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

1. Turn to online communities to help you learn. Find the appropriate Reddits and Discords, hang out on Stackoverflow, join Bluesky/Mastodon and follow a bunch of people in the same space as you.

2. Start teaching others. The best way to learn is to teach. Answer questions on Stackoverflow that you know the answer to, help people out in Discord.

3. Start a blog! Even if nobody ever reads it, writing about what you're learning is an incredibly accelerant for understanding things more deeply and retaining more knowledge.

4. Conferences. Ask your boss if you can get a budget to attend conferences relevant to your work. See if they'll shell out extra for workshops.

5. Side projects. If you want to learn something new and you don't get the opportunity at work, see if there's a small side project you can spin up to start experimenting with it.

6. Find people in similar roles to you at other local companies and see if you can get into a pattern of meeting up every month or so to talk about what you're learning and share notes. Obviously don't go sharing trade secrets with the competition, but in my experience there is always a huge amount you can learn from talking to peers in other companies, in an environment where people feel safe to let their guard down a little and talk openly about problems they are facing.

You don't need to FOMO that, really. It works like that in theory, in practice... In about 2 years of work in a midsize company, I learn about one or two little details from the tech leads in the company. Two third of them were spending more time asking why one would think there are worth asking them a question than replying the question itself. The level of rockstar insufferableness was off the charts.