s/SdmyOKuTKy) A lot of the things said by the author there were untrue and so was his video. I have made my own response video to address everything and show my side of the story with evidence [https://youtu.be/GCxFnV6WCMs?si=gFRQusLwfn\_eVTFN](https://youtu.be/GCxFnV6WCMs?si=gFRQusLwfn_eVTFN) I was getting a lot of abuse from some people, so thought it was important to show my side, but I also want to say thanks for some people who could see I hadn’t violated the license. I hope you watch my video and then judge the situation yourself from the evidence

PSA: Most animated horse assets you can buy are subpar in terms of anatomy and not good enough if your target audience includes "people who like horses"

I'm making this post because I have repeatedly seen people recommend a certain asset and then refuse to believe me when I say it has subpar horse animation. I want to help people do a better job of including horses in their games AND invite devs to leverage the noticeably starved audience of horse girl gamers to their advantage. **"I absolutely can't afford anything else" or "I'm not targeting horse girls so it's good enough for my purpose"** Cool, valid, understandable, then this post isn't aimed at you. I'm aware some people will keep using Horse Animset Pro and be happy with it, that's fine. Also note that I am talking about the animation quality with regards to horse anatomy, not any other aspect of the asset's usability. I haven't myself worked with these assets, I evaluate them based on how they make your game *look*. I understand that usability and feature breadth is crucial for actual development, I just think it would be great if devs didn't have to choose between usability and correct anatomy. #The Problems with Horse Animset Pro Horse Animset Pro (HAP) is a game-ready animation pack and riding system available for Unity and Unreal. It gets widely used when any small dev team needs a horse, and unfortunately is also widely used in games that are supposed to be *about* horses, such as [My Horse: Bonded Spirits](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2376970/My_Horse_Bonded_Spirits/), [Horse Club Adventures](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1518820/Horse_Club_Adventures/), [My Life: Riding Stables 3](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1962150/My_Life_Riding_Stables_3/) or [Spirit: Lucky's Big Adventure](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1270720/DreamWorks_Spirit_Luckys_Big_Adventure/). The rig and animations are really unfortunate, and not in a "stylized but informed" way but in a "ignores basic leg functionality" way. One main issue is that the horse's forelegs are bent at the knee in various situations where it would be physically impossible for the foreleg to be bent on a real horse. For a horse's foreleg to carry weight, the knee joint locks in a straight position. A few concrete examples: * [Walk](https://i.redd.it/1lenul5t24je1.png) and [Canter](https://i.redd.it/eziiib3o24je1.png) each have their moments where the knee is bent while the fetlock is lowered (i.e. obviously carrying weight) * In the [rearing animation](https://www.reddit.com/user/AliceTheGamedev/comments/1ipb6wm/horse_animset_pro_rearneigh_animation_in_slow/) (called "Neigh" in the pack), the horse bends its knees before lifting its forehand into the air, which is impossible and wrong. In reality, the power to rear up comes from the hind end, as you can see in [this reference](https://www.reddit.com/user/AliceTheGamedev/comments/1ipav6p/gif_of_horse_rearing_in_slow_motion_for_animation/). (note also that the forelegs only bend once they're in the air, i.e. no longer carrying weight) * The "Idle Look" Animation in HAP is a particularly bad example where the forelegs bend at random and the horse looks [impossibly crouched](https://preview.redd.it/l3grxnh314je1.png?width=630&auto=webp&s=ac3b442718c4a1b2e3d2245d07df45bc12dabf9c) as a result. If you're not very familiar with horses, these examples may not look overly egregious to you, but for anyone with an eye for horse locomotion, it's pretty jarring. It's not so much one single horrible error, but a dozen details that give the horse an overall wobbly and gummy appearance that's just entirely not representative of an actual horse's movement. (and yeah horses can be wonky goofballs don't get me wrong, but like... there's still rules of physics and anatomy they follow) #Other Animated Horse Assets I haven't reviewed every horse asset out there in depth, but unfortunately, despite the issues with HAP, there's much worse examples out there. * This [Ultimate Horse Riding System](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGnk0Ly5krE) for Unreal advertises its IK solution with examples of the bent forelegs s-curve AND includes an example of the horse's forelegs bending entirely the wrong way around, [see here](https://preview.redd.it/bigwkdzn4aje1.png?width=653&auto=webp&s=9d91751181006670540e892e542ab1befd5f2508). * There's a handful of other "animated horse" assets on the Unity and Unreal stores including ones that feature completely wrong gaits/footfalls and often a complete disregard as to how weight-bearing works for a horse's body. I could spend days listing individual issues, so let me just summarize by saying I have never found any animated horse asset that *doesn't* feature egregious anatomical errors in its promotional material. * [Horse Herd](https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/characters/animals/mammals/realistic-horse-herd-231231) is an (imo) much better-looking alternative that's been out on Unreal for a while and just got released for Unity as well. While it's not perfect, the basic movements look vastly better in that one and I would be interested in hearing how it compares to HAP in terms of usability/features from someone who has worked with both. * Just as another fun worst-of highlight, [here's a 400$ "horse anatomy" model](https://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/3d-rigged-tail-jump-model-1386937) that features an elongated dog's skull instead of any actual equine anatomy, along with another wide variety of issues such as out of place muscles, front-facing predator eyes and of course some faulty weight-bearing logic on top. * There's this "[realistic horse with animations](https://www.fab.com/listings/95db4dc3-2f1b-456d-b3d1-8c924c728633)" for Unreal that I have the least amount of issues with ([deep dive here](https://www.themanequest.com/blog/2024/7/14/new-high-quality-horse-asset-for-developers-this-animated-horse-by-aragon-3d-is-now-available-in-unreal-marketplace)). So far I haven't seen any finished games use it and I can't speak to its usability though, would be interested in hearing experiences! #Common Issues in Horse Animation Animating horses isn't easy, they're weird giants who walk on their fingernails and have no muscles in their legs. Still though, there's definitely a lot of quality reference footage out there (the first moving picture ever was about capturing how a horse's gallop works), as well as equestrian communities who are happy to provide more specific video footage. The main thing people get wrong is **weight distribution** and **impact absorption**: When landing (e.g. from a jump or after rearing), the impact is absorbed *not* through bending the knees, but through the shoulder, elbow and fetlock joints. [Here's a helpful animation that illustrates the right and wrong ways.](https://www.reddit.com/user/AliceTheGamedev/comments/1ipy6gl/horse_foreleg_impact_absorption_reference_made_by/). [Reupload by original creator on bsky](https://bsky.app/profile/brendanbody.bsky.social/post/3lth4rugrqk22) The way a horse's legs stand, lift and absorb weight are often mixed up or otherwise badly applied. I've made [this illustration](https://preview.redd.it/9f6vvr8gpaje1.jpeg?width=1024&auto=webp&s=0d99aefa26293f9e303a3b652231f5baa7206ee7) to try and show the most common problems (on the right) as well as how things *should* look and work. ([Horse anatomy diagram](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/85/Points_of_a_horse.jpg/500px-Points_of_a_horse.jpg) in case the names of bones/joints confuse anyone) Another problem is that even when basic movements and gaits (meaning walk, trot, canter, gallop) are correct, people will invent impossible movements for idle animations instead of using reference footage. Horses do a lot of things that can be used for "idling" though, and you *can* find references if you know what to look for! They can scratch themselves, graze, look around, shake their head, paw at the ground, twitch their ears, lift a hindleg to relax, lower their head to doze, flick their tail and much more. I'll admit that finding video of all that in neat and labelled uploads isn't always super straightforward, but you can always go over to e.g. /r/horses or /r/equestrian and ask if anyone has video of their horse doing a specific thing. It's worth noting that these issues aren't exclusive to indie games and cheap assets: even AAA games like Ghost of Tsushima feature [examples of horrible horse leg anatomy](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5b981d61ec4eb7dc9c7aac8a/4d95f901-4f10-4b95-830d-52986630ebae/vlc_2023-04-25_21-48-27.png?format=1000w). #Context and Background **"Why is this worth caring about?"** In short: "people who like horses and play video games" are a significant target audience that is worth taking seriously if you're looking for a market niche that's starved for good content. The best summary of indicators and sources I have is [here in a talk I gave last year at devcom](https://youtu.be/wiOPrh27ytY?si=8OO9Rt_MiMm_2K80&t=524). Also note that in case anyone reading along has the tech art and asset store skillset to make a competitor for HAP, I believe there's a strong business case here! **"Who are you even and why should I listen to you?"** I've been doing market research and deep dives into horse games and horses in games for over 6 years now through my website The Mane Quest. I'm also a game dev generalist with a focus in producing and marketing and have worked in the games industry for a decade now – you can find credentials and links in the pinned "Contact info" post on my profile. That being said: I am of course not infallible in either horse anatomy OR game animation considerations, so if you do know more than me on these issues (i.e. how we can further improve horse animation and help people get it right), PLEASE do add your wisdom in this thread 🙏 #Further Reading I write a lot about this topic so if you want to know more, check out some of the following links: (these links go to my website The Mane Quest, which is not monetized) * [Adding Horses to your Game: Tips, Resources, Do’s and Don’ts](https://www.themanequest.com/blog/2024/7/16/adding-horses-to-your-game-tips-resources-dos-and-donts) * [Horse Animation: Guides, References and Resources](https://www.themanequest.com/blog/2024/9/6/horse-animation-guides-references-and-resources) * [8 Common Horse Mistakes I Want Game Developers to Stop Making](https://www.themanequest.com/blog/2021/8/22/8-common-horse-mistakes-i-want-game-developers-to-stop-making) * [Comment on "why is horse animation so often off in games" on this subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1ios7yl/ive_been_wondering_about_this_for_ages/mcp8ykz/) * Come join /r/gameswithhorses to follow discussions in this niche genre and stay up to date with horse game news **TL;DR:** Popular horse assets have very wonky anatomy and if you have any intention of making your game appealing to horse-loving gamers (of which there are many), it's worth looking into alternatives or making your own animations.

AI is literally coming for you job

We are hiring for a data engineering position, and I am responsible for the technical portion of the screening process. It’s pretty basic verbal stuff, explain the different sql joins, explain CTEs, explain Python function vs generator, followed by some very easy functional programming in python and some spark. Anyway — back to my story. I hop onto the meeting and introduce myself and ask some warm up questions about their background, etc. Immediately I notice this person’s head moves a LOT when they talk. And it moves in this… odd kind of way… and it does the same kind of movement over and over again. Odd, but I keep going. At one point this… agent…. Talks for about 2 min straight without taking a single breath or even sounding short of breath, which was incredibly jarring. Then we get into the actual technical exercise. I ask them to find a small bug in some python code that is just making a very simple API call. It’s a small syntax error, very basic, easy to miss but running the script and reading the error message spells it out for you. This agent starts explaining that the defect is due to a failure to authenticate with this api endpoint, which is not true at all. But the agent starts going into GREAT detail on how rest authentication works using oAuth tokens (which it wasn’t even using), and how that is the issue. Without even trying to run it. So I ask “interesting can you walk me through the code and explain how you identified that as the issue?” And it just repeats everything it just said a minute ago. I ask it again to try and explain the code to me and to fix the code. It starts saying the same thing a third time, then it drops entirely from the call. So I spent about 30 minutes today talking to someone’s scammer AI agent who somehow got their way past the basic HR screening. This is the world we are living in. This is not an advertisement for a position, please don’t ask me about the position, the intent of this post is just to share this experience with other professionals and raise some awareness to be careful with these interviews. If you contact me about this position, I promise I will just delete the message. Sorry. I very much wish I could have interviewed a real person instead of wasting 30 minutes of my time 😔

Payment Processors Are Forcing Mass Game Censorship - We Need to Act NOW

Collective Shout has successfully pressured Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal to threaten Steam, [itch.io](http://itch.io), and other platforms: remove certain adult content or lose payment processing entirely. This isn't about adult content - it's about control. Once payment processors can dictate content, creative freedom dies. Learn more and fight back: [stopcollectiveshout.com](http://stopcollectiveshout.com) EDIT: To clarify my position, its not the games that have been removed that concerns me, its the pattern of attack. I personally don't enjoy any of the games that were removed, my morals are against those things. But I don't know who's morals get to define what is allowed tomorrow.

16yo watched 6 hrs of C++ on YT; knows C++ now & wants to dev his own game. WTF??

My girlfriend’s son wants to get into game development. I gave him a textbook on learning C++ for game development. [For the record I’m not a programmer but have dabbled here and there]. He said he doesn’t need that book since he just watched six hours of how to program C++ on YouTube and therefore knew everything that was in the book. I asked him have you written “hello world” program. He said no. I asked him what were the different classes of integers. He couldn’t name one. I asked him what the range of a double was and he had no idea what a double was. They were on the first page of the book. Then when I showed him some of the games in the book which were terminal games, he said he didn’t need to learn how to do them because he was gonna develop something like Elder Scrolls. He was gonna leave school and do that and not even go to university. He downloaded unity engine and got some figure to run from one spot to another. Then I heard him yell out “man I’m so fucking smart. “. He used AI to code it. Now I can’t throw him off the balcony to give him a reality check or crack him over the head because I love his mother. What can I say to him from game development/C++ programming point of view to knock him down a few rungs? [edit: anyone thinking I’m gonna hit a 16-year-old over the head obviously missed the point. And anyone thinking this is a rage bait, it’s not. The reality is this kid was going to leave school this summer and not go back because he thought he could make a living and become a millionaire from designing and developing a game all by himself after watching six hours of YouTube. I have been encouraging him given by the fact that I gave him a book and websites and asking him to show me what he’s written. At the same time, I think a reality check about the gaming industry could be in order and that’s what I was hoping for here… because he was actually going to leave school and his mother did not want that for him.] [edit 2: anyone who thinks I’m trying to discourage him from his passion has misread the post. Asking game devs for the reality of the gaming industry and why it might be better to stay at school and get a computer science degree is a far cry from telling the kid he needs to stop coding. I never said anything of the sort and never would discourage someone from their passion.]

Developing games at Tencent - 01

I’m a game developer from China, and I’ve been working at Tencent Games for quite a few years now. To many people overseas, the Chinese game industry might seem a bit mysterious. From what I’ve seen, Chinese developers rarely share their experiences or ideas in open-source communities the way many Western developers do. There are several reasons for this. Culturally, we tend to be more conservative. Language is another barrier—many of us aren’t confident in our English. And honestly, our working hours are pretty long. Most people just want to eat and sleep after work (just kidding… kind of). Let’s talk about working hours first. Personally, my schedule is already considered quite relaxed: I work from 9:30 AM to 6:30 PM, with a break from 12:30 PM to 2:00 PM. That’s around 8 hours a day, and I don’t work weekends. But that’s not typical—different teams and projects have very different paces. Many of my colleagues start their day around 10 AM, grab lunch at 11:30 or 12, and only really get into work around 2 PM. Then they work until 6, take a dinner break, and keep working until 8 or 9 at night. Most people don’t get home until after 10. A lot of young people in this industry stay up late and wake up late—it’s just how things are. As for development, we mostly use Unreal Engine 5 now. Tencent is known for offering relatively high salaries. From what I’ve heard, average income for developers here is often higher than in many parts of Europe or even Japan and Korea. If you're a developer from abroad and want to chat, feel free to drop a comment! I think the pace and mindset of development can vary a lot between companies. Tencent started by making mobile games—and made a fortune doing it. So the business model here is more like a production factory. Just as many people view China as the factory of the world, Tencent could be seen as a giant game factory. This factory succeeded through production efficiency and a massive domestic user base. Our top-earning games are *Honor of Kings* and *Game for Peace*. These two alone make more money than many well-known AAA titles. You can see people playing them all over China—from first-tier cities like Beijing and Shanghai to small towns and even rural areas. For many young people, these games aren’t just entertainment—they’re social tools. Mobile gaming has become the most accessible form of entertainment for many people, especially those without the means for other leisure activities. Everyone has a smartphone, so on public transit you’ll see people either scrolling through social media, watching videos, or playing games. That’s what most young people do during their commute. Because China has such a huge population and long commutes, the market here is fundamentally different. User behavior, lifestyle, and population structure have shaped a completely unique gaming ecosystem—with its own business models and types of games. That’s why I think cross-cultural communication in this industry is essential. Looking at the industry overall, China’s game market reached a saturation point a few years ago. Back then, as long as you got a game launched, it would make money. Why? Because Tencent owns WeChat—the Chinese equivalent of WhatsApp—and WeChat could drive massive traffic to any game it promoted. And usually, the games it promoted were Tencent’s own. So even if a game wasn’t great, people would still play it—and spend money—simply because it was there. With such a large population, even a small percentage of paying users could generate huge revenue. But around 2019, that golden era came to an end. Even though the pandemic brought temporary growth, especially in gaming, mobile games didn’t see the same momentum. In recent years, the industry’s overall growth has started to slow. Tencent realized this and began focusing more on original content—especially AAA games. These are a different beast compared to mobile games. Mobile games were often copied or adapted ideas, where success relied more on execution and operations than creativity. But AAA games require original ideas, large-scale production, and a completely different pipeline. Tencent is now trying to “bite into that cake,” even though most people believe AAA games aren’t as profitable. Their business model isn’t as ideal as mobile games, but the mobile game market is no longer what it used to be. Short videos and social media have eaten away at people’s attention. Young players simply don’t have the time or money they once had. So if Tencent wants to grow, it needs to bet on creativity, originality, and new directions—even if the road is harder. ...

The "apply to everything, even if you're not qualified" mantra really did a number on the job market.

This advice worked well in 2021/2022 but in 2025, it really is screwing up the job market. We will post a role asking for 5-7 YOE and get tons of applicants with no experience applying. We post what is clearly a mid level SWE role and get people who have only worked retail, help desk, restaurants etc applying. AI is making retail employees sound like they use coding in their day to day workflow somehow. Like why even bother? You are just wasting your own time and everyone else's time. Don't even get me started on the sheer number of people who are not even citizens applying for US jobs. These people are the worst. A job will clearly state "no sponsorship" yet an Army of overseas people will apply anyways. If you're a mid level engineer, or even entry level, a large reason why your resume isn't even seen is because a job posting will have 1000s of literal garbage resumes to sort through. People who probably have a higher chance of winning the Powerball than getting a job offer. You can be a great candidate for the job but have 3000 piles of shit stacked on top of your resume that make it impossible for you to be seen. It's literally a gamble or if you have a personal referral. ATS isn't an end-all-be-all sorting tool either.

A 5 min weekly habit completely changed my performance review and got me a bigger raise

I know like me a lot of y’all are coming up on your performance reviews or they just passed and I wanted to talk about a habit that I feel like a lot of people might not know about. When performance reviews came around I would spend hours searching slack and jira tickets about what I did the last year, it was incredibly frustrating. About two or so years ago I got a new manager that taught me about brag documents, basically you fill it out through out the year to have all your accomplishments in one document. We did monthly summaries, every month I’d fill out what I did for the month and send it to my manager. It helped a lot during last year’s performance review. Unfortunately, I started filling out my monthly summaries a month later or a few weeks after the week ended cause I was so busy. Still helpful but still stressed me out when I’m trying to focus on coding. I realized doing it weekly is the hack. Choose the same time every week for me it’s Friday at like 3 and I take 5 mins to log the top accomplishments from the week. Made it easier to make a habit of it rather than forcing myself to write a big review later in the month or year. Feel free to use this template, it’s simple but gets the job done. - win: shipped X / fixed Y - before / after: 310ms / 190ms - metric: - who benefited: - evidence: link/screenshot Ive used notion, google doc and sheet and kudos notes and honestly they all work fine. Use what you feel the most comfortable with and will help you keep the habit up. if you track wins, what changed for you at review time? any tricks to keep the habit going in month 5–6 and beyond? TL;DR: track your accomplishments weekly, it makes it easier to remember what you did the last week rather than year.

I Analyzed Every Steam Game Released in a day - Here’s What Stood Out

Hey everyone, I decided to do a small analysis of every game release on Steam on June 2nd, 2025 (i chose this day because there was lot of release, not many free games and only indie titles, i'm not affiliated in any mean to any of these games) and check how much they grossed after 16 days. The goal isn’t to shame any game or dev : I’m mostly trying to understand what factors make a game succeed or flop. I wanted to see if common advice we hear around here or from YouTube GameDev "gurus" are actually true: Does the genre really matter that much? Is marketing the main reason why some game fails? How much does visual appeal or polish influence the outcome? I’m also basing this on my personal taste as a player: what I find visually attractive or interesting in the trailers, what looks polished or not... It’s not meant to be scientific, but hopefully it can spark some discussion! There was 53 games sold on this day, I split them into five categories based on their gross revenue (datas from Gamalytic) : 1. **0 (or almost 0) copies sold - 13 games** 2. **Less than $500 gross revenue - 18 games** 3. **$500 – $2,500 gross revenue - 10 games** 4. **$5,000 – $20,000 gross revenue - 10 games** 5. **More than $20,000 gross revenue - 2 games** # 1. Zero copies sold (13 games) Almost all of these are absolute slop full of obvious AI-generated content, 10-minute RPG-Maker projects, one-week student assignments, and so on. I still found three exceptions that probably deserved a bit better (maybe the next category, but not much more): * [A one-hour walking simulator](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3694740/Bean_Sidhe/) : mostly an asset flip and not very attractive but seem like there was some work done in the environments and story. * [A hidden-object game](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3766950) from a studio that seems to have released the same title ten times (probably an old game published elsewhere). * [A zombie shooter ](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1984800/DecayZ_Origin/)that looks better than the rest : nothing fantastic, but still look much better than the rest of this category. It apparently had zero marketing beyond a handful of year-old Reddit posts and a release-day thread. It's also 20€, which obviously too much. # 2. $20 – $500 gross revenue (18 games) * **7 total slop titles** (special mention to the brain-rot animal card game built on top of a store-bought Unity asset). I also included a porn game. * **6 generic looking but not awful games** that simply aren’t polished enough for today’s market (terrible capsule under one hour of gameplay..., I'm not surprised those game falls in this category) * **2 niche titles** that seem decent (a tarot-learning game and a 2-D exploration platformer) but are priced way too high. Both still reached the upper end of this bracket, so they probably earned what they should. **Decently attractive games that flopped in this tier:** * [Sweepin’ XS](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3596030/Sweepin_XS/) : a roguelite Minesweeper. Look quite fun and polished; it grossed $212, which isn’t terrible for such a small game but still feels low. Capsule is kinda bad also. * [Blasted Dice](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3232520/Blasted_Dice/) : cohesive art style, nice polish, gameplay look interesting, but similar fate. Probably lack of marketing and a quite bad capsule too. **And a** ***very*** **sad case:** * [Cauldron Caution ](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2991890/Cauldron_Caution/): highly polished, gorgeous art, decent gameplay, just some animations feels a bit strange but still, it grossed only $129! Maybe because of a nonexistent marketing ? If I were the dev, I’d be gutted; it really deserved at least the next bracket. # 3. $600 – $2,500 gross revenue (10 games) I don’t have much to say here: all ten look good, polished, fun, and original, covering wildly different niches : Dungeon crawler, “foddian” platformer, polished match-four, demolition-derby PvP, princess-sim, PS1-style boomer-shooter, strategy deck-builder, management sim, tactical horror roguelike, clicker, visual novel..., really everything. However I would say they all have quite "amateur" vibe, I'm almost sure all of them have been made by hobbyist (which is not a problem of course, but can explain why they didn't perform even better), most of them seem very short also (1-2 hours of gameplay at best). Here is two that seemed a bit weaker but still performed decently : * [Tongue of Dog](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1990540) (foddian platformer) : looks very amateurish and sometimes empty, but a great caspule art and a goofy trailer. * [Bathhouse Creatures](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3209920/Bathhouse_Creatures/) : very simple in gameplay and art, yet nicely polished with a cozy vibe that usually sells good. And one which seem more profesionnal but didn't perform well : * [Pretty Sweet! Healing guardian](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3120000/Pretty_Sweet_Healing_Guardian/) : a princess management game with a very cute artstyle. I don't really get why he didn't do better. # 4. $5,000 – $20,000 gross revenue (10 games) More interesting: at first glance many of these don’t *look* as attractive as some in the previous tier, yet they’re clearly successful. Common thread: they’re all decent-looking entries in “meta-trendy” Steam niches (anomaly investigation, \[profession\] Simulator, management/strategy, horror). Also most of them look really profesionnal. Two exceptions: * [Zefyr: A Thief’s Melody ](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1344990/Zefyr_A_Thiefs_Melody/): a large-scale 3-D adventure that looks great and polished. * [Time Guard - The Red Menace](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3536610/Time_Guard__The_Red_Menace/) : a point-and-click from a Czech studio making adventures since 1997; appears to be a remake or port. Two titles I personally find ""weaker"" (would more say "hobbyist looking") than some from the previous tier but still performed well : * [My Drug Cartel](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2861950/My_Drug_Cartel/) : mixed reviews and bargain-bin Stardew-style UI, but the cartel twist clearly sparks curiosity, and management sims usually sell. * [Don’t Look Behind](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3721080/Dont_Look_Behind/) **:** a one-hour horror game, a bit janky yet seem polished; the niche and probably a bit of streamer attention did the job. # 5. $20,000 – $30,000 gross revenue (2 games) Small sample, but amusingly both are roguelike/roguelite deck-builders *with a twist*: * [Brawl to the West ](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2870150/Bagarre__louest/): roguelite deck-builder auto-battler; simple but cohesive art. * [Voidsayer](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2754370) : roguelike deck-builder meets Pokémon; gorgeous visuals, I understand why it was sucessfull. # Conclusion Four takeaways that line up with what I often read here and from YouTube "gurus": 1. **If your game isn’t attractive, it almost certainly won’t sell.** A merely decent-looking game will *usually* achieve at least minimal success. Out of 53 titles, only one (Cauldron Caution) truly broke this rule. 2. **Genre choice is a game changer.** Even amateurish titles in trendy niches (anomaly investigation, life-sim, management) perform decently. Attractive games in less popular niches do “okay” but worse than trendy ones. 3. **More than half the market is outright slop or barely competent yet unattractive.** If you spend time on polish, you’re really competing with the top \~30 %: half the games are instantly ignored, and another 15–20 % just aren’t polished enough to be considered. 4. **Small, focused games in the right niche are the big winners.** A large-scale project like *Zefyr* (likely 3–5 years of work) only did “okay,” while quick projects such as *Don’t Look Behind* or [Office After Hours](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3207300/Office_After_Hours/) hit the same revenue by picking a hot niche.

We're two indie devs. Our first Steam game made $2.1M, hit #117 today. AMA!

Hi r/gamedev, We’re two indie devs who spent a few months exploring ideas before settling on a train dispatching simulator. The niche existed, but no game really focused on it. We launched in Early Access, spent three years there, and released 1.0 a year ago. Today, we hit #117 on Steam’s Top Sellers - our best rank ever. Total gross revenue have passed over $2.0M few months ago. Some key lessons from the journey: * **Early Access was valuable for funding, but also came with baggage.** If we had the money, we wouldn’t have done it. Big changes hurt our reviews because players hate drastic shifts. We lacked a clear roadmap early on, which made things harder. If we did it again, we'd release 2.0 instead of changing so much post-launch. * **Gradual release helps build a strong community.** Releasing on [itch.io](http://itch.io) first was valuable. Transitioning to a Steam demo helped even more. Don’t be afraid to release something for free. If you finish the game properly, players will buy it. * **Start early, share everything.** We started showing the prototype after 14 days. Just put your game out there. Try different things, whatever you can think of. The more you showcase, the better. Ask for feedback. * **If you have money, test ads.** We started spending on wishlists, and it worked well for us. If you're in a position to experiment, try different platforms and track what brings results. * **Scaling a team remotely worked better than expected.** We brought in new people fully remote, and it was easier than we thought. It also gave us a chance to learn about different cultures, which we really enjoyed. * We are running ads 24/7 on Meta. Sometimes on Reddit as well. **EDIT: Most common questions:** 1) Ads, targeting, spend You just don't develop the game, you develop the marketing along. We've ran 80 campaigns past year, trying normal ads, meme ads, AI generated ads, in-game footage ads, everything you name it. We doing this all the time past 5 years. We develop not just our game but our marketing campaigns. We are at $0.07 per click with $3 CPM and around 4-6% CTR. Monthly spend around $3k. 2) Idea stealing when releasing early It's not happening. Your idea doesn't deliver success. It's your hard work, your choices, effort and expertise that will deliver it. Don't worry about it. Also don't worry about the piracy. Focus on your success and not on the stuff that is not helping you to deliver it. 3) Remote work Creative development like game development or marketing require live feedback and interactions. Text (slack, discord, teams) is your enemy, voice & video is your friend.

My coworker uses AI to reply to my PR review and I hate it

I'm not against him using AI to write code (even though the code he produces clashes with the style, is harder to review, and has been known to not actually solve the bugs.) Given English is not his first language, and he isn't the best written communicator, I'm glad he's finding a tool that enables him to be productive. However, sometimes I'll spend 20 minutes writing a comment on his PR... giving context to some niche code path, how it interacts with other code paths, verbally retracing the conditions that can produce the bug, linking to historical commits helping us both understand the recent changes, etc. Then I'll get back 5 paragraphs of perfect English with a jovial tone saying my points are *so* valid and here's why my coworker made this change, and this and that... >Thanks for the detailed feedback and for raising these points. I've looked through the logic, and I think we're on the same page. Here’s a breakdown of how this change fits in with your observations. >You're absolutely right about the intended system behavior, especially regarding the FooClass workflow and how our SQL query is supposed to handle errors. The core issue we're hitting is a subtle race condition that causes a panic before our self-healing logic can engage. >The "Stuck Bar" Problem & FooClass: Your instinct is correct the foo.error IS NULL check in our query is designed to prevent exactly the kind of loop you described (link). The problem is that the current code panics before it ever gets a chance to call executeBaz(). Because the error state is never saved to the database, the query picks up the same problematic record on every run, leading to a crash loop. >\[Three more paragraphs\] >In short, this change is a defensive fix that ensures our state is updated correctly, allowing the rest of our robust logic (like the SQL query) to function as intended. It addresses the immediate panic while still validating your points about the overall system design. Clearly my coworker took my painstaking reply, fed it into some model with a prompt like "reply to this", and copy/pasted it back. Now instead of trying to work through the language barrier, I'm forced to interact with yet another chatbot instead of a human. The future is here and I hate it.

I’m told that our “engineering-focused” culture is offputting to women

I’m a computational scientist working at a biotech company at a level equivalent to a Principal/Staff IC at a software company. The world of scientific computing is famous for shoddy software: think one-off Python/R scripts with a single 10k line `__main__()` function, zero version control, and no semblance of engineering or coding rigor. While this is the unfortunate norm in most of academia and industry, the computational biology division of my company differentiates itself by eschewing this trend and acting like a real tech company. We take pride in having a very well-engineered codebase, and it’s a large factor in the company’s success in a very competitive market. The company’s customers consistently tell us that we have the best software and analytical methods in the field, which is a big reason why they use our products. The computational biology division is about 90% men. About 25% of our hires are women, but their tenure at the company is much shorter than men’s (median of 2.5 years, compared with 5.5 years for men). A VP at the company (“Velma”) was tasked with improving this attrition discrepancy, and she met 1:1 with all senior members of the division, including myself. Velma told me that the reasons women give for leaving are not the usual suspects, like bro-y culture, intellectual dismissal, outright sexism, etc. Instead, she said that the overwhelming reason women are dissatisfied is our focus on “engineering minutiae” (her exact words). She gave an example of an interaction I had with “Susan” on our team. Susan wrote a tool that used O(n^(2)) memory, which worked fine on test data but blew up on real data. Rather than implement a simple algorithmic fix that would let it run in O(n) memory, Susan’s solution was to just provision a VM with a ludicrous amount of RAM (>1 TB). I was responsible for reviewing her code, and she pushed back when I told her this would be unacceptable for production use. (Her pushback was along the lines of “the biggest AWS VM has 32 TB of RAM, so until we hit that I don’t see any problem.”) Furthermore, according to Velma, Susan was actually very upset that I asked her to implement the O(n) fix, feeling that I was “trying to run circles around her by showing off my knowledge of obscure CS trivia.” That said, Susan did not directly voice this displeasure to me, and with some guidance, ended up implementing the fix. Her tool now runs great in production. My 1:1 with Velma was eye-opening. Thinking back, there is a definite pattern of women on the team writing code that is generally scientifically sound but poor from an engineering/CS standpoint. I did not realize that women specifically were consistently being put off when asked to address these problems. (The opposite problem crops up with some men on the team, whose code is overoptimized and overengineered to the point of unmaintainability. From what I can tell, they are not upset when asked to simplify things — the worst reaction I heard was something along the lines of “that was a bloody clever piece of code and it’s a pity people aren’t willing to take the time to understand it.”) Velma agreed wholeheartedly that we would not change our rigorous engineering standards, and that there is no quick-fix to this problem. She just asked that I be aware of it, and reflect over the coming months over potential ways we can address it. Given the fairly nuanced and levelheaded takes I’ve seen here on gender issues in tech, I thought I’d ask this sub for any advice or experience. Thanks so much! Edit: Thanks for all the great replies! Lots of things to think about. One common thread I want to address: I've seen several comments saying that this is jumping to conclusions based on a one-off anecdote. I only listed the Susan story as an example; Velma gave several other such examples, so she's not basing her conclusions on a one-off. Velma is being extremely rigorous about identifying this as a systemic problem; she went through transcripts of all of the division's exit interviews over the last few years, and interviewed multiple current team members.

I miss having juniors around

Juniors are some of the most creative thinkers in this industry because they haven't been conditioned to use tools and techniques that have matured over time. They're more malleable to new tech. Their solutions come from a place of curiousty rather than ego and it just feels nice to help someone else grow in their career. I miss being a mentor, I miss having study groups for certs, I miss my friends that were laid off this year and last :(

False AI accusations are destroying real creative work

I understand the concerns around AI in game dev. Protecting artists and creative work matters. But the current witch hunt is starting to harm artists and developers who aren’t using AI at all. I have been in the industry for 10+ years, and I hand draw all my game art. It’s unique, stylized, and personal, yet I’ve still had people accuse me of using AI, leaving hate comments and trying to "cancel" our games. I have learned to document the whole process and post how I draw the game art, but honestly, it’s frustrating. False accusations can seriously damage someone’s career, even if they have spent years building their skills and putting real time into their game. People should be more cautious before accusing someone of using AI, you might end up hurting the very creators you’re trying to protect.

I really worry that ChatGPT/AI is producing very bad and very lazy junior engineers

I feel an incredible privilege to have started this job before ChatGPT and others were around because I had to engineer and write code in the "traditional" way. But with juniors coming through now, I am really worried they're not using critical thinking skills and just offshoring it to AI. I keep seeing trivial issues cropping up in code reviews that with experience I know why it won't work but because ChatGPT spat it out and the code does "work", the junior isn't able to discern what is wrong. I had hoped it would be a process of iterative improvement but I keep saying the same thing now across many of our junior engineers. Seniors and mid levels use it as well - I am not against it in principle - but in a limited way such that these kinds of things are not coming through. I am at the point where I wonder if juniors just shouldn't use it at all.

Finally got an offer after a layoff as a 50+ year old SWE

Giving some feedback about the current job market for old guys like myself. Got laid off two months ago after 25+ years as a generalist Staff/Principal back-end SWE. My company decided to cut the whole domestic US team to move the work to Eastern Europe. I remember getting job offers in 1-2 weeks back in the day, before all the crazy AI/COVID over-expansion layoffs. The market is super different now. I sent out about 100 applications and was seriously depressed by the lack of responses. But then, over the last few weeks, the floodgates opened! I was suddenly slammed with interview requests for jobs I'd applied to a month ago. I did seven full interview loops and landed two offers—one from a FAANG-adjacent company and the other from a well-funded startup. Both packages are better than anything I've ever gotten before. UPDATE 9/4: Accepted an offer from the startup which is well funded by a big name SV VC for 270K base + 440K options (toilet paper). The FAANG just didn't have as interesting work and was afraid that I would be just another cog in a giant machine and I can't stand big company politics.

AI won’t make coding obsolete. Coding isn’t the hard part

Long-time lurker here. Closing in on 32 years in the field. Posting this after seeing the steady stream of AI threads claiming programming will soon be obsolete or effortless. I think those discussions miss the point. Fred Brooks wrote in the 1980s that no single breakthrough will make software development 10x easier (“No Silver Bullet”). Most of the difficulty lies in the problem itself, not in the tools. The hard part is the essential complexity of the requirements, not the accidental complexity of languages, frameworks, or build chains. Coding is the boring/easy part. Typing is just transcribing decisions into a machine. The real work is upstream: understanding what’s needed, resolving ambiguity, negotiating tradeoffs, and designing coherent systems. By the time you’re writing code, most of the engineering is (or should be) already done. That’s the key point often missed when people talk about vibe coding, no-code, low-code, etc. Once requirements are fully expressed, their information content is fixed. You can change surface syntax, but you can’t compress semantics without losing meaning. Any further “compression” means either dropping obligations or pushing missing detail back to a human. So when people say “AI will let you just describe what you want and it will build it,” they’re ignoring where the real cost sits. Writing code isn’t the cost. Specifying unambiguous behavior is. And AI can guess it as much or as little as we can. If vibe coding or other shorthand feels helpful, that’s because we’re still fighting accidental complexity: boilerplate, ceremony, incidental constraints. Those should be optimized away. But removing accidental complexity doesn’t touch the essential kind. If the system must satisfy 200 business rules across 15 edge cases and 6 jurisdictions, you still have to specify them, verify them, and live with the interactions. No syntax trick erases that. Strip away the accidental complexity and the boundaries between coding, low-code, no-code, and vibe coding collapse. They’re all the same activity at different abstraction levels: conveying required behavior to an execution engine. Different skins, same job. And for what it’s worth: anyone who can fully express the requirements and a sound solution is, as far as I’m concerned, a software engineer, whether they do it in C++ or plain English. TL;DR: The bottleneck is semantic load, not keystrokes. Brooks called it “essential complexity.” Information theory calls it irreducible content. Everything else is tooling noise.

Study: Experienced devs think they are 24% faster with AI, but they're actually ~20% slower

Link: [https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/](https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/) Some relevant quotes: >We conduct a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to understand how early-2025 AI tools affect the productivity of experienced open-source developers working on their own repositories. Surprisingly, we find that when developers use AI tools, **they take 19% longer than without—AI makes them slower.** We view this result as a snapshot of early-2025 AI capabilities in one relevant setting; as these systems continue to rapidly evolve, we plan on continuing to use this methodology to help estimate AI acceleration from AI R&D automation \[1\]. >Core Result >When developers are allowed to use AI tools, they take 19% longer to complete issues—a significant slowdown that goes against developer beliefs and expert forecasts. This gap between perception and reality is striking: **developers expected AI to speed them up by 24%, and even after experiencing the slowdown, they still believed AI had sped them up by 20%.** In about 30 minutes the most upvoted comment about this will probably be "of course, AI suck bad, LLMs are dumb dumb" but as someone very bullish on LLMs, I think it raises some interesting considerations. The study implies that improved LLM capabilities will make up the gap, but I don't think an LLM that performs better on raw benchmarks fixes the inherent inefficiencies of writing and rewriting prompts, managing context, reviewing code that you didn't write, creating rules, etc. Imagine if you had to spend half a day writing a config file before your linter worked properly. Sounds absurd, yet that's the standard workflow for using LLMs. Feels like no one has figured out how to best use them for creating software, because I don't think the answer is mass code generation.

Aren't you tired of being a "resource"?

I liked my company — I was employee 600 (engineer ~150) at a place that's now 3000 employees and tens of billions in valuation I worked hard, they gave me nice promotions, and lots of ownership and equity, and it was great. But now that I'm senior enough to manage people (and by that I mean literally a single intern), the vibes are off. My 1-on-1s with anyone in management is now about: - what projects are we funding this quarter? - how are we going to frame our metrics for leadership? - does [person a] have bandwidth for this? - do you think [person b] is *good*? I just came here to build stuff... I hate performance reviews, I hate kickoff meetings, I hate "stakeholders" and "leadership", and I hate defining growth areas for my intern who y'all judge way too much! The only stakeholder that should matter is the customer, and when every single one of their zendesk tickets is complaining about the same fucking thing I'm inclined to just fix it!!!! I do not want to have a project doc, and a kickoff meeting, and an assigned PM, and director signoff. Just. let. me. fix. the. thing. Please tell me I'm not the only one who feels this way edit: this post has 500 upvotes and 450 downvotes, so I assume only half of you feel this way 😂😭

After 7 years at the same org, I’ve started rejecting "Tech Debt" tickets that don't have a repayment date.

I've been noticing a pattern over my 7 years at this org (currently Lead System Test), and it's killing our velocity. We use "Technical Debt" as a catch-all for two very different things. There's the **Intentional Debt** (we skipped an abstraction to close a deal), which is fine. That’s a mortgage. We bought the house. But then there's the **Toxic Debt**—the accidental complexity, the god objects, and the flaky tests that we just "retry 3 times" in the pipeline instead of fixing. The issue is that devs treat the toxic stuff like it's a strategic decision. They assume they can pay it down later, but the complexity grows faster than they can fix it. Since I’m the one designing the system tests that have to navigate this mess, I’ve started pushing back. **My new rule:** If you want to log it as "Debt," it needs a Repayment Date. If you can't give me a date, it’s not debt; it’s a defect, and we prioritize it as such. Does anyone else have a hard line for distinguishing between "we chose speed" and "we were sloppy"?

Summary of my recent job search and offer - SWE 20+ yoe

There's been a great deal of panic about the job market here and in r/cscareerquestions , so I thought I'd share my experience. For a point of reference, I'm an older dev (56), no degree, no FAANG, I got started 24 years ago. Target salary range 160-170k, fully remote. * Job search began: December 2 * Applications/Resumes Sent: About 40 * Number of interviews: 2 (4 with the company that hired me, 1 with another. That was one that had reached out to me). * Offer accepted: January 10. (so 1 month of search, but the company that hired me began that process after the first week of searching) * I only used LinkedIn. * I only applied to jobs for which my skills were an extremely close match. I sometimes made exceptions for opportunities in industries where I have a lot of experience (usually in ecommerce or education). The one that hired me was a combination of both good tech match and vertical experience (ed related) * I focused on companies in my NYC area so I could sell the advantage of being able to meet onsite as needed. But I did not hear back from any of those, despite it seeming like a solid strategy. * I ignored job listings older than a few days, focusing on brand new listings with fewer than 150 applicants * I tailored my resume for each listing by removing tech completely unrelated to the requirements * I excluded all but the last 15 years of experience to avoid ageism and dated tech * I studied Leetcode problems every day, and made great progress. I was not asked to code on my interviews. * I researched the living sh\*t out of the company's history, mission and products. * When it was my turn to ask questions, I always asked my interviewer what they thought would be most challenging for me about the position. By the next phase, I made sure I could demonstrate expertise in that area. * I wrote thank you notes to every interviewer

Are daily standups ever actually about unblocking?

Every SWE says: "Standups aren't status reports, they're for unblocking". And that's true in theory, that's the textbook. The whole idea in agile is a quick daily sync where people share progress, surface blockers, and get help before issues snowball. It's supposed to be lightweight, team-driven, and focused on collaboration rather than accountability to a manager. But in the 9 companies I've worked at, standups have always been status reports. Every single one of them. People go around the room listing what they did yesterday and what they'll do today, often phrased more to sound productive than to actually solve problems. Managers (and people who don't contribute to the standup) are always present. Rarely does anyone bring up a blocker, and when they do, it usually gets handled later in chat or a side conversation. The ritual ends up feeling more about reporting up than working together. So I wonder: has anyone here actually experienced a standup that truly functioned the way agile describes it? Should we redefine the meaning of "daily standup" to adequately portray what happens in practice?

I now spend most of my time debugging and fixing LLM code

My company got on Claude a year ago. I am the one who introduced it to the team and got us a subscription. It was great for quickly mocking up UI to feedback from customers. It was great for parsing and interpreting Chinese datasheets for me. Maybe 6 months ago I started added to massive pull requests from senior engineers. One in particular was a huge refactor submitted by the CTO. I noticed that every line was preceded by a comment. I noticed that suddenly we were using deprecated methods. Mixing CPP versions. Stuff that didn't make a whole lot of sense. I tried to push back. I did my job, requested changes, called out where methods seemingly did nothing. Ahh well we're coming up on a deadline so let's just merge it and review in a later sprint. Now we're seeing subtle regressions creep in. Edge cases not considered. The long tail of AI-generated code, extended by AI is now consuming the majority of my days. Is this the future of our industry? Just my company? I feel like I'm wasting my life 8 hours per day reviewing and fixing shit LLM code and it's starting to really get to me.

Mods removing the post about unionization

What an incredibly lame decision. What rule did discussing unionization within our industry break? What do you personally have to lose by tech workers unionizing? Sure, those posts are rife with vehement opposition and support for both sides, but unless you personally gain to lose something by people simply *discussing* unionization, then I see nothing wrong with letting the discussion flow. Our industry within the US has witnessed mass offshoring and mass layoffs as the norm for entire teams of tech workers the second the profit line stops going up. We are stronger when we bargain together.

Gamedev is not a golden ticket, curb your enthusiasm

*This will probably get downvoted to hell, but what the heck.* Recently I've seen a lot of "I have an idea, but I don't know how" posts on this subreddit. Truth is, even if you know what you're doing, you're likely to fail. Gamedev is extremely competetive environment. Chances for you breaking even on your project are slim. Chances for you succeeding are miniscule at best. Every kid is playing football after school but how many of them become a star, like Lewandowski or Messi? Making games is somehow similar. Programming become extremely available lately, you have engines, frameworks, online tutorials, and large language models waiting to do the most work for you. The are two main issues - first you need to have an idea. Like with startups - Uber but for dogs, won't cut it. Doom clone but in Warhammer won't make it. The second is finishing. It's easy to ideate a cool idea, and driving it to 80%, but more often than that, at that point you will realize you only have 20% instead. I have two close friends who made a stint in indie game dev recently. One invested all his savings and after 4 years was able to sell the rights to his game to publisher for $5k. Game has under 50 reviews on Steam. The other went similar path, but 6 years later no one wants his game and it's not even available on Steam. Cogmind is a work of art. It's trully is. But the author admited that it made $80k in 3 years. He lives in US. You do the math. For every Kylian Mbappe there are millions of kids who never made it. For every Jonathan Blow there are hundreds who never made it. And then there is a big boys business. Working \*in\* the industry. Between Respawn and "spouses of Maxis employees vs Maxis lawsuit" I don't even know where to start. I've spent some time in the industry, and whenever someone asks me I say it's a great adventure if you're young and don't have major obligations, but god forbid you from making that your career choice. Games are fun. Making games can be fun. Just make sure you manage your expectations.

I am done posting here, got an offer after 8 month laid off, I am moving on my with my life.

Got an offer after 8 month laid off, thank you for all your help here. Offer is at Coinbase, YOE 4 Base 179,300 Bonus: 5% = \~8,000 RSU: 75,000 per year TC: About 263k I was hella depressed here that I may not get a job again, but it worked out boys, just keep grinding and a chance will come. Thank you again, and in 2 days I will delete this account, get off reddit, and move now with my life. I love y'all!

I am blissfully using AI to do absolutely nothing useful

My company started tracking AI usage per engineer. Probably to figure out which ones are the most popular and most frequently used. But with all this “adopt AI or get fired” talk in the industry I’m not taking any chances. So I just started asking my bots to do random things I don’t even care about. The other day I told Claude to examine random directories to “find bugs” or answer questions I already knew the answer to. This morning I told it to make a diagram outlining the exact flow of one of our APIs, at which point it just drew a box around each function and helper method and connected them with arrows. I’m fine with AI and I do use it randomly to help me with certain things. But I have no reason to use a lot of these tools on a daily or even weekly basis. But hey, if they want me to spend their money that bad, why argue. I hope they put together a dollars spent on AI per person tracker later. At least that’d be more fun

Allow me to provide the definitive truth on will AI replace SWE jobs

I am a director with 20 YOE. I just took over a new team and we were doing code reviews. Their code was the worst dog shit code I have ever seen. Side story. We were doing code review for another team and the code submitted by a junior was clearly written by AI. He could not answer a single question about anything. If you are the bottom 20% who produce terrible quality code or copy AI code with zero value add then of course you will be replaced by AI. You’re basically worthless and SHOULD NOT even be a SWE. If you’re a competent SWE who can code and solve problems then you will be fine. The real value of SWE is solving problems not writing code. AI will help those devs be more efficient but can’t replace them. Let me give you an example. My company does a lot of machine learning. We used to spend half our time on modeling building and half our time on pipelines/data engineering. Now that ML models are so easy and efficient we barely spend time on model building. We didn’t layoff half the staff and produce the same output. We shifted everyone to pipelines/data engineering and now we produce double the output.

Big Tech reality in U.S is just unbeliaveble.

I just came across a post of a junior developer with 2 YOE with a $220,000 TC at Google. He got offered a $330,000+ TC at Meta. I have so many questions... I live in South America and while some things are similar compared to U.S, I've never seen in my life someone with 2 YOE doing the equivalent of $18,000 a month. That’s the kind of salary you might earn at the end of your career *if* you're extremely skilled. Is that the average TC for developers with 2 YOE or this is just at FAANGs? How hard it is to get this kind of job in U.S? We know the market is terrible right now (and not only in U.S) but when I see this kind of posts, I question whether that's true. The market is terrible or the market is terrible for new-grads? For context: we have FAANGs here too, but you would never make that amount of money with 2 YOE and the salary is way lower than $18,000 per month for absolutely any kind of developer role. Edit: unbeliavable\*. Thanks for all replies!

Got an offer from Meta - here are my tips

Landed a job at Meta earlier this year (got lucky with timing before the Feb 10 layoffs lol). **Job summary:** ``` Position: Mid-Level Software Engineer L4 TC: $350k (193 base, 29 bonus, 128 stock/year) YOE: 2.5 years ``` **The interview process:** * Phone screen: 2 leetcode problems in 45 mins * Final: 2 leetcode rounds (same format as phone screen) + 1 behavioral round + 1 system design round * Total Time: 5 hours From initial contact to offer signing took 2 months. **The framework that worked:** With 2 problems in 45 minutes, you really only get 22 minutes per problem. Here is how I would break it down. 1. **Understand the problem first (3 mins)** \- restate it back, walk through examples, ask about constraints. 2. **Don't code immediately (5 mins)** \- discuss approaches starting with brute force, explain why it's bad, then work up to optimal solution. DO NOT IMPLEMENT THE BRUTE FORCE SOLUTION. You don't have time for that. 3. **Get buy-in (10 mins)** \- make sure interviewer agrees with your approach before coding. I write pseudocode comments first as an outline, then flesh it out. A common failure pattern is coding something that the interviewer doesn't understand. 4. **Wrap up (2 mins)** \- explain time/space complexity, offer to write tests for edge cases, or move on to the next problem. **How I prepared:** * Use Blind 75. It has good coverage over all problems. * I DID NOT buy leetcode premium. If you study and understand the patterns, it doesn't matter what problem you get. I know the market is ass right now and the competition is rough, but stay disciplined and the hard work will pay off! I was looking for a job for 9 months until I got this opportunity lmao. Ask me anything! **Soft Plug:** Building a [website](https://chenaaron3.github.io/drawcode/) to visualize code! Mainly targeted towards beginners.

AI Slop PR's are burning me and my team out hard, anyone else experiencing this?

Background: Current role is a TL (dev/manager hybrid at this place), my team has a large amount of domain ownership so we are constantly pinged for PR reviews. Lately there has been a huge push for teams to adopt tools like Cursor, the problem is that while yes they can generate code, it is just lately rapidly becoming an endless stream of AI slop. In the last few weeks: * Multiple 5k+ line PR's that should be sub 100 lines * PR's that have tons of changed files that in some vibe coding iteration were dropped or my new favourite thing endless redirection where multiple things don't actually do anything. * Very scary PR's where the AI did something extremely dangerous i am assuming to make tests work or something. For example one of the PR's actually did such a very subtle change where it aborted early in a middleware basically skipping most of AuthZ, then mocked out a good chunk of the AuthZ in tests which caused tests to pass. * AI hallucinating external services, then mocking out the hallucinated external services. Forcing me to go look up other repos/service maps and validate that yes this api endpoint actually exists. * AI's ignoring project architecture and structure, dumping files everywhere, or ignoring coding styles. The problem is that these PR's are becoming exhausting as they keep touching on my teams domain, so we are required to review and approve them. Pretty much nobody wants to talk about this, nobody wants to discuss this fact. Today a junior came and dropped a 10k PR that is just all over the place, i just rejected it, pretty saying "this issue does not need 10k LoC changed, and i am not going through this." However instead of well addressing the issues of lack of critical thinking or just copy and pasting a story in, instead i am getting push back for being too strict. My entire team has been complaining about this, on average my team of 6 is getting around 30 PR's a day from various teams now. *EDIT* To clarify a few things: * I have told them my issues in detail with other managers this specifically affects my team and a few others who are not discrete feature specific teams as our domain is much larger. Most don't care since it doesn't actually affect them and they specifically care about increasing their own velocity. Our bosses do not care and just want us to go faster. * We have several large monolith java applications, these code bases are not pretty but do have a decent test suite. Cursor specifically has huge issues with some of these project's structure where it will often just stuff into the first folder with a matching name it seems to find. * We do have code rules however they are nowhere near as well documented and enforced.

Am I the only one on here who feels like shit will get done when it gets done, and that stressing about it will only make things worse?

Context: I was just reading through [this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1nsmx8g/missed_deadline_on_unfamiliar_tech_how_bad_is_this/) written by a redditor who's been working on a particular task at their job for over a month, a task which was "supposed" to take 1.5 weeks, and everyone in the top comment was dogpiling on her and downvoting her, saying she's broken her manager's trust, etc. First of all, Jesus you people, I thought this sub was supposed to be on the workers' side, or at least, helping to support one another. Secondly, I just left a job that had this exact kind of mentality and team dynamic and let me tell you, it is not fun, it is not sustainable, and I don't think I was any more productive at that job than I was at previous jobs where they gave me: * well-defined tasks, * ownership over the solution, * freedom to make my own technical decisions, and finally * the time and space to figure it out for myself, and to just "let me know when it's finished" THAT'S trust. Not this bullshit about consistent delivery. Not every technical problem CAN HAVE "consistent delivery". Anyone who's working in this field knows that some problems involve bashing your head against the wall for 8 days until you suddenly have a eureka moment, and then the solution comes together in 40 minutes. That's life. And if you think that in this hypothetical situation, the employee "wasn't adding value" during those 8 days, then allow me to share with you the stonecutters credo: >When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before. Also, for the record, fuck poker planning, and fuck the concept of "supposed to take X long". If you give me a task, I'll tell you how long I think it'll take ME to do it, and you bet your ass I'll complete it as fast as I possibly can, and if I'm stuck, I'll ask people for help. Oh, you say some other colleague can do it in half the time? Great, then give the task to him, and let's just keep adding onto all of the tribal knowledge that only lives in that guy's head, and keep jacking up the bus factor of our team. Oh, what's that, he's swamped and can't take on the extra work? Ok, so I guess you're stuck with me then; the guy whose skills you apparently deemed good enough during my 7 interview rounds for this job. I will do the best possible job I can for you, but I'm not that other guy. I am me, and I am always learning, always improving, and if you give me time & space to develop a deep understanding of the codebase, our architecture, our team processes, etc., I'm positive that I will soon grow to a place where I can complete tasks like this in 1.5 weeks! Shit will get done when it gets done, and it won't go any faster with a manger constantly harassing the employee about delays and "consistent delivery". In fact, it will probably just make things worse, because now instead of having a calm, clear mind devoted to solving the technical problem at hand, the employee is wasting precious cycles locked in fear-based thinking, increased cortisol levels, and reduced blood flow to the brain.

Execs thirsting over AI is killing my passion for software engineering

Hi all, I work at a search engine giant as a software engineer in privacy. We worked on our privacy product over the past 4 years, launched it in beta and it was ready for production. Suddenly our head of cyber security comes out and says that "People used to care about privacy in 2019 but now they want AI" so they decide to kill our product and repurposed the org on adding LLM malware to the product instead. I get that it's a job that pays the bills but I enjoyed every role I had before this one. This one too, I loved the people I worked with and the product. But I can't deal with constant top level buffoonery. The job market is absolutely brutal, even more so in Canada. I remember being approached 10 times a day on LinkedIn at some point and now everywhere I interview, apparently I'm competing with someone with more experience than me while simultaneously accepting significantly lower pay. FML

Just let the bad offshore devs fail?

Somewhat a rant, somewhat asking for advice. I’m a lead and many of my offshore devs just want to be ticket takers. They do only what they’re told, don’t bring up issues they are aware of, and put no thoughts into estimates, often delivering late. The part that bothers me most is there’s no indication that they even care. All week they’ll act like something is going to be done, and then the last day just say it won’t. If I did that as a dev, I’d feel compelled to explain myself. But with them I have to pull teeth to get any explanations. Often I have to step in and hold hands for anything to get done correctly. I don’t even mean perfect. I mean like stop them from introducing jQuery into an Angular project because they think it’s easier to grab the data they want from the DOM instead of learning the framework. Given the effort I have to put in just to get them to succeed, while seeing all of the jobs go to them, I often wonder why I try to help them so much. They’re a threat to my employment, so shouldn’t I just let them fail and try to get them fired? I guess I assume I’ll be the one blamed if they don’t succeed, or they’ll just be replaced with another cheap developer. Anyone succeed in asking management to pay more for better people? Perhaps like most posts suggest, it’s just time to move on!

I don't want to command AI agents

Every sprint, we'll get news of some team somewhere else in the company that's leveraged AI to do one thing or another, and everyone always sounds exceptionally impressed. The latest news is that management wants to start introducing full AI coding agents which can just be handed a PRD and they go out and do whatever it is that's required. They'll write code, open PRs, create additional stories in Jira if they must, the full vibe-coding package. I need to get the fuck out of this company as soon as possible, and I have no idea what sector to look at for job opportunities. The job market is still dogshit, and though I don't mind using AI at all, if my job turns into commanding AI agents to do shit for me, I think I'd rather wash dishes for a living. I'm being hyperbolic, obviously, but the thought of having to write prompts instead of writing code depresses me, actually. I guess I'm looking for a reality check. This isn't the career I signed up for, and I cannot imagine myself going another 30 years with being an AI commander. I really wanted to learn cool tech, new frameworks, new protocols, whatever. But if my future is condensed down to "why bother learning the framework, the AI's got it covered", I don't know what to do. I don't want to vibe code.

How do Amazon devs survive working long hours year after year?

Last 6 months had been brutal for me. To meet an impossible deadline, I worked 10 to 12 hours a day, sometimes including Saturday. Most of the team members did that too, more or less. Now that the project was delivered a week back and I am on a new project, I can tell I’m burned out. I wonder how can Amazon devs or fellow devs working at other companies in similar situation do this kind of long hours day after day, year after year. I burned out after 6 months. How do others keep doing that for years before finally giving in? UPDATE: Thank you all. I’m moved by the community support! It gives me hope that I’ll be able to overcome this difficult situation by following all the suggestions you gave me. Thanks again!

Work isn't therapy. Lessons I learned too late as a Principal SWE

Today is my first day of being unemployed after quitting my job as a Principal SWE due to personal reasons and just wanted to share a few non-technical lessons I've learned over the past few years. They might seem extremely basic to some, but I definitely learned them the hard way. Being somewhat experienced in life and somewhat experienced in the Dev world, I thought I could handle whatever life threw in my direction, but unfortunately, that wasn't the case. **About me**: * **Experience**: 16 yoe. * Company A (15 years): Started off as a co-op, made it to Staff by the time I quit. * Company B (1 year): Joined (and quit) Company B as a Principal. **Lessons learned**: * Prioritize your mental health over everything. Therapy works but only if you take it seriously; just that in itself could take weeks/months, even years. * DO NOT let work be your escape from reality. I definitely learned this the hard way. * You can lose everything - job, relationship, stability and still be okay. * If you're going through some serious shit in personal life, DO NOT try to power through at work. I delivered most of my stuff at work this year, but the quality was horrible. Some of my leads noticed a few discrepancies in some of the ADRs, roadmaps and integrations specs I created, but didn't bring it up to my attention. They knew I was going through tough times at home, and since these discrepancies weren't major, they just let them be. This broke my heart, not necessarily from a "personal branding" perspective, but purely from a professional/technical one. Now on to what lead to these: --- * **Work/Life**: * 2022: * (Life) Wife and I lost a pregnancy (ectopic); one of the fallopian tubes ruptured; severe complications; wife needed lots of after-surgery care that went on for almost a year (into late 2023). * (Work) Work was extremely supportive throughout this experience. * 2024: * (Work) A really good job opportunity came along that I just couldn't say no to, ended up taking this role. Amazing people, awesome product, loved it. * (Life) Towards the end of the year, wife and I went the IVF route, got pregnant again. * Early 2025: * (Life) * (Lost pregnancy #2) Unfortunately we lost the pregnancy due to complications; as long as my wife was okay, we didn't care; we were happy. Doctors told us chances of her surviving the next pregnancy would be VERY low, so not to even look in that direction. * (Wife moved out) After a few weeks, both my wife and I lost it mentally. Reality sunk in. We were there for each other, but not for our own self. We started therapy, it helped a bit, but my wife took this entire experience very hard. She wanted to move back to her parents for a few weeks/months to clear her head. It wasn't easy but I had to respect her wishes. * (Work): * (I wasn't the same anymore): This entire experience took a toll on my mental health, and I just wasn't the same anymore. My ADHD got worse; couldn't focus, couldn't deliver. * (I quit): 2 weeks ago, I gave my 2-week notice. My work was extremely understanding and supportive, but I just couldn't do it. I considered short/long-term disability, but mentally I was done; its hard to put it into words but yeah, I just couldn't do it. * Present: * (Life) Therapy (twice/week). Wife and I are still separated; it's tough, very tough. * (Work) Unemployed; Taking a break from everything for a few weeks. We spent most of our savings on the IVF treatment, but I still have some left to last me through the summer. * Future: * (Life) Continue therapy + looking forward to my wife coming back home. Hopefully soon, but I respect her journey and her wishes as well. * (Work) Let's see what the future holds; I honestly don't know. Perhaps continue being a company man and apply elsewhere, try my luck with YouTube (I know, I know), consider entrepreneurship (SaaS, web/app dev etc), who knows. Edit: Apologies to everyone in case this post is coming across as more of a personal life post rather than the lessons I learned (and wanted to share). As I mentioned in few of the comments, initially it was only supposed to be a few bullet points, and some minimal context, but I found it to be quite therapeutic as I continued to write it. Heading out for a hike now; will check/reply to all messages tonight. Thank you.

Entry level doesn’t exist anymore

This field is done. I’ve applied to over 750 jobs in the last four months and Im still unemployed. Custom resumes, cover letters, reaching out to the hiring team on LinkedIn and still nothing. I have a BS in CS, two YOE , certs and projects. I decided I’d apply to 1k jobs before I gave up but I might just stop now. Just made it to the final round for my second company and again I got rejected. Im just tired. Anyone that’s considering this field, don’t. Unless you have connections and can get in through that or Nepotism don’t bother with this field. I feel like I wasted the last 6 years of my life and all my work, money and time has been for nothing. Fuck the people in charge for destroying this field and giving our jobs away overseas. Looks like a lot of you want to see my resume, here it is: https://www.reddit.com/r/resumes/s/Ah3iYYHT0s Thanks for the feedback, everyone. Looks like I might go back to college now.

Are people no longer capable of reading docs or long text?

There’s a lot of complexity and nuances in projects and systems that I often find is best communicated through writing. So many meetings could actually be productive discussions if everyone had read a doc beforehand and gotten the same background on the topic. I’ve written engineering design docs before (no one else seems to do that on my team), but then get asked to set up meetings to go over it. In the meeting, I just repeat everything in the doc. afterwards, when it’s time to implement, people still don’t seem to understand… they ask basic questions that have been directly answered in the doc When people are new and they message me with questions, I also like to write comprehensive explanations. But I’m finding that they don’t even read them. they’ll respond with a short message, like let’s discuss in x meeting. In the meeting, I repeat everything that I had written, but in a worse form, because they keep interrupting and going on tangents instead of letting me finish. Does anyone else experience this? What kind of place should I work at if I want coworkers who are capable of and value reading and writing?

Our CEO confirmed AI will NOT be taking our jobs at our company

We were having a standard all hands meeting but wanted to highlight a good point our CEO made. AI, vibe coding, LLMs etc are seeing great improvement and non-technical people can even build entire applications from scratch. Everyone seems to be on the AI hype train to where some CEO was even posting about making their own CRM using AI (did not go well for him). There’s definitely some amazing use cases for using AI. One of the CEO’s friends even asked him why doesn’t he just fire half the eng team and build xyz feature (that’s taking 3-6 months to build currently) with AI instead. And our CEO just looked at him and said “okay, tell me EXACTLY what you’d do to build xyz feature”. And the guy had no idea. He tried like “okay well first I’d start a prompt and build it, then …”, and slowly realized he’s not a dev and doesn’t know anything about how infrastructure works. And after few minutes the other CEO realized he has no idea how he would actually do this and how it’d be a terrible idea. Main point is, yes AI is here to stay. Yes AI can speed up development for a lot of us senior devs by a substantial amount. Yes, some people are getting laid off due to AI (plus bunch of other reasons but dont wanna tangent). BUT, in any large scale application with literally millions of lines of proprietary code, huge amounts of context (both technical and nontechnical) required, and a limited context window AIs can maintain, it is not sufficient enough to justify firing a well experienced engineer who knows how to build reliable scalable systems. Reliability matters. Scalability matters. Consistency matters. Which is why 2 of our competitors who’ve been offshoring and cutting back their eng team in favor of AI are behind us in terms of market share. Just wanted to share this. Unfortunate this is not the mindset of other businesses.

The trend of developers on LinkedIn declaring themselves useless post-AI is hilarious.

I keep seeing popular posts from people with impressive titles claiming 'AI can do anything now, engineers are obsolete'. And then I look at the miserable suggestions from copilot or chatgpt and can't help but laugh. Surely given some ok-ish looking code, which doesn't work, and then deciding your career is over shows you never understood what you were doing. I mean sure, if your understanding of the job is writing random snippets of code for a tiny scope without understanding what it does, what it's for or how it interacts with the overall project then ok maybe you are obsolete, but what in the hell were you ever contributing to begin with? These declarations are the most stunning self-own, it's not impostor syndrome if you're really 3 kids in a trenchcoat.

"New Grad" on my team has 4 YOE in his home country?

Early this year, my manger said our team would get a New Grad in the fall to join us. Said "New Grad" joined last week, and the entire team was flabbergasted to know he had 4 years of SWE experience in his home country before his Masters! This is at a well known international tech corporation as well. The dude has more experience than a senior dev on our team and is the oldest of us all! If this is the hiring bar for "New Grad" in these days and age, our college kids are fucked.

I messed up in my 1:1 with my manager — now I feel like I'm in a corporate Game of Thrones

Hey folks, Looking for some experienced perspective here. I had a 1:1 with my manager recently and I think I said too much. I'm a very introverted, pragmatic engineer (90% technical, 10% social skills), if I'm being honest — and I usually just want to write code, close tickets, and feel good at the end of the day. In the 1:1, I mentioned that working with a particular coworker (the project lead) has become really frustrating. I said that I feel like I'm only able to get things done in spite of him, not thanks to him. He's very procedural, very rigid, and I feel like that slows everything down in an environment that demands more agility. Well… that comment kind of opened Pandora’s box. My manager told me, somewhat candidly, that this coworker is notoriously difficult to work with. In fact, they hired me partly because things weren't moving forward with him. The implication I got (not explicitly said, but heavily implied) is that I was brought in to eventually replace him. Now I feel like I'm in some internal Game of Thrones plot I didn't sign up for. I genuinely don't want to take anyone's job — I just want to code, contribute meaningfully, and not get wrapped up in political drama. So… I’m unsure what to do now. Would appreciate any advice from folks who’ve navigated similar situations ?? tsym for reading

How I Made One Million Dollars In Revenue As A Solo Indie Game Dev

I've been working as a solo indie game developer for the past 7+ years and wanted to share an educational video as to how I did it my way. [https://youtu.be/r\_gUg9eqWnk](https://youtu.be/r_gUg9eqWnk) The video is longer than I wanted and more casual. It's not meant to be entertaining. It's not meant to get clicks or views. Its sole purpose is to share my indie dev story and lessons learned after leaving my corporate career and becoming a full time indie game dev. It's my Ted Talk that I never got invited to do. I'd love to hear your thoughts on the video (if you can get through it) and if you have any ideas on how to come up with good game ideas or what I should make next please share! If this video looks familiar, well that's because it is. I liked another post on here and it inspired me to finally do this video I've been wanting to do for a LONG time now. Thanks to the guy who made this [topic](https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1lnr07f/how_i_sold_over_200k_copies_over_3_games_as_a/) on here.

From startup to FAANG world - how to deal with the BS ?

I recently got my first FAANG job after working in startups my entire career and I feel like my life is a krazam video now. The people are super nice and clearly brilliant but it's painful that so much of their energy is spent on planning rituals and not on actually getting stuff done. For a single feature of an internal API I now have to deal with more sign-offs and planning meetings than I used to get launching entire products directly to users. The amount of bikeshedding at every level just to appear Very Smart™ in front of ${N+1} is impressive to witness, and this culture permeates the code directly: everything is overengineered which makes development super slow. Is there any hope? Some coping strategies? Is it a fundamental culture mismatch or will I get used to it? The money is too good to quit, I tripled my TC coming here, I wouldn't mind rest & vest but this place is RTO and if I have to drag myself to the office regularly I would like to enjoy my job at least somewhat. I'll take any advice.

Has anyone actually seen a real-world, production-grade product built almost entirely (90–100%) by AI agents — no humans coding or testing?

Our CTO is now convinced we should replace our entire dev and QA team (~100 people) with AI agents. Inspired by SoftBank’s “thousand-agent per employee” vision and hyped tools like Devin, AutoDev, etc. Firstly he will terminate contract with all outsource vendor, who is providing us most dev/tests What he said us"Why pay salaries when agents can build, test, deploy, and learn faster?” This isn’t some struggling startup — we’ve shipped real products, we have clients, revenue, and complex requirements. If you’ve seen success stories — or trainwrecks — please share. I need ammo before we fire ourselves. ----Update---- After getting feedback from businesses units on the delay of urgent developments, my CTO seem to be stepback since he allow we hire outstaffs again with a limited tool. That was a nightmare for biz.

I'm so tired

Lately, I’ve been coming to terms with the fact that I’m not a great developer. I’m solid at tracking down problems and fixing them - debugging is actually fun for me. Stepping through code and unraveling bugs feels like solving a puzzle. But when it comes to greenfield projects or building new features, it’s a slog. I’m starting to question whether I even want to keep doing this - between the rough job market and needing a decent salary, I feel stuck. What kind of work can a moderately competent problem-solver with decent scripting skills do to earn a living - without spending all day cranking out mediocre code? I’d love to start something of my own. Finding a real problem, building a solution that helps people, and having them actually want to pay for it - that’s the dream. edit: I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who commented. I really appreciate how kind everyone has been - it's encouraging. I've received some good advice and plan to explore a couple of different options. I recognize that I'm massively burnt out. I'd love to quit my job and disappear for a while, but that's not a realistic option at this stage in my life. I'm going to make a concerted effort to start taking better care of myself - and hopefully, I can rediscover a modicum of the passion I used to have for this profession.

AI tools are ironically way more useful for experienced devs than novices

Yes, another AI post about using them to learn, but I want to focus on the topic from a more constructive viewpoint and hopefully give someone an idea on how it can be useful for them. **TLDR:** AI tools are a force multiplier. Not for codegen, but for (imo) the hardest part of software development: learning new things, and *applying them appropriately*. Picking a specific library in a new language implicitly comes with a lot of tertiary things to learn: idiomatic syntax, dependency management that may be different than what you're used to, essential tooling, and a host of unknown unknowns. A good LLM serves as a great groove-greaser to help launch you into productivity/more informed research, sooner. We all know AI has a key inherent issue that make them hard to trust: they hallucinate confidently. That makes them unreliable for pure codegen tasks, but that's not really where they shine anyway. Their best usecase is natural language understanding, and focusing on that has been a huge boon for my career over the past 2 years. Even though CEOs keep trying to convince us we're being replaced, I feel more capable than ever. Real world example: I was consistently encountering bugs related to input validation in an internal tool. Although we enforce a value's type at the entry points, we had several layers of abstraction and eventually things would drift. As a basic example, picture \`valueInMeters\` somewhere being formatted with the wrong amount of decimals and that mistake propogating into the database, or a value being set appropriately but then somewhere being changed to \`null\` prior to upserting. It took me a full day of running through a debugger and another hour-long swarm with multiple devs to find the issues. Now, in a perfect world we'd write better code to prevent this, but that's too much of a "[draw the rest of the fucking owl](https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=34b770eb4fc2a6ee&sxsrf=AHTn8zoGEffY7L5XXyyayCaj0mlU7FNsog:1744718025449&q=draw+the+rest+of+the+owl&udm=2&fbs=ABzOT_CWdhQLP1FcmU5B0fn3xuWpA-dk4wpBWOGsoR7DG5zJBkzPWUS0OtApxR2914vrjk4ZqZZ4I2IkJifuoUeV0iQtlsVaSqiwnznvC1owt2z2tTdc23Auc6X4y2i7IIF0f-d_O-E9yXafSm5foej9KNb5dB5UNNsgm78dv2qEeljVjLTUov5wWn4x9of_4BNb8vF_2a_9-AxwH0UJGyfTMDuJ_sz_gg&sa=X&sqi=2&ved=2ahUKEwidoY-R_dmMAxWg5ckDHUSOF4sQtKgLegQIEBAB&biw=1512&bih=823&dpr=2)" solution. 2nd best solution would be to codify some way to be stricter with how we handle DTOs: don't declare local types, don't implicitly remove values, don't allow something that should be \`string | null\` to be used like \`val ?? ''\`, etc. I really wanted to enforce this with a linter, and there's a tool I've really been interested in called [ast-grep](https://github.com/ast-grep/ast-grep) that seemed perfect for it, but who has time to pick that up? Enter an LLM. I grabbed the entire documentation, a few Github discussions, and other code samples I could find, and fed it to an LLM. I didn't use it to force feed me info, but used it to bounce ideas back and forth to help me wrap my head around certain concepts better. A learning tool, but one tailored specifically to me, my learning style, and my goals. The concepts that usually would've taken me 4-5 rereads and writing it 100 times to grasp now felt intuitive after a few minutes of back and forth and a few test runs. It feels really empowering; for me, my biggest sense of dread in my career has been grappling with not knowing enough. I've got \~8 years of experience, and I've taken the time to master some topics (insofar as "mastery" is possible), but I still have huge gaps. I know very little about system programming, but now with AI as a swiss army knife, I don't feel as intimidated/pre-fatigued to pick up *Programming In a Unix Environment* on the weekends anymore. And I think that's the actual difference between people who are leveraging AI tools the right way vs. those who are stagnant. This field has always favored people who continuously learned and poured in weekend hours. While everyone's trying to sell us some AI solution or spread rhetoric about replacing us, I think on an individual level AI tools can quietly reduce burnout and recharge some of us with that sense of wonder and discovery we had when first learning to program, the energy that once made work not feel like work. I think that the hyper-capitalist tech world has poisoned what should be one of the most exciting eras for anyone who loves learning, and I'd love to see the story shift towards that instead...hence, this post.

Why don’t engineers have unions?

I know historically our jobs have been very lucrative and our working conditions have been pretty good especially the last 10 years or so. However, given the recent turn with how companies are treating engineers now (mass layoffs, offshoring, low ball offers, forcing quitting with in-office policies, etc) im not sure why we dont have unions. I’ve heard of practices from companies that post fake jobs with a posted salary to see how many people apply. Then they repost the same listing with a lower salary to see if people still apply. Rinse and repeat to get an idea of how low they can get offers. Now you can say these practices are all fair game for companies. Sure. But on our end as engineers/workers so is unionizing.

I f***ing hate Azure

*Disclaimer: this post is nothing but a rant.* --- I've recently inherited a data project which is almost entirely based in Azure synapse. I can't even begin to describe the level of hatred and despair that this platform generates in me. Let's start with the biggest offender: that being Spark as the only available runtime. Because OF COURSE one MUST USE Spark to move 40 bits of data, god forbid someone thinks a firm has (*gasp!*) small data, even if the amount of companies that actually need a distributed system is less than the amount of fucks I have left to give about this industry as a whole. Luckily, I can soothe my rage by meditating during the downtimes, beacause testing code means that, if your cluster is cold, you have to wait between 2 and 5 business days to see results, meaning that each day one gets 5 meaningful commits in at most. Work-life balance, yay! Second, the bane of any sensible software engineer and their sanity: Notebooks. I believe notebooks are an invention of Satan himself, because there is not a single chance that a benevolent individual made the choice of putting notebooks in production. I know that one day, after the 1000th notebook I'll have to fix, my sanity will eventually run out, and I will start a terrorist movement against notebook users. Either that or I will immolate myself alive to the altar of sound software engineering in the hope of restoring equilibrium. Third, we have the biggest lie of them all, the scam of the century, the slithery snake, the greatest pretender: "yOu dOn't NEeD DaTA enGINEeers!!1". Because since engineers are expensive, these idiotic corps had to sell to other even more idiotic corps the lie that with these magical NO CODE tools, even Gina the intern from Marketing can do data pipelines! But obviously, Gina the intern from Marketing has marketing stuff to do, leaving those pipelines uncovered. Who's gonna do them now? Why of course, the same exact data engineers one was trying to replace! Except that instead of being provided with proper engineering toolbox, they now have to deal with an environment tailored for people whose shadow outshines their intellect, castrating the productivity many times over, because dragging arbitrary boxes to get a for loop done is clearly SO MUCH faster and productive than literally anything else. I understand now why our salaries are high: it's not because of the skill required to conduct our job. It's to pay the levels of insanity that we're forced to endure. But don't worry, AI will fix it.

I don't have the stress tolerance for this career

Now that I'm more senior, I just find myself stressed all the time. Big projects are entrusted on me and I'm meant to own them - maybe not do everything, but I have to own them and deliver on time and communicate and plan and code. I get into cycles of avoidance and anxiety that causes a crash-and-burn at some point. There are many skills involved that I'm working on, but ultimately it comes down to personality. More and more strength of personality or resilience is demanded from me, especially as the market gets more brutal and I just don't have it.. you need to be able to look at a crashing project and long odds and say I'm going to do it anyways, but I fold. Have you all faced things like this? How do you build up those personality traits of resilience or stress tolerance, coping with anxiety etc.?

Company is deeply bought-in on AI, I am not

Edit: This kind of blew up. I've taken the time to ready *most* of your responses, and I've gotten some pretty balanced takes here, which I appreciate. I'm glad I polled the broader community here, because it really does sound like I can't ignore AI (as a tool at the very least). And maybe it's not all bad (though I still don't love being bashed over the head with it recently, and I'm extremely wary of the natural resource consequences, but that's another soapbox). I'm going to look at this upcoming week as an opportunity to learn on company time and make a more informed opinion on this space. Thanks all. \----------- Like the title says, my company is suddenly all in on AI, to the point where we're planning to have a fully focused "AI solutions" week. Each engineer is going to be tasked with solving a specific company problem using an AI tool. I have no interest in working in the AI space. I have done the minimum to understand what's new in AI, but I'm far from tooling around with it in my free time. I seem to be the only engineer on my team with this mindset, and I fear that this week is going to tank my career prospects at this company, where I've otherwise been a top performer for the past 4 years. Personally, I think AI is the tech bros last stand, and I find myself rolling my eyes when a coworker talks about how they spend their weekends "vibe coding". But maybe I'm the fool for having largely ignored AI, and thinking I could get away with not having to ever work with it in earnest. What do you think? Am I going to become irrelevant if I don't jump on the AI bandwagon? Is it just a trend that my company is way too bought into? Curious what devs outside of my little bubble think.

Not seen as "staff engineer material" because of my personality (they said technical competence meets the bar). I don't know if I can change my personality.

Some honest advice here would be very helpful. Please give it to me straight without sugar-coating it. I have 13 years of experience and have worked in big tech my entire career. I have been on my current team for 4 years. I am a woman. I work on a niche area in lower-level backend/devops that I intellectually enjoy a lot. I had a performance conversation with my manager yesterday. He told me that my technical competence and contributions more than meets the bar for staff but that I don't have the leadership qualities / traits needed for staff and thus the promo would never go through. I asked for concrete examples and these were what was mentioned: \* **Not being assertive or "authoritative" enough**: in conversations with XFN partners, not acting as the authority that tells everyone what direction we should all go in; "asking instead of telling" \* **Unconfident language that makes everyone else unconfident in me**: lots of "I think"s, posing things as questions in PR reviews instead of assertions, responding to my own PR reviews by being too overly accommodating instead of defending my code and pushing back more \* **Not sharing my opinions loudly and thus not dictating direction**: being soft-spoken and letting others set direction instead of stepping up and taking the dominant leader role I feel so frustrated and powerless by this conversation. I by nature do not have a "dominant" or "authoritative" personality and I have never had that. I value harmony and cooperation and making everyone on the team feel heard no matter how junior or senior they are. I value humility and language that makes people feel safe. I hate to throw the "sexist" accusation around and I always try my best not to do that, but I also can't help but feel that this is sexism. I think women naturally a softer more harmonious communication style than men do, and that our "leadership style" is different than men's but no less valid. But maybe I'm delusional in thinking this and the only "leadership" that is seen as valid in the corporate world is the masculine one? I don't know if I can change my personality to be more masculine/dominant but furthermore, I honestly don't even think it's even a good idea because women who act authoritatively / dominantly / confidently are often punished for it, not rewarded. I don't think the rules are the same. I'm not sure where to go from here. It's becoming obvious to me that there is no path to staff engineer here. Even if I were able to act more dominantly, would it not be weird to suddenly go from acting cooperatively to now trying to act alpha? A lot of the coworkers on my team do this but I have always hated this kind of behavior. Do I just leave? I do feel attached to this team because I love the technical things we work on and I have invested years to building up expertise in the area. But I can't help but feel resentful seeing people on my team who are staff but not better at engineering than I am. I feel that we do the same job but they are getting paid a lot more for it. I don't think I will ever be viewed as staff engineer leadership material on my team. But if I leave, there's no guarantee I would be viewed as that at a different team/company and I would have to restart trying to go for staff. The third option is to just accept being a senior engineer forever and "quiet quit" / coast. How do you suggest I go forward? Thank you in advance. edit: thank you all for the feedback and suggestions on what to do next. I am going to brush up my resume and start interviewing.

I feel like once you get laid off you are done for

I've been laid off at my job for 8 months now as a swe. I feel like once you get laid off it's hard getting back a tech job in this competitive market. I've applied to everything including tech adjacent jobs and I have no luck securing an offer. I have 1 yoe and a cs degree. Now, I'm doing a non tech sales job just to get by. It's rough out here. I use to have a lot of pride about what I did and now I don't even care about my job title. I just want to make a decent living and be able to support family and retire

347 Applicants for One Data Engineer Position - Keep Your Head Up Out There

I was recently the hiring manager for a relatively junior data engineering position. We were looking for someone with 2 YOE. Within minutes of positing the job, we were inundated with qualified candidates - I couldn't believe the number of people with masters degrees applying. We kept the job open for about 4 days, and received 347 candidates. I'd estimate that at least 50-100 of the candidates would've been just fine at the job, but we only needed one. All this to say - it's extremely tough to get your foot in the door right now. You're not alone if you're struggling to find a job. Keep at it!

Using unreal engine made me lose all love for game dev

I have loved programming with everything in my soul for my whole life. I love the idea of making video games but using unreal engine has killed this. I have a class for uni where we need to make a game in UE5, today I needed to do an assignment using the navmesh functionality in unreal... it took me like 5 hours to get the most basic shit working. The level of abstraction is insane, people explain how to use unreals features like it's a preschooler your convincing to eat their food. It's nondeterministic, everything is different every time. Just because the navmesh worked on my computer this morning does not mean it still works the same night. Before this class I loved everything about programming, I wanted to learn more about how everything works, but I hate all the abstraction on all of the tools we have to use. For context I love programming in C, in fact right now I'm making a game in C from scratch using only SDL as a sort of hobby project. Rendering, lighting 3d projection all from scratch, and I love it. Is this cool? Yes. Does it have any practical value in game dev? No. Are all my skills wasted in game dev? Are there any game dev jobs that don't involve using a massively abstracted tool like unreal and I get to work with what's actually happening? I love using opengl, directx, and those sorts of things buy no one wants a opengl dev. Everyone hiring wants experience with unity or unreal and I despise the idea of trying to get someone else's badly documented tool to behave when I could just write one myself. I'm a wheel expert in a world full of cars. Do these sorts of jobs exist in game dev? Am I looking in the wrong places or do I need to find a new career path?

Is tech job market really cooked ?

I am SWE with 8 YOE. Nothing too niche, full stack developer that knows a few web dev tech stacks with most recent titles of senior and tech lead. No AI or ML. I was laid off in June. Prepared hard, polished my resume with AI many times, applied to between 200-300 jobs in the span of 2 months. Got about 15 interviews, 4 offers. I think I could get more offers tbh but after I found the company I really liked I accepted an offer and stopped the interview process with the rest. I interviewed with Capital One, Visa, UKG, Amazon, Circle, Apollo, Citadel, FICO, GM and some no names or startups. That’s all to say that after reading reddit I was anxious to even apply but I think I got a decent amount of interviews and negotiated my offers to be either at the higher end of the salary range for the role or even above advertised. I do recognize it’s much harder for junior engineers these days but is there really a shortage for experienced engineers? I haven’t felt that. I’m not even a native English speaker although I do speak English fluently. I’m in the US. I also didnt lie on resume or cheated during coding rounds. Some of them I solved 100%, some not. For example for C1 I got 450/600 points on CodeSignal and still got a callback and an offer after clearing their power day. Ask me anything I guess. Happy to help someone if I can. No referrals though, sorry. I’ve just started a few weeks ago, too early to refer especially someone I don’t personally know. Here are a few things that I believe gave me an edge or worked in my favor: - referrals from my network - local jobs that required hybrid schedule - tailored resumes - soft skills - activity on LinkedIn (mostly commenting) I also tried to outsource the filling out job applications part so I can focus on preparing and interviewing but I didn’t have much success with freelancers from Fiverr. I was also approached by a “do it for you” company but they charge % of your first year salary + a fixed fee and I decided to just do it myself.

Anyone get schadenfreude seeing your old job struggle to hire your position?

Left my old role nearly 2 months ago and they of course had my position posted within days of me leaving. It only stayed up a few days. I just saw the position pop up again. Having been on their side before, I’m almost certain they couldn’t find anyone decent and decided to repost it. Their problem: they are basically looking for a tech lead at a low end senior salary. I was doing tech lead work because I’d been pushing for that position. But despite being told I’d be getting the title and salary bump, they ended up saying they’d only be able to give me the title but no bump. And that’s how I ended up leaving. Anyways, I find it amusing that they are struggling to hire for their unrealistic expectations.

Good game developers are hard to find

For context: it’s been 9 months since I started my own studio, after a couple of 1-man indie launches and working for studios like Jagex and ZA/UM. I thought with the experience I had, it would be easier to find good developers. It wasn’t. For comparison, on the art side, I have successfully found 2 big contributors to the project out of 3 hires, which is a staggering 66% success rate. Way above what I expected. However, on the programming side, I’m finding that most people just don’t know how to write clean code. They have no real sense of architecture, no real understanding of how systems need to be built if you want something to actually scale and survive more than a couple of updates. Almost anyone seem to be able to hack something together that looks fine for a week, and that’s been very difficult to catch on the technical interviews that I prepared. A few weeks after their start date, no one so far could actually think ahead, structure a project properly, and take real responsibility for the quality of what they’re building. I’ve already been over 6 different devs on this project with only 1 of them being “good-enough” to keep. Curious if this is something anyone can resonate to when they were creating their own small teams and how did you guys addressed it. Edit: to clarify, here’s the salary & benefits, since most people assumed (with some merit to it) that the problem was on “you get what you pay for”. Quoting myself from those comments: “Our salary range is between 55k-70k. Bear in mind this is in Europe and my country’s average salaries for the same industry is of 45k-60k, depending on seniority. We also offer good benefits: Policy of fully remote work with flexible working hours, only 3 syncs per week (instead of dailies), 30 days of paid vacations (country standard is 22 days), health insurance + a couple other benefits, and the salary is definitely above market average.”

Have we forgotten business logic?

Hey fellow devs 👋 I've been thinking about something that's been bothering me throughout my career - the way we handle business logic in our codebases. You know, that thing we're supposed to protect "at all costs" with fancy patterns and principles? Let's be real: when was the last time you saw business logic being treated with the respect it deserves? Instead, what I usually see is: - Services/controllers that are absolute units 🫃 - ORM models polluted with business behavior - Massive scripts moving data between DB and UI with zero regard for separation - The loud silence of non-existent test coverage Why did we let this happen? I think there are a few reasons: 1. Our hiring practices are broken: Job posts be like "must know 17 JavaScript frameworks" but zero mention of problem-solving or domain knowledge 2. Architecture? What architecture?: Clean/hexagonal/onion architectures get ignored because "we need to ship fast" 3. The eternal time crunch: Always rushing, always cutting corners, always "we'll fix it later" 4. Software engineers being just “ticket machines”: business logic is something that someone else has to define, we just implement it and we don’t need to understand it (depending on company’s culture of course) What if, in our next project, we took a moment to really understand the "why" behind the features we're building? What if we advocated for separating out business logic in our code, even in small ways? Perhaps we can share these ideas with our teammates, sparking conversations that lead to gradual shifts in how we work. What’s been your experience with this?

Why Software Engineers Rarely Break Free from the quiet burnout of jumping from company to company and doing the same thing over and over again?

This might not have much to do with SWE but careers in general. Hear me out: we join a new company, we figure out our coworkers and the pecking order, we spot the person that carries the team on their back, we figure out our relationships with our manager and stakeholders. And then we do our sprints, our planning, our retros, our demos... you push features, you review PR's ... and the wheel just keeps on turning... In the meantime - you are getting some money, you are moving on in life, slowly, but you are... you're buying that house, you're taking that vacation.... but then you come back... to the wheel...over and over and over again, from company to company.... Why is software so challenging to expand out? Is it the golden handcuffs? Is it the insecurity of starting your own startup? Is it the exhaustion from coding and meetings all day that you can't find another oz of energy to pursue your own thing? Is it the challenge of the quickly moving field that disallows you to have confidence in an idea enoguh to pursue it ?

How to not feel demoralized when working with truly amazing engineers?

I've worked with a certain engineer for multiple years, and every single day I'm shocked by how good he is. I've never seen him stumped. He solves things in days instead of months. It breaks my brain. I've never seen anything like it in my career. Some of it has rubbed off on me, but the gap is still about as large as the pacific ocean. How much could Michael Jordan's skill rub off on your local LA fitness ball player? It extends beyond that though. I'm very certain that there's no skill or talent on earth I could ever be good at on the level that he is at engineering. It's not jealousy, because I know the insane amount of work and discipline he put in and still puts into his craft. When I meet truly exceptional people I'm in awe of them. But it's pretty saddening to be reminded every day that you aren't all that good at the thing you put your heart into. That's not me giving up. I try to improve every single day, but I always end up feeling like: I'm just don't love it enough I'm just not disciplined enough I'm just not intelligent enough At this point those feelings actually hurt my ability even more. I've done so much work with battling things like physical insecurities, but I'm realizing there's an unlimited amount of things I CAN improve or change, and that's 100x more demoralizing.

7 years trying to live off my own games: what went right, what went wrong, and what finally worked

Hi! My name is Javier/Delunado, and I’ve been making games for around 7 years now, mostly as a programmer and designer. Warning! This is going to be a long post, where I’ll share both my professional journey and some advice that I think might be useful for making your own games. I’ve always really enjoyed working on my own projects, and even though I’ve worked for others as an employee or freelancer, I’ve never stopped dreaming about being able to live off my own games. I’ve tried several times: going full-time using my savings, and also juggling indie development alongside other jobs. Finally, in July 2025, I self-published a game called *Astro Prospector* together with two other people. It has done genuinely well, well enough that it’s going to let us live off this for a long time. Said like that, it sounds simple, but the reality is that it’s been a tough road: years of attempts, learning, effort, and a pinch of luck. # Background # 2017 * I started a Computer Engineering degree in Spain in 2017. I had always loved video games and computers, and I had tinkered a bit with Game Maker and similar tools before, without really understanding what I was doing. In my degree second year, once I had learned a bit of programming, I teamed up with my classmate and best friend at the time, and we started making mobile games in Unity just for fun. We published a couple of games, *Borro* and *CryBots* (they’re no longer on the store, but I’m leaving [a couple of screenshots here](https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1-Fhz6lE1sX8XgzDul4bd_tPLefXP0_K4?usp=sharing) out of curiosity) # 2018–2019 * Making those Unity games taught us a ton. Not just programming or design, but especially what it means to FINISH a small game. To publish it, to show it to people, to do a bit of marketing. It was an incredible and funny experience that gave us a more holistic view of what game development really is. So, naturally, thinking we were already grizzled gamedev veterans, we decided to make a muuuch bigger project for PC and consoles, called *We Need You, Borro!*. This would be a sequel to our first mobile game: an adventure-RPG whose main mechanic was inspired by the classic *Pang*. This time, we also had an artist helping us out. The project was scoped at around 1.5 years of development. A terrible idea, if you ask present-day me, haha. * My friend and I lived together, and we balanced classes and other obligations with developing the game. This is where I started learning about community management and marketing in general. I ran the studio’s account, called *TEA Team*, and it helped me better understand what it actually means to promote a game on social media. On top of that, we took part in a couple of fairs where we showed the game to people. It was my first time attending in-person events, and the experience was amazing. I fell in love with the indie dev scene and its people. At one of those fairs, showing a demo of the game, we even won an award alongside much more well-known games like *Blasphemous*. It was surreal to take a photo with our award next to the director of *The Game Kitchen*, holding his. Even more surreal to remember it now lol. * At the same time, we created and started growing the *Spain Game Devs* community, first as a Telegram group and later with an additional Discord server. The idea was to have an online community for Spanish game developers to discuss development, show projects, ask for help, etc., since nothing quite like it existed back then. Small spoiler: that community is still alive and active today, and it’s the largest dev community in Spain. But we’ll come back to that later! # 2020 * COVID hit. I’ll keep this part brief, but between the pandemic and some personal issues, the development of *We Need You, Borro!* and the *TEA Team* studio had to come to a halt. Those were tough months: remote classes weren’t the same, and Borro’s development slowly faded out until it died. Even so, I always try to look at moments like these through a positive lens. When one door closes, a window opens! You can play the [last public demo of the game here](https://delunado.itch.io/we-need-you-borro). * After those turbulent months of change, I focused my gamedev path on two things. On one hand, I teamed up with two other devs, [PacoDiago](https://soundcloud.com/pacodiago) (musician) and [Adri\_IndieWolf](https://adri-indiewolf.itch.io/) (artist), to make jam games and a few small projects under the name *Alien Garden*. It was fun, and even though we never managed to release a commercial game, we did several jam games and had a great time. I learned a lot, and it allowed me to keep practicing and improving. My favourite game made with the team is probably [Clownbiosis](https://delunado.itch.io/clownbiosis). * On the other hand, I wanted *Spain Game Devs* to grow. I wanted a place where people could come together and feel close to fellow developers. Beyond running internal activities and promoting the community on social media, I decided to organize the *Spain Game Devs Jam*. It would be an online jam (still not that common pre-pandemic) focused on developers from Spain. In short, I spent around three months working daily to secure sponsors for prizes, streamers to play every single submitted game, and so on. It was intense and stressful work, but it eventually became the biggest jam ever held in Spain, with around 700 participants and 130 submitted games. The jam was repeated annually, each time more ambitious, until 2024, when it didn’t take place for reasons I’ll explain later. # 2021 * I kept studying, making games in my free time, and running *Spain Game Devs*. That year, [Bitsommar](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0go21cA0CTM) took place, an event in northern Spain that brought together a small group of Spanish developers for a week of pure relaxation. No coding, no working, just resting and bonding. It was a wonderful experience, and I met a lot of amazing people. Among them was Julia “Rocket Raw”, a Spanish developer who, together with Raúl “Naburo”, founded the young studio [Dead Pixel Games](https://deadpixeltales.itch.io/). * Due to life happening, a few months later I ended up staying over at Julia and Raúl’s place. They had been toying with an idea to present at *Indie Dev Day*, an incredible Spanish indie-focused event held every year in Barcelona (now called [Barcelona Game Fest](https://bcngamefest.com)). It seems they were having some trouble with their current programmer. While I was in the shower (where all great ideas are born) I had the brilliant thought of offering myself as a programmer for the project they had in mind, in case they didn't wanted to continue with its current one. They said they’d think about it. A month later, they wrote back saying yes, let’s give it a shot. It’s worth mentioning that, like everything else I’ve talked about so far, this project wasn’t paid, and we had no income of any kind. The idea was to work towards getting that funding through sales of the game or interest from a publisher. * The best part? There was only one month left to get the demo ready and present it at the event. So we went all in for an intense month of crunch, creating the project from scratch. For having just one month, it turned out pretty good, I must say. The game was called *Bigger Than Me*, a narrative (mis)adventure about a boy who becomes a giant when he hears the word “Future”. We presented the project at the event, and I remember it very fondly. People loved it, the event was amazing, I finally met many devs in person, and I made friendships that I still have today. * From there, at the end of 2021, we decided to move forward with *Bigger Than Me*. The plan was to develop a vertical slice and start looking for a publisher to secure funding. The projected timeline was one year for the vertical slice and publisher search, and another year to finish development once funding was secured. On top of that, I was still studying, and my teammates were working day jobs just to survive while we made the game. Precarious, to say the least. # 2022 * Throughout 2022, I focused on working on *Bigger Than Me*, finishing my degree (I took an extra year, 5 instead of 4, because of COVID), and continuing to learn about gamedev by joining jams and running the *Spain Game Devs* community. Throughout 2021 and into 2022, we kept showing *BTM* and talking to publishers. * The critical moment came during that year’s *Indie Dev Day*. We brought *Bigger Than Me* again, with a booth and an improved version. We won some awards there and at other events. People loved it, and I genuinely think it had potential. But it was a narrative adventure. And narrative adventures… don’t sell. Or so every publisher told us. Another important point was that we still hadn’t released any commercial game as a team, and publishers weren’t fully convinced about the project’s viability. * We came back home empty-handed after pitching to many publishers, both in person and online. The game wasn’t considered profitable, and even though it had quality, the market wasn’t going to absorb it. A few weeks later, we made the decision to stop the project: there was no realistic chance of securing funding, and it didn’t make sense to continue without it. It was really hard… but necessary. We decided to rest for a few weeks before doing anything else. [This was the last public demo of Bigger Than Me](https://deadpixeltales.itch.io/bigger-than-me). * In the last months of 2022, alongside wrapping up *BTM*, I also finished my degree. My final project was a complete overview of the history of Artificial Intelligence techniques for video games: things like A\*, GOAP, steering behaviours, etc. At that time, LLMs and similar tech weren’t as mainstream, so I only mentioned them briefly. It taught me a lot about gamedev AI and became a solid asset for my résumé. * After graduating, I started looking for a job in the game industry. My dream was still to release my own games and live off them, but in the meantime, I had to eat. I decided to look for a company working with VR for a very specific reason: I didn’t really like VR. That way, I hoped the job would just be what paid the bills, without fully satisfying my passion, leaving that passion for indie development in my free time. I ended up working for about a year at [Odders Lab](https://odderslab.com/). * It’s now December 2022. Some time after cancelling *Bigger Than Me*, and to clear our heads a bit, we decided to take part in [Thinky Jam 2022](https://itch.io/jam/thinky-games-are-for-everyone/entries), a jam focused on puzzle and “thinky” games. It lasted around 11 days, and we took it pretty calmly. We made a game called [Stick to the Plan](https://deadpixeltales.itch.io/stick-to-the-plan-jam), a kind of sokoban where you don’t push boxes, but instead control a dog who loves loooong sticks and has to maneuver them through the levels. The game turned out really well and got an amazing reception on itch.io. * Surprised by how well *Stick* was received, we decided, after some reflection, to turn it into a full commercial game. It had several things going for it: prior validation, simple development, very controlled scope, and a relatively short timeline. It also had one big drawback: it was a puzzle game. Selling a puzzle game is really hard. It’s probably one of the worst genres to sell, right next to… narrative adventures :). Still, we decided to go for it, mainly to have a game released on Steam and be better prepared for a future project. The studio was renamed from *Dead Pixel Games* to *Dead Pixel Tales*, also as a kind of rebirth symbol, haha. # 2023 * The full development of *Stick to the Plan* started in January 2023. Throughout that year, while juggling my job at Odders, Spain Game Devs, and the occasional game jams, I worked on *Stick* whenever I could. Net development time was about 6 months total, spread across 2023, until we finally released the game in September. Worth stressing: at no point did we get paid while making it. The expectation was to earn money after launch. * In July 2023, I left Odders Lab. Honestly, my stress levels had been climbing nonstop since I started working on *Bigger Than Me*, and it reached an unsustainable point. I decided to quit the stable, comfy job and use my savings to go full time and finish *Stick to the Plan*. This was the first time my savings hit zero because I took the self publishing leap. * That same month, we released a small game: [Raver’s Rumble](https://deadpixeltales.itch.io/ravers-rumble). It was paid by *Brainwash Gang,* and it’s a mini game based on one of the characters from their game *Friends vs Friends*. It was a full week of work, and they paid us around €1000 (in total, not per person. So probably like 9$ the hour lol). I won’t go into too much detail, but communication with the company was kind of rough, and I ended up finishing the job pretty stressed, basically crying while fixing the last bugs, because of how much work we crammed into one week plus everything else going on in my life. * [Stick to the Plan](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2334280/Stick_to_the_Plan) launched as a self published Steam release in September. We got help from [SpaceJazz](https://www.spacejazzgames.com/), a publisher focused on the Asian market that supported us with translation and promotion in some regions of Asia. Later, we did the Nintendo Switch port, and SpaceJazz published it globally on that console. As of today, about two years later, *Stick* has sold around 5,000 copies on Steam. I don’t have Switch data, but it’s probably around 4,000\~ copies at most. As you can see, that’s nowhere near enough to feed three people for even three months. But we had released a real game! * After launching *Stick*, with barely any rest, we started working on prototypes and ideas. Turns out there was a small publisher that funded games from small teams to be made in about 6 months, and they were interested in us. We just needed to land on an idea they liked and we could get funding. So we spent September, October, and November prototyping several ideas in parallel. * This potential publisher was looking for replayable games, genres that allow creativity. Think *Balatro*, *Slay the Spire*, *Dome Keeper*, etc. The big drawback was that the Dead Pixel team leaned heavily toward thinky, narrative, puzzle heavy games. The roguelite / deckbuilder-ish designs we tried didn’t really shine. But eventually we found a small prototype: a mix of *Stacklands* x *Detectives*. It was pretty fun, and we felt it had something to it, a nice blend of narrative investigation and roguelite structure. However… the publisher didn’t fully buy it. * After 3 months of unpaid work on prototypes that got discarded, with almost no rest after *Stick*, the whole team was completely burnt out. Our expectations with the publisher were pretty low at this point, even though at the start it looked like everything would work out. We spent 3 months prototyping, and it led nowhere. * As a last shot, we attended [BIG](https://www.bilbaogamesconference.com/) in December, an event held in Bilbao. We didn’t have a booth, but we did pay for business passes so we could set meetings with publishers. We brought a more refined version of that *Stacklands* x *Detectives* prototype and showed it to friends and professionals. On top of that, we had meetings with several publishers. Among them, Big Publisher A and Big Publisher B (I’d rather not name them here) were very interested. They really liked the idea. * After the event, both publishers emailed us a few days later. How weird, a publisher reaching out to you instead of the other way around, haha. Long story short, Big Publisher B eventually dropped out, and Big Publisher A seemed interested in moving forward. A few weeks passed. # 2024 * The situation was kind of unreal. After months of precarity and fighting just to survive off our own games, it felt like everything was finally coming together. We had an interesting idea. A big publisher seemed ready to sign. If things went well, we’d be living off our own games and shipping something amazing. * But on the other hand, I was done. The weight of the months, the years, had taken a huge toll on my mental health. I developed chronic stress over time, with pretty serious physical and mental consequences. I had been saying for a while, “yeah, I’m going to seriously start reducing stress.” But I never did. There was always just a bit more to do. We were always “almost there.” After thinking about it for a long time, and as painful as it was, I decided to leave Dead Pixel Tales. * It was an incredibly hard decision. After years of struggle, we were about to sign with a big publisher. We had a good game in our hands. Everything looked good. But if I didn’t leave then, I was going to leave in the middle of development, and not in a nice way. And I didn’t want to abandon the team halfway through production. So, as much as it hurt, in January 2024 I told the team how I was feeling and that I had to step away. I’d help them find a replacement programmer, or finish whatever they needed for a few weeks. But after that, I had to distance myself for my health. * The team kept working on the game. I don’t know the details of what happened with Big Publisher A and the project. I really hope they can ship the game someday. * Throughout January 2024 and part of February, I rested. On top of leaving Dead Pixel, I also dropped several other commitments I had. I decided to stop running *Spain Game Devs Jam* and minimize the organizational work there. I started therapy. Little by little my mental health improved, and today I’m doing much, much better in comparison, even though I still deal with some little leftovers every now and then. * In February, I started working at [Under the Bed Games](https://underthebedgames.com/), an indie studio that was in the process of finishing and releasing [Tales from Candleforth](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2200410/Tales_from_Candleforth/). My savings ran out completely for the second time, and I needed to work again. The team, around 8 people total, welcomed me with open arms. * I worked there from February to October. I learned a ton, used both Unreal and Unity, and it was a really enriching experience, both technically and in terms of team management. Special mention: we got mentorship from [RGV](https://es.linkedin.com/in/r-g-v), a Spanish software veteran who knows a LOT and has gamedev experience too. It radically changed how we program and how we understand processes & teams, and it helped me massively later on. * That year I went to Gamescom for the first time with Under the Bed. It was an incredible (and exhausting lol) experience. One of the reasons we went was to meet publishers and secure funding for the next project. * After a few tough months, we didn’t get the funding. It sucked, but there was no choice: everyone got laid off in October, and the game we’d been working on for half a year was cancelled. Another misery for the indie developer. But again: one door closes, another window opens. * At Under the Bed, my main teammate was [Raúl “Lindryn”](https://lindryn.itch.io/). Besides being a great person and programmer, he’s the director of Guadalindie, an indie event held in southern Spain every year. I also had the honor of joining [MálagaJam](https://malagajam.com/), the organization behind [Guadalindie](https://guadalindie.com/), which also hosts the biggest in person *Global Game Jam* site in the world, and I’ve been able to help with their events since. * When Under the Bed closed, Lindryn and I decided to make a small project for fun, to practice and boost the portfolio a bit. It was basically a miniaturized *Factorio* without conveyor belts: a resource management game where you place units that throw resources through the air and pass them along to each other. * Remember that publisher we made a bunch of prototypes for at *Dead Pixel Tales*, who ended up taking none of them? Well, they came back. They messaged me because they were looking for games again. I told Lindryn, and a bit rushed but trying to seize the opportunity, we prepared the project to pitch. We brought Álvaro “Sienfails” onto the team too, a young but insanely talented artist who had worked with us at Under the Bed. * We rushed a pitch deck for the publisher, and it went pretty well. The game was called *Flying Rocks*, and they liked the idea. It had a goofy medieval fantasy tone, keeping the addictive optimization core of games like *Factorio* but simpler, aimed at people who wanted to get into the genre. Plus, we had a few mechanics that allowed for emergent situations I still hadn’t seen in other factory games. * Long story short, we spent several months working on *Flying Rocks* prototypes and mini demos for the publisher. Everything was always great according to them, but there was always just a little more needed. A little more. A little more. We were focused on making the game mechanically interesting rather than polishing the visuals, because we understood the idea had to stand on its own first, and then we’d go deeper on the rest. After 3 months of work, and after 3 different demos, we couldn’t keep doing this because we ran out of money. We even had a contract draft ready to sign, but “the investors weren’t convinced.” We told them: either we sign now, or we have to stop. We never signed, and the project went on hold. If you feel like it, you can try [the latest prototype we made](https://delunado.itch.io/flying-rocks) for the publisher here (password: *rocky dwarf*). * During those months I got hooked on [Scientia Ludos’ channel](https://www.youtube.com/@ScientiaLudos). In several videos, he argued that signing with a publisher generally isn’t worth it, that we could do everything ourselves as a studio. Mixing that with [Jonas Tyroller’s](https://www.youtube.com/@JonasTyroller) advice and [How To Market a Game](https://howtomarketagame.com/) saying that the best marketing is “making a good game,” and being a bit bitter and angry about all the time lost with the publisher, I decided that in 2025 I was going to release a game. I was going to self publish it. And it was going to go WELL. And it did. Self fulfilling prophecy! # 2025 * In January of that year, I started researching the market, determined to find a profitable game to make with a small team. I stumbled upon *Nodebuster*, which I already knew of but had never played. I’ve played idle games my whole life: on Kongregate, on itchio, etc. I love them. When I started playing *Nodebuster* and digging into the emerging genre of “active incremental,” I knew: this is what we have to do. * This emerging genre perfectly matched what we had available: a small team, making small but distilled games, in a niche where there wasn’t much quality yet, and that we personally loved. By late January, I started prototyping *Astro Prospector* and pitched it to my *Flying Rocks* teammates. I wanted them to make it with me, and everything clicked. * Development started in February, and we set the game’s deadline for June. Around 5 months. That way, the goal was crystal clear, and we could shape the game around it. * I’d like to talk in depth about the strategy and the process we followed in a longer article, so I’ll keep it short here. We made a demo for friends and acquaintances, then iterated on it. That became the public demo on itchio alongside the Steam page. Later, we published an improved version of the demo on Steam. And in July 2025, the game released, 15 days later than planned, not bad. You can take a look to the [game here](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3503440/Astro_Prospector/). * Even though we didn’t work with traditional publishers, I did team up again with SpaceJazz, the Asia focused publisher who helped us with *Stick to the Plan*. They handled promotion in China and Japan, and it’s been a really pleasant relationship. * After launch, which went far beyond our expectations (we hit 1200 concurrent players in the first hours), we rested for a week, then shipped a patch fixing bugs and such, then rested two more weeks. When we got back to the office, we decided to work on a free update and include a new survivos/roguelite mode, for people who felt the story mode (5 hours) was too short. * In November, three months later, we released the roguelite mode. I’ll be honest: I enjoyed making the incremental mode more than this one, but it still turned into an interesting package, especially as a huge free addition to an existing game. But yeah, I definitely like making incrementals more than roguelites lol. * Even though both launches went really well, the month before each one was pretty rough in terms of stress (each launch is a big weight on your shoulders. Also, this is the third time I got broke on my self-publishing attempt, so you can imagine lol). And the weeks after, despite the joy, there’s this uncomfortable feeling, kind of like a “post partum” slump. But then it gets better. * As of today, 13/12/2025, we’ve sold almost 100,000 copies. I’m writing this while on vacation, in “low performance mode.” I have money in the bank now, time to rest, and I can finally breathe. After 7 years, I made it. And even after making it, I still feel like this is just a small step on the long road ahead… # Advice Below are a few tips or observations that, looking back, helped me get here. There’s no special order. * Ever since I started doing stuff in gamedev, I’ve been sharing my progress on social media and in groups. Experiments, project updates, tips and problems, etc. This helped a lot of people in my local scene know who I am, and it helped me meet a lot of people. But it has to be done GENUINELY. Not sharing with a marketing agenda behind it. Sharing as a curious human. Sharing FOR OTHERS, not for yourself. * Even though everyone sees things differently, for me it has been crucial to work with small teams to ship projects. Not just in terms of quality, but in a human way too. If one day you’re feeling down, the team supports you. If there’s something you don’t know, maybe they do. You laugh more, everything is more fun. It has its hard parts and you need to know how to work as a team, but it’s worth it. I don’t think I’m built to be a lone wolf, even though I’d like to try it at some point. * When I worked at *Under the Bed*, we had a month where we prototyped different games to decide what was next. A piece of advice I got back then, and tried to apply, was to make prototypes in a way that they cannot be reused. For example, we were using Unity, so we decided to prototype in Godot. That way you stop trying to do things “properly” so you can reuse them, and you can focus on moving fast and prototyping what you need. * If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that creativity isn’t something that appears when you lock yourself in a room and think for a long time, isolated from the world. Creativity is just the infinite, chaotic remix of things that already exist. For *Borro*, we took *Pang* and added Action RPG elements. For *Astro Prospector*, we took *Nodebuster* and added bullet hell elements. Don’t be afraid to take inspiration from something that already exists to build a foundation. I’m not talking about copying, I’m talking about improving it in your own style. * One of the key things in *Astro Prospector’s* development was that even before we fully knew the core mechanics, we already knew the release date. Anchoring a goal and sticking to it was KEY for controlling scope, knowing where to cut, and when. This was inspired by [Parkinson’s Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law), which basically says that work behaves like a gas: it expands to fill the time you give it, just like gas expands to the limits of its container. * Early validation saves ton of work. Demos, prototypes, jams, small tests with real players helped me avoid going all in on ideas that were not really working. * Be careful if gamedev is both your hobby and your job. In my case, it is, or at least it was. It’s important to have hobbies beyond making games, and it’s important to socialize often. Spending too much time in front of a computer takes a real toll. * I’ve always believed that the wisest person is the one who learns from other people’s mistakes. It’s true that some mistakes are hard to truly internalize unless you suffer them yourself, but try to pay attention to what does NOT work for others, think about why, and avoid repeating it. * Take care of the people around you, and surround yourself with people who take care of you. None of this would be real without a family that supported me, a partner who put up with me, and friends who trusted me. Never neglect them. * When planning projects and games, don’t try to design a perfect plan from start to finish. Make weekly plans, keep a high level idea of where you want to go, stay agile, actually agile, not fake Scrum agile (please). Always ask yourself: what is the smallest step I can take right now in the right direction? * Shipping something small beats dreaming forever about something big. Almost every meaningful step in my career came from finishing and releasing something, even if its not good, it sold poorly or just failed. Also, constraints are a superpower. Deadlines, small teams, limited scope. Most of the good decisions in *Astro Prospector* came from clear limits, not from infinite freedom. * Meritocracy does not really exist. Beyond my family, I owe all of this to the public, high quality services I was lucky to grow up with. Education, healthcare, support systems. Fight for them. * Publishers are not villains, but they are not saviors either. Promises without contracts are just that: promises. Protect your time and your energy. And even if you sign with a publisher, do it because you REALLY need it. * Take care of your mental health. Please. If there’s one thing you should take away from all of this, it’s this. If skydiving is a high risk sport for the body, doing business is a high risk activity for the mind. Burning yourself out is not worth it. Learn from my mistakes. Success does not erase the damage. Even when things finally go well, your body and your mind remember the years of stress. Act early, not when it’s already too late. Huge thanks for reading. I’ll keep an eye on the comments and DMs to answer any questions or thoughts. You can also contact me via Discord or Telegram (@delunado\_dev). Hope everything’s going great in your life. Big hug :)

How to get 93k wishlists with 0$ spent on marketing (first game experience)

Hi there \^\_\^ My name is Maria and I’m one of the 3 devs of [Urban Jungle](http://s.team/a/2744010). My friends and I started working on UJ as a hobby project in October 2023 and right now it's sitting on Steam with **93k WLs**. I already did a series of [posts](https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/1i3cv9a/last_january_ive_created_steam_page_for_my_first/) on r/Unity3D about our game dev journey, but I wanna share my experience with marketing here, cuz it's not tied to the game engine \^\_\^ **TL;DR:** 1. **If your game is cute, translate it to Japanese** 2. **Festivals work really well** 3. **Networking is key** 4. **1 demo is not enough, make more!** Soooo as a self-proclaimed marketing unprofessional of our lil group, I just want to share my experience while it’s still kinda fresh, because I strongly believe that other indies can do this as well. As title states, **we’ve gathered 93k WLs with 0 budget.** But it’s clickbait, cuz we’ve spent 25$ for programming course and we bought a 25$ cat asset pack from Unity Asset Store. But aside from that, we haven’t spent ANY money on the game until we reached 50k. Only our time. And sweat. And tears. Other 43k WLs are affected by our publisher, but I really don't know how much. In this post I’ll just share our WLs numbers and marketing beats that I associate with this numbers. **1. Our first 1000 WLs** Steam page of Urban Jungle went live on January 3rd 2024. It was translated into English, Russian, Japanese, Spanish and Chinese using Google translate. We hoped to get 100 WLs in a month, but Japanese twitter account u/IndieFreakJP made a post about us and it exploded. We had 1k on January 6th.  We quickly created twitter account and started posting about game too.  I understand now, why Chris Zukowski always tells to translate Steam page into as many languages as possible. Our game is cute and cozy and it went viral among Japanese players. Twitter is a big social media for them, so arigatou gozaimas **2. 9000 and the first demo** As we still were in shock after Steam page launch success, we started preparing the playable demo. In February 2024 we launched it, even though it was clunky, super simple and lacked polish whatsoever. We thought that pretty screenshots can create false expectations, and being gamers ourselves, we know, that gameplay is the king.  And to our surprise, players loved it. They gave feedbacks, told that game is too easy, had weird bugs, but overall they wanted to play it.  We localized our demo to English and Russian, because we speak these languages, and our friend translated it into Japanese as well. So our most active supporters, I mean, Japanese players, were able to play demo too.  Every cozy gamer and game developer knows about Wholesome Games. They are huuuuge in terms of visibility. So we wrote them an email, and Matthew was so kind that he reposted a tweet about demo launch on their page.  Content creators and streamers supported our lil game too and played it so much that we appeared as Top-2 in New & Trending Demos on Steam. And speaking as a developer, it was a bad demo. But it was enough to prove our concept and vision. First demo was active till April 2024 and we slowly reached 9k wishlists that way **3. 17000 and networking** In April we rebuilt the game almost completely and launched the second demo. And it was so much better gameplay wise. Our twitter account had \~300 followers at that time. But the second demo launch tweet gained a lot of visibility and I still don’t know why. I think it’s a combination of accidental good photos and text that was written using very simple words and a lot of expression. Not usual “selling” tweet vibes, I mean. And this launch was more successful than the first. Big content creators noticed Urban Jungle and we got great videos from GamerGirlGale, CozyTeaGames, etc. It was like a dream come true, because I watch their videos and I play games they recommend. It was like an acceptance into the coolest club of the cutest games.  We experimented with TikTok and Reddit too, but tiktok videos didn’t perform that much and took too much time, also we live in Thailand, so English-speaking videos didn’t perform that well. But reddit was surprisingly good. It didn’t have enormous visibility, but our players are on Reddit and visibility to wishlist ratio was the highest here.  While the demo was out, getting us wishlists, I decided to do some networking. I tried to reach other indies on Twitter and ask for their advice on marketing. And a lot of them answered.  We contacted Doot & Blipbloop, who created Minami Lane, SlavaDev making Monterona, Keith from the team of Spirit City and Yulia, developer of Woodo. They helped us with support, kind words and advice, so I highly encourage you to speak to other indies. We’re all on the same boat and can, for example, cross promote each other.  With the increasing amount of devs that we know, we started to notice memes, challenges and trends and started to post them. And one meme surpassed our demo launch tweet, hitting 20k in visibility and 1k in likes. And in the end of the May 2024, we had 17k wishlists **4. 50000 and festivals** Previously mentioned Chris Zukowski has discord channel How To Market a Game. And there is Holy Grail for all indies - spreadsheet with all upcoming festivals for game developers.  Starting from January I’ve applied to ALL festivals that could feature Urban Jungle. I did it religiously, checking this spreadsheet every week for new entries. I skipped festivals that required an application fee, and the ones where our game wouldn’t fit. Applications to festivals open months before the date itself, so it’s really important to keep an eye on them.  Also if application is already closed, but you believe that your game fits this festival perfectly, it is still worth a try to apply anyway. I did so for the Women Led games festival, and wrote them an email that we missed the deadline. And organizer, Charmaine, replied that there are still 2 slots available. And with this slot we became a part of Summer Game Fest.  At the end of May 2024, Urban Jungle was featured in Pillow Fort Showcase, Cozy & Family Friendly Games by Rokaplay, Guerilla Collective and Women Led Games. Three of them had feature on the first page of Steam.  We launched the third demo and new trailer before the beginning of the festivals and just went adrift.  And by the end of June 2024, we had tripled our wishlist amount and reached 50000 WLs with 0$ spent on marketing (I didn't have a salary u know). **5. 80000 and Gamescom** Since June, we've been working with Assemble Entertainment and they will publish Urban Jungle and help us with marketing on release and post-launch support. We’re very happy to work with them, cuz now we can focus more on development and release of the game. They even helped us to get the spotlight in Guerilla Collective even before our agreement was signed.  I stepped away a lil bit from marketing, but events where I signed up previously still helped us a lot in August-September 2024 and we got into TinyTeams and Wholesome games festivals. And then our publisher said "Hey, you're nominated as The Most Wholesome game on Gamescom" and we're like WHAT?! We didn't go there, traveling from Thailand to Germany would cost us months of rent, so we just got messages from Assemble Ent, how players are coming to the booth, how's their experience with the fourth demo (yeah, we love demos). We didn't win in nominated category, but the winner, Tavern Talk, totally deserved it. We were just happy to be there ahaha. And a lot of devs asked if we or publisher paid any money to get nominated, but we didn't. Assemble Ent just applied our game and it was chosen by the jury. In the end of September 2024, we had 80000 WLs. **6. 93000 and SNF, release, porting, etc aaaaaaaah** Last year in January we dreamt of 1000 wishlists in the first month and our craziest wish was to have 7000 on release. 93000 is a hilariously crazy amount for a tiny team of 3 friends making their first game. Also we know that wishlist amount is not equal to game sales. Everything can go wrong anytime. But these numbers really help with finding publishers and with motivation. It’s a very humbling thought that there is that amount of people who believe in you. And we’re beyond happy to know that so many players are waiting for our silly game about house plants.  **Small tips & tricks** 1. Networking. Meet other indies, cross promote your games and just be friends. We live in Thailand, and this summer we’ve met awesome developers from Bangkok and Chiang Mai. Developing your games in the US or Europe is not the same as in SEA. There are cultural differences, taxes, legal stuff etc, so it’s good to ask someone about all of this.  2. Networking. Again. Festival organizers are on Twitter. If they know about you, they’ll notice your application. Pillow Fort was very kind to accept us to their showcase in a twitter comment. And Rokaplay reposted our tweets too. Wholesome Games knows every cozy game developer in the world. They should know about you.  3. Even a bad demo is a good demo. If you have a Steam page, your chances to get into festivals increase. If you have a demo, it increases even more. Also content creators can play it and create videos about it. 4. We tried to contact content creators and streamers using e-mail in the beginning of development, but very few of them answered. But when the demo was released, small creators supported us and it led to big creators to notice us too. So small creators are the goal, they are the best, we love them with all our hearts 5. Use memes and trends. #screenshotsaturday works well for us and occasional memes work well too. For example, there was a challenge "Never stop 3d modeling" in twitter and we got 30k impressions from it and 1k likes. Just fun fact: Urban Jungle was featured in Thai Facebook account with 6 million followers. But it was account of home appliances store. UJ is the only game in their feed. I don't know what happened, but it was very delightful :D So, that’s everything that I wanted to share. We'll publish our 5th demo soon, and we'll see how well it will perform in Steam Next Fest. So count this post as one of my marketing attempts :"D And release is around the corner too. We're totally not in panic, we're just really-really tired and over caffeinated. Also, we got a lot of questions addressing our visual style and its pipeline. It’s very easy by the way, so pls let me know if I should make a post about it too.

I learned the hard way why prototyping can make or break indie games

After over a decade in indie game dev, I've seen prototyping save (and sometimes nearly ruin) my projects. I'm sharing what I've learned the hard way, hoping it helps some of you avoid similar headaches. When I started out, I thought thorough planning on paper was enough; great ideas clearly defined should work, right? Wrong. Time after time, I've found that no amount of fancy documentation replaces building rough versions of mechanics and seeing if they're fun or not. Look at FTL: Faster Than Light! The devs prototyped their core roguelike spaceship mechanics super early. Because of this, they immediately knew which mechanics were engaging, and which just sounded cool on paper but sucked in practice. They avoided tons of painful rework and nailed the gameplay experience from the start. With my own games, when I prototyped early, I quickly discovered what ideas genuinely worked versus what was awful when played. But here's the kicker, I've also skipped prototyping (usually when under time pressure or feeling overconfident), and every single time, it came back to bite me with expensive, frustrating rework. But prototyping isn't some magic bullet either. I've struggled with the other extreme, getting stuck in endless prototyping hell ("just one more tweak!") and failing to commit. Early in my indie career, my perfectionism disguised as caution left me spinning my wheels for months. It felt productive, but it wasn't, it was just fancy procrastination. I've since learned to prototype just enough to validate core ideas and then force myself to move forward. Now, you! Has prototyping improved your games? Or maybe you skipped it and regretted it later? Have you struggled, like me, with knowing when to stop tweaking and commit?

Rejected a 1 week take home assignment

This was for a mid level IC role asking for at least 6 yoe. I told them the 1 week assignment was a deal breaker for me, and that the 1hr dry coding whiteboarding session should have more than suffice. The rejection came out of me like a reflex response that I even surprised myself. The HR who knew I've been searching for work for a while replied saying this was the first time anyone has rejected their ask, and that they've been through 5 candidates before me, all of whom got rejected. Maybe there's some pattern recognition in me that knew this was just going to be another waste of my time with their assignments. Should I have done it any differently?

Today I lost hope. I feel like I’ll spend my whole life working in a factory.

I’ve been learning game development for 8 years. In the last few years, I’ve lived in a cheap, crappy room, spending all my time improving my skills and portfolio. I had no time to chill or relax, because before and after my warehouse and factory jobs, I focused on improving myself. I invested all my savings to get into a 5-days-per-week internship. They told stories about how many interns got hired afterward, but when the period ended, they just said “thank you” and told me the contract was over. I’ve sent around 200 resumes. I even paid for a professional resume service — still, I landed zero interviews. Some people called me, seemed super interested in hiring me, then ghosted me. Last week, I had an interview appointment, but two hours before it, I got a message saying HR was sick and they had to cancel. Two days ago, they texted me that they changed their minds and won’t be hiring anyone. I work for €1600 a month, in a job I hate, surrounded by people I have nothing in common with. I feel like I’ll live my whole life in a low-quality, tiny room, working for a low salary in a job that’s destroying me mentally. There’s no hope for me. I’m still learning backend development — [ASP.NET](http://ASP.NET) Core — instead of just chilling after work. But I honestly don’t believe my life will have any value. I don’t see the purpose of keeping it this way.

This felt dumb… until it worked: $14.99 demanded extra depth it seems

I didn’t see it at first. Today, my Early Access sits at **Positive** on Steam and has 12,000+ wishlists. The release is planned for Dec 2. I started with a tiny Flash-style sim 4 years ago. Scope crept, like all other projects. I shipped a beta; players "liked it" but said it wasn’t deep enough for a sim. I built a full research tree and expanded further. Shipped a demo. New feedback: “We expect about $0.50 per hour of play. So I would pay $9.99 for this. I was targeting $14.99 for my first indie and didn’t want to disappoint players, so I added Challenge Mode, Career Mode, and took goals from 10 to 70, plus a deep story, rivals, and a Zachtronics-style histogram are coming for the release. Players are seeing the progress. Comments turned mostly positive on Steam for EA players. The lesson I learned from this is that your price is a promise, so match it with real depth and replay. If I could redo one thing, I’d set depth targets before beta and guard scope harder. How would you balance scope, depth, and a $14.99 price?

“Just join the trades bro” fuck that.

The job market is complete shit. I’ve applied to over 500 jobs in just the last two months and only got a few interviews that went no where. The thing though is why tf would I commit to learning a trade after getting a degree and work experience? It just seems like a complete waste of time and I’m personally not motivated enough to study a trade for a few more years just to make 40k while I do the program. I hate how so many people in this subreddit expect us to have this “oh well, time to move on from this career” mindset. No I’m not going to put in the work because I see that it doesn’t get me anywhere. I actually could live at home for another 2-4 years while I do the program but I’m not going to because fuck that. I’m 31 so I really rather not live in my mom’s basement for another 2-4 years. America is collapsing in front of our faces so I’m not spending any more of my time supporting this shit system if I don’t have to. That means working only if necessary. If that means living at home and taking another year to find a tech job, I’ll do that. Edit: To clarify, I have 2 YOE as a full stack engineer. Now I’m looking into DevOps or a related role.

Got Laid Off 12 Days Ago and Signed an Offer Today - Here's My Sankey Diagram

*tl;dr: Title,* [Diagram Here](https://imgur.com/a/5THOIEU)*. 5 YoE, no FAANGs. I have a B.S. in CS + Bio from Berkeley. Primarily Healthcare SWE experience. Job market is not that bad for Senior SWEs. TC >$100k + Fully Remote. I'm a US Citizen.* I always see the doom and gloom from this sub regarding layoffs and the struggles of people finding a job and wanted to add a counter-story. I got laid off from my job on July 14th. It was an absolute gut punch and all of my worst fears came true. I saw all the posts from people with years of experience struggle with finding a job and thought I was absolutely screwed going into the market. Thankfully, either I have a really good skill set or people are being overly pessimistic (though it is most likely a combination of both.) I do think that there is still merit to the doom and gloom though. When looking for a job, there were barely any new grad, entry level, or junior level job postings. Most of the jobs that I saw started at senior and made their way up but it seems that the market for mid and senior level roles is still relatively healthy. Almost every position that I interviewed for was hybrid, with a good chunk being 5 days a week in person. A very small minority were fully remote. As for how I went about that job search, the day I got laid off I got an invite to a "Mandatory Meeting" with my boss + some random person that I didn't know at exactly 9AM. I knew then it was over and immediately started polishing my resume and applying to every company that I could think of. I went directly to the career page and found jobs that I thought that I was qualified for. I may have applied to every company that I can think of, but I only applied to roles that matched my skillset. Every single job that I applied to was either directly on the company page or LinkedIn jobs sorted by last 24 hours. I did NOT use any AI - this includes auto-apply software or even tuning my resume. Everything was done by hand, manually by me. The only "automation" that I did was sign up for a [greenhouse.io](http://greenhouse.io) account so that my name, email, and other info was autofilled by them. The first 48 hours was the hardest because it was just sending applications into the void without knowing if it would yield anything. Then starting Wednesday that same week, I started getting interview requests and stopped applying to new jobs. I did not ask my network for any references as I was not desperate yet. For context, I am in the San Francisco Bay Area and work in the biotech industry (and if you're on r/biotech, biotech is equally screwed as tech, if not more.) The job I got is in the healthcare field but unrelated to the job I previously had. TC is a nice bump up from my previous position but I will not share it since people in real life know what my Reddit handle is (but I can say that it is more than $100,000 but less than $1,000,000.) I have 5 years of experience as a Software Engineer in various healthcare companies ranging from small startups to large companies with both a CS and biology degree from UC Berkeley. Of course, this is just one data point. YMMV To those still hunting, good luck.

Which one to choose?

I have 12 years of experience on the infra side and I want to learn DE . What a good option from the 2 pictures in terms of opportunities / salaries/ ease of learning etc

SF Bay Area - The job market is cooked

Lately, I’ve been wanting to vent about how rough my interviews have been. I’m still employed, but actively looking for a new opportunity where I can learn and grow. Recently, I spoke with a recruiter about a senior-level role. They asked what total compensation (TC) would make me consider leaving my current position. I gave them my exact number, and they immediately said it was fine—they wanted to fast-track me through the hiring process. I had a conversation with the hiring manager, and it ended with him outlining the next step: a CoderPad interview. So I assumed my intro landed well. But the next day, I checked their careers page and saw the same role reposted—this time with a noticeably lower salary range. That gave me a bad feeling. Sure enough, I woke up this morning to an email saying they’ve decided to pass on me. Also worth noting: most company I’ve spoken to so far has explicitly told me they don’t ask Leetcode-style questions. And they’ve all said the final stage would be an onsite.

Postmortem: My first game with a total budget of $246 and a 6 month development timeline made over $3,000 in it's first week

**Game Details** * Title: Mythscroll * Price: $12.99 USD, with a 2 week 15% launch discount * Genres: Text-Based Sandbox CRPG * Elevator pitch: Mythscroll is a D&D-inspired text-based CRPG featuring deep character building, choice and stat-based encounters with branching outcomes, and turn-based combat with a variety of fantasy/mythological creatures. * Steam page: [Mythscroll Steam Page](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3700080/Mythscroll/) **Budget breakdown - Total budget: $246** * Steam fee: $100 (will be reimbursed since I reached over $1k revenue) * Capsule art: $130, hired an artist from reddit * Kenney assets(used for map icons, ui borders, and custom cursor): $0 (got free on a special sale event) * Hand pixeled pixel art backgrounds: $2, itch asset pack (I plan to tip the artist I bought this pack from more once I get paid for the game) * Achievement icons: $6, itch asset packs * Fonts: $0, found free fonts with commercial permissions * Audio: $0, found free audio with commercial permissions * Marketing: $8, for one month of Twitter/X premium, probably not worth it imo, i stopped paying for it after one month **Timeline breakdown** * February 18th 2025: started developing the game * April 30th 2025: published store page to Steam and started sharing the game on various social accounts(x, threads, bluesky, reddit) a couple times a week * Gained around 700 wishlist over about a month of this * May 28th 2025: launched demo to Steam - 720 wishlists at the time of launching demo, demo launch only brought in 133 wishlists over the course of it's launch week * June 9th - 16th: participated in Steam Next Fest (2,727 total wishlists by the end, nearly 2k wishlists gained from Next Fest * Released game: Monday, August 11th 2025 - 3,385 total wishlists at launch * 99 copies sold on launch day, 1 positive review, $1,126 gross revenue * 51 copies sold the second day, 4 more positive reviews, and 1 very long and detailed negative review left towards the end of the day * 20 copies sold the third day, sales momentum was seemingly hurt significantly by the 1 negative review, as visibility didn't drop off nearly as much as sales did on this day. People were still seeing the game, but way fewer decided to buy. * 13 copies sold the fourth day, one more positive review and one more negative review came in * 4 copies sold the fifth day, this day was Friday, and I released a content and bug fix update as well. I also had 2 people reach out to me on my discord server about the game saying that they really were enjoying it, and I swallowed my pride and asked them to leave a review on Steam. * On the sixth day, both people who I asked to leave a review on Steam, left a positive review, and a third person from the discord who was upset about losing an item upon dying in the game, left a not recommended review, which is a bit of a bummer, but did bring me to 10 paid reviews, so I got my review score, 70% mostly positive. On this day I sold 32 copies, hitting the 10 review mark really does seem to make a difference. * On the seventh day (yesterday) I sold 70 copies. At the end of the seventh day I had sold a total of 289 copies and reached $3,228 in gross revenue. I also gained over 1,000 wishlists over launch week too, reaching around 4,400 total wishlists by the end of the seventh day. **My Takeaways** * I think making a very niche text-based game actually helped me reach my goals, because I had relatively small goals. I've seen people advise against making games like this because not a lot of people play text-based games, so the market is just tiny, which is fair and true, but my goals were small enough that the advice wasn't really applicable to me. I wasn't trying to sell thousands of copies, just like, make enough money so it would be as if I had a part time job during these past 6 months. I think/hope this style of game development is sustainable for me as well, because I actually really enjoy it, since it is both my work and my fun I often spend 12+ hours a day on it, and don't really take days off unless I have plans, because it's like, if I was taking time off work I'd want to do my hobby, and this is also my hobby lol. So, I can get a lot done in just 6 months. And then I can start a new project and not get burnt out on the old one. I already have my next 2 game ideas lol, both very different from my first one. * I don't think posting on social media made a big difference for this game, which makes sense since it's not very visually marketable. Except for my first post on the pcgaming subreddit that had a crazy upvote to wishlist conversion rate for some reason, I never really correlated my social media posts to a jump in wishlists. However, I did notice on the weeks I didn't post at all, I seemed to get less daily wishlists on average. So I feel like each social media post probably brought in a few wishlists, which does add up over time, so I guess I'd say it's worth it since it's free and doesn't take long. * I started game dev from game jams, I think this was good and bad for me. Good because I learned scope and how to set a timeline with planned deadlines from the start of the project, and stick to it, and release the project. Which, I did. The bad thing is though, since I am so inflexible on the release date once it's set, I released the game probably a few weeks before I should have, so I have content updates planned for every Friday of this month. * Reviews are everything, early on at least, it seems like they can make or break the game. I am currently incredibly anxious because just 1 more negative review will tip my game into "mixed" which I am trying my best to avoid. Currently 2 of the 3 people who left a negative review have responded positively to the updates I've already made and have planned, but neither have changed their review yet. **My Current Concerns** Reviews and returns. As previously mentioned, I'm currently at 7/10 score on Steam and at risk of becoming overall "mixed". Also, my current return rate is 14-15%, which from what I've seen is on the higher end of average, and half of the returns are for the reason of "not fun" which stings, but I did expect and kept trying to prepare myself for, I know it's a really niche type of game, that doesn't even necessarily appeal to most people who enjoy text-based games. There is no dialogue or deeply immersive descriptions in the game. One of the major inspirations for this game, other than D&D, is Bitlife, in terms of the "text-based" style of the game. It is meant to be a sandbox game where your imagination and personal storylines fuel the moment to moment gameplay, and the game is there in support of that. I tried to communicate that with the tags, I don't use any "lore" or "story" tags, and I do use the "sandbox" and "simulation" tags. I haven't yet figured out how to communicate it better in the description of the game though, which I think would help with reducing the refund rate and frequency of negative reviews. **EDIT:** I have a lot of people fairly pointing out that my salary/hourly wage isn't included in the budget, I elaborate more on this in a few comments but my living expenses were fully covered during these past 6 months, and I was not, and would not have, made any sort of decent hourly wage if not working full time on this game. Before starting this project I was already not really working much, just a handful of hours a week, and sometimes not even that. I didn't initially say this in the post because it's obviously shameful, in a brief defense of myself I want to say that in the first couple years of our relationship I was the one working full time paying most bills, with him working part time or in school or just doing other things for a bit, and then it was pretty balanced for awhile, but I started to have a harder time and the roles started to switch in the past couple years. But this money that the game is making now will be going towards me contributing to our bills again, which is what I meant in the comment where I said "if every game I make does at least this well, I can keep doing this", because I only really need to make enough money to pay for about half of our living expenses during the time I make the game. We never planned on living on just his income forever, I just asked if he'd take a chance and let me do this and he agreed, and it is now doing well enough that I plan to start my next project in September.

Levels FYI 2025 report is out

https://www.levels.fyi/2025/ Obviously this leans more towards big tech but TC is still increasing. Sorry Doomers! Other interesting things were that senior/principal pay increased much more than junior/mid level. US and India market both had TC increases while Canada and Europe got screwed.

Fired from Big Tech, <1 YOE.

0.7 YOE. When I first started this job, I was so excited to build features. I learned so much in such little time and picked up so many soft skills, such as how to consult different engineers and compile their knowledge to properly add new features to infra way too big for any 1 dev to have 100% knowledge on. But my manager squeezed and sucked all of that passion out of me. I’ve tried my best to work on our relationship, but he’s spent all year treating me with explicit disdain, not making eye contact, and ignoring whatever I say in team lunches. I buckled down as much as I could to do better, but every 1:1 became a condescending berating session and I never felt like I truly belonged on the team. Whenever features were delayed, the majority of the time it was because of consistently broken infra, incomplete features from sister teams that mine depended on to start, or inaccurate guidance from dev’s I was asked to consult. I accepted the weaknesses within my control and improved them, but no matter what I did, I could never beat the narrative. Anything I did good was sarcastically devalued and whenever anything went wrong, my manager would tell me I should’ve taken X action that I wouldn’t have known to do at the time without privileged knowledge or time travel (hindsight advice). Coworkers and mentor repeatedly told me I was doing fine, but I just had our first performance review, and I’m being offered 2 things: **PIP vs Severance.** This severance side offer is brand new this year and our company has had huge layoffs. The actual meeting was another vague collection of criticisms, in which, when I asked him what I could’ve ideally done differently, he said “I’m not here to give specific edge cases for you to iterate literally off of and am just looking for high level resourcefulness from you”. When he would list specifically delayed features, I would tell him how I did everything in my power, including implementing his advice (which I can prove), only for the infra related reasons to delay it. When I tried to show areas I’ve improved in, he would agree but then re-insist how below the mark I am even though I’m never been sure what a “Meets Expectation” counterpart of me hypothetically looks like all year. His goalpost for me always felt fictional. Now, I feel extremely jaded and demotivated being forced into this job market. I’ve been leetcoding here and there before this review to hedge myself, but I’m struggling to hold onto any confidence in my abilities. Maybe I’ll never find an opportunity as good as this one ever again, and I can’t cope with that. I’m going through the motions, contacting some industry friends, and doing those silly LC problems, but I feel hopeless.

I used to think data engineering was a small specialty of software engineering. I was very mistaken.

I've had a 25 year career as a software engineer and architect. Most of my concerns have revolved around the following things: - Application scalability, availability, and security. - Ensuring that what we were building addressed the business needs without getting lost in the weeds. - UX concerns like ensuring everything functioned on mobile platforms and legacy web browsers. - DevOps stuff: How do we quickly ship code as fast as possible to accelerate product delivery, yet still catch regression defects early and not blow up things? - Mediating organizational conflicts: Product owner wants us to go faster but infosec wants us to go slower, existing customers are complaining about latency due to legacy code but we're also losing new customers because we're losing ground to competitors due to lack of new features. I've been vaguely aware of data engineering for years but never really thought about it. If you had asked me, I probably would have said *"Yeah, those are the guys who keep Power BI fed and running. I'm sure they've probably repurposed DevOps workflows to help with that."* However, recently a trap door opened under me as I've been trying to help deliver a different kind of product. I fell into the world of data engineering and am shocked at how foreign it actually is. Data lineage, feature stores, Pandas vs Polars, Dask, genuinely saturating dozens of cores and needing half a TB of RAM (in the app dev world, hardware is rarely a legit constraint and if it is, we easily horizontally scale), having to figure out what kind of GPU we need and where to optimally use that in the pipeline vs just distributing to a bunch of CPUs, etc. Do we use PCA reduction on these SBERT embeddings or not? Even simple stuff like "what is a 'feature'?" took some time to wrap my head around. *"Dude, it's a column. Why do we need a new word for that?"* Anyhow... I never disrespected data people, I just didn't know enough about the discipline to have an opinion at all. However, I definitely have found a lot of respect for the wizards of this black art. I guess if I had to pass along any advice, it would be that I think that most of my software engineering brethren are equally ignorant about data engineering. When they wander into your lane and start stepping on your toes, try not to get too upset.

Laid off, got an offer, rescinded, couple months later, 3 offers, which one would ya take?

Got laid off from my job, then got an offer, but was rescinded. Was living off unemployment, but now have 3 offers. Which one would ya take? Any advice from people would be helpful. Datadog: NYC - 265k TC - 15k sign on - 280k total TC Coinbase: NYC (remote) - 260k TC - 25k sign on - 285k total TC Meta: NYC - 280k TC - 35k sign on - 315k total TC I have 3 YOE and used all 3 offers to negotiate higher and higher on all, I think I got very lucky and this top band or would like to think.

Data Engineering Job Market - What the Hell Happened?

I might come off as complaining, but it’s been 9 months since I started hunting for a new data engineering position with zero luck. After 7 years of doing DE (working with Oracle BI, self-hosted Spark clusters, and optimizing massive Snowflake and BigQuery warehouses) I’m feeling stuck. For the first time, I’ve made it to the final stages with 8 companies, but unlike before when I’d land multiple offers, I'm totally out of luck. What’s changed? Why are companies acting like jerks? Last week, I had a design review meeting with an athletic clothing company, and the guy grilled me on specific design details that felt like his assigned homework; then he rejected me. I’ve spent days working on over 10 take-home assignments, and some looked like Jira tasks, only to get this: “While your take-home showed solid architectural thinking and familiarity with a wide range of data tools, the team felt you lacked the clarity and technical depth to match in the design review meeting.” Seriously? Last year, I was hiring a senior BI engineer and couldn’t find anyone who could write a left join SQL, and now I’m expected to write a query for complex marketing metrics on the fly and still fall short? Here’s what I’ve noticed: * Take-home assignments often feel like ticket work, not real evaluations. * Teams seem to gatekeep, shutting out anyone new. * There’s a huge gap between job descriptions and technical discussions. e.g., the JD and hiring manager were all about AWS Glue, but the technical questions were focused on managing and optimizing a self-hosted Spark cluster on Kubernetes. * Transferable skills get ignored. I’ve worked with BigQuery, Snowflake, Spark, Apache Beam, MongoDB, Airflow, Databricks, GCP, AWS, and set up Delta Lake in my assignment, but I couldn't recite the technical differences between Apache Iceberg and Delta Lake. Nope, not good enough. I got rejected. Do you guys really know all the technologies? Are you some sort of god or what? I can’t know every tech, but I can master anything new. why won’t they see that anymore? I’m tired of this crap! It’s not fair. No one values transferable skills anymore; they demand an exact match on tech stack, plus a massive time spent on prep work: online exams and technical assignments, only to get a “no” at the end. \----- \[EDIT\] I'm not a victim here; I already have a job with decent pay, 17 years of experience, and I want to switch to a better team with a 10% pay cut because I have a shitty boss. \----- \[EDIT\] Got a job offer after ten months of applying! And for 10% increase in my salary from a hiring manager who fought for me. I’m over the moon. Companies stole my code, got solutions and designs from me and then told me I lacked communication skills or totally ghosted me, disrespected me, and wasted my time and energy. But finally, I’ve got a solid offer from a decent company. It was brutal, but it was possible. To anyone out there still searching: don’t lose hope. Stay calm, be stoic as much as you can, and protect yourself from burnout. This process is a numbers game. It’s tilted and unfair at times, but it’s still winnable..

We released our game with 13,000 wishlists. It made $36,000 gross revenue in the first week!

One and a half year ago we quit our jobs to make indie games full-time. What could go wrong? We want to take this opportunity and share a bit of our experience and learnings. **First some context:** **Game:** Tiny Auto Knights (async PvP auto battler, think Super Auto Pets but with a 3x3 grid) [https://store.steampowered.com/app/3405540/Tiny\_Auto\_Knights/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3405540/Tiny_Auto_Knights/?utm_source=reddit&utm_campaign=postmortem) **Prior experience** **-------------------** We're a team of 3 programmers and have met at our prior employer where we mainly did mobile ports of PC / console titles (*Titan Quest*, *Wreckfest* and *Spongebob: The Cosmic Shake* to name a few). So we're definitely not beginners and have already shipped some games (on mobile). And while the games we worked on had some cool IPs and were cool games in general, we wanted to do our own games and also wanted to do games for PC, as those are the games we play ourselves. We spent the first month or so with the bureaucratic nightmare of founding a company (we're from Germany) and doing a few game jams to find a game concept we want to develop to a full game. As we played quite a bit of Super Auto Pets in our lunch breaks, we had the idea to do something similar and "fix" some of the things we didn't like about the game. This prototype was also our most successful game jam project and so we decided to bring this game to full release. This was around August / September 2024. **Numbers, numbers, numbers** **----------------------------------** **Timeline** Steam page: December 27, 2024 Public playtest: January 17, 2025 Steam demo: May 15, 2025 Full release: November 7, 2025 **Numbers before release** Demo players: \~12,500 Demo playtime: 53min median | 2h59min average Wishlists 1 day before release: \~**12,000** Wishlists when hitting the release button: \~**13,000** **Numbers now (1 week after release)** Wishlists: **18,507** Gross revenue: **$36,887** Units sold: **5,309** Reviews: 118 total | 98 positive | 20 negative | 83% positive Playtime: 1h29min median | 3h48min average **Learnings** **-----------** **Playtests** Give your game to players and let them give you feedback! Use itch, use the Steam playtest feature, use conventions and indie dev meetings. This feedback is super important to make a good game and make course corrections before it's too late. This will also help you to get fans and super-fans. Those are people that love your game so much that they will tell their friends about it. If you have the chance to go to a gaming convention and exhibit your game there, use this. It's probably not worth it for promoting, but it's super useful to watch fresh people play your game and see where they struggle. A must have for a good onboarding/tutorial. It's also a great opportunity to meet other indie devs. **Demo** If you don't have one of those: \- super beautiful graphics \- a proven record of amazing games \- you're famous you won't get a lot of wishlists without people actually playing your demo (or watching an influencer play the demo). We had less than 2,000 WL before releasing the demo and most of them came from the public playtest before. Make a good, polished demo and update it regularly and you're off to a good start. **Festivals** I don't know if it was something specific about our game or the festivals we were in, but we didn't really see a big boost from them. Would still apply for all of them, but don't expect wonders. **Content creators** We contacted over 400 content creators a few weeks before release and gave them a pre-release key. We made a curated, hand picked list of content creators playing similar games or indie games in general. Unfortunately none of the bigger content creators made content on the release day. We got some videos with 1-3k views and had some streamers with less than 200 viewers play the game on release day and a few days afterwards. But a lot of the smaller content creators (less than 500 views/video on YT) made content and they were really happy that we gave them access to the game. We're not really sure why the game wasn't picked up by any bigger content creator (yet). The demo got a video from Olexa (\~35k views) and two videos from German creator Maxim (both videos \~20k views). **Launch discount & bundles** We went for $14.99 and a launch discount of 35% to get back under $10 for the first two weeks. The thinking here is that $10 is an important mental barrier for buying new games. We also reached out to a lot of devs with similar games to make bundles. This worked really well. We managed to get a bundle with Backpack Battles, which helped a lot with sales. But the best part is that we actually stayed in contact with a lot of those devs and are regularly chatting about our current and future projects. You can just reach out to other indie devs and they will often respond and will be happy about it! **So was it worth it?** **---------------------** We found estimates for the first year of revenue to be around \~4x of the first week. With \~$36k gross in the first week, this will bring us to $144k gross in one year. Let's subtract refunds, VAT, Steam's 30%, cost for localization, our Asian publisher's cut, etc and we will have maybe $50-60k. We worked approximately 15 months on this game with 3 full time devs. Dividing the $60k by 45 (15 months \* 3) we would have each earned a salary of \~$1,3k/month. And that's before income taxes, health insurance etc. So as a standalone project it wasn't really worth it. But we see it as the first of many games and a solid start. If you want to earn a lot of money, don't make games. But we want to make games. Please don't hesitate to ask questions, we're open to share our numbers where possible.

Finally got a job after 13 months

**Position:** Fullstack Software Developer, US, 40k/yr (less than half my prev role) On-site in a third-world city Backfill position in a profit-center .Net, jQuery, SVN, on-prem **My stats:** Master of Computer Science (non-thesis) from a R1, 3.6 GPA Bachelor of Computer Science from a different R1, 3.8 GPA 2 YoE Full Stack SWE at a fintech F500 3 paid Resume workshops + STAR interview preps Multiple side projects 1100+ applications ~30 actual first round interviews, ~20 ghosted 25 second round interviews 8 third round 6 fourth round 5 sixth round 2 seventh round 1 eighth round -> 3 verbal offers, two of which were rescinded due to "lack of funding". Third was the offer above which I took. I am just so happy the search was over. I was considering going back to school a third time to do medical instead. Good luck out there boys.

Nobody is hiring but yet all I see are SWE job postings

Hey everyone, So I’ve been hearing the same thing over and over again: “No one is hiring,” “The job market is dry,” “Even juniors with experience are getting ghosted.” But then I go on job boards, LinkedIn, or even clearances-focused sites, and all I see are software engineering roles — many of them remote or requiring a security clearance. It’s making me wonder: Are companies just posting jobs without actually hiring? Or are they hiring, but just being extremely selective and slow about it? I’m asking because I’m literally just starting my journey into software engineering and will most likely have 4 YOE by the time I even graduate. So while this may not impact me right now, I’m trying to understand the landscape and where the demand actually exists. For those actively applying or on the hiring side — what’s the real deal in the market right now? Appreciate the insight.

Stay at Google or jump to n+1 at Meta?

Im currently a junior swe at Google with 2 yoe. Current recurring TC is ~220. I have a swe-2 offer from Meta for around 340k, 370 if counting signing bonus. I know this seems like a braindead question, but considering that I currently only work around 30 hours a week and have a great manager, is the higher comp worth the risk? The new team is not in ads or monetization, so wlb shouldn’t be completely horrible, but the engineer I talked to on the team told me to expect working around 45-50 hours a week.

It is possible to remain an IC into old age?

I'm probably older than most people here - I'm 40. I'm a staff level engineer at a mediocre company. I am making out okay. 200k tc in lcol geo When I look at the long term trajectory for my career - I am honestly not sure if it is possible to stay gainfully employed as an individual contributor into my late 50s and up until retirement age of 65. I see very few to no people of that age still working as engineers. It seems borderline impossible to keep up with the rapidly changing skillsets required for software development as you get into late ages and your brain slows down. (I think my brain is already slowing down) I do see many managers and directors in that age range. But few to no ICs. I'm trying to figure out if it is necessary for me to transition into management or some other aspect of technology to sustain the next stages of my career.

I am a DE who is happy and likes their work. AMA

In contrast to the vast number of posts which are basically either: * Announcing they are quitting * Complaining they can't get a job * Complaining they can't do their current job * "I heard DE is dead. Source: me. Zero years experience in DE or any job for that matter. 25 years experience in TikTok. I am 21 years old" * Needing projects * Begging for "tips" how to pass the forbidden word which rhymes with schminterview (this one always gets a chuckle) * Also begging for "tips" on how to do their job (I put tips in inverted commas because what they want is a full blown solution to something they can't do) * AI generated posts (whilst I largely think the mods do a great job, the number of blatant AI posts in here is painful to read) I thought a nice change of pace was required. So here it is - I'm a DE who is happy and is actually writing this post using my own brain. About me: I am self taught and have been a DE for just under 5 years ([proof](https://www.reddit.com/r/learnpython/comments/lmi2lg/from_a_beginner_to_beginners_from_printhello/)). Spend most of my time doing quite interesting (to me) work where I have a data focussed, technical role building a data platform. I earn a decent amount of money with which I'm happy with. My work conditions are decent with an understanding and supportive manager. Have to work weekends? Here's some very generous overtime. Requested time off? No problem - go and enjoy your holiday and see you when you back with no questions asked. They treat me like a person, I turn up every day and put in the extra work when they need me to. Don't get me wrong, I'm the most cynical person ever although my last two managers have changed my mind completely. I dictate my own workload and have loads of freedom. If something needs fixing, I will go ahead and fix it. Opinions during technical discussions are always considered and rarely swatted away. I get a lot of self satisfaction from turning out work and am a healthy mix of proud (when something is well built and works) and not so proud (something which really shouldn't exist but has to). My job security is higher than most because I don't work in the US or in a high risk industry which means slightly less money although a lot less stress. Regularly get approached for new opportunities of both contract and FTE although have no plans on leaving any time soon because I like my current everything. Yes, more money would be nice although the amount of "arsehole pay" I would need to cope working with, well, potential arseholes is quite high at the moment. Before I get asked any predictable questions, some observations: * Most, if not all, people who have worked in IT and have never done another job are genuinely spoilt. Much higher salaries, flexibility, and number of opportunities than most fields along with a lower barrier to entry, infinite learning resources, and possibility of building whatever you want from home with almost no restrictions. My previous job required 4 years of education to get an actual entry level position, which is on-site only, and I was extremely lucky to have not needed a PhD. I got my first job in DE with £40-60 of courses and a used, crusty Dell Optiplex from Ebay. The "bad job market" everybody is experiencing is probably better than most jobs best job market. * If you are using AI to fucking write REDDIT POSTS then you don't have imposter syndrome because you're a literal imposter. If you don't even have the confidence to use your own words on a social media platform, then you should use this as an opportunity because arranging your thoughts or developing your communication style is something you clearly need practice with. AI is making you worse to the point you are literally deferring what words you want to use to a computer. Let that sink in for a sec how idiotic this is. Yes, I am shaming you. * If you can't get a job and are instead reading this post, then seriously get off the internet and stick some time into getting better. You don't need more courses. You don't need guidance. You don't need a fucking mentor. You need discipline, motivation, and drive. Real talk: if you find yourself giving up there are two choices. You either take a break and find it within you to keep going or you can just do something else. * If you want to keep going: then keep going. Somebody doing 10 hours a week and are "talented" will get outworked by the person doing 60+ hours a week who is "average". Time in the seat is a very important thing and there are no shortcuts for time spent learning. The more time you spend learning new things and improving, the quicker you'll reach your goal. What might take somebody 12 months might take you 6. What might take you 6 somebody might learn in 3. Ignore everybody else's journey and focus on yours. * If you want to stop: there's no shame in realising DE isn't for you. There's no shame in realising ANY career isn't for you. We're all good at something, friends. Life doesn't always have to be a struggle. AMA EDIT: Jesus, already seeing AI replies. If I suspect you are replying with an AI, you're giving me the permission to roast the fuck out of you.

What to do about a dead weight on the team?

We were hired about the same time; she was hired as a Senior with 7 YOE from household F500 companies with an impressive resume. We were originally on different projects, but 6 months after hiring, we were brought to the same team, under another developer for a project that is due this month. Since then, her only contribution has been to run stand-ups; basically scheduling weekly meetings and asking people what they do in the meetings. Worse still, she regularly misses those stand-ups, locking people out of meetings, and only to comes up with pathetic excuses like "plumber at my door" or "sorry I lost track of time" (she is fully WFH). Her technical expertise is a puddle, even for things she supposedly has years of experience in. For instance, not knowing how to use modern python dependencies manager (poetry/pdm/uv), or not being able to use Typescript for frontend development. Her PR reviews are outright atrocious: she commented that we shouldn't be committing .gitignore. I can't even say a positive thing about her work ethic either. She would take several weeks to fix a simple PR and generally do everything to avoid having to work. Image files too large to put on cloud? It's a blockage for this week. Upsampling the image to make it smaller? Nah she will just try again till the connection times out and report as a problem... When she was hired, she was supposed to be the most senior and our team lead. When the lead for our project resigned, I became the team lead since she was "not familiar with our code" enough, despite the project being developed from the ground up, when she and I joined the team. I assigned her a ticket in January, which is a simple "serialise the data to a suitable format" involving calling the equivalence of \`df.to\_csv\`. That ticket has yet to be completed. At first, I was not too unhappy, coming from a shittier workplace with a much worse pay. However, now that the deadline for the project is approaching, I am feeling much jaded from the whole experience. Basically 99% of the contribution comes from me: code design, implementation, CI/CD, testing, documentation, deployment. Her employment has been near 18 months and she has not written more than 100 lines of code. She is also fully WFH with at least 20% higher salary. Should I oust her to our director, or should I just look for another job?

The 42 Immutable Laws of Gamedev by Paul Kilduff-Taylor. Which ones hit home, and which ones you disagree with?

I was listening to the last episode of **The Business of Videogames** podcast by Shams Jorjani and Fernando Rizo (this is literally the best podcast for indies that nobody seems to know about), and they had **Paul Kilduff-Taylor** as a guest, the founder of Mode 7 who has been into gamedev for more than 20 years. On the podcast, he talked about [an article he wrote a while ago](https://modecollapse.substack.com/p/42-essential-game-dev-tips-that-are) where he laid out 42 tips on gamedev (title of the article is: *42 Essential Game Dev Tips That Are Immutably Correct and Must Never Be Disputed by Anyone Ever At Any Time!*). During the podcast, he is pressed on some of the tips (e.g. the one on no genre is ever dead) and goes into more depth on why he thinks that way. Here are the 42 tips he wrote. Which ones hit home for you, and which ones you strongly disagree with? 1. Use source control or at least make regular backups 2. Your game is *likely* both too boring and too shallow 3. Your pitch should include a budget 4. Your budget should be justifiable using **non-outlier** comparators 5. A stupid idea that would make your friends laugh is often a great concept 6. Criticise a game you hate by making a good version of it 7. Changing a core mechanic usually means that you need a new ground-up design 8. Design documents are only bad because most people write them badly 9. Make the smallest viable prototype in each iteration 10. Players need an objective even if they are looking to be distracted from it 11. No genre is ever dead or oversaturated 12. Games in difficult categories need to be doing something truly exceptional 13. Learn the history of games 14. Forget the history of games! Unpredictable novelty arises every year 15. Great games have been made by both amazing and terrible coders 16. Be as messy as you want to get your game design locked… 17. …*then* think about readability, performance, extensibility, modularity, portability… 18. Procedural generation is a stylistic choice not a cost-reduction methodology 19. Depth is almost always more important than UX 20. Plan for exit even if you plan to never exit 21. Your opinion of DLC is likely not based on data 22. There’s no point owning your IP unless you use it, license it or sell your company 23. PR will always matter but most devs don't understand what PR is 24. People want to hear about even the most mundane parts of your dev process 25. Be grateful when you win awards and gracious (or silent) when you don't 26. Announce your game and launch your Steam page simultaneously 27. Get your Steam tags right 28. Make sure your announcement trailer *destroys* its intended audience 29. Excite, intrigue, inspire with possibilities 30. Your announcement is an invitation to your game’s community 31. Make “be respectful” a community rule and enforce it vigorously 32. Celebrate great community members 33. Post updates *at minimum* once per month 34. Community trust is established by correctly calling your shots 35. Find an accountant who understands games 36. Understand salaries, dividends and pension contributions fully 37. Find a lawyer you can trust with anything 38. Read contracts as if the identity of the counterparty was unknown to you 39. A publisher without a defined advantage is just expensive money 40. Just because you had a bad publisher once doesn’t mean all publishers are bad 41. “Get publisher money” is hustling. “Make a profitable game” is a real ambition 42. Keep trying - be specific, optimistic and generous

Escaping Legacy Tech: Landed 2 AI Offers After 8 Months of Prep (250k+ TC)

For the past 9 years, I’ve been stuck in legacy tech. I built niche monolithic apps with no exposure to distributed systems or system design. Time flew by, and I got pigeonholed in outdated “dinosaur” companies. Trying to leave my job was incredibly demoralizing. Thousands of job applications and a painfully low callback rate. I was discouraged by this and even more, by my background and lack of modern systems experience. I really felt like I was stuck at a dead end. I posted here asking how long it takes to prep for system design interviews from 0.  Many replies were disheartening, like “you need real on-the-job experience.” But it turns out…you don’t—at least not to pass interviews.  Here’s what I did while working full-time: LeetCode (6 months): Focused on the top 150 problems, revisiting and practicing each one 4-5 times. (I failed many, many interviews along the way). System Design (1.5 months): Started from almost zero and crammed, studying about 15 systems deeply, mainly through videos and practice. Applications: Sent out over a thousand applications with very low callback. Landed interviews mostly through headhunters. Interviews (6 months): Juggled my full-time job while going through processes with 45 companies (failing most of them early on). It was brutal: endless rejections, self-doubt, and burnout. But I just landed 2 solid offers in AI (around 250k+ TC). If you’re in a similar rut, know that it is absolutely doable with consistent effort. You can break free even without the “right” background. AMA if you have questions!

Anyone else just content with where they are?

I’ve been developing software professionally for 20 years. I’ve done startups, retail, small companies, large companies, the whole spread. I’ve been with the same company for about 5 years and am currently a Lead. The job pays well (Midwest salary), the benefits are insanely good, work-life balance is great, I get a dependable bonus, and love working with the team on modernizing a decades-old monolith to browser-based tech. It’s a great mix of architecture-esque planning work, interactions with business, and coding. For years I’ve had managers trying to push me into management. I’m not wholly against this except for the fact that nearly every company I’ve worked for has turned management over every few years. Being on the delivery side at least has the illusion of stability. Since I had a kid almost 7 years ago stability has taken on elevated importance. Can’t hop around startups any more. All that said, I just like where I’m at. I like still having a foot in the weeds and problem solving. Keeps me sharp. It feels like IT is always in this state of wanting more. Anyone else content and just wanting everyone else to chill sometimes?

Stay at Google vs Meta NYC

Currently L4 at G with ~3 YOE 300k TC. Got an offer at Meta NYC: Base: 193k Rsu: 450k Bonus: 29k TC: 335k + 35k signing I really want to go to NYC but wondering if I should just stay at G and look to internally transfer instead. Reading a lot of the negative discussion around Meta is giving me cold feet especially since the TC increase is minimal. The team at Meta more aligns with my interests and where I want to take my career in the future though. Plus, my org at google is currently offering voluntary layoffs, so I could potentially take that and get a nice severance before moving to Meta. That plus the free relocation offered by Meta makes this move financially more appealing.

4-Day work week trial period. Is this industry standard?

Hi Devs, So I work a a large tech company probably biggest in my country . They recently announced a volunteer trial 4-day work week program. However the details of it seem bizarre to me and I am wonder if this is how other places have implemented the policy too. So the basis is 4 days a week any monday thursday or friday can be taken off. The expectation is you'll work 32 hrs a week, but be as productive with the expectation that you will also become more productive (which makes sense, this is the whole point of these programs) However, you will lose also 20% of your salary and time off accrual for sick, vacation and personal days. The trial is 1 year so once you start youre also stuck for the year. So to me this seems like they want more work done in less time for less pay??? Am I crazy or does this not defeat the entire purpose of implementing this policy? Its supposed to provide better balance and mental health, but this seem so counterinitiative. Would love to hear from other devs who have had a chance in a 4-day work week environment, how did your org implement it? Did it stay? Did it work for you?

How the heck are indie developers, especially one-man-crews, supposed to make any money from their games?

I mean, there are plenty of games on the market - way more than there is a demand for, I'd believe - and many of them are free. And if a game is not free, one can get it for free by pirating (I don't support piracy, but it's a reality). But if a game copy manages to get sold after all, it's sold for 5 or 10 bucks - which is nothing when taking in account that at least few months of full-time work was put into development. On top of that, half of the revenue gets eaten by platform (Steam) and taxes, so at the end indies get a mcdonalds salary - if they're lucky. So I wonder, how the heck are indie developers, especially one-man-crews, supposed to make any money from their games? How do they survive?Indie game dev business sounds more like a lottery with a bad financial reward to me, rather than a sustainable business.

Make something small. Please. Your (future) career damn near depends on it.

I see so many folks want to make these grand things. Whether that is for a portfolio piece or an actual game. So this is my 2 cents as someone who has been in multiple AAA interviews for candidates that range from juniors to Directors. Motivation always dies out after the first couple months in this industry. It's fun, flashy, cool, etc. at first but then it's a burden and "too hard" or "over scoped" when you are really neck deep in the shits. I really think it's killing folks chances at 1. Launching something and 2. Getting their foot into the industry. Trying to build something with complex systems, crazy graphics and genre defining gameplay is only going to make you depressed in a few short months. Now you feel like you wasted months and getting imposter syndrome from folks talking about stuff on Linkedin. Instead, take your time and build something small and launch it. Something that can be beat in a hour, maybe 2. Get feedback or simply just look at what you made and grow off that. 9/10 you know exactly where the pain points are. Reiterate on the design again, and again, and again until you are ACTIVELY learning from it. Finish something small, work on a beautiful corner. You can learn so much by simply just finishing. That's the key. You can have the most incredibly worded resume but that portfolio is and will forever be king. I need to know I can trust you when shit is HOT in the kitchen to get the work done. We are all under the gun, as you can see looking at the window at the industry. Of course there are the special game dev god chosen ones who we all know about but you should go into this industry thinking it "could" happen to you. Not that it "will". Start small, learn, create, fail and do it again. You got this. Don't take yourself out before you even begin.

Senior HFT/Quant Trading Engineer with 10+ YoE: Job Search Experience and Sankey in Late 2025

Sankey: https://i.imgur.com/0zOk1wv.png Wanted to add a data point of my experience applying in late 2025 as a Senior with a well-defined domain expertise in quantitative and low latency trading. I was laid off ~1.5 months ago from my previous firm and worked with a specialized headhunter who focuses on placing prop trading SW and FPGA engineers. I didn't personally submit any applications—everything was handled by my HH. We applied to eight firms/quant funds in a targeted fashion. My HH's relationship with certain firms allowed me to bypass a few bureaucratic HR stages and get in front of hiring managers immediately. This was my first time on the market as a Senior and my interview experience mostly aligned with how I chose to prepare. The mix of questions I encountered was roughly 9:1 domain-specific C++ to LeetCode-style DSA. There were a bunch of questions on deep C++ features, trading-specific minutiae (exchange protocols, executing a low latency strategy on a particular exchange), lock-free algo knowledge, etc. Ironically, the rounds that tripped me up the most _were_ LeetCode-style questions, so I regret not doing more than the 10-15 questions I practiced but overall my preparation was accurate. I withdrew from the interview process at three firms since I received a solid offer from a firm I liked (on a desk/team I liked as well). I anticipate I would've gotten another 1-2 offers had I seen those through to the end but I was satisfied. * Timeline from start of search to offer: 1 month * TC: ~$500K * Location: Chicago * Preparation: 10-15 LeetCode questions and implementing dozens of lock-free/high-performance data structures in C++. Reading a few intermediate to advanced C++ books to refresh (think Nicolai Josuttis, et al.). Playing around with some language features in the newer standards (C++23/26).

My Very First Game Development Job (1999)

Hi I'm one of the creators of Call of Duty, A distinction held by only 27 people, This story is about how I landed my very first Game development job: I never knew in a million years that I would get to become a game developer. I didn't see it back then. There were ingredients that came together almost miraculously to jar me into action. I was a kid working on something like my 3rd or 4th year of Burger King, I worked hard to afford myself a Gaming PC, one equipped with 3dfx graphics, Celeron 300a (I think mine overclocked all the way to 450!), and a good-sized monitor (19Inch Beast of a CRT) that I would lug to a local LAN party club. I was pretty good at working software. I gravitated towards programming and CAD/CAM classes in high school. The curriculum was generally too easy. In a Basic programming class, I did my own thing and created a program that would bounce lines like the screensavers of that time would. In another class I created animations using HyperCard transitions and entertained the whole class. An AutoCAD teacher gave a File cabinet of work to do at your own pace. I finished the work in 2 weeks and used that class as my sleep class. (stayed up too late playing Quake). I nearly failed this class, the teacher wanted me to reach higher “You should be designing Rocket Ships, not sleeping”. He allowed me to pass on the condition that I helped him draw up a plan for his friend at my Lunch Hour. I was strained on my credits, so this was critical for me to pass high school! The circumstance of my low credits in high school was that I missed a year for bereavement so I couldn’t afford any missed credits. It was truly a difficult time. Another teacher teaching CAM (Computer Aided Manufacturing?) did the same, working through all the curriculum in a short amount of time. Having nothing left to do, the question came up, What Do you want to do? There was a small opportunity there to leave my Kush job at Burger King to work at a Computer Case building plant drawing plans, but I did not get the job. At my LAN party, a friend had a surprise announcement. HE was doing LEVEL DESIGN Remotely for a company in the UK. He showed me his Unreal demo that he used to apply for the contract, it was a pretty basic challenge to which I don't remember much of the details but surely, I could create a one room area and apply for myself. I had an answer to the question my CAM Teacher had asked me. This teacher heard my plan and allowed me to lug my own Personal Computer into the classroom to try and learn how to create Unreal Levels so that I could apply myself to this job. I was working right out of Highschool after I submitted my own demo. A lush organic Cave that had water in it, and mosquito’s buzzing around. A button down beneath the water opened the door above inside the cave to allow you to escape. The contract I was on was paid per-level and the game was to be Unreal on the PSX. That’s PlayStation 1! I was zipping through “stages” and getting paid. How awesome! Unreal back then, was all about CSG operations. There were a handful of primitive shapes you could use to carve out the world. Wanting more organic terrain with the limited number of polygons we had to work with I came up with a tricky method of creating terrain that didn’t just look like skewed boxes and primitive shapes carved out (this would rapidly increase the polycount). I could the technique the “Blob Method”, this involved taking a 3-sided pyramid (all triangles) and duplicating it until I had a cube made of triangles, from there I would duplicate the cube and union it so I could get more triangles, then each vertex would be pushed out to create organic terrain. This madness would persist throughout my career as a Level Designer. I did things that nobody in their right mind would do. Maybe I’ll talk more about that in future story time. The project was ultimately cancelled, while disappointing it gave me a ton of real-world experience. Recently I was approached about this for a “revival project”, It amazes me how passionate fans of these games can be.

Finally Got a Job Offer

Hi All After 1-2 month of several application, I finally managed to get an offer from a good company which can take my career at a next level. Here are my stats: Total Applications : 100+ Rejection : 70+ Recruiter Call : 15+ Offer : 1 I would have managed to get fee more offers but I wasn’t motivated enough and I was happy with the offer from the company. Here are my takes: 1) ChatGpt : Asked GPT to write a CV summary based on job description 2) Job Analytics Chrome Extension: Used to include keywords in the CV and make them white text at the bottom. 3) Keep applying until you get an offer not until you had a good inter view. 4) If you did well in the inter view, you will hear back within 3-4 days. Otherwise, companies are just benching you or don’t care. I used to chase on 4th day for a response, if I don’t hear back, I never chased. 5) Speed : Apply to jobs posted within a week and move faster in the process. Candidates who move fast have high chances to get job. Remember, if someone takes inter view before you and are a good fit, they will get the job doesn’t matter how good you are . 6) Just learn new tools and did some projects, and you are good to go with that technology. Best of Luck to Everyone!!!!

Some of you aren't writing tests. Start writing tests.

[This came to my attention in this post.](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataengineering/comments/1k1pl3y/a_databricks_project_a_tight_deadline_and_a_pip/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) One of \*the big things\* that separates a data analyst from a data engineer, imo, is whether or not you're capable of testing your code. There's a lot of learners around here right now so I'm going to write this for your benefit. I hope it helps! # Caveat I am not a data engineer. I am a PM for data systems, was a data analyst in my previous life, and have worked with some very good senior contributors and architects. I've learned a lot from them and owe a lot of my career success to their lessons. I am going to try to pass on the little that I know. If you know better than I do, pop into the comments below and feel free to yell at me. Also, testing is a wide, varied field, this is a brief synopsis, definitely do more reading on your own. # When do I need to test my code? Data transformations happen in a lot of different ways. When you work with small data, you might write an excel macro, or a quick little script for manipulation. Not writing tests for these is largely fine, especially when it's something **you** do just for **your** work. Coding in isolation can benefit from tests, but it's not the primary concern. You really need to start thinking about writing tests when two things happen: 1. People that are not you start touching your code 2. The code you write becomes part of a complex system The exception to these two rules is when you're creating portfolio projects. You should write tests for these, because they make you look smart to your interviewers. # Why do I need to test my code? Tests take **implicit** knowledge & context about the purpose of your code / what it does and makes that knowledge **explicit**. This is required to help other people start using the code that you write - if they're new to it, the tests help them understand the purpose of each function and give them guard rails as they make changes. When your code becomes incorporated into a larger system, this is particularly true - it's more likely you'll have multiple folks working with you, and other things that are happening elsewhere in the system might necessitate making changes to your code. # What types of tests are there? I can name at least 4 different types of tests off the dome. There are more but I'm typing extemporaneously and not for clout, so you get what's in my memory: * Unit tests - these test small, discrete parts of your code. * Example: in your pipeline, you write a small function that lowercases names and strips certain characters. You need this to work in a predictable manner, so you write a unit test for it. * Integration tests - these test the boundaries between different functions to make sure the output of one feeds the input of the other correctly. * Example: in your pipeline, one function extracts the data from an API, and another takes that extracted data and does a transform. An integration test would examine whether the output of the first function results is correct for the second. * End-to-end tests - these test whether, given a correct input, the whole of your code produces the correct output. These are hard, but the more of these you can do, the better off you'll be. * Example: you have a pipeline that reads data from an API and inserts it into your database. You mock out a fake input and run your whole pipeline against it, then verify that the expected output is in the database. * Data validation tests - these test whether the data you're being passed, or the data that's landing in a given system, are of the expected shape and type. * Example: your pipeline expects a json blob that has strings in it. Data validation tests would ensure that, once extracted or placed in a holding area, the data is both a json blob with the correct keys and the data types for those keys are all strings # How do I write tests? This is already getting longer than I have patience for, it's Friday at 4pm, so again, you're going to get some crib notes. Whatever language you're using should have some kind of built-in testing capability. SQL does not, unfortunately - it's why you tend to wrap SQL in a different programming language like Python. If you only have SQL, some of what I write below won't apply - you're most likely only doing end-to-end or data validation testing. Start by writing functional tests. For each function in your code, write at least one positive case (where it gets the correct input) and one negative case (where it's given a bad input that might break it). Try to anticipate ways in which your functions might fail. Encode those into your test cases. If you encounter new and exciting ways in which your code breaks as you work, write more tests for those cases. Your development process should become an endless litany of writing code, then writing tests, then testing, then breaking, then writing more tests, then writing more code, and so on in an endless loop. Once you've got a whole pipeline running, write integration tests for the handoffs between your functions. Same thing applies as above. You might need to do some mocking - look that up. End-to-end tests - you might need more complex testing techniques for this, or frameworks. If you have a webapp over your data, you can try something like Selenium. Otherwise, not my forte, consult your seniors. You might also need to set up a test environment with some test data. It's expensive time-wise, but this is why we write infrastructure as code (learn that also, if you can). Data validation tests - if you're writing in SQL, use DBT. If you're writing in Python, use Great Expectations. If you're writing in something else, I can't help you, not my forte, consult your seniors. Happy Friday folks, hope this helped! Tagging u/Recent-Luck-6238, u/FloLeicester, and u/givnv since you all asked!

What in the God's name have I been making for 12 f-ing years?

Yesterday I published a [half-joking post](https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1ogyb7b/dear_soloindie_game_developers_would_you_be_so/) on this subreddit, and it got some traction. However, the comment that received even more upvotes than the post itself was this: *"12 years on a mobile game? What are you making?"* There were quite a few others, like the one I created my title from: *"What in God's name have you been making for 12 f\*cking years?"*, or another one: *"If you've developed a mobile game for 12 years, it's probably going to be bad"*. So, I decided to actually answer the question and share the story of my game - especially since such long-term projects are pretty unusual these days, and most solo/indie developers seem to focus on shorter development cycles. And you can decide how bad the game turned out to be. I'll try to answer all the main questions: * What game am I making? * Why has it taken so long? * Why do I keep working on it? * How much money has it earned so far? and even * How do I promote my game? # TL;DR I started making an idle/incremental game **back in 2013** and released it as a Flash game on Kongregate **in 2016**. It turned out to be quite successful, got a lot of traction and **earned a decent profit** from in-app purchases over the next four years, while I focused completely on fixing bugs, adding features, and creating more and more content. **In 2020**, when Flash technology died, I decided to port the game to Unity and publish it on mobile. **In May of this year (2025)**, I finally released it on Google Play. Currently I'm still working on it (and probably will keep doing so). # Wrong assumption One wrong assumption that commenters are probably making is that when I say I've been working on the game for 12 years, it means the game is still not released. That's not true! The first version of the game was released back in 2016, 3 years after I started developing it. I mean, it's still a pretty long development cycle, just not 12-years long, right? # What game am I making? At the end of 2013, I stumbled upon **Cookie Clicker** \- an idle/incremental game that had just been released at the time - and I completely fell in love with the concept. However, as a game developer, I instantly found hundreds of aspects that could be added or improved to make the game even better. I guess many people here know exactly what I'm talking about. So, I got to work right away. And that's how my own idle/incremental game was born. I called it **Get a Little Gold**, because instead of baking cookies, players collect gold by clicking on a stone in the middle of the screen. At that time, idle games were almost non-existent. Name any popular title in this genre, and I'm 100% sure it was released after I started working on mine. *Clicker Heroes, NGU Idle, Antimatter Dimensions, Trimps*, even *Adventure Capitalist* \- all of these came out after 2013. So **Get a Little Gold** was one of the pioneers of its genre, and many concepts that are now widely used were first introduced in my game. For example, challenges and multiple layers of prestige. # Why did it take so long? Despite looking simple on the surface, the game is actually quite deep and packed with content that gradually reveals itself as players progress, prestige, and unlock new layers, modes and upgrades. In its current state, it will likely take you 3-4 months just to reach the late midgame and unlock all the main modes. Moreover, in 2014 (a year after I started working on the game) my daughter was born. That made me absolutely happy, but it also affected my productivity not in the best way. Unsurprisingly, it took me **3 full years** to create and balance the first version of the game before finally publishing it on Kongregate. Players on Kongregate seemed to really enjoy the game, and that motivated me to keep improving it and adding more content like new challenges, modes, and unlocks. So I kept working on it for the **next 4 years**, releasing about **40 major updates** (almost one per month!). Until, in 2020, Flash Player was discontinued (stopped working in browsers), and I ended up with a popular and loved game that couldn't be played anymore. That's why I decided to port my game to Unity and bring it to mobile devices. Honestly, I always thought idle games were a perfect fit for mobile, but I'd never had the chance to make one. The end of Flash felt like a sign that it was finally time. However, to do that, I first had to learn Unity and C#, since I'd only ever worked with Flash and its ActionScript 3 programming language before. It took me **about a year to learn Unity and another one to rewrite nearly half of the game**, when russia invaded my country and launched missiles on my hometown. The war terminated development for a full year. During that time, I created another short project about the russian invasion - but that's another story. I returned to working on **Get a Little Gold** in mid-2023 and kept developing it until, finally, in **May 2025**, I finished the port and released it on Google Play. # Why do I keep working on it? **Get a Little Gold** is my most successful project so far. Before that, I had made a few smaller games, but none of them ever reached the numbers that Get a Little Gold did. Not only did it gather **over 2 million plays on Kongregate** and become one of the most played idle games on the portal, but it also started generating a pretty decent income through in-app purchases. I'll get back to the actual numbers a bit later. That's why I decided to invest even more time into porting the game and releasing it on mobile devices. The game also managed to build an **incredibly friendly and dedicated community on Discord**. These people have been waiting and supporting me throughout the entire process of porting the game. Honestly, I don't think I would have been able to finish the game without their support. Right now, I'm working on the iOS version of Get a Little Gold, which will hopefully be released in 2026. And as long as people keep playing, I plan to keep updating the game and adding new content. # What about money? During the 4 years when the game was active on Kongregate, it earned **almost $105,000** (around 90% from in-app purchases and the remaining 10% from ads). I know that's not much (especially since it was further reduced by Kongregate's commission and taxes), but my monthly "salary" still ended up being considerably higher than the average salary in Ukraine at that time. At the same time, I'm fully aware that in many Western countries it would be impossible to live on that income. After releasing the game on Google Play, it now earns **a little over $1,000 per month** on average, and I'm doing my best to keep improving it and hopefully increase that number. I also hope that releasing the game on iOS will help boost the revenue. # What have I done to promote the game? First of all, my main source of promotion has been players who loved the original Kongregate version. They helped me test the mobile version and became its first players. Additionally, a little over 2 years ago I created **a YouTube channel** where I share my development journey and post devlogs. For example, here's a video where I tell the full story of the game in detail: [How I solo created the game that earned more than $100K](https://youtu.be/xUVbQG4_pe0) Finally, since I don't have any budget to spend on ads, the only other promotion I've done is a couple of Reddit posts. Genre-specific subreddits like r/incremental_games can be a great way to showcase your game and attract some players. Also, as a solo game developer with 15 years of experience, I'm fully aware that developers rarely play other developers' games. So, speaking about reddit posts, believe it or not, the one you are reading right now wasn't made to promote my game, but rather to share my somewhat unusual experience, which I hope might be useful to some of you. With that said, if anyone decides to give my game a try, I'd really appreciate your thoughts: [Get a Little Gold on Google Play](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.TheGamestStudio.GetaLittleGold) This was a long post, and I tried to cover everything, but if you still have any questions, feel free to ask them in the comments. And thank you for reading all the way to the end!

There is something broken in the hiring process.

We had a Senior SWE req open for a few weeks through a third party hiring agency (not my choice, I don't like hiring agencies) and the best we could find was some guy at the end of his career with a spotty employment history (lots of employment gaps, lots of short stays) over the past decade. We got tons of AI generated and fake applicants. We are just looking for a generalist C/Python/Go/Microservices role and are willing to teach people on the job as long as they have good problem solving / debugging skills. We are also in what I'd consider a desirable sector (Cybersecurity). The problem is that we've consistently had hiring related issues, and basically all hires since I've started have ended up being bombs to the point where we've had to hire foreign contractors to fill positions. This has been over 5+ years of me working at my current company. With the amount of people complaining that they cannot find jobs, especially new grads, why are we having such challenges finding hires? We provide a competitive base salary (near the bottom of our region's range but still competitive), benefits (standard benefits package) and competitive TC which is driven entirely by RSUs. On top of this we are 100% Remote with anything in office being handled by 5 people who live local (includes myself). We are posting to LinkedIn and have a strong LinkedIn presence. The job postings are posted by our company and not the hiring agency. The listing passes my filter for "I'd apply for this". The only thing I can think of is that we are not "Big Tech". I work at a small company (<50 employees). Is this hurting access to the job pool? Are our recruiters being too restrictive in filtering? Are AI-driven applicants stealing spots non-AI driven applicants would be normally populating? Do you have any experience with this? It's driving me insane.

Mid Level Engineer's Job Hunt Experience

After all the doom and gloom of the market I wanted to post my experience. Especially since I am younger in my career (4 years) in comparison to many here who are job hunting. I recently went through the whole shebang and wanted to shed some light for those who are definitely not a junior but may not be a senior yet. TLDR: I started searching in late July. Sent out about \~80 applications until mid August which is when the interviews started to kick in. Out of those 80 I had 5 callbacks (i.e. actual chances to interview). I went through the interview process with 4 out of 5 companies and received 4 offers. The offer I accepted was a significant pay increase both base salary wise and especially total compensation. Okay so the details **Why'd I start searching?** I started searching because I reached a tipping point in frustration at my previous role mainly due to my apathetic coworkers, blame-oriented management, and because of where I am in life outside of work. What I mean by that last part, is that I am young and have no big responsibilities, which allows me to take the risk of making a large jump in my career and even going somewhere to "grind". I also recognized that I was starting to stagnate in most facets of an engineering career such as pay, technical expertise, and breadth of knowledge. I very clearly defined what I **needed** and **wanted** in my next job, those being: * **needed** to be in a different industry * **needed** to make at least the same total compensation * **needed** the new team to pass the "vibe check" * **needed** the job to not be through a contracting agency * **wanted** to have a different tech stack * **wanted** to be in the same city I was or a specific other city * **wanted** to be closer to hardware instead of pure software * **wanted** to make more than current total compensation NOTE: *One thing that is not a* ***need*** *or* ***want*** *for me here that is different than many other people is WLB. This just isn't super important to me at this point in my life and I am hungry to grow.* **How did I apply?** With this and an updated resume I set off on my job hunt. I won't go too into details about my resume simply because I don't have an anonymized version. I don't really think my resume was the biggest differentiator here. However, it was parse-able for ATS systems and contained a ton of "key word" technologies like Kafka, AWS, React, Springboot, Kubernetes, etc. I had a pretty simple routine. I'd go grab a coffee and some breakfast in the wait room or a private area. Then I'd spend the first \~45min-1hr of every work day applying or preparing/studying. Leetcode and practicing my behaviorals was how I studied in the beginning but once I was comfortable with any easy level problems I kind of just stopped leetcoding. IMO, there's heavy diminishing returns with leetcode very quickly. For applying, I first created a list of companies I was fairly confident hit my **needs** and **wants** and scoured their careers pages. After that, it was just straight LinkedIn jobs. Of the 4 interviews I went through 3 of them came from Linkedin and 1 came from direct careers page. As far as applying I sought after anything that hit my **needs** that was recently posted (last week?). I very quickly ran out of recently posted jobs that hit my needs which is when I set my goal of 5 applications every workday. So like the first 30 minutes of this routine would be applying, then the latter half would be searching for postings for the next day. Near the end of my 80 applications I was really struggling to find jobs that were worth applying to and called it quits, then I started getting interviews. **Interviewing** Out of the 80 applications I got 5 different companies wanting to interview which really surprised me after hearing how bad the market was. I really think this came down my tech stack, my location, my willingness to go in office, the fact I am "cheap" to hire compared to seniors, my pickiness of where I applied, and just dumb luck. The 1 company I declined to interview with was simple, they didn't meet by **need** to make at least the same total compensation. I also already had other interviews lined up and did not have the bandwidth to prepare for another even if I was just gonna use it as practice. So for the 4 I had I started studying fairly hard. Some light leetcode, working on THREE different personal projects, behavioral, and company research. Once I finished my first interview and bombed my first ever system design portion that was then added on as well. Out of this preparation I think studying the companies and really honing in on my behavioral helped the most. There's a base level of competency expected via leetcode or other technical interviews, but once that is met I think these matter so so so much more. Studying the companies really helped me prepare for what the interview was going to be like and if there was specific tech or problems they'll bring up give me foresight. This is also where there was the most turmoil.. Companies either got the process over with immediately and wanted an answer with 1-2 days OR they would flip flop around on scheduling because of various issues. For 2 of the companies the jobs either got filled half-way through the process OR the job went away completely due to budget cuts or restructuring. While, in my instance, both of these companies came back with other opportunities it really scared the shit out of me and I could see how unstable the market was. All interviews had at least these portions: 1. HR screening 2. Technical test (leetcode, practical, something else) 3. Behavioral test During this time is also when I'd conduct my "vibe checks" of the teams. Like is often said this is your opportunity to interview them as they are doing to you. 2/4 of the companies failed the vibe checks hard. You could just tell I'd be walking into an impersonal dumpster fire. If I did not have a chance to interview with the direct team I'd be working with, I flat out wouldn't work there regardless. That's too big a risk in my eyes. **Accepting offer** I'll just quickly lay out the companies: * Company A - Big company in different industry, same enterprisey tech stack, fair total comp, lowest base pay, vibe check was utterly failed * Company B- Direct competitor to my current company in big banking, same enterprisey tech stack, high total comp, highest base pay, vibe check was off * Company C - Startup vibe of company but matured (10+ yrs old), different industry and tech stack, total comp was the lowest of all but the base pay was nice, vibe check passed * Company D - More of a true start up (again mature) but gearing up to go public in next couple of years, different industry and tech, total comp was fairly close to company B, base pay was second highest, and I would have worked much closer to hardware When I first started getting offers, company D was one of the ones who dropped out of interviewing. So I initially accepted C. It was the least pay of all 4 but that's not what I was after, I was after growth and learning, plus I still made more than my current job. Literally the day I accepted the offer company D reaches back out saying the position was open again. This was a dream company for me so we went through the process and I ended up getting the offer. I accepted it and renege company C which understandably ghosted me as soon as I sent that email. This again scared the piss out of me because the instability in the market made me worried who I accepted would just rug pull me and be like "jk you have no job". **Conclusion:** I know without a doubt I was very lucky in my search. My interviews expected me to have way more ownership and breadth than I would have expected for someone at my level, luckily I did have that experience. In retrospect I think the biggest differentiators for my success in the search was being really picky on the jobs I applied to, willingness to be in office, and a lot of ownership/breadth from previous role. I didn't end up taking the highest paying job because that wasn't what was most important to me. So far the new role has been great and filled a lot of void I was missing at my previous role, but only time will tell if it was the right choice!

My film/tv career is over, where to start with game development?

Worked my ass off for 15 years in the camera department. Put over 70 seasons of television on the air. All of it meaningless as the past two years have seen my industry absolutely disappear. Have always loved games (which doesn’t matter) and I’ve got some solid ideas for simple games focused on narrative design through gameplay elements. I do have some money to spend on education/equipment if that changes any suggestions. I know there are many posts like this, and I see alot of good suggestions. But if you were 40 and at a crossroads in your career, where would you start if you could do it all over again? **Update** I am completely overwhelmed by the response to my post. Thanks everyone for words of encouragement and I am still processing all of this new information. To those who reached out with advice and words of encouragement, thank you! It’s all gonna work out somehow and I’m not giving up!

5 Games Released on Steam—$48k Revenue Later, Indie Dev Still Feels Out of Reach. What Should I Do Next?

I’ve released **5 games on Steam** over the past few years, earning **$48,302 total revenue** across **11,692 units sold**—but I still can’t make indie dev a full-time career. **Quick breakdown of my games:** * **PEGGO!** – $15,613, **5,851 units**. My most consistent seller. Incremental pachinko game with **“Mostly Positive”** reviews. * **Dead Unending** – $28,117, **3,524 units**. My highest revenue game ($10 price), but reviews are **Mixed** and burnout hit hard during development. * **Incremental Island** – $2,799, **1,029 units**. Launched recently and slowly building momentum. * **Portal Puzzle** – $161, **59 units**. Great game but flopped because I skipped marketing entirely. * **Level Down** – Launching June 2025. Hoping this one does better. **Marketing So Far:** * **Reddit** has been my best tool—consistent sales when I post in relevant subs. * **YouTube** occasionally hit big when creators like **Cartoonz** picked up my games, but results have been unpredictable. * Steam sales always boost revenue, but only temporarily. **The Problem:** I’ve graduated with a **CS degree**, and now I’m unsure what’s next. Indie dev is the dream, but it doesn’t feel **sustainable** yet. I’m stuck between pushing harder to grow sales or looking for a more traditional job. **What I Need Help With:** * How do I **break out** of this earnings plateau and **scale up** my games? * What’s worked for other devs trying to grow from hobby income to **full-time indie dev**? * Should I **double down** on my marketing strategies or **pivot** entirely? * How do you know when to **stop** pushing a game and move on to the next one? I’d love to hear advice from anyone who’s made this work—or even from those still trying. Thanks for reading! **Links to my games for context (feedback always welcome):** * [PEGGO!](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1684820/PEGGO/) * [Dead Unending](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2236240/Dead_Unending/) * [Incremental Island](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2847980/Incremental_Island/) * [Portal Puzzle](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2611630/Portal_Puzzle/) * [Level Down (Upcoming)](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2966910/Level_Down/)

The biggest problem people have in game dev has nothing to do with creating games.

Now I’m not claiming to be a famous game developer or even a good one at all, I just do it as a hobby. But I do run a business and have experience in that department. The biggest issue I see with people in game development across all skill levels and technical experiences. Is that they fail to understand that they are creating a product and selling a product which is essentially running a business,may that be big or small. Managing your project (project management) wondering what game (product) to build ? Knowing if people will even like it (user validation) getting people to find your game and buy it (marketing) managing external/internal team help (business management) Basically all the skills that you will find with running a game project completely fall under all the skills you will find with running any type of business. I’d recommend if you are struggling with any of these, that yes whilst specific game dev resources may help, have a look at general advice/tutorials on project management, marketing, finding team members etc etc . It will all directly apply to your project And in the same sense as running any type of business, it’s always a risk. It’s not a sure fire job with a salary, there are no guarantees and no one is going to hold your hand. Most people start their passion business as part time evening jobs, it’s no different in game dev. And people quit to work on their dream job being a game dev. If that’s the case, you need to figure out your cash flow not just build a game you like. But if you get it right and create a fantastic product that consumers actually want to buy. Then you’re in for winner!

What makes a staff/principal software engineer?

We (Series A startup) are currently hiring for a senior level (7+ years if I had to put a number) at minimum among many positions we have open. We get some candidates that are really experienced, often with back to back 2-3 year gigs “tech lead” or “manager” (and back and forth often). One particular candidate sees himself as staff/principal and had salary expectations beyond what we had in mind for a senior. Our compensation are currently being guided by our VC, so I’m going to assume it’s “fair”. My personal feeling is that the compensation is also pretty fair. I am all for the candidate seeing himself as higher level. I gave him my assessment for what I deem for minimum requirements for a senior level. However, I am struggling to know what level beyond that real means, esp for hiring someone new. From my past experience, I’ve seen what a staff level is like: code output, quality etc. but this was for someone who I already work with. I am curious how people here 1) hire externally for staff+ level and 2) pitch themselves as staff+ level for new employers?

Leave my current recession-resistant job for Big Tech?

Not trying to brag I'm just curious for some advice: I recently received an offer for a FAANG company on a team that sounds really interesting (Kindle devices) and has a really great TC. However, if would require me to move 3000 miles to a city I've never been to and don't really know anyone and it would also require me to leave my stable job at a big bank. With possible economic instability looming, does it make sense to take this leap? It would really suck to move to this HCOL city just to get laid off immediately especially in a tough job market, but I feel like the career opportunity is hard to say no to. My team really likes me so there's a solid probability I could get my job back if I needed to, but if they implement a hiring freeze, they may not be able to. Any helpful thoughts? Edit for extra details: I am 24 with 3 YoE. Pay bump is $110k TC in MCOL city to $270k in HCOL city (Seattle). I currently have \~$35k in cash and more in stocks but who knows what that will be worth for a while lol. Also considering selling my car since I would like to live in a walkable part of the city which would give me \~$15k.

Confirm my suspicion about data modeling

As a consultant, I see a lot of mid-market and enterprise DWs in varying states of (mis)management. When I ask DW/BI/Data Leaders about Inmon/Kimball, Linstedt/Data Vault, constraints as enforcement of rules, rigorous fact-dim modeling, SCD2, or even domain-specific models like OPC-UA or OMOP… the quality of answers has dropped off a cliff. 10 years ago, these prompts would kick off lively debates on formal practices and techniques (ie. the good ole fact-qualifier matrix). Now? More often I see a mess of staging and store tables dumped into Snowflake, plus some catalog layers bolted on later to help make sense of it....usually driven by “the business asked for report\_x.” I hear less argument about the integration of data to comport with the Subjects of the Firm and more about ETL jobs breaking and devs not using the right formatting for PySpark tasks. I’ve come to a conclusion: the era of Data Modeling might be gone. Or at least it feels like asking about it is a *boomer* question. *(I’m old btw, end of my career, and I fear continuing to ask leaders about above dates me and is off-putting to clients today..)* Yes/no?

i messed up :(

deleted \~10000 operative transactional data for the biggest customer of my small company which pays like 60% of our salaries by forgetting to disable a job on the old server which was used prior to the customers migration... why didnt I think of deactivating that shit. Most depressing day of my life

Making a game doesn't have to be a business

I see a lot of discussion here and in similar areas about wanting to make a game and release it and those talk a lot about marketing, selling, etc. I wanted to make this post because I've always framed it this way too, but honestly, I've gotten a lot of satisfaction from friends, family, participants in game jams, etc playing my games with no commercial business at all. I know we can share on itch, any social media, etc. Caveat: I have a successful career and im not trying to start a business. Partly because I've run businesses and know that making a game would only be a fraction of the work. Not framing my success with commercial success keeps it fulfilling. Anyone else have similar experiences? Big note: this is not an "artists should give away their work" post. No one is _entitled_ to your art without fair compensation. Just saying that you haven't failed if you choose not to focus on the capital

Advice from a Game Designer of 15+ years affected by the recent layoffs

I’ve recently been impacted by the madness, and have some free time on my hands now. I’m considering having some (free) 1-1 calls to answer any questions, provide advice, share my experiences. Whether you’re looking to find ways to grow or are feeling disheartened with the state of things right now. I believe there is a lot about the discipline that isn’t widely discussed, I’d like to change that. I have worked in PC, Console, Mobile throughout my career. With big and small publishers, for indies, work for hire, own startup, contracts, freelance, and probably more. My game design experience covers a very broad spectrum of the discipline. It would be a candid conversation of what it is really like being a game designer. Just to state the obvious: I won’t be breaking any NDAs, leaking or sharing any confidential insider info. It’s rough out there right now, and I would like to help. I’ll try a few of these first and if they go well I might set up a calendar to book directly.

135,000 TC to 75,000 to TC

Background: No college degree, graduated bootcamp 2 years ago, found job at small start-up offering 135,000 TC and worked for 1.5 years. I got extremely lucky as the interview process was very straight forward (no leetcode, no system design) just talk about a project I've worked on. Situation: Start-up ran out of money and needs funding. They owe me close to $70,000. I've been jobless for three months. I haven't had the chance to study leetcode or system design questions thoroughly and would basically start from square one. Haven't received any leads in terms of interviews. However, I have a extended family member offering a job that offers 75,000 salary at a small local company. If I take the job, I would expect to stay there long term, at least 1 - 2 years as it's a close family member. My biggest regret is not leveling up my skills while at the start-up and now I have 0 confidence in the job market. Should I test the market or just take the job?

My (American) company is opening R&D efforts in India.

I hope this title/post isn’t taken the wrong way, but we all know that there are a ton of talented engineers in India that can be hired for relatively low cost. Our new CTO has enacted a hiring freeze, and just announced that we’ll be opening R&D efforts in India, and I’m concerned what this might mean for the safety of my job. For context, our engineering team is roughly 200 people, made up of SE1-3s, and some Seniors. For anyone who has worked at a company that has gone through something similar, I guess my questions are: 1. How long after “opening R&D efforts” might it take until the new engineers are actually hired? 2. Is it more likely that they will be brought in to replace people, or to supplement what we already have? 3. If people are replaced, which people are most likely to be replaced? Will it be performance based, salary based? A mix of both?

Are US devs shackled to the US job market?

I have 20+ YOE with a little management experience but am mostly IC tech leadership. We have been trying to think of plans to live outside of the US in case shit really hits the fan (we are non white and Muslim). But the salaries in the US are so high compared to the rest of the world I don't know how we can seriously do this without a big hit to our quality of life. Any expats here or people who have moved out of the US? Did you have to make compromises?

Got laid off last year for the first time in 12 years. Experienced the worst job search of my career. Here's the Sankey.

[2024 Job Search Sankey](https://i.redd.it/wwa5kzx1nz7g1.png) [Here’s my previous post](https://old.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/rqpfir/the\_result\_of\_my\_passive\_job\_search\_over\_the\_past/) where I got the job I was laid off from. I was there for two and a half years and I hadn’t interviewed at all during that time. It took me four months to get an offer and I managed to get two of them in the same week. One was from an early seed stage startup and the other was Meta. I accepted Meta for more immediate TC and stability, but then I got laid off again just before hitting my year mark. I just finished interviewing again and this time the results are much better. Waiting for the last potential offer/rejection to come in before I post that Sankey. Overall the system design interviews were my biggest weakness again like in my previous search. Hellointerview helped a lot with that and I ended up paying for two mock interview sessions with them. Those are painful but worth it. Besides system design interviews, though, I got rejected a lot in the initial round for not having enough depth in particular tools. I’ve been working in developer tools and infrastructure for most of my career and a lot of places I was applying to wanted much deeper experience with Kubernetes, Terraform, and AWS. I had worked with all of those at the previous two jobs I had in the 6 years prior to this search, but hadn’t really dug in deep on them and it showed in those early screens. I also got several rejections in the final rounds towards the end where the feedback was that I did very well but someone else just had a bit more relevant experience so they were getting the offer. I even had one recruiter say that the hiring manager tried to get headcount approved to extend offers to me and the other candidate but got denied and I was the second choice. Here’s the details of the two offers I did get: **Seed stage startup** * Salary: $190k * Target bonus: 10% * Equity: $88k in options * Remote **Meta** * IC5 * Salary: $215k * Target bonus: 15% * RSUs: $710k over 4 years * TC: ~$425k * Hybrid 3x/week [Sankey source](https://sankeymatic.com/build/?i=IIBxBsEsFMBMAIDaA2AHAXXgOQPbwE7QDOIOAdkdAFCgQwKIDsArJgErQBW0AxgC5wqAeiHwAhkSIBXALaQyAc3Hhw8HADN4fABbRxPHtBACEYsFB5i%2BkckQLEp4E%2DHnxLKogBp4UkLCt6kJpkvMREYvgAnjTm9EgATBjwAMJiKvAA7qKEPPhSkAL4MXRwCZgA8mRQIeKSYTLQZHzFUKWIAIyYABJipuCEvZEuTdD4AG4wGaXqOPhaugQ44NS0rQzx7Lx5BaP2JOSwgqtxHZgAkmQFkGlavNqX7otSZLBUVD19A7BD8oUT0FMEDM5jo9PglnpTvAONx%2BIIqBxcvlCntSC82ht4ABxbQ4IgmN6I7YohqSMQKUoNJDtZAAFkwAHUCtpYIQMgitsjdqTwhSEFSUElUuksvYkTsikSuXMeeTKZDaUkcXiCVKJfBZXyNZD2vToVxeKrOerNfKkHrKtU9BJKJIGk0OeKSWE5fydedLtYbgIePdII9wc9XlRhapRTlibsoQAVMQAaz0uKpNsgCjI9uaocy2WNKI6AE5NrCCVnw7mo8xOvALldvXcHjdAy8Q2kwzmnVGAMyM5msgEtkXtyNzJgVKrya11O2NTOt7Ni4fU1jY3H4%2BGxhPwJOToip9MzsrwJk6PvsjeJnDJyR7jPUouGwTnreXnc3g%2BITEAMXkjZwQaoT7brUu5preULHiybLiOoKJiAYRjWIoajqOooyEtAcG6Agf58FoeAyEMIR8Bksxxne%2BrFoIHCYaUOF4RqhHQMRpHkbgqK2NQVA1l6qg%2Bn6AZ%2Di8CTIPecKvNx1y8fW%2Dq%2DkG1J6t%2BZCyc2El1r6DaqE2DDtAADJgypruJnqSbc6kyZpgkMMugEvsBb4OqpUlmQJcngb2bJccZan8cp2ljlawH1DObyWhOgXTk0SDdhRD6vKFNQ2kFkWIHqEGnlQ8U7kluEpR6tZOT5Fn%2Dpl4VEGB0WKb5byVUVQkdMuMKxVQNVPHVmJpVBYgwbscGGMY8hKBoqFFC1WnkeUKFoaNlnkdGGEyBqVi%2BgNbxzWIC0yEt2gDeNk1FBle3kcA8HGIIE3DeRAAivBWsGABcjVifAADEyTJDpH06VQd1sYQ%2BwUHoz2MLSwPA99pZDtKL0AEbMDwtLxIw30dQCL35vmqDqIwnbfcdfXOM9H2fp%2BH3feduyEzpPD5qTd2OaZhWtQglO0swtPTXJlOMLAtPXTwt0vR9CO0yjGTQbBJ2IYNh3PYcYg0%2DmuOxKUlOfV9D0Yb6tFSLhfD4YxzH4GRqufd9arOmSWpUibtMlYlEW4c9nbxNDnY6Ujd0GQTyDc8g0DqzZV4gfukVOy7btI7uABeehi%2B0%2BbxF9W7wLpqBfZt%2BAKK4qjtPEVAECnedaCnqD59D8CJ1Q0NKDwSyzC9KGN%2Bo%2Bd8PgYgUCAEQHlgVBkDghyZIX%2BfaPAbP5yQcE7SwZezIccxJ6Cyb57X4D189qAb5v%2Bc4J3PAFEM7RUOoq9izwUjjFY596DpAB0zD5%2DIuj4AU6jggtfARBSzRuHXczPejADFZqF3vveAt9WZUHAGISIdFZ49R1peKw%2Dp86cCkPiIIMDn5ZwoNgFBaDrDqEiI0WAdge72DGKMSgCg24gBHmQqwH9lpkFrjICATFiB63gCELu%2BJIFiGhtAcAdgV5rzVqTLckAB5kO2gobQUBZG4VvtPeAMwmjqDgnocIFAAC0lBn7N3gFaCee8kK3yLoQKB1gKHRz0O0XS%2BdNppgwSnUmUCBHgCUsmMAGF8B2AAJrj0gDHFOyB85TFTNoXCtJXH8MEWMNIUhrTeIiP4%2DO6hHDgBADkSAu5yDwACfAUgu5rB5PcTgdkmRoARKiTE9xRSrh5LEAgtIe4wHjy1smBBaTIC%2BNwgI4E1B4DQwGHGUgvwK5fXieARJKjZibVwgAck8DfBZ%2BcsnQHUJAAAHvABZqz4DSBQts3ZqzF7QCGpQXCYh4ChKGW0tw9yEDpyYtcjMNgKDtwTJEeZ%2Dp8n5ygOgmQ0M0jt0MKkmQOAKHwGOKUbRt8dK6R0swbwcKb66niCDKgEKoW%2DWIGiSgYCb5Ip0p2fMKLb66WYLSLFkK9Dm25C6K2ehtHtDvp2ZAyBvAUpBtS7FdLNZYTUDreiBEuFMRIkbQlH12ioGRfAVFnZUCJBxnylIc4ywdjmKitO8R8ztC5WihFOk86qrtlOMqB5UXMHzMwZAnZyU3zdgik1tLqxeQKhpJm8rb7WvZfEA18R44%2BxpVCr2pR4U2vzLSA17RGAIvvqq0W4seqSx2kNXYqK7HxFtTG5AGND6qo5kJBVMrs0Gp0nqzsvLXWB1fKBS14DaT5kVQGukjBQmqses4eF7Qq3lsVcwF1UKk3worS2qVaBEghr0OTLV8LkAVrlai41iRS6qrxghcNRKkXsodanZgCbXV8wFqOn2DqdKs3aIeqFHxlBfB%2BCMcYkxpj11BIsZY3qb60jzagaNn6PqJEVqqtaG0to7UzagTs1rz0XtQAW119K5h%2DTRIcBAqLkDxE7O2h1aBkDWqAA) EDIT: Explaining my terrible labels: * Withdrew after accepting offer: I used this for the companies I withdrew from once I accepted Meta's offer. * Rejected: means the company rejected me at some point * Ghosted: the recruiter stopped responding to me without an outright rejection * Call w/ recruiter: Only used this if it was the first step before anything else after either applying or getting their email or LinkedIn message. A few places slipped this and I also used it to distinguish between getting rejected or withdrawing before or after talking to the recruiter on the phone.

15 years of experience, still a senior backend engineer. Is it bad?

I started working when I was 16 on a freelancer platform, to make a little bit of extra money, emigrated and switched to full time at 18. From 26 to 31 years old I took time to take a degree in mathematics, and then a 1 year course in business administration, formally a mix between a PhD and an MBA in econometrics, which was a waste of time TBH, but I was still working part time as a freelancer. Now I'm 37 so it makes roughly 15 years of experience. I also have a couple of successful startup + cash out under my belt. A few years ago I got promoted to tech lead, but after a few months I asked to switch back to senior backend because I was spending too much time managing people instead of dealing with tech problems. I always thought that what matter is money, and currently I feel like I have a good salary. Am I wrong in thinking I can be an engineer forever? Should I be more career focused? I got the doubt because I see some of my coworkers became directors, head of, .... While I roughly have the same title since forever, but I both hate and am bad at political / people topics EDIT: Thank you all for your kind words. I guess I was being a bit anxious about getting old LOL

Reset Salary Ranges?

Is it just me or does it look like maybe salary ranges are being reset at a lot of companies for otherwise highly skilled positions? For instance, I’m seeing principal level engineer positions at, say, $120k-135k base? Depending on org, that’s almost a terminal position for engineering so that feels a bit low for the amount of responsibilities and experience expected. Maybe nothing new for a lot of companies but feels like a devaluation in the value software engineers provide and demand in the economy.

Real talk - what is people's appetite for forming a software developers union/guild/association?

A few disparite thoughts: - Software engineering has identity of being a meritocracy, with these very high salarys for the people right at the top of the game. There's the thought that 'well that could be me'. So this leads to people working on side projects out side of work etc, because 'I just need to be better than the other developers, then I can I get the 500K job'. Great for the employers. - We've probably all worked with other software developers who we thnk aren't particularly good, and there's a thought that the purpose of a union/association/guild shouldn't be to uphold mediocre standards. - I think agile is suffocating the profession. It's before my time, but I think previously software developers had more power in determining how things got done, because they were able to get together and plan it out. Now, it's all broken down into Jira tickets and the developer is just assigned 'do this thing'. It means we get shoddy solutions and the job sucks.

I don't enjoy working with AI...do you?

I've been a Data Engineer for 5 years, with years as an analyst prior. I chose this career path because I really like the puzzle solving element of coding, and being stinking good at data quality analysis. This is the aspect of my job that puts me into a flow state. I also have never been strong with expressing myself with words - this is something I struggle with professionally and personally. It just takes me a long time to fully articulate myself. My company is SUPER welcoming and open of using AI. I have been willing to use AI and have been finding use cases to use AI more deeply. It's just that...using AI changes the job from coding to automating, and I don't enjoy being an "automater" if that makes sense. I don't enjoy writing prompts for AI to then do the stuff that I really like. I'm open to future technological advancements and learning new things - like I don't want to stay comfortable, and I've been making effort. I'm just feeling like even if I get really good at this, I wouldn't like it much...and not sure what this means for my employment in general. Is anyone else struggling with this? I'm not sure what to do about it, and really don't feel comfortable talking to my peers about this. Surely I can't be the only one? Going to keep trying in the meantime...

As a HM, how can I encourage my prospective hires to negotiate their offers

My company has standard offer/signon bands, and recruiters will tend to leave headroom for offer negotiations. Not all candidates negotiate, especially women, and leave money on the table. As their future manager and it's not my money, nor do I manage budgets, I'd like them to max out their comp. It's much easier for them to get that bag at hire, as there really isn't any possibility to change their salary outside of the basic merit/promo cycle, and those increases are much smaller than what they can negotiate up at hire. Wondering how this community handles this situation?

An Ode to the Lost Magic of the 2010s ZIRP startups

It really is incredible how suddenly the world changes. Many of us are now unemployed, facing layoffs, taking salary cuts and enduring grueling work environments to try and get through the worst tech recession since 2008. I myself now work in a fusty, old and stable government department in Europe. But I once worked for a couple of 2010s ZIRP startups. And what places they were. People from across Europe and the world would rock up to these places and bring their seductive cocktail of cultural insight, experiences and languages. And they were motivated primarily to create something new and cool. The types who would have hated the fusty corporate offices that many of us now flee to in search of job security. And the energy was explosive. Sure most of their companies didn't make much profit or, in many cases, even revenue - but the magic was palpable. Not least because the company socials brought together so many people from different cultures and countries. Love, friendships (and even startup founder partnerships) were forged in these places. And this magic was often sparked overseas at global socials that the startups flew everyone to so that we could all party in foreign lands. I myself was flown to New York alongside everyone else in the London office to party for three days. It was crazy. Much of that magic was captured in photographs that disappeared not long before those bankruptcies were declared. Many of those people have since moved on to more sensible lives, corporate jobs and the bright beginnings of early middle age. But for a moment, it was magic.

Having A LOT of difficulty attracting/keeping engineering managers at my start up after years as an IC developer. Any advice?

Update: People seem hung up on the wrong thing here. We pay a competitive salary for a start up manager ($350K + options), it's just low compared to an engineering manager job at like Google. FAANG EM salaries, even for front line managers, are often $600 K a year I have about 20 years experience in the tech industry (16 with big tech/FAANG companies, 4 with startups), mostly as an IC developer. About 18 months ago I co-founded a start up and it has gone pretty well and now we have 15 developers. This is a lot for me to manage and, to be honest, I am not the best people manager. It's one of the reason I have gone back to being an IC developer over and over again. I have been trying to attract engineering managers to the company and both of the first two I have hired have left at after a few months, citing me as the reason. The first one never really seemed to know what he was doing at the company, and really seemed to have a lot of trouble dealing with ambiguity. The second one, who came directly from big tech, seemed EXTREMELY uninterested in doing and hands on work, and actually went to the CEO and tried to take my job. I have reached out to some decent managers in my network I had in big tech but none of them want to work at the level of pay we can offer. The reality is I am going to be a lot more technical than any manager I hire under me unless I promote one of the engineers on the team. Anyone have any experience with this kind of problem? Any advice on going from IC developer to start up executive and trying to attract engineering managers and keep them happy?

37 yrs old no experience whatsoever

I’m a 37 years old dad, working as a longshoreman. I’ve been gaming since I was 5 years old. Last week I broke both my shinbone and fibula in the right leg, in a nasty fall at work, and I’m in for a pretty long recovery at home. Luckily, I have a pretty good salary and I’ll get paid 90% of it over the next months (Thank god for Quebec’s CNESST). I’ve been thinking about what I could do, and pondering if I could try making a small game, from scratch, but I have literally **Zero** experience in it, and my laptop is a 2017 Macbook Pro… am I fucked from the get go? How could I dip into this hobby, and where should I start from?

Google or Apple for FTE SWE New Grad Role?

Hey guys! I had previously made a post about another company but I was fortunate enough to get opportunities from both Apple and Google starting after I graduate in May 2025. For some background, I am a US citizen (not from a top school) and had 2 previous internships at Big Tech companies. The Apple offer is in the Bay Area and the good thing is that I already know which team I will be working for and it’s pretty interesting. For Google, I’m still in PA matching since I interned in Cloud but assuming I do receive the offer (which apparently should happen), it will most likely also be in the Bay Area (where I interned at) and in Cloud, but I won’t know what team I will be in yet. Apple TC is around 200k and Google is around 215k. I was wondering what your opinions were regarding the state of these companies currently? What do you guys think is the better company to work for, more value resume wise, etc? What would you guys choose? Thanks!

Bloomberg offered my Senior SWE???

I interviewed at Bloomberg earlier this month. I did 4 interviews over 2 days. According to my recruiter I passed all of them. However I didn’t get the offer for an entry level position, they offered me a chance to interview for Senior SWE with only 2 years of experience. Am I being set up for failure? What should I study? My recruiter said I’ll have multiple rounds of DSA and single rounds of system design/hiring manager conversations. The team I was matched with is the Data and Analytics Gateway Platform Team. Anyone have any insights? 2 YOE | 95k TC

Differences I see from my experience in Defense, MAANG and Big tech industries.

Hey all, Im 7 YOE. I have worked in the defense industry my first few years (RTX, Lockheed Martin, BAE, etc), then during the hiring height of 2020-2022 I went to FAANG-level company and spent a few years there in their cloud based system. THis year I got laid off and after a few months I was able to get a job in a big tech cloud based system. I wouldnt consider my current company FAANG level but id say most people would know it. I will pre-face this that it is my experience. Im not saying every project in each industry is like this, I've known people in AWS who claim to not have to do anything past 5 pm and get great reviews and bonuses. I know people in defense who say they work a shitload of hours to get things done. Here are some of the differences I've seen from all three jobs: # Onboarding: Defense - didnt really have an onboarding. It was just kind of, build and run the system. I remember they gave me a task to change the headers of a few files just as an excuse to get me to build. FAANG - they bascially gave me an onboarding doc, that didnt even seem official. It was just a doc that got passed around with steps. I was surpriused nobody had ever took time to put it in a version control style doc system. It was just in the middle of some doc sharing system online. Current: to my surprise their onboarding was the best and most chill. They gave me clear indiciation of where they expect me to be. The first week was just 3 hour courses each day of onboarding for my company. The second week was a self paced class for onboarding for my team. The videos were very instructive, and easy to follow along and my favorite part was they basically gave us guidelines for how to get promoted. # work life balance: Defense - probably had the best work life balance of the bunch. I never had to think about work after 5pm. By 6 the building was a ghost town with a few stragglers. They worked on a 9/80 schedule so I had 3 day weekends 2-3 times a month (26 times a year). I could also work for extra PTO, where if I worked extra hours one week I could save it in a "extra time" bank and use it as future PTO. FAANG - definetely the worse of the 3 so far. It was expected ot be available practically 24/7. I went to that FAANG company because I had heard it was one of the few that you coould have a life, but I never realized that cloud was the exception to that rule. People were respodning to emails late at night, getting on calls late, responding on vacation, etc. THey were cool about taking time off but it felt like if you weren't drinking the kool aid and doing 10x more like verybody else was doing, it wouldnt go well for you. Current - still early to tell but it seems that there isnt as much of a "work late" culture here. People set their own times, some work a bit later but Ive never seen any crazy discussions happen at 11 pm like I did in my last job. A few principal engineers have gone on vacation and not yet have I seen any of them get on a call or message thread to answer any type of question. # Expectiations: Defense - really didnt have much expectations. I practically worked 20 hours, coasted the rest, was my team's scrum master, etc and over excelled in their eyes. There was no real due date on things because contracts in defense last multiple years. I remember when I got there the expectation was to complete the project within my first year. It took 3 years to finish and nobody batted an eye. FAANG - expectations were very high. If you were finishin up with a major task, theyd throw another one at you before you were even done with the first. Seemed even as aJr/mid-level I was expected to lead meetings, always be available, etc. I worked way more at this job than I did at defense and felt like i was underperforming because if I did 8-10 hours, most others did 10-12 hour days. In reviews it seemed like I was compared to my teammates, not so much compared to what the expectation of the job was. Current - again still early. But seems like their expectations are pretty fair. A quote from the first day I like was "if you want to be the person that does 40 hour weeks and gets your job done, you can have a long career here. If you want to be the person that does 50+ hour weeks here for that quicker promotion, you can do that but just respect your work-life balance". # Time and meetings: Defense - hardly had any meetings. We did standup evertday (except fridays) for 30 minutes but it mostly lasted 15 minutes. We hardly went over. I never learned the concept of parking lot until I got to FAANG lol. It was in office so just walking to someone's desk was really just the norm. FAANG - seemed like if your day didnt have 4 hours of meetings, you were underperforming. Everything was a discussion. Parking lot would take an extra hour and most of it was discussing things that I felt didnt really have to take that long. At times some of my tasks were pushed back due to someone wanting to discuss about one simple change. If you had to talk to someone, it was hard to get them on a call and when you did they didnt appreciate their time being wasted. In meetings it seemed everyone was stressed to have the meeting finish. Current - seems nobody is really stressed about meetings. Parking lot items get resolved pretty quickly. Everybody doesn't mind hopping on a call and lasting an hour with you. Edit: someone asked for interview styles. I wont give exact details but ill say more or less how it was. # Interview: Defense: I was a college grad so I got invited to an all day hriing event by the company. It seemed like the interviews didnt ask anything technical, they jsut wanted to get ot know me. At the end of the day they had me list my favorite teams and told me theyd let me know. I've interviewed for other defense companies, tbh there were no leetcode questions or anything like that. Technical questions were more like "what is OOP?" or how I would design a simple code. FAANG - first was a pre-round codesignal style question to see if I knew what I was doing. Once I passed that I went through 2-3 rounds of interviews asking leetcode style questions and then a manager meet. Big tech - similar to faang. Pre-interview exam to make sure I knew what I was doing. Once I passed that it was 2-3 rounds of code/system questions. Edit 2: people asked about TC # TC \- Defense: as a college grad in a HCOL state I started at about 78k wiht a 5k bonus. Within 4 years and 1 promotion I was making 90k and yearly bonuses that was around 5k-8k. No stock. I know people who jumped to other defense company and they are around 120k. Promotion seemed like it happened every 2-3 years. \- FAANG - I never got promoted in my few years though I doubt I deserved it in their eyes. I never really saw anybody get promoted really. Like one mid level SWE had been working more than most seniors and she didnt get promoted. AS for TC it was about 220k between base stocks and signing bonus. I moved to a low COL state shortly after joining and my base pay dropped by 20k so it ended up being around 200k \- Current company - TC is about 200k with just basepay and stock (no signing bonus) but according to them, im promised up to 10% bonus that would bring my total pay to around 215k. # Benefits \- Defense: 3 weeks of accrued PTO. But since there was timsheet we technically were not allowed to do overtime. A work around was if I worked 90 hours in a 2 week period, I could use 10 hours and save it in a special bank that I could use later on. So If in a 4 week period I worked 200 hours, I could set 40 hours to that special bank. And if I had a 2week vacation I could use the special bank for the first week and my regular PTO for the second week. It was good benefits outside of that, tuition reimbursement which I used to get my master's degree without taking on more debt. Discounts on personal travel (it wasnt amazing but good enough) etc. \- FAANG - Unlimited PTO. Some of the best benefits i've ever seen will probably will ever have. There were multiple different types of reimbursement programs for almost anything. Discount codes on almost any store that were actually pretty good discounts. Similar benefits when it comes to tuition reimbursement, etc. \- Big tech - unlimited PTO. Again good benefits, just not as good as FAANG. Company will give random 3 day weekends to employees that they announce pretty early so people have it prepared.

This is how we gathered 100k wishlists before our demo launch, capitalizing on a successful previous title

Heads up: this thread might not be the most useful for many indie developers out there because the step of releasing a first successful game is a different kind of challenge. But I wanted to share it for those who might be interested - how we capitalized on a first successful title ([Monster Sanctuary](https://store.steampowered.com/app/814370/Monster_Sanctuary/)), which started as a solo project, to now running a small indie dev team of 14 people working on our second project [Aethermancer](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2288470/Aethermancer/). ([I did write a post mortem about the first project two years ago](https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/11oje5z/my_first_game_sold_over_half_a_million_times_how/)) --------------------------- TL;DR - for comparisons sake: **Monster Sanctuary had** ~2k wishlists on first demo launch (in spring 2018) ~8k On Kickstarter (fall 2018) ~40k on Early Access launch (summer 2019) ~140k on Full launch (fall 2020) (tho keep in mind, after EA launch the wishlist number gets inflated quickly and is less important) **Aethermancer had** ~45k wishlists after first month of steam page launch (in spring 2023) ~100k wishlists on demo launch (10. February 2025) ~150k wishlists after first two weaks of demo launch and going into the steam next fest ~ heading towards scratching 200k wishlists after steam next fest ends --------------------------- **Before the steampage launch for our second project** here are the things I think we did quite well with our first project, which helped greatly getting a good head start on the announcement of our second project later: - Took the time and polished the first game as much as possible. Took a lot of feedback during the demo and early access and tried to make it as best as possible based on it. Always took high effort to keep it as bug free as possible. The most important goal was always to have a great game. This helped greatly to have a good Steam review score on the game. - Didn't engage in any shady or unpopular business practices, like microtransactions, pay2win, treating our employees/contractors badly. - Released updates for the game post launch, including a free DLC. Our line of thought was that we rather release the DLC for free so all of our community could enjoy it, we might sell more units of the base game this way and to give something back to our fanbase, which helped to secure their support in the future. - Engaged a lot with our community, taking feedback, being transparent, but also very active. We also hired our community manager who was doing it voluntarily at that time. He did a great job keeping our discord alive even after the game released and not let it die. Later we hired another community member as our QA, who also continued to help with community management on the side. - Hired a part time (later full time) marketing person. Marketing is very important for any game project, no game really sells by itself. Even tho we didn't announce the second project yet, the marketing person helped greatly keeping our community alive and active with content/challenges/raffles/surveys. Also planning our announcement and steampage launch of the second project. - We stayed within a similar genre for our second project (monster taming) - while still innovating by combining it with Roguelite elements this time. --------------------------- **What I think we did right for the second project announcement and steampage launch:** - Launched the steam page right away when first time announcing the project. If you have an existing fanbase, announcing a second project they eagerly await, will be the most viral moment early in the development. You want to cease this opportunity to start gathering wishlists. - Chosen a good time for launching the steam page: You want to launch it as early as possible to start gathering wishlists, but at the same time you need to have enough to show for the fanbase to be hyped and interested in the project. In our case it was after half year of pre-production (while also still working on updates for our first project) and a year working on the prototype. - We created a first trailer of the game for the announcement - many of the things shown in the trailer were already working in the prototype, but some we specifically just made for the trailer (for example enemies in the overworld had scripted movement) [The announcement trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuYiigqbP-Q) - Before the announcement, we had a longer teaser campaign where we gave hints and riddles for our community to solve - Plan the announcement well, having most of the team involved - not just the marketing person. Get the word out in as many places as possible, reached out to the contacts we gathered during the development of our first project and the people we helped out with something in the past. - We localized the steam page right from the get go into some languages - We managed to acquirre enough wishlist additions in a very short time after the steam page launch, which made the steam discovery queue pick up our game and continue to gather many wishlists on a daily basis for almost a month --------------------------- **What I think we did well on the way to the demo launch:** - Treat our employees and contractors well. We have rather generous working conditions (for gamedev) - 35h weeks, no crunch, 30 days off per year, flat hierarchy, very democratic, low management but encourage self-involvement. If the project goes very well, everyone will get rev share on top of their salary. Despite majority of our employees and contractors being rather young (many university graduades with barely any professional gamedev work experience) I think those working conditions helped greatly still getting the most out of the team, pushing their limits and achieving great results. - Being constantly active on our existing social media channels, but also open up new ones ([Tik Tok](https://www.tiktok.com/@moi_rai_games_) for example in our case, some shorts there went viral granting us some small wishlist spikes) - We launched a closed alpha for the upcoming demo in early 2024, with dedicated and vocal community members and raffle winners where everyone could participate. The primary goal was to gather feedback and polish the demo. - Run multiple surveys with the alpha testers to get precise feedback what was working well and fun and what wasn't. - We pushed the public demo release multiple times, also switched the targeted steam next fest. We did this to polish and rework aspects of the game that were not perceived that well yet based on the feedback we got from our alpha testers. We worked on the demo until it felt right and 'good enough' to show to the public. - We localized the demo, to have a bigger audience reach. - We applied to several showcases and got picked up by the Guerrila collective, which gave us another spike of wishlists during mid of 2024. [The trailer we did for the Guerrila Collective](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3OpvooPgUU) - We released the demo in quite good quality overall (of course still not perfect, as it never is. Vital things were still missing, like for example mouse support). But the demo was polished enough for us the receive an 'overwhelming positive' steam review score quite soonish after launch. - We gathered a total of 100k wishlists until the demo launch. All of them getting notified on the demo launch helped greatly to have a viral demo launch and getting picked up by the discovery queue of steam again, boosting the wishlists to a stunning 150k in matter of two weeks. - We signed up with a Publisher that we felt would help us well specifically at the marketing aspect. We considered to do self publishing for a long time during the project, but ultimately decided against it. Pushing the demo multiple times, we felt we could need additional help taking some work off our shoulders. We signed with 'offbrand games' and made the cooperation announcement on the demo launch day. The announcement and their effort on promoting the game helped us greatly having a viral launch of the demo. - We worked with a indie game marketing agency (Future Friends). They helped us with strategical decisions but also with the outreach to press and content creators. (this cooperation started before we decided to sign with a Publisher, but ultimately we felt it was still worth it and our Publisher also liked the cooperation and might work with them in the future) - We waited with our first outreach to press & content creators until the demo was out - This is the [Demo announcement trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDoTiL14oIg) We are of course very happy with how the demo launch went so far - but keeping in mind of course all of this was only possible because we had a successful first project and a loyal and active community!

The Data Engineering Toolkit

I created the Data Engineering Toolkit as a resource I wish I had when I started as a data engineer. Based on my two decades in the field, it basically compiles the most essential (opinionated) tools and technologies. The Data Engineering Toolkit contains 70+ Technologies & Tools, 10 Core Knowledge Areas (from Linux basics to Kubernetes mastery), and multiple programming languages + their ecosystems. It is open-source focused. It's perfect for new data engineers, career switchers, or anyone building their Toolkit. I hope it is helpful. Let me know the one toolkit you'd add to replace an existing one.

Looking for a Data Engineer Buddy to Grow Together 🚀

Hi everyone, I’ve been working as a **data engineer** for over 5 years, focusing primarily on **stream processing** and building robust **data and ML platforms**. I’m looking for a like-minded **data engineering buddy** who’s also passionate about advancing their career and sharpening their skills. Feel free to DM me if you’re interested. Let’s connect, grow, and tackle challenges together!

High TC Remote First companies?

I’m at 350k TC and am looking for possible next steps. I’m at a tech lead / senior 2 level, and WLB (rarely more than 40 hours a week) is important. Tech stack is JVM (Java, Kotlin, Scala) with a heavy emphasis on big data and distributed systems. It seems like most of the companies I used to look at potentially working at one day (Google, etc…) have gone RTO.

How can I tell if it's time to leave my company?

First job - been here 5.5 years. I'll try to break it down as simply as possible: Pros: * Free to come and go as I please (start time, end times, hours worked) * Manager and skip don't micromanage - let me plan my tasks * Great relationships with people in key positions - I'm currently building a course on few subjects to lecture the entire R&D department * Potential to climb ladder, clear path - I'm a Senior now, can pivot to TL if wanted * Job is 25 minute bus commute from home * Above average pay for the field - getting stock refreshers but small amounts (cleared 120k with bonuses this year in a MCOL-HCOL area) * People are very friendly - lots of people I'm close with at work Cons: * Company is doing poorly - stock has dropped 90% since its peak in 2021, no recovery in sight * Previous stock refreshers (1-3 years ago) dropped significantly in value * Really good engineers are getting poached by FAANG, no clear replacements for them in a niche field * Less than good people are jumping ship to other companies * Company is stingy with new stock refreshers - which makes me feel like there's no point in committing to it - if I'm busting my ass I should be in position to get rich if the company climbs out of the hole - this isnt the truth. Im having troubles convincing myself to use logic and get up and apply for the FAANG poachers - they're offering 50% more salary with a brand new stock package worth 100-150k over 4 years. Has anyone else been in a place like this and made the move?

Anyone else feel like data engineering is way more stressful than expected?

I used to work as a Tableau developer and honestly, life felt simpler. I still had deadlines, but the work was more visual, less complex, and didn’t bleed into my personal time as much. Now that I'm in data engineering, I feel like I’m constantly thinking about pipelines, bugs, unexpected data issues, or some tool update I haven’t kept up with. Even on vacation, I catch myself checking Slack or thinking about the next sprint. I turned 30 recently and started wondering… is this normal career pressure, imposter syndrome, or am I chasing too much of management approval? Is anyone else feeling this way? Is the stress worth it long term?

Backend software engineer in oil and gas, long term career advice needed

I’m currently working as a backend software/data engineer in a mid sized oil and gas company. Depending on how well we do my TC is anywhere from 200k - 240k. I live in a MCOL city. The company I work for is great in terms of work life balance, it is 5 days in the office with on call rotation, but we do have 6 weeks PTO and another 1 week of sick days. We also surprisingly don’t do layoffs, we’ve never had layoffs even when oil hit negative during covid. I currently have 4 years of experience in software and before that I was an electrical engineer with 4 years of experience. I’ve been with this company for almost 4 years now. Right now I’m currently a Senior within the company but probably out in the market I’d be considered a mid level. I’m working my way up in the company pretty quick and I have a good relationship with my manager. I believe within 3 years I’ll be at a manger role with my TC somewhere around $350k. In terms of the work I do, it’s a variety of backend work from API development, to ETL’s, managing database schemas/SP’s, and working with real time data. The tech stack on the backend is mostly Python with a little bit of .NET, I’ll be dabbling in GO soon as well for our realtime data calculations from RMQ. On the database side I’ve pretty much worked with every sql/nosql database you can think of. I’ve been thinking about my long term career growth. I’ve seen posts about people making 500k - 1m TC and would like to work towards that. I’m absolute dogshit at LC, however at work I’m able to architect out solutions for new projects and solve issues quickly. I would say I still have room to grow here, I’m still learning new things and have the freedom to introduce new technologies. Wondering what I need to do to prepare for that next big jump? And how’s my career here so far?

Our Story of How Two Idiots Accidentally Became Full Time Paid Game Devs and Somehow Launched a Steam Page

Hey everyone! I’m Baybars, the team lead of an indie studio, Punica Games, based in Istanbul. We just launched the Steam *Coming Soon* page for our first-ever PC game, Fading Light, and after a full year of chaotic effort, mistakes, growth, and learning everything from scratch, it felt like the right time to share our story. This post tells the full journey — how we started with almost zero game development experience, what went wrong, what saved us, and why we kept going. There’ll be early concepts, disasters, tiny wins, and all the stuff in between. We hope it helps anyone struggling with the messiness of game dev — or just entertains those who’ve been there before. Store link to Fading Light: [Wishlist if you're curious](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3528230/Fading_Light/) #      Contents of the post: 1. How we accidentally found ourselves developing the game 2. Why we struggled with our first proof of concept 3. Starting from scratch with zero experience 4. Our nightmare with visuals, sound, and voice acting 5. The plot-twist savior who saved the project 6. How we ruined our first teaser (and partially fixed it) 7. What we learned, and what’s next ***1. How We Accidentally Found Ourselves Developing Our First Game, Fading Light*** Almost exactly a year ago, I was working full-time as an AI researcher at a mid-sized tech company, simultaneously with my Master’s in AI. My friend Emin, now the game’s programmer, was also at the same company, working in web development. We were in a professional environment — organized, efficient, working with globally known clients. Our company was unusually supportive of young developers: they funded internal R&D, AI research, and even dabbling in game dev through a small internal team called *Punica Games* (back then just two solo devs experimenting with mobile). One weekend, they held a **36-hour internal game jam** with a small cash prize — mostly for fun. Emin had dabbled in Unity before; I had zero experience. I have always been a gamer, but my only exposure to game development was watching GMTK videos during lunch and reading an article about the MDA framework. We joined the jam as a joke, partly for the free food, teaming up with a graphic designer who had a pixel art background, plus three others from the company who weren’t even gamers, just to even the team count. The jam theme was **"Symbiosis"**. We quickly imagined a fantasy setting where the world is completely dark, and survival depends on a symbiotic relationship between a man and a fire spirit. The man can’t navigate the darkness alone, and the fire boy (eventually named Spark) constantly dies unless the man helps him regenerate — thus, *Fading Light* was born. We immediately fell in love with the idea — it just *felt* right. The concept clicked with the theme, and we thought, “Maybe this could actually turn into something.” Suddenly, we weren’t just there for the food anymore. The next 34 hours were pure madness. Chaos. Bugs. Fights. Mental breakdowns. Here’s a picture of us mid-jam, basically broken but still pushing forward: [An image of us fussing during the jam](https://imgur.com/a/KZ6cu2b) Despite everything, we submitted on time. The visuals were rough, the code was worse, but the core idea — this emotional symbiosis mechanic — *worked*. It wasn’t a great jam game. But it was a damn good proof of concept. And somehow, with a good presentation, we won. Here’s what the jam version looked like:  [Game Jam Version Image](https://imgur.com/a/29jUcjK) To our surprise, the company executives approached us afterward. The offer wasn’t glamorous — no funding dump or big promises — but it was real: >**“We’ll keep paying your salaries and give you time. Show us what you can do.”** We took the leap. The original graphic designer couldn’t join us full-time (her role at the company was too essential), but we, two mostly clueless devs, were now officially tasked with turning this game into something real. 2. How (and Why) We Struggled to Come Up with a Good Proof of Concept After the game jam, we were given two weeks to prepare a presentation for the company: something that outlined our vision for the full game — scope, mechanics, design, everything. We split the workload. The first week was pure brainstorming — figuring out mechanics, art direction, tone. We aligned on most ideas pretty quickly. In the second week, Emin focused solely on the technical side — code structure, modularity, frameworks, configurability, development pipelines. Meanwhile, I (with a bachelors degree in French Literature and thousands of pages written before) took charge of the narrative and worldbuilding. What started as "some ideas and lore" quickly became a 60-slide monster document filled with: * The world’s history * Character backstories and personalities * Psychological profiles * Dialogue samples * Story structure and themes Here’s a slide from that initial lore doc — sorry, it’s in Turkish: [Dialogue Sample](https://imgur.com/a/JUA6VmH) We were hyped. We reviewed each other’s work and were genuinely proud of what we had. Then, the day before the presentation, it hit us like a truck: **There’s no way we could actually make this game.** The scope we envisioned was massive. We were about to walk into a room and say: >“Hey, this is our first ever game. We’ve never done this before. Give us 3+ years and full salaries so we can build this ambitious, emotionally driven, narrative-rich metroidvania we have in mind. Don’t ask us how we’ll be able to nail it. Just trust us.” We already knew the answer: no way in hell! Naturally, we panicked. Our solution? Bluff. We pitched the presentation as a “vision piece.” A dream scenario. An ideal version of the game, if we had unlimited time and money. But in reality? We told them we’d massively reduce the scope, shrink the project down to something deliverable in a single year. That’s what we said. But that’s *not* what we meant. Our actual plan was: >“Let’s pretend we’re making a small game, but secretly try to cram in all the big ideas anyway. We’ll find a way. We’re smart, we’ll figure it out.” Believe me guys, this idea sounded way more logical back then than how it sounds now. Why did we think this was a good idea? Because we were delusional. Full of false confidence. Still high off our jam win and totally clueless about how difficult game development really is outside of a 36-hour sprint. We gave the presentation, pitched the reduced scope. The execs liked it. They didn’t believe we could deliver the *full* thing (rightfully so), but they were open to the smaller version. So we struck a deal: * One year of full-time development * Progress milestones along the way * Art assets provided *occasionally* by the company’s designers when available It was official: we had a year to build the “small” version of *Fading Light*. Just the two of us. And we had absolutely **no idea** how to do it. ***3. How We Started With Almost Zero Experience After Deciding to Develop the Game*** Now that we had a one-year timespan and a vague plan in place, it was time to… actually make the game. Which meant we had to face the uncomfortable truth: **We didn’t know what the hell we were doing.** # On my side: It was my first time using *a game* as a medium for storytelling — something I’d only ever done through novels, plays, and essays before. I knew how to *write*, but I had zero understanding of how to *design* a narrative experience where the player pulls the strings. I’d always been on the playing side of games, never the creating one. On top of that, *Fading Light* wasn’t a simple story to tell. We weren’t planning to use walls of text, slow-paced cutscenes, or dialogue boxes. And even if we wanted to — we couldn’t. The protagonist, **Noteo**, is illiterate. That single design choice eliminated a lot of traditional storytelling tools. Every narrative beat had to be communicated through visuals, sound design, character behavior, lighting, and level design — and I didn’t even know what a Unity scene looked like, let alone how to plan one. # On Emin’s side: He had to go through the **world’s fastest Unity + C# crash course**. Sure, he made something playable in the jam, but now he was staring down: * Code architecture * Optimization * Bug tracking * VFX Graph * Shader Graph * Playtesting systems * Game feel, inputs, animation blending * Literally everything We were under fire — and the only way to survive was to learn *everything*, *fast*. And that’s what we did. # Enter survival mode. We went into absolute grind mode. No weekends. No breaks. No real work/life balance. Just relentless reading, prototyping, debugging, storyboarding, failing, redoing, and trying again. I remember devouring the book **Directing the Story** by Francis Glebas in a day and a half because I needed to storyboard a cutscene without having *any* visual assets. I was drawing stick figure scenes like a kindergartener. Emin was prototyping animations with rectangles. We were researching things like **how bioluminescence works in nature**, and then trying to build luminance shaders that could simulate merging two separate shadows together — even though we had no assets to test it with yet. We were desperate. But we were learning — and slowly, building. **And somehow… it started coming together.** After a couple of months, Emin had a modular, bug-free project skeleton up and running — with help from a senior dev at the company and some of their custom internal frameworks. He became *shockingly* fast with Unity, given where we started. On my side, the narrative was taking shape. We had: * Deep character profiles * Fully fleshed-out backstories * Psychological arcs * Speaking styles and behavioral quirks * Biomes, narrative progression loops, story events, and more And most importantly, we had a playable project. Not a full game. Not even a prototype. But something we could tinker with. We could test mechanics — jump height, dash range, attack feedback — and iterate. Here’s what it looked like in that early stage: [Unity Rectangles](https://imgur.com/a/0smFgCj) It wasn’t much. But for us, it was a miracle. Our company was happy with the progress. The code was clean, the world was promising, and the passion was visible. Now, after months of work, it was finally time to do the one thing we’d been waiting for: Start making the game *look* like a real game. Unfortunately… That's where the real pain began. ***4. How We Struggled With Early Visual Designs, Music, Sound Effects, and Everything Else*** After months of full-time development, what we had was… Unity rectangles shooting arrows at each other. No art, no effects, no mood — just blocks. It was time to move past that and start building the world’s visual identity. We were excited. We figured seeing the game in a more polished form would motivate us, help us iterate faster, and give us a clearer direction. We were very wrong. Since we didn’t have a full-time artist on the team, we had to rely on multiple graphic designers from the company. They could contribute when they had spare time — if they weren’t busy with other projects. That alone made things tough. But the real problem was this: every artist we worked with had different backgrounds, different skill sets, and different understandings of what we were building. And we had no experience in giving clear, useful art direction. Here’s an example. We finally got a chance to work with one of the *only* senior graphic designers available to us. I gave him a document describing our main character, Noteo, in detail: * “A mask-like face with a bioluminescent pattern” * “A sheepskin-like cloak to protect him from the cold” * A bunch of references from other metroidvania games to explain the tone and genre What I *didn’t* include was the most critical information: * Intended body proportions * Actual art style * Tone of the character (he’s supposed to be a grounded, emotionally damaged survivor) So the designer — completely logically — assumed we wanted something in line with the mainstream metroidvania references we gave him. This was the result: [Cartoon Noteo](https://imgur.com/a/zfQ1M3D) Oof… It wasn’t a *bad* design — in fact, it looked great on its own. But it was completely disconnected from what we were aiming for. We wanted a balance of realism and stylization. **Noteo** was meant to be the "real" one: a cold, grounded character carrying trauma and pain. **Spark**, on the other hand, would be his colorful, stylized counterpart — a literal floating flame child full of energy and mischief. That contrast was the heart of the story. But the Noteo we got looked like a cartoon protagonist from a lighter action platformer. He didn’t look like someone you’d relate to. Or believe. We told the designer this, and understandably, he was annoyed: >“Why didn’t you just tell me that from the beginning?” Fair. Luckily, he was patient. He reworked the design from scratch using more grounded proportions and realism. Around the same time, the designer from the original game jam came back on board to create Spark — and she nailed it in one go. Here’s how they both looked after all: [Noteo and Spark](https://imgur.com/a/Ikoa5o1) So far, so good. Until our luck ran out. # Then everything fell apart. We had now used up all our favors with the experienced artists. That left us with less experienced designers, often unfamiliar with game development and spread across multiple disciplines. I had to coordinate them — try to unify a consistent art style across wildly different skill levels, backgrounds, and time constraints. At the same time, I was juggling: * Trying to design a proper marketing plan * Coordinating asset production * Planning our *Coming Soon* page for Steam The result? Total disaster. We had a messy collection of unfinished or mismatched assets. The styles clashed, the proportions varied, and some pieces barely got past the sketch phase even after a month of focused work. Some even looked like literal jokes… [This is what everything looked like](https://imgur.com/a/dgwx8dp) And just to make things even worse... # Sound. Music. Voice Acting. More pain. Sound effects and music were *slightly* more manageable. We used licensed sound effects, and a few musician friends chipped in to help us build some initial tracks. But voice acting? That nearly broke me. We knew from early on that voice acting would be key to the emotional tone of the game — especially for Noteo and Spark. But we were in Turkey, and we needed English-speaking voice actors with *very* specific vocal profiles. Weeks went by. Nothing. Local options were limited. Most didn’t speak English well enough for the roles, or didn’t match the voices we were imagining. Hiring native freelancers from abroad was impossible with our non-existent budget and the brutal TL–USD exchange rate. At one point, I even considered paying from my own pocket — but it would’ve bankrupted me before we got past the first few lines. So I asked every friend I had to try recording. Nothing usable. Total failure. Giving up on voice acting wasn’t an option either — the narration design was already built around it. Removing it would’ve meant reworking the entire game’s storytelling approach from the ground up. As a last-ditch effort, I decided to try something desperate: **I would voice both characters myself** and then use AI tools to manipulate the recordings. At first, the results were awful — no emotion, robotic tones, unnatural pacing. But after hundreds of iterations and tests, I finally got a few clips that sounded… okay. Not perfect. Not final. But usable as **placeholders**. Enough to show intent. # Reality check. At this point, several months in, we had a decent **vision** in our heads. We could picture how the game should look, sound, and feel. We even had early plans for the teaser and the Steam page. What we *actually* had was: * Sloppy, inconsistent visuals * Emotionless placeholder voice acting * Randomized sound effects * Amateur music * Almost nothing animated except Noteo and Spark Everything else — mobs, bosses, backgrounds — was either half-finished or completely unusable. Animating anything at that point would’ve been a waste of time. We didn’t even want to see those assets moving, let alone expect anyone else to. We were dangerously close to burnout. Everything felt like it was falling apart. And that’s exactly when our story took a sudden, unexpected turn... ***5. How a Really Talented Artist (With a Plot Twist) Saved Us From Almost Quitting*** This is where we used up *all* our remaining luck in a single plot twist. At this point, we were six months into development, and things were looking grim. Despite all our work, we had nothing visually coherent to show. The art was inconsistent, the assets unusable, and we’d already burned through all the experienced designers we had access to. We were on the verge of surrender. Mentally preparing for the possibility of getting fired and shutting down the project. Then someone new joined the company, Burcu. She was a newly hired junior graphic designer — fresh out of university, just starting her first-ever full-time job after a year of unemployment. Her portfolio didn’t exactly scream “game artist,” which is probably why she hadn’t landed a job earlier. But at that point, I had no other options left. I figured I might as well ask her for help. I showed her what we had, explained the problems, and asked if she’d be willing to try drawing a character for us. She said "Hmm, let me see what I can do,” and asked for a day. She was still in her trial period, which meant she wasn’t locked into any team or project yet. I used that window to get her on board, just for a single test. # One day later, she delivered an asset. A fully layered, game-ready character asset — designed from scratch, beautifully composed, polished, and absolutely *on point*. It was fast, it was clean, and it was exactly what we’d been trying (and failing) to get for *months*. She didn’t just “draw something pretty.” She *understood* what we were going for — the tone, the mood, the proportions, the lighting, all of it. I stared at the screen thinking: >*What if she redesigned everything? What if she fixed the whole visual identity of the game?* So I asked her. She said: >“Sure, just tell me what you need.” Here’s what happened next: [*Before and after Burcu*](https://imgur.com/a/3sped0j) At that moment, it was obvious: we had to get her on the team asap. Full-time. No excuses. But there was a problem. We were already running over budget, and we’d been on a losing streak for months. Asking the company to add another salary to our struggling team felt like marching into a boss fight without gear. Still, we had to try. # The meeting that changed everything We set up a meeting with the company executives — including the big boss himself. We were ready for a fight. We brought our new character designs, our pitch, our reasoning, our desperation. We said: >“This is Burcu’s work. We want her on our team full-time. We need her. Please give us this one shot.” We braced for a negotiation. Instead, the boss looked at the screen, nodded, and said: >“Yeah, sure. Why not? We were considering putting her on *Fading Light* from the beginning anyway. Also, you’re getting a real budget now — and more help.” We just sat there, stunned. We didn’t actually expect the events to turn out like that. What a legend... # The comeback arc begins With that one meeting, everything changed. * Burcu officially joined the team full-time * We got proper support and more resources * The atmosphere in our tiny team shifted from dread to momentum We suddenly *believed* again. After all the struggle, all the failed assets, all the patchwork coordination — we finally had a real artist. A visual direction. A renewed sense of purpose. We felt unstoppable. And naturally, that meant the next lesson was waiting for us — just around the corner. # 6. How We Ruined Our First Teaser and Had to Do Everything From Scratch With Burcu on board and our morale finally repaired, we went into full beast mode. She started methodically recreating every asset we had — characters, backgrounds, UI elements, you name it — and it all looked **amazing**. The broken visual identity we’d been struggling with for half a year was finally taking shape. We weren’t just “catching up” — we were *leaping forward*. Meanwhile: * I was focused on designing the teaser trailer, finishing leftover assets, and structuring our *Coming Soon* Steam page * Emin was working deep in shaders, VFX, physics-based movement, and some incredibly cursed experiments on Spark’s “head” * And we finally got assigned an **animator** — a part-time co-worker named **Can**, an ambitious intern studying Game Development in his second year Now, Can was a beginner. This was his first time animating in a serious pipeline. But at that point, we were all beginners at something. The goal was simple: ***6. How We Ruined Our First Teaser and Had to Do Everything From Scratch*** With Burcu on board and our morale finally repaired, we went into full beast mode. She started methodically recreating every asset we had — characters, backgrounds, UI elements, you name it — and it all looked **amazing**. The broken visual identity we’d been struggling with for half a year was finally taking shape. We weren’t just “catching up” — we were *leaping forward*. Meanwhile: * I was focused on designing the teaser trailer, finishing leftover assets, and structuring our *Coming Soon* Steam page * Emin was working deep in shaders, VFX, physics-based movement, and some incredibly cursed experiments on Spark’s “head” * And we finally got assigned an animator — a part-time co-worker named **Can**, an ambitious intern studying Game Development in his second year Now, Can was a beginner. This was his first time animating in a serious pipeline. But at that point, we were all beginners at something. The goal was simple: "Deliver a teaser video for the *Coming Soon* page launch by the 10-month mark." We were *finally* experienced enough to start doing this for real… right? Well. # We forgot one important detail. We didn’t know a thing about cinematography. We had a rough storyboard: camera angles, scene descriptions, bits of dialogue, timing. But the moment we sat down to actually build the teaser in Unity, **nothing felt right**. Every time we played back a scene, it looked *fine* — but not *impactful*. Not fun. Not emotional. Not memorable. And worst of all — **we couldn’t figure out why**. The visuals were there. The music was there. The voices, lighting, movement — all functional. But it felt... dead. Maybe it was because we’d imagined something greater in our heads. Maybe it was just too safe, too slow. Whatever the reason, it didn’t hit the way we wanted. It just wasn’t good enough. # But we delivered it anyway. The deadline came. We exported the teaser and showed it around: * Some local game publishers * A few local studios * Friends and fellow devs at physical gatherings The reactions were okay: >“Looks good for a first project.” >“Hey, this is pretty solid for a first game.” >“Oh, you made this? That’s impressive.” But deep down, we were crushed. We didn’t want to be complimented *as first-timers*. We didn’t want people to say, “Great *for a student project*.” We just wanted people to say: >“This looks like a good game.” Not “good enough.” Not “promising.” Just **good**. And we knew, in our bones, that this teaser didn’t reflect the soul of the game we were building, or at least, we wanted to build. # So we asked for more time. We sat down with our execs again and told them honestly: >“We’re not satisfied. We don’t think this trailer represents the game — or us. We want to delay the Steam page launch.” To our surprise, they agreed immediately. At that point, they had already started believing in the game’s potential — not just because of the teaser, but because of the way the project had recovered from failure after failure. So they gave us two more months. No pressure. Just finish it the right way. And this time, we did. We kept rebuilding. We reworked assets, improved sound design, replaced placeholder voice acting with better AI-enhanced recordings, and tightened the animation pipeline. We even went back and rewrote whole parts of the teaser storyboard to fit the new tone and pacing. # And finally, a year in… We launched the *Coming Soon* page. We still think it’s not perfect. Not even close to what it *could* be with more time and polish. But we knew we had to stop hiding the game and start showing people what we were building. After a year of working in secrecy, this was our new philosophy: >**Ship the game publicly. Grow with your audience. Let people** ***see*** **the process and hold yourself accountable to them.** Now we’re no longer building *Fading Light* just for ourselves or for the company funding us. We’re building it for the people who will play it — and for the people who are watching. ***7. What We Learned on the Journey — and What’s Next for Us*** Now that *Fading Light* is public, we’re no longer stuck in the one-year deadline we gave ourselves at the start. After long talks with our team and the people supporting the project, we’ve secured more time. We now have **around two more years** to continue working on *Fading Light* — this time with a proper schedule, more structured support, and a clearer vision. Our long-term goal? Create a **10–12 hour long metroidvania** with high-quality, non-repetitive content that can stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the best in its genre. In the short term, our plan is to release a **30–40 minute demo** in the next **seven months**. Before that demo drops, we’ll be reworking or redoing a lot of things from scratch — again: * Character animations * Combat feedback and hit effects * Ragdoll physics * Lighting systems * Sound and voice design * And pretty much anything that doesn’t yet feel *right* But now we’re not polishing for the sake of perfection — we’re iterating for *immersion*. Our focus is making sure every second of the game *feels intentional*. # What we learned along the way If you’re like we were — ambitious, naive, inexperienced — and you still want to build the best possible version of the game in your head... Be prepared. It’s going to be hard. *Really* hard. You’ll learn things you didn’t even know existed. You’ll fail a lot. You’ll lose months of work and question whether anything you’re doing makes sense. And if you’re doing it without a full team, a budget, or experience — it will feel like survival mode. But if there’s even a sliver of progress... a hint of growth… If you believe there’s *something* worth chasing inside the chaos… It’s worth it. Because if you don’t give up — if you stay flexible, stay learning, and keep building — you’ll find a way. It might be messy. It might be full of bad decisions and lucky accidents. But you’ll end up somewhere real. And one day, someone might care about the thing you made. That’s what we’re chasing with *Fading Light*. And now that it’s out in the world — even just as a *Coming Soon* page — we’re more committed than ever to delivering what we promised. Thanks for reading this long-winded, ridiculous, personal, and honestly kinda cursed journey. Lastly, if you’ve read this far, thank you. Seriously — it means a lot. We’d love to know what you think about our journey and our game. 

I graduated, got rejected from 400 jobs, failed 4-5 startups, and somehow still found my path through indie games (long post but I hope it helps)

Hey guys, I wanted to quickly preface this long post: I'm not here to self promote, I just want to share my journey in case it helps or inspires anyone feeling lost (especially new grads). This past year and a half has been a rollercoaster for me, so buckle up while I tell you how I went from 400+ job rejections to helping **pay out over $250k** to gaming creators. In **May 2024**, I graduated with a CS degree from a mid-tier Canadian university with a perfect GPA and at the top of my class. I come from a household where academics were everything so I prioritized studies thinking that's all it took to be successful. After **400+ job rejections** across tech and games, I realized just how wrong I was. I had done everything "right" on paper, but the only real projects I had were a bunch of small itch.io games. I honestly felt like a complete failure. But now that I wasn't focused on studies, I went back to the one thing that's always been constant in my life - indie games. I took time to catch up on games that were rotting on my wishlist and I fell back in love with gaming after sacrificing it for so long to focus on school. That's when I decided I needed to do something in this space. I live in a small Canadian city with basically no game industry. Hardly any studios and barely even a tech scene tbh. But still, I felt determined to contribute to my local indie game ecosystem somehow, even if I didn't know where to start. So I convinced my three best friends to quit their jobs and take a year to build projects together. This was probably the worst year of my life. Our first project was an AI-powered pixel art tool, kind of like Aseprite but with "AI features". Artists hated it (for valid reasons), and after talking to a bunch of them, we shut that down quickly. Still, we thought AI could be really interesting to help indie game devs so we naively built more AI projects. Our second attempt was an [AI tool for Unity](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ve5nJfWIxk4) that could build things in-engine from prompts. We actually built a working prototype we were proud of... and then realized we made the classic indie mistake: building something in isolation without taking any feedback. When we finally showed studios, some ghosted us, some told us it didn't solve a real problem, and others bashed us for using AI in general. It was super demoralizing because truthfully, we thought we were onto something. We spent months building it only to get crushed. After that, we bounced between a few other ideas: AI for playtesting, AI for market research, AI for *anything*. If I'm being honest, it was just us desperately trying to chase a trend and disguise it as "innovation". In **December/January 2025**, things got even worse. We had a very rough co-founder breakup and suddenly went down from 4 -> 3 founders. This caused the startup at the time (IndieBuff) to get spun down. **February/March 2025** was bleak. No money, no progress, zero morale. The remaining 3 of us all come from immigrant households, so to our parents, we just looked like complete idiots wasting our degrees. I've never felt more ashamed, and we were honestly really close to giving up. In **April 2025**, we stopped forcing shitty AI ideas and started fully indulging in indie culture again. We joined game jams, played different indie titles daily, and eventually started a [small TikTok account](https://www.tiktok.com/@jestr.gg) where we highlighted cool indie games we found. None of us had done social media before, so we did it partly out of passion but also to understand why TikTok felt so hard for so many devs we talked to. To our surprise, our account was growing pretty fast. A couple vids went viral and suddenly a lot of indie devs and fellow gaming creators were reaching out. We even started consulting indies for free and doing daily content for 3-4 studios for $400/month. It wasn't anything amazing but after a year of failed tech ideas, this was our first real income - and it came entirely from supporting indies directly. By **June 2025**, we'd met a lot of short-form creators and something became increasingly obvious: gaming creators want to work with indie devs, but the collaboration ecosystem for TikTok is nowhere near as mature as Twitch or YouTube. Creators told us: \- They get ghosted constantly \- Payments are unreliable or take months \- Communication is chaotic \- Without an agent, they're basically invisible Studios told us: \- TikTok matters a lot \- Creator management is overwhelming \- YouTube/Twitch is becoming too expensive \- they *want* to work with creators, they just don't know where to start For the first time, instead of forcing AI into a non-existent problem, we listened and found very real issues on both sides. We put together a tiny website in 1-2 weeks. It was super crude but it let studios: \- Set a budget \- Set a CPM (amount to pay per thousand views) \- let creators make videos \- automatically track views \- automatically pay them We launched it on July 28th and shared it with our small Discord of \~15 creators we had befriended. Our first campaign was for a game called [LORT](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2956680/LORT/), and the results surprised everyone. The studio loved how simple it was, and creators loved the experience. So much so that they started spreading the word. We started getting more creators interested, more studios reaching out, and for the first time in over a year, things were moving *upward*. To capitalize on the momentum, we lost sleep and kept building. More features, easier onboarding, expansion into other regions - whatever we needed, we did it. I think people saw how hard we were trying, and word spread even faster about "three young guys you should talk to about games on TikTok." So where are we at now? Well, since **July 28th, 2025**: \- We've paid out over **$250,000+ USD** to gaming creators on TikTok, Reels, and Shorts \- Creators have generated over **50M+ views** for various indie games \- We now have around **200 creators** from Canada, the US, Germany, France, Australia, Brazil, Spain, and more If things continue to grow, I'll be able to take a salary in the new year. It'll be minimum wage, nothing crazy, but I would have never expected I'd be making money from something *we built*, especially after all our horrible ideas. My journey is honestly just getting started. I still lose sleep daily worrying that this could all be over tomorrow, but until then I'll keep doing my best to help indies get discovered and help creators get paid. The reason I'm posting this isn't to brag or to promote anything. I'm sharing this because I'm someone who's come to realize a very harsh truth: **I'm painfully average**. I'm not particularly talented, my grades didn't matter, I don't live in a big game city, I don't know anyone in the industry, and I had no idea what I was doing when I started. Only when I accepted that, did things finally start working. When I stopped chasing trends and started genuinely pursuing my passion - talking to indie devs, hearing their stories, playing more games and helping spread the word for free - *that's* when I accidentally stumbled into a real business. I know this isn't the most typical post for people building games, but I hope it resonates with anyone feeling lost, especially as a new grad. Don't isolate yourself, be willing to learn, and most importantly - don't give up on your passion! Happy to answer any questions about the journey so far, mistakes, pivots, or anything else Thanks for reading <3 TL;DR: Graduated with a perfect GPA but still got rejected by 400+ companies. I built and failed 4-5 AI startups but pivoted into TikTok and indie games. Made a small tool to connect creators + devs. In 4 months I paid out $250k+ to creators and generated 50M+ views for indie games. Lesson: Follow your passion, talk to more people, and don't give up.

What's going on in the world of small, local software companies?

Hello! I took a sabbatical in 2023 to focus on a different career outside of tech, intended to take a break for about 6 months but things have been going well enough that it turned into 2 years and counting. Anyway, I was thinking about dipping my toe back into the industry next year. I don't really want to work at a FAANG company, and I don't really need huge TC. I'm pretty content to work at a smaller company that isn't doing anything in the AI realm, a company that makes "boring" software with a "boring" tech stack. Does anyone know what that world is like right now? I'd be pretty content to take an $80k/year TC package doing, say, PHP if it meant I didn't have to go through months of screenings and assignments competing with 200 other resumes. Or are even the small companies inundated with applicants, doing 4+ rounds of interviews for mid-level positions? Thanks!

Why don't data engineers test like software engineers do?

Testing is a well established discipline in software engineering, entire careers are built around ensuring code reliability. But in data engineering, testing often feels like an afterthought. Despite building complex pipelines that drive business-critical decisions, many data engineers still lack consistent testing practices. Meanwhile, software engineers lean heavily on unit tests, integration tests, and continuous testing as standard procedure. The truth is, data pipelines *are* software. And when they fail, the consequences: bad data, broken dashboards, compliance issues—can be just as serious as buggy code. I've written a some of articles where I build a dbt project and implement tests, explain why they matter, where to use them. If you're interested, check it out.

I feel like no matter what I do promotionally, no matter how much advice I follow, our game just does not get wishlists. This maybe suggests that our game is just bad, but we consistently get very positive feedback from people who see and play it. So what am I doing wrong?

The title question is obviously a bit broad and difficult to meaningfully respond to without any context, so here is some context: We're a two man team at the moment (used to be 4), we studied professional game design and then a postgrad business course with a focus on game deveopment, applied for an Incubator grant with our game pitch and were successful. The grant was specifically for business expenses, not salaries or anything like that, but allowed us to register a business and we started making our first game. Life got in the way a lot, the project took longer than we expected and all, but we have stuck with it when we can and are finally about to release our game in just a couple of weeks. Over the course of the whole project I have done hours upon hours of research into marketing indie games on low/no budget, social media promotion etc. and have tried my best as someone who doesn't (well, didn't) really use social media in a personal capacity to follow all of the guidelines, data, and advice I came across. I am very introverted and really dislike promoting myself or things I am involved with so I really had to push myself out of my comfort zone for this, but I did it because it's obviously important if we are hoping for anyone to know our game exists! So I have tried to put all the things I've learned into practice over the project. Posting (with admittedly varying degrees of consistency) on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and more recently trying Reddit, and have put so much of my time into social media based promotion while trying to manage our business admin and also get dev done. But my efforts seem mostly to be ineffective. We are stuck at 300 wishlists over all this time, and even posts that do pretty well don't seem to really convert into any or many wishlists. We have gained roughly 30 in the last month even though I've been stepping up the promotional efforts. I feel like I am doing things right on paper, and I think we have made a decent game (sometimes😅). I feel like I know what I'm doing to some degree sometimes but others it feels like nothing is really working and I get massive imposter syndrome and it can all be quite disheartening. So I feel like the obvious conclusions are: 1. Our game is actually just bad and/or not appealing. While I am certainly open to this being the case, we have put a lot of love and attention and time into our game, I feel that we are at least reasonably competent as devs, and we consistently receive very positive feedback from people who see and play the game. So it's hard to identify what the problem is. When I ask for feedback from other devs it's also all just positive and people say they think our game will do well, but this just doesn't seem to be reflected in the numbers. 2. I am just actually terrible at promotion! This is certainly highly possible and/or probable. However usually when I put so much time and energy into learning something or achieveing a particular outcome I am able to do so with at least some degree of success. Perhaps I am just fundamentally misunderstanding something important about the whole process, but I am apparently unable to identify what this might be on my own. We release in just a couple of weeks and it seems inevitable that despite my efforts it's going to sell like 12 copies and then just fade out of existence. Which is.. demoralising to say the least after everything we've put into it. I am not expecting that we will magically achieve some wild success or anything of course. My expectations are low, but I guess thought my efforts might just do a little more than they are based on feedback we have been getting, and want to learn why this is the case. I don't want to post our Steam page or anything as this is not supposed to be a promotional post. Hopefully it's okay to mention our game's name so that people can at least have a look around in order to provide feedback if they feel like it, the game is called 'Monch!'. **Edit:** apparently linking here is okay in this context so here is our [Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2079990/Monch/) page. Thank you for your time to anyone who reads through all this, and I hope everyone has a fantastic weekend. **Edit:** I did not expect to get remotely so many (or any😅) responses, thank you to everyone who has or is taking the time to respond, I hope to be able to reply to everyone if I have the time to, sorry if it takes a bit or if I miss something.

2025 Front End Job Search Experience -> Offer

**Here's my job and interview experience in 2025. 14yoe.** To not bloat the main thread, some topics will be in comments below. I was working at a fintech company and they did huge layoffs after acquiring 2 companies, nearly every engineer from our division was cut. it frikin sucks but it is what it is. 350 applications -> 18 recruiter calls -> 12 tech screens -> 3 final rounds -> 1 offer; i applied to practically every single front end position in existence. Sankey diagram here [https://i.imgur.com/pwHagNt.png](https://i.imgur.com/pwHagNt.png) Time elapsed: 3 months. I landed an offer with Marvell Semiconductor as Staff UI Architect! This position is unique- hybrid of Front End Engineering + UI/UX Design. I was tested on designing UI's for semiconductor (switches, data center etc) data visualization, as well as javascript fundamentals. I initially asked, wouldn't you want a graphic designer since bulk of the work is UI/UX design? but they said no, they could never understand the technicals of FE dev nor EE. they wanted someone who knew UI/UX design, FE, AND EE. So i was a unique fit for the role. **Stats:** \-TC: Years 1-4: 248k -> 276k -> 303k -> 330k (Includes estimate of guaranteed refreshers) \-High level role with Data Center Network UI design + some front end dev \-4 days a week, 30mi commute 10AM-2:30PM, avoids traffic, 45mins. On call for overseas folks 8-10PM. + Occasional travel overseas to india. \-highly rated on glassdoor, low layoffs compared to peers \-incredibly smart EE folks; I studied EE in college but pivoted to FE dev and now this is almost going back to my roots. Interview: \-I didn't even expect a call back, the position seemed out of my league, but behold, i did. Told recruiter my background in FE dev, not a pro UIUX designer but i know the concepts and i work with them. Said he'll get back to me and the next week they want me for a GIGA HARDCORE FINAL ROUND with 6 directors/vps/staff engineers. 6 1:1's PLUS a presentation to all 6. Oh my god I’ve never got grilled on UX design this hard in my life. One of the directors (PhD from MIT) asked me: Say aliens are invading earth. You need to design a control panel for a missile defense system that is user friendly to the operators. Button? Console; command line etc? What’s the design like, how about communication? How do u communicate to others, alarm system? Should there be a mute button? If the operator is in a hurry and needs split second decision how do u ensure the cleanest UI design? Security? Another director (ex-AWS) asked: Say u have a data center with servers and switches that transmit data, but data can be failed / low quality / bad transmission, design a gui for this. VP asked me: Say there’s a bar graph. X axis is quality and Y is number of items. Title of graph is “amount of items of various qualities over the past 24 hours”. Now, we don’t like this presentation and instead want the X axis to be time. But we still want to show the data for quality/# , so we’re adding another data point. How do we display the graph now? Staff FE dev grilled me on js fundamentals such as closures and promises. I fumbled on a few questions but managed to get most, explaining thought process. Crazy interviews, hiring manager told me as a closing thought "This position is challenging to fill" and i had that thought RACING in my head 24/7. what could it mean? Did he like me and i'm a contender? Or did it mean "this is a tough role to pass"; i asked chatGPT and it said "THIS IS A HUGE GREEN SIGNAL" i was like lolwut really? ok then! Week later recruiter emails me "I wanted to connect with you regarding feedback and next steps" im like NEXT STEPS?? GG? lets fkin goooooooooo. and boom offer. Craziest part is i couldn't prepare for these UI questions, came leftfield, i just winged it and somehow i had enough intuition to pass them. Recruiter told me many candidates were able to pass coding, but struggled/froze on the Design Mission Control System design question. I guess i have some semblance of talent in UI design? Update 12/18/25 - been 2 weeks, i've gotten the repo of the data center network ui prototype vibe coded by offshore folks and i've been tasked to improve it. So far it's all dev work. \---- Some FE coding questions I had this year: **Discord -** tech screen - failed Create a UI for a formula parser that has fields a, b, c. You can type numbers in the field and the output of the fields would be those numbers, but you can also type letters in the fields and they would add up the numbers stored. For example in field A if you type 3 the output of field A is 3. Then if you type A in field B the output of B is 3. In field C if you type in AB you get 6 (3+3) the reqs were so ambiguous so it took me awhile to understand the problem. NO AI, write on own IDE with screenshare. **Crunchyroll** \- tech screen - passed Create a react app that renders a collection of anime titles and its image, from json data; for(var i=0; i<5; i++) setTimeOut console.log(i) "trick" question whats the output and why? **Crunchyroll -** final coding round - failed Polyfill the "getElementsByClassName" function. Aced system design though, the interviewer was impressed. **Walmart -** tech screen - ghosted Write a "deepclone" function that copies an object with variable depth and contains anything, including other objects, arrays etc. **Oracle -** tech screen - failed (passed question but they chose another candidate with more backend exp) Create a react app that displays a credit card, with buttons to switch which cc to view, cc data comes from json. Clicking on cc will replace the text with X's- X's correspond to how many words there are, so FIRST LASTNAME will be XXXX XXXX. **Anduril -** tech screen - failed You know in your IDE the directory structure, with folders and files? Given a pic/mock of that, Build it. **Amazon -** https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/1iudddy/rainforest_loop_experience_frontend_l5_12_yoe/ \--- Closing thought: It's rough out there for Front End devs. There are fewer positions than before, but way more AI/ML positions. However, FE dev compensation is still competitive, u just needa know so much. I'm not incredibly smart or talented, most other engineers are more brilliant than I. The biggest source of my success is the resilience to failure. The amount of rejections and failures is so high but every time, i write down what went wrong, study it, and gain knowledge, so over time every failure builds up to more and more knowledge. *^(Note: I didn't run any of this thru AI.)*

(meta) Let's talk about rule 3: No General Career Advice

It seems like many interesting and highly relevant to SWE folks posts seem to be deleted via Rule 3. The examples listed in the sidebar are: >No general career advice, including "should I take company/role X or Y", questions about hot markets, equity, salary, FAANG, job titles, interview questions, or negotiations. and >Any career advice thread must contain questions and/or discussions that notably benefit from the participation of experienced developers. Career advice threads may be removed at the moderators discretion based on response to the thread." >General rule of thumb: If the advice you are giving (or seeking) could apply to a “Senior Chemical Engineer”, it’s not appropriate for this sub. However it seems like this rule gets applied far too broadly in this sub. It feels like what it actually is interpreted to be is, "if answers might apply to other people in other industries, it's probably a Rule 3 violation." For example: [https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1icxkmr/is\_being\_the\_wildcard\_developer\_a\_good\_or\_bad/](https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1icxkmr/is_being_the_wildcard_developer_a_good_or_bad/) was deleted this way recently. It was one of the more interesting and applicable to SWE folks I've seen here but because it tangentially is relevant to other fields, it was deleted. Responses here absolutely benefit from the participation of experienced developers, as called out by the sidebar. What I'd like to see is a lessening of how broadly Rule3 is applied. I struggle to understand why the above was deleted but of the [top posts](https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/top/?t=year) from the last year, so many of those are still present. Of the last year top 10: * [https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1g0m8mb/be\_aware\_of\_the\_upcoming\_amazon\_management/](https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1g0m8mb/be_aware_of_the_upcoming_amazon_management/) \-- Amazon has many non-tech managers and this is far more than tech-specific * [https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1b89gqf/the\_cto\_of\_my\_company\_challenged\_all\_engineering/](https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1b89gqf/the_cto_of_my_company_challenged_all_engineering/) \-- this applies to all managers. As someone who was a different engineer type before being a dev, the same root problem applies to all managers - many managers exist who have NO idea what their team does and cannot do even the most basic of job tasks. * [https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1gz9ksj/my\_senior\_engineer\_interview\_experiences/](https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1gz9ksj/my_senior_engineer_interview_experiences/) \-- this is just blatantly an interview question/experience Rule3 violation * [https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1gtoe56/after\_5\_years\_of\_working\_in\_tech\_ive\_surmised/](https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1gtoe56/after_5_years_of_working_in_tech_ive_surmised/) \-- this is the case in most engineering disciplines * [https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1fic0db/amazon\_moving\_to\_five\_days\_a\_week\_inoffice/](https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1fic0db/amazon_moving_to_five_days_a_week_inoffice/) \-- this applies to all amazon employees. FAANG is also explicitly called out as a Rule3 violation * [https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1g6j7vi/overwhelmed\_at\_new\_faang\_job/](https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1g6j7vi/overwhelmed_at_new_faang_job/) \-- most of the comments/discussion apply to anyone joining a new job and overwhelmed. FAANG is also explicitly called out as a Rule3 violation So of the top 10 posts in the last year, 6 of them seem to be Rule 3 violations as well (but not deleted). As someone who was a different engineer in my first career (though not a chemical engineer, as the sidebar lists), all those threads apply just as well to my prior engineering discipline. And by the definition of Rule3 seems they should have been deleted. This is just an example of the inconsistency in how it's applied. An additional and even more fundamental problem with how Rule 3 is applied is that the further you go in your career, the less specific to "tech" and the more intermingled tech/people/processes are for the types of questions/discussions you have. And these are the types of discussions which get deleted with some regularity here. The impact here is it feels like r/ExperiencedDevs is more like r/MidlevelDevs because essentially everything in the staff+ category and much of the senior+ category has a lot of overlap with other engineering disciplines and end up deleted. The specific changes I want to see: 1. lessen enforcement of Rule 3 when it's pretty clearly a discussion that is beneficial and related to SWEs. I would not be in favor of deleting any of the above, for example, even though I believe they are current Rule 3 violations. Because even though the advice is basically generic engineering advice, it's still beneficial for devs. 2. Remove the "general rule of thumb" section from the sidebar. 3. Clarify somewhere what this means: "notably benefit from the participation of experienced developers" because most of the Rule 3 violations I comment in seem to fully fit this. So either remove this text entirely or define more what this means.

Two offers, how much does tech stack matter?

Company A: 95k TC, fully in person working with Python, AWS, dockers, K8s. 25 minute commute Company B: 100k TC, fully remote, Java 21 + spring and AWS (some migration from on-premises) I would like the remote offer but I wonder if I’d be hurting myself long term taking that. K8s seems harder to learn alone and so many postings have it listed. End goal is to work remote. How easy is it to switch from Java enterprise dev later? The Java market seems very saturated… thoughts?

Amazon vs DoorDash New Grad

I recently received an offer from DoorDash and Amazon (AWS) for new grad. Amazon: - AWS, Team TBD - Location: Seattle - TC: ~$175k first year DoorDash - Team TBD, I give preferences later - Location: SF - TC: ~$200k first year Any advice on how career advancement/growth, job security, culture, etc. looks like at both companies would be great. I haven't heard the best things about WLB for both but it would be interesting to compare the two. I do not have info on what teams I would be joining at either company at the moment. Thank you!

How common is it for managers to act more like secretaries?

In my organization, the engineering managers function more like secretaries. They book meetings, handle logistical issues, conduct initial interviews with new hires (nothing technical), and set our salaries. The managers I’ve had have never had a good idea of what I’m actually doing. They don’t know much about the product and have probably never looked at the code. In my experience, whenever they try to make decisions on their own, things tend to go awry. Is this common? I feel like it would be much better to actively encourage engineers within the teams to take on managerial roles while still doing some of the team’s actual work. But about 4 out of 5 manager hires in my company come from outside. Maybe it’s a Sweden thing.

How are people over 50 finding it changing jobs?

I moved country so had to take a step back in my career, UK (outside London I mean) had much less options and salary than New York. Have a reasonable role but probably have to change roles in a few years and wondering how those over 50 find that process?

From My First ETL Project to Landing a Data Engineering Role: Lessons Learned and Next Steps

Hello r/dataengineering community! I've recently ventured into data engineering and completed my inaugural ETL pipeline project. The project involved: * **Data Source:** NYC Taxi Data * **Orchestration:** Airflow * **Storage:** PostgreSQL * **Querying:** BigQuery * **Containerization:** Docker Compose This experience has been incredibly educational, but I'm aware there's ample room for growth. For those seasoned in data engineering: * What do you wish you had known when you started? * Which areas or skills should I prioritize next to advance my career? I've documented the project's details in a video and would appreciate any feedback or suggestions: [Project Walkthrough Video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpYZuoNGJQ4) Thank you all for your guidance and support!

Got a 100% Salary Raise Overnight. Now I Have to Lead Data Engineering. Am I Preparing Right?

Hey everyone, I need some advice on a big career shift that just landed on me. I’ve been working at the same company for almost 20 years. Started here at 20, small town, small company, great culture. I’m a traditional data-warehousing person — SQL, ETL, Informatica, DataStage, ODI, PL/SQL, that whole world. My role is Senior Data Engineer, but I talk directly to the CIO because it’s that kind of company. They trust me, I know everyone, and the work-life balance has always been great (never more than 8 hours a day). Recently we acquired another company whose entire data stack is modern cloud: Snowflake, AWS, Git, CI/CD, onboarding systems to the cloud, etc. While I was having lunch, the CIO came to me and basically said: “You’re leading the new cloud data engineering area. Snowflake, AWS, CI/CD. We trust you. You’ll do great. Here’s a 100% salary increase.” No negotiation. Just: This is yours now. He promised the workload won’t be crazy — maybe a few 9–10 hour days in the first six months, then stable again. And he genuinely believes I’m the best person to take this forward. I’m excited but also aware that the tech jump is huge. I want to prepare properly, and the CIO can’t really help with technical questions right now because it’s all new to him too. My plan so far: Learn Snowflake deeply (warehousing concepts + Snowflake specifics) Then study for AWS certifications — maybe Developer Associate or Solutions Architect Associate, so I have a structure to learn. Not necessarily do the certs. Learn modern practices: Git, CI/CD (GitHub Actions, AWS CodePipeline, etc.) My question: Is this the right approach? If you were in my shoes, how would you prepare for leading a modern cloud data engineering function? Any advice from people who moved from traditional ETL into cloud data engineering would be appreciated.

Is the dream of moving to the US for big tech dead?

28M. 5 YOE. I work for an American company while living in Canada. When I joined it wasn’t terribly uncommon for them to do TN Visa’s if you went from Junior -> Senior internally. Fast forward to today, they slashed all salaries, never do relocations and there’s lots of immigration uncertainty in the US. I now want to jump ship but am nervous about the market. How hard is it to get a role/relocate to the US (Seattle, SF, Austin, NY) with 5 YOE?

Got lowballed and nerfed in salary talks

I’m a data engineer in Paris with 1.5~2 yoe. Asked for 53–55k, got offered 46k. I said “I can do 50k,” and they accepted instantly. Feels like I got baited and nerfed. Haven’t signed yet. How can I push back or get a raise without losing the offer?

Developing games at Tencent - 02

Part 01 - [https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1mhf7om/developing\_games\_at\_tencent\_01/](https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1mhf7om/developing_games_at_tencent_01/) \-------------------------------- I honestly didn’t expect my first post to get this much attention. To be fair, a lot of what I wrote last time was me just talking off the top of my head, then turning it into text and translating it to English. So some parts weren’t very precise, hope you don’t mind. And I’m just a regular developer, not someone with access to all the big-picture data. Most of what I say is based on my own impressions and experience. For this second post, I want to share a few other thoughts. A lot of people asked me about foreigners working in China, especially in game development. I’d say yes, there are definitely opportunities. In my company and department, we have quite a few foreign colleagues. They work in English, we work alongside them just fine. But if you’ve worked in game dev for a while, you know that many key problems require frequent, intense communication. If you’re not fluent in the language, it’s really hard to keep up with that kind of fast, back-and-forth problem-solving. That’s probably one reason why it can be tough for foreigners to fully take part in the more core, high-frequency parts of development. I think it’s the same story in Japan or any non-English-speaking country. As for English levels in Chinese studios: day-to-day conversations are of course in Chinese, since almost everyone’s Chinese. But the actual work content, like code, is in English. A lot of tools and software are in English too, even if there are Chinese versions. Technical folks like programmers usually read English pretty well, but most people aren’t good at speaking or writing it. Honestly, even this post of mine is translated with AI. In code comments, some devs write in English, some in Chinese, and some just throw in pinyin words if they’re not confident in English. It’s not always easy to read. From what I’ve seen, designers and programmers usually have the best English, while older artists often know only basic terms. If you’re an artist in China and your English is good, you’ll stand out a lot. Now, about the bigger picture in China. The reality is, most people here aren’t that wealthy yet. The country is developing fast, but compared to Japan, Korea, Europe, or North America, our GDP per capita is still much lower. That shapes a lot of things. For example, in my last post I mentioned why we work so much. A big part of it is just the sheer number of people and the intense competition. The economy’s growth has slowed down a little in recent years. In China's mainstream culture, there is still controversy over the rationality of entertainment through video games. Perhaps East Asian culture is not one that agrees that people need entertainment. Some people were surprised that salaries in Chinese game companies can be higher than in Europe. If you’re talking about Tencent specifically, yeah, the pay can be good because it’s the biggest private internet company in China. But here’s the catch: the benefits and work-life policies don’t really match the salary level. Two examples: * New hires only get 5 days of paid vacation a year. After 3–5 years, it goes up to 10 days. In Europe, I hear you can get over a month off. * Wedding leave is only 3 days where Tencent is based, in Guangdong. So if you get married while working here, you only get 3 days off. Pretty crazy, right? We often envy European colleagues for their vacation policies. So if you compare salary to working hours, our hourly rate isn’t that high. But on the flip side, the cost of living in China is much lower than in Europe, so you can actually live more comfortably here on the same income.For example, you can order a delivery online, and it can arrive the next day – very convenient. There’s also something I call the “engineer dividend.” China’s education system produces tons of strong STEM graduates, really skilled engineers. But because there are so many of them, competition is brutal and wages are relatively low compared to their skill level. Companies like Tencent can hire a lot of great engineers at a lower cost. If a game hits big, Tencent captures that value. It’s not just Tencent, companies like ByteDance with TikTok and many other Chinese apps are built on this same model: lots of hardworking engineers grinding for relatively low pay compared to Silicon Valley standards. About mobile games: from a technical perspective, making mobile games isn’t easier than AAA. There are tough challenges like performance optimization, network sync, and plenty of other tricky problems. But we all know that tech is only one part of making a game. Whether a game is fun or not doesn’t always depend on the technology behind it. And finally, you can’t really talk about Chinese games without mentioning government regulation. The Chinese government has strict control over all cultural products: books, movies, magazines, and yes, games too. Especially in recent years, for reasons most people know, the rules have tightened. The government can block new games from launching, cut off distribution channels, even shape public opinion in ways that affect the industry. It’s a real risk for companies. That’s why Tencent and other studios are pushing more and more towards overseas markets, and the government actually encourages that — the idea is, “Go make money from foreign players.”

Company getting acquihired. What should I expect as a tech lead?

Our small (-25 person) startup is getting acquired by a much larger late stage startup in a similar space. We’re a strategic acquisition as we focus on a smaller but growing niche. I lead the technical side of a product that is core to the value proposition of the company and I am identified as a key person for integration into the acquirer. Being at the acquiring company in a former role, I saw that the exec team of the acquired usually gets Director/VP titles, but what happens to the ICs? I’m currently making below market rate and would probably fetch 1.3-1.5x my salary if I were to go for roles at larger companies. Should I expect anything beyond a salary bump (maybe not to 1.5x)? Maybe a signing bonus conditional on staying for a year, etc.? Trying to understand what a “fair” offer would be. “Just” getting another normal employment contract doesn’t seem very appealing to me, and I’d almost rather start my own company in the same space if I felt the offer wasn’t very good.

What mistakes did you make in your career and what can we learn from them.

Mistakes in your data engineering career and what can we learn from them. Confessions are welcome. Give newbie’s like us a chance to learn from your valuable experiences.

After the publisher expressed intent to sign, the artist I had worked with for six months no longer wished to continue.

I don’t want to use an overly dramatic title, but this is what just happened. The artist and I have been worked remotely. While building the core gameplay loop for our card game, he sometimes had to work overtime at his day job and couldn’t contribute for a week at a time, but fortunately we were always able to keep moving forward. We originally planned to finish the prototype in September, but it was delayed until December. Thankfully, the prototype turned out well, and the feedback from friends who playtested it was very positive. I pitched the game to four publishers. Three replied, all saying the prototype was good: one said they would discuss internally and call me in a few days, another wanted to see the next demo, and the third said they would talk with me the next day. Since they also run incubator programs, they wanted to discuss whether I’d be willing to work on-site at an incubator. I excitedly shared all of this with the artist and told him about the incubator opportunity. but here’s the issue. The artist simply said he couldn’t do any on-site work. Confused, I asked whether an incubator, or even me paying him a salary equal to his current job. The answer was no. He then sent a long message explaining his position, almost like a final conclusion. In short, he felt the game wasn’t good enough yet, that working on an indie game would damage his resume, and that money couldn’t make up for the resume gap. He wants to continue working at established companies, and believes that any gap in his employment, given the current market, would make it very hard for him to find another job. That reasoning is understandable, I can’t really argue with it. I’m now reconsidering whether it’s possible to finish the game entirely through remote collaboration. But I have two concerns. First, I can’t be sure remote work will be efficient. Second, the long message the artist sent really unsettled me. I’m worried there’s now a gap in trust and confidence between us. He may not truly believe in the project, and that could mean he won’t be able to stick with it until the game is finished. That would be fatal. Since this just happened, I’ve chosen to withhold details. There’s no outcome yet. # Edit: What surprised me the most was that everyone was suggesting I replace the artist, but my gut feeling tells me that changing the artist is not a good idea. My original post was only meant to discuss the efficiency and feasibility of remote collaboration. I’m also glad that most people were polite and didn’t immediately accuse me or make assumptions about me. I just had a pleasant conversation with the artist. I still wanted to keep working with him, and he agreed to continue collaborating remotely. The artist said that because the work is remote and he has a full-time job, he can’t provide a large workload or rush work, and I fully accepted that. This artist will be responsible for maintaining a consistent art style, reviewing the quality of outsourced work, and designing character concepts (which I think is similar to the role of a concept artist). I will look for outsourcing for card illustrations and visual effects. I hope we can work together all the way through to the completion of the project. Additionally, that incubator didn’t sound very good. Especially when I heard “if we damage the incubator’s facilities, we have to compensate,” I felt that publisher was really underestimating me, so I declined.

Are platforms like Databricks and Snowflake making data engineers less technical?

There's a lot of talk about how AI is making engineers "dumber" because it is an easy button to incorrectly solving a lot of your engineering woes. Back at the beginning of my career when we were doing Java MapReduce, Hadoop, Linux, and hdfs, my job felt like I had to write 1000 lines of code for a simple GROUP BY query. I felt smart. I felt like I was taming the beast of big data. Nowadays, everything feels like it "magically" happens and engineers have less of a reason to care what is actually happening underneath the hood. Some examples: * Spark magically handles skew with adaptive query execution * Iceberg magically handles file compaction * Snowflake and Delta handle partitioning with micro partitions and liquid clustering now With all of these fast and magical tools in are arsenal, is being a deeply technical data engineer becoming slowly overrated?

How do senior data engineers view junior engineers using LLMs?

At work, I'm encouraged to use LLMs, and I genuinely find them game changing. Tasks that used to take hours, like writing complex regex, setting up tricky data cleaning queries in SQL, or scaffolding Python scripts, now take way less time. I can prompt an LLM, get something 80% of the way there, and then refine it to fit the exact need. It’s massively boosted my productivity. That said, I sometimes worry I’m not building the same depth of understanding I would if I were digging through docs or troubleshooting syntax from scratch. But with the pace and volume of work I’m expected to handle, using LLMs feels necessary. As I think about the next step in my career, I’m curious: how do senior data engineers view this approach? Is leveraging LLMs seen as smart and efficient, or does it raise concerns about foundational knowledge and long-term growth? Would love to hear your thoughts, especially from those who mentor or manage junior engineers.

US job search 2025 results

Currently Senior DE at medium size global e-commerce tech company, looking for new job. Prepped for like 2 months Jan and Feb, and then started applying and interviewing. Here are the numbers: Total apps: 107. 6 companies reached out for at least a phone screen. 5.6% conversion ratio. The 6 companies where the following: |Company|Role|Interviews| |:-|:-|:-| |Meta|Data Engineer|HR and then LC tech screening. Rejected after screening| |Amazon|Data Engineer 1|Take home tech screening then LC type tech screening. Rejected after second screening| |Root|Senior Data Engineer|HR then HM. Got rejected after HM| |Kin|Senior Data Engineer|Only HR, got rejected after.| |Clipboard Health|Data Engineer|Online take home screening, fairly easy but got rejected after.| |Disney Streaming|Senior Data Engineer|Passed HR and HM interviews. Declined technical screening loop.| At the end of the day, my current company offered me a good package to stay as well as a team change to a more architecture type role. Considering my current role salary is decent and fully remote, declined Disneys loop since I was going to be making the same while having to move to work on site in a HCOL city. PS. Im a US Citizen.

Databricks free edition!

Databricks announced free editiin for learning and developing which I think is great but it may reduce databricks consultant/engineers' salaries with market being flooded by newly trained engineers...i think informatica did the same many years ago and I remember there was a large pool of informatica engineers but less jobs...what do you think guys?

Analyzed 14K Data Engineer H-1B applications from FY2023 - here's what the data shows about salaries, employers, and locations

I analyzed 13,996 Data Engineer and related H-1B applications from FY2023 LCA data. Some findings that might be useful for salary benchmarking or job hunting: TL;DR \- Median salary: $120K (range: $110K entry → $150K principal) \- Amazon dominates hiring (784+ apps) \- Texas has most volume; California pays highest \- 98% approval rate - strong occupation for H-1B One of the insights: Highest paying companies (having a least 10 applications) \- Credit karma ($242k) \- TikTok ($204k) \- Meta ($192-199k) \- Netflix ($193k) \- Spotify ($190k) Full analysis + charts: [https://app.verbagpt.com/shared/CHtPhwUSwtvCedMV0-pjKEbyQsNMikOs](https://app.verbagpt.com/shared/CHtPhwUSwtvCedMV0-pjKEbyQsNMikOs) **\*\*EDIT/NEW\*\*** I just loaded/analyzed FY24 data. Here is the full analysis: [https://app.verbagpt.com/shared/M1OQKJQ3mg3mFgcgCNYlMIjJibsHhitU](https://app.verbagpt.com/shared/M1OQKJQ3mg3mFgcgCNYlMIjJibsHhitU) \*Edit\*: This data represents applications/intent to sponsor, not actual hires. See comment below by r/Watchguyraffle1

IT hiring and salary trends in Europe (18'000 jobs, 68'000 surveys)

In the last few months, we analyzed over 18'000 IT openings and gathered insights from 68'000 tech professionals across Europe. Our **European Transparent IT Market Report 2024** covers salaries, industry trends, remote work, and the impact of AI. No paywalls, no restrictions - just a raw PDF. Read the full report here: [https://static.devitjobs.com/market-reports/European-Transparent-IT-Job-Market-Report-2024.pdf](https://static.devitjobs.com/market-reports/European-Transparent-IT-Job-Market-Report-2024.pdf)

I made a chart to de-risk gamedev

I made a chart to compare **copies sold** with **time spent** on gamedev in order to obtain a **given annual salary.** (Inspired by XKCD's "Is It Worth the Time?") It's customizable so you can enter in how much you plan to sell your game for and what your profit margins are. Gamedev is only risky if you can't afford to fail, and knowing what you need to achieve before you start is a strong step in the right direction of making wise gamedev decisions. To customize it, choose File > Make a Copy and enter in your own Game Cost and Profit Margin [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LEPf71MaNkSNS2B0q1teu4V0dnijiEIj08ewAhAAFSU/edit?usp=sharing](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LEPf71MaNkSNS2B0q1teu4V0dnijiEIj08ewAhAAFSU/edit?usp=sharing) I hope this helps!

State of the Games Industry and Job Market in 2025

Hey all, I recently wrote a post [reflecting on the last 5 years](https://kaiwueest.com/insights/layoffs/) in regards to the economy and all the hiring and firing that happened because of it, starting with COVID all the way to today. I've looked at different sources and just wanted to share some numbers I've come across here with you. According to Amir Savat, the industry is on track to **shed 40'000 roles since 2022 by the end of this year.** [\[1\]](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/amirsatvat_2025-games-layoffs-forecast-42225-6328-activity-7320607851230420994-coqh?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAxzSucB9Xh2rSTniFLco0yOBTZhwKbi_8c) These are his recorded layoff numbers: * 2022: 8'500 * 2023: 10'500 * 2024: 15'631 * 2025: 6'328 (Projected) However, the important data point is that the open roles we are expecting to have this year industry-wide will exceed the layoffs. Annually that's been about **13'500**, a number that has stayed somewhat constant between 10k - 15k, and with turnover included it rises to about 20k. [\[2\]](https://venturebeat.com/games/how-amir-satvat-finds-jobs-for-thousands-of-game-industry-people-gdc-talk/) That, even on its own, is good news because it means we're stabilizing and recovering. But to quote Rob Fahey: The big question isn’t whether the jobs that went away will come back – they will – but *where* and in *what* form they'll come back. And to look at that I'd like to use Ben Pielstick's and Rich Vogel's insights to describe this shift. [\[3\]](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/game-industry-job-market-shifts-20242025-ben-pielstick-vf5ue/) [\[4\]](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/observations-from-gdc-2025-rich-vogel-tdn6c/) To start, experimental, risky and niche stuff like VR/AR development got absolutely destroyed. Platform wise, most open positions are now in PC, followed by mobile, followed by console game development. As you'd expect, with safe games and safe monetization models. On a studio level, AAA saw decreases in headcounts, while indie and AA made gains. Outsourcing also continues to increase across the board, with large studios becoming hesitant to build up every pipeline in house. It may explain why Art, QA and Narrative where the hardest hit disciplines. Lastly, regions also experienced differences in job losses and gains. North America, the most expensive labor market, saw the largest losses followed by western Europe. And it's also where the job growth is the slowest. Meanwhile, lower-cost regions like eastern Europe, Asia, Brazil and India are experiencing that growth as jobs are moved and entire new studios are being formed there. It's a sad reality, but it is what it is. It's cheaper to hire developers there, which means that a job lost over here has a high chance to end up over there. And even then, this process will take a year or two. Until then, the prospects for entry-level job seekers will remain very tough, and our salaries won't make us jump in joy. The political uncertainty, ranging from trade wars to actual wars, does us no favors here either. And yet, here we are, and many of us will power through it and look back in a couple years, from wherever that may be. Anyways, those were my 2 cents. I'm not a subject matter expert and just riding the waves like most of you, but if you have any insights or anecdotes to share I think we'd all be happy to read and discuss them.

I am losing faith in my new artist after previously getting scammed, I'm losing faith.

For context, I've been working on a RPG game for 7 years now (longer unnoficially), this is a world I've escaped in since I was a child and is a labor of love. This game is what I'm going to leave behind because according to doctors, It's unlikely that I'm making it past the age of 45. This is all I have, this is what it means to me. Sorry for the upcoming hefty text, a big part of it is me venting cause I have no friends. I found my first artist on Deviant Art, his portfolio was polished, his art told stories and he had experience working for a chinese company that mass produced artwork. He quickly connected cause he was craving to quit his job to work on real projects with people who would appreciate his name. Fast forward, we signed a contract I showed him everything about my project, we agreed on 20,000$ which I VERY FOOLISHLY accepted to pay in advance. Side note, those were my savings, I haven't done financially well in a long time due to hardship. He started doing the work, it was amazing, but within a month he started slowing down... and the quality of his artwork was nowhere near what he started with. It went from amazing linework, to something a beginner would draw in illustrator it made no sense. When I told him that won't work, he asked for more money. He said my expectations were too high (which I never hid from the start), that my game was too much work and he would only continue if I paid another 20,000... that was a month in and he didn't deliver enough work to get that money's worth yet, even. So yeah, I realized I was getting pushed around, getting scammed at that point too. He started gazlighting me and would use nasty personal attacks when I tried to make things right, wished I would shut up and die... then he blocked me everywhere until I threatened to sue... but he's in Thailand and yeah, that just got more complicated cause after that he ghosted me. That was an expensive lesson, it demoralized me for an entire year - I barely touched my project during that time. Then I dug myself out of my hole and knew I'm betraying myself if I don't keep going. I went out and hunted for another artist, this time much more dilligently, I went as far as talk to the people who hired them before to see how that went. Looked at their social media, demanded an interview, and so on. I've learned my lesson. Then I find my new (current) artist, he has a good reputation, he's super pleasant to speak with, he's connected with his art, he has a beautifully distinctive style that is very close to my vision, we immediately got along and started to discuss everything. I know I needed a full time artist at this point, or someone who can contribute several hours weekly on my game to fully skin it. Then he asked me for 1,000$... I'm like, ahead or in full? He went "full", he loved my project so much, he thought it would succeed and that it could be his break. He wanted his name on the frontlines (aka Game by ME, Artist by HIM), and I was like absolutely but you need more money... like, those are my expectations weekly. Are you sure? He kept insisting that it was, and that he'd just make money with all of his other clients (he did a lot of small jobs). We started working, and well... everything was great except that... he was being lazy about my project. Which was my fear when he insisted that 1,000$ was enough. Then brought back the conversation after a few months, he's barely done any finished artwork I could use. It was all sketches and it seemed he was struggling with consistency (like a character would have 3 holes on a belt, and suddenly no holes, etc). So I opened dialogue with him again and he had a bit of a cold response this time, he goes "well I have other jobs too I need to make money"... so I was like, wth... instead of acting up, I just offered him more money on the spot. I told him maybe even work out a weekly or monthly salary, tell me how much money you make a month and we can work up from there! Then you can focus on my project! And that wasn't enough? Now his mother died, his doctor told him he can't draw anymore (even though his social media is coming up with new art all the time...), and I don't know I just want to bash my head against the wall. Should I just fire him and cut loose on that stupid 1k, should I try to continue negotiate with this artist for a weekly/monthly salaray or a bigger flat rate? Or is this enough of a red flag to just run for the hills right now... I'm so tired. I have a massive game with fully funtional systems, on a white canvas, with no art. It makes me weep. Sorry for the heft message, probably no one reading but if you did, thank you for listening.

I analyzed 50k+ Linkdin posts to create Study Plans

Hi Folks, I've been working on study plans for the data engineering.. What I did is: first - I scraped Linkdin from Jan 2025 to Present (EU, North America and Asia) then Cleaned the data to keep only required tools/technologies stored in map \[tech\]=<number of mentions> and lastly took top 80 mentioned skiIIs and created a study plan based on that. [study plans page](https://prepare.sh/redirect/de-study-plan) The main angle here was to get an offer or increase salary/total comp and imo the best way for this was to use recent markt data rather than listing every possible Data Engineering tool. Also I made separate study plans for: * Data Engineering Foundation * Data Engineering (classic one) * Cloud Data Engineer (more cloud-native focused) Each study plan live environments so you can try the tool. E.g. if its about ClickHouse you can launch a clickhouse+any other tool in a sandbox model thx

Analytics of "An Unfinished Game" : Results of a blind Steam launch with 1000 wishlist

Hello, I’m Vinzzi, solo dev behind my first silly game called ["An Unfinished Game"](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2919990/An_Unfinished_Game/) that quietly released on Steam one month ago on June 19th. I wanted to share the results and analytics as openly as possible to give an idea to other small starting indie devs on what to expect from a Steam launch with relatively low visibility. **Wishlist :** * At launch : 1140 * Currently : 1963 (+800 since launch) * Wishlist deletions : 203 * Wishlist purchases : 118 * Conversion Rate : 5,5% How did I get 1140 wishlists for launch? About 850 came directly from the participation at the Steam Next Fest back in October last year. The remaining 300 came from natural wishlist’s addition (on average 2 per day). I honestly can't recommend enough participating in a Steam Next Fest, it's free visibility at the simple cost of making a free demo version. **Sales and revenue :** * The game was sold at a price of 6,99$USD along with a 20% launch discount. * Units sold : 229 (half of which came within the first week of launch, remaining during Steam Summer Sales) * Units refunded : 14 * Gross revenue : 1350 $USD * Expected net revenue : less than 800$ USD (I have not yet received money from Steam, it should only be at the end of the month, but it’s a guesstimation of gross minus returns, chargeback, taxes, Steam 30% cut and transfer cost). Since the end of Steam Summer Sales, the sales are stagnating a bit with about 1-2 copies sold per day. **Other information :** * Median time played of 1h30 which is honestly good considering it’s about the time it takes to finish a playthrough of my game. * I did almost 0 marketing. Only shared in very few Discord servers/Subreddits. As such it was a pretty blind release. * The game is not localized, only available in English (almost all sales are from the Anglosphere/Europe). * No controller or Steam deck support which can definitely affect sales numbers (a lot of feedback from peeps wishing it had controller support). * 21 Steam reviews of the game (0 negative yippie!). So looking at a ratio of about 1 review per 10 copies sold. * 4 curators reviewed the game, once again all positive. * The free demo was played by about 900 users. **Conclusion:** Considering the game niche nature (comedic walking sim about game development), the fact it’s my first game (far from perfect), and the lack of any marketing, I’m still pretty happy of the results. It was a long journey, lots of ups and downs but I reached the goal of a finished game... or in this case “An Unfinished Game” hehe. If I can, you can too! The usual : **Don't expect a masterpiece success on your first attempt, nor should you do it for the money.** I estimate my "salary" per hour spent on the game at something like 0.5$/hour, which, spoiler alert, is really far below minimum wage. I'll end with a shame(full)less plug : If you want to play a silly 3D walking-sim joking about game developpement and the gaming industry in a midday fashion between Stanley Parable and Portal, the [Unfinished Game](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2919990/An_Unfinished_Game/) Testing Facility welcomes you! There’s lot more that I could share but I don’t want the post to be too long, so I’ll be in the comment answering questions if anyone have any, AMA! \- Vinzzi, Creator of an Unfinished Game.

Rant of the day - bad data modeling

Switched jobs recently, I'm a Lead Data Engineer. Changed from Azure to GCP. I went for more salary but leaving a great solid team, company culture was Ok. Now i have been here for a month and I thought that it was a matter of adjustment, but really ready to throw the towel. My manager is an a**hole that thinks should be completed by yesterday and building on top of a horrible Data model design they did. I know whats the problem.but they dont listen they want to keep delivering on top of this crap. Is it me or sometimes you just have to learn to let go and call it a day? I'm already looking wish me luck 😪 this is a start up we talkin about and the culture is a little bit toxic because multiple staffing companies want to keep augmenting UPDATE OCT: Went back to my old job, Lessons learned. there's something called Emotional Salary guys!!

Lead Data Engineer vs Data Architect – Which Track for Higher Salary?

Hi everyone! I have 6 years of experience in data engineering with skills in SQL, Python, and PySpark. I’ve worked on development, automation, support, and also led a team. I’m currently earning ₹28 LPA and looking for a new role with a salary between ₹40–45 LPA. I’m open to roles like Lead Data Engineer or Data Architect. Would love your suggestions on what to learn next or if you know companies hiring for such roles.

Data Engineer/ Architect --> Data Strategist --> Director of Data

I'm hoping some experienced folks can give some insight. I am a data engineer and architect who worked his way up from analytics engineer. I've built end-to-end pipelines that served data scientists, visualizations, applications, or other groups data platforms numerous times. I can do everything from the DataOps / MLOps to the actual analytics if needed (I have an academic ML background). I can also troubleshoot pipelines that see large volumes of users on the application end and my last technical role was as an architect/ reliability engineer consulting across many different sized companies. I've finally secured a more leadership-type position as the principal data strategist (I have no interest in being middle management leading technical groups). The issue is the company is in the construction sector and largely only uses Microsoft365. There is some Azure usage that is currently locked down by IT and they won't even give me read-only access. There is no one at the company who understands cloud concepts or software engineering -- the Azure env is set up from consoles, there is no versioning (like no Git let alone Yaml), and the CIO doesn't even understand containers. The engineers vibe code and if they need an application demo for a client, they'll vibe the python and use Streamlit and put it on a free public server. I'm honestly beside myself and don't know what to do about the environment in general. IT is largely incompetent when it comes to any sort of modern practices and there's a lot of nepotism so no one gets fired and if you aren't related to someone, you're shit out of luck. I'm trying to figure out what to do here. Pros: \- I have the elevated title so I feel like that raises me to a different "social level" as I find higher leaders are now wanting to engage with me on LinkedIn \- Right now I kind of have a very flexible schedule and can decide how I want to structure my day. That is very different from other roles I've been in that had mandatory standups and JIRAs and all that jazz \- This gives me time to think about pet projects. \- Adding a pro I forgot to add -- there is room for me to kind of learn this type of position (more leadership, less tech) and make mistakes. There's no one else gunning for this position (they kind of made it for me) so I have no fear of testing something out and then having it fail -- whether that's an idea, a communication style, a long term strategy map, etc. They don't know what to expect from me honestly so I have the freedom to kind of make something up. The fear is that nothing ends up being accepted as actionable due to the culture of not wanting to change processes. Cons: \- I'm paid 'ok' but nothing special. I gave up a $40k higher salary when I took this position. \- There is absolutely no one who can talk about modern software. It's all vibe coders who try to use LLMs for everything. There is absolutely no structure to the company either -- everyone is silo'ed and everyone does what they want so there's just random Python notebooks all over Sharepoint, random csv files where ever, etc \- The company is very old school so everything is Microsoft365. I can't even get a true Azure playground. if I want to develop on the cloud, I'll need to buy my own subscription. I'm forced to use a PC. \- I feel like it's going to be hard to stay current, but I do have colleagues to talk to from previous jobs who are current and intelligent. \- My day to day is extremely frustrating because no one understands software in the slightest. I'm still trying to figure out what I can even suggest to improve their data issues. There are no allies since IT is so locked down (I can't even get answers to questions from them) and their leader doesn't understand cloud or software engineering. Also no one at the company wants to change their ways in the slightest. Right now my plan is: (this is what I'm asking for feedback on) \- Try to make it here at least 2 years and use the elevated title to network -- I suck at networking though so can you give some pointers? \- use this time to grow my brand. Post to Medium, post to LinkedIn about current topics and any pet projects I can come up with. \- Take some MBA level courses as I will admit that I have no business background and if I want to try to align to business goals, I have to understand how businesses (larger businesses) work. \- Try to stay current -- this is the hard one -- I'm not sure if I should just start paying out the nose for my own cloud playground? My biggest shortcoming is never building a high volume streaming pipeline end-to-end. I understand all the tech and I've designed such pipelines for clients, but have never had to build and work in one day to day which would reveal many more things to take into consideration. To do this on my own may be $$$. I will be looking for side consulting jobs to try to stay in the game as well. \- I'm hoping that if I can stay just current enough and add in business strategy skills, I'd be a unique candidate for some high level roles? All my career people have always told me that I'm different because I'm a really intelligent person who actually has social skills (I have a lot of interesting hobbies that I can connect with others over). Or I could bounce, make $45k+ more and go back into a higher pressure, faster moving env as a Lead Data Architect/ engineer. I kind of don't want to do that bc I do need a temporary break from the startup world. If I wait and try to move toward director of data platform, I could make at least $75k more, but I guess I'm not sure what to do between now and then to make sure I could score that sort of title considering it's going to be REALLY hard to prove my strategy can create movement at this current company. I'm mostly scared of staying here and getting really far behind and never being able to get another position.

Making 100k with 5 years experience with Snowflake and Databricks

It was my first job, and I cant take it anymore. If i get let go could I find another DE job making about the same MCOL. How is the job market. I feel like I am very underpaid but salary beats no salary or should i shoot for 135k

Feeling stuck with career.

How can I break through the career stagnation I’m facing as a Senior Data Engineer with 10 years of experience—including 3 years at a hedge fund—when internal growth to a Staff role is blocked due to companies value and growth opportunities, external roles seem unexciting or risky and not competitive salary, I don’t enjoy the current team as well bcz soft politics are floating. And only thing I value my current work-life balance, and compensation. I’m married with single child living in Berlin and earning close to 100k year. I’m kind of going on circles between changing the job mindset to keep continuing the current job due to fear of AI and job market downturn. Is it right to feel this way and What would be a better way for me to step forward?

I built a free job board that uses AI to find relevant jobs

**Link:** [**https://www.filtrjobs.com/**](https://www.filtrjobs.com/) For ML roles title matching is a bad way to look for jobs. so many Data Engineering jobs are just called "Software Engineer" (e.g. airbnb does this) which makes it tough to find data engineering jobs My app ranks all job postings matching filters based on the contents of your CV and the JD to rank jobs It's **100% free. No annoying sign up emails, no auth, no paywall, no ads.** My infra costs are well within free tiers so this will remain free forever Features I added I really wanted (Under additional filters): * Top companies filter, I used salary posting info online to curate \~50 well known high paying companies * H1B sponsorship -- if a company doesn't sponsor in the posting, it is filtered out * ATS chips: helps me avoid workday postings bc theyre so annoying I've been through the job search and I know its so brutal, so feel free to DM and I'm happy to give advice on your job search P.S. the job board is only for US rn, working on expanding it to other locations

Which DE offer should I take? which tech stack will you pick?

Hey you all, I have been looking to change job as a data engineer and I got 3 offers that I have to choose from. Regardless of salary and every thing else, My concern is now just about tech stack of the offers and want to know your opinion on which tech stack do you think is best, considering on going trends in data engineering. To add context, I live in Germany and have about 2.5 full time YO and 2 years of internships in data engineerings. - Offer 1: Big Airline company - main tech stack: Databricks, Scala, Spark - Note: I will be the only data engineer in the team working with an analysts, intern and team lead. - High responsibility role and a lot of engagement needed - Offer 2: Mid size 25 YO ecommerce company - main tech stack: Azure Fabrics, dbt, python - Note: I will be the only data engineer in the team working with 3 analysts and team lead. - The want someone to migrate their old on-prem tech stack to azure Fabrics and use dbt to enable analysts - High responsibility role and a lot of engagement needed - Offer 3: Tech start up (Owned by big German auto maker) - main tech stack: AWS, python, protobufs - Note: data platform role. I will be working with 4 data engineers (2 senior) and a team lead - Medium responsibility role as there are other data engineers in the team My main back ground is close to offer 2 and 3, but I have no experience in databricks (The company ofc knows about this). I am mostly interested in offer 1 as the company is the safest in this market, but have some doubts about whether the tech stack is the best for future job changes and if it is popular in DE world. I would be glad to hear your opinions.

Is self learning enough anymore?

I currently work as a mid level data analyst. I work with healthcare/health insurance data and mainly use SQL and Tableau. I am one of those people who transitioned to DA from science. The majority of what I know was self taught. In my previous job I worked as a researcher but I taught myself python and wrote a lot of pandas code in that role. The size of the data my old lab worked with was small but with the small amount of data I had access to I was able to build some simple python dashboards and automate processes for the lab. I also spent a lot of time in that job learning SQL on the side. The python and SQL experience from my previous job allowed me to transition to my current job. I have been in my current job for two years. I am starting to think about the next step. The problem I am having is when I search for DA jobs in my area that fit my experience, I don't see a lot of jobs that offer salaries better than what I currently make. I do see analyst jobs with better salaries that want a lot of ML or DE experience. If I stay at my current job, the next jobs up the ladder are less technical roles. They are more like management/project management type roles. Who knows when those positions will ever open up. I feel like the next step might be to specialize in DE but that will require a lot of self learning on my part. And *unlike* my previous job where I was able to teach myself python and implement it on the job, therefore having experience I could put on job applications, there aren't the same opportunities here. Or at least, I don't see how I can make those opportunities. Our data isn't in the cloud. We have a contracting company who handles the backend of our DB. We don't have a DE like team in house. I don't have access to a lot of modern DE tools at work. I can't even install them on my work PC. A lot of the work would have to be done at home, during my free time, in the form of personal projects. I wonder, are personal projects enough nowadays? Or do you need job experience to be competitive for DE jobs?

From Unemployed to Data Engineer? Need Honest Advice on This Risky Move.

Hey everyone, I’ve been lurking here for a while, and this subreddit has been incredibly useful, so I wanted to reach out for some sincere advice. I’m based in the UK and come from a strong technical background—a Master’s in Mechanical Engineering—and worked my way up to a senior level in that field. Through my work, I had exposure to Python for automation and analysis, but I never formally worked in a data-related role. Due to lifestyle reasons and wanting more stability for my young family, I stepped away from that career. Since then, I’ve been unemployed for a while but have completely immersed myself in Data Engineering. It’s honestly all I’ve been eating and drinking—I’ve fallen in love with it. I’ve been teaching myself from scratch, going deep into SQL (including advanced concepts like window functions, query optimization, and performance tuning), understanding the full ETL process, and reading Fundamentals of Data Engineering by Reis & other software design style books for the correct business speak (to ensure I am conversant in the data language). I’ve also worked on end-to-end projects, taken courses on the Azure tech stack ADF etc and built an understanding of data modeling methodologies (Kimball, Inmon, Medallion Architecture). To make sure I’m covering enterprise-level knowledge, I’ve also learned about CI/CD and how it applies to data pipelines. As a personal project, I’ve built and automated my own data pipeline using sports data, which has really boosted my confidence that I can handle the responsibilities of a DE role. I feel like I have a solid grasp of Data Engineering concepts and am eager to put in whatever work is required. Here’s my dilemma: I’ve been out of work for some time, and with a young family to support, I really need to secure a reasonable salary. A significant pay cut just isn’t possible for me. A friend from a previous workplace, now in a senior position, has offered to be my reference and say I worked as a Data Engineer there. While I have the skills and knowledge to do the job, I understand this is ethically grey. My ultimate goal is to land a DE role through interviews based on my actual skills and knowledge. Given my background and the effort I’ve put in, do you think this transition is realistically possible? Has anyone here made a similar switch, and if so, how did you position yourself effectively? I’d really appreciate sincere advice. If you’re just here to pass judgment, please move along—I truly want this and am looking for guidance from those who have been through similar journeys. Thanks in advance!

Is the MS SQL stack really that special?

I can't decide if this is the usual recruiter/hiring idiocy or not. Had a recruiter reach out on LinkedIn about a position, I responded with the usual salary + remote questions. Then he asks what my experience with the MS SQL stack (SSIS, SSRS) is. I've 10+ years of experience, using literally every other RDBMS stack except MS SQL. Is all of my other experience RDBMS and big data and everything else really not that transferable? Or is this the usual "we want interviews to match the JD perfectly" BS?

Game dev compensation: what actually motivates you?

Hey folks, I’m the founder of a small 4 person indie studio. Up until now we’ve just paid everyone a flat salary, but we’re getting ready to expand the team and I’m trying to understand what actually attracts talent and keeps people motivated. I’ve been considering adding bonuses tied to milestones or revenue. The upside seems obvious when a project does well, but the flip side is rough...those systems might tank morale if a game underperforms. If you work in professional game development, how is your compensation set up? Salaries only? Profit sharing? Royalties? Milestone bonuses? What actually motivates you day-to-day? Would love to hear real experiences.

Feeling stuck as the only data engineer, unpaid overtime, no growth, and burnout creeping in

Hey everyone, I’m a data engineer with about 1 year of experience working in a 7 persons' BI team, and I’m the only data engineer there. Recently I realized I’ve been working extra hours for free. I deployed a local Git server, maintain and own the DB instance that hosts our DWH, re-implemented and redesigned Python dashboards because the old implementation was slow and useless, deployed some infrastructure for data engineering workloads, developed cli frameworks to cut-off manual work and code redundancy, and harmonized inconsistent sources to produce accurate insights (they used to just dump Excel files and DB tables into SSIS, which generated wrong numbers) all locally. Last Thursday, we got a request with a deadline on Sunday, even though Friday and Saturday are our weekend (I’m in Egypt, and my team is currently working from home to deliver it, for free). At first, I didn’t mind because I wanted to deliver and learn, but now I’m getting frustrated. I barely have time to rest, let alone learn new things that could actually help me grow (technically or financially). Unpaid overtime is normalized here, and changing companies locally won’t fix that. So I’ve started thinking about moving to Europe, but I’m not sure I’m ready for such a competitive market since everything we do is on-prem and I’ve never touched cloud platforms. Another issue: I feel like the only technical person in the office. When I talk about software design, abstraction, or maintainability, nobody really gets it. They just think I’m “going fancy,” which leaves me on-call. One time, I recommended loading all our sources into a 3rd normal form schema as a single source of truth, because the same piece of information was scattered across multiple systems and needed tracking, enforcement, and auditing before hitting our Kimball DWH. They looked at me like I was a nerd trying to create extra work. I’m honestly feeling trapped. Should I keep grinding, or start planning my exit to a better environment (like Europe or remote)? Any advice from people who’ve been through this? Edit: The management decided to compensate us with additional annual leave, and I found out that our senior engineer has been negotiating with management for a salary raise for the entire department after these rough days. I think there’s something I’m missing.

35k euro in Paris as a data engineer is it good or bad?

I have 3 years of experience before Masters and graduated from a FRENCH B SCHOOL. Got an offer of 35k location Paris. Is it according to market standards? How much salary I should ask. What's the salary of an entry level Software Engineer/Data Engineer in Paris

Post-mortem: Tiny Witch - The Game That Didn’t Give Up on Me

Hey everyone! How’s it going? My name is Ramon Barbosa, and I’m the founder of a small indie studio here in Brazil, South America. Alongside me are my wife, Suellen Fernandes, developer Luis Patrocínio, and a great friend, Skullbrow, who helped create the initial artwork for my games. My journey in game development began in 2015, during my spare time while working as a developer. To fund the studio, I invested 30% of my salary since my specialty is programming and I needed support in other areas such as game design, art, and sound design. After an eight-hour workday at my main job, I would spend another four hours creating games. In 2021, I published my first game. At the end of that same year, in December 2021, I released the second one, which unfortunately didn’t achieve the expected results — it didn’t even reach a thousand dollars in sales on Steam. I started to think that maybe making games wasn’t for me, especially since I had been doing it for a few years and felt like I wasn’t making progress. On top of that, balancing both jobs was becoming increasingly exhausting. But since I had already started developing the demo for a third game, I decided to at least finish it. After completing the demo for *Tiny Witch*, I decided to release it on Steam Next Fest without much expectation. And that’s when everything changed. **TL;DR** * *Tiny Witch* made me continue developing games. * Participating in Wholesome Games 2022 led to a significant increase in wishlists and coverage on sites like IGN. * The demo on Steam Next Fest won over the community, with highly positive feedback. * I received funding that allowed me to hire a small team to help me finish the game. * The launch had its challenges, such as difficult balancing and criticized controls. * The game won the Google Indie Games Fund 2023 and was released on Google Play Pass. * Now, I’m working on bringing *Tiny Witch* to consoles and developing an even cozier new game. **About the Game** In *Tiny Witch*, you play as a little witch who runs a magical store in a town full of dungeon masters. The goal is to fulfill customers’ requests before they become impatient by mixing ingredients, crafting minions, and activating spells to keep up with the demand. The game combines time management and crafting mechanics, requiring agility, organization, and strategy. As the store grows, the challenges increase, but new expansion opportunities also arise. The money earned can be used to unlock equipment and decorations, while different stages — such as forest, cave, and desert — bring various requests and customer types. All of this comes with a touch of magic and charming pixel art! **Game Numbers** Here are the game’s statistics: * Lifetime Steam Units: 4,160 units sold on Steam * Lifetime Retail Units: 415 activations via Steamworks * Lifetime Total Units: 4,575 units in total * Lifetime Units Returned: 561 units refunded (13.5% of Steam sales) * Lifetime Total DLC Units: 69 DLC units sold * Review Score: 71% positive (64 reviews) **Development Time:** * 6 months to develop the demo with a team of three professionals * 8 to 10 months participating in events and seeking promotional opportunities * A few additional months to secure the finishing funding * 8 months to finish the game after receiving funding These results reflect *Tiny Witch*’s initial performance in the market, highlighting both its strengths and areas for improvement in future projects. **What Went Right** **Participation in Wholesome Games 2022** This was the real turning point. When *Tiny Witch* appeared at the digital event, the impact was immediate: on the day of the broadcast, the game received 1,507 new wishlists—the highest number in a single day at that time! Additionally, participating in the event allowed for the game to be mentioned on renowned websites like IGN, bringing even more visibility to the project. **Reception of the Demo** The demo on Steam Next Fest was also essential. I wasn’t expecting much, but the community greatly embraced the game. The feedback not only praised the concept but also offered valuable suggestions. This response reignited my motivation to continue. **Interest from Publishers** After the demo’s success, several publishers reached out to discuss the game’s porting potential. On one hand, this was amazing because it meant something was compelling about the demo and the game itself. On the other hand, I won’t deny that I felt a lot of fear — the doubt about whether I could truly move forward started to weigh on me. Even so, this interest was the push I needed to keep going. **Final Funding (Finish Funding)** After a few months of negotiations, I finally secured **finished funding** for the game, along with a marketing budget. This financial support was enough to help me complete the game and release it with more content and improvements. While the money didn’t cover my expenses, it allowed me to hire people to support me during development and make it possible to finish the project. **Launch and Recognition** Despite the challenges, *Tiny Witch*’s release was the studio’s most successful to date. The recognition didn’t stop there: the game received the Google Indie Games Fund in 2023, enabling its launch on Google Play Pass. This achievement boosted the team’s morale and solidified *Tiny Witch* as the studio’s first major milestone. **Challenges of Developing Games in Brazil** Here, I’d like to give a bit of context about what it’s like to develop games in Brazil. First, English is not my native language. Of course, I study and understand how to communicate well, but I still have moments when I get stuck, which can make certain situations, like events and negotiations, more challenging. This isn’t a complaint, but a way to show the challenges that developers here face. For example, publishing a game on Steam requires a fee of 100 dollars. Although the conversion isn’t always done at the full exchange rate, the impact of that amount in Brazil is much greater: it represents almost 38% of the minimum wage. In comparison, in the United States, the same amount is about 8% of the federal minimum wage and only 3.5% in Washington state, where the minimum wage is the highest in the country. This is just one example of how costs can be heavier here, making every achievement even more special. **What Went Wrong** **Difficulties at Launch** Despite all the effort, the launch didn’t achieve the expected performance. Perhaps the fact that it was released on a Friday, with only 20,000 wishlists, contributed to this. Additionally, the game ended up being more difficult and chaotic than the audience expected. The controls were also criticized for not being as responsive as they should be for this type of game. **Burnout and Anxiety** This was one of the hardest parts. In early 2024, the intense workload — 12-hour days, split between my main job and game development — took its toll. Burnout and anxiety affected my mental health and delayed the necessary updates to address the issues reported by players. **Undetected Issues During Testing** Even with QA tests and external playtests, some problems went unnoticed, impacting the game’s initial reception. This highlighted the importance of conducting more extensive testing in different contexts. **Lessons Learned** **Keep Going, Even When It Feels Difficult** The path isn’t always easy, but each obstacle overcome brings new lessons and opens doors that once seemed unreachable. If *Tiny Witch* taught me anything, the next step might be the one that changes everything. **Work-Life Balance** Taking care of your mental health is essential. Overworking not only affects the quality of the game but also prevents you from enjoying your achievements. **Early Feedback** Releasing a demo as early as possible is a great way to gather valuable feedback. This input helps adjust development to meet players’ expectations and avoid negative surprises after launch. **Adjusting Expectations** Every developer has their journey. Comparing yourself to others can be discouraging. The best approach is to focus at your own pace and seize the opportunities that come your way. **More Comprehensive Gameplay Testing** Thorough testing is crucial, but playing the game repeatedly can make certain problems harder to notice. That’s why external testing helps identify issues that only first-time players experience. **Conclusion** If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that *Tiny Witch* didn’t give up on me — and I didn’t give up on it either. The game brought the studio’s first major achievements: media recognition, financial investment, and an international award. Now, I’m focused on porting *Tiny Witch* to consoles and continuing to improve the game within my possibilities. At the same time, I’m developing a new project to create a truly cozy experience — one that feels like sipping hot tea on a late afternoon, wrapped in a blanket, watching the sunset. Another important point is that it’s okay to take a break and reassess your plans. That doesn’t mean you won’t succeed — sometimes, you just need a little rest. Know that challenges are part of the journey. And sometimes, the next step might be the one that changes everything. See you next time!

From software developer to game dev, is it doable today ?

Hello, I’m a software developer in France, and I’ve been working for almost two years now. I have a typical French background with an engineering degree. I’m mainly focused on backend development, mostly working with Java. I’m lucky to have a real passion for game development, but I’ve put it aside for too long. Social pressure, higher salaries… but I’m tired of it, and I really want to dive into this passion. I want to grow alongside other developers, be connected with artists, game designers, etc. I’d love to hear from people who have followed a similar path. Is this kind of career shift easy? Common? If you made the switch, do you regret it? I’ve been dedicating my free time to Unreal Engine development for about a year now. I’m working on a project that’s moderately advanced, though progress is slower because I’m also handling the artistic side—3D modeling, texturing, animations… which takes more time than the development itself. But I do have something to show—could that help me? I know these times aren’t ideal for being picky, but I don’t want to work in a “work-for-hire” studio doing mobile ports or ads… I need to be creatively stimulated. In France, we have Ubisoft’s graduate program for new graduates, but it requires less than one year of professional experience. That’s unfortunate, as it seemed like an ideal entry point for me. Do you know of any other similar programs? I’m open to moving abroad, though it might be tricky since my girlfriend would need to be able to come too. Thanks for reading :)