> You can actually make a very comfortable career of Senior and Staff by learning to identify this kind of work/system and proposing ways to simplify it.

Where?

IT departments, typically, though occasionally there are whole companies that work in "technology" where this type of work can be found.

I said the above as a jest, but seriously, simplification of complex stacks has been a good consulting gig.

Most large companies. There is a stark difference between the distinguished engineers and the tier below them in terms of asking people to stop doing things badly.

I've typically worked in SRE and platform engineering work and that's where I've gotten exposed to these kinds of Rube Goldberg machines. Make a short list of them when you find them and then use them as a hit list during "cost cutting". Most people don't want to touch these systems because they look big and expansive and generally "work". They're just very poorly optimized.

Dare I say, any time I see a function as a service my brain immediately drifts to inspecting the cost implications of said process.

As opposed to all those people that make similarly comfortable careers in middle and upper mgmt by identifying simple systems and complicating them beyond recognition?

These roles aren't opposed at all, they greatly benefit each other :-)

Bringing what used to be the privilege of upper management (wasting massive amounts of resources while getting paid handsomely) down to software developers.

It's that trickle-down effect people talked about, right?

It's a beautiful symbiosis.

Hah, yes. I will say that while I understand the general disdain here, as I grew more senior in my career I realized the world takes all types. There are "doers" who will rush to an end goal that's highly prioritized and then there's "optimizers" who come fix that mess up into a durable, cost-effective system. Some people are gifted enough in knowledge and have the right business priority to do both at the same time, but usually they're required at different times.

Anecdotally, optimization tasks (in this brain) are multitudes easier than innovation tasks. I spend a lot of time thinking about how to do things differently whereas optimization utilizes many lessons I've learned over and over again with well-trodden patterns. That's to say, I'm grateful for the doers :)

> learning to identify this kind of work/system and proposing ways to simplify it

"I dont think you are fitting in here at MegaCorp"

"You are being negative, the system is great, we don't like that kind of attitude here".

> "You are being negative, the system is great, we don't like that kind of attitude here".

I want to see more lines of code, not less.

Hmm looking at your git statistics it appears you have only pushed 60 commits this month with 12,000 lines of code changed - while Jimmy over here has pushed 200 commits this month with 200 lines of code changed.

If you do not improve next month we are going to have to let you go, we just cant carry a 0.3x employee such as yourself.

"We need this to scale to hundreds of millions of users across many regions"

"But we have no users at all right now"

"But we might have hundreds of millions of users in future"

I am the author and this has caused me psychic damage.

You should take a vacation.

Tried it. Nope. You can get people to acknowledge it but because it's not a fun project or doesn't involve an upsell you can bill the clients for, it'll go in a product backlog for a decade or two.

I don't care any more. I'm just there to tell people what's shit and then laugh when it explodes in their face.

That is what skunkworks are for. You just deliver on time and you are fine.

What is this deliver thing? I haven't done anything productive for years.

The easy part is choosing a better end-state; anyone can do that, and for any of these Rube Goldberg machines at a large-ish company, several people likely have.

What makes someone a staff+ is finding a path to iteratively evolving towards that end-state without breaking anything along the way and while having progress to show off at each step.

Oh yes but part of that is knowing that you need to get others on board. Things get messy when no one knows the end goals with changes.