Engineers Want Back to IC Coding Work

“My overseas colleagues barely do any work I work at an EU based company with some presence in the US. My team is one of the teams with some members in America, and I've been in 2 different teams now with this setup over the last couple of years. Naturally, we only overlap for a few of hours, towards the end of my EU working day and the start of the US working day. However, Im increasingly noticing that despite working on the exact same sprint and BAU, the US colleagues do much less. Some of”

“I recently moved from Company X to its parent company, Company Y. I’m still based in the same building, but I’m now doing a different job in another department. It has only been a month since in my new role. I took the new role because I wanted to gain some different experience before returning to my home country if the new role couldn't sponsor me. I’m currently on a temporary UK visa with around four months remaining, and neither role offers sponsorship. I had hoped the move might create a”

B2C!!

“I’m ~4 YOE in embedded/firmware at a semiconductor company in Bangalore India. My long-term goal is to work in low-level software—drivers, HAL, hardware-facing development, ideally building things from scratch. I’ve already told my manager and director that I want to move into this kind of work. Infact that was the main reason for switching job around a year back. My director said he would explore opportunities within our department and get back to me in about two weeks. There’s also a potential”

“I love only being responsible for myself, but I also love variety. I love being involved more deeply, but I also love being in my own bubble. I love money, but I also love peace. My fear is that if I stay senior IC I’ll grow bored and miserable (because honestly, I’m already a bit bored and I have 30 years until retirement). Should I take the leap or is that a big mistake? submitted by /u/NeitherNetwork3596 [link] [comments]”

“Good read! Thanks for sharing. Based on this what im doing now is definitely a ‘in engineering team PO’. Ive grown out of this role and feel so bored every day but imposter syndrome is a thing and I don’t feel like I have enough experience to fill a product manager role. Any advice on training materials, mindset change… is truly appreciated.”

“The infra engineers aren’t sys admins, meaning your sys admins aren’t doing networking so what even is this argument lmao. Are you saying your org just has 0 sys admins? No windows roles? If you have your infra engineers doing sys admin work then that’s just sad lol. And the argument was never does an infrastructure engineer need ccna levels of knowledge, yes they do. Idk what your point was tho”

“I have spent the last several years building a career that would lead me towards a VP or CTO type future, and I've discovered that this work drains me, and I just don't really want to do what my boss does. I love helping people do great work, I like coaching teams, and I like learning and getting into the weeds of the work, I just don't want the responsibility of enforcing HR policies and spending so much time working through performance and promotion cycle stuff. I'd like a litt”

“I’m 26 and work for a financial company I really like, but my department is going through a restructuring and there isn’t much room for growth in my current role. I’m trying to figure out what makes the most sense: Stay in my current fully remote role, enjoy the flexibility, and use the extra time to work toward my CFP and other licenses. Try and move into a higher-paying internal role with more growth, but take on a 45+ minute commute. Take a lateral internal move that requires going into the o”

“I’m about a month into a new job as a Solutions Engineer, and honestly, the experience has been pretty rough so far. At my previous company, I had been there long enough to become one of the go-to people on the team. I was technically still a junior, but I was the senior person in my batch and had built up a lot of knowledge of the product. If something wasn’t working, people would usually come to me before escalating it to Engineering. I handled a lot of troubleshooting, implementations, and cl”

“I didn't want to get into this in my original post, but this is definitely part of the problem. The development team needs modernization. We have a lot of excellent developers, but these developers have spent many years developing on a tech stack of PowerBuilder, COBOL, and SQL stored procedures. API development, testing, deployment, and maintenance are not anything that they have worked with before.Finally after months of me complaining, the management team has gotten the approval to hire one a”

“Honestly, I don't know if I need a promotion to Principal Engineer or not. I am happy to be in my current position, but the thing is, my manager thinks, This person is not asking for the next role, so he is not ambitious and doesn't ask much, so we will not give him important work. With colleagues and friends, I have seen them asking, Oh, that person with less talent or without knowing anything is applying and getting promoted, why not you? They will come to the assumption that I don&#39”

submitted by /u/SuccessElectrical941 [link] [comments]

“I’m about a month into a new job as a Solutions Engineer, and honestly, the experience has been pretty rough so far. At my previous company, I had been there long enough to become one of the go-to people on the team. I was technically still a junior, but I was the senior person in my batch and had built up a lot of knowledge of the product. If something wasn’t working, people would usually come to me before escalating it to Engineering. I handled a lot of troubleshooting, implementations, and cl”

“My background: 7 years experience, has been working for R&D engineer, data engineer, AIDC, HPC, supercomputing, Agent platform. I quited my job since April 2026, I expected that I can solo dev and earn money easily, and could be shined. but the reality totally different. the idea is cheap, the implementation is cheap as well now. your idea could be copied by someone easily. even you developed the product with outstanding features, it is hard to be seen over the internet. the distribution is”

“Has anyone worked in an organisation where leadership have become so sold on the idea of being able to move to a “product operating model” that they throw out all normal programme and project management functions, including for the delivery of work that is physical in nature like building new sites, delivering reforms across multiple in person and digital services or other large scale initiatives that touch many product teams? If yes, did it work? If no, what were your learnings? if this sounds”

“4 yoe, bachelors from a t3 (overall) university, golden handcuffs senior role at a highly respectable though early stage company right now. this role is very demanding, way more than my last. think often pulling 60-70 hour weeks (from a solid 9-5 or even less at my old role unless something really blew up after hours) and often encouraged to work through the weekends, etc. i went from fully remote to almost entirely in person. it also doubled my salary from my last, so i expected a step up but i”

“Disclaimer: I used AI to help me translate the text, as English is not my native language I’d like to hear some opinions about my current situation, especially from people who have been through something similar. I’m trying to understand if there’s a reasonable way to deal with this kind of work environment or if I should simply move on. For context, I’m a developer with around 10 years of experience and I work in Italy. I’m currently part of a startup that is actually controlled by a large corp”

“We used to call these people Cave Trolls and I'm not sure when we eradicated them but it must have been in the late adopter phase of Agile. You have to be able to explain what you've done and why or that part of the code will have a bus number of one. And instead of treating that as an asset it's now treated as a liability, as it properly should be. I can say though that as a lead, and in some cases as an aspiring one, I've taken people aside who clearly don't enjoy arguing a”

“I've been working at this place for several months now (my first real cs job) and i started very motivated and with great expectations. Just for context, I work in a small company with roughly 15 developers where the team lead pretty much runs the entire dev team. The man is in his 50s with decades of experience. He is also the only person who can merge code to the main branch and he is the only one who does code reviews for the entire team. The situation is so bad that doesn't even read”

“I got piped at my job and I think I am too dumb for corporate life. Context : I am a tier 1 IIT graduate, have worked across 2 FAANG and 2 tier 1 companies. Except one I have faced performance issues at all others. Consequence : i switched 4 companies in 5 years now. Recruiters and hiring managers look at me in disdain despite having all top brand names on my resume. I am super introvert and have a habit of doing my work in silence. Hence I get skipped over for any important project and no one r”

“I started as an intern and hired as engineer after graduating, been with my company for 4 years full time. I have Coworker A in the same team, a fellow engineer but senior level, that I work closely with for the past 5ish years, I told him I'm stressed and with no increase in salary and everyone being spread very thin I'm going to start job hunting. I heard from Coworker B that Coworker A directly told him that he thinks I only do technician work and I should be happy with my salary for”

“right. My problem is i continue to escalate this to the product group lead and he is basically rolling over and saying i don't care let engineering deliver that message then to leadership (which they never do) and we are always the barer of bad news and not even pressure testing what they are coming up with and how we can negotiate”

“I’ve been a dev at a Fortune 50 company for 5 years (first job out of college) Over the years the following has happened: ⁠I’ve had multiple managers due to reorgs/managers leaving for other positions. As a consequence of this, a lot of stuff i did got forgotten during these manager transitions . My new 4th manager is using the excuse of “sorry i wasn’t there when you did that/those things” when i ask if i have a shot at getting promoted to Senior this year. ⁠Multiple waves of layoffs since earl”

“Hey Everyone I have around 5 years of experience and would need your advice in choosing the organization. I have two offers one from MNC and other from product based company but the role is different . With product based it is kind of non technical close to managerial role (this company was my client earlier and based on relations I got the job when I asked them as none of my interviews was getting cleared) and now I got the role in MNC as Salesforce Devops Engineer role. I am in dilemma as what”

“Hello everyone, first time posting here. I am currently working in a great company in Europe but in a terrible position. I am working as a System engineer in Linux which is basically a glorifiied tech support for the inhouse proprietary apps. However several departments in the company got deleted basically and all the work got funneled to us. We support like 15 products and we do everything for those apps from setting up and fixing any issues. My position basically involves working with tickets,”

“I disagree with your point on “the more experienced and senior you become, the less items will get brought up.” This always happens on a healthy team. I do agree that you’re in design’s lane here though - idk why everyone thinks they need to get all fancy with AI prototyping. Whiteboard and marker is all you should be using especially if you are a new PM. Shouldn’t be using the power tools before you learn to use the basic stuff smh”

“Title above - left a release engineer role where I was in office 4 times a month, much more comfortable, nicer people and less workload. The tech wasn't great and not improving so I left after 2.5 years for a junior site reliability engineer role. Twice a week in office, much more complex/ better tech stack. The workload has nearly tripled and I don't think I like all the high tech aws/ Azure devops pipeline technologies. Took the job as it was career progression, and is the right career”

“Hi, I've been recently added to be part of a 4 person team to bootstrap a new project. This is happening in big tech, and basically I'm being pulled into this team after leadership learned that throwing bodies at a problem doesn't mean we can solve a problem. So from that failed experiment, they now picked four people (me included) to reboot the failed project. But this time it will work because its a leaner team. My question/concern is that 2 people will be in India and 2 p”

“Counterpoint: if you like planned sprints, clear prioritization, and strong product management fundamentals, moving into platform/ops is a horrendous idea. If I had to do it over again, there’s no way in hell I’d trade known/scoped quantity of sprint work for 10000 fucking firefighting hours per sprint.”

“Hello everyone, I’m looking for some outside perspective on a pretty big career decision. I’m currently a Quality Operations/Quality Systems Manager at a large medical device company in South Florida. My total compensation is around $145K including base salary, bonus, and stock. I moderately enjoy my job, but one of the biggest things keeping me here is the work-life balance. I have plenty of time to play sports, enjoy South Florida, and have built a good social circle over the years. I’ve now b”

“What about situations where you try to ask things but just gets ignored cause your manager doesn't wants to babysit and wants you to get things on your own? At the same time is hard cause, in my case, my manager is my team, it's only the two of us in the area at the company (it's a startup)”

“I am also in your shoes. It can feel challenging and the team I was supporting also felt like they were running away to do their own thing. The top post has great advice - I would add that if I depend on someone else for a deliverable I try and give a deadline or a due date. If they don’t like the due date then they will give you an alternative date. If that still doesn’t work, like the post said above flag it and surface it to your PLT, respectfully”

“I’ve been reflecting on my current stack and daily routine lately. While I appreciate the stability of my current role, the day-to-day maintenance and incremental improvements mean I'm not always exposed to new paradigms or forced out of my comfort zone. The landscape moves incredibly fast right now, between the shift toward Platform Engineering, AI-assisted workflows, and new CNCF projects dropping every week, I want to make sure I don't stagnate. I'd love to hear how you all are ke”

“The entire premise of Agile and Scrum and any other related “methodology” around development practices is to micromanage bad engineers. Genuinely talented senior engineers do not need any sort of Scrum, Agile, whatever. Adding processes to make up for people is the wrong approach. Rather, the people should not need it in the first place. In the two large tech companies that I’ve worked at folks just tracked their work independently and didn’t make any kind of ceremony out of it.”

“maybe llms are still bad at the architecture of complex systems, but inventing the architecture of complex systems is not what engineers do every day even in large companies, even at senior levels and above. from my experience, most of the work with complex systems is legacy maintenance, not creating a new architecture. typical engineer work even in big tech companies is to understand what the business wants from you and come up with an ad hoc solution in code in existing services to solve this”

“I work in a large manufacturing company that I'm sure all of you would know if I disclosed the company. I have been in a my role for over a year, and during that year my team got a new director who I absolutely despise. I've watched this team grow to become extremely toxic in the past 8 months since they've been here. They consistently go on about how we need to make sure we're out supporting our employees and engaging, but then we get stuck in projects that provide little meanin”

“I do. I've worked with junior colleagues at my previous company where questions couldn't be answered and they couldn't explain why they did what they did. It's hard to explain but for me it's not the same if I use Ai too much. Even if I understand what's being built.”

“If you want to have a career as a senior developer you need to fix this. Showing up is the bare minimum.”

“I am currently a software engineer in Bengaluru, India. In a year I may have to decide whether to go on tech path i.e. system architect or managing path i.e. engineer manager. I am confused on which would be better for me, need detailed pivots to decide on this from salary, job security, work type pov, etc. submitted by /u/No_Jello1118 [link] [comments]”

“By “baby” I mean working under someone who’s only ever worked at that specific company. For example an intern who converted to full time and stuck around, or this was someone’s first company out the college and they just continued to climb the ladder. Let me just preface by saying, I don’t think there is anything inherently WRONG with being a company baby. Depending on your field or role it can actually be a good thing. But in my opinion, company babies should only be leading internal hires and”

“Looking for advice from folks maybe in similar scenarios who have gotten out of the rut that I seem to have gotten myself into. TL;DR - Coming up on 5 YOE at F500 company, not tech focused, but working on a very popular streaming service that isn't Netflix. Not working on anything interesting, been pinned as the "AI Guy" for the past 2 years. Underpaid, insane WLB, like I have been working 10-20 hours nbd, but I am still young and want to make more. Not sure if I want to go into bi”

“What you describe is honestly how new hires should work. You are going to learn so much and come out far ahead than others your age. This is your ticket to becoming a better engineer. Work there at least until you have enough experience to not apply as a junior elsewhere. You will need to use AI for other jobs, so just make a side project with it.”

“Not sure how extroversion would be the difference maker here. I've at least tried to build a culture where all ideas are welcome and very often ideas from the team overwrite the initial ideas from product. Lots of collaboration.”

“I currently work 32 hours a week as the main internal IT person for a logistics company with around 110 users. We also have an external MSP, but I handle most of the day-to-day IT work and coordinate with them when necessary. My work includes: User and device management Laptop deployment and endpoint policies Identity, access and security management Software deployment, licensing and updates Managing our ticketing system and CMDB Cloud storage, mailboxes and collaboration tools Managing and rede”

“Our engineers have started doing all the tech debt and refactoring that’s been hanging around not getting done”

“Working in a politically tough corporate environment where I feel I’m unable to move up. I’m a high performing engineer but struggle politically with higher level peers with influence. Also the environment is in a bit of turmoil with leadership changes and org changes. Pay is good and wlb is ok but all of the political stuff is limiting. I have been interviewing and the latest offer is at a company that seems to have a great culture and seems supportive. Unfortunately base is 35k below current a”

“Right? If someone successfully learned everything that way I’d say we’re wasting their talent by having them do any kind of job I’m doing here”

“I’m a 30F with ~9 years of experience in ad tech/media, primarily on the agency side. I’m currently at a point where I’m considering two very different paths: Continue in ad tech/agency: Move into a Director-level role with strong compensation and continue building on the experience and seniority I’ve accumulated and then move onto the brand side. Pivot into Product Management: Move into a more traditional product environment, potentially taking an Analyst or entry-level product role to get my f”

“Same man. Left my job at NASA. Every piece of robotics I built for the Mars rover was predicated by a sticky note. Stacks and stacks of sticky notes, the cumulative result was a piece of machinery that performs experiments autonomously 140 million miles from earth, just 123 years after humanity accomplished its first controlled flight at Kitty Hawk. I knew that sticky notes were the answer. So I told the Director of NASA to blow it straight out of his ass - I’m a sticky note man 4 lyfe. Moved ho”

“I'm honestly focused on doing that. Especially in my previous job. I don't know if my feeling of lacking guidance just makes me afraid to act. Like I'm waiting to get a green light for most things.”

“I think the answer to your question is that unfortunately it depends on where you work. Different teams build different cultures. But I’ll try to answer to my best ability? So firstly, regarding the ticket we had a similar issue where my developer saw no value writing the criteria to resolve the issue, or the finding of the investigation because of the same reason. But what he didn’t realise is that he would most likely be working on something else for a while before getting a chance to come bac”

“Over the 8 years of my careers, I've been "de facto" lead a few times, having full ownership about the stack, making architectural decisions, choosing tools, being the only person in the department, mentoring other team members about new technologies that i proposed and migrated to, elevating the standards of the team... However, I never had the title nor I directly managed any other person This is clear in my CV, stating the responsabilities, ownerships and outcomes. On the techni”

“Yeah the trick is to be on your A game your first year to earn trust, scope things out and see how things are run, then slowly cut corners and see how far you can get away with things. Like in my current role they forced RTO but they don't really actively check when we go in and go out, so I just coffee badge that shit when I can”

“So I started a new position with an MSP as an embedded tech at a school. For context I came from a different MSP & I have about 5 years of experience. I’m noticing a lot of gaps & inefficiencies & I need help with a few. -They are still manually setting up laptops, using a usb with all of their apps that need to be downloaded. I know there’s a way to have a USB skip the OOBE when plugged in, create a local user account & go right to the desktop after a couple of restarts. How do”

“There is a balance. You can make the fix now (keep stakeholders happy) and then create a long term plan to address the larger issues. When new at a job, yiu have to establish trust first. Make the fix, demonstrate you can finish things, and start offering tech debt solutions then.”

“If it’s a role change rather than a title change I don’t see a reason to tell them. Roles change all the time. A title change would be a variation on your contract. In the EU at least which on reflection might not be relevant.”

“So, unfortunately I just got fired today. Started 5 months ago so it's been a short stint. Sorry for the semi-long post, but I could really use some perspective and your thoughts on the feedback I received. I've been doing Fullstack work for 5 years now. Previously 4 years at the same company. At this new company I was hired as a senior developer in a small dev team of 3 people. I got fired for 2 reasons. I need advice on the second. Attendance and meeting stability. My sleep has been a”

“There was a rotation in almost every place I worked at. You built it, you support it. In a healthy rotation, you get your turn not so often and it is part of your normal workday (so your planned work should be reduced). And to be honest, it increases the motivation to build things right. On-call is a more difficult story. If the company is big enough and they pay extra, then these is often enough people who volunteer. But that's not the case in smaller companies.”