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Yep. Part of why for a team like mine the knowledge solo "system architect" is untouchable here but also a glaring issue for upwards of 15 people and oodles of money.
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Apr 23, 2024 18:26
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Have to wait 120 days for this to hit the law books, everyone expecting a lot of appeals.quote:the Federal Trade Commission voted to ban noncompete agreements, which bar millions of workers from leaving their employers to join a competitor or start a rival business for a specific period of time. The FTC’s move, which is already being challenged in court, would mean that such employees could apply for jobs they weren’t previously eligible to seek.
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Apr 25, 2024 12:58
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The second part about salaried overtime is also great. It doesn’t affect a lot of people here, I assume, but is a welcome change for a lot of people.
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Apr 25, 2024 17:11
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What's a solid number of engineers to have under you as a TL whose focus is primarily writing tech designs, reviewing product docs, planning rollouts, and doing code reviews? At 5 I'm feeling a little bit spread thin as there's a near constant barrage of incoming support tickets and questions as well.
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Apr 26, 2024 22:34
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Bojack Srcmain posted:What's a solid number of engineers to have under you as a TL whose focus is primarily writing tech designs, reviewing product docs, planning rollouts, and doing code reviews? At 5 I'm feeling a little bit spread thin as there's a near constant barrage of incoming support tickets and questions as well. 6-8 is the number the book will give you. 9+ isnt uncommon, depending on the company. leper khan fucked around with this message at 23:17 on Apr 26, 2024 |
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Apr 26, 2024 22:55
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Bojack Srcmain posted:What's a solid number of engineers to have under you as a TL whose focus is primarily writing tech designs, reviewing product docs, planning rollouts, and doing code reviews? At 5 I'm feeling a little bit spread thin as there's a near constant barrage of incoming support tickets and questions as well. Sounds like there is a knowledge silo. Most likely root causes could be: a gap in your documentation, a lack of interest from your teammates to understand the big picture, or maybe a culture of blame which disincentivizes people from wanting to be on support duty.
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Apr 26, 2024 23:21
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Bojack Srcmain posted:What's a solid number of engineers to have under you as a TL whose focus is primarily writing tech designs, reviewing product docs, planning rollouts, and doing code reviews? At 5 I'm feeling a little bit spread thin as there's a near constant barrage of incoming support tickets and questions as well. I think this depends entirely on how much outside product- and project- management, release, operational, test and front-line customer support your team has. If you are purely engineers banging out bug fixes and features then yeah the number can be more than a handful, maybe 6-9 depending on how many junior level people you have, and still leave you on a technical track, but it sounds like you have a pretty high customer support load which is going to knock that down a bit. My team on the other hand had our product and project management support taken away and our operational and test support abstracted up into a broader org, so I've pretty much given up on doing any significant technical work at 6 reports as I'm doing all of the team's product-, project- and people- management as well as participating in our various oncall and toil rotations.
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Apr 27, 2024 06:15
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Bojack Srcmain posted:What's a solid number of engineers to have under you as a TL whose focus is primarily writing tech designs, reviewing product docs, planning rollouts, and doing code reviews? At 5 I'm feeling a little bit spread thin as there's a near constant barrage of incoming support tickets and questions as well.
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Apr 27, 2024 19:06
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Definitely something I've called out to my boss. We're aware of this, but also I'm getting a new boss soon (as in new to the company). Part of the reason isn't comfort or desire but the fact that I'm a knowledge silo in 2-3 areas that my team owns. We're working on transitioning but it's going to take time. Ideally I'd like to hand off some of the program/product management and do primarily tech designs, code reviews, and broader PoCs for new features and functionality. I'd love to not be a regular Monolith committer.
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Apr 27, 2024 23:05
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leper khan posted:6-8 is the number the book will give you. 9+ isnt uncommon, depending on the company. That's for an EM-only with light team-lead duties. Team-lead would be 2-4 directs or 0 directs and a full team of 6-8 indirects.
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Apr 29, 2024 17:54
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https://fortune.com/2024/04/29/gen-z-job-seeker-refused-90-minute-task-recruiter-slammed/ Moaning about only 90-minute tasks interviews, drat, I wish. Implication is a high paying job too, “ financial modeling test”. 🤷🏻♀️
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Apr 30, 2024 03:47
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Okay, I know what I hate about dependency injection frameworks: Digging through 10+ calls of custom purely DI code. Modules make modules, some implement module interfaces and are provided by other modules, etc.
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Apr 30, 2024 04:15
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I'm trying to figure out whether or not this job can be saved, and I'm honestly not sure. So at the risk of identifying myself, I work for a FAANG as an SRE style role and changed teams about a year and a half ago; a week and a half ago before some personal leave I told my boss I wasn't sure if I could keep it up, and that I was considering just tossing him my badge and walking out of the building without a plan. Moreover, I told him I wasn't sure we could actually fix this issue. I'll start with The Bad. The long and short of it is that I agreed to run a program, and after agreeing (and planning), the scope ballooned wildly out of control, somewhere on the order of 10x more work. I got some staff for it, so that wasn't entirely without an offset, but it's bigger than I can properly keep control of, and I'm struggling pretty badly to offload work and responsibility to the folks on my team - the work is highly undocumented, we're taking it over from a site that did it for years and they did a good shot, but it's a very complex business process with *actual* deadlines, as in if it doesn't get done, it could seriously affect our company's bottom line. Then we started losing people, and now we're down quite a few, including the only experienced person other than myself on my team. I've basically been running myself ragged since July of last year, and we are entering into the busy season, which won't let up until December 2nd. On top of that, my team also has technical debt going back decades, and a bunch of other structural problems. So that's all basically bad, and without context it basically sounds an awful lot like 'wow you should leave' - so here's The Good: I moved to development about 2.5 years ago and this team has a lot of great opportunities for someone with my skillset; strong enough that they not only gave me a promotion very shortly after joining but are actively pushing for me to get promoted again to senior - this isn't lip service from my boss either, I've had multiple managers in the org ask when my promo doc would come up for review. My reviews this year were impeccable, and I'm widely respected and liked on my team. I also, somewhat paradoxically, think my management aren't idiots - a lot of the problems we're in are long term issues with technical debt, and the guy in charge of our org changed about five years ago and since then he's been pushing for a lot more automation and toolbuilding to try and dig our way out, as well as attracting more work (we're variable headcount, so more work == more staff). This is a *lot* better than the old guard, who from everything I've heard essentially took on a bunch of extremely bad work and then refused to try and make a plan for getting out of it, eventually leading to a bit of a riot. I've got support from my manager as well as one of our principal engineers, but I'm struggling to think of what could actually solve the problems. I'm not so naive as to think that my manager is entirely on my side, but it seems pretty clear that keeping me around is a benefit to the team, and they're willing to try and help get things addressed if they can. The specific domain I own contains some work that could be slipped or deprioritized, even dropped entirely, but there's a lot that literally cannot be slipped. If I were to quit they would probably need to give it back to the team who used to do it. (Not the end of the world, but highly disruptive for them, and I'm trying to avoid it since I like them quite a bit and they're working on things that I think are very important.) If I stick around, I think my best plan is to get some coaching or mentoring on being a tech lead from the higher level folks in my org, but we're kind of the middle of a big hurricane of work that's spinning up, and I'm already having to spend a fair bit of time every week fighting about the deadlines we're having to slip, or correcting entirely unreasonable goals. I get that's basically Tech Lead work, but on top of everything else it's pretty exhausting. That's a bit of a ramble, but any advice on figuring out if I should walk or not? It's not a great time for the job market, and since I haven't hit senior yet I don't have the advantage of that title in negotiations. I have some general contacts, but it's not as though I have a clear offer waiting for me somewhere.
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Apr 30, 2024 05:41
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Sounds like management has your back and they're trying to up level your compensation as fast as possible Did I miss anything there? In two years you'll be management and this will all be behind you Everything is always a poo poo show, but it sounds like everything is going as good as humanly possible there. If more than one manager outside your immediate group has reached out in praise, sounds like you're headed in the right direction, you just need to wait for institutional inertia to catch up
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Apr 30, 2024 06:32
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Quitting is perhaps a permanent solution to a temporary problem. You may like your management but I'm not getting the feeling they're doing a great job on this. Ultimately they're responsible for the success of this project, and from what you've said, it sounds like they've put it at great risk by letting you become the single point of failure. My other observation as an ex-FAANG SRE is that it never occurred to me before I joined that they'd expect everyone to not only be technically skilled (that's all they tested in those infamous interviews after all), but also competent project managers and communicators. Prior to working there, I was simply told what to do, and periodically give status reports. But at the FAANG, all of a sudden I was responsible for what I chose to work on, planning & prioritizing features, driving its progress, communicating its status to stakeholders, lobbying for resources, etc. And as a former code-monkey, I didn't have great skills in those areas. It was "learn or perish", and while I learned a lot, ultimately I perished. I put the blame on myself until much later when I realized the full extent to how they'd overloaded me. I'd taken it on without question because I'd bought into the propaganda that everyone who worked there was super-smart and capable, and I was hired there, so therefore I must be of the same caliber. But it simply wasn't true. I may be projecting a little here, but my feeling is that you're in a similar situation. You've been burdened with the task of project management, you feel responsible for this project's success, and now that it's at risk (and not for reasons entirely within your control), you feel stressed out enough to consider quitting. I think there are 2 important questions to ask yourself: 1. Do I actually want all this project management / tech lead work? Or would I be happier with less responsibilities, more coding? 2. How do I make this role "boring"? Meaning, how do I change my attitude so that I'm not stressed out about this project? The various project managers I've encountered don't seem to get stressed about their projects. I suspect they achieve this by being detached: they care about the process, rather than the outcome. A good project manager cat-herds people, ensures items are planned & prioritized, risks are assessed, and status is communicated... but they're not emotionally invested in the project itself being successful. Consequently, they only need to focus on whether they're doing their job well, and not whether the project will actually succeed, or stress about the inevitable poo poo That Happens that might delay delivery. When these invariably happen (e.g. "we don't have enough people / time / skills to complete this by the deadline!"), they calmly just identify that as a risk, perhaps come up with some mitigation ideas, and communicate it up to management... it's not their problem to own. It sounds to me like you are both emotionally invested in this project's success, and consider the risk of failure to be your problem. And imho, neither of those should be the case.
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Apr 30, 2024 06:50
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Agreed that your managers aren't doing a good job, if they're expecting you to sacrifice yourself to keep the project from failing. Does your manager know the extent of your struggles? Have they asked you to work overtime to keep the project afloat? IMO the way to approach this in a healthy organization is to not compromise on work life balance: "So far the project has only survived because I haven't been working at a sustainable pace for almost a year. What I can get done sustainably is X, Y, Z, which means A, B, C won't get done by the deadline. Would you like me to prioritize differently?" Sometimes that means things fall on the floor and projects fail because they're understaffed, but that creates the impetus to get more headcount. You're the best judge of whether you're in a healthy organization though.
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Apr 30, 2024 12:59
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you arent even a senior dev, and youre constructing that the project area you own is a lynchpin for the organization. either failure to deliver is nowhere near as catastrophic as you expect, or your managers are extremely bad at their job; having allowed the team to lose staff without replacement. i believe its likely youre being gaslit to prompt you to work OT and burn yourself out.
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Apr 30, 2024 13:34
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Huge +1 to dialing back the emotional investment. If it falls, the worst that happens is you don't get another promo. Make an effort to communicate when things are off track and suggest mitigations where feasible, cut aggressively, and go home at 5.
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Apr 30, 2024 17:00
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Paradoxically, reducing how personally invested you are will help you make better decisions. I'm struggling with this right now too. I'm so stressed out by everything that goes wrong that it's impacting my ability to make good decisions by like noon on Wednesday, so if I'm going to keep making adequate quality decisions all week long I've got to reduce the burnout. Which means reducing the stress, which this thread and my manager have both advised me to do by trying to take things less personally. Everything is always on fire, so work the problems but don't get so invested they burn you.
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Apr 30, 2024 21:56
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Bojack Srcmain posted:What's a solid number of engineers to have under you as a TL whose focus is primarily writing tech designs, reviewing product docs, planning rollouts, and doing code reviews? At 5 I'm feeling a little bit spread thin as there's a near constant barrage of incoming support tickets and questions as well. Why is code the only thing you mention reviewing? What would happen if you told whoever was writing that code you review to also write parts of the tech designs or rollouts?
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Apr 30, 2024 22:20
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Last year, I moved into a role where I was expected not to really build anything, and lead only by influence. Once I took a step back from the work I was doing on my previous team, and I looked at who my stakeholders were, I realized that for all the things I wanted to do, I needed the same people. Collaborative work is a thread synchronization problem, and if you start multitasking, and everyone starts multitasking, sooner or later you're context switching your coworkers off of your own #1 priority and onto your #2 or #3 priority. You will get better results by slowing down.
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May 1, 2024 03:57
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