Tech Industry
Yesterday
861
Is meta really worth the wait?
Tech Industry
3d
32603
What happens when most of your team is Indian?
Tech Industry
Yesterday
785
PM is irrelevant role and will die in next 2-3 years.
Ask Blinders
Yesterday
2031
How big are the balls of Google to lay off thousands and then do 70 BILLION in stock buyback?
Software Engineering Career
3h
284
Do Tech leads make more than Engineering Manager?
Was in a core engineering team 9 years ago in FAANG. I saw one of my former managers become a VP today which reminded me the days we worked together. Have been working in similar teams since then, people earn more and more money, but the design goal and quality of their work is really low compare to what we had 9 years ago. Managers spend so much time doing stand ups, making Gantt charts, but they are actually clueless about how to achieve first class engineering results. Many of them were promoted by some companies writing website or phone apps for being the fastest committer implementing simple java loops on AWS and running scrums.
the QE role was replaced by Dev taking on both. Quality- is an understatement
When MS had the SDET role the majority of SDETs and the test managers were utterly useless. As a result devs and PMs looked down on testers. That's one of the reasons MS got rid of the role and made devs do the testing. That's just one example and maybe other companies treat the QA/SDET role more seriously.
Working in Quality Engineering for 15 yrs … not just MS all Devs/dev Managers even at mid tier(tier3/tier4) companies look down on Testers… and so sadly we are hired as consultants and not as FT in many of those companies…
9 years ago engineering was legitimately a harder job (from a technical standpoint) and much more intimidating to break into. In 2005 I wasted three days debugging "if (a = 1)", which would have been caught instantly by modern-day compilers. There was also no StackOverflow, so you had to figure out a lot more stuff yourself. And with the dotcom bust, a lot less people were interested for the money. You'd have to be quite good to want to enter the field under those conditions. Being a high schooler tinkering with code in 2005 means you were a specific type of person.
You had to be independently passionate. Although I was a child in 2005, and only had a few summer cs experiences. Couldn't comment on the professional world at that time.
You're just getting older and jaded. You're noticing stuff that's always been there now that you have a clearer perspective of things, on top of the world itself changing and the old problems getting solved with the efforts shifting to other stuff
At least there were big data frameworks, functional programming, cloud and no sql in 2010s. What do we have today? Can you name me a few things people building these days revolutionized the industrial standards?
That stuff is still there. There are good mature tools providing good solutions for those, so they are no longer all the talk. Instead the efforts are going towards video streaming, deep learning based services and iot mainly
@Stripe, I read your comments on the thread and you're absolutely right. There's way too much money in the system that contributed to this situation of lack of innovation. I totally get what you mean there hasn't been anything innovative that has come up the past 5 years. Especially nothing that improves people's QOL in a pretty noticeable sense. The excess money sloshing around is what contributes to this complacency in the industry and distorts normalcy by a huge amount. I have been voicing the same concerns you have privately to close friends because publicly not many are able to understand this take and you get blowback publicly if you voice it because they are either too new in the industry to understand or not mature enough to think a bit broader and higher up in the tree like you are. You will just come off as cynical and doomer when in reality you're essentially just speaking harsh truths no one wants to hear. The other thing is this field is heavily saturated now. Vast majority of folks coming into the industry now are not coming in perhaps like you and I might have for the sheer love of it but because they are chasing the money because this is the new Wall St essentially. You probably have seen this already from anecdotal evidence when you talk to new grads. I see this so much when talking to family and new folks in the industry (university/college included). College/Uni folks have essentially gamified their learning to prioritizing leetcode over practical work. Their recommendation to their friends when you interact with them is just grind leetcode and ignore everything else. We also can't blame them for this as they are just adjusting to what the industry has become. When money chasers come in the overall innovation goes down as everything becomes gamified into planning on how to suck money out rather than trying to truly innovate. You can see this at FAANGs too, there's an overall lack of innovation it's just the primary products driving their businesses forward backstopped by a huge amount of excess liquidity injected into the system. All that capital gets pushed towards FAANG because they are status quo leaders and you get maintenance of status quo and nothing more. The other excess capital gets pushed towards startups who frankly are not starting up for the most part to innovate and deliver value but to seek an exit to grift as quickly as possible. Frankly speaking there is no solution to this. The only way is they have to pull all this excess liquidity out of the system but that sends cracks through the system and realistically is not going to happen. It's not like old America where the best quality product or service gets rewarded. Post 2009 and drastically more so after 2018 it's the best grift that gets rewarded. Just embrace this nonsense and try to build up your personal wealth to provide a good life for yourself and family and try to seek mental peace elsewhere. There's honestly no point trying to fight this. It's totally nonsensical this is how the system works now because this hasn't happened before since the inception of America until post 2018. Best/ideal isn't rewarded anymore, it's short term ROI that's rewarded. This is also bad for the US because our innovation in IT has completely flatlined is going nowhere and obviously this is not beneficial in the long term as eventually some other nation will eat our lunch.
Well said!!
OP you are just becoming old. Take care of your health too, changes will be drastically fast.
People earn more money not just because their skills are increasing but also because the leverage and value tech creates per employee has increased in the past decade
Not to mention the increase in money supply and a good chunk of getting parked at tech companies.