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What I learned working with a senior engineer as a new grad

tanishqkancharla.dev

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Re: What I learned working with a senior engineer as a new grad

#111

Post by ignoramous »

dionidium wrote: post #101
yodsanklai wrote: post #44

I've noticed many of these articles about what it takes to be a good software engineer talk about code quality. I recently started to work in a team of very senior engineers (with relatively little experience) and what I've noticed is that code quality is rarely mentioned. Everybody write "good enough" code and there's never much discussion around code quality (occasionally a few remarks in code reviews) or design. G…

I used to work with a guy who took "gets shit done" to a level I'd never seen before. It changed the way I look at programming. He was actually a pretty good engineer. Wrote good-enough code. But he wasn't precious about anything and he didn't care all that much about finding the 100%-guaranteed-socially-approved-correct way to do things. What he had was an incredible ability to diagnose and fix problems quickly, str…

If I may, you should encourage your ex team-mate to share their side of things: https://staffeng.com/stories

Re: What I learned working with a senior engineer as a new grad

#112

Post by ignoramous »

pjmlp wrote: post #48
yodsanklai wrote: post #44

I've noticed many of these articles about what it takes to be a good software engineer talk about code quality. I recently started to work in a team of very senior engineers (with relatively little experience) and what I've noticed is that code quality is rarely mentioned. Everybody write "good enough" code and there's never much discussion around code quality (occasionally a few remarks in code reviews) or design. G…

Make it work, then make it pretty. Undelivered pretty code doesn't deliver any business value. Same applies to 100% code coverage that isn't running on customers computers.

> Undelivered pretty code doesn't deliver any business value.

See also: https://apenwarr.ca/log/20211024 (Wants, needs, and chasm crossing).

Re: What I learned working with a senior engineer as a new grad

#113

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

yodsanklai wrote: post #44

I've noticed many of these articles about what it takes to be a good software engineer talk about code quality. I recently started to work in a team of very senior engineers (with relatively little experience) and what I've noticed is that code quality is rarely mentioned. Everybody write "good enough" code and there's never much discussion around code quality (occasionally a few remarks in code reviews) or design. G…

Depends on where you are.

In the company I used to work at, code quality was a huge deal. I think, destructively so.

Nevertheless, I exercise pretty extreme code quality in my work (see for yourself[0]). It's long reached the state of "muscle memory," and I work very quickly.

As I am the person that most frequently has to go back and fix the code I write (I eat my own dog food), I write code that is what I want to see, when revisiting, six months later.

On another note, this industry considers six years to be "senior." I find that interesting.

[0] https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY#browse-away

Re: What I learned working with a senior engineer as a new grad

#114

Post by Retric »

tpoacher wrote: post #69
pjmlp wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Make it work, then make it pretty. Undelivered pretty code doesn't deliver any business value. Same applies to 100% code coverage that isn't running on customers computers.

The counterpoint to this is "Rough Prototypes have a bad habit of being shipped out as End-Products". And technical debt 'does' kill products. There's probably an optimum somewhere in the middle of each philosophy, but it's certainly not close to either extreme.

> an optimum somewhere in the middle

Reasonable code isn’t technical debt. The obvious tipping point is when spending X hours now likey saves people less than X hours in the future. Which unfortunately depends a great deal on the details of the actual project involved and therefore requires experience not some universal methodology.

Re: What I learned working with a senior engineer as a new grad

#115

Post by purplerabbit »

nnnnico wrote: post #110
dchapp wrote: post #82

> Long verbose names don't cost anything They absolutely do have a cost. The question is whether the benefit they bring in implicit documentation is worth their cost. > Even beyond the DX of readable names, it also acts like a type-checker. By reading the code, you can verify at least the semantics make sense. I would strongly prefer that the actual type system do this job instead. As a toy example, if a function is…

>They absolutely do have a cost. what cost? aesthetics?

Cognitive overload. Storing 3-4 succinct variable names in your head takes the same energy as storing 1-2 verbose variable names in your head.

Re: What I learned working with a senior engineer as a new grad

#116

Post by confidantlake »

The passionate arguments about what a senior is or isn't seems strange to me. Who cares if someone is junior, senior, jedi, ninja whatever. Using senior to distinguish between someone who just started and someone who has been there for a while seems perfectly fine.

Re: What I learned working with a senior engineer as a new grad

#117

Post by _gabe_ »

rr808 wrote: post #89
yotamoron wrote: post #72

6 years of experience does not make one a senior engineer. I`ll be polite and say that most engineers with 6 years of experience I know are not seniors.

Yeah its pretty scary, 6 years mean you've either only understood on one or two big systems, or you've job hopped more projects and never understood them in depth.

According to this[0] John carmack released 22 games before Doom all in the span of 5 years. Years of experience means nothing, working on real products that get shipped means a lot. I know plenty of programmers with 10+ years of experience that may never reach the level of expertise that Carmack reached in 5 years "professionally".

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carmack

Re: What I learned working with a senior engineer as a new grad

#118

Post by tanishqkanc »

sergiosgc wrote: post #98
tanishqkanc wrote: post #65

Hi! I’m the creator of the post. Thank you for all the comments on my post! I’m glad more people are getting to see it. Thanks for posting, @antidnan! Reading through, it looks like I have some rough edges of my website to clean up as well...

Congratulations on the post. One may agree or disagree with the content, but the text is clear, to the point, and generally very well written. Good writing is, to me, the foundation of a good engineer. I know excellent engineers who are not great verbal communicators, but every excellent engineer I know writes like you do. I think it is the result of a structured thought process, that flows naturally into a structure…

Thank you so much! I’m so glad it gave off that impression. I went through a lot of revision and planning to write it: I had learned a lot, and wanted to organize all of it carefully. I’m glad it paid off!

Re: What I learned working with a senior engineer as a new grad

#119

Post by enraged_camel »

dionidium wrote: post #101
yodsanklai wrote: post #44

I've noticed many of these articles about what it takes to be a good software engineer talk about code quality. I recently started to work in a team of very senior engineers (with relatively little experience) and what I've noticed is that code quality is rarely mentioned. Everybody write "good enough" code and there's never much discussion around code quality (occasionally a few remarks in code reviews) or design. G…

I used to work with a guy who took "gets shit done" to a level I'd never seen before. It changed the way I look at programming. He was actually a pretty good engineer. Wrote good-enough code. But he wasn't precious about anything and he didn't care all that much about finding the 100%-guaranteed-socially-approved-correct way to do things. What he had was an incredible ability to diagnose and fix problems quickly, str…

In my experience it is useful to have such people on the team, but if they make up most of the team then the codebase becomes a gigantic mess over time, and it negatively impacts everyone else.

Re: What I learned working with a senior engineer as a new grad

#120

Post by tanishqkanc »

scary-size wrote: post #86
tanishqkanc wrote: post #65

Hi! I’m the creator of the post. Thank you for all the comments on my post! I’m glad more people are getting to see it. Thanks for posting, @antidnan! Reading through, it looks like I have some rough edges of my website to clean up as well...

I enjoyed reading your blog post. It was very well written. Most of your points resonate with me.

Thanks!
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