Episode 506: I hate my job with AI and my team-mate thinks I suck

21 snips

Mar 30, 2026

They tackle mourning the loss of hands-on coding as AI shifts work toward reviews, maintenance, and higher-leverage tasks. They explore ways to find new satisfaction by shaping standards, architecture, and product outcomes. They also dig into dealing with a perfectionist teammate who undermines leadership and how candid conversations and exposing people to broader responsibilities can help.

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ADVICE

Encode Team Standards Into Rules

Encode standards into deterministic rules like linting so AI and juniors produce fewer errors.
Dave recommends investing time in meta work (lint rules, processes) because it improves AI outputs and reduces review time.

ADVICE

Treat Reviews As The Next Engineering Puzzle

Treat code review and QA as solvable bottlenecks by redesigning process and tooling.
Jameson suggests both technical and organizational fixes to remove the new review bottleneck created by AI-generated code.

INSIGHT

Big System Problems Still Need Humans

Hard system problems remain uniquely human: fault tolerance, security, scalability, and UX.
Dave says these architecture and product problems resist simple prompt-based fixes and reward deep thinking.

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In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

Hi Djavison,

I’ve heard y’all say something along the lines of “this is the most exciting time to build software” in a few recent episodes.

I’m glad that has been your experience and seems to be the experience of many others.

But for me as someone 5 years into the career who is, thankfully, employed—I can’t help mourning a job that no longer exists. Obviously, there are still lots of us with the job title “software engineer” that create software. But, what I originally fell in love with doesn’t really seem like a thing you can get paid to do anymore.

I now spend most of my development time reviewing code and making sure things work. Which feels way less rewarding and way more soul-sucking.

Maybe I’m just nostalgic for being a more junior developer, but it’s obvious that our jobs have changed forever and will continue to evolve.

So, my question is: How can I get excited and feel passionate about this new way of doing things?
I am a senior team lead with 10+ years of experience. This is the first time I’ve had a team mate that clearly disrespects me.

I have a Middle+ teammate who is technically perfectionistic and openly says I’m doing a poor job and that basically he doesn’t see me as an authority. He says I am not as devoted to technical excellency and improving the project as he is, and that I ignore his opinions, which is his term for not having the same opinion about tech stuff as he does.

He doesn’t see the big picture and thinks he’s the only person on the team trying to make the code better. But the worst part is he never admits he’s wrong. I had to scramble to fix a bug he created when we caught it right before release, and he accused ME of introducing it!

My manager know what’s going on, but I feel terrible about it. I have many different projects and responsibilities. I can not be as devoted to the codebase as he wants. Plus, I am not the architect and nor should I be. I see that it demotivates him (like the person in the 499th episode), only in this question I am the senior.

I know my weaknesses and I am working on them, I don’t think I can address his feedback. More than that, I’ve always tried to maintain a good relationship with him and always gave him the freedom to work on tech stuff and develop his skills. But what to do when your child has grown and is now unthankful? 😂

Thanks for your advice!