Ask HN: What are some educational resources for more senior engineers?

Very much so. We're kind of arriving at a workflow which dictates: If one of the experts or architects has to be asked about some topic, the documentation in that area has to be improved, ideally together with that expert and based on their answer. Similar to how an SLA relevant outage requires a post mortem to fix or mitigate root causes.

Not gonna lie, initially this was somewhat annoying. You had to type up long aeswers, or talk about a topic a lot, and then you had to write the same thing down again. So much repetition and so much markdown! So much time not doing tech stuff.

But doing this for a while.. well initially we ran into the problem of having too much documentation and needing to organize it. We enlisted help from technical writers in the company there a bit. But doing this for a while has resulted in very effective documentation for the teams. Not just architectural decisions written from an ivory tower. Very hands-on design guidelines, explanations and how-tos from practical projects in the company. If the ivory-tower-architect yells at you with a direction, those tell you how to get there.

And this generates a lot of velocity and trust in the teams. You have a problem, you pick up the guide, and for seasoned topics, your problem disappears within that sprint with that guide.

https://AllEngineeringBlogs.com covers all company engineering blogs and sends daily updates.

The senior engineer's job is managing engineering intangibles:

- psychology

- team work

- understanding economics, business context

- establishing reinforcing and refining culture

- setting a strong example, inspiring through practical demonstration + theory/reasoning

- improving standards in every aspect of engineering

- championing the system, making it work, but also making it shine

- retaining the best people, raising their standards even further

- dealing with politics at an above average level (not necessarily at grand-master level)

- "wisdom" - humility, strong will, reasonable words, firm decisions, etc

I'd recommend reading about Admiral Rickover. If I had to recommend one book - "The never-ending challenge of Engineering".

If you have less time, read his essay "Doing a job": https://govleaders.org/rickover.htm

The big 5 personality traits. Openness conscientiousness extraversion Agreeableness and neuroticism. It is a more scientific way to talk about team dynamics and personality.

https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fsocialsci.libretexts.org...