I admit that I became lazy and slacked. Whenever there was a need to get my hands dirty and dive deep into code, I would push it off to my teammates. I only did the fun stuff i.e. high level systems design. Because of this i have almost zero devops/cloud experience and never worked with message queues. The biggest problem I am facing is preparing a story bank for “tell me about a complex project that you worked on” questions. I stopped coasting about a year ago and tried really hard to get valuable job experience. However, the opportunities in my team aren’t great. They are mostly low impact tickets where the complexity lies not in the technical aspect but in the “gathering info and figuring how exactly to solve the problem because nobody has any idea about this code”. Once I spend enough time reading the code and coming up with a solution, which may take up to 3 sprints, the implementation is easy peasy and I can’t say I’ve really worked on a complex project. So, I guess I have two problems. I coasted and my team/company doesn’t have good opportunities. Are there others with this problem?
Sorry to say it but What excuse will you give yourself when you die having coasted through life? … wow what life it was just chilling and in others work!!
I think when dying people regret having worked too much as opposed to coasting lol
The best for you to do if you are genuinely interested to learn is to look for a team internally and change. Work there for 18 -24 months and you will get good experience to move up the ladder or move out. I couldn’t worry about the time lost but focus on the good times ahead. Also don’t discard the friends, fun, experiences, skills you learnt while you coasted. You might not have got these if you were to work 14-15 hours.
Got PiPed
Honestly what you described as your role is commonly the kind of job extremely senior engineers do. Their role is to be a force multiplier, not to single handedly write all the code themselves. Even if you were the most skilled and prolific coder in the world, there are limits to what a single human being can feasibly produce solo. Why is it that you've valued writing code versus doing the work to make the code easy to write more?
The OP thinks adding a caching layer to a service and message queues is more complex than anything he’s done. I don’t think everyone’s on the same page in terms of what high-level system design means. He should study LC and get into a better role at a level that requires no system design.
Your story doesn’t add up. You said you did the fun stuff i.e. high level design, but you still don’t have stories to tell? How would doing devops work have given you those stories?
Not just devops stuff. For example, let’s say there was a problem related to concurrency in a service that my team owned. I would take part in the high level solution discussion and try to contribute but the bare minimum I would do is to understand what’s happening on a high level. The actual coding part, I didn’t do. I don’t think this is a good story to tell because if the interviewer probed me, they would easily figure out that I didn’t do much for this project. Maybe I miscommunicated that I did the actual solution design on a much granular level.
Maybe I need to properly understand what does and does not qualify as a candidate to be used for “tell me about a complex project you worked on”?
tough luck
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Define good experiences
A project where you were the major contributor (or lead) and it had high technical complexity as well as complex business logic. For example, adding a caching layer to a microservice?
Adding a caching layer to a microservice is good experience? Oh boy. Study LC non-stop and get into a FAANG company at a level that doesn’t require system design. Then you can grow into a more senior role.