septerr

I am just a regular software engineer at a Silicon Valley company. I go to bed and wake up with anxiety on an almost daily basis. It all seems to stem from work.

Psychologically and philosophically speaking, the root cause is not work, rather my own mind etc. but :shrug:

I want to do a pulse check to see how common it is for folks working in tech, to suffer from this level of anxiety.

My company has "IC levels" 3 through 8. 5 = Senior Engineer, 6 = Staff, 7 = Principal. Not sure what title 8 gets.

There is a "rubric" that defines the things an engineer must demonstrate in order to qualify for each of these levels.

There is a similar system for engineering managers.

What I find is that the managers' rubric expects them to do their day to day job well and promotes them for it.

But the engineers' one expects them to do something out of the box after level 5. They ought to create something that will cause people to sit up and take notice. It does not matter if you wrote high quality code, raised the engineering quality bar for a team, led a team to ship and deliver on time consistently etc. Excelling at their actual work does not seem to matter.

The salaries for managers and ICs are the same at each level. This makes me think that the easiest way to rise up the echelons of a typical tech company and make money is to become an engineering manager. It feels like the role also allows you to have better work life balance. Instead of burning the midnight oil for the company, you can use your spare time to continue to code but on your own ideas. Plus no on-call rotation.

It also appears that interviewing as a manager must be easier. I feel they mostly have to pass behavioral type of interviews and let their experience mostly represent their qualifications. An IC on the other hand must really put in the work before getting on the interview beat - read something like cracking-the-coding-interview, refresh their knowledge of algorithms they would never use in their job etc.

I wonder if the system's been rigged by and for the engineering managers?

What is your opinion on this?

I'll start. I currently only know part of our architecture. Best described in terms of an API request's path:

Mobile (Native and React Native) and web (React) -> Cloudfare with page-rules -> AWS ALB -> Nginx. Nginx does (1) auth + (2) routes to Golang/gRPC micro services or a Rails monolith.

We are a consumer facing software and our problems arise during periods of high traffic. Usually, the monolith's database is the bottleneck. The push in my org right now is towards breaking the monolith into meaningful microservices.

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I want to vicariously learn how other companies are architecting their software to solve their unique problems. :-)

A friend, who is a programmer, was recently diagnosed with Parkinson's. He is in his late 30's.

Does any one here have Parkinson's? How many years has it been since you were diagnosed? Are you still programming? What advice would you give my friend?

How much time approximately do you spend with your significant other on weekdays and weekends?

If you take anti-depressants, what has their biggest impact been on your life? Have they made you more productive? Have you experienced any drawbacks?

(I am considering seeing a doctor about depression. I am not sure if what I experience is really depression. I have been wondering, maybe I have never experienced 'normal' as other people do. I wonder if they will help me focus better and be more productive, esp. in my spare time.)

What new things (technology related) are you learning (of choice)?

I am personally learning naught right now.