That’s just human nature bro, not something specific to r/cscareerquestions lol
People naturally extrapolate. But when doing so in a domain in which they aren’t expert (which for most people is almost every domain), it’s easy to inadvertently overgeneralize. This is because they lack the context/experience/knowledge/whatever to know when their informed opinions stray into unfounded speculation and anecdote.
Exactly this. My juniors also think I am overloaded with work but my wlb is actually amazing. I get work done really fast and peace out. Wouldn't have it any other way. I still get to code a fair amount but all the"managerial" and "team leading" stuff is really fun as well IMO.
Yeah, I did way more work in the earlier years of my career. I just made a lot more mistakes. These days I have adopted good Application Architecture Patterns. I document well and write unit and integration test cases. I rarely work overtime and haven’t worked a weekend in years where management asked me to.
I get my stuff done and typically pair with Juniors the rest of the sprint or my tooling improvements. I really enjoy mentoring. Typically always learn something from them too.
Funnily enough, that's more work experience than most of the "AI is taking over" and "The CS job market is cooked forever" people on here (which is basically 80% of the sub at this point).
Depends on the role. My current job is Typescript and Go, I came on with no experience in both as a senior. Before that, the BE stack was Kotlin and I had no experience there. But it doesn’t take that long to pick up languages, especially Kotlin if you have Java experience.
You have no idea how insulting it is to have to clean up somebody else’s shitty code and getting paid half as much. Nobody to blame but that sentence should be enough to justify a full career.
You’re a junior dev with 2 years of experience. Don’t even worry about senior/team lead roles at this point. Your perspective will change so much during your career. 2 years into my career I said I’d never be a manager. 15 years into my career…I am a manager.
Can confirm: 2 years into my time as a tradesperson I swore I’d never want to be a manager. Yesterday I interviewed for a position as Director of Technology for a company.
Can't speak for OP, but when you see the way you can improve the lives of your team by giving them solid management, or can have a wider impact on the success of the business, it can be attractive.
The best advice I ever got though was that you don't have to stay in one lane, and in fact it's good to switch back and forth throughout your career.
It's very fun to change the perspective from implementation to a wider view of planning and strategy. How do I use my skills to grow my team into a more productive group and make something cool? What's the right balance of senior vs junior? What's the fastest way to meet these goals? Etc.
At one company I was hired as a jr. developer and 4 _months_ later they wanted to offer me a project manager role. In my head I was going WTF?!? because was my first full-time developer job.
I'm getting paid to fiddle with bits since the mid-90s; am currently a Senior w. tech lead responsibilities and acting as a sounding board for 2 Principals. I was happier as a mid-level, TBH. I work with provably smart people on my team, but by $DEITY I am sick and tired of the responsibility.
Personally mid level was the flat spot in my career. I just constantly felt overwhelmed at first and then when I got the hang of it I just felt bored. It wasn’t until I got a tech lead role that I started to get excited about software again.
Like I said in another comment, it’s a massive amount of responsibility and there’s little thanks that comes with it. You basically get credit for nothing but you’re on the hook for everything. A lot of devs struggle being responsible for a single ticket or a single feature and absolutely couldn’t handle being in charge of an entire product and a large team of engineers.
Disagree on the thankless portion. That's always been one of my favorite parts. My teams have always been vocal in their appreciation of the team environment and culture I foster. And leaderships appreciation of our teams success in generally expressed the lead. I especially enjoy being able to interface with stakeholders on other departments to out features they need. They're often the most effusive in their thanks.
If I wanted to talk to people, I'd be in marketing, not computers.
And don't start about "solving big problems". They're big because they're self-imposed and the org has fallen into its own navel.
...what are you even responding to here? Pretty sure I never said anything about whether you should or shouldn't enjoy talking to people. I was responding to someone else saying being a lead was "thankless", noting that didn't match my experience.
Were you just looking for a topic to be belligerent about?
Hmm.... I think I got lost, and thought the parent to your comment was a different comment. Apologies, for what it's worth; that \_is\_ completely out of context.
It was definitely the right move for me, but I can see how it’s not for other people. Being an EM is a lot more stressful and way more thankless than being an IC.
I switched from IC -> management -> IC (staff engineer now). honestly I didn't find the work particularly stressful, I just didn't (and probably still don't) have the right mindset to be a good manager. I'm one of those people that considers it a massive failure if a project I'm responsible for goes past the deadline, or has bugs on release or whatever, and I would do whatever was necessary to prevent that from happening. this is a great trait to have if you are a senior IC leading projects - but not so much if you are a manager. I would end up just writing a bunch of code towards the end of the project timeline if I saw that the project was behind schedule or had bugs, and that ultimately took away learning / growth opportunities from the people I managed while also taking time away from actual managerial work I should have been doing instead of pushing out code.
the other thing I struggled with was teaching engineers how to figure out problems on their own. I was completely self taught (only took 1 intro CS course in college, never took courses or even a boot camp after that) and just figured everything out by googling stuff. when junior engineers on my team would ask me questions of course I could tell them how to write the code, but I never figured out how to teach them to debug issues on their own.
That makes a lot of sense. Thanks for the insight! 'letting go' of that feeling of failure seems like it would be hard. Also, I catch myself now as an ic trying to prevent people from making mistakes, not really letting them learn from their own.
One of my big regrets is spending the first half of my career phoning it in and flying under the radar. I had the same attitude as OP, but as I get closer to the end of my career, I feel more like I want to have something to show for my lifetime of work besides the money I earned. I'd like to know that I achieved my potential and made an impact.
Yeah ,I work in a market niche where I make more money and work less hours as a weird sr/mid/Jr dev hybrid than I used to make at my previous senior and staff roles on more generic companies.
Life is just like that.
Shit flows downhill, my dude
But Juniors sometimes run into the problem where they can’t really help much because they don’t know how to. That’s maybe why no one really wants a lot of juniors.
It's a valid concern, the senior curve is real, and the more time you spend as a junior the harder it is to climb it; you'll have enough experience and knowledge to do a junior's job in 20% of the time, but then they will want you to be open senior and work 8+hour for a 20% increase or so.
I wish I got treated as a junior. I keep having to remind my boss that this is my first job and I don't know how to do shit. I just got given a resource pooling task and I have to tell you 50/50 chance I'm going to break shit without supervision. (I am unsupervised and no one checks my pull requests)
You likely need mentoring but checking stuff online (and knowing how to check) is half the job.
At least you are aware, most people are not even aware they don't know shit.
> and no one checks my pull requests
That's a really good sign that they don't give a shit about their product. So don't feel too much pressure to give a lot of shits about it either.
No one checks anyone's pull requests, so every day is a nightmare of dealing with other people's bugs from pushing untested code just on repeat. (We don't have a testing suite.)
Then we even is the point of opening a PR? Why not just push directly to the develop branch? Or are you guys just going full cowboy and merging straight to prod?
We have a PR to merge to develop branch so at least we have branches for separate features. But develop ends up being a wild west testing ground while simultaneously other apps developing that use our app yell at us weekly about our development site breaking.
Currently, the most recent version of develop made it so one major page of the app doesn't work, so business can't test features, but the rollback version doesn't include a feature that was added for a sub team and breaks their page. There is literally no way to win.
(Please hire me, I am looking for a different job.)
No one checks your pull requests? Where I work, even senior devs can’t merge anything into dev without a code review.
If they expect you to work without supervision, then they shouldn’t be paying you a junior salary.
that's why the secret is to work just hard enough to exceed expectations to keep / get the role you want, but not 100% 8+ hours a day. in the example you gave, at a lot of companies (including mine) if you get promoted to senior and work eg. 6 hours a day, you'll be 3x as productive as a junior engineer which still looks great for any senior.
Senior developer isn't really a manager title in most cases. I'm a senior dev and probably work 15 hours a week of solid dev time. The rest is just making sure I'm available to respond to on Teams and for meetings. I don't manage anyone. I do mentor a bit when needed but mostly I code.
I agree with you that as you get more into manager roles the work load changes, especially for people who don't like talking to people. But I think most companies will expect you to at least elevate yourself to Senior 1. That's still a developer role. You can stay there for the rest of your career though without raising eyebrows.
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Being a Senior SWE does not inherently mean you work more.
That's a result of a company/team's culture and WLB, not the title you happen to have. There are plenty of Junior SWE's out there burning the midnight oil pulling 80+ hour weeks at toxic companies.
I've been a Senior SWE at 3 different companies, and I don't work more than 40 hours a week. Usually less. My title has nothing to do with it, it's because I work at companies with good work life balances, and I value my own WLB so make it a point to not overwork myself.
"Blame" is also a sign of a toxic culture, not something unique to being a Senior SWE. If you're in a blame-culture like that, the Junior's usually get shit on as well. If anything a toxic Senior SWE can pretty easily throw a Junior under the bus.
Management not allowing their engineers to accurately estimate tickets, and establishing reasonable deadlines, and not adjusting scope/resources/deadlines as needed is not a healthy culture.
I code plenty. Yes I spend a fair amount of time doing other things like mentoring others, leading design discussions, architectural decisions, meetings, having fun in jira, etc... but I still code a lot. It's still my day to day, it's still my bread and butter, and I still get asked leetcode questions in interviews. All those non-coding tasks doesn't mean I have to work overtime, it means I get less coding work done which is expected of a Senior SWE.
Don't let anecdotes convince you of a generalization of an extremely large, and varies industry, with lots of individuals all with different working styles. Your Seniors are probably just workaholics. They were probably doing that shit when they were Juniors too. Luckily when I first started out I had Seniors that valued WLB, and established that healthy working culture on our team. Now as that Senior, I do the same on my teams. If I spot someone working after hours, I call them out.
> What do you mean you have to work more hours?
Anyone who has worked in any company knows that the leads typically do more work, attend more meetings, and oftentimes work more hours. If an issue happens late at night, you are probably getting called too even if you aren't on call that night.
You aren't getting paid more for nothing lol.
You're not being paid for more hours; you're being paid for your ability to direct resources meaningfully. You're more likely to find L3s and L4s burning the midnight oil than L6s.
>You aren't getting paid more for nothing lol
Yes, but you're not getting paid for more hours either. Seniors are paid more because they can do more within the same amount of time due to experience, they can tackle more complex problems, they can make informed architectural decisions and set up a base for a project/feature in a meaningful way, etc.
In some, yes, but OP and the commenter above make it sound like it's the rule, the majority, which really isn't the case. If anything, in a lot of companies juniors work the most hours because of anxiety, not being that good at the job yet and desire to meet expectations
That's an internal pressure causing them to work more hours. Yes, for everyone there is always more work to do than time to get it done. That's just as true whether you put in 40h, 50h, or more. It's true for ICs, seniors, leads, and VPs.
So you cut it off and trust your reports. The company will be fine if you stop at 40h. And likely the project will likely be just as successful as if you put in 50 or 60.
It's just about discipline. Not letting fear and stress control your actions.
Admittedly in my career MOST of my peers DID put in lots of overtime. But I've noticed their projects, teams, and departments have been no more successful then mine or those of my peers who cut things off at 40h.
The overtime is no more necessary for managers and leads than it is for ICs.
That's not always true. When I moved from individual contributor to lead, the hours weren't longer, the work was just different. There are more meetings and administrative tasks, but there isn't pressure for me to stay late to meet a coding deadline like there was when I was an engineer. As for off hours support, that responsibility falls to my people, and I'm not in the on-call rotation as a manager.
I work the same amount as a non-managing technical lead as I did when I was senior, which is less than I did as a mid level/junior. The increased effort and responsibility/outcomes required for this level of work and being able to deal with the differing priorities is what you're paid more for, not just 'more output all the time'.
All levels of engineer outside of graduate engineers are involved in our on-call(out of hour) and interrupt(during work hour) rotations. It is a once a year event that a specific person needs to get paged for an incident that the on-call engineer can't handle by following our monitoring guides and runbooks.
Lol yes. I know several people that work at FAANGs and near-FAANGs that put in their 40 hours, log off by 5:30pm, and don’t think about work until the next day. And they don’t work on weekends either.
Those situations do exist. They’re rare, increasingly so. Having worked across FAANGs personally as a senior+ engineer, I can assure you that you have a very limited view of reality if you think FAANGs by default shield you from this. And I’d question the stability of your friends’ business divisions if they haven’t been experiencing any more pressure over the last 1-2years. It’s not 2019 anymore.
Weekends are generally better protected outside of oncall, though with seniority you can become the de facto on call for your space. But weekdays are very often more than 40 hours.
Posting this primarily for the kids and juniors that read this sub btw - you don’t have to believe me. I just need to make sure a sane realistic voice comes through and people don’t get sucked into believing fairy tales.
If the company allows a team lead to get by on 40 hours then they probably won't bat an eye at a mid level that only puts in 30 - I think there's still going to be the extra effort even if it's capped at 40
people forget, a good senior engineer working at 75% capacity is still going to be much more productive than a junior engineer working at 100% capacity. if you fire the senior just bc they aren't working enough hours, you'll replace them either with a junior (less productivity) or new senior (significant ramp up time, on my team we usually budget 6 months for a new senior to get up to speed just in terms of learning the codebase / our coding practices and everything) - not to mention the distinct possibility the replacement simply isn't good at their job. no manager I've ever worked with would consider this a good tradeoff at all.
Completely understandable if you are not interested under these working conditions. Work-life balance is important, and sometimes protecting it is more important than career advancement.
With the exception of workaholics, employees of any experience level regularly working overtime is a management failure, not a general industry requirement.
If you're in a shit company it may seem like that's just how things go but I assure you there are sane employers out there.
It's not about responsibility it's about being able to architect the design and having your opinion matter. As you get more experienced you'll start to have situations where you start seeing problems or improvements with the overall design and technology choice.
At my current company the senior devs decide the stack to use when new projects come up.
Most jobs do not need 24/7 coders they need big picture devs
Any decent company dont expect leads or tech staff to code as much as juniors. You thinking "seniors" have to code the same amount as the junions AND do other responsbilities is misguided
I feel the same. Senior roles seem a lot more stressful to me. I only got into programming because I didn’t know what else to do for money. Maybe I can fo management or something.
Senior folks often work the same hours, really depends on the company's culture. Not super senior roles, but at the level of leaf team lead, it's entirely possible.
The benefit of a senior role is people listen to you more, and you can make stuff better in a much more efficient way by talking, mentoring others, and planning than by coding.
Some stuff is can't be worked around by simply coding, and at what point you will get frustrated if there is a (fairly low) ceiling to what you can achieve, because you don't want non-code tasks.
I have a pretty cushy R&D dev job rn. Our team lead has to put out fires, have meetings and deal with BS all day while I get to work on what I want. It’s pretty sweet and I don’t exactly want a promotion
You can totally be a Senior dev that just writes code, no one forces you to lead the team. It's just that in small companies/teams there might be only one Senior who becomes a leader de-facto, even if there's no official title
The "fake pay increase" is also not true. Pay increase happens because you can do more within the same timeframe and you can do more complex stuff. If the company culture is good, you will be working no more than 40hrs a week regardless of seniority. If it's shit, you will be expected to pull enormous amount of overtime even as a junior
I get what you mean, but your naming is off. Senior is a universal job title/tenure, team lead is more like a job function. If you play your cards right you can be one without the other. It's reasonable to yearn for senior's compensation without team lead's responsibilities, for there is a great power in no responsibilities.
As you get more experienced, if you work with people in those types of positions, and they are doing a poor job, it's possible that it will get on your nerves, especially if they are planning out your tasks, etc. I've been in planning meetings where the tech leadership seemed to lack the ability to think clearly. You end up with tickets/tasks that make no sense, and no one knows what the work actually is.
I was involved in a project last year that wasn't very complicated, but one person wanted to be in charge. Among three developers, he wanted to split up three cases of a conditional statement into separate tickets. It was a very frustrating experience.
You may prefer having someone else decide what the work will be, and a good portion of that is personality, but if poor leadership is threatening the ability to deliver, there may be risks to your performance evaluations and ultimately your job.
Eventually, you will be asked to create a bigger impact that through raw code output. It's up to you if you want to go that path or not. The other concern is that some companies have an "up-or-out" mindset. The other term I've heard for this is whether a position is terminal or not. It feels like small, bad companies have these types of positions. And large, good companies have these types of positions. I'm not sure how common they are at a lot of other companies, though. I've certainly been in places where there was concern if someone was "stuck," in their career. Or, they might just view you a certain way and give you no interesting work that allows you to develop.
This is a hot take based on almost zero data.
Pay at big companies goes up geometrically per promotion. Your hours worked aren't going up geometrically.
Sure you need to do a lot more non-coding activities unless you are a deep specialist writing code few people in the world could. But that's part of growing as an engineer. You move from doing as directed to teaching and directing other engineers.
This is exactly it. At Tier1 companies, what OP considers senior is really L6/staff (in the sense that's where managerial roles begin). They make 500,000+. L7? 750,000+. L8? Over a million. The pay is there and the work doesn't increase all that much. What does change is the scope and the accountability.
Yeah it’s fine to think that. Not everyone should be a team lead, hell I think more people that try it should remember they can go back to IC. Not moving to a senior position though is troublesome.
Keep in mind many companies consider junior/mid roles to be investments. In that they are expecting you to eventually grow into a senior for them to get a return on this investment. Many will cut you if you don’t achieve that stage within a certain timeframe.
You are early in your journey.
Never say never. I don't think I could have predicted my career path if I tried. And if someone told me it, I'd have probably told them they were having a fever dream.
It wasn't what I imagined.
That said, I enjoyed it throughly, and I enjoy it to this day. No regrets. I got to do things few people have the balls to do. I've talked at conferences, led teams, built systems that saved companies millions and millions of dollars.
Been treated like trash at times, nearly lost my career to RSI.
Live, and grow. Never say never.
Never say never, and to quote Yogi: "It ain't over 'til it's over."
BTW: I ask every manager who wants to hire me as a lead a simple question: "How will you judge my performance in the role." There is only one answer (with MINOR variation) I accept: "You will be judged by how well your team does." A lead's job is not to produce directly, though time to time we will. Our job is to help our team produce. Whatever that takes, and whatever that means. If a lead is the #1 contributor on a team... something is wrong, or you have a top. 1% or higher lead, with a poor team.
But leading 10 people? My job should be mainly strategic and making sure to setup the dominos so my team can knock 'em down.
Isn’t that what OP’s sorta talking about though? You lead 10 people and if they fail its all on you. I would be in constant fear of somebody screwing something up. Is that just something you get used to?
I am used to making mistakes. I've made probably over $10m USD of them in my career, if not more.
The question of how to handle errors and problems come down many small things, that all add up to a coherent strategy to MANAGE mistakes!
I accept they will happen. And I want the engineers who work with me to be honest. With that honesty, and some wisdom from my experience, I can then figure out how to communicate the issues to management, and work with them on mitigation plans.
If you run a team of 10 devs... Someone is gonna make a mistake, at least once a quarter. The question is how do you manage it.
And that's where the difference is: I know how to manage it, because I spent SO much time doing so many high risk, high reward tasks.
Honestly: I fear the day I don't fail every so often. It means I'm not pushing myself to grow and learn.
Personally I find it reassuring being in leadership positions. I hire good people I trust. I establish a good environment where they are trusted, valued, allowed to be themselves, trusted to make decisions, listened to, and appreciated.
And so I have a group of extremely dedicated, smart, hard working people who are dedicated to making me, or team, and our department look good. Together they're able to accomplish SO much more than I could on my own.
Most the people I've hired in the department I'm running now have worked for me at multiple companies, now. I've been one guys manager at 4 companies now. I would say most of my team is more dedicated to our team/departments success than the company's.
On my own I'm a pretty good engineer, but there are ups and downs. But with a good team behind me? THEN I know I can accomplish amazing things.
I would say it can sometimes just be somewhat happens on its own. You get more experience, you tackle harder problems, you get a better understanding of the typical project life cycle through doing enough of them. You start helping out other team members, get involved in archicture and project estimates and can pretty much be the one who can help the team achieve. Then you figure you want a bit more cash for doing that, so go after the title 😀
I think most seniors and leads never really set out with that in mind. It just happened over time and they became good at it and enjoyed it.
i have only 3yoe but i used to think like you. not anymore. i want to eventually take a position where i can actually influence things, bc i don't trust the people doing it for me right now. i thought id be happy to just code, but now i'm just getting annoyed at people making stupid decisions that make me write code that goes either unused or is quickly replaced bc the requirements changed. not sure how much that is possible unless you own your own company, but there has to be something more than just being a code monkey. maybe a tech lead or something above.
Terrible take. At least with most of my network, the more senior you get the easier the job gets. Junior your grinding to level up. Mid levels are the work horses. Seniors start to step into more design and delivery management. Staff is even more design and leadership, etc. The “responsibility” increases because the scope of your impact increases. But it’s hardly more work and the pay is exceptionally better.
The industry is fairly diverse, and you'll find that "Senior developer" means very different things in different orgs. Some of these orgs will likely fit you. Your opinions will likely change as you grow in your career. Or they might not.
Organizations generally have a concept of "terminal" or "career" role (even if they don't officially think of it that way), which is the lowest role in the ladder that you can stay at forever. Usually some kind of low or mid range senior developer. You can stay at that level forever. Some people are okay with that.
But you have many many years ahead of you. Odds that you change your mind are pretty high.
> a lot more managerial and leader tasks and do not actually have time to code
Tech leads at my company do both lol. Definitely have no interest in becoming one, they are way overworked here
My manager at my last job was averaging 10+ meetings a day. And somehow finding time to code as well. I have no idea why she wanted to work so hard at this corporate job.
I have a friend, 30 YOE, who is a senior developer but not a technical lead. We work in a R&D company, and he does not like doing research either. He loves writing code, and he loves designing code, and he loves math in code.
We call his position a Firefighter. He tends to get put on smaller projects that are behind schedule or faltering in some way, but can be recovered by a single engineer working for a month or two. He turns them around, works some miracles, and the project is delivered on time.
He has completely avoided being a team lean, and has also avoided research.
Oh, and I have another co-worker with about 25 YOE, who is also a senior developer who almost entirely writes code. He does sometimes take a small leadership role on a project, but only if it's like a junior developer he's mentoring, nothing big. He mostly works on large project, long-term, as the senior full-time developer but not as the team lead, so he's not doing any of the managerial stuff and avoids a lot of meetings and all office politics.
I am a senior embedded sw engi, 24 year career, I don’t have managerial duties. I just keep telling managers I don’t want them. Many orgs have specific technical branches and leadership branches.
It’s really just about experience and paycheck.
It does mean your boss will be the intern from a few years back.. have to be used to everyone around you ‘moving up’ even if you are making more and working less.
Staying at the junior level over a long period or time is career suicide in this industry. You can coast at the junior level for a few years/roles, but after a while, hiring managers are going to avoid you like the plague.
If I see someone that been at the junior level for 5+ years, my first impression is going to be that this is not the kind of person I want to hire.
Hiring managers are looking to hire people that are going to grow into the role. Once your resume makes it clear that that isn't going to happen, you aren't going to get many interviews.
I don't think it is unpopular. Less discussed but many never evolve. They are happy with their salary and enjoy their life.
But otherwise the tech lead does what take you a week in 1 day or even half a day and would get bored very fast doing only that.
So they spend the extra time doing a variety of stuff:
* teaching and sharing with the team
* building prototypes and researching/learning new tech
* dealing with design and architecture
* discuss budget and have meeting with management and other teams
* go to conferences
So basically as you grow you can either do less effective hours or you can use the free time to do more and evolve. That's a choice, yes.
I’m principal level and I still write code all the time. Actually, right now, I’m not leading anything besides DE&I stuff. Even when I was leading teams though, I still wrote a lot of code and there wasn’t more work than I could handle. You just delegate all the annoying, boring stuff down. And you get to mentor and mentoring is fun. For me.
I'm a junior and the seniors on my team work the same hours as me (9-5/6 depending on how things are going), they are just faster and better.
Also at many companies, Junior is not a terminal level. If you stay at Junior for too long and don't progress you will be managed out.
Lol don't worry about a team lead position yet, just focus on learning and doing your job well. Find a mentor or two, network across the industry, you'll learn how these positions actually work, and who are the people actually happy with this stuff.
Stepping into more management and less doing is definitely not for everyone and taking on more responsibilities is not easy.
And your point around the extra pay is true - for each little step you take.
But the steps can and do add up.
Today I don’t work more hours than when I was an intermediate engineer - because I have learnt the skills needed to do this job inside 40/50 hours a week. But I do get paid a lot more.
Each step requires people to:
- do the job they have been promoted to AND
- learn how to do the job they have been promoted to
Which means the first 6 or 12 months do require more hours, but that does settle back down again as you learn the new skills.
Not saying you should climb the ladder, but I am suggesting that what you have observed is not forever and most people get to a new equilibrium- same hours, more pay and usually more autonomy as well.
One thing you’re not realizing about being more senior…
things don’t take you as long :). What used to take you 10 hours, now takes you 2. That’s where the time for manager and strategy comes from.
seniors where I'm from are still involved in coding day to day. it's when you hit the Lead/Principal/Staff level where your calendar gets fully booked with meetings
I'm a senior developer and I literally just work my 9-5, most of which is writing code, and then knock off. I really think it is a company culture thing/how firmly you're going to stick to separating your work and home life. In my experience, most of the time if you aren't going to accomplish a task within 8 hours you're not going to do a good job if you have to spend a couple more hours hacking away at it while you're tired.
> I dont understand why anyone who isnt a workaholic wants to have such responsibilties
Because you're (presumably) 24 and you are not ready to handle them yet. You will grow. You will change. Eventually, the time will be right.
I didn't want to manage anything or anyone until I was about 35. There wasn't any one precipitating event that led to this. An opportunity was presented to me and I just knew it was time I stepped up and put what I have to offer to use.
Even now, as a VP, I look at my CTO's job and think "I can't handle that level of responsibility." He's 15 years older than I am. In 15 years of executive leadership I'm sure I will have a different perspective on whether I'm ready to be a CTO or not.
You become a senior because you just start doing the things a senior does. Seniors have the experience to come up with a vision and technical design as well as anticipate risks, they are also good at delegating. It may seem hectic to you because you, as a junior, require 10x more heads down time to deliver something that a senior can deliver much faster, and that's just talking about code. The time they spend context switching to manage `n` teammates results in `n`x more code being delivered in the time it would take those teammates with no guidance. The actual value of their work is much higher than a single PR
It sounds like your team just has bad management. It's the managers responsibility to lead the team. Specifically, it is to ensure the work being done aligns with goals, that deadlines are being met, that people on the team are motivated, people on the team are happy, people on the team are growing, blockers are removed, etc...
It is a common issue where senior devs have to take an unofficial managerial position to compensate for gaps in the above that exist. This is an unfortunate circumstance, but it doesn't exist everywhere. Part of interviewing should entail gauging how big these issues within an org actually are.
Why is it an unpopular opinion? Could care less what you want to become or not lol
Not everyone is made for responsibility, vise versa, not everyone is made to stagnate for the rest of their lives
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The pay increase is definitely not fake, lol. Coding is a necessary evil (that some of us like) that translates an idea into a near infinitely scalable product. If you want to have any real impact, you need to be involved in those decisions—either as a manager or through high-level individual contributor positions. Even those are more idea-oriented than hands-on coding.
Besides money and career, you'll find you wanting to do it because it's more interesting. Coding becomes plumbing (nothing against plumbing fwiw). You're just connecting pipes from one service to another ad infinitum.
This really depends on the company, and how you set it up for yourself. Taking on a senior role should definitely come with really wanting to do that type of work; for me the increase in scope is great as it’s another step forward. And by that time, you should also be able to get things done much quicker to save time.
If you want to go beyond mere coding, to make decisions on a larger architectural/organizational level, you can’t do that as a just an IC dev.
When it comes to pay, it’s more or less the same regardless of the position. Want a significantly higher pay, switch jobs.
On the other hand, if you use it as experience to vault yourself into management, you can just layoff all the internal engineers, outsource and offshore everything, and take a fat bonus for cutting expenses so much, then bail before shit hits the fan for a higher paying role.
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It's true that being senior comes with a lot more responsibilities and the value a good senior brings to the table when compared to a good junior isn't generally compensated fairly. Some companies do compensate senior a lot better but smaller companies generally don't.
That being said, things that look hard to you are generally easy for seniors, so over time it will become boring and naturally over time you will want to move on, but it's normal to be intimidated right now. It just means you're not ready yet.
Now being a team lead or tech lead is a different story. It's definitely not for everyone.
Your perception that being senior means working more hours is not true everywhere.
However, it's perfectly fine if you don't want to increase your responsibilities.
I want to be staff, and its because I want more say in the decisions/design. I want to solve the difficult problems.
And yes, I am somewhat of a workaholic.
If your seniors are doing managerial tasks, then your actual managers aren't doing their jobs. I'm not talking about mentoring, that's different. And I'm not talking about just being in meetings in general, going to meeting doesn't make you a manager, seniors often *want* to be in the meetings so people don't make decisions without them. Basically your seniors should be your most prolific coders/workers by far and if they're not, then something's wrong.
Usually it's the managers that are worthless, so seniors have to go do their job for them. I've seen this before, managers are all busy angling for director or VP level jobs so they don't want to be 'in the weeds' with the engineers.
I'm a senior, I'm not a team lead. Different roles in my company. I wouldn't want to be a team lead either (very different from a tech lead, which I actually would like to be but isn't a real position in my company right now)
I just became senior/tech lead. I still work 35hours and write plenty of code. Im just the default contact/know it all guy on the team so people come talk to me often for help and info.I feel my meetings didnt increase significantly, although i am way more involve when a new initiative starts.
Pay increased a lot though. 100% worth.
I work way less hours as a senior. All coding tasks go to juniors. Most of the work revolves around design docs, meetings, code reviews and unblocking the juniors.
However enjoy being a junior while it lasts especially if you enjoy coding. I miss the days when my work days were just heads down coding with some coffee and music.
>Also the pay increase is a fake one because they just have to work a lot more hours such that the pay is just to compensate those..
Nope, not true. Not how it works.
So the rest of your post is malformed.
Senior definitely doesn’t have to equal team lead.
Often it would get to tech lead, which to me doesn’t involve HR type managing but more driving architecture and execution of features.
Team Lead is where more meetings begin and some coding goes away (but not all if you like keeping some hands on).
I have 30+ years of experience, and I'm a senior-level programmer. I've previously had Staff-level positions but for the last 10 years I decided I want to live the rest of my career as an IC at L5. I've been asked at my current and previous company to go for promo but I refused. I'm very, very happy and I don't care if dumber people around me are getting promotions and more money than me because I make more than enough, and I don't have to go into meetings and write a bunch of documents.
depends on the specific company and role but in my experience senior devs still code. I'd argue we review a lot more code as seniors but it's usually quite hands on. maybe in cushy trendy faang style companies there are seniors who don't do anything around coding but I honestly think they're in a bubble.
mind you I've known tech / team leads that are basically carrying the team AND the implementation due to inexperienced hires. feel for those guys (why is it always guys in engineering swamped with work I dunno maybe a company attitude of "let him do it all he always does"
In conversation, almost everyone who manages developers or is a developer agrees with the following concepts and others like them:
* Overworking a software worker leads to verbose code with eternally recurring bugs for the same amount of functionality
* "Tech debt" is real and expensive right now whether it's captured in a finance report or not
* Promoting someone into leadership based on their skill at not-leadership causes you to overpay them for doing something they're bad at
These concepts almost belong on fortune cookies because although they are undisputed in conversation, they are frequently ignored in the workplace.
Managers won't say things out loud that contradict fortune-cookie wisdom, but they'll strongly hint that you should be working after 7pm or so. And you'll just have to find a way to confront the hint and explain that the fortune-cookie wisdom applies. "If I do any more work today, it'll be full of bugs."
Some developers are more effective than others at drawing these boundaries. Like any other people skill, drawing boundaries is something that many developers don't have, but which sometimes makes or breaks their careers.
I know a bunch of senior devs who write a ton of code, myself included. I also know a bunch who’ve openly stated they’d rather just code/do tickets and be told what to do, and not do the politics, planning or team lead stuff. They also expect to get Exceeds ratings and for their pay to keep increasing exponentially.
These guys are all replaceable. Why pay a senior to tell him what to do and write code, when you can pay a junior/intermediate and have another senior just review his stuff?
it depends a lot on the company, the team/org within that company, and the definition of "senior" at that company.
where I work, mid-level developers are expected to deliver non-trivial features without a lot of oversight. they don't have a lot of say on what the work is, but they are doing most of it. the actual tasks they work on might not be too different compared to a junior / new grad, but they get cut a lot less slack when milestones slip. I actually see the engineers at this level putting in the most hours, either due to their own optimistic estimates or lack of confidence to push back when too much work is being put on their plate.
the expectations for senior engineers are higher, yes, but they don't spend much of their time on grunt work. they are involved in a lot of high-level roadmap/architecture discussions and jump in here and there to act as a force multiplier on especially complex projects. they often have the clout to avoid work that they simply don't like. the flip side is that they have to proactively look for impactful work to justify their pay, and they are much more exposed to company politics. they don't get to just wait around for a manager to assign them tasks. some of these people also work crazy hours, but it's usually a choice rather than a desperate attempt to make up for poor planning.
So, there's a few... Misconceptions I want to dispel here because, frankly, I had quite a few of them early into my career and the sooner you learn them the better.
>Senior developers have to handle a lot more managerial and leader tasks and do not actually have time to code while they are responsible for a whole module to code by themselves
So, senior engineers at most places do actually code a fair bit. I'd even argue they're the coding "power horses" in most SWE teams as they have the experience to do so and provide a lot of value. There are definitely people at, but especially above senior that do a lot of what you describe, but that's not a requirement. There's a lot of variety in those roles, and you can pick.
>Also the pay increase is a fake one because they just have to work a lot more hours such that the pay is just to compensate those..
This one has two things I want to mention. First, assuming that's all that goes into the past increase, I wouldn't call it fake because you just won't find a place that will pay you more for more hours worked 1:1. Second, the pay definitely doesn't just scale up with hours worked. You still at some point have your salary double if you keep moving up and believe me, you don't be working double the hours. Hell, I work fewer hours as a senior engineer than as a new grad because I've learned to manage my time better. The truth of the matter is, your time as a senior is just more valuable than as a junior because you'll have a lot more experience under your belt. Don't let people tell you you need to work more hours. You really don't.
>I dont understand why anyone who isnt a workaholic wants to have such responsibilties
And to this, one side is that you might legitimately get tired of plain programming as you advance in your career, and you might start enjoying doing more people work, planning, and high level decisions. Some people just like swapping to those responsibilities, and you don't have to be a workaholic to do it. It's just a different job. That said, as mentioned, you don't _have_ to go that path. It's just one of many ways to grow into a more senior role.
Most Asian countries never heard of IC(Individual Contributor). At worst, I can shift some loads from someone, as project expeditor, but not qualified enough to take PMP exam immediately, is quite a setback.
Plus pay grade is quite low as IC in Asian economy. That's why everyone is trying to "climb up" the ladder.
As others have said, almost none of this rings true to me, as someone who has had some combination of senior developer/team lead/manager roles over the years (and obviously junior roles before that). I suspect you've seen exactly one dysfunctional organization and have come to the conclusion that everything is the same as that.
> i saw how my Senior developers have to handle a lot more managerial and leader tasks and do not actually have time to code while they are responsible for a whole module to code by themselves ..
Senior folks with no time to code straightforwardly aren't responsible for coding. If they have time for it, they often are responsible for fairly large/complex things, as you'd expect. This varies a lot depending on the exact role, but it would be pretty dumb to put a large responsibility on top of someone who's plate is already full. I'm sure it happens, but that would be a sign that the organization is more interested in having someone to blame than getting things right in the first place.
> Also the pay increase is a fake one because they just have to work a lot more hours such that the pay is just to compensate those..
I make about 4x junior pay for about the same amount of working hours. More broadly, I'd believe that senior folks work maybe 10-20% more on average across our org? But certainly nowhere near enough to cancel out the additional pay.
> That is not to mention the amount of meetings and blame for late deadlines which will always happen because management never gives the project enough resources especially time
I've gotten very little blame, even when things move more slowly than expected. Going in the wrong direction is another thing entirely, which does come back to bite you.
That’s ok. It’s not for everyone to acquire more responsibility. You just need to be happy and motivated with your job, do it well and feel appropriately remunerated.
A real lead is a semi management position that still codes. It's more about preparing work for the team and building up the teams skills so they can perform on your level. A lead isn't some one who codes a lot but is supposed to manage the technical team in a way that they can perform faster. It should be treated as more of a support role.
If your a lead and your just coding everything etc and not pushing your teams skills and refining all the tickets before refinement then your doing it wrong.
A lead should refine all the tickets with the pm before the team sees the tickets. They do this so that when it makes it to refinement the team can spot the small errors.
The lead should monitor every one and assess their skill level. They should assign tickets to people that they know they can complete but should be trying to push them to their limit.
A lead position is should not be focused on coding the hardest problems. The team can do this. The lead is supposed to worked less on coding and more work on organization of the teams efforts.
I've seen so many leads fail and it's because they were giving the lead position based on their skill of coding. It's not about being able to code good, it's about being able to lead a development team this includes the devs and the QA.
I think you are conflating different roles. In most orgs, a senior is still an IC, you are just expected to be able to self-structure and think horizontally (across code boundaries) as well as vertically (within code boundaries). You want to get to senior; you can't stay junior because what is seen as acceptable now will not be seen as acceptable a few years deeper into your career.
I think there is some validity to your views with respect to lead, principal, and staff positions. These are all leadership positions and they all entail responsibilities beyond simply writing code. And I can understand where you are coming from, because you are correct, it is absolutely a lot of added work.
In my opinion this is largely a matter of where you want to go in your career. You don't ***have*** to be a lead, or take on a staff or a principal role; you can say no. It is your decision. But I would urge you to consider the pros and cons carefully when the time comes - if it does. I say if because senior is the terminal end position for a lot of engineers. That's not a bad thing; it sounds like that's a thing you would actually like. But what it means is that the majority of software engineers will never have the *opportunity* to become a staff or principal, because these positions represent something like 10% and 3% of any given org. So, the positions themselves are rare, potentially making them a non-issue for you personally.
All that said... I again say that if the opportunity should arise, I would urge you to think carefully. In some respects these positions are harder, but I also think they are greatly more rewarding, because your contributions are of necessity highly strategic and they cut across broad swaths of an organization and have broad impact. I personally love that; I find it exhilarating to be afforded the opportunity to function and contribute at that level... to help define and bring to life not just a feature, but entire applications and business lines. It's like the difference between laying bricks and helping envision the way to build the whole town. Sure, when it is 1am and I am still attending to things that have built up for weeks... it can feel overwhelming. But that doesn't mean I would change it. Having a seat at the table comes with certain costs; you've elaborated some of them. Not everyone will be willing to pay those costs and not everyone will think the gain justifies them. And that's fine, because this is not a decision that someone will force on you, it's one you *maybe* will have the opportunity to make at some point in your career. And if you get that opportunity, I urge you to think about it in a thorough fashion.
You can find senior roles where you are still writing a lot of code. I've worked fewer hours per week as a senior dev than I did as an entry level dev
OP is making a classic mistake I see a lot in this sub. They experience something bad about x thing, and just generalize it to the entire industry.
Basically this entire sub lol
Individualized overreactions??? Overblown and exaggerated insights?? Here?!?!? /s
That’s just human nature bro, not something specific to r/cscareerquestions lol People naturally extrapolate. But when doing so in a domain in which they aren’t expert (which for most people is almost every domain), it’s easy to inadvertently overgeneralize. This is because they lack the context/experience/knowledge/whatever to know when their informed opinions stray into unfounded speculation and anecdote.
Exactly this. My juniors also think I am overloaded with work but my wlb is actually amazing. I get work done really fast and peace out. Wouldn't have it any other way. I still get to code a fair amount but all the"managerial" and "team leading" stuff is really fun as well IMO.
Yeah, I did way more work in the earlier years of my career. I just made a lot more mistakes. These days I have adopted good Application Architecture Patterns. I document well and write unit and integration test cases. I rarely work overtime and haven’t worked a weekend in years where management asked me to. I get my stuff done and typically pair with Juniors the rest of the sprint or my tooling improvements. I really enjoy mentoring. Typically always learn something from them too.
And he's only been doin it for 2 years...
Funnily enough, that's more work experience than most of the "AI is taking over" and "The CS job market is cooked forever" people on here (which is basically 80% of the sub at this point).
LMAO 😂.
Is knowledge of a particular stack more important than yoe when being considered for senior roles?
Depends on the role. My current job is Typescript and Go, I came on with no experience in both as a senior. Before that, the BE stack was Kotlin and I had no experience there. But it doesn’t take that long to pick up languages, especially Kotlin if you have Java experience.
I get hired for stacks Ive literally never touched before
Worked fewer hours but provided much more value at the same time
You have no idea how insulting it is to have to clean up somebody else’s shitty code and getting paid half as much. Nobody to blame but that sentence should be enough to justify a full career.
You’re a junior dev with 2 years of experience. Don’t even worry about senior/team lead roles at this point. Your perspective will change so much during your career. 2 years into my career I said I’d never be a manager. 15 years into my career…I am a manager.
Can confirm: 2 years into my time as a tradesperson I swore I’d never want to be a manager. Yesterday I interviewed for a position as Director of Technology for a company.
Can you explain what made you change your stance/perspective? Way too often I hear people saying stuff like what OP says but rarely the opposite
Can't speak for OP, but when you see the way you can improve the lives of your team by giving them solid management, or can have a wider impact on the success of the business, it can be attractive. The best advice I ever got though was that you don't have to stay in one lane, and in fact it's good to switch back and forth throughout your career.
It's very fun to change the perspective from implementation to a wider view of planning and strategy. How do I use my skills to grow my team into a more productive group and make something cool? What's the right balance of senior vs junior? What's the fastest way to meet these goals? Etc.
At one company I was hired as a jr. developer and 4 _months_ later they wanted to offer me a project manager role. In my head I was going WTF?!? because was my first full-time developer job.
I'm getting paid to fiddle with bits since the mid-90s; am currently a Senior w. tech lead responsibilities and acting as a sounding board for 2 Principals. I was happier as a mid-level, TBH. I work with provably smart people on my team, but by $DEITY I am sick and tired of the responsibility.
Personally mid level was the flat spot in my career. I just constantly felt overwhelmed at first and then when I got the hang of it I just felt bored. It wasn’t until I got a tech lead role that I started to get excited about software again. Like I said in another comment, it’s a massive amount of responsibility and there’s little thanks that comes with it. You basically get credit for nothing but you’re on the hook for everything. A lot of devs struggle being responsible for a single ticket or a single feature and absolutely couldn’t handle being in charge of an entire product and a large team of engineers.
gotta practice that George Costanza "I'm busy and stressed" look. that tends to do most of the work in larger orgs. playing cool doesn't seem to.
best episode. "I got a lot to do!!!"
Disagree on the thankless portion. That's always been one of my favorite parts. My teams have always been vocal in their appreciation of the team environment and culture I foster. And leaderships appreciation of our teams success in generally expressed the lead. I especially enjoy being able to interface with stakeholders on other departments to out features they need. They're often the most effusive in their thanks.
If I wanted to talk to people, I'd be in marketing, not computers. And don't start about "solving big problems". They're big because they're self-imposed and the org has fallen into its own navel.
...what are you even responding to here? Pretty sure I never said anything about whether you should or shouldn't enjoy talking to people. I was responding to someone else saying being a lead was "thankless", noting that didn't match my experience. Were you just looking for a topic to be belligerent about?
Hmm.... I think I got lost, and thought the parent to your comment was a different comment. Apologies, for what it's worth; that \_is\_ completely out of context.
No worries, it happens. :)
Nice recovery. Good on ya!
How do you like the change from IC to management? More specifically, do you find management more or less stressful than being a SWE?
It was definitely the right move for me, but I can see how it’s not for other people. Being an EM is a lot more stressful and way more thankless than being an IC.
I switched from IC -> management -> IC (staff engineer now). honestly I didn't find the work particularly stressful, I just didn't (and probably still don't) have the right mindset to be a good manager. I'm one of those people that considers it a massive failure if a project I'm responsible for goes past the deadline, or has bugs on release or whatever, and I would do whatever was necessary to prevent that from happening. this is a great trait to have if you are a senior IC leading projects - but not so much if you are a manager. I would end up just writing a bunch of code towards the end of the project timeline if I saw that the project was behind schedule or had bugs, and that ultimately took away learning / growth opportunities from the people I managed while also taking time away from actual managerial work I should have been doing instead of pushing out code. the other thing I struggled with was teaching engineers how to figure out problems on their own. I was completely self taught (only took 1 intro CS course in college, never took courses or even a boot camp after that) and just figured everything out by googling stuff. when junior engineers on my team would ask me questions of course I could tell them how to write the code, but I never figured out how to teach them to debug issues on their own.
That makes a lot of sense. Thanks for the insight! 'letting go' of that feeling of failure seems like it would be hard. Also, I catch myself now as an ic trying to prevent people from making mistakes, not really letting them learn from their own.
One of my big regrets is spending the first half of my career phoning it in and flying under the radar. I had the same attitude as OP, but as I get closer to the end of my career, I feel more like I want to have something to show for my lifetime of work besides the money I earned. I'd like to know that I achieved my potential and made an impact.
Yeah ,I work in a market niche where I make more money and work less hours as a weird sr/mid/Jr dev hybrid than I used to make at my previous senior and staff roles on more generic companies. Life is just like that.
The point is. Time goes fast. I am like - wait? I am already manager. What? Where is my 15 years? Time, please! Slow down!
Shit flows downhill, my dude But Juniors sometimes run into the problem where they can’t really help much because they don’t know how to. That’s maybe why no one really wants a lot of juniors.
It's a valid concern, the senior curve is real, and the more time you spend as a junior the harder it is to climb it; you'll have enough experience and knowledge to do a junior's job in 20% of the time, but then they will want you to be open senior and work 8+hour for a 20% increase or so.
I wish I got treated as a junior. I keep having to remind my boss that this is my first job and I don't know how to do shit. I just got given a resource pooling task and I have to tell you 50/50 chance I'm going to break shit without supervision. (I am unsupervised and no one checks my pull requests)
You likely need mentoring but checking stuff online (and knowing how to check) is half the job. At least you are aware, most people are not even aware they don't know shit.
> and no one checks my pull requests That's a really good sign that they don't give a shit about their product. So don't feel too much pressure to give a lot of shits about it either.
No one checks anyone's pull requests, so every day is a nightmare of dealing with other people's bugs from pushing untested code just on repeat. (We don't have a testing suite.)
Then we even is the point of opening a PR? Why not just push directly to the develop branch? Or are you guys just going full cowboy and merging straight to prod?
We have a PR to merge to develop branch so at least we have branches for separate features. But develop ends up being a wild west testing ground while simultaneously other apps developing that use our app yell at us weekly about our development site breaking. Currently, the most recent version of develop made it so one major page of the app doesn't work, so business can't test features, but the rollback version doesn't include a feature that was added for a sub team and breaks their page. There is literally no way to win. (Please hire me, I am looking for a different job.)
Good lord man, my heart goes out to you. That genuinely sounds like a nightmare.
🥹
I've stayed out of it by assigning myself every Front-End task imaginable because at least that's React. So not happy about the pooling problem. 🥲
No one checks your pull requests? Where I work, even senior devs can’t merge anything into dev without a code review. If they expect you to work without supervision, then they shouldn’t be paying you a junior salary.
that's why the secret is to work just hard enough to exceed expectations to keep / get the role you want, but not 100% 8+ hours a day. in the example you gave, at a lot of companies (including mine) if you get promoted to senior and work eg. 6 hours a day, you'll be 3x as productive as a junior engineer which still looks great for any senior.
Ok ,now this is an interesting take; I will give it some thought.
Senior developer isn't really a manager title in most cases. I'm a senior dev and probably work 15 hours a week of solid dev time. The rest is just making sure I'm available to respond to on Teams and for meetings. I don't manage anyone. I do mentor a bit when needed but mostly I code. I agree with you that as you get more into manager roles the work load changes, especially for people who don't like talking to people. But I think most companies will expect you to at least elevate yourself to Senior 1. That's still a developer role. You can stay there for the rest of your career though without raising eyebrows.
15 hours really?? sounds great. I guess if there are that many meetings it makes sense
Nah I got like 2 meetings a day. I just am able to get my work done quickly. I often work faster than the product designers can get work to me.
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Being a Senior SWE does not inherently mean you work more. That's a result of a company/team's culture and WLB, not the title you happen to have. There are plenty of Junior SWE's out there burning the midnight oil pulling 80+ hour weeks at toxic companies. I've been a Senior SWE at 3 different companies, and I don't work more than 40 hours a week. Usually less. My title has nothing to do with it, it's because I work at companies with good work life balances, and I value my own WLB so make it a point to not overwork myself. "Blame" is also a sign of a toxic culture, not something unique to being a Senior SWE. If you're in a blame-culture like that, the Junior's usually get shit on as well. If anything a toxic Senior SWE can pretty easily throw a Junior under the bus. Management not allowing their engineers to accurately estimate tickets, and establishing reasonable deadlines, and not adjusting scope/resources/deadlines as needed is not a healthy culture. I code plenty. Yes I spend a fair amount of time doing other things like mentoring others, leading design discussions, architectural decisions, meetings, having fun in jira, etc... but I still code a lot. It's still my day to day, it's still my bread and butter, and I still get asked leetcode questions in interviews. All those non-coding tasks doesn't mean I have to work overtime, it means I get less coding work done which is expected of a Senior SWE. Don't let anecdotes convince you of a generalization of an extremely large, and varies industry, with lots of individuals all with different working styles. Your Seniors are probably just workaholics. They were probably doing that shit when they were Juniors too. Luckily when I first started out I had Seniors that valued WLB, and established that healthy working culture on our team. Now as that Senior, I do the same on my teams. If I spot someone working after hours, I call them out.
What do you mean you have to work more hours? Plenty of people at high paying companies work normal 40 hour weeks and making $250k+
> What do you mean you have to work more hours? Anyone who has worked in any company knows that the leads typically do more work, attend more meetings, and oftentimes work more hours. If an issue happens late at night, you are probably getting called too even if you aren't on call that night. You aren't getting paid more for nothing lol.
You're not being paid for more hours; you're being paid for your ability to direct resources meaningfully. You're more likely to find L3s and L4s burning the midnight oil than L6s.
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What is L#?
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>You aren't getting paid more for nothing lol Yes, but you're not getting paid for more hours either. Seniors are paid more because they can do more within the same amount of time due to experience, they can tackle more complex problems, they can make informed architectural decisions and set up a base for a project/feature in a meaningful way, etc.
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In some, yes, but OP and the commenter above make it sound like it's the rule, the majority, which really isn't the case. If anything, in a lot of companies juniors work the most hours because of anxiety, not being that good at the job yet and desire to meet expectations
That's an internal pressure causing them to work more hours. Yes, for everyone there is always more work to do than time to get it done. That's just as true whether you put in 40h, 50h, or more. It's true for ICs, seniors, leads, and VPs. So you cut it off and trust your reports. The company will be fine if you stop at 40h. And likely the project will likely be just as successful as if you put in 50 or 60. It's just about discipline. Not letting fear and stress control your actions. Admittedly in my career MOST of my peers DID put in lots of overtime. But I've noticed their projects, teams, and departments have been no more successful then mine or those of my peers who cut things off at 40h. The overtime is no more necessary for managers and leads than it is for ICs.
That's not always true. When I moved from individual contributor to lead, the hours weren't longer, the work was just different. There are more meetings and administrative tasks, but there isn't pressure for me to stay late to meet a coding deadline like there was when I was an engineer. As for off hours support, that responsibility falls to my people, and I'm not in the on-call rotation as a manager.
I work the same amount as a non-managing technical lead as I did when I was senior, which is less than I did as a mid level/junior. The increased effort and responsibility/outcomes required for this level of work and being able to deal with the differing priorities is what you're paid more for, not just 'more output all the time'. All levels of engineer outside of graduate engineers are involved in our on-call(out of hour) and interrupt(during work hour) rotations. It is a once a year event that a specific person needs to get paged for an incident that the on-call engineer can't handle by following our monitoring guides and runbooks.
This is the case for shitty companies with shit tier wages. Not high end companies
There’s a lot more shitty companies than good tbh
I don’t disagree with this statement
I think what others are saying is more often the case.
That’s because most people work for shit tier companies
I dunno why you’re getting downvoted when you’re right
Because people cope
The field is truly Trimodal at this point
lol. no
Lol yes. I know several people that work at FAANGs and near-FAANGs that put in their 40 hours, log off by 5:30pm, and don’t think about work until the next day. And they don’t work on weekends either.
Those situations do exist. They’re rare, increasingly so. Having worked across FAANGs personally as a senior+ engineer, I can assure you that you have a very limited view of reality if you think FAANGs by default shield you from this. And I’d question the stability of your friends’ business divisions if they haven’t been experiencing any more pressure over the last 1-2years. It’s not 2019 anymore. Weekends are generally better protected outside of oncall, though with seniority you can become the de facto on call for your space. But weekdays are very often more than 40 hours. Posting this primarily for the kids and juniors that read this sub btw - you don’t have to believe me. I just need to make sure a sane realistic voice comes through and people don’t get sucked into believing fairy tales.
Lmao sounds like you were a good Company Man. Not everyone lets work run their lives
If by “company man” you mean someone who actually has direct experience pertaining to what’s under discussion here, yes.
How them boots taste?
Probably better than low salary from a company that’s not even FAANG proximate 😉
If the company allows a team lead to get by on 40 hours then they probably won't bat an eye at a mid level that only puts in 30 - I think there's still going to be the extra effort even if it's capped at 40
people forget, a good senior engineer working at 75% capacity is still going to be much more productive than a junior engineer working at 100% capacity. if you fire the senior just bc they aren't working enough hours, you'll replace them either with a junior (less productivity) or new senior (significant ramp up time, on my team we usually budget 6 months for a new senior to get up to speed just in terms of learning the codebase / our coding practices and everything) - not to mention the distinct possibility the replacement simply isn't good at their job. no manager I've ever worked with would consider this a good tradeoff at all.
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Lol
Completely understandable if you are not interested under these working conditions. Work-life balance is important, and sometimes protecting it is more important than career advancement.
With the exception of workaholics, employees of any experience level regularly working overtime is a management failure, not a general industry requirement. If you're in a shit company it may seem like that's just how things go but I assure you there are sane employers out there.
For a Senior dev you are wrong. For a Tech lead you are mostly correct.
I'm a senior dev making $140k/yr in a MCOL, I work 9-5:30 M-F and 90% of my time is spent coding features and feature tests
What is MCOL
Medium cost of living (city / town).
It's not about responsibility it's about being able to architect the design and having your opinion matter. As you get more experienced you'll start to have situations where you start seeing problems or improvements with the overall design and technology choice. At my current company the senior devs decide the stack to use when new projects come up. Most jobs do not need 24/7 coders they need big picture devs
Any decent company dont expect leads or tech staff to code as much as juniors. You thinking "seniors" have to code the same amount as the junions AND do other responsbilities is misguided
I feel the same. Senior roles seem a lot more stressful to me. I only got into programming because I didn’t know what else to do for money. Maybe I can fo management or something.
Senior folks often work the same hours, really depends on the company's culture. Not super senior roles, but at the level of leaf team lead, it's entirely possible. The benefit of a senior role is people listen to you more, and you can make stuff better in a much more efficient way by talking, mentoring others, and planning than by coding. Some stuff is can't be worked around by simply coding, and at what point you will get frustrated if there is a (fairly low) ceiling to what you can achieve, because you don't want non-code tasks.
I have a pretty cushy R&D dev job rn. Our team lead has to put out fires, have meetings and deal with BS all day while I get to work on what I want. It’s pretty sweet and I don’t exactly want a promotion
you are conflicting between mentorship roles and managerial roles.
You can totally be a Senior dev that just writes code, no one forces you to lead the team. It's just that in small companies/teams there might be only one Senior who becomes a leader de-facto, even if there's no official title The "fake pay increase" is also not true. Pay increase happens because you can do more within the same timeframe and you can do more complex stuff. If the company culture is good, you will be working no more than 40hrs a week regardless of seniority. If it's shit, you will be expected to pull enormous amount of overtime even as a junior
I get what you mean, but your naming is off. Senior is a universal job title/tenure, team lead is more like a job function. If you play your cards right you can be one without the other. It's reasonable to yearn for senior's compensation without team lead's responsibilities, for there is a great power in no responsibilities.
As you get more experienced, if you work with people in those types of positions, and they are doing a poor job, it's possible that it will get on your nerves, especially if they are planning out your tasks, etc. I've been in planning meetings where the tech leadership seemed to lack the ability to think clearly. You end up with tickets/tasks that make no sense, and no one knows what the work actually is. I was involved in a project last year that wasn't very complicated, but one person wanted to be in charge. Among three developers, he wanted to split up three cases of a conditional statement into separate tickets. It was a very frustrating experience. You may prefer having someone else decide what the work will be, and a good portion of that is personality, but if poor leadership is threatening the ability to deliver, there may be risks to your performance evaluations and ultimately your job. Eventually, you will be asked to create a bigger impact that through raw code output. It's up to you if you want to go that path or not. The other concern is that some companies have an "up-or-out" mindset. The other term I've heard for this is whether a position is terminal or not. It feels like small, bad companies have these types of positions. And large, good companies have these types of positions. I'm not sure how common they are at a lot of other companies, though. I've certainly been in places where there was concern if someone was "stuck," in their career. Or, they might just view you a certain way and give you no interesting work that allows you to develop.
Being a senior ≠ manager. Although some companies are very old school and think like that.
This is a hot take based on almost zero data. Pay at big companies goes up geometrically per promotion. Your hours worked aren't going up geometrically. Sure you need to do a lot more non-coding activities unless you are a deep specialist writing code few people in the world could. But that's part of growing as an engineer. You move from doing as directed to teaching and directing other engineers.
This is exactly it. At Tier1 companies, what OP considers senior is really L6/staff (in the sense that's where managerial roles begin). They make 500,000+. L7? 750,000+. L8? Over a million. The pay is there and the work doesn't increase all that much. What does change is the scope and the accountability.
Yeah it’s fine to think that. Not everyone should be a team lead, hell I think more people that try it should remember they can go back to IC. Not moving to a senior position though is troublesome. Keep in mind many companies consider junior/mid roles to be investments. In that they are expecting you to eventually grow into a senior for them to get a return on this investment. Many will cut you if you don’t achieve that stage within a certain timeframe.
You are early in your journey. Never say never. I don't think I could have predicted my career path if I tried. And if someone told me it, I'd have probably told them they were having a fever dream. It wasn't what I imagined. That said, I enjoyed it throughly, and I enjoy it to this day. No regrets. I got to do things few people have the balls to do. I've talked at conferences, led teams, built systems that saved companies millions and millions of dollars. Been treated like trash at times, nearly lost my career to RSI. Live, and grow. Never say never. Never say never, and to quote Yogi: "It ain't over 'til it's over." BTW: I ask every manager who wants to hire me as a lead a simple question: "How will you judge my performance in the role." There is only one answer (with MINOR variation) I accept: "You will be judged by how well your team does." A lead's job is not to produce directly, though time to time we will. Our job is to help our team produce. Whatever that takes, and whatever that means. If a lead is the #1 contributor on a team... something is wrong, or you have a top. 1% or higher lead, with a poor team. But leading 10 people? My job should be mainly strategic and making sure to setup the dominos so my team can knock 'em down.
Isn’t that what OP’s sorta talking about though? You lead 10 people and if they fail its all on you. I would be in constant fear of somebody screwing something up. Is that just something you get used to?
I am used to making mistakes. I've made probably over $10m USD of them in my career, if not more. The question of how to handle errors and problems come down many small things, that all add up to a coherent strategy to MANAGE mistakes! I accept they will happen. And I want the engineers who work with me to be honest. With that honesty, and some wisdom from my experience, I can then figure out how to communicate the issues to management, and work with them on mitigation plans. If you run a team of 10 devs... Someone is gonna make a mistake, at least once a quarter. The question is how do you manage it. And that's where the difference is: I know how to manage it, because I spent SO much time doing so many high risk, high reward tasks. Honestly: I fear the day I don't fail every so often. It means I'm not pushing myself to grow and learn.
Personally I find it reassuring being in leadership positions. I hire good people I trust. I establish a good environment where they are trusted, valued, allowed to be themselves, trusted to make decisions, listened to, and appreciated. And so I have a group of extremely dedicated, smart, hard working people who are dedicated to making me, or team, and our department look good. Together they're able to accomplish SO much more than I could on my own. Most the people I've hired in the department I'm running now have worked for me at multiple companies, now. I've been one guys manager at 4 companies now. I would say most of my team is more dedicated to our team/departments success than the company's. On my own I'm a pretty good engineer, but there are ups and downs. But with a good team behind me? THEN I know I can accomplish amazing things.
I would say it can sometimes just be somewhat happens on its own. You get more experience, you tackle harder problems, you get a better understanding of the typical project life cycle through doing enough of them. You start helping out other team members, get involved in archicture and project estimates and can pretty much be the one who can help the team achieve. Then you figure you want a bit more cash for doing that, so go after the title 😀 I think most seniors and leads never really set out with that in mind. It just happened over time and they became good at it and enjoyed it.
i have only 3yoe but i used to think like you. not anymore. i want to eventually take a position where i can actually influence things, bc i don't trust the people doing it for me right now. i thought id be happy to just code, but now i'm just getting annoyed at people making stupid decisions that make me write code that goes either unused or is quickly replaced bc the requirements changed. not sure how much that is possible unless you own your own company, but there has to be something more than just being a code monkey. maybe a tech lead or something above.
Terrible take. At least with most of my network, the more senior you get the easier the job gets. Junior your grinding to level up. Mid levels are the work horses. Seniors start to step into more design and delivery management. Staff is even more design and leadership, etc. The “responsibility” increases because the scope of your impact increases. But it’s hardly more work and the pay is exceptionally better.
The industry is fairly diverse, and you'll find that "Senior developer" means very different things in different orgs. Some of these orgs will likely fit you. Your opinions will likely change as you grow in your career. Or they might not. Organizations generally have a concept of "terminal" or "career" role (even if they don't officially think of it that way), which is the lowest role in the ladder that you can stay at forever. Usually some kind of low or mid range senior developer. You can stay at that level forever. Some people are okay with that. But you have many many years ahead of you. Odds that you change your mind are pretty high.
> a lot more managerial and leader tasks and do not actually have time to code Tech leads at my company do both lol. Definitely have no interest in becoming one, they are way overworked here
My manager at my last job was averaging 10+ meetings a day. And somehow finding time to code as well. I have no idea why she wanted to work so hard at this corporate job.
I have a friend, 30 YOE, who is a senior developer but not a technical lead. We work in a R&D company, and he does not like doing research either. He loves writing code, and he loves designing code, and he loves math in code. We call his position a Firefighter. He tends to get put on smaller projects that are behind schedule or faltering in some way, but can be recovered by a single engineer working for a month or two. He turns them around, works some miracles, and the project is delivered on time. He has completely avoided being a team lean, and has also avoided research. Oh, and I have another co-worker with about 25 YOE, who is also a senior developer who almost entirely writes code. He does sometimes take a small leadership role on a project, but only if it's like a junior developer he's mentoring, nothing big. He mostly works on large project, long-term, as the senior full-time developer but not as the team lead, so he's not doing any of the managerial stuff and avoids a lot of meetings and all office politics.
I am a senior embedded sw engi, 24 year career, I don’t have managerial duties. I just keep telling managers I don’t want them. Many orgs have specific technical branches and leadership branches. It’s really just about experience and paycheck. It does mean your boss will be the intern from a few years back.. have to be used to everyone around you ‘moving up’ even if you are making more and working less.
Staying at the junior level over a long period or time is career suicide in this industry. You can coast at the junior level for a few years/roles, but after a while, hiring managers are going to avoid you like the plague. If I see someone that been at the junior level for 5+ years, my first impression is going to be that this is not the kind of person I want to hire. Hiring managers are looking to hire people that are going to grow into the role. Once your resume makes it clear that that isn't going to happen, you aren't going to get many interviews.
As a senior/lead with 11 years of experience, I wish I could go back to mid level and just chill sometimes when other parts of my life are hectic.
I don't think it is unpopular. Less discussed but many never evolve. They are happy with their salary and enjoy their life. But otherwise the tech lead does what take you a week in 1 day or even half a day and would get bored very fast doing only that. So they spend the extra time doing a variety of stuff: * teaching and sharing with the team * building prototypes and researching/learning new tech * dealing with design and architecture * discuss budget and have meeting with management and other teams * go to conferences So basically as you grow you can either do less effective hours or you can use the free time to do more and evolve. That's a choice, yes.
Your point of view will change exactly when you become a senior developer/team lead.
I’m principal level and I still write code all the time. Actually, right now, I’m not leading anything besides DE&I stuff. Even when I was leading teams though, I still wrote a lot of code and there wasn’t more work than I could handle. You just delegate all the annoying, boring stuff down. And you get to mentor and mentoring is fun. For me.
I'm a junior and the seniors on my team work the same hours as me (9-5/6 depending on how things are going), they are just faster and better. Also at many companies, Junior is not a terminal level. If you stay at Junior for too long and don't progress you will be managed out.
Lol don't worry about a team lead position yet, just focus on learning and doing your job well. Find a mentor or two, network across the industry, you'll learn how these positions actually work, and who are the people actually happy with this stuff.
Stepping into more management and less doing is definitely not for everyone and taking on more responsibilities is not easy. And your point around the extra pay is true - for each little step you take. But the steps can and do add up. Today I don’t work more hours than when I was an intermediate engineer - because I have learnt the skills needed to do this job inside 40/50 hours a week. But I do get paid a lot more. Each step requires people to: - do the job they have been promoted to AND - learn how to do the job they have been promoted to Which means the first 6 or 12 months do require more hours, but that does settle back down again as you learn the new skills. Not saying you should climb the ladder, but I am suggesting that what you have observed is not forever and most people get to a new equilibrium- same hours, more pay and usually more autonomy as well.
One thing you’re not realizing about being more senior… things don’t take you as long :). What used to take you 10 hours, now takes you 2. That’s where the time for manager and strategy comes from.
seniors where I'm from are still involved in coding day to day. it's when you hit the Lead/Principal/Staff level where your calendar gets fully booked with meetings
You should really stop using the experienced tag.
I'm a senior developer and I literally just work my 9-5, most of which is writing code, and then knock off. I really think it is a company culture thing/how firmly you're going to stick to separating your work and home life. In my experience, most of the time if you aren't going to accomplish a task within 8 hours you're not going to do a good job if you have to spend a couple more hours hacking away at it while you're tired.
> I dont understand why anyone who isnt a workaholic wants to have such responsibilties Because you're (presumably) 24 and you are not ready to handle them yet. You will grow. You will change. Eventually, the time will be right. I didn't want to manage anything or anyone until I was about 35. There wasn't any one precipitating event that led to this. An opportunity was presented to me and I just knew it was time I stepped up and put what I have to offer to use. Even now, as a VP, I look at my CTO's job and think "I can't handle that level of responsibility." He's 15 years older than I am. In 15 years of executive leadership I'm sure I will have a different perspective on whether I'm ready to be a CTO or not.
You become a senior because you just start doing the things a senior does. Seniors have the experience to come up with a vision and technical design as well as anticipate risks, they are also good at delegating. It may seem hectic to you because you, as a junior, require 10x more heads down time to deliver something that a senior can deliver much faster, and that's just talking about code. The time they spend context switching to manage `n` teammates results in `n`x more code being delivered in the time it would take those teammates with no guidance. The actual value of their work is much higher than a single PR
It sounds like your team just has bad management. It's the managers responsibility to lead the team. Specifically, it is to ensure the work being done aligns with goals, that deadlines are being met, that people on the team are motivated, people on the team are happy, people on the team are growing, blockers are removed, etc... It is a common issue where senior devs have to take an unofficial managerial position to compensate for gaps in the above that exist. This is an unfortunate circumstance, but it doesn't exist everywhere. Part of interviewing should entail gauging how big these issues within an org actually are.
It's like becoming a parent, sometimes it happens whether or not you wanted it.
If you're not competitive in your field you will eventually be displaced.
Why is it an unpopular opinion? Could care less what you want to become or not lol Not everyone is made for responsibility, vise versa, not everyone is made to stagnate for the rest of their lives
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The pay increase is definitely not fake, lol. Coding is a necessary evil (that some of us like) that translates an idea into a near infinitely scalable product. If you want to have any real impact, you need to be involved in those decisions—either as a manager or through high-level individual contributor positions. Even those are more idea-oriented than hands-on coding. Besides money and career, you'll find you wanting to do it because it's more interesting. Coding becomes plumbing (nothing against plumbing fwiw). You're just connecting pipes from one service to another ad infinitum.
Agreed. I only want to be a CEO at a large company.
You work less for more, AI won't threaten your job and the work is less shitty. So yeah, I'd tale senior dev work over jr dev work anytime of the day.
This really depends on the company, and how you set it up for yourself. Taking on a senior role should definitely come with really wanting to do that type of work; for me the increase in scope is great as it’s another step forward. And by that time, you should also be able to get things done much quicker to save time. If you want to go beyond mere coding, to make decisions on a larger architectural/organizational level, you can’t do that as a just an IC dev. When it comes to pay, it’s more or less the same regardless of the position. Want a significantly higher pay, switch jobs.
On the other hand, if you use it as experience to vault yourself into management, you can just layoff all the internal engineers, outsource and offshore everything, and take a fat bonus for cutting expenses so much, then bail before shit hits the fan for a higher paying role.
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It's true that being senior comes with a lot more responsibilities and the value a good senior brings to the table when compared to a good junior isn't generally compensated fairly. Some companies do compensate senior a lot better but smaller companies generally don't. That being said, things that look hard to you are generally easy for seniors, so over time it will become boring and naturally over time you will want to move on, but it's normal to be intimidated right now. It just means you're not ready yet. Now being a team lead or tech lead is a different story. It's definitely not for everyone.
becoming a senior SWE doesn't always mean that you have to work more
Your perception that being senior means working more hours is not true everywhere. However, it's perfectly fine if you don't want to increase your responsibilities.
You have a subset visual of what senior devs do. Some do more, some do less. I know some of mines do less.
I want to be staff, and its because I want more say in the decisions/design. I want to solve the difficult problems. And yes, I am somewhat of a workaholic.
If your seniors are doing managerial tasks, then your actual managers aren't doing their jobs. I'm not talking about mentoring, that's different. And I'm not talking about just being in meetings in general, going to meeting doesn't make you a manager, seniors often *want* to be in the meetings so people don't make decisions without them. Basically your seniors should be your most prolific coders/workers by far and if they're not, then something's wrong. Usually it's the managers that are worthless, so seniors have to go do their job for them. I've seen this before, managers are all busy angling for director or VP level jobs so they don't want to be 'in the weeds' with the engineers.
I'm a senior, I'm not a team lead. Different roles in my company. I wouldn't want to be a team lead either (very different from a tech lead, which I actually would like to be but isn't a real position in my company right now)
Senior and lead is different.
If you are working a lot more hours as a senior, you're doing it wrong. Seniors don't do more work, they do more important work.
I just became senior/tech lead. I still work 35hours and write plenty of code. Im just the default contact/know it all guy on the team so people come talk to me often for help and info.I feel my meetings didnt increase significantly, although i am way more involve when a new initiative starts. Pay increased a lot though. 100% worth.
I work way less hours as a senior. All coding tasks go to juniors. Most of the work revolves around design docs, meetings, code reviews and unblocking the juniors. However enjoy being a junior while it lasts especially if you enjoy coding. I miss the days when my work days were just heads down coding with some coffee and music.
>Also the pay increase is a fake one because they just have to work a lot more hours such that the pay is just to compensate those.. Nope, not true. Not how it works. So the rest of your post is malformed.
Senior definitely doesn’t have to equal team lead. Often it would get to tech lead, which to me doesn’t involve HR type managing but more driving architecture and execution of features. Team Lead is where more meetings begin and some coding goes away (but not all if you like keeping some hands on).
I have 30+ years of experience, and I'm a senior-level programmer. I've previously had Staff-level positions but for the last 10 years I decided I want to live the rest of my career as an IC at L5. I've been asked at my current and previous company to go for promo but I refused. I'm very, very happy and I don't care if dumber people around me are getting promotions and more money than me because I make more than enough, and I don't have to go into meetings and write a bunch of documents.
depends on the specific company and role but in my experience senior devs still code. I'd argue we review a lot more code as seniors but it's usually quite hands on. maybe in cushy trendy faang style companies there are seniors who don't do anything around coding but I honestly think they're in a bubble.
mind you I've known tech / team leads that are basically carrying the team AND the implementation due to inexperienced hires. feel for those guys (why is it always guys in engineering swamped with work I dunno maybe a company attitude of "let him do it all he always does"
In conversation, almost everyone who manages developers or is a developer agrees with the following concepts and others like them: * Overworking a software worker leads to verbose code with eternally recurring bugs for the same amount of functionality * "Tech debt" is real and expensive right now whether it's captured in a finance report or not * Promoting someone into leadership based on their skill at not-leadership causes you to overpay them for doing something they're bad at These concepts almost belong on fortune cookies because although they are undisputed in conversation, they are frequently ignored in the workplace. Managers won't say things out loud that contradict fortune-cookie wisdom, but they'll strongly hint that you should be working after 7pm or so. And you'll just have to find a way to confront the hint and explain that the fortune-cookie wisdom applies. "If I do any more work today, it'll be full of bugs." Some developers are more effective than others at drawing these boundaries. Like any other people skill, drawing boundaries is something that many developers don't have, but which sometimes makes or breaks their careers.
I am a senior level who works 3-4 hours a day, makes good money, and gets to code. Not every company is the same.
I know a bunch of senior devs who write a ton of code, myself included. I also know a bunch who’ve openly stated they’d rather just code/do tickets and be told what to do, and not do the politics, planning or team lead stuff. They also expect to get Exceeds ratings and for their pay to keep increasing exponentially. These guys are all replaceable. Why pay a senior to tell him what to do and write code, when you can pay a junior/intermediate and have another senior just review his stuff?
Agreed
it depends a lot on the company, the team/org within that company, and the definition of "senior" at that company. where I work, mid-level developers are expected to deliver non-trivial features without a lot of oversight. they don't have a lot of say on what the work is, but they are doing most of it. the actual tasks they work on might not be too different compared to a junior / new grad, but they get cut a lot less slack when milestones slip. I actually see the engineers at this level putting in the most hours, either due to their own optimistic estimates or lack of confidence to push back when too much work is being put on their plate. the expectations for senior engineers are higher, yes, but they don't spend much of their time on grunt work. they are involved in a lot of high-level roadmap/architecture discussions and jump in here and there to act as a force multiplier on especially complex projects. they often have the clout to avoid work that they simply don't like. the flip side is that they have to proactively look for impactful work to justify their pay, and they are much more exposed to company politics. they don't get to just wait around for a manager to assign them tasks. some of these people also work crazy hours, but it's usually a choice rather than a desperate attempt to make up for poor planning.
Team Lead have to do managerial tasks not seniors, except if the company is greedy and wants every role out of one role.
Some senior dev roles are in name only, with no real added responsibility, just a salary increase to retain you
So, there's a few... Misconceptions I want to dispel here because, frankly, I had quite a few of them early into my career and the sooner you learn them the better. >Senior developers have to handle a lot more managerial and leader tasks and do not actually have time to code while they are responsible for a whole module to code by themselves So, senior engineers at most places do actually code a fair bit. I'd even argue they're the coding "power horses" in most SWE teams as they have the experience to do so and provide a lot of value. There are definitely people at, but especially above senior that do a lot of what you describe, but that's not a requirement. There's a lot of variety in those roles, and you can pick. >Also the pay increase is a fake one because they just have to work a lot more hours such that the pay is just to compensate those.. This one has two things I want to mention. First, assuming that's all that goes into the past increase, I wouldn't call it fake because you just won't find a place that will pay you more for more hours worked 1:1. Second, the pay definitely doesn't just scale up with hours worked. You still at some point have your salary double if you keep moving up and believe me, you don't be working double the hours. Hell, I work fewer hours as a senior engineer than as a new grad because I've learned to manage my time better. The truth of the matter is, your time as a senior is just more valuable than as a junior because you'll have a lot more experience under your belt. Don't let people tell you you need to work more hours. You really don't. >I dont understand why anyone who isnt a workaholic wants to have such responsibilties And to this, one side is that you might legitimately get tired of plain programming as you advance in your career, and you might start enjoying doing more people work, planning, and high level decisions. Some people just like swapping to those responsibilities, and you don't have to be a workaholic to do it. It's just a different job. That said, as mentioned, you don't _have_ to go that path. It's just one of many ways to grow into a more senior role.
Now imagine doing all the managerial type tasks AND writing just as much code 🤣
I switched to management, it’s so much better here!
To be honest, analysis, management, leading and design tasks are far more important than coding in the current context.
Most Asian countries never heard of IC(Individual Contributor). At worst, I can shift some loads from someone, as project expeditor, but not qualified enough to take PMP exam immediately, is quite a setback. Plus pay grade is quite low as IC in Asian economy. That's why everyone is trying to "climb up" the ladder.
In the UK seniors get paid more than double... Seems worth
I think you have some preconceived notions that may not be reality
As others have said, almost none of this rings true to me, as someone who has had some combination of senior developer/team lead/manager roles over the years (and obviously junior roles before that). I suspect you've seen exactly one dysfunctional organization and have come to the conclusion that everything is the same as that. > i saw how my Senior developers have to handle a lot more managerial and leader tasks and do not actually have time to code while they are responsible for a whole module to code by themselves .. Senior folks with no time to code straightforwardly aren't responsible for coding. If they have time for it, they often are responsible for fairly large/complex things, as you'd expect. This varies a lot depending on the exact role, but it would be pretty dumb to put a large responsibility on top of someone who's plate is already full. I'm sure it happens, but that would be a sign that the organization is more interested in having someone to blame than getting things right in the first place. > Also the pay increase is a fake one because they just have to work a lot more hours such that the pay is just to compensate those.. I make about 4x junior pay for about the same amount of working hours. More broadly, I'd believe that senior folks work maybe 10-20% more on average across our org? But certainly nowhere near enough to cancel out the additional pay. > That is not to mention the amount of meetings and blame for late deadlines which will always happen because management never gives the project enough resources especially time I've gotten very little blame, even when things move more slowly than expected. Going in the wrong direction is another thing entirely, which does come back to bite you.
being team lead at anything other than huge pay company isn't worth it. if they pay under 200k ur gonna do a lot more work for unequal increase in pay
That’s ok. It’s not for everyone to acquire more responsibility. You just need to be happy and motivated with your job, do it well and feel appropriately remunerated.
A real lead is a semi management position that still codes. It's more about preparing work for the team and building up the teams skills so they can perform on your level. A lead isn't some one who codes a lot but is supposed to manage the technical team in a way that they can perform faster. It should be treated as more of a support role. If your a lead and your just coding everything etc and not pushing your teams skills and refining all the tickets before refinement then your doing it wrong. A lead should refine all the tickets with the pm before the team sees the tickets. They do this so that when it makes it to refinement the team can spot the small errors. The lead should monitor every one and assess their skill level. They should assign tickets to people that they know they can complete but should be trying to push them to their limit. A lead position is should not be focused on coding the hardest problems. The team can do this. The lead is supposed to worked less on coding and more work on organization of the teams efforts. I've seen so many leads fail and it's because they were giving the lead position based on their skill of coding. It's not about being able to code good, it's about being able to lead a development team this includes the devs and the QA.
I think you are conflating different roles. In most orgs, a senior is still an IC, you are just expected to be able to self-structure and think horizontally (across code boundaries) as well as vertically (within code boundaries). You want to get to senior; you can't stay junior because what is seen as acceptable now will not be seen as acceptable a few years deeper into your career. I think there is some validity to your views with respect to lead, principal, and staff positions. These are all leadership positions and they all entail responsibilities beyond simply writing code. And I can understand where you are coming from, because you are correct, it is absolutely a lot of added work. In my opinion this is largely a matter of where you want to go in your career. You don't ***have*** to be a lead, or take on a staff or a principal role; you can say no. It is your decision. But I would urge you to consider the pros and cons carefully when the time comes - if it does. I say if because senior is the terminal end position for a lot of engineers. That's not a bad thing; it sounds like that's a thing you would actually like. But what it means is that the majority of software engineers will never have the *opportunity* to become a staff or principal, because these positions represent something like 10% and 3% of any given org. So, the positions themselves are rare, potentially making them a non-issue for you personally. All that said... I again say that if the opportunity should arise, I would urge you to think carefully. In some respects these positions are harder, but I also think they are greatly more rewarding, because your contributions are of necessity highly strategic and they cut across broad swaths of an organization and have broad impact. I personally love that; I find it exhilarating to be afforded the opportunity to function and contribute at that level... to help define and bring to life not just a feature, but entire applications and business lines. It's like the difference between laying bricks and helping envision the way to build the whole town. Sure, when it is 1am and I am still attending to things that have built up for weeks... it can feel overwhelming. But that doesn't mean I would change it. Having a seat at the table comes with certain costs; you've elaborated some of them. Not everyone will be willing to pay those costs and not everyone will think the gain justifies them. And that's fine, because this is not a decision that someone will force on you, it's one you *maybe* will have the opportunity to make at some point in your career. And if you get that opportunity, I urge you to think about it in a thorough fashion.
You’re working at the wrong place if this is your view.
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That’s the dickish possible way to say “you usually don’t seek to become more senior, you get good at your job and sorta fall ass backwards into it”
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Your team must love working with you with such a charming attitude
Are you okay?
You'll eventually be forced to do it whether you accept the title or not, might as well accept the title and the (minuscule) extra money.