It's been ages since I interviewed. I started relying heavily on AI tools for my daily dev work over the past couple of years, so my whiteboard coding skills are pretty much gone. I’d definitely bomb a LeetCode screen right now. Are companies still leaning on the old DSA grind, or have hiring processes changed to reflect how most of us code these days?

My manager thinks full-day pair programming is great for collaboration, but I'm struggling with it. It feels like someone is looking over my shoulder constantly, which ruins my focus and leaves me totally drained by the end of the day. Should I tactfully tell my manager how this is affecting me? How do you all feel about pair programming?

My current full-time job is a total dead end and I'm miserable, but it's stable. A recruiter reached out about a contract-to-hire position that's exactly what I want to be doing, but I'm wondering if it's just going to be a glorified temp job. Would it be crazy to leave a permanent position for this?

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

Do you think microservices have saved or wasted engineering time? Argument for the latter: most engineering teams adopt them before product market fit, scale, team scale, and operational maturity. These teams would likely have been better off with a modular monolith. I’d love to hear your experience. Let’s discuss!