What’s the biggest problem you are facing at your company/job?

I work in a hazardous industry. To meet internal and regulatory standards, we really need a certain level of engineering capability.

But the company has been hellbent for several years on diminishing the number of engineers and the influence that engineers have, and we are just on a slow march towards the next major accident. But until somebody dies, nothing will really change.

The salami-slicing reduction in engineering decision-making authority also means that there is no path to escalate issues.

There's a discontentment felt by every engineer in the organisation resulting in cynicism and disengagement, and yet to hear the upper management speak, we are all bursting with excitement at what exciting times we are living in, and relishing the diversity and inclusion.

99% of the problems I face personally is some variant of how do you take a team of people with differing levels of ability and not have them perform at a level of the lowest common denominator in every skill category?

I don't know what the answer is but I think code reviews are fundamentally broken. They need to be more dynamic and more intelligent, simply requiring a code reviewed by someone is close to worthless.

If I'm the JavaScript expert then I should be able to tag myself as such so I know about every piece of JavaScript that's going into the codebase before it's merged. But more importantly, if I'm the expert on some section of the codebase I should be able to "lock" that code to myself in such a way that any changes to that code must first go through me.

Maybe this kind of thing is already possible, but I've just not seen it. Half the time code reviews are worthless because it's one dev who doesn't really know what they're doing reviewing code of another dev who doesn't really know what they're doing.

Trying to find ways to look busy so that I don't get assigned more projects.

I'm on a project that breaks even + some pocket money. Main problems is the code base which needs a major overhaul in order to reduce cost of change & maintenance. I don't see a meaningful way for incremental ( = over a long time) refactoring, because that would increase code complexity for a long time until the incremental refactoring is finished while we'd still need to implement CRs and fix bugs. Any refactoring has to be done in a big-bang approach, but the project isn't generating enough money to fund that downpayment.

Edit for motivating factors.

A good problem: growth in headcount, more teams, more communication required, less you can know all that is going on.

The application getting more complex and developers not stepping up in terms of skills/knowledge.

I recommended rewriting the whole terraform infra code base in Crossplane sarcastically in the interview but my manager might be taking it seriously enough to want to see it implemented as a POC.

Politics, people talk too much, but nothing gets done and no one will take responsibility for it in the end.

Not sure if it's interesting to tackle. ;)