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Senior engineers are living in the future

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Re: Senior engineers are living in the future

#111

Post by marcosdumay »

didgetmaster wrote: post #92
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…

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…

> I'm sure he felt stupid when I pointed it out.

He certainly did. There is no amount of experience that makes people not feel stupid about those. What changes is that you learn to not be affected by it, because you know that it's not a personal flaw (at least not one specific to you), and while you can improve on it, you can't completely fix it.

But the alternating between feeling like the dumbest person on Earth and the smartest person on Earth never goes away.

Re: Senior engineers are living in the future

#112

Post by lupire »

Gwypaas wrote: post #38
Sholmesy wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well, golang is a tough language. This _could_ be true for some, but it directly conflicts with the stated goals of the language. Most people (that I've spoken to) would consider Go to be a simpler language, with fewer features, than other comparable languages.

The issue with Go is the implicit footguns you will inevitably hit. Starting out with Go sure feels like a super power because of the simplicity and productivity, until the code base has grown and you now meticulously inspect every single line to understand the entire context a change is bringing, because you do not trust it in isolation to be correct. https://eng.uber.com/data-race-patterns-in-go/

You use Golang as a replacement for many Baah and Python programs, and never touch concurrency.

Concurrency is tricky, and that is true in every language, but less so in Go.

Re: Senior engineers are living in the future

#114

Post by giantg2 »

michaericalribo wrote: post #83
giantg2 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That hasn't been my experience. I've even had managers pit devs against each other.

Those sound like bad managers :/

I guess so. I haven't had a truly good one out of the 19 or so that I've had in 10 years.

Re: Senior engineers are living in the future

#115

Post by skohan »

lupire wrote: post #106
skohan wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

By the time you have real maintainability problems, it's too late to improve code quality.

It's never too late. I've had to pick up development on orphan projects before, and some of them are real stinkers. You can always quarantine the bad bits and start to impose a proper separation of concerns.

Re: Senior engineers are living in the future

#116

Post by bobthepanda »

lupire wrote: post #91
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.

Right. There’s always a bigger fish, so if you have imposter syndrome you’ll never be satisfied. Best to ignore those ideas.

Re: Senior engineers are living in the future

#117

Post by skrtskrt »

Often as I've grown in engineering I've wished there was just a series of books that I could study backwards and forwards in order to just become a highly knowledgeable engineer.

Instead it turns out that I'm just piling little pebbles of knowledge and experience on top of other ones, and I couldn't look back and design a book or a course or a curriculum to bring my old self to where I currently am. There are some pebbles just sitting on the side that haven't had an opportunity to be integrated into the pile yet, and some never will. It's all so... random

Re: Senior engineers are living in the future

#118

Post by manv1 »

Senior engineer = experience. For example, when building an HA system with embedded devices the devices shouldn't use the DNS cache and should ignore the TTL. They also shouldn't validate expiration dates on TLS certificates.

Why not? Because stuff will fuck up if you don't do that.

Also, you have to deal with the "regional power failure" situation, where every one of your devices will call home at the same time. Do devices need provisioning before they work? Because if they do, you need to handle that load fast.

Do you believe a MAC address is unique and universal? It isn't as unique as you think, and not everything on the internet has a MAC address.

Essentially, someone who's been around for a while realizes there's a difference between the spec (correctness) and what needs to happen to get shit to keep working (customers).

Re: Senior engineers are living in the future

#119

Post by lupire »

treeman79 wrote: post #19
revskill wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 10 years Java/PHP developer doesn't know how to use Golang on the job in 3 days.

Had a guy with 20 years experience at a top mail carrier come in for a senior position. We were very excited to interview him. He had spent the 20 years copying the same html file and changing the text for whatever was needed. Struggled heavily with the concept of a loop.

> copying the same html file and changing the text for whatever was neede

Can also describe a complex single-page web application :-)

Re: Senior engineers are living in the future

#120

Post by BoorishBears »

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."

I learned how to program starting on calculators in middle school and eventually moving up to games.

Looking back, I accidentally turned my first full time into a senior position almost immediately

A local company gave this self-taught developer a chance as a glorified intern, but a few weeks in and I reimplemented a project they had given to a contractor in a weekend after overhearing their back and forth.

We ended up shipping my MDM on hardware across the country that Christmas, less than 3 weeks after that weekend project, and I spent the next 2 years extending it as a platform: completely driving the functionality that sales would then go and sell new clients on, designing and implementing an autoscaling analytics backend and frontend, embedded V8 so that client's engineers could script the product without mucking in my codebase about with source access ;)

I remember I got a 25k pay raise at one point by simply saying "I was thinking I'd make more once we got past the evaluation period"

I had actually been trying to ask for us to set up a performance review, but in retrospect they were probably terrified of losing this guy they were paying half a senior dev's salary to do 2x the work, and were ok paying 2 thirds of a senior dev's salary instead...

In some ways I feel like the work I did there was more senior than the work I do now, at least in a technical sense. I think it's the soft skills that come from experience

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