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 …

We recently brought a new engineer (a peer) onto our team, and he exhibits some traits that I can best describe as “performative overwork.” Here are a few examples:

• Publicly making a scene first thing in the morning on Slack about how late they stayed up the previous night (or how early they got up that morning) to work.
• Frequently making references to things they were told or “insights” they gleaned from higher-ups - giving the impression that they are in the “inner sanctum” and know things the rest of us don’t.
• Reaching out via direct message to “thank” me for accomplishing a task that was assigned to me by our mutual boss, thereby trying to subtly place themself in the position of someone who has oversight over my work.

I’m pretty sure I know how to handle this. I know I need to let this wash off me like water off a duck’s back. There are a lot of difficult people in this world, and feeling as though you need to change them or they need to be corrected in order for yourself to …

10 YOE, currently leading a team of 6. This has been bothering me for a few months and I don’t have a good answer.

Two of my junior devs started using AI coding assistants heavily this year. Their output looks great. PRs are clean, tests pass, code compiles. On paper they look like they leveled up overnight.

But when I ask them questions during review, I can tell they don’t fully understand what they wrote. Last week one of them couldn’t explain why he used a particular data structure. He just said “that’s what it suggested.” The code worked fine but something about that interaction made me uncomfortable.

I’ve been reading about where the industry is going with this stuff. Came across the Open Source LLM Landscape 2.0 report from Ant Open Source and their whole thesis is that AI coding is exploding because code has “verifiable outputs.” It compiles or it doesn’t. Tests pass or fail. That’s why it’s growing …

Founder has been using vibe coding a lot. He used it to deliver a small GUI for upload management and he used it a lot for compliance purposes. Now he has thinks, because we have a synchronous Django app, that he can use Claude to improve performance by rewriting the entire thing in Rust with Axum. He says he will just test every endpoint and every parameter (also with vibe coding) to make sure the output is the same. The thing is he doesn’t even know Rust, none of our engineers do. He thinks he can just maintain the whole thing with Claude and we will eventually learn Rust. What am I supposed to do? I am the highest level engineer at our small company. This app was developed over the course of six years.

I’ve usually been an enormous advocate of adding tests to PRs and for a long time my struggle was getting my teammates to include them at all or provide reasonable coverage.

Now the pendulum has swung the other way (because of AI generated tests of course). It’s becoming common for over half the PR diff to be tests. Most of the tests are actually somewhat useful and worthwhile, but some are boilerplate-intensive, some are extraneous or unnecessary. Lately I’ve seen peers aim for 100% coverage (it seems excessive but turning down test coverage is also hard to do and who knows if it’s truly superfluous?).

The biggest challenge is it’s an enormous amount of code to review. I read The Pragmatic Programmer when I was starting out, which says to treat test code with the same standards as production code. This has been really hard to do without slamming the brakes on PRs or demanding we remove tests. And I’m no longer convinced the same heuristics around test code hold true anymore. In …

I run a Plex server for family. But “family” turned into friends, then friends of friends, then some guy my cousin works with. I started wondering who was actually using my server and if accounts were getting passed around.

Other tools show you what happened. They don’t tell you when something looks off. So I built Tracearr.

What it does

• Session tracking - who watched what, when, from where, on what device
• IP geolocation - city, region, country for every stream
• Sharing detection - five rule types:
  • Impossible travel (NYC then London 30 min later)
  • Simultaneous locations (same account, two cities, same time)
  • Device velocity (way too many IPs in a short window)
  • Concurrent streams (set limits per user)
  • Geo restrictions (block countries)
• Trust scores - users build or lose trust over time. Get alerts via Discord, ntfy, webhooks
• Stream map - see where your streams are coming from on a map, live or historical
• Multi-server - Plex, Jellyfin, Emby all in one place
• Kill …