101–110 of 241 posts
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…
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Can you give an example of a failure at step 2?
A 10 years Java/PHP developer doesn't know how to use Golang on the job in 3 days.
In 3 days someone should be able to fix a small business logic bug in a program in a new language, like copy-pasting a if-block to handle a new simple case, or improving an error message by grabbing a variable from context and for setting it for output, but not write a useful program.
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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,…
Another common reason is when you get new manager(s) and they don't respect the insight which "All the superstars at my current company have been here for a while" have. Often the superstars are just normal people who really knows the business well and therefore what makes sense to implement and what should be skipped. When you earn enough money for a decent lifestyle, then I think this becomes the major reason for a…
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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…
Really all it is is "3 days to showcase you have a working compiler, ide, formatter, can run the tests, and are familiar with the CR tools". The rest of it is learned (hopefully quickly) through the CRs, and any senior engineer should be comfortable making a few idiomatic mistakes in their CRs that they learn from.
I could do all those setup things in N days without ever learning any programming language.
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> it is literally effortless to accidentally cultivate the impression of being some kind of wizard
My impression of that bit was that the author was saying it may look like a senior engineer is a wizard, but actually it's just experience and it's not magic.
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> "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…
Now I do it and do the same things they did with me: facilitate my thought and troubleshooting process rather than give me answers. I think the people that are successful in Senior+ engineering are that way because of certain technical and character traits they've developed.
One is a willingness to be right in the long run. When I was a young engineer I would make my cases hard with data. As a senior engineer I sit back and let the machine mull for a while because I know that's what the engineering machine will do regardless of how technically right I may be. Another is knowing that right isn't always right. Sometimes the right answer is technically wrong, or the learnings of wrong need to be made before we collectively can be right. Another is a lot of patience; patience for myself, patience for others. I recently admitted I was behind on work because my power was out for three straight days. Young me would've found a coffee shop and worked those days with a single monitor down to the bone. Senior me took my dog to the park.
Not everyone makes it to senior, had I not forked my path in certain places I don't think I would have. My advice, relish your time as non-senior and ask lots of non-technical questions. The technical stuff comes over time and by necessity.
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A 10 years Java/PHP developer doesn't know how to use Golang on the job in 3 days.
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.
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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.
* also me sometimes, but that's confusing since I just used the commercial definition of the word a few comments above.
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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