I'm not sure if it's having two managers or the fact I've been employed for 2 months but haven't worked on the same thing for more than a week. I'm almost at the breaking point because people expect me to ramp up to these projects every single week and be the miracle boi and fix all the problems. Sometimes I feel it isn't worth living out here for the jobs. Can't get into any FANG companies and startups always underpay. Can maybe anyone take time to help me out? Or at least leave some comments about how to actually progress in this career?
That is the real world for you, miracle boi
So you've had a new project every week of employment? Not anything small, like a new project of rewriting the major components and maintaining all of the other work meetings? Check my other post and see if it sounds normal.
I’m a PM, so I deal with the ever changing client requirements directly every single day, which is why I work my ass off to protect my dev from being exposed to turbulence. Sounds like your product person has some issues to figure out...
miracle boi...haha, reminds me of sk8er boi song.
Congratulations, you're being forced to learn how to become an engineering manager. Not the people under you part, but the managing up, communication, process definition, and balancing part. Nobody likes learning this in a startup environment but it's valuable experience. What doesn't kill you only makes you stronger. (Based on your description of the work env, your company acts like a startup even if it isn't one)
Be the miracle boi? This industry rewards people who are comfortable in ever changing situations. If you aren’t comfortable with a small startup join a T2 company and then transition to a FANG. Message people on LinkedIn, ask coworkers for recs and talk to people at other companies. Then us them for referrals, they’ll do it happily for the referral money.
I understand ever changing. Maybe if I explain the scope of tasks. Come in on Monday and you start working on what you were doing Friday, the CTO messages you to change and check this other system and optimize it. Next the original owner of the thing you were working on tells you it's urgent to get this done by tomorrow. What needs to be done? You need to optimize a 300 line SQL query that has 50 database functions and triggers which all expect certain formats of data. You also need to check and fix all of our repos for your changes. Wait, the CTO comes back and says you're the only one available and you need to start working on this other major platform that handles encryption for all of the company. You need to harden and secure the entire project and make it scalable to handle our increasing load. This is top priority atm. Another product lead needs this event notification publish right now because we our users are complaining about getting too many emails. Disabling it is not an option says product (it is). You need to have this done by EOD. Oh the CTO noticed some graphs having large numbers and sends a link to you. Hey can you look into this? Our system is going to be hurting soon and our product is going to stop working and making money if you don't figure out what's going on. Wait again, the junior dev needs help maintaining this repo and the CTO said I needed to train him. Oh his code is awful. HR just assigned you some coding interviews to conduct which has had a 100% failure rate so far (low quality candidate). Just sprinkle those around. Did I mention you have a mandatory 20 minute standup every morning, and every week you have an hour mid-sprint planning and a 2 hour sprint planning every week? Oops the people team decided to book a nice big block of time during the week that you must attend for culture reasons. I think there is a limit of how often "changing situations" before it's so detrimental to actually make any progress. All repos are written by different people because of turnover, partial refactoring, partial rewrites. Split across clouds during migration rather than biting the bullet (can't find time because something else is important)
Your company has no process. We here run sprints and such adhoc requests come through JIRA and time is allotted. OR you are always firefighting because the team is understaffed.