pcmoney

I have worked at a BigTechCo for about 3 years and feel like my engineering skills are slowly and steadily deteriorating. Multiple people in my team, org, and other BigTechCos have expressed the same concern.

Essentially, everything we do is between other mammoth systems and thus most “work” is actually configuring systems to talk to each other or talking to other teams about guarantees, capacity etc. The actual engineering work is minimal and the development speed is glacial.

Previously I worked at a small consultancy, a green field company, and startups. Small teams, full stack, very fast paced, interesting work (dynamic programming, exotic schedulers, path planning, front end/back end, databases, events/streams, native mobile).

Now I feel I just slog through esoteric config or some custom DDL, language, or tool nobody else uses. No team can do anything meaningful by themselves, everything requires meetings and infinite Google Docs. The pay is more than 2x what I was making before and the promos keep coming but it all just feels like BS.

Does anyone else have this experience?

Note: I have definitely improved in cross team communication and collaboration etc. as well as big org politics. So not a total loss.