Comment by aabdi

myself? senior engineer role is basically figuring out the business problem and getting funding.

IDK i've always been able to get senior managers/managers to give me lots of leeway to do wtv i want and figure out problems. At least in most places i've worked at.

i work on platform stuff mostly, so there's always a large need for stuff. the backlog alone b4 all the agentic stuff was roughly 20-30x the capacity of any team (per year). 80% of requests were usually SVP goals and we'd just outright drop them due to lack of capacity or request HC transfer/away teams.

i.e. internal improvements alone were always massive (not gonna talk about prod code/cross team organization).

1. we need better test coverage for x,y,z

2. we need to be able to eval the long term costs (XX growth YOY, how to reduce)

3. the internal system streaming is inefficient, need to eval the alternative systems

4. we need better ops handling/management automation for issues and sev3s/sev2s. i.e. scaling, anomaly analysis, bugs introduced, improved metrics, dashboards.

5. DX stuff needs better handling, people keep confusing themselves on how to onboard. better docs on how to onboard, automation,

6. teams x,y,z are fighting with each other bcz they don't have a good grasp on systems, improve internal docs on arch and interop

7. we need automation to be able to more easily test our systems in an adhoc fashion

8. there's no linters for API platform, leading to bad results and inconsistency.

9. we're seeing bugs in the code, but aren't appropriately manualy testing after deployments. spawn 100 agents to do it, compile the results. do it every X days, feed the bugs back into the system.

i could go on and on. and this is one service, usually you own quite a few, and each one has their unique set of challenges.