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I'm not sure I agree. If I'm paying you nearly half a million a year as a US FAANGish senior engineer, I'm not going to have much patience for the excuse that "

I'm not sure I agree. If I'm paying you nearly half a million a year as a US FAANGish senior engineer, I'm not going to have much patience for the excuse that "my manager didn't find enough high-value work for me to do". Compensation like that, to me, implies a higher degree of ownership and responsibility. If you're a junior engineer, or sitting somewhere on the left-hand peak of the bimodal software engineer compensation curve [0], then sure, I'd expect your manager/PM/TL to slice up some reasonably high-impact work for you to take care of. Otherwise, bug PMs for ideas. Learn the basic shape of the organization you work in. Draft some one-page proposals and pitch them. Don't expect to get paid like a heart surgeon just for crushing well-scoped React feature requests. [0] https://danluu.com/bimodal-compensation/ https://danluu.com/bimodal-compensation/

ghaff 3y ago
Yeah. I've never had that sort of comp but for long stretches of my career I've largely charted my own path. While my first manager in my current job and I always got along very well, he traveled a lot, I traveled a lot, and I never expected much in the way of specific direction. If I had a question I asked him.But we largely did our own things under a general umbrella. Probably atypical but I was hired pretty atypically as well. (Basically a position was created for me.)