u/chasectid

Hey, I have about 7YoE and I joined a mid-sized B2B SAAS startup in late ‘24 and have been working there since.

I originally joined in the designation of Software Engineer II and got recently promoted to Senior Software Engineer here.

The company makes good money and have very wealthy clientele. However, their entire software foundations seem extremely flimsy to me and my team often suffers from the shortcomings of several other systems randomly failing on us.

Result of this? High support volume, high amounts of customer asks, incidents and support tickets and we crumble under the pressure.

For the first year of my tenure, I tried to do RCA fixes and aligned with several cross functional staff engineers to maintain a standard of delivery ensuring our systems don’t regress.

However, our business leadership itself is against all of this. They want their products out as soon as possible and our Eng leaders don’t have the backbone to pushback for quality.

This means no matter what we do, we’re stuck with a mountain of garbage that never clears. You do blitz week, quality week, operational week everything has been tried on the book, 3 months later we find ourselves back in square 1.

Now I have given up and sorta lost interest in all of this. I focus on my core project deliverables, begrudgingly take up Oncall and only think about all this stuff for that 1 particular week.

I had a 1:1 with my manager and he said that since I’m a senior engineer now, I should be taking a lead on one of the operational components (like API Failures) and attempt to keep it as healthy as possible.

Now, I know this ask is not unreasonable and I have done this throughout my career, however I’m extremely bored and want nothing to do with these things in my team as I’ve given up all hopes of things getting better. I like doing projects and maintain high levels of quality there, so i don’t think I’m burned out. But I don’t have any motivations to fix systemic issues here. I don’t wanna get promoted to staff anytime soon either.

Does that make me a bad senior engineer?

It irks me when people theorise like “Oh The Iriali must’ve explored the emberdark before they left Roshar”

The way I see it Irialis must have multiple groups within themselves going on their own long trail. Maybe the people stick together right now, but they might’ve diverged initially.

If it’s an entire race of people, I highly doubt there are no more than populating a region within Roshar. I believe there would be multiple such trails going on in parallel.

What do you guys think?