I just walked away from an interview where they asked me to live-code a solution using only a whiteboard and no AI assistance. Completely detached from how actual engineering happens in 2026. If a company refuses to let you use the tools that make you 10x faster, does that mean their internal culture is just as stuck in the past?

I’m making $170k, but 80% of my job is just cleaning up hallucinated code from our offshore team. Leadership thinks they’re saving millions by using AI-powered contractors, but I’m spending my entire week fixing basic logic errors and security holes that shouldn't exist. The actual codebase is becoming a house of cards that’s going to collapse. Does anyone else feel like their high salary is basically hazard pay for managing a mountain of AI slop?

I'm an AE at Microsoft and have 'climbed the ladder' from a junior entry level vendor role. I'm learning a tonne in my current role and feel there's a ceiling to my career progression. I'm a victim of not hopping around tech companies to benefit from salary bumps. As a result, my salary and level are lower than what they should be. I have a potential opp to join Google as an AE in a different role, potentially more junior but would massively boost my sales accumen, Should i make the jump?

when you talk about TC at a company that offers RSU's, are you factoring all of that into Y1 TC, even though it vests over a number of years? Doesnt seem right to me. the recruiter keeps telling me 800k TC, but 400 of that vests over 4 years. seems that levels.fyi calculates it that way

My company just slashed our On-Call Compensation structure by 50% because they claim our new automated monitoring tool reduces the manual burden. In reality, PagerDuty is hitting us just as hard at 2 AM. It feels like an incredibly underhanded way to cut total compensation without changing the official base salary numbers on our contracts. How do you collectively organize a pushback against a policy change?