[bob1029]

I am the most senior technology person in a <20 person startup and I do a pretty even 50/50 on code vs non-code tasks. It's not very stable though. Some weeks I'll be on calls for 30+ hours, others I'll be locked in the dungeon and pushing hundreds of commits. Really depends on where we are at. I am actively trying to get out of code duty because it's really hard to manage the overall tech strategy when you are 20000 feet deep fighting some ancient balrog for days on end.

After doing this a while, I realized that writing the code isn't the part that takes a long time. It's rewriting it over and over because you didn't fundamentally solve what the business was asking for the first time. I prefer to focus on that part of the puzzle now. Making sure it gets done right the ~first time. Help others on the team avoid lava pits that they can't see yet.

I try really hard to avoid writing any code until I am nearly certain how something should be implemented. Exploratory rabbit chases are quite rare for me these days. A younger me would be appalled, but I enjoy a new kind of game - Making the customer happy for minimal effort and then getting paid.

[gosenx]

Sounds like a lot of fun. I work as Platform Engineer so I’m also on call for about 30+ a week sometimes. The only thing I don’t get to do is programming a lot, I mean I do write some Terraform, YML, Go, scripts etc but not the type of coding that you spend a month building something rather than small programs to automate and facilitate our ops work.

I want to shift from ops to systems programming and find a completely new role.

I’m really good at the debugging and diving into new codebases, but companies don’t like the fact that I don’t really have a previous full time coding role.

Happy to ear how things are going for you and how you have grown technically.

[diarrhea]

I am also in the boat of wanting to switch to systems programming. Writing code in Terraform or YAML is soul-sucking to me, but sadly all I get currently. I have previous, full time software engineering experience, so I have “seen the light”, making Terraform/YAML feel that much more like a punishment.

I’m building up Rust skills (1 year in now) to make the jump once that’s more popular. It’s a slightly risky bet (Rust jobs are currently 95% crypto).