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At previous jobs while wearing the hat of "senior software engineer", management always expected from teams the now common "you build it you run it" way of work

At previous jobs while wearing the hat of "senior software engineer", management always expected from teams the now common "you build it you run it" way of working. The seniors of the team were supposed to know (or to learn) all the nuances of the parts that composed their infra: redis, rabbitmq, postgres, go, docker, k8s, github ci/cd, oauth,... Of course, senior software engineers should also know all the stuff related to software engineering (DS, algorithms, system design, solid, etc.) I ended up burnt out. Too much to learn, and I'm not really interested in most of the infra tooling we were using (I loved redis and got to know tons of it, on the other hand I never really cared about k8s or rabbitmq). Sadly, more often than not, companies out there still expect the mentality of "you build it you run it" which implies acquiring knowledge of all the little things in your infra that can go wrong in production. Damn it.

muxator 4y ago
While your burnout is understandable, I'd see the whole situation in a positive light: instead of treating complexity as someone else's problem, this forces the team to aim for simplicity. This kind of attitude is often in charge of more senior engineers, since they are the ones who most probably understand (or have lived through) all the possible nuances on wanting to rely on so many systems. If I'd were in your shoes I would have ended up burned out too if I were given the responsibility of having to understand it all, but no mandate to simplify it as much as possible.
waynesonfire 4y ago
Oh yeah, this trend is toxic. It's a cost-saving technique. GraphQL is another toxic technology that relieves the responsibility of designing the API to users instead of the application owners. May as well just give folks access to your DB and have them run SQL queries themselves. Look! No need for a UI. All this at the expense of the software engineer that has to manage all this complexity themselves.
ikiris 4y ago
... who do you think is supposed to manage all this complexity if not the people who are building the software?
rc_hackernews 4y ago
This was exactly me and few months ago and is also how I burned out at my last job. You can add all the front-end stuff to that list too. I think it’s easy to say we as engineers should make things simpler. I have no idea how to do that in practice on a team though. Once the complexity started to creep in, seems like a wave just kept sweeping everyone towards more and more complexity.

muxator 4y ago

While your burnout is understandable, I'd see the whole situation in a positive light: instead of treating complexity as someone else's problem, this forces the team to aim for simplicity. This kind of attitude is often in charge of more senior engineers, since they are the ones who most probably understand (or have lived through) all the possible nuances on wanting to rely on so many systems. If I'd were in your shoes I would have ended up burned out too if I were given the responsibility of having to understand it all, but no mandate to simplify it as much as possible.

waynesonfire 4y ago

Oh yeah, this trend is toxic. It's a cost-saving technique. GraphQL is another toxic technology that relieves the responsibility of designing the API to users instead of the application owners. May as well just give folks access to your DB and have them run SQL queries themselves. Look! No need for a UI. All this at the expense of the software engineer that has to manage all this complexity themselves.

ikiris 4y ago

... who do you think is supposed to manage all this complexity if not the people who are building the software?

rc_hackernews 4y ago

This was exactly me and few months ago and is also how I burned out at my last job. You can add all the front-end stuff to that list too. I think it’s easy to say we as engineers should make things simpler. I have no idea how to do that in practice on a team though. Once the complexity started to creep in, seems like a wave just kept sweeping everyone towards more and more complexity.