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Senior engineers are living in the future

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Re: Senior engineers are living in the future

#91

Post by lupire »

triyambakam wrote: post #81

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 i…

Don't compare yourself to others. Life is half chance. Find a good paying job and a good life.

There is nothing special at the top of the ladder, just more money sometimes. Money isn't the only way to build a good life, and that's all money is good for.

Re: Senior engineers are living in the future

#92

Post by didgetmaster »

wccrawford wrote: post #27
sp332 wrote: post #20

One of my classmates in college couldn't handle this. I'd glance at some awful Visual Studio compiler error and then point out a missing semicolon. He ended up feeling stupid, but I was trying to be encouraging because his code was pretty good aside from some missing punctuation, which will come with practice. He ended up switching majors.

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…

Even very senior engineers can make simple mistakes that can bruise their egos. Several years ago I was called into the office of the chief architect. I was also a senior engineer with a lot of experience, but he was quite famous (at the time) in the industry for his technical skill. He was convinced he had found a compiler bug. He had some c code that he had traced through the debugger at the assembly level. It was something like this:

if(/some really long boolean value with AND and OR clauses/); { /* some code to execute if TRUE */ }

He was sure that the if statement was FALSE some of the time, but the code inside the brackets would always execute. He spent more than an hour pouring over the code.

It took me a few minutes before I noticed the semicolon at the end of the if statement. I'm sure he felt stupid when I pointed it out.

Re: Senior engineers are living in the future

#93

Post by ianbutler »

skohan wrote: post #71
nostrademons wrote: post #44

Earlier 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 very real, but the bounds you have to exceed before lack of quality start to bog down development are pretty large.

As a senior I can pretty quickly tell in the languages I write in often, when something is a smell, and if you keep repeating some code smells for a like a year you'll start seeing compounding effects on development speed. Understanding when to allow those with good reason and when to coach someone to stop doing those is an important skill for a senior imo.

But it's definitely not immediate, way more of a pernicious concern, the codebase will effectively rot until it's painful to make changes.

Re: Senior engineers are living in the future

#94

Post by nonethewiser »

triyambakam wrote: post #81

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 i…

I've kinda had the opposite experience. I started my SWE career in my early 30's. I feel like I've been treated as if I have more experience because of my age. And to some extent, rightly so. We have substantial work experience compared to a 21 year old. I did not start in a junior role.

Point being, don't blame your age. And don't underestimate yourself. And definitely don't compare yourself to others. If you are growing, then good fucking job. Keep doing that and maybe switch positions to somewhere more conducive to your growth if you feel like that's necessary.

Re: Senior engineers are living in the future

#95

Post by zackmorris »

onion2k wrote: post #7

This explains why I'm so tired.

I was thinking the same thing, that as we gain experience, it can sometimes get harder to not see problems, which can lead to environmental depression.

The flip side is that I used to suffer from agism-related depression, because I generally knew the answers but was powerless to sway anyone because they thought that I was too young to know what I was talking about. That didn't end until I hit middle age and realized that the problem wasn't so much about my performance, but my inability to communicate and set boundaries like older people do.

Re: Senior engineers are living in the future

#96

Post by gabereiser »

zmxz wrote: post #77
gabereiser wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We job hop for a number of reasons. The primary one being compensation when their current job isn’t keeping up with inflation. Another is lack of promotion when you went above and beyond (as you were coached to by your manager, for that promotion). Another reason (which is why I do) is that life for some of us isn’t as stable. I move. I’m forced to sometimes because of rent. Sometimes that means having to find a new,…

While I agree with the reasons you outlined, my experience so far shows that number one reason is being the impostor. Most people I've had displeasure to work with job hopped because they got the job through lies, which showed when faced with bearing responsibility and having to finish the project, I've seen many just jump the boat.

That hasn’t been my case at all. If you have that, maybe your interview process is broken.

Re: Senior engineers are living in the future

#97

Post by jahewson »

ironmagma wrote: post #51
revskill wrote: post #8

Senior means two things: - Have experience - Self learning though above experience. I met many experienced developers, but most of them failed at step 2. To me, they're still junior.

I think you can be senior without experience. To me, senior means "can handle ambiguous/incorrect/incomplete problem definitions."

No, you have you know the traps and specifically you have to know your own biases and this only comes with failure, thus experience.

Show me a mid-level engineer and I will show you someone busy walking straight into a trap.

Re: Senior engineers are living in the future

#98

Post by soco »

zibby8 wrote: post #78
wccrawford wrote: post #27

Earlier 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…

Perhaps this is really stupid and juvenile, but the show Adventure Time had an episode where one of the characters said “sucking at something is the first step to being kind of god at something.” I think that’s an important lesson a lot of people should learn. Going out and sucking it up is awesome if it means you’re getting better at something.

On the other hand, toxic positivity sounds exactly the same. So which is one and which is the other? What to do when you suck at something? Persevere or pivot? Both are praised in TED talks, but you just can't pursue them at the same time.

Re: Senior engineers are living in the future

#99

Post by skohan »

nocman wrote: post #88
skohan wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 ha…

Probably I am being a bit hyperbolic. I could be more precise and say: code quality is a solution you should reach for if and only if you are running into real maintainability problems.

But I strongly disagree with the sentiment that someone should not write code in a certain language, or should not contribute to a project until they know how to write idiomatically according to all the "accepted" best practices. It's a pedantic and elitist attitude which has little to do with making good software, and runs counter to the practice of learning how to use a language, which is necessarily a process involving ignorance, trial and error.

Re: Senior engineers are living in the future

#100

Post by gabereiser »

claytongulick wrote: post #61
gabereiser wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We job hop for a number of reasons. The primary one being compensation when their current job isn’t keeping up with inflation. Another is lack of promotion when you went above and beyond (as you were coached to by your manager, for that promotion). Another reason (which is why I do) is that life for some of us isn’t as stable. I move. I’m forced to sometimes because of rent. Sometimes that means having to find a new,…

If we're doing honest self-reflection as an industry, another reason I see programmers job-hop is because they don't want to sleep in the bed they made.

There may be some of that but that hasn’t been my experience. Most of the time it’s because of comp or as another poster reminded me, bad manager. If people are leaving because they coded themselves into a corner, the code review process where you are is broken.
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