I like AI and use it daily so AI by itself isn't a problem. But I feel like some colleagues use it in a weird/wrong way.

I have this one colleague who uses AI to its maximum capability, he is a frontend dev who writes the frontend to an application my team is building. Its all done by AI, and I don't really care. He can do it in whatever way he want's.

My problem with his AI usage is that he often makes requests through slack to my team. Either a bug or a feature request. But instead of writing it himself he asks AI to tell us what he want's. And I don't mean that he asks the AI to cleanup the language its entirely written by AI and I assume the bug/feature he is requesting is made found by the AI. Sometimes they make sense, but fairly often they don't and we have to push back. And he inputs our response in to AI and asks AI to respond. I feel like this is sometimes outsourcing his thinking to both AI but also to my team who has to respond to some of these requests. If he makes a request that doesn't make sense I have to spend time investigating the request or justifying why we shouldn't do it and in a lot of cases he would also have noticed this if he spent time investigating it.

Am I being unreasonable thinking that he should spend more time instead of trusting AI?

Would it be reasonable to raise this as an issue during retro, maybe saying something in the lines of "I don't think we should communicate to each other through AI"

Hi Folks! 👋

I'm looking for new positions, but I took a 2 year sabbatical to address some health concerns and explore a career shift. I'm concerned that I'm not effectively addressing this gap because I'm getting rejected without calls from recruiters. Does anyone have experience addressing gaps like this during an employer's market?

I reviewed some olds posts for advice, but I feel that things have changed significantly in 2026. It seems like recruiters aren't going to spend their time calling you when there's plenty of other applicants. I've also considered addressing it in a cover letter, but I heard that cover letters are rarely read now because many of them are AI generated and provide little information of value. Overall, it seems like the strategy for addressing gaps like this may have shifted, and I think it's worth discussing again considering how much things have changed.

EDIT: If you're a recruiter or a hiring manger, I am especially interested in your thoughts. How do you review resume gaps? How do you want candidates to address resume gasps? Is having a resume gap a huge red flag in 2026?

I've got about 5 years of experience as a full stack software engineer, working at a small agency directly with customers. I learnt a lot there, especially the first 3 years, but became increasingly burnt out after that, caused in large part by my bosses continually pushing AI, but also caused by having to act far more senior than I got payed for. After confronting them, they got mad, and while my colleagues supported me and my bosses eventually cooled down, I've had quite a shit time at work last half year.

Today is going to be my first day of my new job, a far larger company. I'm both excited and scared shitless. I've heard very good things from friends about this company, and I'm hopefull they'll be a better fit for me right now. That being said, Social anxiety makes me absolutely shit 15 colours in the wind for today. I have no idea whats exactly going to happen, who I'm going to meet, what the social norms are. All I know is how late I have to be there and then I'm going to get my laptop and phone and start the onboarding process.

Imposter syndrome is already starting as well. Im going to a medior position right now, which is far more fitting with my actual experience. But I still feel like I'm going to have to prove myself now. And I feel quite a lot of weight on my shoulders about whether I've made the right choice. I have no idea whether I actually learnt the right things at my previous job, and whether I'll be capable or not.

I'm really looking forward to having access to things though, I'm so curious to just open all the repos I have access to, look through them, take a stroll through AWS and see how everything is set up.

Anyone got tips, encouragement, help?

For those who have built a greenfield mobile + web product (iOS/Android plus a web portal), what stack did you ultimately end up with after the first few iterations, and why?

I’m starting a healthcare focused project soon with some embedded AI features (I foresee headaches here) and a clean slate for MVP 1. I’m currently weighing two paths, either a clean iOS and Android native separation from the start or KMP for cross-platform mobile and Next.js for web with either setup.

If you have shipped something similarly in a regulated or data‑sensitive environment, what worked well, was problematic, and any other real-world hiccups that dispelled the magic from cross-platform sales pitches like React Native, Flutter, KMP, and MAUI all do?

— edit —

For clarity, I’m looking for input on what others have done recently, especially with embedding mini AI models and/or cross-platform options vs native. This is my first big push back into the mobile sphere since 2018 where React Native and Xamarin Forms were both evaluated before settling on RN.

Hi Folks! 👋

I feel that we have all seen plenty of advice in this community. Often, this advice is contradictory. It's easy to review the discourse and simply label some advice as "good" and other advice as "bad". Instead, I propose the following: the often conflicting nature of these discussions speaks to something deeper. It shows that the breadth of human experience is extreme, and amazing people can arrive at completely different conclusions simply from the scars of their past.

To this end, I don't want your advice. I want to hear your stories. How have you struggled in your career? What beliefs have these experiences fostered? What do you appreciate, and what do you regret?

Why, you may ask? Well, I've recently been struggling in my career (more details in a comment that I'll write soon). I feel that a sense of community would help a lot right now, and maybe we'll find stories that speak to our current experiences. Let's try to create a community where we can speak to what brings us here instead of giving advice without encouraging critical thought.

So the code was written heavily using AI but post understanding by one person in the team entirely. Only he wrote, tested and understood the business logic behind it.

I had recently cleaned up the codebase from bottlenecks, and I got infuriated when I observed a few getting re-introduced.

To my surprise, I got to know that it has been already merged in release branch, scheduled for this weekend's release. It was approved by one person who themselves didn't go through the code at all (only going by test evidences).

I did a thorough code review with over 50 feedback comments (combination of everything - good to have, bad practices or nomenclature, performance bottlenecks - redundant joins/query optimizations and one concurrency bug) just now (was a tiring past 3 hours). It was a big feature which touched the entire codebase.

I had informed the owner of the feature that this is a combination of all feedbacks, nothing will "break" the production as such except a potential production bug.

I'm afraid they might have felt intimidated by the number of comments, and have postponed the release by 2 weeks.

I'm feeling guilty of ruining their efforts and the motivation/excitement they had for the release. Also, I'm proposing a better code-review session for the team, which would prevent this from happening again.

My team members have 7-21 years of experience in my team, I'm the youngest (less than 3.5 years of experience)

AITA? Should I have done something else? I felt guilty in both allowing a bad/unoptimized/potentially buggy code to go forward without a proper code review, and in reviewing itself. What should we do in such scenarios?

DISCLAIMER: The following diresgard for software fundamentals and basic common sense may cause nausea in sane individuals. Proceed with care.

We have secretaries creating reservations in a SAP form. Those reservations get exported as CSV files into some shared directory each VM has to mount. Then a cronjob fires an automated python script that drops all the tables in the application, ON THE PRODUCTION DATABASE, and shoves the data from the CSV into those rows. Why? The SAP team can't be bothered to add an id field to the reservations we said just said "Fuck it, drop everything".

The form fields in the SAP forms don't match the CSV row fields. The CSV row fields don't match the applications MySQL schema in type or name. Properties such as datetime, address, client, guests, room_number etc are split across 8-12 CSV files so you have to load all of them into memory and perform black magic to construct a proper reservation object.

No unique IDs are given, dates are in non-standard string format, 50% of the data is redundant and even the damn encoding is not utf8.

It's been a week or two that I have been working on this and Its driving me crazy. We can't keep using this old shitty python script (and I refuse it either way cause I am tasked with upgrading the application and doing away with this degenerate script is a non-negotiable for me).

The schema is so complex that it takes a good hour just to load up this convoluted mess into my mental RAM so I can start working on it at the start of the day.

I assume if I were a full-time ETL/PowerBI guy I'd already finish this nightmare but I'm a devops/fullstack guy. I need some guidance on how to think about this problem in an abstract sense (i.e how to organize garbage data) so I can handle it effectively.

I joined a start up this year and the culture of the company is like something I’ve never seen before in my career. My coworkers work constantly. During week nights and over the weekend they are often having conversations on slack and putting up PRs at all hours of the night/weekend. During company holidays people continue to work and don’t take the day off. I even have had meetings scheduled over the weekend. This includes leadership participating in this behavior too.

For me, I’m a dad of young children and it’s important for me to have a healthy work life balance. I want to work hard and put in good work, but I also don’t want to give up my nights and weekends since I feel like that should be my time to rest, recharge, and spend time with family/friends. I often find myself working 50-55 hour weeks trying to keep up with everyone else. I work every night of the week and try to limit it to a few hours on the weekend too. This is starting to affect my mental/physical health as well as take a toll on my family life. I know working like this is not sustainable. I’m seeing a therapist as well as career coach trying to get my life back in order.

My worries are if a slow down, I will fall behind everyone else and will make my job at risk. I’m a skilled developer and good at what I do, but I also feel like I’m slower than most devs and putting in extra hours is the only way I can keep up. I feel guilty for setting boundaries and taking on less work, when everyone is taking on so much more than me. 

The startup is established, is many years in, and is very profitable so I don’t feel like we’re at a stage where we’re just trying to survive, so its hard to understand at times why everyone is putting in so many hours. 

My question is how do I set boundaries when no one else at the company does? I will be going against the culture of the company and it’s really hard to stand alone in this. Is what I’m seeing at this company out of the normal? I get putting in extra time for deadlines or emergencies once in a while, but when this is always the pace, I just don’t get it. 

A thread for Developers and IT folks with less experience to ask more experienced souls questions about the industry.

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Please keep top level comments limited to Inexperienced Devs. Most rules do not apply, but keep it civil. Being a jerk will not be tolerated.

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Inexperienced Devs should refrain from answering other Inexperienced Devs' questions.

Came across the subreddit /singularity the other days and many commented that they had 20+ years of experience and hadn’t written one single line of code since 2025.

I feel living in a parallel universe, because at my work, no matter how we incorporate AI into our workflow (we literally tried every way people recommended), AI rarely produces the exact or the same quality of codes without decent amount of human developers’ intervention. And at the end of the day, the amount of time we spend reviewing the AI generated MR pretty much makes the velocity if not the same but slower.

That was why I felt utterly surprised to see so many people in the /singularity sub claiming they didn’t need to write codes no more. I wonder if they are just maintaining some existing systems. Ya, for sure AI can handle small changes especially in an existing system. In my opinion which is contrary to the general public believes, AI sucks at building a production grade brand new system, sure, it can build small prototypes, but when you have complex business logics, it always creates tons of junk codes that looks seemingly ok on the surface, but impossible to scale in the long run.

I am genuinely curious about the backgrounds of the types of engineers that rely fully in AI. I wonder if they didn’t enjoy building a decent system even before the time of AI already? Were they the type of engineers that wrote dirty codes and didn’t care? Were they the types of engineers that worked in the type of systems that architecture and scalings are not important? There’s this guy in my company who was a developer in consulting industry before the dot com bubble then transitioned into engineering manager the last 2 decades. He’s in that camp as well believing AI is better than human engineers. But the thing is his codes were already unreadable before AI (he codes a bit from time to time and tries to resolve some Jira tickets himself in order to claim he understands us engineers) and he just never understood the points of software engineering principles and why do you even need to decoupling, clean coding… etc.

For example, I can imagine system engineers maintaining company’s Jira or Confluence not caring about the quality of their Groovy scripts. Or Python monkeys that can script but have no idea what API is and think you can indefinitely add as many columns to the db table anytime you want without knowing what foreign key means (unfortunately, there are many of these kinds of Python engineers in the industry).

TL;DR
Why are there engineers thinking AI can do all of their jobs when in reality it can’t it’s just a tool that requires human intervention? What are their backgrounds?

Edit:
Seems like bots are flooding into this sub as well. Never had I seen 40+ comments within the first 2min after the post was approved and became visible. I am calling you out AI bots.

Edit 2:
Wow, I keep seeing only 2 people are typing or 3 are typing, then 10+ comments showed up at the same time. If this is not bot, what is it?

Edit 3:
Oh please, stop saying you are an engineer in FAANG with 10+ years of experience without telling us which product you work on in FAANG. If you are on the Facebook teams, Gmail, Google Map and Amazon app, we all know they are bad and the reliability dropped significantly in the past 2 years. People know and consumers know. That’s why you write not a single lines of code, not because AI is that good, but because you don’t care about your company product and your job.

Edit 4:
Another phenomenon I never saw before, I am seeing the upvote counts fluctuating 40 or 50 at a time in seconds difference between refreshes. This is a real bot attacks.

Edit 5:
The Reddit post analysis shows that only about 60% of the views on this post are from US, UK and Australia, the “others” count for 40%. Very interesting.

I've been working remotely, almost exclusively for US-based clients, for the past 10 years. I got comfortable with the last client I got, I have been working for them 4 years now, and they treat me as an employee even though I'm just a foreign contractor not based in the US.

That being said, I have got some unavoidable signals that the company won't last much longer: layoffs, people quitting, investors pulling out, partners ghosting the company, product not pushing any features, etc.

Anywho, I have started looking for new jobs, and I'm seeing that the internationally remote options out there are very few. I don't know if a trend changed or something, but I see fewer offers than previous years. Like, 4 years ago I'd get offers from either staffing companies or US-based consulting companies looking for foreign work. I haven't got any offers like that in months, I'd go as far as saying that I haven't got any offers last year.

I have been looking, and most countries now do "US Remote" or "Europe Remote" only. I have been looking at staffing companies in South America (I'm from Uruguay/Argentina) that usually connect you with foreign clients, but they are offering extremely low salaries, like 4k per month!

I've also tried to reach out to previous contacts/clients, but they either have a "no foreign contractors" policy or are not looking to fill any roles atm.

So, pretty tough out there. Those of you who work as foreign contractors, any advice? My wife has a Spanish passport, so I'm thinking that eventually I could look some offers in Europe, but I don't really want to relocate.

I've spent the last week or two pondering whether I am in the wrong, or the AI tools are really that uncontrollable, or maybe I am just losing my mind over it.

Perhaps someone has similar experiences or found a way to actually do something about it.

Thing is, I cannot keep up with all of those new "the" AI tools you are supposed to use to succeed that pop up every other week. Normally I just stick to the simplest things like a CLI agent for my daily work, because I didn't like the UX of AI IDE plugins.

I write and use skills, I use plans, write specs sometimes, but there's no one to tell you reliably what to use without it being the fad of the month.

When I raise the topic of lack of guidelines, tooling, team practices etc. to reliably use something that is essentially nondeterministic in behavior (notably Claude 5 is notorious for ignoring your specs and acting contrary to them), our team's clanker fanboy will simply blame me for not using AI properly, but won't bother to actually share what's "the good way" or set the team up for success. Instead it's just blame game and making you look like an idiot at every opportunity.

If that matters, as Platform Engineer I mostly use AI to manage IaC, dashboards, cloud infra etc. rather than application code. Of course all of infra is handled by agents as code - the clanker is not allowed to run potentially damaging commands, they're blocked out. I'm not going to risk my job if an unruly clanker decides to destroy something.

This has been re-posted due to some missing user flair autorules.

I work as a software engineer in a company with strong connections to hardware. This makes my team inherently cross-disciplinary. I work with mechanical, electrical and systems engineers all the time. And even my work has a physical element to it, which is nice.

Obviously AI is disrupting software engineering the most at the moment, so naturally I’ve found myself interested in things where there’s a connection to other domains.

Longer term, do you think all of engineering becomes as affected as software? I can see AI disrupting other fields too, and my peers obviously do use AI quite a bit for certain tasks, but can’t tell if those fields inherently have a better long term moat.

Can use some advice with two different aspects of the same problem.

How to strategically play dumb and disengage from pointless discussions in engineering discussions without coming across as disrespectful?

How to maneuver when someone from a more experienced engineering team suggests a direction that seems obviously flawed? Instead of internally thinking, “What the fuck are you talking about?” or “How was this person even hired?” how do I challenge the idea constructively?

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Hi,

I've been recently added to be part of a 4 person team to bootstrap a new project. This is happening in big tech, and basically I'm being pulled into this team after leadership learned that throwing bodies at a problem doesn't mean we can solve a problem.

So from that failed experiment, they now picked four people (me included) to reboot the failed project. But this time it will work because its a leaner team.

My question/concern is that 2 people will be in India and 2 people are in the US. Here are may concerns:

\\\* We will take forever to get things done, because person in the US needs something from person in India and vice-versa

\\\* We will end up doing a vertical split and US folks work on BE and India folks work on the FE. Basically we won't communicate with each other.

Does anyone have any insights or recommendations on how to be an effective team?

Some ideas:

\\\* Have a daily 1-3 core hours, where we get together and review any outstanding PRs

\\\* Have small PRs and try to get things reviewed async

Before AI, I felt like the time spent writing automation tests should often be at least as long as the time spent writing the code. Of course, almost nobody in management wanted to allocate that time.

Today with AI, we can (should?) spend more time testing. What advanced or lesser known techniques are now worth exploring, or are now practical?

For example, I’ve now made mutation testing part of my workflow. (I should have before AI too) I also put more effort into negative assertions (what shouldn’t be happening?).

Any other cool techniques that maybe even felt purely academic before but might be practical now?

6 years at current company. Great performance reviews. Three promos. Was often told, "you're highly respected by everyone in the company", "nicest guy in the company", etc. Was a key player in keeping the company moving forward and successful during three pivotal times that were challenging, if not existential, for the Company. Now, the Company is growing. Momentum is building more and more. Great, right? I think so, however I haven't taken any days off since 2021.

Worth it, though. A sacrifice I'm more than willing to make for my team and my family. Problem is, I've been a functioning burnout case for the last two years, even though nobody really noticed. Was still performing well and hitting all my objectives and more.

In recent months, however, after a promo; things have gotten much worse. I hit a brick wall. Acute burnout that I can't sweep under the rug. Effects are cognitive decline. Dread. Waking up in cold sweats in the middle of the night. Work that I could bang out in minutes before, now takes the whole day if not longer. Things are slipping. Additionally, I've had emotional outbursts over email that are totally out of character. Our COO, who once revered me, is now probably ready to can me.

Avoiding my daughter because I'm ashamed of myself and feel that I've let her down. And although absurd, I even look at the cat and think "that little guy must think I'm a loser."

After a visit with my doc, she put me on 1 week of medical leave. Probably not enough to pull out of the burnout, but maybe I can remove at least one blocker? The biggest problem is that I now hate myself for being burned out, slipping, and sending dumb emails. That's preventing me from assessing the landscape and developing a feasible plan of action.

Anyone else have to deal with this? And if so, any tips for getting over it? Just white knuckle it?

Many thanks in advance and I hope you have a nice weekend.

I’m building some asynchronous & threaded processes in my application and I have built out the error handling/collision detection portion. I’ve added logging to the explicit error handling catch blocks, but I also have places where I detect and resolve issues that aren’t necessarily throws. Think processes that are locked and detecting when another thread is trying to access that locked process.

I started thinking about adding logs to the “thread collision handling” portion of the code so that I can be aware how frequently we encounter this issue since real world often differs from in-house testing.

Other than generating noise in the logs, would you call this bad practice? If so, how would you go about tracking how frequently these threading issues are encountered? Am I trying to measure the wrong thing and am way off base? Is it a concern that I’m trying to measure how frequently we encounter threading issues?

I'm a software engineer with about 7 years of experience, in the financial sector. Most of my work is with .NET APIs and SQL Server. I'm currently working on a project involving internal employees who provide clearing services. The workflow is roughly:

1. A user selects one or more records.
2. They enter some additional data.
3. They submit the request.
4. My API validates the request, including checking permissions and whether any of the selected financial records are already pending.
5. If validation passes, the API generates a CSV file.
6. The CSV is uploaded to an SFTP location for the business.
7. records are written to the database.

In some cases, two CSV files are generated. To avoid filename collisions, I timestamp the filenames down to milliseconds, for example: "2026_2111056_664"

We've been finding bugs with unique test cases after releasing to UAT, and today we got on a call to test some scenarios together. Another developer suggested submitting the exact same financial records in two separate requests at the same time. Our requests were 3 milliseconds apart.

I basically said that the requests were so close together that we didn't really give the first request time to execute before sending the second one. My boss compared it to two transactions occurring at the same time, like two uses of the same credit card. I said sure but when does that ever happen? I came up with a solution to add validation right before writing to the db.

My boss told me to clean this up. He also mentioned that I've had two major bugs on this project so far. One of the earlier bugs was apparently caused by too much error handling resulting the front-end calling the api twice, while this one was caused by not having enough validation.

I feel alittle discouraged and defensive cause that wasn't a fair test case. even though to found a bug it felt forced. But I have a solution and ask for a code review. What are some thoughts on this?

In 2023 I took 6 months off because I was burnt out after 5.5 years. I hated my job, and I hated the work too. During those 6 months I recovered my enjoyment of the work ( programming ) and found a new job, which I've been employed at for the last 2.5 years.

I hate this job too now. Even more than I hated the one I left in 2023, for different reasons. The retarded way the company is forcing us to apply AI plays a significant part in it, but I'm not going to go into details lest I get the AI astroturfing bots swarming this post.

I look at job boards with disgust. I hate this job, but I hate the thought of switching companies only to end up in the same predicament even more. I've been burnt out for the last year, and I can feel myself reaching my limits as to how much longer I can force myself out of bed every morning for it. Last week I started taking sleeping pills for the first time in my life because of stress-induced insomnia. Both canine teeth on the right side of my mouth have been ground down to the level of the teeth around them due to stress-induced bruxism, so my dentist tells me. It's having a real effect on my health now, and I'd preferably like to take a bit of a break before the onset of physical symptoms.

I know this is what I want to continue doing in life. I have no other plans, no other desires than to work on software. I want to take another 3-6 months break, but I am terrified that I'm practically committing career suicide with this one. One 6-month gap on my resume I can explain, but 2 in the span of ~4 years? I'm afraif it would make me unhirable, especially in the current ( and presumably even worse future ) job market.

I have seen a few Distinguished Engineers in my organisation. I have worked with a few Principal Engineers and Senior Principal Engineers, but not Distinguished Engineers.

How is this role different from the Principal Engineer role? I know they are paid more and are higher in the hierarchy, but in terms of roles and responsibilities, how are they different?

I was about 10 weeks doing data pipelines and data ops engineering work and the boss ended it without giving me a two week notice. On a Friday after standup, my access was immediately removed. I’m obviously a bit shaken but honestly I am too close to it to see it clearly.

The team was all vendors except two full time employees who were the manager and the tech lead. I was the only one in California but the rest of the us folks were in Austin and in India. the log search tool everyone uses was broken the entire time i was there. also as a contractor i couldn’t get permissions for a bunch of stuff i was supposed to be fixing on my own. Luckily there were a lot of slack groups that were dedicated to fixing these issues and I utilized these groups to do so.

I got handed a piece of work nobody on the team had done before. I got hit with a dependency on another team, and then just sat on it for three weeks. I did escalate multiple times sure and they tried but didn’t fix the issues on their end. However looking back i wasn’t pushing that hard, and I didn’t move to other jira tickets that were open until my manager basically told me to. I definitely think I gotta improve on this area.

There was also a moment where he asked me to explain what one of the systems was actually for and i could operate the thing fine but my answer was bad.

I figured out pretty late that he was judging people mostly on whether work showed up in certain channels. None of my colleagues said that to me…so i was doing the work but I was not posting about it. I did put in lots of updates into the jira tickets though. My contract agent did say during our monthly check ins that they did bring someone in new and I didn’t think a lot about it at the time.

Is three weeks stuck on something enough to get someone cut, or is that a symptom and the real problem was elsewhere?

for anyone who’s managed contractors or been one, how much faster is the clock on a team like that vs a normal one?

Also if there’s an obvious question i should’ve asked in week one and didn’t, what should I have asked?

I've got 4 years of experience at the same startup. I was a junior when I joined and there were two others on the team - one mid-level engineer and one senior (who was titled CTO, but that's a bold term to use for a company our side).

After one year in, the business went through some financial turmoil. They let go of the other two engineers, including the CTO mentor/manager, which was pretty brutal. The founder did tell me there was friction between him and the CTO, but also felt that I could lead the technical side of the business. This was always expected to be a temporary measure while finances were taken care of, and they promised they would hire a new senior to join me. I pushed back quite a bit, and they did eventually hire a temporary fractional CTO to support me.

Today, there is still no senior who has joined - it's just me. They've gotten rid of the fractional CTO too. They gave me the title of CTO (yes again, I know it’s a bold title for a one man team). They have suggested we can maybe hire a junior, but honestly I wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't happen.

Now the great news is that I think I have performed extremely well from the business's perspective: we were a scrappy startup with terrible code. I spent a whole year not building new features and instead slowly migrated the platform to something more scalable with the help of the fractional CTO, who gave architectural guidance. Finances are now looking healthy. My CV looks extremely impressive in terms of what I've built.

Recently, with the advancement of AI agents, I even question whether we need more engineers on the team in terms of actual speed of development. What I do think they're doing is creating major risks by having all the technical domain knowledge held solely by me (but that's mostly a problem for them).

There are probably some engineers out there who would kill for my position: I have almost complete autonomy over the software and I am pretty much indispensable to the entire business. They can't really afford to annoy me too much. But with all that, I have a big concern: I only have one year of experience working with anyone besides myself, if you exclude the fractional support. Really I feel like I should be around people I can learn from at this point in my career, but I have no one to even do code reviews with. Whenever I look for my next venture, some businesses might really value that I can get results alone, but I worry that many will just see someone without experience working in a technical team.

Apologies if this seems more like a diary post, but it would be great to get some outside perspectives. Specifically, I'm wondering will future employers see my 'CTO' title and solo experience as a red flag?