Ask HN: How can I grow as an engineer without good seniors to learn from?

Came here to say this.

The Oil & Gas industry is not sexy and never will be, but it pays well above market and people with niche skills will do very well there (as you have no doubt now seen).

Technological progress in the space tends to move pretty slowly (especially on the Operational Technology side of the business) owing to many factors, but mainly risk avoidance. The flip-side of this is that once one company adopts a technology, the others tend to follow suite, so what you're doing may be very portable should the need arise.

Another benefit of O&G is that due the the specialised nature of a lot of the roles, you'll keep running into the same people at different organisations throughout your career, so keep your keep expanding your network along the way.

Don't let your perception of slow growth worry you too much - on the technology side, progression will come naturally as you take on new and more challenging projects. As a tech in a very different field, but a similarly isolated environment, I too have had these thoughts throughout my career, but remember there is a big wide world outside of silicon valley, and plenty of successful careers to be had.

It sounds like you have a boss you like who you could learn a lot from - this is huge. I'd focus on getting him to teach you to become a domain expert in the Oil & Gas space. This combined with your (relatively) niche technology skills will make you a unicorn in the future and combined with your network, pave the way should you want to become independent in years to come.

Good luck!

I agree. Writing well is _highly_ technical.

I don't think you necessarily need a mentor. I would do that:

1. Learn algorithms, buy some book and start reading.

2. Learn theory of neural networks, use the Chollet book to develop some knowledge and intuition.

3. Write many small "pet" programs implementing basic stuff: implement a small database, a small programming language interpreter, a small editor, a small neural network, ... Each time try to apply good design.

4. Embrace simplicity in everything you write, don't make things more complex than needed.

5. Read good quality code, especially read open source code which is at a degree of complexity that makes reading valuable. Dont' read Kubernets... or PostgreSQL perhaps. Learn more self-contained code bases.

6. Participate to some OSS poject.

7. Start some side-project and put it on GitHub, were you are the main designer. Develop something that you need. A library, or a small utility, something that you really enojoy doing. Do it at a quality level that makes you happy. Never regret pushing code on GitHub if you feel that for the level you are right now it is appropriate.

8. Don't give a fuck about what other programmers think of your work, if you did it at the max level of what you can do. Anyway most programs on the Internet suck, including the ones of people feeling very competent.

Most people don't have seniors to learn from, so don't feel like you are behind because of that. What I did was constantly build stuff at home, commercialization motivating me. I learned plenty of stuff that way. I created websites in the early days of the WWW. I created iPhone apps back when it came out, I created improved versions of apps used at work, I built new apps that work would use, etc. I kept in mind that these apps needed to work at the "enterprise" level, so I had to make sure they could handle load, had efficient algorithms, database structures, etc.

My thought process was I get to learn stuff, so even if I didn't make any money off it (I mostly didn't), I learned how to ship. This included (yuck) documentation, QA, etc. Doing things like that you really learn not only how to code and how to structure your programs, but about the 80/20 rule which to me is it takes 20% to get POC and 80% to get it ready to ship.

The senior I finally got to work with was mainly to validate that I was on the right path, because I could write just as well as he could. I met this guy probably 4 years into my career and we were pretty equal at that time. He had about 5+ more years experience than me, and he was VERY sharp. I probably haven't worked with someone better since and this was 20+ years ago.

One more thing, I was the "computer guy," at my first company out of college. I did the workstation building and support, the networking, the server setup and user administration (Windows NT days), and wrote applications in MS Access for the company to use. I had to interview the users and managers on what the apps should do and whatnot. I had to learn how to scale MS Access for 250+ user base (ugh). I had to do all the reports and everything computer related. That company was a toxic shithole but it was actually a blessing. I never would have learned as much had I got a big corporate job. You tend to get pigeonholed in those places doing the same thing over and over. And yes, I was terrified of not being good enough the whole time; that helped too.

Good luck!

actually he should be comparing with other software engineers in his industry