Legitimate-School-59 shares a behind-the-scenes look at the technical and business realities for senior engineers earning over 150k, focusing on Azure migrations, large-scale codebase management, security enhancements, and more.

What Senior Engineers Earning 150k+ Work On: Tech and Business Realities

By Legitimate-School-59

This candid community reflection explores the day-to-day responsibilities of senior engineers and architects working in large enterprises with complex Microsoft-centric stacks. Below is a breakdown of recurring technical and business tasks based on real-world experience:

Core Technical Tasks

  • Azure Security and Networking: Segmenting Azure infrastructure into new VNets for improved security, carefully avoiding disruptions to production applications.
  • ETL and Data Processing Architecture:
    • Building new Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) processes for more robust data consumption.
    • Migrating from legacy SSIS packages to modern solutions like Azure Data Factory, Logic Apps, and Azure Functions, plus Snowflake for analytics.
  • Application and Codebase Modernization:
    • Large-scale React app redesign.
    • Gradual migration from numerous small git repositories to a consolidated monorepo setup, resolving dependency problems (notably “10 years of NuGet artifact hell”).
    • Upgrading the codebase to .NET 9 ecosystem-wide.
  • Software Maintenance and Review:
    • Ongoing pull request reviews, code cherry-picking for releases, and managing the branching strategy.
    • Maintaining institutional C# backend services and performing frequent upgrades.
  • Documentation and Onboarding:
    • Creating detailed manuals for developer onboarding, environment setup, and branching strategies.

Typical Business & Organizational Challenges

  • Meetings and Review Overheads:
    • High frequency of meetings, grooming sessions, architecture calls, and collaborative decision reviews.
    • Pull request reviews and internal communications are flagged as notable time sinks.
  • Management and Coordination:
    • Managing people, fielding stakeholder requests, and acting as a liaison between business and technical decision-makers.
    • “Telling people above me to not make stupid decisions”—illustrating the challenge of influencing technical direction from within.
  • Resource Constraints & Deadlines:
    • Constantly juggling resource allocation, deadlines, and the expectation to “find hours that don’t exist” for urgent development work.
  • Legacy Systems and Vendor Software:
    • Maintenance and troubleshooting of institutional and vendor software, with humorous references to outdated tech and arcane error messages.

Roles Held

  • Enterprise Architect
  • Development Manager
  • DevOps
  • “Professional puck passer” (tongue-in-cheek title for dealing with internal bureaucracy)

Representative Technologies & Concepts

  • Azure: Virtual Networks, Azure Functions, Logic Apps, Azure Data Factory
  • .NET (specifically migrating to .NET 9)
  • DevOps: Monorepo migrations, NuGet management, Git branching, release management
  • Data Platforms: SQL Server, Snowflake, legacy SSIS
  • Frontend: React
  • Security: Network segmentation, application security improvements

Common Themes

  • Frustration with business processes and resource allocation
  • Technical debt accumulation and cleanup initiatives
  • Emphasis on pragmatism and problem-solving under real-world constraints
  • Centrality of Microsoft technologies in enterprise-scale engineering

“I spend most days telling people above me to not make stupid decisions…”

This thread offers a grounded, unfiltered look at what it really means to drive and support large-scale tech initiatives inside a business, highlighting the intersection of advanced Microsoft technology stacks and the human factors that shape daily engineering life.

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