In my ten years as a software engineer, I’ve discovered a bizarre trend that smooth projects often get less recognition than chaotic ones. It may be due to a perception that it must have been an easy project if it was so smooth. On the other hand, projects with multiple day follows, dramatic reverts, etc get a ton more visibility. Have others seen this on their organization?

How are your daily standups run? Yeah, some people throw in blockers here and there but it’s really just people talking about how productive they were the day before by listing their accomplishments. It’s not the time or place for that. I think stand ups should just be revised to “is there anything stopping you from during your work that the entire team needs to know”?

Is anyone else nervous about getting pushed out of tech as you age? I love software engineering and can’t imagine doing anything else, but I worry the industry won't love me back in ten or fifteen years. Is this a realistic fear, or is it just standard mid-career anxiety?

Am I overreacting or is this a completely reasonable thing to be anxious about? My company has been doing surprise layoffs with no heads-up whatsoever. You'll notice someone is just gone from Slack one day, and leadership stays completely quiet until gossip starts spreading. It's been really hard to focus, knowing anyone could be next.

What’s your take on oversized Pull Requests? Knowing that it’s the norm of AI assisted development, automation hasn’t still caught up with humans reviewing the changes.. I would and still reject overly large PRs for reasons outside of testing and fixtures.