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.

Am I overreacting or is this a completely reasonable thing to be anxious about? My company has been doing surprise layoffs with no heads-up whatsoever. You'll notice someone is just gone from Slack one day, and leadership stays completely quiet until gossip starts spreading. It's been really hard to focus, knowing anyone could be next.

What’s the “worst” codebase you’ve ever worked in? I oversee a handful of legacy of inherited services and am finding incremental ways to deprecate/sunset what I can. It has a ton of dead code but it isn’t even the worst I’ve seen. Projects with old libraries that aren’t supported, database layers woven in, and no linting/types.

Has software engineering shifted from “building to last” to “building to replace”? Earlier, we'd build a system, take it to production, and it would run for years with small enhancements and maintenance. Now. every few years there's a push to rewrite everything with a new tech stack, often because the existing system is considered "outdated" or "not sustainable." Are frequent rewrites driven by real business needs, or are we too quick to replace systems instead of evolving them?

What’s your take on oversized Pull Requests? Knowing that it’s the norm of AI assisted development, automation hasn’t still caught up with humans reviewing the changes.. I would and still reject overly large PRs for reasons outside of testing and fixtures.