not my experience at all across 3 separate companies. Ime senior engineers are the highest level that still spends most of the day heads down most days, and that's why I'm gonna stick it out at this level as long as I can.
Have you considered writing your own projects that you have to hide from your employers, and be careful with whom you discuss, so as to avoid the legal complications of the company owning your work?
Of course there's no point in trying to rationalize this 'cos these people use meetings to try justify their usefulness to the company (HR does the same with random activities), so you end up drawing red lines with invisible ink...
Senior engineers write enabling code/scaffolding, and review code, and mentor juniors. They also write feature code.
Lead engineers code and lead dev teams.
Principal engineers code, and talk about tech in meetings.
Senior Principal engineers, and distinguished technologists/fellows talk about tech, and maybe sometimes code.
Good managers go to meetings and shield the engineers from the stream of exec corporate bs. Infrequently they may rope any of the engineers in this chain in to explain the decisions that the engineers make along the way.
Bad managers bring engineers in to these meetings frequently.
Terrible managers make the engineering decisions and push those to the engineers.
People in the technical career track spend most of their time making software, one way or another (there comes a point were you're doing more preparation to code than actual coding).
As soon as you jump into the management career track it's mostly meetings to report the team's progress to upper management, even if you're supposedly "technically oriented".
Absolutelly, as you become a more senior tech things become more and more about figuring out what needs to be done at higher and higher levels (i.e. systems design, software development process design) which results in needing to interact with more and more stakeholders (your whole team, other teams, end users, management) hence more meetings, but you still get to do lots of coding or at least code-adjacent stuff (i.e. design).
I’ve worked for startups too; everyone does everything all at the same time! Let the chaos reign! But it is fun in its own way.
I work for a large company now after the startup I worked for was acquired. Hierarchy, bureaucracy, layers, we’ve got it all. For worse and for better though, it allows me to focus and specialize on what I’m awesome at and furgeddaboddit (ahem! delegate) the stuff that I suck at to those who excel at those tasks.
I work on the City side of the development world. We're always getting screamed at for taking 3 weeks to review a plan set by the same developers who want to meet with me every minute of every fucking day.
I've got 40 projects in my review queue and all of them are demanding a weekly meeting. When am I supposed to do the fucking reviews?
When you talk to your management and show them how overworked you are and ask for a helper. But don't just say how much, show them in business lingo so they actually understand.
Fill out your calendar with the meetings and show management how you have no time for meaningful work because of meetings.
I'm on the Municipal side. City Council ain't gonna raise taxes to hire more people.
I'll get burned out and leave soon enough. The longest-serving person in the development department has been here just over a year, and we pay nearly double what other cities in the area do.
My job was to organise the work between the workers, keep the business away from my subordinates, and only waste their time when they had the complete information being asked for the specific reason.
And if I wasn't doing one of the things above, my job was to pick up the horrible things that no one else wanted/I had experience and domain knowledge in (eg : accessibility testing)
I just got a Jr dev job about 3 weeks ago and I haven't written a single line of code. It's all been meetings and other shit. I'm kind of ok with that. Lol
I think this is something a lot of people posting here don't get. You can be a programmer, make apps or games in your spare time, set your own goals and be your own boss, and that's great. Suddenly you get a "normal" job programming and you have you deal with customer requirements, business nonsense, and working as part of a team; that's being a software engineer. One isn't superior to the other, they are just different beasts.
Absolutely. There is very little programming involved in a normal job most of the year. I actually knew that before getting in. I have friends on the same team that have been there before me and they explained things beforehand. I have so many meetings and business stuff daily. We also reach out to users to help them fix issues on their machines, too.
This is not the first time I’ve seen memes like this, and it makes me so glad I’m not involved in programming or software development. I would straight up die.
If you can find a comfy mid level role or a "real" senior role that is mostly code it's a very rewarding career. But yeah I'd lose it with day long meetings
