Does your job get easier and less time consuming as you rise up the corporate ladder?

Hi everyone,

I'm probably not phrasing the question correctly. But here it goes.

I'm asking this to better understand the perspective of different roles on the technical ladder. I'd love for people to share more about their experiences in their roles, be it EM, Senior EMs, Staffs, Principals, D, VP, SVP, CTO

I know that as you grow in your career, the further you get from being hands-on as a developer. But you are still expected to be technically strong. I have been reading the two books "Manager's Path" and "Staff Engineer's Path" to better understand the next steps in my career. But I'd like to learn more from you folks. Do you find that you have to work even harder than before or more time at work, or do you base it on different metrics now?

Here's me. I'm currently a Senior SWE in a big tech company. My experiences vary from Start-ups to FANG. During my time in FANG, I'd say I'm the grunt of the company. My day-to-day would look like this: - code refactoring, optimization - await/ask for tasks from EM/Senior to work on - design and developing new services/features - documentation/design documents - operational excellence - being a silent listener in meetings - Oncall ;(

Now as a Senior SWE, I spent most of my time doing the following: - Led meetings in the team, encouraging knowledge-sharing, and mentorship initiatives within the team, and sister teams - Doing (once in a long while) informal 1-1s with the teammates so that I know them better in terms of strengths, weaknesses, interests, ambitions, personal life, etc. This is partially being a human (to me) and assisting in assigning tasks accordingly. (This is more of an EM's job, but he comes to me for advice at times.) - Being an architect in the team. I'm normally the first to take up major projects and develop technical specs. I may or may not own the implementation depending on bandwidth. - Ensuring that the services that my team owns are running healthily, operational excellence, observability, documentation, reviewing PRs and other technical documents. - Collaborating with other teams, answering technical questions here and there, etc. (This is rotated sometimes) - Code implementation in whatever tasks that I'm taking on. - Occassionally, depending on the scope, leading projects involving multiple teams - Oncall ;(

I'd say that writing design documents take up a lot of my time. But I actually really enjoy this a lot now compared to writing code constantly. I used to hate writing documents because I'm bad at them. But as I grew in my career. I learned the importance of it and being a good communicator. Being able to communicate via writing is an a real skillset.