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Ask HN: What non-technical skills make a senior dev and how to develop them?

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Re: Ask HN: What non-technical skills make a senior dev and how to develop them?

#121

Post by bbcbasic »

humanrebar wrote: post #38
mknocker wrote: post #36

Being the last man standing. Seems sad but when people leave bad company, usually the people who stay get promoted and some of them become senior developer. I have seen this strange pattern a few times.

Absolutely. A good way to make this happen is to crank out piles of write-only code. You'll look more productive than your peers and you'll be the expert on a relatively large part of the system. When things inevitability go wrong, you'll also be the hero that powers through the weekend hacking a solution together. Be sure not to document or comment this code. It makes your memories critical to the operation of the b…

Ha ha. Generate the piles of code but keep the generation program private. Then being a hero and refactoring thousands of lines takes you five minutes at the weekend. Evil!

Re: Ask HN: What non-technical skills make a senior dev and how to develop them?

#122

Post by mk89 »

mknocker wrote: post #75
mk89 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if I actually know you and the user mknocker. Seriously, it's scary to read this stuff for how real it is :)

Good to know I am not alone :) There are a few pinpoints also to detect if the company you are interviewing to is one of these. Usually, they are 'building' a new team for an existing product. As I grew up in my career I started to develop the reflex to ask why the previous folks left. You might not get an honest answer but at least it gives you more information either you should continue the hiring process or not.

That's a very good hint, thanks!

I also usually ask "if someone has left the company in the last year" or so. However, they might lie, but most of the time they are not prepared for such a question. Reading micro-expressions (I am trying to learn...!) and the tone of the voice might help you with that, so that you can dig in and put some pressure to get some truth out of it.

Re: Ask HN: What non-technical skills make a senior dev and how to develop them?

#123

Post by CiPHPerCoder »

bbcbasic wrote: post #120
CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't know. As I said, I don't have the free time for those. :P

Sounds like you choose to spend your free time not at parties. Which is cool. So do I.

Yes and no. I made a choice years ago and I'm still enduring the consequences of it, with no recourse until I cross the finish line.

Re: Ask HN: What non-technical skills make a senior dev and how to develop them?

#124

Post by avn2109 »

hluska wrote: post #100
rzzzt wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any suggestions for becoming more accurate when it comes to estimating effort? I find that my estimates are generally all over the place and multiple attempts at predicting how much time it will take to complete an assignment don't converge as time passes. Even though I had seen and been given diverse tasks over the course of my work, I can not really pick a previous item of similar magnitude for referenc…

I'm not terribly good at this, but I've had some luck taking the first answer that pops to mind and multiplying it by three. It's a crude method, but over time, it has worked well for me.

This usually works OK in practice for small or medium projects, but as Brooks points out in the Mythical Man Month, you are also tripling your estimation error. This can cause a lot of divergence for longer projects.

Re: Ask HN: What non-technical skills make a senior dev and how to develop them?

#125

Post by enraged_camel »

kafkaesq wrote: post #97
OpenDrapery wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Willingness to do grunt work is a fast track to becoming a manager who says "I haven't coded in years". No good deed goes unpunished. When you step up to be a team player and do that grunt work, you open yourself up to getting more and more of it. Next thing you know you have to stand up for yourself or become a door mat.

If you're in an environment where rolling up one's sleeves and taking on the grunt work leads so quickly to negative reinforcement loops, in the way you describe... then that's a sure sign that you've found yourself in the wrong environment. In healthy environments (and yes, they do exists) good deeds are actually rewarded, not punished.

I don't think it's so black and white. In this case, the "punishment" isn't literal. It simply comes in the form of more grunt work, which people trust you with because you have taken it on before and did a good job with it. You may actually be rewarded too when the annual review comes, if you know how to spin it.

Furthermore, grunt work can be an excellent opportunity to shine. For example, you can figure out a way to automate it so that the next person who works on it (which may be you again) has to spend only a fraction of the time on it. Things like running reports or generating documents tend to lend themselves really well to automation, and a little programming ability can take you a long way.

So yeah... think twice before turning away grunt work, even if you believe that you may be given more of it in the future if you agree to take it on now.

Re: Ask HN: What non-technical skills make a senior dev and how to develop them?

#126

Post by Kalium »

tootie wrote: post #43

I think everyone in this thread is wrong. There is one thing I look for any time someone is looking to increase seniority in the organization and that's ownership. How much responsibility can you own with minimal oversight? Will you seek out the resources you need? Will you remove blockers. Will you do what you say? Will you get others to help you? Some people do this by producing lots of code and some of them do it…

One of the things I've noticed is that this is very sensitive to the organizational context. How receptive is the organization to people wanting to increase seniority?

Re: Ask HN: What non-technical skills make a senior dev and how to develop them?

#127

Post by peace011 »

Based on my experience at small companies and large corps, being a smooth-talking B-player gets you more money and fame than being a great "hacker". However, please, I beg you, always stay TRUE to yourself! The world doesn't need any more zombies trying to climb the corporate hell, the world doesn't need more arse-kissers, it doesn't need fake smiles and interest based "friendships", and it doesn't need more conforming sheep. Stay TRUE to yourself! Peace...

Re: Ask HN: What non-technical skills make a senior dev and how to develop them?

#128

Post by dang »

iopuy wrote: post #42

You must be great fun at parties.

Personal attacks are not allowed on Hacker News. Please don't comment like this here.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11909304 and marked it off-topic.

Re: Ask HN: What non-technical skills make a senior dev and how to develop them?

#129

Post by mk89 »

marcosdumay wrote: post #87
mk89 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My comment was a sort of provocation, but I see that some people seem to agree with it. It makes me a bit sad, but unfortunately sometimes it's pretty hard to change things - if at all! The other comments are all relevant and very good, but they seem to overlook one important aspect: the company's attitude. What all those comments have in common is that they assume things work according to Tom DeMarco's book Peoplewa…

> What all those comments have in common is that they assume things work according to Tom DeMarco's book Peopleware. This is a funny comment, since he keeps repeating through the entire book phrases that sound like "you probably won't be able to get this for your team", "you likely never seen it anywhere, but...", "when doing our research, we've seen this. You might doubt it, but trust me, this exist on some places."

> This is a funny comment, since he keeps repeating through the entire book phrases that sound like ...

Yeah, I know. Of course I meant "things work according to the advises given by the book ..." or something like that. I read the book, and everybody agrees that "it's a great book, but in reality...".

Re: Ask HN: What non-technical skills make a senior dev and how to develop them?

#130

Post by AndreyErmakov »

collyw wrote: post #62

OK, not strictly answering your question, but for me its about being able to give a developer any job and knowing that they can work it out. Development, database design, server setup documentation. Being able to work on or debug any part of the stack.

Actually, this is the one reply in the entire thread that in fact answers the question. This is how I see a senior developer as well.

In your professional evolution you start with simple tasks, learning to accomplish them, first under supervision, then alone. Then you get larger assignments and learn to work without hand-holding. Finally you learn to solve all kinds of problems in your field of expertise with your chosen technology and you get entrusted with making the right decisions and doing the good job of it.

But then at some point it stops mattering what work to do, in what part of the technology stack it is located, or even what technology stack this is. It becomes a matter of simply learning what you need to know to perform the work, doing it, closing this issue and moving on. That's what seniority means (or should mean to provide a base of reference).

This is viewed from the technical side of things of course, and I believe this is what the question implied. Good communication abilities and developed soft skills are essential too but those transform a developer into somebody else to whom the title of a senior developer no longer applies. They're no longer just a developer but a higher-level product.

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