Where I am often hung up in comparison is due to age. I dropped out of college and spent my early 20s learning agriculture and construction. Now I work in software engineering and my current manager is younger than me. Not only is he younger than me, but he's been able to climb up to an engineering manager in a shorter amount of time than I've been working as a SWE. So I feel really lame - wasted so much time early in my life and still seem to be wasting time.
Senior engineers are living in the future
81–90 of 241 posts
Re: Senior engineers are living in the future
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you can be senior without experience. To me, senior means "can handle ambiguous/incorrect/incomplete problem definitions."
This skill comes from experience. If you're talking about experience in a particular subdomain, then yes for sure.
The trick is, what people refer to "experience" in the workplace is very strictly defined as workplace experience in your role. But you can get experience from a wide variety of tasks, even ones that don't involve your current career. Working with vendors to organize a convention can prepare you for writing software. Or a volunteer/school software project could prepare you for a paid role, but nevertheless it is not counted.
Re: Senior engineers are living in the future
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
No doubt. But It’ll be a more favorable comparison to you if you are focused on achieving your manager’s expectations, and proactively contributing to the larger org — not comparing yourself to others as your personal performance metric. It’s obvious when someone is contributing to the organization in good faith / trying to do their job well, vs trying to edge out a colleague in specific eval criteria to look better.…
That hasn't been my experience. I've even had managers pit devs against each other.
Those sound like bad managers :/
Re: Senior engineers are living in the future
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find that egos can be really fragile when people are just starting to learn things. Pointing out the mistakes so quickly can seem like a great help (and it is!) but some people react like they're staring at the sun. Instead, I find it better (except for how long it takes) to walk them through finding the problem as if it's really hard and just nudging them to the steps they'd need to take to find it themselves. The…
I think one of the quickest ways to make life easier and less stressful is to try to ignore the ego as much as possible.
Easier said than done, no? I think one of the defining qualities of an ego is deceiving the individual into behavior - ymmv.
But that’s why failure, psychedelic experiences, and more are important (imo) - for keeping the ego in check
Re: Senior engineers are living in the future
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd give them 1 week. And measure again at starting of week 3, if they are still struggle, that's very likely they suck at learning.
- Are you still struggle?! - Y-yes... - You are fire! Note: Sorry for the cheap joke, I also make frequent grammatical errors in English.
Usually, they will appoint a cold room for 1-1 meeting to hear what's going on. And find out whether it's hiring process or teaching process that's the problem.
Re: Senior engineers are living in the future
#86Where I am often hung up in comparison is due to age. I dropped out of college and spent my early 20s learning agriculture and construction. Now I work in software engineering and my current manager is younger than me. Not only is he younger than me, but he's been able to climb up to an engineering manager in a shorter amount of time than I've been working as a SWE. So I feel really lame - wasted so much time early i…
The reason the author says it so many times is because it is so hard to do in practice :)
You have an opportunity to distinguish yourself. You already stand out and break the mold as someone with a nonstandard background, and it will get noticed—and treated differently—if you excel.
Re: Senior engineers are living in the future
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
The trick is that Go isn't a new language, it's an old language with a new coat of paint.
3 days to learn how to write syntactically-valid Go or 3 days to learn how to write idiomatic Go? Idiomatic Go has some very large differences from idiomatic Java or PHP, including things like 1) the reliance on multiple return values and early exits for error handling 2) interfaces instead of inheritance 3) plain old data structures instead of everything-is-an-object 4) goroutines 5) table-driven testing 6) complete…
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Re: Senior engineers are living in the future
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
3 days to learn how to write syntactically-valid Go or 3 days to learn how to write idiomatic Go? Idiomatic Go has some very large differences from idiomatic Java or PHP, including things like 1) the reliance on multiple return values and early exits for error handling 2) interfaces instead of inheritance 3) plain old data structures instead of everything-is-an-object 4) goroutines 5) table-driven testing 6) complete…
"code quality" is not real, it's just something software engineers like to argue about like sports. We like to talk about how code is written, because we look at code all day. The rest of the world only cares about what your code does once it's compiled. Senior engineers solve problems. They're not overly concerned with ticking all the boxes just so they can get a "good code" sticker.
> "code quality" is not real, it's just something software engineers like to argue about like sports.
While I do agree that many developers sometimes like to argue about "code quality" too much (and I've probably been guilty of that at times), "code quality" is definitely a real thing. I have have interacted with code bases that were a joy to read/modify, and I've interacted with code bases that made you pull your hair out at every turn (and also many levels in-between the extremes). It is not always a case of just "arguing for the sake of arguing".
Re: Senior engineers are living in the future
#89Where I am often hung up in comparison is due to age. I dropped out of college and spent my early 20s learning agriculture and construction. Now I work in software engineering and my current manager is younger than me. Not only is he younger than me, but he's been able to climb up to an engineering manager in a shorter amount of time than I've been working as a SWE. So I feel really lame - wasted so much time early i…
Don't think like that. It might not have happened yet, but I'm sure in the future you'll be glad you can apply knowledge from agriculture and construction into your SWE role. And maybe not in your SWE role, but at least somewhere in your life.
Re: Senior engineers are living in the future
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same. I've never seen anyone become proficient in a new language/platform in less than a year. Sure, you could learn Go's syntax, use it in the style of Java/PHP, and make it work, but that is not being proficient in Go and its idioms.
A year? That's a very long time for anyone who isn't a novice to learn a new language.
I would bet hard money that even an experienced developer wouldn't learn C in a year (e.g. avoid or recognize most UB and security issues) without prior exposure. I'll grant that C is pathological in that respect though.