You take on a fucking lot of responsibility, start giving demos, working with product managers, marketers, help teach people what is possible in the product and what isn’t. This isn’t a chill gig. It rarely is. It usually involves a fuck ton of effort and planning.

This is just part of jobs in general and if you had any indication it wouldn’t be you were lied to. One of the early things I remember being told in engineering school is that you will have to be social and work on a team. As soon as a project requires more than a few people then you will be working on cross-functional teams and need to work together with a variety of people.

Often you will be underpaid compared to the effort you put in

You might be shocked to learn that employers do not pay for “effort”, they pay for the (perceived) value you bring to the business. People that get paid well are value multipliers (or they play the game well enough to appear that they do). The people that work with them do more because they are there guiding things. If you don’t bring that value, you tend to top out at “Senior” engineer titles and the pay that brings with it. I’ve had to have somewhat blunt conversations with people to explain that I’ve given them a poor performance review not because they haven’t put in the hours, but because they aren’t using their effort efficiently. Working overtime consistently is an indication of poor prioritization and delegation more than having too much work.

As someone that absolutely despises self-checkout I’d be happy if this was the case, but I don’t believe this. I’ve had stores open up near me this year that only have self-checkout options.

I’m not doing labour for a company where I’m not getting a discount for it. I’d rather wait longer in line for a person to do it than to go through self-checkout out of principle. Plus all self-checkouts I’ve ever used are designed end up pissing me off because they are designed to be user hostile.