No wonder I can’t find a TPM job anywhere. The senior devs are doing all my work.
this post was submitted on 09 May 2024
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not my experience at all across 3 separate companies. Ime senior engineers are the highest level that still spends most of the day heads down most days, and that's why I'm gonna stick it out at this level as long as I can.
Do you have excess creative energy?
Pour it into discussion that achieves nothing of value.
Have you considered writing your own projects that you have to hide from your employers, and be careful with whom you discuss, so as to avoid the legal complications of the company owning your work?
Of course there's no point in trying to rationalize this 'cos these people use meetings to try justify their usefulness to the company (HR does the same with random activities), so you end up drawing red lines with invisible ink...
I work in the government and I honestly don't know when anyone does any real work. It's meeting after meeting overlapping other meetings. All week.
How does stuff get done, seriously?
Are you like trying to keep my unemployed?
Get out of my head, Charles
No, this is incompetent management.
Senior engineers write enabling code/scaffolding, and review code, and mentor juniors. They also write feature code.
Lead engineers code and lead dev teams.
Principal engineers code, and talk about tech in meetings.
Senior Principal engineers, and distinguished technologists/fellows talk about tech, and maybe sometimes code.
Good managers go to meetings and shield the engineers from the stream of exec corporate bs. Infrequently they may rope any of the engineers in this chain in to explain the decisions that the engineers make along the way.
Bad managers bring engineers in to these meetings frequently.
Terrible managers make the engineering decisions and push those to the engineers.
bruh, your company has money for all those layers in your lasagna?
your company has money for no one above mid-level engineers to be actually building the product?
I’ve worked for startups too; everyone does everything all at the same time! Let the chaos reign! But it is fun in its own way.
I work for a large company now after the startup I worked for was acquired. Hierarchy, bureaucracy, layers, we’ve got it all. For worse and for better though, it allows me to focus and specialize on what I’m awesome at and furgeddaboddit (ahem! delegate) the stuff that I suck at to those who excel at those tasks.
I came here to say the same.
People in the technical career track spend most of their time making software, one way or another (there comes a point were you're doing more preparation to code than actual coding).
As soon as you jump into the management career track it's mostly meetings to report the team's progress to upper management, even if you're supposedly "technically oriented".
Absolutelly, as you become a more senior tech things become more and more about figuring out what needs to be done at higher and higher levels (i.e. systems design, software development process design) which results in needing to interact with more and more stakeholders (your whole team, other teams, end users, management) hence more meetings, but you still get to do lots of coding or at least code-adjacent stuff (i.e. design).
Good managers go to meetings and shield the engineers from the stream of exec corporate bs
Was lucky enough to work with one... once.
TIL my company has only bad managers.
There is a reason I keep refusing to take the "Lead" position. I know what I'm good at.
Now I don't know, but I been told
It's hard to run with the weight of gold
Other hand I have heard it said
It's just as hard with the weight of lead…
I knew I finally made it to a senior role when I started to do nothing but paperwork.
I work on the City side of the development world. We're always getting screamed at for taking 3 weeks to review a plan set by the same developers who want to meet with me every minute of every fucking day.
I've got 40 projects in my review queue and all of them are demanding a weekly meeting. When am I supposed to do the fucking reviews?
When you talk to your management and show them how overworked you are and ask for a helper. But don't just say how much, show them in business lingo so they actually understand.
Fill out your calendar with the meetings and show management how you have no time for meaningful work because of meetings.
I'm on the Municipal side. City Council ain't gonna raise taxes to hire more people.
I'll get burned out and leave soon enough. The longest-serving person in the development department has been here just over a year, and we pay nearly double what other cities in the area do.
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