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

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

#61

Post by rawgabbit »

Even when I was in large companies with over 10K employees, there were times due to internal politics I could not interact with more experienced folks. Truth be told, the difference between fresh graduates and seasoned people... is the more experienced people learned from the school of hard knocks.

Most of which can be distilled into: Don't follow fads, the latest shiny tech; they will only break your heart and maybe ruin your career. You want to deliver a quality product that just works, never breaks down, and if it does it is easily diagnosed.

What that means is (a) use software from vendors you can trust and have actual live support (this means they are usually expensive) (b) KISS. In a small shop you will be responsible for everything. You want as few moving parts as possible. You especially want to avoid all custom integrations; they suck. If software B doesn't offer an out of the box connector to software A which your company already is using. They are immediately ruled out. (c) never trust a salesman/saleswoman. Before you sign any contract, you want to try it out as proof of concept. Just because they say they have an out of the box connector, for example, does it actually sync the fields you want? Verify it works before signing any contract. If the salesman doesn't like it, tell them good bye.

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

#62

Post by rich_sasha »

rawgabbit wrote: post #61

Even when I was in large companies with over 10K employees, there were times due to internal politics I could not interact with more experienced folks. Truth be told, the difference between fresh graduates and seasoned people... is the more experienced people learned from the school of hard knocks. Most of which can be distilled into: Don't follow fads, the latest shiny tech; they will only break your heart and maybe…

KISS actually means, sometimes write it from scratch yourself, which will save you time short-term and teach you great stuff long-term, rather than use the "industry standard".

When setting up my current operation, I needed a job scheduling framework. I looked at Airflow, but by the time I had to choose a DB backend and create usernames and set up SMTP server, I gave up. In half a day I knocked together a basic single machine scheduler, which does 5% of what Airflow does. But it does that very well, took me frankly less time than setting up this behemoth, and works really well for my team.

Is it better than Airflow, or Prefect, or whatnot? Surely not; but it saved me time and taught me a lot about job scheduling.

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

#63

Post by hstojkoski »

christoff12 wrote: post #58
janoc wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not about "being taught". But if you are the only technical person around, who is going to show you what a good or bad practice *in your specific field* is? That you won't find on Stack Overflow or by asking ChatGPT. Being able to talk to an experienced mentor who knows the field you are working in is invaluable. Unlike learning some framework or design patters or what not, this information you won't find anywh…

You'd be surprised at how useful Stack Overflow and ChatGPT can be at helping to illuminate knowledge gaps. I've found that one of the harder aspects of being unguided is figuring out the unknown unknowns. You might stumble into a solution of sorts that mirrors a best practice but not know there's a "name" for that solution -- until you see it spelled out after googling around. That discovery can lead you down a rabb…

I think the OP you are replying to points to "you don't know what you don't know". SO and ChatGPT can be useful, if you know what you are doing is fishy and ask for directions.

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

#64

Post by rawgabbit »

rich_sasha wrote: post #62
rawgabbit wrote: post #61

Even when I was in large companies with over 10K employees, there were times due to internal politics I could not interact with more experienced folks. Truth be told, the difference between fresh graduates and seasoned people... is the more experienced people learned from the school of hard knocks. Most of which can be distilled into: Don't follow fads, the latest shiny tech; they will only break your heart and maybe…

KISS actually means, sometimes write it from scratch yourself, which will save you time short-term and teach you great stuff long-term, rather than use the "industry standard". When setting up my current operation, I needed a job scheduling framework. I looked at Airflow, but by the time I had to choose a DB backend and create usernames and set up SMTP server, I gave up. In half a day I knocked together a basic singl…

I didn’t say anything about not writing code yourself. Sometimes that is the best choice. KISS to me means simplicity and less moving parts. If you have to hire a large team to support your data flow, I would argue you are doing KISS wrong.

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

#65

Post by rich_sasha »

rawgabbit wrote: post #64
rich_sasha wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

KISS actually means, sometimes write it from scratch yourself, which will save you time short-term and teach you great stuff long-term, rather than use the "industry standard". When setting up my current operation, I needed a job scheduling framework. I looked at Airflow, but by the time I had to choose a DB backend and create usernames and set up SMTP server, I gave up. In half a day I knocked together a basic singl…

I didn’t say anything about not writing code yourself. Sometimes that is the best choice. KISS to me means simplicity and less moving parts. If you have to hire a large team to support your data flow, I would argue you are doing KISS wrong.

I didn't think I was disagreeing with you...

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

#66

Post by protocolture »

My first job out of uni was with an IT recycling company that was trying to extract itself from the rest of its conglomerate. I wore so many hats I could have started a store. Our highest security priority was preventing the other members of the conglomerate from seeing our customer list, for instance.

My tip is to try and best practice everything. Locate the correct method online, especially if theres applicable vendor best practice. Every time the director asked me to do something new, I would go away and find out what I should be doing, and then made that the basis of our negotiations. I didn't win every one of these fights, but I managed to spin the job so far that I did IP telephony, Security Cameras, built the company's ad forest and hundreds of other small relevant to my career wins. I ended up with 2 direct reports. And in the process I took a very immature business and injected a large amount of maturity that they kept with them for more than a decade. And I did them correctly, or as correctly as I could without support. By the time I looked to move on I was immediately made a senior in my next role.

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

#67

Post by arealaccount »

rich_sasha wrote: post #62
rawgabbit wrote: post #61

Even when I was in large companies with over 10K employees, there were times due to internal politics I could not interact with more experienced folks. Truth be told, the difference between fresh graduates and seasoned people... is the more experienced people learned from the school of hard knocks. Most of which can be distilled into: Don't follow fads, the latest shiny tech; they will only break your heart and maybe…

KISS actually means, sometimes write it from scratch yourself, which will save you time short-term and teach you great stuff long-term, rather than use the "industry standard". When setting up my current operation, I needed a job scheduling framework. I looked at Airflow, but by the time I had to choose a DB backend and create usernames and set up SMTP server, I gave up. In half a day I knocked together a basic singl…

Kiss actually means write it yourself if you dont need a big framework, but use the big framework if it’s going to take an army to build it in house

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

#68

Post by DougN7 »

My “mentors” (or other people who influenced me) mostly taught me (a few different times) to expect more of my output. As a programmer that meant to spend more time thinking things through, write bullet-proof code (as much as I could) and to challenge my assumptions. I have now transferred to you 80% of what I got from them (though they definitely got those principles deeper into my being than I’ve just been able to do).

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

#70

Post by disambiguation »

newfocogi wrote: post #38
vinay_ys wrote: post #22

Couple of important lessons that will keep you in good stead for a long time: 1. Learn how to learn well, continuously, and sustainably. Tech changes rapidly. And you will want to hop from one domain to another, just for keeping things interesting and to move with markets. This is both a blessing and a curse. It is a blessing because you can start late and still be in the top percentile if you have the brains and wor…

How do you learn how to learn well?

You're doing it right now, i.e ask questions and seek answers.
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