I got fired from my first job, took down a database server with a badly written query, and was rejected from a FAANG. That all happened over the pa...
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
... and the documentation you skipped in point 3 😂 A product needs documentation for someone who will use it and doesn't have all the context that you have.
This is also painfully true... that's why I tend to start looking for a new job when this happens. There's nothing wrong with sharing experience and teaching juniors, but when the work starts to be an endless loop of meetings, I simply lose interest.
Right!
Same around here. Just crossing my fingers waiting AI to kill meetings and Scrum
Hey,
Reading this felt like looking into a mirror – especially points #2, #4, and #12.
I've been building SHALA (Supportive Help Agent and Lifeline Assistant) and working on an LLM Security Audit tool, and honestly? The gap between "code works on my machine" and "code works for real users globally" is where most of the hard lessons live.
4 (The work isn't over when you finish coding) – yes. Deployment, monitoring, user trust, security follow-ups… that's 80% of the actual job.
And #12 (Solve the problem you have today) is something I constantly have to remind myself. With LLM security especially, it's tempting to over-engineer for threats that don't exist yet. But shipping something solid now > planning for every edge case.
10 and #11 about communication problems – couldn't agree more. The worst bugs I've seen weren't about bad logic. They were about assumptions nobody wrote down.
Anyway, appreciate you sharing this. It's a good reality check for anyone who thinks 10+ years means "easy mode." Would love to connect if you're open to chatting about building ambitious, global-scale products – lessons like these are gold for teams trying to move fast without breaking everything.
Cheers,
Jack
That's when the job starts :)
Totally agree! And thinking to Agile Principle... you reported many of them here... this experience is the one every senior coder face during their experience...
May be the one missing is: Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount
of work not done--is essential.
The more code, the more problems :P
Great read. These hard truths really resonate. I especially agree with the emphasis on showing progress over perfect estimates, the importance of testing and deployment, and how communication often makes or breaks a project. As you said, senior roles bring more meetings, so protecting focused coding time and automating what machines can do are practical ways to stay effective. Thanks for sharing such honest, actionable lessons.
Very true. Unless nobody is going to use it. Apart from yourself, that is. ;-)
Good point! Well, in that case, we are our own end user and main dev team :)
love it. short and useful.
Thanks :)
So damn right!
Thanks! :P
Totally resonate. and especially #12, 100%
Glad to know I'm not alone with #12 :)
the visibility one is the hardest to internalize. shipped a clean refactor with zero communication, watched a messier feature with daily updates get more org credit. the work and the signal about the work are separate jobs.