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I chose to study computer science because it was supposed to be math intensive and the job market was a lot better than other fields. I really enjoyed coding and solving problems in school. Nowadays, my job consists of very little “real” coding. Things my job consists of. Not just in my current job but also former job at last company. - Interviewing and deciding whether to hire people. - Gauging employee performance - Working with business people to gather requirements - Creating user stories - Writing up documentation and design docs - Answering random questions from the team - Estimating deadlines - Answering to leadership why we didn’t meet a deadline or why this bug got into production Whatever little bit of “real work” I do isn’t even “real” coding. It’s doing stuff like figuring out why this random library isn’t working the way it’s supposed to according to its documentation. Writing worthless boilerplate unit tests that won’t even help stop defects. Finagling with CDK/cloudformation because security keeps sending adjustments that don’t matter. All this stuff is so stressful and unsatisfying. It’s not at all what I had in mind what my job would be like when I was a student writing AVL trees for my algorithm class. I want out
sounds like you shoulda stayed an L5 SDE instead of getting promoted
I feel this as an l4 lol
computer science isn't the same as software engineering
Very few startup companies or some small portion of MAANG have real challenging work, rest all is plumbing and understanding the systems.
Plumbing and leaks are also challenging and business critical.
Have you tried a smaller company? I've worked at companies with sizes from ~100 to >100k and everything in the middle. At smaller companies there is in general more coding but also less internal software to support you. (Just DIY everything)
Yeah these past few weeks I’ve been giving it a lot of thought of getting a job at a smaller company. I figure I’ll lose a lot of compensation but idk how much of a price to put on whether I actually enjoy work
Folks who joined us around last year from Amzn/Msft didn't lose compensation meaningfully. (G/F are a different story though.) Might be tough to get in in today's high interest environment though. and in general uncertain what SWE comp is going to look like going forward. 2020-2021 were like the peak of the market.
It’s why some people go into academia. They take the pay cut to experience the full (albeit theoretical) range of their interests. Or some people found a startup and take on that risk for a similar type of trade-off.
The empty face expression makes it so much better.
Welcome to software engineering. It’s 10% coding and 90% thinking about coding.
Sounds like you’re on a generic swe / leadership track while you want to be on a hardcore engineering/architecture track. Within many companies the role you’re looking for does exist - usually buried under weird titles in the teams that solve very complex problems. However, keep in mind that for career growth (even in a hardcore engineering track) you need to have certain interaction skills (eg to convince people why your design is better than others). Try to find a niche. It will make it easier trying to find the roles where you can “go deep”. Also find companies / teams that are more focused on solving really complex problems over just plumbing a bunch of infrastructure together.
I do.. lost a decade working for lousy companies for gc I would slap my earlier self hard
That’s a very weird flex post…