lazythrowawayd

You should also ask if they feel their manager facilitates their productivity.

Or they're "productive" in a different way. There's one developer on our team who spends large portions of his day creating diagrams, documents and largely unneeded JIRA tickets. It's busy work, but since he has nothing else to do, he just creates document exhaust.

I'm already in talks with two well known pre-IPO startups (<500 employees). The devops vortex is a new animal to me as well. I've never had so many problems moving systems into production than I have at this company.

Edit: I've talked with many in my professional network and they describe similar meeting loads (~1 hr/week) as you do. I'd estimate I spend on average 3 hr/week in meetings. And most of these meetings don't result in action items. They're essentially pointless.

I probably spend half my time not working. I'm burnt out though. After a few years at my current position, I just don't care.

Why is this?

I've had a few promising projects languish because my manager is slow or hesitant to allocate resources. That's a bit demoralizing. When I'm on a path to production for a functioning system I get caught up in the devops meeting vortex. That's a waste of time and it takes several weeks to get any sort of resolution. In these cases my time is mostly spent looking for workarounds and not "working". I feel there are a lot of politics and favoritism in the company, and my manager (and our team) is not on the right side. It's demotivating to have your work ignored because you're not a priority. I don't know how anyone stays for more than a year.

Edit: In the first few months I worked on random on-going projects, but was quickly made lead on some new projects. It was good at first, but after about 9 months I'd say most (90%) weeks I don't put in anywhere near 40 hours of work.

The sad thing is I've always gotten a raise (double digit in two cases) and full bonus every performance cycle.

I've finally started looking for another job.

Does anyone have recommendations? I'm really looking for a company that enables their individual contributors (engineers) to actually get shit done.