"A senior developer can develop a whole application from scratch by himself. Senior devs know about design patterns, architecture, automating testing, performance, security, debugging, bug fixing, testing, validation, etc. This doesn't mean they don't have questions or make mistakes, it means they know how to identify problems and where to find the right answers. That's why they are the ones who get assigned highly complicated tasks that require an exhaustive level of knowledge."
Ask HN: What qualities show that you're an experienced software engineer?
31–33 of 33 posts
Re: Ask HN: What qualities show that you're an experienced software engineer?
#321) You can anticipate complexity - the what, where, when and why of how it shows up. You are not afraid of it, but...
2) You manage your time well - yours and others'. Figure out when complexity needs to be handled. Respect other peoples' time, they also have important things to do that don't involve you. While you could spend 1 month to figure out the answer to this gnarly bug in open source software after running strace and tcpdump and poring over the linux kernel source code...ask yourself - is this the best use of my time? The answer might still be yes. Just don't forget to look up every once in a while.
3) You prove your skill at 1) and 2) to yourself and others by empirically testing your decisions and evaluating the results.
4) You realize there are trade-offs to every decision you make. This sounds trite until you recognize that things that seem like no-brainers to you aren't, to others. This also applies to how you choose your workplace. Every place I have ever worked at has one really fucking annoying issue, but I have seen enough of these that I can rank them in preference.
5) You are aware of how others perceive you. Peer feedback on your performance should never be a surprise to you. If people were scheming against you, you probably should have known.
I guess after you feel comfortable with these things, you kind of stop caring about the answer to "am I experienced enough?"
Re: Ask HN: What qualities show that you're an experienced software engineer?
#33You say "programmatic & design qualities" but I actually think a senior developer is more productive because they enhance team health by creating vision, mentoring junior devs, and effectively articulating their vision. This ultimately is the difference: can you expand your productivity by setting the team's pace and get others bought into a vision on how things should be done? If no, you could be the smartest tech w…
I've always wondered if a developer who gets shit done would be offended if I told them what they've done is shit.
Really depends on how much trust and empathy there's in the team.. I say my stuff is shit all the time and am okay w/ others saying it too in the context of my team.
If a random person emails me saying my code is shit -- not so well as I lack rapport w/ them. But, if random person emails me saying why my code isn't ideal and how I could improve, that would be awesome