Higher expectations at new level
I was a SWE II at my previous company but at my new company I am a SWE III. I recently just joined 2 months ago. In addition to one SWE II and engineer manager who joined at the same time; more or less. Our skipped recently assigned us to write up reports on SEV 3 incidents and do a read out. I felt like I definitely had higher expectations and was grilled way more.
The sev 3 incident I covered was about a sister team's API that went down. It was due to a vendor changing a new business rule. It now can return a null object which our database did not like. The meeting was schedule for just one hour. I felt like there was more expectations on me. Co-workers started to grill me for a full 50 minutes. My engineering manager follow soon. After I was done with my read out the SWE II did their presentation within 20 minutes; very little grilling.
After the meeting I had one co-worker who is at my same level send me a Slack message. In it he expressed how it's a little unfair how our skip threw a sev 3 incident report at me even though I was so new. Nevertheless, he mentioned how I should give more context such as how our domain was using our sister domain's API. That way people could follow the root cause easier. During my 1:1 with my engineering manager he expressed very similar views. Though one thing I will comment is that I think he's too new to have any genuine opinions of his own and he's piggybacking on the opinions of others to fulfill his part of engineering management. My engineering manager expressed that this whole requirement of sev 3 reports for new ICs felt rushed. Nevertheless, I should have came more prepare with better explanation of root cause, timeline of the incident, and action items so incidents like this will not happen again. He expressed that they eventually want me to grow where I can take on sev 2 or sev 1 incidents when I am on call.
At my previous company I was a SWE II and things felt easier. I never took on the role of incident management, writing up documentations or public speaking. After this week, the things I am going to start doing is to join the org wide incident read out so I can see the expectations of a read out and start to explore more of my team's systems. It's tough.