Experienced Devs Feeling Unvalued & Misaligned
Seasoned developers across various tech stacks and roles are experiencing a disconnect between their expertise and current work. This manifests as feeling underutilized, shifted to less desirable tasks, questioning skill relevance, or struggling to find fulfilling roles that leverage their experience. The core pain is a lack of alignment between their skills and their current responsibilities.
SOURCES (60)
“Also worth noting - the top fields outside of management are cloud, SRE, and DevOps which all fall under web. "Backend" and "frontend" don't necessarily mean web dev, but they usually do.”
“Recently exited to industry after 10 years at B4 and have some old clients reaching out to me for solo consulting. Current employer is ok with me doing this in my free time. I don't mind giving some advice here and there and making some cash on the side but I'm worried about the implications - liability, proper contracting, taxation etc. I'm also weary of any unknown maintenance/legal/tax costs associated with just keeping a consulting entity afloat. If I do this is there a class of”
“I see so many people talk like it’s so simple, “get a CS degree, get into enterprise sales making $150k with commission after 12-24 months as a SDR, and eventually $300k+ as you work your way up” Then you look on indeed/linkedin and the roles are for like $40k salary and the AE roles have absurd qualifications lol Is it all just nonsense? Does everyone start that low? Are they extremely niche roles? submitted by /u/Jayman453 [link] [comments]”
“I’ve been working in the Salesforce Ecosystem for 4 years now. Upon implementating Sales Cloud + CPQ mainly executives whom are none daily users have made it clear from week 1 that it was s***. This has gone on for years despite working on the sysem to make loads of improvements single handedly without consultant support as the two we has previously use were horrible! So I made the decision to take full responsibility solely. We had a team of 3 people, 2 had moved on and the 1 left is pretty use”
“Hey everyone. My background is ~9 years of experience. Right now I am NodeJS Senior SWE and basically acting Team Lead. In current organization I work for last 6 years. I am starting to look for new opportunities both to grow my income and my expertise. Also I am fully remote and regardless of how funny it may sound - I deeply miss social aspect of showing up in office every once in a while. So I started looking for new Senior positions in my local market (Central EU) and so far overwhelming maj”
“Hey everyone, I’ve got some experience with web development, mostly React and Next.js, and I’ve been thinking a lot about where the industry is headed. I’ve been considering learning Node.js and moving more into full-stack development, but honestly, I’m starting to feel a bit unsure with how fast AI is moving. I’m not sure if it’s still worth putting a lot of time into expanding my web dev stack, or if I should be focusing more on AI-related skills instead. I really enjoy web development and wan”
“Not sure if this is too unique of a situation, but curious if others had this similar situation and what they did to get out of it. I work at a medium sized company, the core employee for platform management (team of 3) of our endpoint management (Tanium). Biased, but feel I am rather good at my job based on results and feedback. IT for the IT folks across various business units. Trying to venture out to a new company seems rather difficult since I don’t have that Intune and Jamf experience. Not”
“They do, and you can learn best practices quickly especially if you know the questions to ask. There are relatively few jobs where a decade of experience in one language is actually critical.”
“So I used to work in big tech as a AWS + Windows Engineer. I managed a global video surveillance fleet of Windows Servers, millions of IP cameras, etc all through AWS. Most of my work was creating applications in AWS CDK to create automations to support various initiatives, or to improve management of the windows servers and/or the IP cameras. I recently switched to a "Windows DevOps" job at a bank, and I find the work to be really boring and uninteresting. They barely if ever let me u”
“I have moved several industries in the past but not as PM, I started as a biologist, turned IT administrator, turned web developer, turned motion graphics artist, turned production manager, now a project manager for the animation industry one thing that I am sure of myself is that I'm always curious which probably led to me exploring a lot of stuff and moving away when it gets boring, maybe that's why I like PM now and why I was led to this because it gives me the freedom to explore with”
“Im in my early 30s and trying to figure out what to do next. I feel like I have three options, and all of them make sense for different reasons. I’ve spent about the last five years in director-level roles in a specialized area of healthcare, and I had started to become known as an emerging leader in that space (at least I think, lol). Most recently, I was appointed to lead a large federal program while also serving as a director at the university that held the government contract. Both the fede”
“"When the finance manager is made head of IT" Well, have I got news for you lol.. No, I'm kidding. Partly.... For context, I worked for almost 10 years as a dev myself. This was way back when. Eventually, I got back in the industry in a management perspective after being a finance manager for a different company. Matter of fact, that makes me understand more what you're getting at. You can either choose good, fast, or cheap, and you can pick two, but sometimes you just need to”
“So I used to work in big tech as a AWS + Windows Engineer. I managed a global video surveillance fleet of Windows Servers, millions of IP cameras, etc all through AWS. Most of my work was creating applications in AWS CDK to create automations to support various initiatives, or to improve management of the windows servers and/or the IP cameras. I recently switched to a "Windows DevOps" job at a bank, and I find the work to be really boring and uninteresting. They barely if ever let me u”
“40k is criminal, leave, take your experience and don’t look back. Out of pure curiosity how much experience do you have?”
“I've been working as the only web dev for an e-commerce brand for just under a year, previously worked at an agency in a small technical team. There's about 70 people in company, with 8 figure turnover, millions of sessions per month across several sites. London based but remote, I get paid about £40k. There was previously another dev who was also my manager, but they've started working on another part of the business and I now do this alone. Since then I've been struggling with”
“I've been hired for my first bigger project as a freelancer. I have 15 YOE in web dev, mostly in vanilla LAMP which some time working with dotnet/react. I don't have a ton of experience setting them up from scratch and maintaining as our SRE team does that. I do have good experience building local docker php, MySQL, etc. docker containers for development. I've been building small react based, don't end only, sites only on cloudfalre. The website will need login, recurrin”
“As title says really. For some context, joined a F100 on their grad scheme two years back despite having 2YEO, current title is Junior DevOps but I'm really doing mid level software engineering - paid 43k. My manager can't promote me or guarantee any opportunities for at-least a year, but it's a multinational. Got an exciting offer for a software engineer role at a small tech company. Loved the interview process, exciting career direction - albeit a bit scary as more responsibility.”
“I work as an architect for a specialized area within a much larger company. Of the several teams having to implement my designs there are a couple engineers who constantly fight me on my decisions. Of the two, one in particular is… acidic. He has a strong following among the engineers and is constantly posting trollish questions about why I am involved in any given decision. He’s a good engineer, don’t get me wrong. But I am forever deflecting his pointless questions while also trying to answer”
“This is basically a sign that your company is not growing by building valuable products but entering the race to the bottom of cost cutting. It won’t get better.”
“Last month I left my previous DevOps role for a new one. The pay increase was the main reason I left. My old role had good colleagues, interesting work, and an office I could go into whenever I wanted, but I just didn't feel I was being paid enough for the work I was doing. It was a fairly big company and I'd been there 7 years. The new company is smaller and fully remote. I'm starting to feel like the grass isn't always greener on the other side. Here are the pain points I'm”
“Hey all hope you are doing well. So I am 6 years into Desktop Support, BE Computer Science. Looking to switch to a different field. Main reasons are rotational shifts, weekend work, and honestly a pretty toxic current workplace. Long term I want to get into Full Stack Development, but I know that's a longer runway, so looking for a solid intermediate step right now. I've narrowed it down to three options and could genuinely use some real world perspective instead of just researching in c”
“We had this person on our team who used to write textbook-style, perfect code. The problem was that this person used to humiliate other developers and wouldn't give constructive comments on PRs. Whenever someone approached him to ask about the framework he had implemented, he would never explain, saying he didn't have time. This was about a year ago. I wish that person had stayed because now we would have bombarded him with Copilot-generated textbook-style code. I loved his coding even b”
“I have 2 years of exp in fullstack development and am looking to move up to mid-level roles. Here are a few story summaries that could be used as the answer for questions about accomplishments in behavioral interviews but I don't know which one to choose because I feel like none of them are accomplishments. Debugged and developed a solution to resolve a recurring production bug that kept causing our service to crash. TLDR: Db connection pool was exhausted causing Kubernetes health check to f”
“Could you change who you're targeting? If you're only going for larger corps or have high standards right now you should re-assess. After 6 months you should take anything, even as a bridge job to look for another gig”
“Yea the on-call bit stresses me out, but since I work with a big team I think I will get used to it? And in the end I feel like, yeah the world doesn't revolve around us and I can't keep being a cry baby and just want what I want. But on the other hand, I am really doubting whether I am built for it. Yea it's like some people just aren't fit to be a soldier. But then again if we are at war/the world is changing, then you have to adapt right?”
“Early in my career I optimized for writing less code. Now I optimize for owning less complexity. Those aren't always the same thing.”
“tough call. the on-call bit is what stands out to me, if you already hated it before then a weekly rotation will eat at you fast. context switching all day sounds like a recipe for burnout if you're not wired for it the AI angle is interesting but I wouldn't pick a career path just trying to outrun automation. both roles will shift, platform stuff feels safer short-term but nobody really knows. if implementing simpler features is your comfort zone the C# gig might fit better day-to-day,”
“I got 5 YOE as a fullstack engineer, and some of those years I dabbled a lot with DevOps tasks (e.g. k8s, AWS deployments). I am looking for work, and I got an offer as a Platform Engineer and also a C# Developer (with different companies). I am asking specially for the future; in your opinions, will software engineers be more affected by AI in comparison to platform engineers? Since it seems to me you need more platform engineers in order to run increasing AI workloads and since they are more c”
“OP 100% this is the way. Even reaching out to retired co-workers or those not in the state is 100% worth your time.”
“And the initial comment mentioned Carson Gross opinion, when thinking about the approach to JS. So I'm confused why Redux even gets mention. When Carson Gross is all about the server as the sole maintainer of state”
“Thanks so much for that starting point for me! I will absolutely have to dive head first into this”
“Is that too much to ask for? Apparently it is nowadays. I have 3+ years building full stack applications with complexity going up as high as figma-like equivalent, as in drag-and-drop component canvas with collaboration support using CRDTs. I haven't been able to find a job for the past 6 months despite passing behavioural, systems design and technical interviews. What is going on? What more is the industry asking for? What more can I do? submitted by /u/TheFitnessGuroo [link] &#”
“What's the best way to get my foot back in the door? I had a medical leave and then decided to have a kid before going back, looking to get back to interviewing in next 6 months to a year. Basically life is just hard in this economy and I was making decent money before medical halted it and to keep afloat its necessary to return to work. I have a BS in CS, 10+ years of professional experience as a full stack dev (mainly java backend as core strength) as well as test engineer and scrum master”
“I joined the BI/DW bandwagon around 2006/07 when it was hot and the only skill I could easily acquire was SQL and PL/SQL. Prior to that I tried my hand at programming C/C++ and that drove me mad and had given up on career in software. However, thanks to MSBI GUI based SSIS I found it easy to get a break through. In couple of years I was given a project on SSAS and learnt MDX and found that to be very interesting and became quite decent at it. I read the original book by Mosha Pasumansky tuples,”
“Part help desk, part dc tech guy, mostly dude who does other random stuff that involves a dc. Im mostly concerned with setting up new racks, servers . I cannot lift them by myself. Hell im disabled legally due to my leg. I was never told about doing this during my interview (currently temp). Nothing I was told about the job is 100%(wfh included) And this is 6 days a week work wise no OT. Id toss in 100k but haha not likely. submitted by /u/Abject_Serve_1269 [link] [comments]”
“It's not replacing all devs but it definitely is decreasing the amount of devs needed for a given task or project. At my company we decided against hiring more people and are just using more agents. We have a workflow where the PM works with an AI to write a ticket as well as build a prototype in HTML and CSS of how a feature should work, then we as devs have workflows to take that ticket and iterate on it with AI. Most of the time the LLM is good enough to one shot it and open the PR.”
“I worked for big tech out of undergrad (mostly frontend/mobile for a few years) moved on to work at a few startups where I naturally switched to do more backend/cloud infrastructure work. I never got a 'formal' education in terms of masters or any kind of certs. Would it be worth it for me to start getting some Certs (like AWS solutions architect - associate/professional) if I want to switch my career towards more solutions design/consultation? I don't know many people personally that went this”
“It's always Domain Driven Design for me using backend aggregate and ubiquitous language. Once i build up the capabilities, i proceed to database wiring and api layer. Frontend is the last piece. That's always better because it helps me think of a problem from the behavioral and conceptual view to my specific situation. Then the frontend follows. I had instances where i started with the frontend and ended up building the functionality I didn't need just because of the similar UX model”
“I was a web turned software developer for a brewery for close to 8 years, but the company went through a "restructuring" phase so myself + 24 others were victims of said restructuring. I've been applying to any role that is relevant to my skill set (.Net/C#) but have been met with either radio silence or an interview where I get told they were pursuing other candidates afterwards. I'm coming close to my sixth month of being unemployed and I'm rapidly losing hope that I'”
“Hey all, I’m looking for some advice and see what some of you guys might do if in my situation. For some background, I am an L5 equivalent at an F500 tech company. I have been working here for around 4 years now. The role is fully remote and I am based in NYC while most of my team is elsewhere in the US. My total comp at this company is looking to be around is ~195-205k this year with: Base: 155k RSU/Bonus/ESPP: 40-50k And it’s gone up historically aound 20k year over year, with the latter years”
“This started in 2022, and honestly, it did not start with excitement. It started with pressure. We did not have enough server capacity, but the requirement did not get smaller. My boss pushed me to build an Office viewer that ran entirely in the browser. I had a deadline and no clear way to render Office files reliably on the client. I was frustrated and not even sure the request was reasonable. My first plan was embarrassingly simple: find a library, wrap it, ship it. Instead, I found a graveya”
“I have ~2 years of IT experience at an MSP. I am the senior in my department. Nearly none of my work is tier one anymore. I want a title (and perhaps a raise). I would appreciate any feedback on my updated resume. I've always been told to keep length to a page. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1j0rES1Hn8DaDKnsiPW4NUiU_G_AWLHxewJS2R_K6UDo submitted by /u/DankMemesBlake [link] [comments]”
“Hey everyone, I’m a full-stack developer, and I’m confident in my ability to build software. The part I struggle with is figuring out what people actually need and what they’re willing to pay for. I want to build a small SaaS product that solves a real problem instead of creating something nobody ends up using. I don’t have much experience with market research or validating ideas, so I’d really appreciate some guidance from people who’ve been through this. The reason this matters so much to me i”
“Hey everyone, I’m a full-stack developer, and I’m confident in my ability to build software. The part I struggle with is figuring out what people actually need and what they’re willing to pay for. I want to build a small SaaS product that solves a real problem instead of creating something nobody ends up using. I don’t have much experience with market research or validating ideas, so I’d really appreciate some guidance from people who’ve been through this. The reason this matters so much to me i”
“Hey everyone, I was unexpectedly laid off today from my role as a Java Backend Developer (2 YOE), NIT KKR CSE GRAD ). Honestly, I am in a state of shock, completely overwhelmed, and finding it incredibly hard to process this right now. The sudden loss of stability is hitting me hard, and my anxiety is through the roof. I want to pick myself up and start looking for a new job immediately, but my mind is blank. I don't even know where to begin or how to structure my days to recover from this s”
“Hey everyone, I have 2.5 years of experience in end-to-end implementation, from project scope design to sprint delivery and testing. Since I work in a small but established company, this experience is crucial for delivering projects without relying on a single team of developers. I’m writing to ask for advice on how to get a freelancing gig to support my salary, which isn’t very high. I’m considering doing it to pay off some debt. Your advice and suggestions would be greatly appreciated. If this”
“Years ago I switched from full stack to front end and lately I’ve been working at a company that uses a relatively uncommon framework for their ui. Despite showing interest in wanting to do backend work it doesn’t seem like that’s something I’ll be allowed to do. This creates two challenges for me (1) potential employers aren’t interested in the stack I work with now and (2) they seemingly don’t like that I’m missing recent backend experience. How do I realistically escape this trap? One might s”
“I genuinely enjoy backend, Spring Boot is my thing, i can sit for hours designing entities, fixing weird transactional bugs, optimizing queries, writing clean service layers and i feel alive doing it. but the second i have to touch angular or react for actual ui work or styling or making things responsive, dealing with css, i just shut down. i dont hate api integration tho, calling endpoints, managing state for that, thats fine, thats basically backend logic in disguise lol, its the actual visua”
“With 30 years in IT and 8 years at Amazon, I'd focus on pivoting rather than starting over. Look at Cloud, DevOps, SRE, Solutions Architect, Customer Success Engineer, or AI/automation roles where your infrastructure experience is still highly valuable. Also consider SaaS companies. For example, companies like BoldDesk are investing heavily in AI-powered customer support, automation, and knowledge management, creating opportunities for experienced IT professionals beyond traditional sysadmin”
“I have around 10 years of IT experience with a mixed background in software development, BI, and cloud data engineering. My career journey looks like this: 2 years in .NET software development (C#, ASP.NET) 4 years in BI development – building dashboards, writing SQL, and working with ETL tools like Alteryx and Pentaho 4 years as an Azure Cloud Data Engineer – Azure Data Factory, Databricks, PySpark, SQL, data pipelines, and cloud data platforms Recently, I completed the Salesforce Data Cloud (D”
“ngl the title matters less than whether you can point to actual code you owned. If the analyst job lets you automate reports, write SQL, touch integrations, build internal tools, milk that hard and put those bullets on the resume as engineering work.”
“Personal projects are the way to go, for sure. Or switching companies. In a company you get to work with real environments, but in your personal projects you can test anything you want to. (Btw, don't use any AI subscription at work without your company approval; you could be fired for that)”
“I am 23F. I have been working for this startup for 3 years. I just finished my degree last year (education is cheap in my country, no student debt). It is a good job, interesting enough to keep me engaged during the day. My colleagues don't like me much but my bosses love me so whatever. I have gotten a lot of raises during the years and do okay financially. Well, a lot of people in my circle think that I should leave to go after something that is either more meaningful or more financially r”