Ask HN: Is it bad that I don’t want to be a senior engineer?

The problem is the pay usually doesn't come with the lower responsibility.

I was a senior dev some where and decided to quit because they were outsourcing and reorg-ing and using a weird platform. I quit. but, I sure miss the regular raises and the pension and the 401k match.

Going to say yes, because most Senior Eng roles are not much different than regular Eng roles. The title is given as part of a recruiting tactic/negotiation.

Good chance you can find a Senior role elsewhere that's just coding.

I’ve felt the same way, and actually left my last role 3 months ago because of it.

I did have some burn out, however I was increasingly becoming more aware that the small salary jump for a senior role just didn’t match the massive jump in responsibilities.

In the end I’m working on my own stuff now, but failing that I’d be looking for a more normal role, or significantly more remuneration to take on that stress/work again.

> I’m a senior engineer who is expected to be a tech lead for my team and work on cross functional projects.

Shouldn't the title then be "Is it bad that I don't want to be a tech lead?"?

I think that there is a distinction between a tech lead and a senior engineer. As a tech lead you have more responsibility for the success of a given project while as a senior engineer you're (mostly) responsible for your own contributions.

So is it bad if you don't want to be a senior engineeer? Yes, because it's a very natural progression from being a non-senior engineer. It would almost be like saying that you don't want to be good at your job.

Is it bad if you don't want to be a tech lead? Not at all, it's a different job, requires a different skillset and you should absolutely be able to turn it down if it isn't for you.

My perspective based on the places I've worked:

* Jr Engineer - Your work is given to you as bite-sized well-defined tasks.

* Mid-level - You're working on and delivering entire projects. The project is often well-defined.

* Sr Level - You're more working on a problem space, and it's much more open-ended. You may have to come up with and define your own projects.

* Tech Lead - Your focus shifts from your own impact, to the impact of your entire team. This is the biggest shift, where you need to spend way more time communicating, getting alignment with multiple teams, etc.

I sympathize with OP for missing the days of only working on well-defined tasks. However, being able to tackle open-ended problems is a huge value to businesses and it's the reason senior engineers make a lot more.

I feel the same (from time to time). It's becoming harder and harder to be just "a software engineer" in this industry. All of a sudden, the "perfect" software engineer must:

- be "product oriented: "Think big", "Think customers-first", "Get shit done"

- make his/her colleagues better (by mentoring, by leading by example, by giving talks)

- stand up and make himself heard (e.g., working on projects that touch on multiple teams... because staying in your corner is so 90s)

- focus more on "delivering features" instead of making the products more stable (otherwise, no salary increase. Bugfixes don't bring money)

- be on call, because "you build it, you run it, you own it"

- ... all of these, of course, while keeping your tech skills up-to-date (which is in itself quite taxing)

No, it is fine if that is the role you enjoy and you do not the expectation of being compensated at a higher level.

Heh, i'm a "Team Lead" for a small/medium company and it's a joke. We're in desperate need of the CTO/Leads to own problems in our development cycles (the usual, tests, documentation, etc), and for my area i recognize, can identify and want to prioritize it... yet i'm too damn busy. Everyone is. I "own" several mission critical aspects in the company and we just don't have the manpower to move it to someone else.

Your burnout and architectural decision comment resonated with me.

Why don't you look for another job that has the same title or similar but with different responsibilities?

I don't see anything wrong with that but I do feel like you can still attain that same role but have it less overloaded. Maybe try a different company or share this with your boss?

I think I rarely read about people being burned out at Fortune 500 companies but saw your other comment that you aren't actually at one.

I think everyone gets to where you are at some point. If they do not, then they are not trying new things. Nothing wrong with deciding you hate the current and want to return to what you enjoy.

I am in the same boat, and cannot wait to return to the job you are doing.

Remember, if you love your work, are you really working?

I hear ya. I love building products and pushing boundaries.

I really detest all the whining and crying that’s in software. I understand junior developers will be slower and need mentorship, but that’s not what I’m talking about.

Here is an example on the front-end:

Using DOM methods to interact with a webpage without string parsing, as opposed to querySelectors, provides superior flexibility. You can do all kinds of cool things that querySelectors won’t allow. Also querySelectors are slow at about 450x slower in chrome and around 242,000x slower in Firefox. That’s the difference between 1 foot and 46 miles. People can’t live without stupid shit and will fight tooth and nail for conveniences. It’s not about learning or a tiny bit of extra effort. It’s about insecurity.

That was just one example of many. Worse is the extreme Invented Here syndrome where many developers expect NPM packages to do their job for them.

I would be really hesitant to be a team lead at the wrong organization because tolerance of the childish bullshit petty insecurities could be a career death trap. At the right organization a team lead would be allowed to set high standards to drive a product forward to market with greater durability and performance, but that requires an affirmed commitment from higher management.

Definitely not wrong!

But your feelings are worth some introspection. Why are you burned out? Is it because the company is expecting too much of you? Is it the wrong role? Is it because you are holding a pager and don't want to be?

I'd think about less about why you want to return back to just fixing tickets and more about how the current situation isn't working. Then you can make some moves. Examples from my career:

   * I was at a small company where only the two senior devs were on call. Not sustainable. I worked with the execs to document things such that everyone in the company did tier1 on call pager duty.
   * I was at a company where I was kinda bored in my role. I talked to my manager and did a tour with the database management group (this was years ago). Learned a lot, came back to SWE with more energy.
   * I was not happy as an eng mgr for a variety of reasons. I shifted to devrel and have been learning new skills with increased pay.

You aren't required to remain an engineer, either. There are many auxiliary functions at companies which benefit from the skills of a sr dev:

   * devrel (as above)
   * product owner (seen that shift happen multiple times)
   * technical trainer (I've done this, happy to chat about it with you)
   * sales engineer
   * support engineer (tier 3 at a bigco can get some interesting tickets, I imagine)
   * startup CTO (want to wear all the hats and take a risk, you'll have plenty of co-founders).

I wrote more about making a move into an related occupation here: https://letterstoanewdeveloper.com/2020/10/05/how-to-make-a-...

Make sure you're at least well compensated for it. At least 2x to make it worth your while IMO.