Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

281–290 of 305 posts

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

#281

It is entirely possible to learn by yourself online. I did it! But a warning: you will spend years in the weeds, focusing on things that don't matter. Good in-person advisors can help you avoid some years wasted time. The fastest way to learn is to move to the Bay Area and work with people who have been doing this for decades. That is not a sufficient criteria (anyone can be a bad teacher), but the experience is extr…

> But a warning: you will spend years in the weeds, focusing on things that don't matter.

That sums up anyone's college experience.

The hard part is telling apart what doesn't matter from what does. More often than not, what dictates which is which is the project you find yourself working on.

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

#282

Craving for a team of more senior people to learn from, "yodas" who guide you - is a fallacy. I hear younger people mentioning it in interviews constantly as to what they dream team would look like. You can learn from everyone around you, regardless of their status. There is no "universal developer experience curve", everyone has more or less knowledge on a field or with a specific tool/framework. You can learn almos…

> You can learn from everyone around you, regardless of their status. There is no "universal developer experience curve", everyone has more or less knowledge on a field or with a specific tool/framework.

There's a big difference between learning from someone and having someone teach you something. The latter expedites your progress and clarifies learning path, whereas the former can even waste your time with political fights pulling you into dead-ends.

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

#283
I am fully self taught, was a Senior Dev at Amazon (got it after 2 years of the L5 Standard Dev), and prior to that, spent about 4 years in the industry.

The last thing you want to do is learn from a senior. Any worthwhile mentor that actually is worth listening to will usually tell you to go try stuff and figure it out.

If you have a laptop, you have all the information and environment to learn. The only thing that you need to have is a framework of learning, which is very simply this:

Chose a feature to work on -> Write some code -> something doesn't work -> research the error, figure out why it doesn't work -> try various solutions until it works.

Rinse and repeat.

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

#284
There are a lot of suggestions here that seem problematic. For example, the idea that you should read everything and actually understand every detail. While it's a good idea to read a lot about your craft, this task is literally unlimited in the time that it can consume. Do read about best practices, a lot, but experience is probably even more important, and my suggestion is about maximizing the benefit of your experience:

I suggest this high level idea, which I have done in isolation in the past and caused tremendous growth. Think of something you'd like to optimize, run an experiment over a year and take careful notes. For example, once I decided I wanted to minimize defects that I released into production. For a year, I tracked every single defect I released into production, and made brief notes about how I could have avoided it. This led to me completely changing my attitudes and approaches about what is important. I discovered, for example, that very few of my production failures were caused by me writing code with bugs, and that by far what I needed to do is improve my testing strategies, what kind of data I test with, and how faithfully I represent the production situation during unit testing and end to end testing, and how I approach testing in general. There were a lot of observations and approach changes I made, but the thing that made these really stick is that they were my own lessons. Everything in my process was rooted in a hard lesson I learned myself. Whenever someone asks me why I do X I have a war story to back it up.

The point is, you can figure out for yourself the big areas to improve if you set a goal for a thing you want to improve, and carefully record your results, and review those periodically and look for commonalities. You can look at the advice from others endlessly, but the best teacher is experience, usually your own. Make the most of your own experience by figuring out what's important to you and think about process improvement for yourself and those that you work with, as a first class thing.

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

#285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In general, read the NASA workmanship standards guides for wiring/crimps, and failure analysis documentation like tin-whiskers/shock/vibration/ignition. When working in an industrial setting priorities need to shift away from cost optimized garbage people obsess over like chatGPT, and understand when you mess up people may get seriously injured or dead. Understand shell-offshore standards compliance rules, and explos…

So they don’t have lockout systems on oil rig equipment yet?

I can't discuss client specific internals, but some equipment takes 3 days to bring up online.

People are fragile, maintenance/inspections need done, and team communication is more important than any lock with a post-it note. People mess up, and other people bear the consequences. The "figure it out as we go crowd" is not welcome... =3

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

#286

> But even then, I'm afraid I am not producing the software to the highest standards of the industry since we don't have any rigorous cross-checking, I wouldn't worry about this too much. As long as what you're doing seems to vaguely match whatever information about best practices you can find online, you're probably good. As long as you're not inventing your own security tech, using floating point values for financi…

> Reusing feature flags in a high frequency trading scenario I think I read about this story

https://dougseven.com/2014/04/17/knightmare-a-devops-caution...

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

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everybody has different learning styles and it's almost condescending to say "well, this method that works well for you is a fallacy, try my method".

Learning styles is something that's actually not supported by science at all and a common myth that is damaging. https://onlineteaching.umich.edu/articles/the-myth-of-learni... There's a good back about how to learn effectively written by cognitive scientists: Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning by Henry L. Roediger III, Mark A. McDaniel, and Peter C. Brown Definitely worth a read, even reading a summar…

OMG, that's great to see. Finally scientific proof that I was right when I refused to do "highlighting" like they were trying to make us in school and university.

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

#288
post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And there's an adage updated with modern understanding "Perfect practice makes perfect" . It's not just repetitions but ensuring you train the patterns you wish to do automatically next time. Excellent code is slow to write, the first 10 times, but eventually it's just as fast as junky code.

You should keep in mind that code quality is mostly subjective. You can create a PR that coworker 1 loves because it hides the complexity and then have coworker 2 come in and say that it's complete garbage, because while the complexity is hidden, it still has to be understood in this context, only increasing the difficulty of working with the project I.e using a state-machine vs a switch/case to determine a status at…

There are also those who view obscure and quasi-obfuscated ways of solving a problem as "elegant" as opposed to more straightforward and easy-to-read ones. Usually found near the ones ranting about superfluous code comments.

Or making/sharing LinkedIn posts showing the uber-obscure or complicated "Senior Developer Solution" next to the more straightforward and easy-to-read "Junior Developer Solution."

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

#289
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you learn how to learn well?

I tell myself to not adhd it and instead take time and read through a whole manual, experiment in a local sandbox, grasp the limits of knowledge and features and also where it gets deep. Then in a regular work I explicitly detect where it pays off and feel “see I told you”. This creates a motivational loop to continue not-adhd-ing through tech. Sometimes I still fly over the knowledge, but then may note that what I’v…

I love the manual method and occasionally used it. Basically assuming there is no Internet, just a book and a repo of source code and try to figure out how to do something.

Sadly I'm now so easily burnout that even setting a dev env up can burn me out.

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

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So they don’t have lockout systems on oil rig equipment yet?

I can't discuss client specific internals, but some equipment takes 3 days to bring up online. People are fragile, maintenance/inspections need done, and team communication is more important than any lock with a post-it note. People mess up, and other people bear the consequences. The "figure it out as we go crowd" is not welcome... =3

I'm just learning about lockout systems from convos on the internet, but the idea is you have a device that locks the equipment in shutdown mode. Apparently fairly common in power generation. The hasp (the part the shackle goes into) has multiple holes, and everyone doing maintenance has their own lock, which they all put on while they're in the danger zone.

You're supposed to remove your lock when you finish up, but it sounds like sometimes angry phone calls have to be made.

Post reply on HN