[collyw]

"the life of an engineer, it seems, is not as rosy as originally anticipated".

Ok this affects me at the moment. Why? Because I have two incompetent bosses. Basically I have junior / intermediate level programmers telling me what to do (and getting paid more than me for it). They took the promotion for the money. I do the "smart" work and make the technical decisions (when they make technical decisions they are often poor choices, basically from lack of experience).

Its at the point that I am going to take the next management position that comes up.

[romanovcode]

> I do the "smart" work and make the technical decisions (when they make technical decisions they are often poor choices, basically from lack of experience).

I believe everyone thinks they're the only one smart, special snowflake.

[collyw]

My team leaders suggest options and they are usually either very poor design decisions (like I would have made in my first couple of years of coding). Or they just don't know.

Maybe I sound arrogant, but when you have to override 75% of their decisions for something better, then I think I am more experienced than them.

Then there was having to dig onto code written and commented by them.

   # open file 
   file.open(filename)

It honestly looked like one of the blog articles about how not to write comments.

[sergiosgc]

You've been the victim of the Dilbert Principle in action. It is quite common. Do not jump to management because of this. Jump companies. Some seem to avoid the Dilbert Principle, although I know none that escapes Peter's Principle.

[awinder]

That sounds like maybe a failing for these particular managers? I guess every company is different, but it sounds like your managers may be failing to delegate properly, and you end up with a corporate structure where every step up the pyramid means doing what all the previous levels do, plus more. Often that has pretty detrimental effects from failure to properly delegate, but it doesn't have to be that way. That might be a trap that managers who were engineers have to work harder at to not fall into.

[dmpk2k]

Companies that have any technical workers must have at least two promotion tracks: management and technical. It's downright stupid "promoting" someone into a position where their skills and affinity cannot be fully utilised.

Consolations.