How many of y’all are building just basic CRUD APIs, calling other endpoints to store stuff and retrieve other stuff and how many of you are building cutting edge stuff redefining the limits of what’s possible, saving companies millions of $ a year, handling infrastructure that serves hundreds of thousands of QPS that we read about on engineering blogs of companies like Uber, Instagram etc? #engineering #software #swe
Product guy here, I have a slightly different perspective. The customer doesn’t care whether the api/project you contributed to is technically complex or not. Many times a lot of complex software/projects are not as groundbreaking for the company, they make a good headline or conference talk, might even get you a promo, but inconsequential for the company. Seen many examples where a simple UI hack or copy change deliver more money for the business, than the 2 quarter effort, that principal engineer championed to save, in infra costs. Value your work relative to impact it makes to the customer, not what other engineers admire you for ;) Tip: If you are a jr. engineer, become your PMs best friend, he will contextualize the value of your work better than your EM :)
Very true.
What you said is good for PMs but not engs. Those kind of business opportunities are mostly identified and prioritized by PM. If you keep working on such things as an eng you will get replaced easily soon or later. Eng should always look for complex and critical systems for real tech companies like aws or meta infra in order to keep competency.
And here I am who didn’t even code for a month and keep on doing operations work 🤡
Building designs of future hardware accelerators to run your queries faster if that counts
What’s the tech stack?
snap go back to do leetcode hards, thats what you do
I'm working on services that has 100M QPS. *Drops the mic*
Yeah, is it just writing business logic and having the scalability handled by infra teams who have already built such systems?
No also dealing with scalability issues too. We always get inconsistency because our systems aren't transactional.
I'm doing neither. Not involved with APIs and nothing groundbreaking.
I miss being the crud guy, I am lost in neverending infrastructure now..
Building Crud stuff that save clients million and making millions. Technology wise, it's not that complex. But because our clients are making billions each year. Even a 1-3 % improvement results in large gain. So the true innovation is access to rich clients list and their product pain points. And have an ecosystem they can't easily migrate their work off it. (There are already couple open source bbg terminals competitors, but without rich clients using it, there is not enough network effect to support it) If we gave the same tool to poor unemployed fresh graduates. It'll be useless.
I used to do really cool eng heavy stuff handling millions of qps. Now I basically do crud stuff. I want to go back to the cool work
The vast majority of us are building the simple stuff. There’s probably only a handful of people spread across the major players actually working on groundbreaking projects.
This is the truth comrade. I make good $ doing CRUD stuff but it gets boring at times and feels shallow compared to all the cool work done by the demigods in the engineering blogs.
Not true. In reality lots of people are working on potential groundbreaking stuff, and just a handful succeed. This is how risk minimization works in the mind of the leadership, strategic redundancy