There are times I do technical work and times my entire job is putting out fires and making sure the wheels stay on the bus as we barrel full speed to a release. Making sure people have work. Making sure they know what it is, and the customer is on board. Tracking deadlines. Managing expectations. Making critical decisions about the architecture and the like.
Any developer can write code. This stuff requires a different set of executive functions, and engineers that can do both are generally promoted.
What you're describing is a manager, not an engineer. Do you have any managers in your company? What is their job?
I don't know where these "pure" perfectly spherical software engineers work who are super-senior staff level, but still do nothing but type in code. I've never seen them. As soon as you advance beyond the entry-level, you need to broaden your scope and be more of an actual engineer rather than just someone who writes code.
The manager's job is (among others) to make sure the team is working well together, solve any inter-personnel issues, work with each of their directs on career development, sometimes provide direction of what to work on, sometimes actually assign individual tasks, pass down announcements and direction from the higher-ups, help to manage the team members' performance, and work with HR when needed. They're not there to do all the stinky non-code-typing things in your project.
They’re being pushed until these administrative roles because Directors have no idea how to leverage their talent and default to putting them into EM-like roles because that’s what they do but again, it’s a waste of talent and experience.
Nobody knows our codebase as well as me because I built it. My output of customer value has dropped to 10% of what it used to be and I don’t think it would be possible today to build the things we built pre-acquisition that made us valuable in the first place.
Thankfully we were able to hire another engineer who is very good and has been able to keep up with internal and external requests. I am thankful he’s been able to get up to speed so I don’t leave my coworkers high and dry.
At 35 years old, I’m cooked, Chat. Thriving at a megacorp with these management styles is orthogonal to delivering value to customers.
I think the explanation is simpler, I suspect it's just many people have a desire to be in a different role or multiple roles. Also, successful generalists tend to think everyone should be a generalist. That's why they muddle the role descriptions in their heads.
Schroedinger's manager.
What is the team's manager doing if not coordination, allocation, and tracking?
That may be true, but even the act of looking can provide some measure of hope, which can make everything more bearable.
And if something is gonna take a few days or a week, all the managers do is ask me five times if I can instead divide the work and farm it out to other engineers. If it isn't taking on the order of hours, they want to throw people at it to go faster. Parallelism is clearly a manager KPI.
The ball is squarely in the employer's court and they are maximizing their position accordingly.
Woah, woah, they're not overseas, they're "Virtual Employees" now. You're not supposed to look behind the curtain.
Lucky you. :P
What people actually want is VC money salaries without having to pay the VC piper's price, which is more of a problem.
(AI has changed this somewhat, because it's so energy-intensive that it's become a capital asset. And of course we have to consider the monopolistic nature of software markets.)
The Borg can buy you out, but don’t give them your soul. The world is a better place with more entrepreneurs and new businesses. That part is on us.
I'd look for something else, but seeing this report, talking to friends and reading some comments in various threads on HN, it's clear the grass isn't greener anywhere else.