I’m burned out, I don’t want to be responsible for architectural decisions. I don’t want to write TDDs. I just want to be given tickets and run with them. I miss those days.
I just need to relax a bit in a role with less responsibility. Has anyone ever felt this way before? What did you do about it? Am I wrong to feel this way?
* Jr Engineer - Your work is given to you as bite-sized well-defined tasks.
* Mid-level - You're working on and delivering entire projects. The project is often well-defined.
* Sr Level - You're more working on a problem space, and it's much more open-ended. You may have to come up with and define your own projects.
* Tech Lead - Your focus shifts from your own impact, to the impact of your entire team. This is the biggest shift, where you need to spend way more time communicating, getting alignment with multiple teams, etc.
I sympathize with OP for missing the days of only working on well-defined tasks. However, being able to tackle open-ended problems is a huge value to businesses and it's the reason senior engineers make a lot more.
Shouldn't the title then be "Is it bad that I don't want to be a tech lead?"?
I think that there is a distinction between a tech lead and a senior engineer. As a tech lead you have more responsibility for the success of a given project while as a senior engineer you're (mostly) responsible for your own contributions.
So is it bad if you don't want to be a senior engineeer? Yes, because it's a very natural progression from being a non-senior engineer. It would almost be like saying that you don't want to be good at your job.
Is it bad if you don't want to be a tech lead? Not at all, it's a different job, requires a different skillset and you should absolutely be able to turn it down if it isn't for you.
I really detest all the whining and crying that’s in software. I understand junior developers will be slower and need mentorship, but that’s not what I’m talking about.
Here is an example on the front-end:
Using DOM methods to interact with a webpage without string parsing, as opposed to querySelectors, provides superior flexibility. You can do all kinds of cool things that querySelectors won’t allow. Also querySelectors are slow at about 450x slower in chrome and around 242,000x slower in Firefox. That’s the difference between 1 foot and 46 miles. People can’t live without stupid shit and will fight tooth and nail for conveniences. It’s not about learning or a tiny bit of extra effort. It’s about insecurity.
That was just one example of many. Worse is the extreme Invented Here syndrome where many developers expect NPM packages to do their job for them.
I would be really hesitant to be a team lead at the wrong organization because tolerance of the childish bullshit petty insecurities could be a career death trap. At the right organization a team lead would be allowed to set high standards to drive a product forward to market with greater durability and performance, but that requires an affirmed commitment from higher management.
- be "product oriented: "Think big", "Think customers-first", "Get shit done"
- make his/her colleagues better (by mentoring, by leading by example, by giving talks)
- stand up and make himself heard (e.g., working on projects that touch on multiple teams... because staying in your corner is so 90s)
- focus more on "delivering features" instead of making the products more stable (otherwise, no salary increase. Bugfixes don't bring money)
- be on call, because "you build it, you run it, you own it"
- ... all of these, of course, while keeping your tech skills up-to-date (which is in itself quite taxing)
I did have some burn out, however I was increasingly becoming more aware that the small salary jump for a senior role just didn’t match the massive jump in responsibilities.
In the end I’m working on my own stuff now, but failing that I’d be looking for a more normal role, or significantly more remuneration to take on that stress/work again.
But your feelings are worth some introspection. Why are you burned out? Is it because the company is expecting too much of you? Is it the wrong role? Is it because you are holding a pager and don't want to be?
I'd think about less about why you want to return back to just fixing tickets and more about how the current situation isn't working. Then you can make some moves. Examples from my career:
* I was at a small company where only the two senior devs were on call. Not sustainable. I worked with the execs to document things such that everyone in the company did tier1 on call pager duty.
* I was at a company where I was kinda bored in my role. I talked to my manager and did a tour with the database management group (this was years ago). Learned a lot, came back to SWE with more energy.
* I was not happy as an eng mgr for a variety of reasons. I shifted to devrel and have been learning new skills with increased pay.
* devrel (as above)
* product owner (seen that shift happen multiple times)
* technical trainer (I've done this, happy to chat about it with you)
* sales engineer
* support engineer (tier 3 at a bigco can get some interesting tickets, I imagine)
* startup CTO (want to wear all the hats and take a risk, you'll have plenty of co-founders).
Good chance you can find a Senior role elsewhere that's just coding.
Your burnout and architectural decision comment resonated with me.
I think I rarely read about people being burned out at Fortune 500 companies but saw your other comment that you aren't actually at one.
I am in the same boat, and cannot wait to return to the job you are doing.
Remember, if you love your work, are you really working?
I was a senior dev some where and decided to quit because they were outsourcing and reorg-ing and using a weird platform. I quit. but, I sure miss the regular raises and the pension and the 401k match.