Exactly. When I joined the company I'm at now (consumer energy industry), the energy crisis hit and the servers melted from all the people looking to fix their contracts etc. I wasn't directly involved, but loads of developers did a mammoth effort to rewrite old services to prevent this from ever happening again.
New energy crisis this year, the servers held, the company made a lot of money from new contracts via a combination of getting lucky with long-term buy-in contracts and the servers staying up unlike the competition. But there were no heroes, no praise to e.g. the developers putting in the extra hours, etc - it was business as usual, or business as it's supposed to be.
I've been noticing this as a solo dev. I need to put lots of work into infra and security, and all I get for it is... the thing not blowing up (hopefully!).
The work is invisible, and impossible to "show off", so it's a bit unrewarding and demoralizing. But hey, someone needs to do it!
And the worst part is, because it's invisible, a higher up manager will think "Ah, we don't need these people anymore, let's replace them with juniors, an external company, and/or AI". It's maddening.
It's why senior developers should end up in management or in positions of making decisions, but it's a completely different type of job to software development, where reason and objective truth and whatnot is barely relevant compared to social skills and connections. (this may be inaccurate, I'm not in that 'layer').
Exactly. When I joined the company I'm at now (consumer energy industry), the energy crisis hit and the servers melted from all the people looking to fix their contracts etc. I wasn't directly involved, but loads of developers did a mammoth effort to rewrite old services to prevent this from ever happening again.
New energy crisis this year, the servers held, the company made a lot of money from new contracts via a combination of getting lucky with long-term buy-in contracts and the servers staying up unlike the competition. But there were no heroes, no praise to e.g. the developers putting in the extra hours, etc - it was business as usual, or business as it's supposed to be.
I've been noticing this as a solo dev. I need to put lots of work into infra and security, and all I get for it is... the thing not blowing up (hopefully!).
The work is invisible, and impossible to "show off", so it's a bit unrewarding and demoralizing. But hey, someone needs to do it!
And the worst part is, because it's invisible, a higher up manager will think "Ah, we don't need these people anymore, let's replace them with juniors, an external company, and/or AI". It's maddening.
It's why senior developers should end up in management or in positions of making decisions, but it's a completely different type of job to software development, where reason and objective truth and whatnot is barely relevant compared to social skills and connections. (this may be inaccurate, I'm not in that 'layer').