Background: 12 YoE senior/staff eng, 7 in my current role in systems/SRE. Ex-FAANG, still in “big tech” but a much smaller company.
I have been at my current employer for about 2 years now, and I am trying to find ways to get noticed and move up. There has been a lot of complaints about a particular workflow we use that hasn’t scaled well over the years, so I thought I’d focus in there. I came up with a proposal to improve the workflow and submitted it to my principal for review.
Their feedback? “Not needed, we’ll have AI agents deal with the toil.” No strategic direction, no architectural advice on how I can integrate agents into the workflow. Needless to say I was caught off guard by this and feel as though my proposal didn’t get the attention it deserved. I did a lot of research on the architecture I proposed and I feel the response was unduly dismissive.
Now, I have no way to prove this but I feel like this is due to my C-suite pushing for AI integrations in basically everything. I understand PEs drive direction pushed from the top-down, and sometimes that may include some investor buzzwords that VPs don’t actually understand. But “use AI” is not a real strategy, IMO. Yeah, AI can streamline some tasks, but in my mind you still need to architect solutions that scale well and make sense to humans that are operating them.
Coming from FAANG, I have a lot of respect for the title of principal engineer and always strove to get there myself one day. I was always impressed listening in on design review meetings and the amount of technical breadth and depth they had to drive architectural decisions. I am disappointed that my first attempt to improve things for my company was shot down with so little forethought by a PE.
tl;dr I came up with a well-researched proposal to improve an important workflow that wasn’t scaling well, and my PE told me that we can just use AI instead of investing on fixing our tech debt.
I haven’t experienced this before. Any advice would be appreciated!
I feel like this is due to my C-suite pushing for AI integrations in basically everything
I would put a small amount of money on it actually being because this guy was involved in setting up that workflow and sees your suggestion to fix it as criticism that it is shit (and by implication so is he).
Very common defence mechanism.
I agree with small amount of money. Far from a certain thing, but common enough to be worth risking a couple of bucks.
Edit: fixed typos
The advice depends on your reporting structure. If you have a mansger who is not the principal, then my advice is talk to your manager. They would know how to best navigate your corporate culture.
If the principal is your manager then unfortunately, its about being able to have a honest conversation. Ask him, “what would you do in my situation”
I work at a large non-tech company, you have heard of. We dont have rigid dev titles but i am the most senior tech person for our suite of applications. No one reports to me in an hr sense but dev decisions go through me.
Sure we have upper management pushing ai but we report to the internal business we support. So our decisions have to benefit the business. I just tell the other devs to explain how they used copolot to solve an issue in their annual review.
I use ai every day, for various things (not a lot of dev work) but your principal is trying to shoehorn something in for the sake of saying “ai”
I am sorry you have to go through such a review
We have a guy who joined us out of school and has been with us for a year. I trust his judgement. He is good at what he knows and comes to me for guidance. If he tells me he is going to fix an issue that has been bothering us and it doesnt conflict with a priority, i say go for it. Thata how it should be.