| > where I can flex my engineering skills without BS Not to be snarky, but it depends on how good you are and where you are (and have a track record of being). I don't know you but when most people complain about "BS" they're complaining about the fact that they have to justify their priorities, projects, and timelines or interact with other departments. This is exactly what high paid SWE work is these days. You can have less collaboration by moving to infra, but it'll still be the norm. Usually the only way you're allowed to go live in your coding hole is by being way better than the median engineer and having an eye for changes that produce massive amounts of value. Some examples: 1. Guy who works at a node shop who mostly ships optimizations and improvements to V8. Generates >2 mil ARR in savings every year. 2. Engineer who goes around the codebase quietly removing scaling bottlenecks for different teams. 3. Engineer who sits around solves all the hard distributed systems bugs that come in. Something wrong with the paxos implementation you rely on? he can patch it. If you can't be this person for a company it's much harder to step away from how the company actually gets run. > work with good, competent people who care as much as I do There are some mid-size startups that fit this description, but at larger companies your only hope is to find this at the department level. Remember that 27,000 SWEs work at Google. It'd be weird if every single department was mostly full of good, competent people who care. If you want this in your work you generally need to be targeting engineering organizations at the size of 50-200 people. |
As someone who made the switch to infra, don't do it. The same problems mentioned before will become uncontrollable roadblocks to you getting real work done and you'll have zero power to do anything about it.
You do get to provide enormous amounts of value but typically only when the stars align.
Unfortunately the only real way to make that difference is in software team management and then say goodbye to contributing code.