How much work do you do in your day to day ?

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.

Vibe coding is encouraged at my work, which has dramatically increased my workload in the last year as it’s gotten good enough to use in production workflows. I mentioned to my boss that if he wants to continue shipping 4x as much code as before, he needs to hire 4x as many reviewers, product people, etc because while coding might now be “at the speed of inference” (it’s not), the rest of the process is not.

Do you think you are being overworked compared to the industry standard (from experience or vibes) ?

Hell no. I don’t have personal experience, but I read enough social media from other software devs to know I’ve got it pretty good.

What are your responsibilities ?

I’m the de-facto UI guy on the team, and also kinda the team lead’s go-to debugger for PROD issues. But we all do at least a little bit of everything. Really, we’re all considered “responsible” for the systems/features we’ve built personally, in that if an issue comes up on something I built, the team lead comed to me first about it. Usually.

Do you do application deployments ?

Not directly. The main server guy does the actual work of building the deployment artifacts and copying them up to the server, while the main database guy does the same for all database artifacts, including assembling migrations scripts.

But our monthly scheduled deployments are a full-team affair. We’re all on a call together, and we’re all testing the stuff we worked on to make sure it deployed properly, and on occasion when something goes wrong, we’re whipping up a hotfix on the spot.

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 )

I touched on it a little above, but there’s definitely roles, although the lines are blurry.

One guy does all the server maintenance stuff, that falls through the server provider’s responsibilities. He also is the de-facto lead of our auth systems.

One guy is the de-facto database lead. He does almost all of our ETL-related work, and often will be the first prototyper of new features or new workloads, by just playing around with data in the database and figuring out how to properly map it into what users want to see.

One gal is our de-facto quality control. Generally, she does a secondary review of every change that gets merged, to check for regressions and such. This is particularly useful when multiple people end up working on changes to the same feature or system, and don’t necessarily coordinate with each other.

Me, I mentioned, I’m the de-facto lead for UI, as I’m the one who spearheaded the effort to get us using TypeScript, and wrote almost all of our TypeScript “framework”.

One guy is, I guess you could say, the de-facto lead for all our legacy features, that still run on jQuery and CSLA, and other nonsense. And we have a lot of those.

The last guy doesn’t really have any AREA that I’d say he’s a lead for, simply because he’s not been around long enough to really build onele. He’s cranked out quite a few big features, and would definitely be considered a lead on those.

Do you work off hours ?

VERY rarely.

Do you make the industry standard or are you paid less ?

Don’t really know, honestly. Probably a bit under. I’m at like 110k/year, I think? In a relatively-low-cost-of-living area.

I don’t think I’m necessarily over worked. I don’t work overtime (not approved or funded at the moment). I’m a senior developer, so I’m involved in architectural decisions, I’m expected to work on any part of the system, I write test plans and update design documents.

I take part in planning work, as we all do with agile an I usually provide guidance for that work.

I mentor and help other people, offer advice to them as well as to my manager when he asks. I’m basically given freedom to keep an eye on everything and help out or guide. I also investigate issues and communicate with the clients when required.

I’m not involved in devops, we have someone for that. Our software is installable in individual machines, but not deployable on cloud infrastructure. I’d that makes sense. We don’t have users or profiles in the normal sense; we don’t develop a web based system. We don’t do server management or application hosting.

I think I’m paid fairly well and I get a decent vacation allowance and benefits. I have no idea what the industry standard is.

Does that answer your questions?