I have been working at a large bank for a few years. Although some coding is needed, the bulk majority of time is spent on server config changes, releasing code to production, asking other people for approvals, auth roles, and of course tons of meetings with the end user to find out what they need.
I guess when I was a junior engineer, I would spend more time looking at code, though I used to work for small companies. So it is hard for me to judge if the extra time spent coding, was because of me being a junior or because it was a small company.
The kicker, is when we interview devs, most of the interview is just about coding. Very little of it is about the stuff I listed…
Pretty common everywhere. https://staffeng.com/guides/staff-archetypes/
The better programmer you are, the more likely you get promoted in hopes of making the whole team good like you, the less time you spend doing what you were promoted for.
Seniority typically means the scope of your role increases - you interact with other teams more, you spend time on high-level design, etc.
From what you describe, it sounds like you’re doing that.
If you miss coding, you can assign yourself a few small bugs/features. That keeps you familiar with the codebase. It’s probably a good idea to choose stuff off the critical path, since the meetings are what you’re actually paid to do at this point.
I’m a principal engineer now, and I write the best code of my life today, and I also spend the least amount of time doing it.
I’m in network automation, so I spend a lot of time working with operators and specing change requests. I template what they do today to prevent errors, I then simplify those templates, expand them to be done in better ways, and write tools to automate the busy work.
Once the operators are happy running the tools instead of operating, they get hosted as a service, that schedulers and other tasks can call to remove the operator entirely where possible.
With our reduced operation time, we then scale up until we hit the operational limit again, and repeat.
Very typical to move in to a position where you are designing the code more than writing it. Junior devs probably can’t architect a system as well and especially if you already know the system well you are in a better position to know the best design. But with that comes writing, documenting, organising a team, planning work, estimating, interacting with project management and customers, going through the SDLC hoops. The junior devs get given a spec / design and “just have to type out the code”, with the seniors there to support, guide / mentor. This leaves very little room to code yourself, and the bits you do do might be the more complicated bits, in which case you should think about bringing along a junior for the ride and teach them. Or they might be the simple tools and libraries that you can do in a couple of hours because that’s all the time you can find to do it in.
I feel you. I’m a Senior Backend Engineer, and the more experienced I get, the less I code. And the meetings… so many meetings!
