Something’s been bugging me about how new devs and I need to talk about it. We’re at this weird inflection point in software development. Every junior dev I talk to has Copilot or Claude or GPT running 24/7. They’re shipping code faster than ever. But when I dig deeper into their understanding of what they’re shipping? That’s where things get concerning. Sure, the code works, but ask why it works that way instead of another way? Crickets. Ask about edge cases? Blank stares. The foundational knowledge that used to come from struggling through problems is just… missing. We’re trading deep understanding for quick fixes, and while it feels great in the moment, we’re going to pay for this later.
We’re a somewhat big player in a niche industry that manufactures for a large industry. Yearly profits are in the hundreds of millions of dollars, market cap is a few billion, so low end of mid cap stocks. I don’t want to doxx myself, but think of something like producing drills for oil rigs and you won’t be far off.
We have about 50 software developers across three time zones (7 or 8 scrum teams) and a pretty high requirement for correctness and very little emphasis on rapid delivery. It’s okay if it takes more time, as long as can plan around it, so we end up with estimates like 2-3 months for things that could have an MVP in under a month (in fact, we often build an MVP during estimation), with the extra time spent testing.
So yeah, it’s a nice place to work. I very rarely stay late, and it’s never because a project is late, but because of a high severity bug in prod (e.g. a customer can’t complete a task).
Sounds nice? What type of place you work at? I’m guess not a big corp
We’re a somewhat big player in a niche industry that manufactures for a large industry. Yearly profits are in the hundreds of millions of dollars, market cap is a few billion, so low end of mid cap stocks. I don’t want to doxx myself, but think of something like producing drills for oil rigs and you won’t be far off.
We have about 50 software developers across three time zones (7 or 8 scrum teams) and a pretty high requirement for correctness and very little emphasis on rapid delivery. It’s okay if it takes more time, as long as can plan around it, so we end up with estimates like 2-3 months for things that could have an MVP in under a month (in fact, we often build an MVP during estimation), with the extra time spent testing.
So yeah, it’s a nice place to work. I very rarely stay late, and it’s never because a project is late, but because of a high severity bug in prod (e.g. a customer can’t complete a task).