“Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.”
Engineers, similar to humans — want to build new systems, new products, and deliver massive impact on a near infinite cycle of continual output. However, a decent chunk of Senior IC work is doing a lot of stuff nobody else wants to do — sure, there is the fun stuff but there’s also the maintaining important but (maybe) boring systems. This doesn’t necessarily mean that this work is unvalued or underappreciated — but it might not be fun, and it also might not be attributed to you in this or really, any calibration cycle.
That being said, I do think it’ll definitely make you a better, more valuable engineer — in ways that at times might be hard to measure but that being said, paradoxically — I would attribute a lot of my professional growth at Lyft to learning about critical systems and helping Lyft be more successful by using knowledge learned through inbound queries, “incidents” and other fun events.
These learnings didn’t deliver immediate impact, but rather a delayed impact which was realized months (or years) later through new projects; these second order consequences unlocked our ability to build a number of driver focused products, all of which wouldn’t have been possible without these understandings.
None of these unlocks would’ve been discovered through assigned feature work, or product development — because ultimately the product doesn’t care about core systems until they want to change them. Only ownership provides this unlock — it’s up to individual engineers to flex the muscle of reading other people’s code, understanding request flows, and other at times puzzling issues in order to build up our Product Development toolbelt.
The role of an IC is “about knowing the answers while managers ask the questions”. Senior ICs should always seem like the smartest people in the room — and I’ve no doubt their ability to understand systems they didn’t construct is a large part of that, because the more systems you know, the more tools you understand — the more answers you have.
