Career on Max Codes Things

June 1st

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 22:12:58 -0400

Today is June 1st. It’s been a bit more than a month since I sat down to write.

In fact, I forgot to publish my last post entirely after writing it. It was fine, as it was quite short.

Birthdays

I’ve been quite busy in the past month. May is the month of birthdays, and the last month of nigh-nonstop celebrating from Christmas-forward.

The highlight of which, as it is every year but especially this one, was my partner’s birthday! She turned 30 this year, and I went extra hard on one of our yearly traditions.

Every other year, we host a small tea party for some of our close friends for her birthday. Another of our friends was born on the same day, so it also counts as two birthdays in one!

My trick for hosting is to generally just have way too much food, and some takeout boxes for people to bring some of the party back home.

There’re a few places I know where to buy small treats, and then I try to make a handful of recipes myself.

The plan is simple: feed them lunch, a snack, and supper all in one. And then, when they think it’s over and they’re safe I ship them off with even more food to remember us by.

I pour some of myself in the work, and it’s part of how I show my love and appreciation to those close to me. I’m not great at voicing this love as often as I should, so I try to make up for it in my hosting.

This was the first set of birthdays, but we also saw the same group later that month for two additional birthdays. Overall, a very enjoyable time with some very fun and kind people.

At Work

A bit messy, but what’s new?

The main highlight has been that I worked to fill out my promo packet. Should I have been the one to do so? Probably not, but I’m in an interesting position right now where my direct manager is the senior director of our department with ~70 people under her. Even more interesting is that she’s now the interim VP with >200 people under her banner. She initially filled it out, but she was missing a lot of data as she just started a few months ago so it wasn’t as strong as it could be. Instead, I worked on a V2 and she’s going over the results this week to present later this month.

We’ll see where that goes. If it doesn’t go through, then it’s probably time to look elsewhere, which is not something I want to do. I like my colleagues, the pay is above average and the benefits are good. However, friends, family and colleagues are telling me that if it doesn’t go through for some reason then it’s time to go. The promotion I’ve been working to get for two years is the level at which my colleagues have argued I should’ve been hired at.

Back when I applied to this job, my last company had already been through multiple rounds of layoffs and I was getting worried about the future. I had been put up for promotion, but all promotions were pushed back by 6-12 months, so I started looking. I was more worried about landing a job, so instead of going for a diagonal move I went for a position at the same level I was at. Now after 3 managers, and just as many reorgs, I finally feel like someone has my back to argue for my promotion. I just hope it finally happens, I’ve been working at that level for years now so I just feel like my career has been falling behind numbers wise.

Fun thing that’s coming up, I’ll be doing some presentations internally for teaching our new colleagues! Just some domain knowledge stuff, I’ll prep some slides and whiteboard drawings. It’ll make for a nice change of pace. We’ve had 5 new hires in my team of 13 devs the past two months alone. While AI has been an accelerator for the folks that have recently started as far as getting their boots on the ground and getting smalls tasks done, we’ve noticed that their domain knowledge is just not at the level we expect.

We recently threw one of the new hires into our support rotation as they were reaching 90 days, and they were struggling to answer even the more basic questions asked by our other internal teams, often relying on AI which led to hallucinations. The problems in that channel often involve things like finding production data in a weird state and needing to figure out how that state was reached. Often, these issues touch multiple services under our umbrella. These aren’t things you can troubleshoot without at least some knowledge of the domain, AI can’t fill in the blanks if you’re unable to provide the right context.

In life

Slow, so very slow. So very tired.

My partner and I just started semaglutide medication for weight loss, now that generics are available in Canada. We’re hoping it helps us on the path back to health.

With better health, moving might become easier and energy would come faster after that. At least that’s the hope.

Other than that, I’ve had no time for learning at home. Or in all honesty, it’d be better to say I’ve made no time. Too much of my time has been spent rotting away last month, I’ve had to bring back app timers.

June

This June, we need to rebuild the deck in the yard. We’ve never done anything like this so this should be… interesting?

We’re taking 10 days off for it, which will hopefully be enough. It’ll make for a nice mental break though, which I feel I am in dire need of.

The weather is getting warm, the sun is out longer, my mood is a little better. Here’s to summertime?

Photo by Nelly Antoniadou on Unsplash

A Jack of Some Trades

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 21:37:21 -0400

Today at work, I stayed in a bit later than usual. I’ve been busy leading a project that I’m quite proud of, but has kept me busy. We’re in our last Sprint, and I’m expecting to have completed the rollout by Friday next week.

In this project, I currently have a recently hired dev working under me. His heart is in the right place, he’s an alright programmer, and he’s got the AI tooling to fill in the gaps.

… or so I thought.

A little late

Monday last week, we kicked off our three-week sprint. Of his tasks, he had two smaller carry-over that he was able to close early on the Tuesday. Then, another that I expect the average intermediate would need somewhere between 2-4 days, so I would’ve expected the task to be either completed the Friday or be ready to merge the Monday of this week.

Instead, we skip to today, where I was on my second pass of his PR review. The work needing more, and the developer finally admitting he was stuck and confused about what’s next.

The blame

Is he to blame, for not raising the flag earlier? That he was stuck or confused? That asking Claude did not fill in the blanks? Perhaps a little bit.

Mostly, I blame myself. I should’ve checked in with him more. I need this project to go well.

I could give 10,000 excuses.

a few / 10,000

My mental health, tumbling down a hill the longer I have to deal with copy-pasted AI findings from my colleagues in my PRs, that when questioned about they pull back on as they never spent the time to verify their veracity.

The inane number of tasks I assigned myself this Sprint, the pressure pushing my head under the water. Gasping, my metaphorical lungs stretched thin.

The distractions too many, the SEV1 incident catching my eye. Worried they will point the finger at my department again somehow and we’ll be stuck with another few weeks of patching various things that were not on our list of priorities this year.

My dog, having explosive diarrhea in the middle of the night 3 nights in a row.

The rain, four days in with 2 to 3 more to go.

The yearly new budget recruiter spam on LinkedIn, making me picture grasses greener.

My care, my drive, the gasoline being pumped to my motor heart. Fading. Fading. Fading.

The reality

I simply did not do my job well. That’s okay, I’ll learn, I’ll move forward. I’ll pull myself out of the slump and push forward again.

What was the issue? The developer was working in a realm he was unfamiliar with. He’s not really a junior, but I’d qualify him as an early intermediate.

The task was to add to our E2E integration test suite after the bulk of our work was completed. This involved introducing two new containers, and gaining an understanding of the part of the code he had never touched. It’s also an optional pipeline that we run twice a day and post the output to Slack to catch regressions.

What he told me is that all he’s ever done was server-side programming work, nothing else.

What were my expectations?

In all the jobs I’ve had so far in my career, I needed to wear many hats, sometimes many at once. Sometimes I was QA, other times PM, sometimes team/project lead, often times programmer, and other times architect or database analyst and data engineer.

And that’s not counting which layers of the code I’ve come to touch. Pretty much all of them at this point.

The gaps he listed to me were:

Never really worked with Docker before.
Did not have a good grasp of networking basics (this touched on Docker networking).
Had not used the Testify packages before (acceptable, that’s details).
Never had to interact with a CI pipeline before, no matter the flavour.
Could not figure out how to debug our app as he only knew how to do it through Jetbrains.

With all my feelings about AI, I would’ve expected some of these gaps to be filled by a chatbot.

But was the breadth of knowledge I expected simply too large our of an intermediate dev? I can’t help but second guess myself.

Have I worked with too many jacks of all trade in my career, even excluding myself, that it has come to taint what I should expect an average developer to know?

In his shoes, I expect the was an anxiety, a guilt perhaps at not being able to do better or more. Though I may be projecting, as that is how I would’ve felt in his position.

I can’t count on that being the case though.

A reflection

Lately, I’ve been thinking about my career. I am not yet 30, though that will come early next year, meaning that on the average timeline I have more than the entire length of my lifetime thus far left to work.

That’s a depressing thought for sure, and I don’t know if I’ll make it that far, but I have to assume I will.

A week ago, I was discussing with another colleague about where this career will be in 2, 3, 5, 10 years. This other colleague is in his mid-40s, and much better positioned in life. His house is partially paid off, he’s got kids and savings, and experience to fall back and the titles to make any job search easier.

I have to think about if my chosen career will still exist by the time I’m halfway through the rest of it.

Is being good at many things what I should be doing? Should I be putting all my eggs in one basket and pick something to be a true expert in, and hope I’ve picked the right one? Or maybe I should switch to the management path? Become a tech or team lead and hope that managing humans will stay longer than managing agents?

I don’t know, and I’m getting too tired to think about it now. It’s high time I stop writing this and get some sleep.

I’ll need to find the answer eventually, before the world makes the decision for me. Before I become what I fear I’ll be, useless to society.

Goodnight.

Cover by J. Schiemann on Unsplash

Second picture is one I took myself, during my trip to Japan. This was taken on a road near Jishi-in Temple, in Kyoto.