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Senior Devs in huge corps: Do you even code? (programming.dev)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I have been working at a large bank for a few years. Although some coding is needed, the bulk majority of time is spent on server config changes, releasing code to production, asking other people for approvals, auth roles, and of course tons of meetings with the end user to find out what they need.

I guess when I was a junior engineer, I would spend more time looking at code, though I used to work for small companies. So it is hard for me to judge if the extra time spent coding, was because of me being a junior or because it was a small company.

The kicker, is when we interview devs, most of the interview is just about coding. Very little of it is about the stuff I listed..

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[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Senior backend developer here . I have been refusing positions as tech or team lead for exactly this reason. All my colleagues that ended up in those positions basically stopped having any time to code. Some of them left to go back to coding in another company as they were burning out from all the meetings and admin stuff.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Same boat. Nuh uh, you're not promoting me. I don't want to have to deal with offshore support, meeting 6 out of 8 hours, making sure Jira board is up to PM's standards and only reading code when any of the devs have an issue they cannot solve by themselves or something breaks. I tried management career path and hated it with all my heart, quit when they wanted to promote me higher. Let me do what I enjoy, I'll deliver.

Bonus points - developers make more than managers up to 2 or 3 levels up where I live, so it doesn't even calculate.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

That's interesting, where do you live?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Poland.

A lot of development and other IT related jobs get outsourced, so experienced devs are in very high demand. We usually work in a B2B arrangement, a developer starts their own company (sole trader I think it's called in the US) and invoices an agency that deals with corporate customers.

Salaries are around 3-4x average national salary, with smaller taxes than on a work contract and less safety (which is not a problem due to high demand). Locally, managers do not usually play any role, I report directly to the customer's managers, usually far away from Poland. If I were to sign a contract with the customer, that's no longer B2B usually, the salary is less and taxes are higher.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Not OP but I'm in France and it seems to happen everywhere. I absolutely refuse to become a manager/tech-lead/whatever because they always get stuck in the same kind of job forever. I like C++ but I don't want to write C++ for the rest of my life, I want to study all the new things. And if you become a tech-lead, people lie to you by saying you will make decisions for the future. It's false and you have almost no power to change anything.

[–] scottyjoe9 5 points 1 year ago

This is exactly what happened to me. I was a team lead at my old job and I interviewed as a senior dev but got offered a standard dev position. In the end they offered me the same money as what I was making as a team lead so I took it and have never looked back! The reduced pressure and better work-life balance are so good. I now earn much more than I did at my old gig so 🤷‍♂️

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

A friend of mine been there, and he done exactly that.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I'm sure in a few years from now nobody will code anymore and you will just tell the AI what you want to see implemented.

Same as nobody writes actual machine code anymore and everyone only uses higher languages.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Higher-level languages compile (pretty much) reproduceably into machine code, so the same C code would always produce the same executable as long as the same compiler version is used.

Current AI chatbots will produce completely different results if given the same prompt twice. In its current form it can't be used in a reliable toolchain for anything.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

Big Part of my daily business is explaining people what they should code... People aren't reliable as well.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

You still have to understand the code as a senior, you don't want to merge code, where you don't know what it's doing (AI extinction anyone, haha?). And I actually doubt that nobody will code anymore in a few years, as some stuff requires quite some creativity that is just nowhere close with LLMs (even with GPT4). I'll admit though that probably 90+% will be able to be written by AI (and is in some way today already, if it's relatively repetitive code). So yeah the new main dev-role will likely be "prompt-engineer". But it'll be interesting, the fast progress with AI never stops to surprise. And GPT4 is definitely able to think slightly abstract (and with correction writes quite good code). Deepmind also just recently released alpha-dev, which improved the state of the art in sorting...