Fabio ManganielloI am an engineer with more than two decades of experience, and I use LLMs to write a lot of my code in my corporate job.
I tried to first avoid them altogether and then minimize the usage, but I honestly don’t believe that an engineer in 2025 is given much choice.
You see, 20 years ago when I joined the industry (and still 10 years ago) it was possible (and actually it was the norm) to start a career doing C/C++ development, and then use the same languages and technologies until the end of your career.
It would take a junior developer years just to master the C++ standard library.
The biggest leap you were expected to take at some point was how to use Boost or Qt, or a different compiler, but that was it.
Today, instead?
Well, in my past two jobs alone I’ve already counted 7-8 programming languages that I’ve had to work on just in the past 3 years.
I’m expected to easily switch from a Java component, to one in Kotlin, to a Python script, to some legacy Perl stuff, to debugging something on an old Ruby codebase, to a Go executable that a guy made a few years ago, to investigating API calls in our frontend code in Typescript+React, to writing Painless scripts for ElasticSearch, Groovy scripts for Neptune, Scala code for Spark, Lua integrations for our C bindings etc.
And around 20-30 libraries and frameworks that I’ve had to master.
I’m expected to know everything about Airflow, DBT, Spark, Tableau, MySQL, Snowflake, Gitlab CI, Harness, Kafka, Redis, ElasticSearch, Neptune, Tinkerpop, DynamoDB, MongoDB, and countless other frameworks and data solutions. And provide my management on demand with in-depth comparisons among these technologies. And I’m also expected to train on the fly my models with PyTorch or Tensorflow if required. And I need to know how to deploy it on the fly to our infra with Terraform, Ansible and everything in between. And I need to know everything about ingress, outgress, sizing and scaling cloud components, security etc. And monitoring with Grafana, Loki, Kibana, Graphite metrics, Prometheus metrics, CloudWatch metrics, OpenTelemetry, and every week there’s something new. Oh, and let’s not even get started with the frontend madness, where the whole stack basically changes once a week.
Oh, and this on top of your FOMO colleague who every day comes up with “hey have you checked Dart / Nim / Rust / Elixir / Haskell / Nix? Shall we rewrite everything in it?”
It was just devs at the beginning, then it became full-stack devs, then full-stack devops, then dev-sec-ops, then dev-sec-ML-ops that also know everything about cloud and monitoring, now it’s basically “pay that single guy to know everything about everything, and threaten him to fire him if he bitches”.
When you hear HR say “we have a polyglot stack” what they actually mean is “you’re expected to hear of a tool or a framework for the first time at the morning coffee break, and by 5PM you’re supposed to provide a PoC for it on top of our product”.
In the beginning I was genuinely curious of learning new stuff.
Now, when the “new stuff” comes at the pace of one new thing every 2-3 days, and I’m given one day to master it, and by the next day I’m already supposed to deploy iron-strong stuff in prod with that stuff, I honestly don’t give a single fuck anymore.
This is just cognitive fatigue with no added value caused by companies that have been under-investing in engineering for years, and if you take their requests seriously then you just end up underperforming, or burning out, or both.
No single human brain can hold so much information, master all of it, and be proficient with it at professional level in a short time.
And, at some point, it becomes even pointless learning so many things. You become the guy who already knows 60 languages and he’s tasked to urgently learn the 61st in order to keep his job, with no respect for the breadth of knowledge that you’ve already achieved over all those years.
So do you want me to learn Scala in one day, as if all the stuff I already know wasn’t enough for you, and the next day deploy a Spark plugin that needs to handle millions of requests per hour, otherwise you may lay me off, and you don’t even have enough passion in tech to listen to me and understand the challenges - but on the other hand you keep dumping on me all the bullshit your investors bring up?
Sure, I’ll ask ChatGPT to make it for you.
If you ask idiotic questions and have unrealistic expectations of what a human can do, no matter their experience, and it’s not like you care a lot about delivering a good product anyway nor reward me for my efforts, then you deserve some vibe coding shit in prod.
And please don’t come back to me with gaslighting bullshit about “being motivated to do this job” because YOU killed all the motivation.
By the time things start to go on fire I’ll just make sure to move somewhere else, so you can ask the next vibe coder to fix it.
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