I work way too much. Technically I’m supposed to have a 36h work week, but I have already accumulated 120h of overtime this year. I had a diagnosed burnout two years ago that wasn’t entirely work related (lots of stress from family drama), but it hasn’t really gotten much better since then.
What are your responsibilities ?
On paper I’m just a regular-level developer in a DevSecOps-flavoured Scrum Team of 13 (9 of which are devs, it’s a pretty big team). But since I’ve been there since the start of our current main product, I have accumulated a lot of stupid side roles. I’m the main Frontend person, so I go to all the Frontend meetings and talk to the UX/UI Team. I’m the main onboarding person, so I do all the setup and introductions when a new colleague or intern joins in, as well as the tech support when colleagues have problems with their IDEs or other parts of their dev environments. I’m the designated Security Engineer so I have to go to all the Security meetings as well as be the one who turns all the new security regulations into actionable tickets, as well as monitor that they are actually implemented. Absolutely hate that role, so I talked to my manager about it a year ago and he assigned me a Junior dev that I could train to take over my Security duties. That manager fired that Junior last October, so all the tasks are back on my shoulders. He did assign a replacement, but that person is not a developer so they can’t do anything that involves actual implementation. Meaning that my workload has actually increased because now I not only have to teach them about Security Engineering things but also explain Software Dev and how our codebases work.
Ugh, and reviewing Pull Requests has gotten so rough since my company started hard-pushing Claude Code on everyone. All the devs that use it heavily report awesome time saves, but they all ignore that that saved time just comes from them not properly checking the code. So all the shit floats to the top during PRs. Reviews have been taking around 4x as long as they used to, especially when I have to re-check everything because Claude Code fucking changes half of the already reviewed code every time it’s used to “fix” something I marked during the review. Which introduces even more problems so it changes even more code during the next iteration. I spend like 1.5 MONTHS going back and forth with a guy from another team while reviewing his PR. He was just extracting a feature I had build into a more centralized repository so that other teams can use it. I built that feature in two days, making the changes to make it more generic would have taken me two more days at most. Nah, instead we got a PR with over 100 threads and like 50 commits. ughhh
Do you do application deployments ?
Luckily we’re fully Cloud-based with proper CI/CD pipelines, so deployment is pretty easy. But yeah, if I ever find the time to build a feature I’m also the one deploying it, naturally.
What does the ownership look like in your compan. Do devs own everything and perform all tasks for the application to function? ( server management, server user profile management, application hosting, etc )
My department has like 100 devs and we’re all working on products within the same AWS-based ecosystem. So there’s a team that handles core functions, aws accounts and central dependencies, and the product teams can just focus on developing their specific products. It’s a pretty chill system all things considered. Ownership for the products lies broadly with the teams that maintain them.
Do you work off hours ? I don’t work on weekends, but since the job has “flexible work hours” I can work whenever I want/have to. Sometimes starting at 5am, sometimes ending at 10pm. Whatever is needed, I guess 🤷
Do you make the industry standard or are you paid less ?
When I got picked up as Junior in early 2023 I made 44k before taxes, which was more than most of the people in my graduation class. But the salary hasn’t really grown with the amount of shit I have to deal with, so I feel pretty severely underpaid right now. I make just a bit under 50k (would be 55k if I worked a 40h week). Technically the yearly raises are coming up next month, but last year was just 3.8%, so I don’t think this year would be much better. Either way, I’m handing in my notice of resignation next Thursday 🥳 The new job I have lined up starting in October pays 62k with a lot less responsibilities. I probably could have gotten more if I kept looking, but I really just wanted out. I might look again once I have started that new job, since I can leave with a notice of just 2 weeks in my first 6 months there. Apparently I’m pretty decent at job interviews. I only applied to like 60-ish places during my job hunt, refusing to write any cover letters and never touching anything AI-related during the whole process out of principle. Had only 3 companies offer me an interview, but all 3 interviews led to them offering me the job.
I’ll do you one better. Vivziepop fans were some of the most annoying people I ever had the displeasure of interacting with. And that was before her animation stuff went mainstream and she just did this annoying animation meme shit. I was a moderator in an Art Community on Amino at that time and somehow Amino paid her to shill it to her fans (the community had no say in this). So they showed up in droves, ignored all community guidelines and just posted the dumbest things imaginable. I still personally dislike Vivziepop because of that.