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A 30-Something Full-Stack Dev Gets Blunt Career Advice: Promotion Is a Quota Game, Not a Meritocracy

Programmer 1v1 Interview Series No. 9: Should I Move into Management?

Author: 双越AI_club

Hello everyone, I'm Shuangyue. Creator of wangEditor, former senior front-end engineer at Baidu and Didi, elite instructor at Imooc, PMP, and author of Front-end Interview School.

I've been running a "Programmer 1v1 Interview Series" where I chat via WeChat voice or text with one programmer at a time, they share their situation and confusion, and I give advice. Below are the main points from the 9th interviewee (no personal sensitive info), shared for your reference.

Basic Info

He owns a house and a car locally, works at a branch of a large/medium internet company, has decent income, and the job is fairly stable.

He said they've had a few rounds of layoffs, each time a few dozen people, which isn't much relative to the company size.

But they're hiring very few now, only backend Java/Go tech stacks, for Agent-related development.

In internet companies, front-end roles are already gone.

Big companies are also saving money

They used to use claude-code with the Claude model, and the company gave each person a few hundred dollars of tokens per month. But now the company also finds the cost too high, lowered the budget, and encourages using domestic large models.

First, this shows every company is saving money and cutting budgets in every direction. Second, it shows domestic models are now basically usable and meet daily project development needs just fine.

Regarding the development process, their business team sets stricter requirements, from requirements, design to process, to ensure stability. The internal tools team is more free-form, such as self-developed, self-tested, self-released. They previously promoted SDD development, but it hasn't been rolled out company-wide; each team uses it according to its own situation.

He said they are now starting to use AI for code review and exploring AI automated testing processes, which might replace some testers. Developers get laid off, and testers too.

AI applications have basically stabilized

Since this spring, although large models are still updating, AI tools in every direction have basically stabilized; their functions and application scenarios haven't changed much, with no sign of evolving to the next generation.

Mainly divided into three areas:

In any area, AI applications are now an efficiency tool, not a proactive, creative brain.

The goal and loop mentioned overseas have been around for a while but haven't been widely promoted or used, which shows they're not that useful.

I predict that next year should be the year AI programming + full-stack stabilizes; both in process and tech stack, best practices will start settling out, just like the Vue + Springboot set of best practices from 10 years ago.

Should I move into management?

He's worked 8 years and reached age 30. Staying as a junior-level developer always brings career anxiety, so he naturally thinks about promotion.

I said: You're asking the wrong question. Whether you can be promoted is not about whether you want it. Do you get it just because you want it? Whether promotion happens depends mainly on whether the company has a slot, and then on your skills and effort.

For example, some companies 10 years ago had 1000 people this year, 2000 next, 5000 the year after. As long as you performed decently, you'd get promoted every year. But now companies are laying off and shrinking hiring, with no overall growth. As long as your boss doesn't leave, you won't get promoted even if you're excellent.

Since the job is stable, focus on doing your projects well, meanwhile add value to the team, show your value to your boss, keep accumulating. If an opportunity comes in the future, promotion will naturally fall to you.

This requires sustained output, patience, and luck.

Want to look at overseas job opportunities

He has the idea of finding a job abroad, first for the work environment, and second for the future education environment of his kids.

His English foundation is decent, reading and writing are fine. He said he recently plans to specifically study spoken English and practice for a while.

I support this idea, but I think his approach is wrong. I suggest he: Don't rush to learn spoken English first. Go send out resumes, test the waters, and see if there's any response.

If there's a response and interview opportunities, then cram spoken English. If not many opportunities, then don't rush to study, don't do futile work.

AI programming is the same domestically and abroad, and overseas is actually months ahead of us, so their programmers are also losing jobs.

I follow a programmer in Europe on X; he's been unemployed for months and hasn't found a suitable job. He says a single position now has dozens to hundreds of competitors. Compared to years ago when a referral basically guaranteed an interview, now even with a referral you wait in a long queue. Too many people, too few jobs.

For them, as a foreigner competing against local people, the difficulty is easy to imagine. So you have to explore first, then invest.