r/ExperiencedDevs
Senior engineers, tech leads and engineering managers
- Size
- Large
- Buying intent
- High
- Promotion
- Closed
The highest-quality discussion of engineering tooling decisions anywhere on Reddit, and promotion is not permitted in any form. Members are senior enough to influence or make purchasing decisions, which makes the prohibition genuinely frustrating.
Read it anyway. The threads where a staff engineer explains how their organisation actually chose between two vendors are worth more as market intelligence than most of what you would pay a research firm for, and the language members use is the language your buyers use internally.
What people actually post
The evaluation write-up
How a team chose between options, with the real reasoning rather than the public version. Invaluable to read.
The organisational problem
Process, hiring and team structure. Sometimes reveals a tooling gap indirectly.
The career question
Seniority, compensation and management tracks. High volume, no commercial relevance.
What people get wrong about it
People skip it because promotion is banned. It is the best free market research on the platform and skipping it is a mistake.
Can you promote in r/ExperiencedDevs?
Closed. Mentioning your own product will be removed regardless of context, disclosure or relevance. Participate as an engineer or not at all.
What gets you removed
Mentioning your own product in any form. Removal is consistent and the membership is unsympathetic to the argument that it was relevant.
A good first contribution
Answer a question about technical leadership or organisational dysfunction. Nothing you do here can be commercial, so contribute as an engineer or read quietly.
Products that fit here
- Understanding how buying decisions are argued
- Learning your buyers' internal vocabulary
- Testing whether a problem is widely felt
- Nothing transactional
What does not work
Any attempt to work around the rule. The membership is senior, attentive and entirely unsympathetic.
Timing
Irrelevant, given the above.
How it compares to the neighbours
The communities closest to r/ExperiencedDevs, and how they differ on the three things that decide whether one is worth your time.
| Community | Size | Intent | Promotion |
|---|---|---|---|
| r/ExperiencedDevs | Large | High | Closed |
| r/devops | Large | High | Conditional |
| r/programming | Very large | Low | Closed |
| r/dataengineering | Mid-size | High | Conditional |
Where this fits in a wider plan
r/ExperiencedDevs appears in our list of the best subreddits for developer tools, which sets it against the other communities worth watching in that market. If you are starting from nothing, the six-week plan in finding your first 100 users covers how to build standing before you mention a product at all.
Watch r/ExperiencedDevs without reading it.
Lidar reads it every day, scores each post against what your product does, and sends you the ones worth answering. Along with the rest of engineering and infrastructure.