[ActorNightly]

Yep this is normal. The more senior you go, the more you are either managing people, or are just a subject matter expert that ends up either fixing problems or writing design docs.

There is an art of being able to code with people rather than your fingers as a senior engineer, but often time this requires a capstone project to develop from scratch which is far and few in between.

The thing to do with big tech is find a position that pays the most per time spent actually working (which is not always the higher pay), and enough to cover all your needs, and then work on personal projects in the off time. Or you can grind out for several years while saving money, then take unpaid leave.

[pcmoney]

The problem with personal projects is they almost always lack the scale, complexity, or real world constraints/drivers that real work does. Helpful to feel like you're actually building something but it is kind of boring to build things without a team. I really do enjoy learning from others with different approaches and learning from pairing and mentoring more junior developers and having to explain why we are doing things. There are just so few repetitions at BigTechCos that its hard to get that there.