Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer • Hacker News Board

Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

#301

Post by giantg2 » Sun, May 30, 2021, 10:08 PM UTC

alexeldeib wrote: post #290

giantg2 wrote: post #264

"Sure, $120k + bennies + pension sound great, but you'll be selling your soul to work on esoteric proprietary technology." It sounds great because it is great. I don't make that much and I work on boring systems. I guess those numbers also explain why the author can recommend maxing out the 401k. People supporting a family on less than $100k don't have $19.5k per year to put into it.

You have a great point, but let's balance this out with a few of the author's other comments. - OP uses the phrasing senior engineer. - Never worked for FAANG. This is relevant because $120k + bonus/benefits is basically a FAANG new grad. Fairly normal for SV tech companies. - Those numbers likely provide a solid standard of living, but as a senior engineer you are likely underpaid. - Esoteric and proprietary knowled…

I'm an intermediate dev, masters degree, 9 years experience, non-FAANG, higher cost of living area (not SV, NYC or NVA), and work with obscure tech and proprietary tools.

It sucks that I suck. Oh well.

Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

#302

Post by TameAntelope » Sun, May 30, 2021, 10:08 PM UTC

sharken wrote: post #85

> If I'm awaken at 2am from being on-call for more than once per quarter, then something is seriously wrong and I will either fix it or quit. Sometimes fixing the problem will require special access to Production which you don't have, or even a specific role with that extra bit of initiative. Otherwise i agree 100%.

This is true unless you own a meaningful portion of the company (>1%). To dump your entire investment because of extra hours is not a way to get that asymptotic upside.

Maybe... none of this applies to people who own meaningful portions of the companies they work for.

Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

#303

Post by giantg2 » Sun, May 30, 2021, 10:09 PM UTC

tolbish wrote: post #300

giantg2 wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hiring process for the company wasn't special. Of course half the stuff they claimed in the interview changed later (was hired as a Java dev but was assigned to Filenet, they said rhet dont outsource or layoff but have started doing both). This was an internal transfer. There were definitely warning signs in that interview. I was desperate because they were outsourcing my job in an obscure tech (Filenet) and we w…

The issues in your earlier post point to a problem with the company as a whole. It is surprising that the issue is with a specific role.

What do you mean exactly? There are tons of problems with the company. Stay long enough at any large company and I'm sure there are plenty. The issues can change dramatically from department to department.

Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

#304

Post by tolbish » Sun, May 30, 2021, 10:16 PM UTC

giantg2 wrote: post #303

tolbish wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issues in your earlier post point to a problem with the company as a whole. It is surprising that the issue is with a specific role.

What do you mean exactly? There are tons of problems with the company. Stay long enough at any large company and I'm sure there are plenty. The issues can change dramatically from department to department.

The lack of documentation/procedure, and the process issues with others contacting you needlessly instead of the SME. They just seem like structural issues that would not be specific to one team.

Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

#305

Post by josalhor » Sun, May 30, 2021, 10:17 PM UTC

> Tests are important but TDD is a damn cult.

I don't see people commenting on this one! That may be a good thing because it means people are not questioning it :)

Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

#306

Post by emidln » Sun, May 30, 2021, 10:18 PM UTC

convolvatron wrote: post #285

MikeDelta wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They should try programming on an airplane or without internet connection. For some the productivity drops to zero without stack overflow.

i grew up a long time before stack overflow. actually used man pages and read books. there is just _no way_ to program in Rust or Go without access to a search engine and the package libraries.

I've done various rust and clojure projects by downloading a lot of git repos ahead of time for reference while on a long-haul flight. This works pretty well, but you need to do a bit of research ahead of time on which libraries you might want access to. This is probably slower, as you have to read source code and think more about the type signatures (rather than looking at some misc example), but if you have 15 hours, what else are you going to do?

Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

#307

Post by equasar » Sun, May 30, 2021, 10:21 PM UTC

mrfusion wrote: post #266

Why does he hate pandas?

Maybe because they are expensive to breed and keep them alive. Not an expert to say if they are worth or not. Nature wants them out but human wants to keep them.

Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

#308

Post by hutzlibu » Sun, May 30, 2021, 10:22 PM UTC

MikeDelta wrote: post #114

user_50123890 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because good senior programmers are rare (as can be observed if you post a job listing). Most of this stuff comes from students / junior developers, where yes, they probably visit stack overflow every 20 minutes

They should try programming on an airplane or without internet connection. For some the productivity drops to zero without stack overflow.

"For some the productivity drops to zero without stack overflow."

And it is bad to be a newb? And even for experienced devs to go to stackoverflow regulary ... isn't it productive, to not always reinvent the wheel?

I can solve allmost everything on my own. But if I have a new problem, I assume someone else already had - I would be stupid, to figure it out on my own, when I could get a working solution in 5 min googling.

But I actually programm without internet connection most of the time, as I like being outside, away from noise (and wifi)

Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

#309

Post by titanomachy » Sun, May 30, 2021, 10:23 PM UTC

vsareto wrote: post #128

>I don't know why full stack webdevs are paid so poorly. No really, they should be paid like half a mil a year just base salary. Fuck they have to understand both front end AND back end AND how different browsers work AND networking AND databases AND caching AND differences between web and mobile AND omg what the fuck there's another framework out there that companies want to use? Seriously, why are webdevs paid so l…

I've been a "full-stack" developer at large tech companies, and my experience is there at least it means "frontend developer who can put together a basic API server". My fellow full-stack developers and I would spend most of our time building out frontends, which was generally regarded by others as challenging and specialized work, and maybe 20% of the time adding API endpoints to fetch or update some data, which was considered straightforward.[0]

Not having to wait for some other engineer to make the backends made us a lot more efficient. It definitely was rewarding to be able to complete products end-to-end.

Hiring standards and pay were the same as for any engineer, at least in FAANG.

[0] Yeah, occasionally we had to optimize some SQL queries or whatever but we're competent engineers, we can figure it out even if it's not what we do every day.

Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

#310

Post by mancerayder » Sun, May 30, 2021, 10:25 PM UTC

vageli wrote: post #3

> The most underrated skill to learn as an engineer is how to document. Fuck, someone please teach me how to write good documentation. Seriously, if there's any recommendations, I'd seriously pay for a course (like probably a lot of money, maybe 1k for a course if it guaranteed that I could write good docs.) I agree but think it is more than just _documentation_: effectively communicating ideas through text was one o…

Exactly. That's not a documentation problem, that's a writing problem. A lot of tech people don't enjoy writing, but also they're sometimes not very good at predicting or empathizing with the future reader of their writing. Sometimes that's also manifested in speaking, and failing to context frame concepts, arguments and ideas before jumping into excruciating detail. Senior managers notice this, and this limits your career.

So I argue that the issue is writing skills, of which technical documentation is a subset speciality of writing skills. I will add, similar to math problems or programming, writing wants you to do it over and over so it can get better.