this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2023
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Yeah, you either work extra hours or you work during the meetings or both or you get de-skilled pretty quickly unless you work open source, second job or personal projects in the non-work hours. Otherwise, you can treat it like BS job but your skills will become BS and you will have to get better at lying and or potentially go into management with that level of experience. RN I'm unemployed and I'd gladly take any position, even if I'm qualified for senior, and I don't care if I have to work extra hours to keep up and this is coming from someone who has been actively organizing on the job at my last two tech jobs.
There is another way. Push back. Decline meeting invites along with a note "Thanks for the invite but I don't think I'm needed at this one am I?" 90% of the time people don't even read your decline reason. Or just leave yourself tentative till the last minute unless you really believe you need to be there.
Far too many devs seem to think you can't decline meetings and yet spend their time descoping development work because we're too busy... When it comes to annual reviews / your next contracting gig, the guy / gal who got the work done is the door who's door is knocked on.
If you're a senior engineer, then you should have a team of juniors doing most of the coding. Your job is to architect, peer review, meet with stakeholders, etc.. At least that has been my experience. Unless you are on one of those small teams with all senior engineers and then you have to do all of the above, and the coding too. I've had that experience as well.
small team with inexperienced new people that needed a lot of training and we also had "architect" positions and those guys I would never even see or talk to, they were in their own realm somewhere isolated from the actual work. what you are describing was more like the "principal" engineer and we had one of those and he was mostly only doing meetings and occasionally doing some work when the itch struck him sufficiently