My manager wants me to mentor our new hire next month. I’m a little stressed about it because I still feel like I’m still just winging it most days, even after a year. Is it normal to feel underqualified when you first start mentoring someone?

Valuable metrics are a quiet superpower. What are some you like to pay attention to? Here are some GH metrics that have helped me: 1. PR Cycle Time — how long from PR open to merge. If this spikes, something's blocking the team. 2. Review Load per engineer — who's doing 11 reviews while others do 1? 3. Stale PRs — PRs sitting unreviewed for 5+ days are a team health signal, not just a delivery signal. 4. Deploys per week — Teams that ship frequently have fewer big-bang releases and lower stress

I’m feeling annoyed because I feel like I haven’t built a single new thing in months. Every week is the exact same cycle of chasing down outages, rushing out hotfixes, and patching tech debt that was written before I even started working. I'm starting to wonder if the whole industry is like this, or is my company just uniquely chaotic?

Anyone a bit concerned about developers’ AI usage for 100% of development tasks? It’s not like medical students using it to get their certifications.. there are exams. But we’re building software that runs our day out day lives.

Do you think software engineering should be a licensed profession? Or do you think it eventually will be? There is so much at stake at times with what we do. While I think software a decent enough job with regulation where it really matters (financial or self driving like development), I’m sure it’s not to the par of what it should be. To add, engineers have a pretty easy recovery should they act in bad faith.