AMA: 👋 I'm Michael. Former-moderator of the sub, Facebook top performer, "the Coding Machine", junior -> principal / 2009-2017, helper of bootcamps students and grads, founder of Formation for experienced engineers preparing for interviews.

Q1: Find WHAT and WHERE you are a top 10% person at and go there. Video games + Amazon Games. Ice Hockey + The NHL. Languages + Duolingo. If you feel average, you have to put in more hours than anyone and you'll put in those hours in an area of passion. If you spend 5 hours a day playing video games and that's what you want to do you have to figure out how to connect that to a company and job. Q2: I don't have a good answer for this one. I can give my personal answer which likely doesn't work for others and has costs, but when things don't go well I build. If I cause a bunch of bugs and feel bad, I don't mope, I fix them all as fast as humanly possible. If I take down the site, I don't freak out, I fix it as fast as humanly possible. So my answer is to build, but yeah, not for everyone. Q3: I think AI is turning testing on its head, see this: [https://engineering.fb.com/2026/02/11/developer-tools/the-death-of-traditional-testing-agentic-development-jit-testing-revival/](https://engineering.fb.com/2026/02/11/developer-tools/the-death-of-traditional-testing-agentic-development-jit-testing-revival/) so be open minded to how you apply the lessons you've learn with AI to test things every better and faster. Q4: I don't see ANY job as safe, like even doctors and nurses, and you have to be really good at what you do, so find a job you will be good at and don't chase a safe job. I know someone who said they want to be a firefighter because that must be safe, and then saw a startup that is building robot AI firefighters. You'll be miserable if you become a firefighter for job security and not because you like it. Q5: EXPERIENCE WITH THE INFRA is baseline, knowing is base line for mid level engineers and companies still want experience. It's impossible to simulate the scale of big companies but try anyways, like dive into niche and odd small scale areas that you REALLY understand. Like even tracing a packet from a client through AWS for real and not on paper. Like client -> global load balancer -> load balancer -> ec2 box nginx -> service on that box -> log hello world. Something you can study in an hour but probably takes most people 8 hours to actually get fully working from scratch, manually, if you haven't done it.