Senior dev be like...

The other half are about useful things, like what to do next, how your interfaces will look like, and "if you need help, just tell me, I can escalate it".

As opposed to non-business MNBAs of course

I feel this in my soul

LOL. So true.

This is the perfect description.

Ex test lead, this 100%.

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)

should be, ftfy :-(

"Are you don't yet? Why aren't you done yet? Help me update infinite plans that will be outdated in a week. Also, I just promised a bunch of stuff... all that stuff we already promised, I think you can do that faster."

When I was a dev, I once had a PM with no technical skills that decided he would "learn to program to help catch us up"... He did not succeed.

You get focus time?

Also, what the hell is the point in an EOD standup if you're gonna have another one in zero working minutes?

Sitting in a meeting right now....

This is such a an accurate comment.

We do standups twice a week. At worst they run a half hour for my team of about 10 people. Usually we're done in 15-20 minutes. Please tell me it's just an absolutely made up joke that you have an hour and 15 minutes of stand up meetings every day. I would shoot myself.

Does a lot happen between an EOD standup, and the morning standup? Pick a lane lol

Hey, you are actually double booked for the nth meeting for annual “Goals” that’s coming up!

Too real.

TIL my company has only bad managers.

Good managers go to meetings and shield the engineers from the stream of exec corporate bs

Was lucky enough to work with one... once.

There is a reason I keep refusing to take the "Lead" position. I know what I'm good at.

bruh, your company has money for all those layers in your lasagna?

I came here to say the same.

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).

Agreed. Use your experience to shape the direction your teammates are moving in. Be an architect, and let them handle your light work.

Ehhhh, depends on how your titles work, and I would argue that's at least a little odd. Most senior engineers I know are ~50/50 code/oversight, at worst. Once you get to Principal or Staff, though, you're lucky if you write 50 loc/week.

Senior rarely translates to something like architect anymore, it's at least a level or two up from there.

I've worked in a few places, all with senior engineers, including myself as a senior engineer, all of which the senior engineers spent most of their time actually engineering. If I went somewhere as a senior and was told I was going to be in meetings all day, I would quit because that's management, not engineering.

No it isn't - a senior engineer should be a technical track professional that's excellent at their job - it's likely there will be a fair amount of mentorship but that can take many forms including PR reviews and pair programming.

A technical lead, architect, or a front line manager is the one that should be eating meetings four to six hours a day. And absolutely nobody should be in eight hours of meetings a day - even bullshit C level folks should be doing work outside of meetings. Eight hours of meetings means that you're just regurgitating the output of other meetings.

I'd clarify that having occasional eight hour meeting days isn't bad, there might be occasional collaboration jam sessions that everyone prepares for... but if your 8-5-52 is solid meetings then nothing productive is happening.

Staff Engineer: 10 hours of meetings each day

Where I work, Senior Engineer is an IC role. They attend the same meetings as other engineers. Its the Staff+ Engineers and managers that attend more meetings (in ascending order)

I mean I’m a senior engineer and I mostly handle escalations and high priority client issues, but my work is mostly break/fix

Engineer should still be an IC position and not have that many meetings. It should be a project or team lead that does the majority of meetings.

This is largely semantic, and highly subjective, but to me "Engineer" implies more design, architecture, and planning (ie, meetings).

A Senior "Developer" would imply more day-to-day coding to me. Not that companies care what I think, of course.

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?

I work in the government and I honestly don't know when anyone does any real work. It's meeting after meeting overlapping other meetings. All week.

How does stuff get done, seriously?

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.

Just find a place that hasn't solidified their IT structure and processes enough for people to have time to invent BS overhead.

THE STANDARD PRACTICE IS WHATEVER I SAY IT IS JANICE! how are business critical things no one knew existed breaking

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.

I love planning.

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