[fancyfish]

No, and I am actively interviewing to leave. I treat interviewing like a chance to “re-level” myself with a sorta-objective third party, and I am getting offers for 10-20%+ higher comp.

The fundamental issue is that optimizing things, paying down tech debt, maintenance, etc just don’t get nearly the same fanfare as new features or product launches. I don’t blame people, because the latter is flashier, and more understood by nontechnical folks in the business.

For people like me who work behind the scenes, you need a trusted manager who understands the importance of your work and will go to bat for you, and/or you need to regularly publicize your accomplishments in a measurable, easily understood way. For me, that means posting a tidbit in Slack whenever I make a noteworthy change.

I wish my sort of work was respected inline with its business impact, but alas, it’s harder to measure or communicate things like “developer time saved” vs “feature X bumped sales by y%.”

[axg11]

Great perspective that interviewing is "re-leveling" and seeking recognition elsewhere. Ultimately, good work that improves technical debt and maintenance should be recognized if you have a good manager. I think a lot of issues arise from the fact that a manager is a single point of failure. There should be a fallback in case they are bad at the recognition side of their role.