this post was submitted on 09 May 2024
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Yes, that's generally the job of a senior engineer.
Agreed. Use your experience to shape the direction your teammates are moving in. Be an architect, and let them handle your light work.
It depends VERY much about the content and invitees of the meetings.
If you're there to give your expert engineering feedback, awesome. If you're there to receive the information you need in order to provide expert engineering feedback, awesome.
So often, I find, meetings are too broad and end up oversubscribed. Engineers are in a 2 hour meeting with 10 minutes of relevance.
There are serious differences in meeting culture, with vast implications oh the amount of efficacy you can juice from the attendees.
Ehhhh, depends on how your titles work, and I would argue that's at least a little odd. Most senior engineers I know are ~50/50 code/oversight, at worst. Once you get to Principal or Staff, though, you're lucky if you write 50 loc/week.
Senior rarely translates to something like architect anymore, it's at least a level or two up from there.
The beauty of titles like this is that they're absolutely meaningless.
You can't compare them between companies, sometimes even departments, you can't compare them between different industries, and you can't compare them between countries.
I'm a senior, and my job is currently to sit in meetings most of the day to convince BAs, architects and other team's leads not to make stupid decisions. The rest of my time I'm communicating the results back to my colleagues and writing escalation mails, because Steve again tried to re-introduce his god awful ideas that we shot down five times before and I'm hereby voicing my concerns in a business-like tone, but actually would want to exterminate him and his entire offspring.
My old project, however, was completely different and I actually spent 70% of my time actually writing code and 20% code-related meetings.
Sounds like you're doing the job of a PM to me, but I guess that's just confirming your point that titles aren't comparable
Not really, it's really largely a technical discussion, but we have a distributed monolith (the architect calls it micro service...) so each change of an interface will percolate through the entire system.
Staff Engineer: 10 hours of meetings each day
This, unfortunately, is accurate.
No it isn't - a senior engineer should be a technical track professional that's excellent at their job - it's likely there will be a fair amount of mentorship but that can take many forms including PR reviews and pair programming.
A technical lead, architect, or a front line manager is the one that should be eating meetings four to six hours a day. And absolutely nobody should be in eight hours of meetings a day - even bullshit C level folks should be doing work outside of meetings. Eight hours of meetings means that you're just regurgitating the output of other meetings.
I'd clarify that having occasional eight hour meeting days isn't bad, there might be occasional collaboration jam sessions that everyone prepares for... but if your 8-5-52 is solid meetings then nothing productive is happening.
Fully agree. Not every high paying job has to end up with management duties. That's the Peter Principle.
Anti Commercial-AI license
I've worked in a few places, all with senior engineers, including myself as a senior engineer, all of which the senior engineers spent most of their time actually engineering. If I went somewhere as a senior and was told I was going to be in meetings all day, I would quit because that's management, not engineering.
Where I work, Senior Engineer is an IC role. They attend the same meetings as other engineers. Its the Staff+ Engineers and managers that attend more meetings (in ascending order)
Engineer should still be an IC position and not have that many meetings. It should be a project or team lead that does the majority of meetings.
Tech Leads and Staff+ Engineers are still IC roles. If you're not managing people, then you're not in a manager role.
I mean I’m a senior engineer and I mostly handle escalations and high priority client issues, but my work is mostly break/fix
This is largely semantic, and highly subjective, but to me "Engineer" implies more design, architecture, and planning (ie, meetings).
A Senior "Developer" would imply more day-to-day coding to me. Not that companies care what I think, of course.
Yeah, at this point "Engineer" and "Developer" are 100% synonymous in the industry.
It's true. I even live in a place where the "Software Engineer" title actually does require a special designation, and I'm a "Software Engineer", and I have no such designation, so there's that.