Man I’ll tell you, it certainly doesn’t feel like being an immortal wizard with a cool sword.
It feels like being the foot soldier at the front of the spear line as Orcs are charging at you.
And the formation is a triangle, and your the tip.
And I would trust the devs behind me if I had time between everyone I have to talk to .
I fucking literally went into this career to limit the amount of talking I have to do to people. $150k isn’t worth this level of stress for the remainder of my career.
Having watched from the outside as other people make this transition, it never looks fun. At least in large organizations, it just looks like a ton of added responsibility without enough additional authority to make meaningful change.
I remember having a period of time like this when I was enlisted - I was held responsible for the completion of tasks but not given authority to reward or correct the behavior of those in my charge. I would absolutely loathe being in that position again in the civilian world.
I’ve had to be this for a few months. Never fucking again.
At young software companies, there is usually N+1 person who is basically a swiss army knife for the product, to “do it all”: Presales, Professional Services, Tier 3 support, Software Engineer, Architect, security explainer, Product Management, documenter of strange conventions that nevertheless must be adhered to, and et cetera. Annoy this person at your peril.
I cast IT WORKS ON MY MACHINE
Over-full stack developer.
I can think of specific instances where I’ve done each of these roles in my software engineering job:
- Tech support
- Sysadmin
- DevOps
- QA (oh do I have a story about this one)
- Management
- Release management
- Agile coach
- Security engineer/pen tester
- Compliance
- Custodian
As well as customer relations. I don’t know that I’ve ever done much product management, though.
Fukin hell, I’m in this meme. At least all my customers are engineers. So, less orcs that need slaying.
Mate, the one thing you discover in this job is that no matter where you go, your “customers” always seem to be complete morons or something. At least that’s what you’d think listening to my younger colleagues :,D
We provide API management, CI/CD support, middleware and a few other things to the rest of the company and the number of times we have to explain basic stuff to software devs is kinda… exhausting.
That is me rn
