12 ms·

Unfortunately you will either need to change your attitude or change teams. In your position, the expectation is that you are mostly a working through others a

Unfortunately you will either need to change your attitude or change teams. In your position, the expectation is that you are mostly a working through others and acting as a force multiplier of their work. So doing stuff like: * figuring out what motivate your juniors and trying to align that with what needs done * giving them work which stretches their abilities but doesn't overwhelm them * giving them some space to fail but not too much * grooming your juniors to be leaders themselves so they can do some of this mentorship And in general, there are two ways to go. The first is to accept the fact that many senior engineering and most staff engineering gigs are more about this kind of mentorship approach than actually doing work. And basically accept that the prime "getting shit done" years of your career are done and you will mostly be working in this new way now. The second is to change jobs where you are back in the driver seat. As a senior engineer, these positions DO exist even at FAANG (over on my team, I am the most junior with 12 years of experience). However, the more senior you get, the harder it is to find a role like this, especially in big tech - its the rare exception. Startups and consulting gigs probably better align with wanting to be hands on keyboard, but at the price of a paycut.

PragmaticPulp 4y ago
> * figuring out what motivate your juniors and trying to align that with what needs done This is true, but be careful about taking this too far. Young people arrive at the workforce with a wide range of expectations and motivations. Some of those are going to be unrealistic. You should always try to work with them to understand what drives them and help them find their fit. The most frequent misaligned expectation I've seen in juniors is the desire to lead greenfield projects in year 1 of their career. It can be very disappointing to arrive at your dream job and learn that you have to work on someone else's code, and that you have to build a reputation before they'll hand you the fun greenfield work.
- BurningFrog 4y ago
  I wish there was more focus on working with existing code in education, since it is by far most of the work in real projects, and also the hardest.
  - bobthepanda 4y ago
    It's kind of hard to make "legacy" purposefully bad code that is useful for teaching assignments. Certainly a lot more work than drawing up a spec.
    - BurningFrog 4y ago
      Changing existing bad code i an advanced topic. Just working with adding features to decent existing code is all I ask.
- unsui 4y ago
  Literally just had this situation come up in a recent 1:1 with one of our junior devs. He asked about being able to work on greenfield projects focusing on AWS technologies. I had to go into a historical context data dump on the value of addressing technical debt (the project she is being assigned to), and how that frees us up to work on the cool and shiny projects. I think it landed, but I could see some of the fire slightly snuffed out of him.
azangru 4y ago
> In your position, the expectation is that you are mostly a working through others and acting as a force multiplier of their work. OP said that his role is senior developer. Developer. Not a manager. Not a team lead. But someone who wants to write code, preferably together with other experienced developers, and by doing so, enjoy the process of learning and understanding technology at a deeper level. Why, then, would one expect his responsibility to be motivating juniors, giving them work, or raising them to be leaders? Also, if someone wants to write code, teamed up with other senior developers, where should one go?
- thatguymike 4y ago
  ...Because OP is getting paid a big salary to do what the business requires, not what they wish their responsibility could be? > Also, if someone wants to write code, in a team with other senior developers, where should one go? > Startups and consulting gigs probably better align with wanting to be hands on keyboard, but at the price of a paycut.
  - azangru 4y ago
    > ...Because OP is getting paid a big salary to do what the business requires, not what they wish their responsibility could be? Is this what the business truly requires though? As a person grows his skill in software development domain, does the business really require him to transition from being an expert programmer to being an unskilled manager? Being a competent software developer doesn't qualify one for a big salary? Isn't it what the Peter Principle was all about?
    - Tyrek 4y ago
      What the business truly requires is an abstract question. What the business expects of him, however, has been answered in this thread. The purpose of a system is what it does, etc.
- celim307 4y ago
  This is what the role looks like in the vast majority of bigger tech companies, for good reason. Tech companies biggest hurdle is steering the boat. To launch anything you need to coordinate, align, and get consensus, beyond just your own team. Can engineerings develop in a vacuum? Can they take even well defined tickets, and build an optimal solution without knowing the product direction and vision? The manager is a people manager, not a product builder. Marketing, product, other engineering teams, all need to be aligned. As the most senior you're probably setting the high level architecture, so you're going to be the "API" or point of contact on which the other architects on other teams will need to communicate. Selling that architecture to juniors involves all those things mentioned, and as the architect you're responsible and the best person suited to judging their work as aligning with the vision/architecture. Senior role is usually defined and evaluated in performance reviews for the impact that goes beyond the code. I'm not explaining it super well, but its something you realize is a natural part of the role as an engineering leader. And that what a senior+ engineer is, a leader. Mid level engineer is a terminal role in a lot of companies for those who don't want the added responsibility. To your other point, there do exists teams where its all seniors who mostly do IC work. These are usually high-value, high-risk, core product engineering R&D. Or some kind of DX (Developer Experience) team where you are building tooling for other engineers, but even these teams too often has juniors, as at the end of the day, they are just another type of platform team
slg 4y ago
I never worked at a FAANG. Do these teams not have managers? Most of those responsibilities seem like the job of a manager. In my career, this approach of one senior person on a team of juniors means the senior is responsible for a lot of the system design and other high level technical decisions, but they wouldn't be counted on for things like motivating other employees.
- sershe 4y ago
  I think having this position is actually a tacit partial compromise (a perk) for people like the OP (or myself, I'm in a similar situation and have similar feelings about it). I've seen people willingly jump from being a senior dev to being a manager, and either cease or limit actual dev work; however myself and many others don't want to be a manager, full stop. So, I end up doing the tech lead work (planning, design, divvying up work, interacting with other teams a lot esp. on high level, making sure it all comes together), and some of the more technical mentorship/etc. stuff, while the actual manager, who is also my manager, does most of the latter, including most of the motivation and all the HR/promo stuff. If I had to do all the latter I'd likely switch jobs, my manager might suspect as much.
  - pg_1234 4y ago
    That seems like a pretty good compromise ... in your case. For most people in this position the sane advice is GET OUT. The company plans to leech as much of the value of your experience as possible, and pass it on to cheaper juniors. Furthermore they will pay you nothing for this (it's an opportunity to "give back"), but they will use you to hook naive juniors for lower pay (an opportunity to "learn from the best"). Basically the company is exploiting you to scam your replacements.
    - sershe 4y ago
      Hmm, so if there are a lot of junior developers - inevitable as more people are getting STEM degrees - I should not help them grow, so that they are not able to do my job? Sounds pretty bleak. Continuing this to its logical conclusion, should I try to sabotage them too? :) By the time cheaper juniors are able to do what I do they might demand the same salary I demand, or whatever salary I might be able to demand at the time. Frankly even from a cynical perspective, this doesn't check out. Juniors usually don't try to own the same thing - I'm already there and at any given point could do it better, shared component ownership is rare, plus they'd rather own something new so they can get promoted. Plus juniors move around more. Moreover, while new juniors are relatively easy to replace or outsource, someone with tons of expertise in the area and experience of owning it and working thru others is harder. So, being a large area lead seems more secure than being a junior.
pyb 4y ago
OP never said he was their manager. In fact, OP's manager probably doesn't want him to be mentoring all day long.
- eropple 4y ago
  That's very frequently exactly what a staff engineer is expected to do at large orgs, though.
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  OP might consider asking their manager rather than guessing. "Hey, there seem to be a lot of juniors. How do you want me to approach this?"
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
That seems like a fairly good example. For better, or worse, many tech companies, these days, seem to be obsessed with hiring large armies of inexperienced developers. I have always assumed that they rely on embedded process, to get these developers to work towards release-ready products, but they may also be relying on mentorship and training from senior developers (I like that, better). In my previous position, we did some fairly advanced and unique stuff (image processing pipeline stuff, in C++). It was almost impossible to hire engineers that already knew it. We had to look for people that "had potential," and hope to train them into a workflow. It also meant that each employee was a big investment in time, and encouraged us to keep them on board for many years. Training (I've done a lot) is a big fat pain, and not for everyone; but I feel that it is well worth it, to learn to do it. It makes you a "go to" person for problem-solving (which not everyone likes, but problem-solvers are extremely valuable). It also engenders trust, deference, and respect. TL;DR, it's good for your own personal career, to become a good mentor.
- Silhouette 4y ago
  For better, or worse, many tech companies, these days, seem to be obsessed with hiring large armies of inexperienced developers. I suspect that has been true in many tech companies over the past few years but will be much less true in those same companies over the next few years. A culture where everyone with <10 YOE is job hopping every 18 months for a big compensation boost does not encourage either investment in training up those people by a company or development of deeper skills and experience by an individual. If the recent trends in the tech employment market carry on this year I expect we'll see a lot more incentives for good people to stay with good employers for longer and a lot less willingness by employers to pay silly money for those with little experience and limited skills. Just like previous market swings we'll probably see less emphasis on hiring and more on stability and longevity of good working relationships.
jeffwask 4y ago
>And in general, there are two ways to go. The first is to accept the fact that many senior engineering and most staff engineering gigs are more about this kind of mentorship approach than actually doing work. And basically accept that the prime "getting shit done" years of your career are done and you will mostly be working in this new way now. 100% and this is far from being a FAANG thing (never mind that FAANG doesn't even exist anymore). My experience is mostly in startup and PE based companies and it's like that there as well. The majority of my managers have been non-technical, corporate continues to shrink the management layer to "save money" (line managers with 20+ engineers), support roles like project managers in many places have been eliminated, and managers seem to spend the majority of their day dealing with comms so organizing and managing the doing aspects of doing work have fallen to me as a Principal, Staff, Lead engineer. My role these days seems to be to come in and bring organization to chaos, mentor / teach engineering (not how to code but how to be a professional engineer), be a tie breaker on big technical decisions, and set the vision and direction for my teams. Most folks I know who wanted to stay doers topped out a Senior or Engineer II and chose to stay there. This is also likely to just increase or accelerate as the baby boomer generation (the largest working generation ever) who occupies a lot of leadership roles these days start to retire and leave a huge gap in qualified and ready candidates to fill the void. There just aren't enough of us so I expect we will see more and more folks press ganged into leadership that never really wanted that.
- catchnear4321 4y ago
  I for one am excited about this potential transition from eager leaders to reluctant ones. Sure, there will be bumps. Difficulties. It might yield something new. Perhaps more focus on getting things done rather than getting things.
- mixmastamyk 4y ago
  Boomers already retired a while back, with even fewer exceptions after covid.
  - jeffwask 4y ago
    Baby Boomers: Baby boomers were born between 1946 and 1964. They're currently between 57-75 years old They haven't. I'm GenX and all of my boomer parents still work and lots of my friends boomer parents. It's starting but it won't peak for about 5 years.
mattpallissard 4y ago
I'd say this tracks my non faang experience. I used to find it frustrating to have a team full of greenhorns but changed my tune quickly. 1. They were eager as hell. It's refreshing to be surrounded by people like that. 2. You can get more done with them by training and helping mop up the occasional mistake than you can without them. In the end it was great but an entirely different role than what it said on the tin. > Startups and consulting gigs probably better align with wanting to be hands on Also tracks.
sidlls 4y ago
Those bullet points are spot on. Once you reach a certain level of experience, by years and/or breadth of experience, you are far more effective and valuable as a source of advice and education than as a code slinger.
harel 4y ago
Small correction: Consulting gigs are not a paycut. They are a pay multiplier.

PragmaticPulp 4y ago

> * figuring out what motivate your juniors and trying to align that with what needs done This is true, but be careful about taking this too far. Young people arrive at the workforce with a wide range of expectations and motivations. Some of those are going to be unrealistic. You should always try to work with them to understand what drives them and help them find their fit. The most frequent misaligned expectation I've seen in juniors is the desire to lead greenfield projects in year 1 of their career. It can be very disappointing to arrive at your dream job and learn that you have to work on someone else's code, and that you have to build a reputation before they'll hand you the fun greenfield work.

BurningFrog 4y ago
I wish there was more focus on working with existing code in education, since it is by far most of the work in real projects, and also the hardest.
- bobthepanda 4y ago
  It's kind of hard to make "legacy" purposefully bad code that is useful for teaching assignments. Certainly a lot more work than drawing up a spec.
  - BurningFrog 4y ago
    Changing existing bad code i an advanced topic. Just working with adding features to decent existing code is all I ask.
unsui 4y ago
Literally just had this situation come up in a recent 1:1 with one of our junior devs. He asked about being able to work on greenfield projects focusing on AWS technologies. I had to go into a historical context data dump on the value of addressing technical debt (the project she is being assigned to), and how that frees us up to work on the cool and shiny projects. I think it landed, but I could see some of the fire slightly snuffed out of him.

azangru 4y ago

> In your position, the expectation is that you are mostly a working through others and acting as a force multiplier of their work. OP said that his role is senior developer. Developer. Not a manager. Not a team lead. But someone who wants to write code, preferably together with other experienced developers, and by doing so, enjoy the process of learning and understanding technology at a deeper level. Why, then, would one expect his responsibility to be motivating juniors, giving them work, or raising them to be leaders? Also, if someone wants to write code, teamed up with other senior developers, where should one go?

thatguymike 4y ago
...Because OP is getting paid a big salary to do what the business requires, not what they wish their responsibility could be? > Also, if someone wants to write code, in a team with other senior developers, where should one go? > Startups and consulting gigs probably better align with wanting to be hands on keyboard, but at the price of a paycut.
- azangru 4y ago
  > ...Because OP is getting paid a big salary to do what the business requires, not what they wish their responsibility could be? Is this what the business truly requires though? As a person grows his skill in software development domain, does the business really require him to transition from being an expert programmer to being an unskilled manager? Being a competent software developer doesn't qualify one for a big salary? Isn't it what the Peter Principle was all about?
  - Tyrek 4y ago
    What the business truly requires is an abstract question. What the business expects of him, however, has been answered in this thread. The purpose of a system is what it does, etc.
celim307 4y ago
This is what the role looks like in the vast majority of bigger tech companies, for good reason. Tech companies biggest hurdle is steering the boat. To launch anything you need to coordinate, align, and get consensus, beyond just your own team. Can engineerings develop in a vacuum? Can they take even well defined tickets, and build an optimal solution without knowing the product direction and vision? The manager is a people manager, not a product builder. Marketing, product, other engineering teams, all need to be aligned. As the most senior you're probably setting the high level architecture, so you're going to be the "API" or point of contact on which the other architects on other teams will need to communicate. Selling that architecture to juniors involves all those things mentioned, and as the architect you're responsible and the best person suited to judging their work as aligning with the vision/architecture. Senior role is usually defined and evaluated in performance reviews for the impact that goes beyond the code. I'm not explaining it super well, but its something you realize is a natural part of the role as an engineering leader. And that what a senior+ engineer is, a leader. Mid level engineer is a terminal role in a lot of companies for those who don't want the added responsibility. To your other point, there do exists teams where its all seniors who mostly do IC work. These are usually high-value, high-risk, core product engineering R&D. Or some kind of DX (Developer Experience) team where you are building tooling for other engineers, but even these teams too often has juniors, as at the end of the day, they are just another type of platform team

slg 4y ago

I never worked at a FAANG. Do these teams not have managers? Most of those responsibilities seem like the job of a manager. In my career, this approach of one senior person on a team of juniors means the senior is responsible for a lot of the system design and other high level technical decisions, but they wouldn't be counted on for things like motivating other employees.

sershe 4y ago
I think having this position is actually a tacit partial compromise (a perk) for people like the OP (or myself, I'm in a similar situation and have similar feelings about it). I've seen people willingly jump from being a senior dev to being a manager, and either cease or limit actual dev work; however myself and many others don't want to be a manager, full stop. So, I end up doing the tech lead work (planning, design, divvying up work, interacting with other teams a lot esp. on high level, making sure it all comes together), and some of the more technical mentorship/etc. stuff, while the actual manager, who is also my manager, does most of the latter, including most of the motivation and all the HR/promo stuff. If I had to do all the latter I'd likely switch jobs, my manager might suspect as much.
- pg_1234 4y ago
  That seems like a pretty good compromise ... in your case. For most people in this position the sane advice is GET OUT. The company plans to leech as much of the value of your experience as possible, and pass it on to cheaper juniors. Furthermore they will pay you nothing for this (it's an opportunity to "give back"), but they will use you to hook naive juniors for lower pay (an opportunity to "learn from the best"). Basically the company is exploiting you to scam your replacements.
  - sershe 4y ago
    Hmm, so if there are a lot of junior developers - inevitable as more people are getting STEM degrees - I should not help them grow, so that they are not able to do my job? Sounds pretty bleak. Continuing this to its logical conclusion, should I try to sabotage them too? :) By the time cheaper juniors are able to do what I do they might demand the same salary I demand, or whatever salary I might be able to demand at the time. Frankly even from a cynical perspective, this doesn't check out. Juniors usually don't try to own the same thing - I'm already there and at any given point could do it better, shared component ownership is rare, plus they'd rather own something new so they can get promoted. Plus juniors move around more. Moreover, while new juniors are relatively easy to replace or outsource, someone with tons of expertise in the area and experience of owning it and working thru others is harder. So, being a large area lead seems more secure than being a junior.

pyb 4y ago

OP never said he was their manager. In fact, OP's manager probably doesn't want him to be mentoring all day long.

eropple 4y ago
That's very frequently exactly what a staff engineer is expected to do at large orgs, though.
ceejayoz 4y ago
OP might consider asking their manager rather than guessing. "Hey, there seem to be a lot of juniors. How do you want me to approach this?"

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago

That seems like a fairly good example. For better, or worse, many tech companies, these days, seem to be obsessed with hiring large armies of inexperienced developers. I have always assumed that they rely on embedded process, to get these developers to work towards release-ready products, but they may also be relying on mentorship and training from senior developers (I like that, better). In my previous position, we did some fairly advanced and unique stuff (image processing pipeline stuff, in C++). It was almost impossible to hire engineers that already knew it. We had to look for people that "had potential," and hope to train them into a workflow. It also meant that each employee was a big investment in time, and encouraged us to keep them on board for many years. Training (I've done a lot) is a big fat pain, and not for everyone; but I feel that it is well worth it, to learn to do it. It makes you a "go to" person for problem-solving (which not everyone likes, but problem-solvers are extremely valuable). It also engenders trust, deference, and respect. TL;DR, it's good for your own personal career, to become a good mentor.

Silhouette 4y ago
For better, or worse, many tech companies, these days, seem to be obsessed with hiring large armies of inexperienced developers. I suspect that has been true in many tech companies over the past few years but will be much less true in those same companies over the next few years. A culture where everyone with <10 YOE is job hopping every 18 months for a big compensation boost does not encourage either investment in training up those people by a company or development of deeper skills and experience by an individual. If the recent trends in the tech employment market carry on this year I expect we'll see a lot more incentives for good people to stay with good employers for longer and a lot less willingness by employers to pay silly money for those with little experience and limited skills. Just like previous market swings we'll probably see less emphasis on hiring and more on stability and longevity of good working relationships.

jeffwask 4y ago

>And in general, there are two ways to go. The first is to accept the fact that many senior engineering and most staff engineering gigs are more about this kind of mentorship approach than actually doing work. And basically accept that the prime "getting shit done" years of your career are done and you will mostly be working in this new way now. 100% and this is far from being a FAANG thing (never mind that FAANG doesn't even exist anymore). My experience is mostly in startup and PE based companies and it's like that there as well. The majority of my managers have been non-technical, corporate continues to shrink the management layer to "save money" (line managers with 20+ engineers), support roles like project managers in many places have been eliminated, and managers seem to spend the majority of their day dealing with comms so organizing and managing the doing aspects of doing work have fallen to me as a Principal, Staff, Lead engineer. My role these days seems to be to come in and bring organization to chaos, mentor / teach engineering (not how to code but how to be a professional engineer), be a tie breaker on big technical decisions, and set the vision and direction for my teams. Most folks I know who wanted to stay doers topped out a Senior or Engineer II and chose to stay there. This is also likely to just increase or accelerate as the baby boomer generation (the largest working generation ever) who occupies a lot of leadership roles these days start to retire and leave a huge gap in qualified and ready candidates to fill the void. There just aren't enough of us so I expect we will see more and more folks press ganged into leadership that never really wanted that.

catchnear4321 4y ago
I for one am excited about this potential transition from eager leaders to reluctant ones. Sure, there will be bumps. Difficulties. It might yield something new. Perhaps more focus on getting things done rather than getting things.
mixmastamyk 4y ago
Boomers already retired a while back, with even fewer exceptions after covid.
- jeffwask 4y ago
  Baby Boomers: Baby boomers were born between 1946 and 1964. They're currently between 57-75 years old They haven't. I'm GenX and all of my boomer parents still work and lots of my friends boomer parents. It's starting but it won't peak for about 5 years.

mattpallissard 4y ago

I'd say this tracks my non faang experience. I used to find it frustrating to have a team full of greenhorns but changed my tune quickly. 1. They were eager as hell. It's refreshing to be surrounded by people like that. 2. You can get more done with them by training and helping mop up the occasional mistake than you can without them. In the end it was great but an entirely different role than what it said on the tin. > Startups and consulting gigs probably better align with wanting to be hands on Also tracks.

sidlls 4y ago

Those bullet points are spot on. Once you reach a certain level of experience, by years and/or breadth of experience, you are far more effective and valuable as a source of advice and education than as a code slinger.

harel 4y ago

Small correction: Consulting gigs are not a paycut. They are a pay multiplier.