Exactly. Everywhere I've worked had at least 3-4X more bugs than we had capacity to fix, and the bug count grew over time, net of any fixing happening. There was never difficulty finding problems to solve. Unfortunately most places don't give engineering the autonomy to solve critical issues. It's just feature cram and redesigns, over and over, and let the bugs pile up.
The challenge is finding problems that are “worth” solving as a staff engineer. General “bugs” are not staff worthy. Staff need to convince leadership to fix an architectural problem that removes a whole class of bug.
Sometimes the biggest impact you can make is just changing the spelling of T-E-H to T-H-E on a very visible page. Hopefully that's not a staff level problem in your company.
I get your point. Staff levl engineers should be working on really hard problems that will make a long-term impact, but they often aren't very visible at any one moment. It's only when you look over long-term and you realize that things have slowly gotten better that you realize the impact. At least I hope they've gotten better. I've made some decisions over the years that I wonder if they really made things better or not. And it's really hard to say since there's no control where you can say, well this is what it would have been a different way.
This has been my experience until the past 6-9 months, when AI got good enough that I can build rails to prevent more bugs while also hammering through critical issues, redesigns, etc.
It’s never been better to be a staff+ engineer, where you can knock shit out of the park and tee up your team to do the same all at once
I actually really appreciate the mindset this has given me towards life in general, and I consider it a superpower.
I find people get overwhelmed and go deer in the headlights when there is a huge amount of stuff to do.
I actually feel relaxed when I say “it’s not possible to do it all. There will always be more jobs than time. The only thing that matters is that we work on the most important things”
I also enjoy seeing the things that just perpetually sit at the bottom and never even get close to being looked at. Others stress and think it’s a huge problem. I like to look at them and see that in context, there are much bigger fish to fry, and we’re doing the right thing by frying the bigger ones and ignoring the little ones.
Mostly agree, one small caveat. I always had a class of critical problems. They were rarely the important, but they were critical to things running smoothly.
