I'm not sure if this is the best place to drop this anecdote, but I looked at a position where the responsibilities included working on the backend API and partner integrations, third party integrations, machine learning, internal tools and reporting, devops, and Postgres administration (including query optimization, horizontal partitioning, and reliability).
Since it was a small-ish company, I thought maybe this was just their generic "senior software engineer" posting. Nope. I asked them. They actually expected people to be able to work on all of those things. By my count, that's about 5 different teams that should be working on those things... except that this place has ~15 engineers. I self selected out of that process because, although I could certainly do the API and integrations stuff, if I'm the best person you've got to work on ML, your company is in bad shape.
I probably could have applied and gotten an interview anyway, maybe even gotten the job, but I know it wouldn't have been someplace I could do my best work. I'm very glad I'm not there.
Since it was a small-ish company, I thought maybe this was just their generic "senior software engineer" posting. Nope. I asked them. They actually expected people to be able to work on all of those things. By my count, that's about 5 different teams that should be working on those things... except that this place has ~15 engineers. I self selected out of that process because, although I could certainly do the API and integrations stuff, if I'm the best person you've got to work on ML, your company is in bad shape.
I probably could have applied and gotten an interview anyway, maybe even gotten the job, but I know it wouldn't have been someplace I could do my best work. I'm very glad I'm not there.