Engineers Want Back to IC Coding Work
Experienced engineers are increasingly burdened with responsibilities beyond coding, leading to frustration, skill stagnation, and a desire to return to individual contributor (IC) roles. Organizational changes, shifting priorities, and unexpected design work are eroding their core engineering focus and autonomy.
SOURCES (60)
“I’m a junior and the only dev on my team and my manager isn’t techy. I have a meeting with my coworker who’s an analyst and that non-techy manager just to let them know what’s going on. I feel like I overshare my problems but…”
“I work in Tech in a demanding and male dominated sales role. I do well, make good money and work at a well known amazing company with a large trajectory for growth. All of this on paper sounds like I have it all. However, I can’t shake this feeling that I just don’t want to do this anymore. The last few years ive hit a slump. How do I navigate from here? My experience is all within this industry and I feel like I’ve been there done that when I look at job openings. I’ve met with leadership, they”
“Recently moved from being what I would call a full stack Systems administrator at a smaller government org (1500 users, 200VM's) to a new position. The new job, The new good: Pay raise of just over $40,000, staying within Government sector, some better flexible hours, commute is the same. Away from shoddy boss. The new bad: Working in a SCIF (secure facility), job has security implications so when I interviewed the hiring agency could not disclose what my job exactly was/would be. My title i”
“Either lead with the why and find common incentives, or if it’s rotten to the core escalate and get leadership to drive incentives. There is no other way”
“I've passed two interview loops of system design interviews up until this point in my career for mid level engineering roles. I'm a senior engineer now going through recruiting again and am curious if the system design interview rounds will be roughly evaluating the same things for senior vs mid level or if they're expecting me to be substantially more technical in how I answer the question. For IC4 mid level eng, knowing the components and their attributes and math was enough. What&”
“Yeah that’s a good point. It’s people like screaming when they see my monitor is big and my screen is zoomed in. I surely close. The other devs know and I mean I get some jokes still, but not horrible. It’s a lot of problems when other roles or people I haven’t met walk in the area I’m working and are like WTF”
“I have no experience public speaking but my boss asked me at the last minute to lead an important workshop with managers and VPs. I’m a grunt background worker and don’t have a title, never done anything like this before, and I’m incredibly nervous because the workshop is full of people on another level from me. I’m terrified of public speaking, insecure and get extreme anxiety, shake, stutter and lose my thoughts when I’m anxious like I know I will be. My anxiety is to the point where I know I’”
“I can only agree with everything you said. Also, "The best way to "gel with your team" would be to stop considering them to be techies" That was a poor choice of words on my part. English is not my native language, so some words slip in there. Also, I used to be a developer for 10 years way back when, so I'm just old. Let's keep it at that. I guess everybody has to deal with people who like their steaks well done, while you know that's not the way you should cook”
“4.5 YOE, currently mid-level at a large company. Just got an internal offer to move to a different team as a Senior - 36% raise, hybrid role. I'd be moving from a more engineering-focused team to a more business-facing one, and the new role would make me the sole technical reference for a squad composite mostly by data engineers, building internal tools that a data team relies on. Btw, is a new platform, so that's why I would go as a tech reference. A few things are making me hesitate: t”
“Im a 10 yoe embedded swe. I can pump out code and documentation and overcome hurdles 10x faster. Because i already know how to architect good code, i can guide the Ai to develop a plan and pretty much auto through it. I've always been slow with build systems like cmake but Ai can write good cmake in seconds.”
“Most of the problems most of us are working on solving are fairly novel and unique and innovative. I spent 15 years at FAANG and maybe came across 2 novel problems that entire time, lol.”
“I spent four years becoming really good at technical work, then accepted a team lead position because it seemed like the obvious next step. Turns out I hate almost everything about it. My day is now scheduling, approving time off, handling tiny disputes and sitting in meetings where I barely speak. The strange part is I dont feel overwhelmed. I’m meeting expectations and my manager says I adapted quickly. I just miss producing something myself. My previous role hasn’t been filled yet, and I’m co”
“For context: I lead a small team that’s responsible for resiliency and scale management of one part of our entire platform. Though, this is a heavily-used and heavily-sold of the platform For the past 1 year or so, I have been working almost every other night and on every other weekend almost, along with many other people. We have been under pressure to deliver features quickly. This obviously deteriorates quality and we face bugs that we have to fix here and there. This eats up our time too. I”
“I don't necessarily mean people whose main role is as a technical writer (although I'm sure insight from those people would also be valuable). But more along the lines of engineers/devs who have leveled up their technical writing skills, and how that has affected them individually, as well as the surrounding team or org. Something I notice in my work, which I'm sure is very common, is documentation that just... sucks. It's one thing if something is outdated, or having duplicate p”
“Hey folks, But of a long one, bear with me. I'm a solo technical team member for a small business, who ended up in this role as the only person on the team with any sort of tech savvyness. I want to avoid being the person that future tech folks at the company curse, and to do that, I think I need to do some serious growing. Originally, I was just doing data science stuff with python, but over time my role has shifted to being a sysadmin for the org, including security / compliance responsibi”
“Totally. Used to think success meant hitting some arbitrary revenue number and grinding 80-hour weeks. Now I genuinely get more satisfaction from seeing my team handle things without me - like your marketing guy out shooting drone footage while you're doing meaningful work at the nonprofit. The freedom and impact hit different than the hustle ever did.”
“I'll keep it short and succinct. 8+ years experience as a software developer. I joined as a new Team Lead at a smaller accounting software company. Head of Engineering is 6 months in his new role. Company is a weird mix of devs that have been here 4-8+ years, and less than a year. Team is 25 ish people. Over the course of working there, they let go of a PM, 3-4 devs. 2 Weeks after I joined everything was on fire. 4 devs + me on the team, one started two weeks before me. We had a monthly job”
“IT people are used to being supportive and helpful, that's basically the entire job. The IT people who don't succeed are the ones who have a real/actual chip on their shoulder for the 'stupid users' who actually make the organization run and provide our paychecks. I'm not really sure the reasoning behind hating sales or production departments, usually its some weird obsession with being technically correct and unwilling to accept that someone can be wrong and ignorant about c”
“This is my first IT job which I’ve been at for about 3.5 years. I’m also burnt out. I do support engineering/tech support for my company’s cloud network and firewall services. This might get downvoted a lot, but I don’t have much interest in IT or work in general if I’m being honest. I do like a lot of the aspects that this line of work has given me though (previously worked only min wage jobs and hated it). I’ve come to learn that the only technical stuff I can find interest in is with security”
“My latest position hired me to be an infrastructure engineer but a year in they got rid of the MSP and rolled every bit of operations into my role. Which meant I'm literally one person handling every request for everyone in the company. It's a very difficult role because I'm not a manager and I don't have any authority. And so I would get abused quite a bit especially by Executives and above. And my boss didn't have my back. The screener asked me if I've tried to have the”
“It is absolutely brutal in the sense that everyone on my team is a junior, and there was no onboarding. This sounds exactly like my company. Pretty much everyone on the dev team is either junior or mid-level because anyone senior takes one look at how dysfunctional the place is and stays away. We have four team leads, but they’re either too busy with their own work to help anyone or completely apathetic. And Our CTO is basically a CISO/compliance officer with very little actual software developm”
What is your current role and your new role? That will affect next steps.
“I have been with this company for 3 years (because it was remote and was coasting) but the manager is just a junior engineer got only promoted to manager because the CTO likes him, he made a presentation about AI and called us the devs glorified form developers to mention that we could use AI without feeling horrible about delivering low quality shit to the customers. I'm not learning anything it seems and lately it has been getting more toxic to be there, so I'm thinking if these 3 year”
“Working as software engineer IC (individual contributor). Over the past 3 years I have come up with a bunch of projects and delivered them on time. They have been received well by all the stakeholders and I even got an appreciation award for one of them. I have seen that a certain team takes them over after an year or two of me maintaining and upgrading them as per new requests, and I am forced to hand over everything and even give a KT to the new person, only to see that those projects are then”
“Hello, I was hired at as a senior data engineer at my current org about 6 months ago. I have been working for 5+ years now which I am told is "young" for a senior. I feel that I am starting to notice that people are right about that as I am making very simple data engineering mistakes. Embarrassingly today I was trying to help a data scientist drop a column from a history table since the column had now been renamed. It would have wiped out all the history of that column if someone else”
“I'm a new grad SWE and I started on my current team back at the end of April. I recently started working on a new task (3 subtasks) that was part of a feature for an internal service that the project manager for my team was aiming to launch on the 27th, after finishing other tasks I had been working on back on Friday. I got this new task assigned at the beginning of the sprint the Wednesday before this past Wednesday, but hadn't worked on it since I was working on the other things that I”
“I started out as a founding engineer building core product features for early-stage startups. I genuinely believed that if the tech was good enough and the product solved a problem, it would essentially sell itself. Then I started my own growth agency and had to actually get on calls and close B2B deals to survive andd I got absolutely humbled. Here is a raw brain dump of the things I had to learn the hard way after realizing that building the product is only 20% of the battle. Nobody buys your”
“I'm needing help with something, most of which has to do with team structure but need to rant. I have a coworker who is technically in charge of UX and Design, but has REALLY been pushing into SEO over the last month....which certainly UX plays a factor and I acknowledge that, but it's jumped into other realms and it's starting to seriously impact my efficiency because I have to constantly educate them and justify my reasoning at a time where we are all overloaded with work. This per”
“The emphasis on remote/hybrid is a huge turn off to me. Controller at a large or even midsized company is expected to be in office for team building and socialization/strategizing with other leaders. You should instead look for flexibility to WFH in certain situations. Most major corporations are starting to require people to come back to the office for at least 4 days/week. You may believe this is outdated thinking but most CFOs and CEOs hiring for Controller positions are of this mindset. You”
“I don’t think they understand what senior level IC requires, it’s much more than producing output.”
“I'm a senior IC who's been in the industry for about a bit less than a decade, mostly at Google and a couple of other FAANGs prior. My superpower has always been deep technical knowledge, and I wanted to see if anyone else has similar feelings about how to thrive in a post-Al tech industry. LLMs are confidently wrong 10-20% of the time, and those mistakes are only getting harder to catch to the untrained eyes. They're obviously here to stay since they enable fast, "cheap" c”
“I am a sales engineer at a large tech company, and I've found myself in a position where I'm being pushed out. I've been with the company for over 3.5 years, and the vast majority of my initial RSU grant has already vested. During my mid-year performance review, they nitpicked a handful of areas where I could improve and used those points to give me the lowest possible rating. At my company, that's essentially a death sentence, regardless of how well your accounts are performing.”
“I’m in a dilemma and would like some advice from others who have maybe experienced the same or have more time under their belt and want to give their two cents. Would you: 1) stay in a role you’ve been in for a few years with questionable potential for growth/change but a good relationship with your supervisor & teams Or 2) accept a role with a larger organization for more money, benefits and potential for growth/change submitted by /u/PBcupzz [link] [comments]”
“I’m in a dilemma and would like some advice from others who have maybe experienced the same or have more time under their belt and want to give their two cents. Would you: 1) stay in a role you’ve been in for a few years with questionable potential for growth/change but a good relationship with your supervisor & teams Or 2) accept a role with a larger organization for more money, benefits and potential for growth/change submitted by /u/PBcupzz [link] [comments]”
“I’m looking for honest feedback because I feel too close to this situation to judge it objectively. I’ve been with my current company for several years in a technical role after switching careers. Since then, I’ve focused on building my skills and positioning myself for growth, with the goal of eventually moving into project management or a leadership role. **Accomplishments** Earned an associate’s degree and completed multiple certifications Currently studying for the CAPM Taken on responsibili”
“I work at an MSP and have recently been promoted to a support engineering position. I have been at this company a little over three years and moved from a half technical half admin position to mainly technical. I am the first line of defense for tickets that come in on the weekend primarily and there is SO MUCH I do not know. It’s overwhelming and I constantly have to ask for help. I’m trying not to doxx myself but I have an internal KB and an internal LLM to rely on but I feel so anxious. I kno”
“Meta reversed the policy that pushed engineers into ai teams regardless of whether they wanted the move, reportedly after enough internal friction that forcing the reorg was costing more than it gained. Read that twice. A company tried to mandate what kind of work its engineers do with their own careers, the engineers pushed back, and the company caved. This is the part worth holding onto. The framing everywhere was ai is the future and everyone should pivot. Sure. But there is a difference betw”
“I've been thinking about this problem lately and wanted to hear how other engineering teams deal with it. As our systems grow, it feels like engineering knowledge gets scattered everywhere—GitHub PRs, Jira tickets, Slack threads, docs, dashboards, runbooks, and people's heads. Some situations I've seen: A senior engineer leaves, and suddenly nobody knows why a service was designed a certain way. A production incident happens, and engineers spend more time searching Slack, GitHub, Jir”
“so we had this voice AI thing — stt llm tts pipeline and it was locked down, like don’t touch it without talking to me first, cause it’s a pretty sensitive part of the system. anyway my teammate just went in and added a flag that skips the whole mic/audio setup, so now instead of voice it just spits out text, basically she made basic chatbot blindly using ai. that also broke the actual scoring since the scoring needed the audio pipeline to work, so instead of fixing it she just hardcoded 90/100”
“I have a love and hate relationship with game development. I love getting stuck into the coding side and the problem solving side. My day job I am a senior full stack engineer so I have no problem finishing big projects. Every time I've started a project, I make learnings on why the last one failed, the current one I'm working on couldn't be more simple (tiny scope on purpose). However my number one cause of burnout when it comes to game development, is zooming out to the big picture”
“It’s been a year since I rejoined last year after 12-month maternity leave. A month in, I got assigned to a project, a big one, with a couple of more teammates in it plus other team members outside our team. It feels good most of the time. But honestly, deep in me, I feel sad because I feel that my value became less after being gone for a year. I feel like I am no longer one of the key people in the team. I feel being sidelined. Like I am just there to help but I am not a subject matter expert a”
“Quick question please - I would really like you advice please two years as Chief of Staff in Technology, I have the chance to move into a delivery management role on the Finance Modernisation Programme, the orgs Oracle implementation. It is a permanent role change work at the same job level working alongside a senior delivery manager. I would be coordinating delivery across the Oracle modules (finance, EPM, project and reporting), managing the continuous improvement backlog after go-live, runnin”
“I was at Dell tech (had a lot of control over calendar) and accepted role at SaaS AI start up as an AE. 4 month overlap before quitting Dell officially. Start up laid off before I could find new gig. How do I possibly explain the overlap? I was at Dell 12 years and this company only 7 months. I have interviews with a couple top SaaS companies next week and have my true start date of my second job. submitted by /u/Bitcoin401k [link] [comments]”
“Hey, I am an NPI engineer in hardware industry that is managing transfer from R&D to production, which usually entails mostly the following: Taking the deliverables from R&D, giving technical feedback regarding manufacturability and assembly process mostly. Managing ECRs, ECO's and CCO's to implement the design in our systems in order for our purchasing dept to purchase the material for the beta and GA products. Being a focal point for operations, building timeline of material le”
“Stay true to your mission. Just because your changing doesn’t always mean your mission does. It should still be aligned”
“That reference of IT Manager or Director means absolutely nothing. What is your contribution to a team? How relevant are you to your team? You get hit by a bus tomorrow, what Information or knowledge leave a gap?”
“I've been in the 'data science' space for a decade+ or so now. One thing I've noticed is that generally - give or take - outside of the elite jobs (<2-3% aka not me and almost certainly not you) the caliber of coworkers has declined drastically. I'm not some fabled data scientist. I wasn't some GitHub nerd who had everything embroil or terminal wizard nor could I write out the math to a GBM on a blackboard. I'd even forget basic obvious statistics. But I felt like”
“I’ve been sitting with this thought for the past couple weeks.. I started working as an independent IT consultant and implementation manager almost a decade ago. I loved the growth, the money, the career highs. But after becoming a mother (first time mom) things shifted. My priorities changed and I noticed I was spending my leftover hours with my family because I was already mentally exhausted by the time I got to them. 🥺 My current work requires constant mental engagement, constant context swi”
“A while back I posted about joining a non-tech healthcare company. I've been here a little longer now, and while my initial concerns haven't gone away, something else has started bothering me even more. Link of previous post. I applied a lot of what you guys suggested me, thank you. I didn't realize how good the community is on this sub We're building what is supposed to be a fairly complex CRM with AI agents, workflow automation, WhatsApp integration, and mobile apps that will e”
“It's not your school. It's the industry reality combined with location, current experience, and YOE. You're competing with people from major companies that have more years of experience or applicable experience (ie. working at scale, familiarity with similar systems) due to layoffs. Ex-Amazon hires from your recent company also show the reality of the industry right now. Amazon has had tons of layoffs so that's who you're competing with when you apply.”
“I've been working at a local startup as a DevOps engineer for the past year. I have a total of around 3 years of experience, which is considered mid-level at best. I've worked with various technologies and I'm not that confident in my technical skills but I do try my best to deliver. That's not my problem though. My problem is that communication with my manager is terrible. I am rarely assigned any tickets. My work is a mixture of verbally assigned tasks with minimal details and”
“Agreed, you can always go back and forth. Our VP of engineering made the switch 3-4 times in his career before he decided. It is a side motion. I am an engineering manager, because I am also unsure. It's easier (still hard) to keep technical skills sharp than it is to manage imaginary people. If the job is a tech lead role then you get a bit of both worlds. People tend to get too hung up (when they are younger) about which direction to go when you really got decades ahead of you career wise.”
“It’s a promotion out of the things you’ve been doing well into a job that has a completely different set of responsibilities and skills if you are performing it correctly/well. It’s maybe higher on the org chart but it isn’t a direct promotion into a more technical role.”
“I've been a senior SWE at this startup for the past few months and evidently I've been kicking ass, my skip approached me and asked if I wanted to be promoted to EM. It sounds good, and I've offered mentorship to junior engineers before, but I've never managed performance. It sounds like the Engineering Manager position at my gig is more like a tech lead that does some supervisor stuff, include performance management, calibrations, etc. I was told that my job will include more of”