horse_called_proletariat [none/use name]

If you’re a senior engineer, then you should have a team of juniors doing most of the coding. Your job is to architect, peer review, meet with stakeholders, etc… At least that has been my experience. Unless you are on one of those small teams with all senior engineers and then you have to do all of the above, and the coding too. I’ve had that experience as well.

small team with inexperienced new people that needed a lot of training and we also had “architect” positions and those guys I would never even see or talk to, they were in their own realm somewhere isolated from the actual work. what you are describing was more like the “principal” engineer and we had one of those and he was mostly only doing meetings and occasionally doing some work when the itch struck him sufficiently

Yeah, you either work extra hours or you work during the meetings or both or you get de-skilled pretty quickly unless you work open source, second job or personal projects in the non-work hours. Otherwise, you can treat it like BS job but your skills will become BS and you will have to get better at lying and or potentially go into management with that level of experience. RN I’m unemployed and I’d gladly take any position, even if I’m qualified for senior, and I don’t care if I have to work extra hours to keep up and this is coming from someone who has been actively organizing on the job at my last two tech jobs.

Quiet quitting is sorta stopping working… so I guess we are like a dim lightbulb lol That said though, a burnout antidote is to start a union and love your craft, not your boss’s bottom line. That’s the real boss fight. Grind culture can lead to burnout but frankly it can also not. For me personally, grinding to level up my own coding skills for myself or for volunteer efforts is far more satisfying that working extra hours for some VC’s profits. Not that I haven’t had cool projects at work but you don’t always get to have those and also I am not gonna be putting in unpaid hours of work anymore for their profits. Open source, personal projects for a portfolio, volunteering for something you actually CARE about is a good burnout antidote. If you do it off the clock at a strict workplace you can still enjoy what you got into tech for in the first place while you spend your time at work doing what it takes to stay employed, while organizing, should you choose to do that. In a more bougie workplace you could even do that on the clock and not get much pushback at all. That said, if you really want to be pro-athlete level coder you are probably gonna have to put in more than 40 hours weekly combined at and off work, tech skills are fastly moving target, so it does require it but hell, at least its not physical work… And as far as the corporate porkies and their manager lackies, my observation (* anecdotal but I have also talked to many coworkers about this type of stuff and confirmed it repeatedly) is that the bigger the company, the more clueless they are about who is really doing what of value. Case in point, working hard and overdelivering doesn’t always save you from the random ‘fire’ button. I’ve seen it happen to myself and my coworkers based on really dubious reasoning behind upper management’s layoff decisions, which they are also super un-transparent about. If you are not levelling up skills you will probably eventually get proletarianized, having to do much more manual and outdated work for much less pay than before, which is also good, in a way, because you will find yourself with other proletarianized ex-coders that will want to start a coder’s union much more than a bunch of bougie techies who are feeling themselves as indivuals far more than as a workers collective. Don’t be a sellout, be skilled worker that’s also an organizer in solidarity with the rest of the working class, even if you are a bougie worker. Code for your own enjoyment and to keep up with the craft and for whatever org or volunteer effort you actually CARE about, not for licking the bosses’ boot.

don’t try making changes as individual. do it when you have leverage, after organizing your coworkers collectively into a formally recognized union or an informal grouping of workers that take action together and are willing to take some risks. and I’m not just talking about technical changes to projects or ops, im talking about workplace processes, such as how much unpaid time you work, getting guarantees about not getting laid off, keeping or improving current pay and benefits, getting on the job training, getting to work certain types of skills without getting deskilled, etc.

Otherwise, for technical challenges, a lot of it boils down to how popular you are and internal politics and whether management will or will not get in your way. as a worker, i’m less concerned with how well the business performs and much more concerned with how my coworkers and I are treated. I do also dislike toil but realize that too much automation can also remove the need for myself to be employed. If you are working in the west it can also mean getting yourself replaced with outsourced workers, who will either also be de-skilled and only taught to use the automation you wrote and paid less or very skilled and without access permissions and still payed way less than you. Its a fucked system in every type of way.

I often wish my coworkers would care way more about working conditions and the way they are being exploited and used and less on technical aspects of how the work gets done. Not that a well organized work process and sane technology choices wont make things easier for workers sometimes, but this is traditionally the job of senior engineers colluding with management to figure out and not much of my concern, even if I do have good ideas on how to improve things, which will get ignored by the needs of the business and executive’s silly decisions that they make that day