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Senior engineers are living in the future

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Re: Senior engineers are living in the future

#211

Post by Test0129 »

GolDDranks wrote: post #161
_ktx2 wrote: post #107

Being a senior engineer is weird when looking retrospectively. I remember being a junior and experiencing what the author is talking about with respect to puzzlingly staring at my seniors when they could answer obscure questions. 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+ engineer…

> Not everyone makes it to senior As a someone who isn't a junior, having two years of game development (in-house game engine dev) and five years of enterprise (mostly web-based internal tools & some data engineering with big data) development under my belt, but hardly a senior either, what do you think as the alternative to not "making it to senior"? Asking out of curiosity.

Being in the "optimal zone" I think. The best dollar-value-to-expectations is probably at the mid-level. Senior+ you take on a lot more responsibility, need to know a lot more, and you're not always compensated for all that knowledge. Having been at senior and above for a while now I can say that the juice isn't always worth the squeeze.

Nothing is wrong with optimizing for actual life things. It's hard to not be a company man when you reach the higher echelons. Generally, your real life suffers some. Especially since the invention of pagerduty.

Re: Senior engineers are living in the future

#212

Post by stevenhuang »

bluGill wrote: post #181
hnfong wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find the opposite. If you know how it feels like to learn something you have a natural talent for, and you know what it feels like to be struggling, then you can choose to focus on the things that are most "efficient use of your time". Especially considering that life is short. Of course, you can always choose to learn something you aren't best at, but at least you know the trade offs (i.e. needing to spend relativ…

I'm not convinced there is such a thing as natural talent. (there is such a thing as lack of talent) All the greats are just average people who focused until they became great. You just have forgotten what it is like to be a child who knows nothing. I've been speaking English since I was a toddler, I'm learning Spanish now and I make tons of mistakes and often can't understand even a basic sentence - but in fact I'm…

The concept of a thing called G factor shows there is such a thing as a natural innate talent.

Re: Senior engineers are living in the future

#213

Post by roflyear »

macintux wrote: post #166
pantojax45 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you hire someone in a language they don’t know, you expect them to learn on the job. It’s reasonable by day 3 to expect them to show some code - even if terrible.

At some companies you’re still in onboarding hell on day 3.

I would say, most? Or maybe I have been really unlucky, lol! I don't think it is POSSIBLE for an employee at my current company to be productive before week 2.

Re: Senior engineers are living in the future

#214

Post by trey-jones »

roflyear wrote: post #207
trey-jones wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would never fault someone for not being able to pick up a language and use it competently in 3 days. I understand why you use this as an example, with having samey syntax, but there is still nuance. I think the bigger indicator is you've been in the industry for 10 years and call yourself a PHP/Java dev. At this point you should have dabbled in probably 10-100 ways of solving problems depending on what your 9-5 loo…

I dunno. I haven't had much need to do a major project in another language other than Python for the last 10 years. Is that an issue?

I recognize the value of expertise in a language. I recognize that I have touched so many different languages that any "expertise" that I might have possessed at some point has probably passed as I've missed out on new features, etc. I guess I would just expect you to be really knowledgeable and efficient in python!

So I don't think it's an issue, if that's been your job. My job exposes me to a lot of different technologies: many programming languages and endless different software that might be supporting a web application (databases, webservers, firewalls, etc.). I consider my value to be looking at problem and being able to spot 10 different possible points of failure in a system in my mind and order them by priority based on likelihood and ease of troubleshooting. And this is something that I think is only gained through experience and that's what separates me from someone who just started.

Re: Senior engineers are living in the future

#215

Post by Adiqq »

idontpost wrote: post #208
Adiqq wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot of baggage that comes with each language. I could probably learn any language at that point, but it also takes time to learn whole ecosystem, mostly used libraries and tools. You typically can't do this in week or two, because you need to actually write something and see how it feels, if there are any surprises. You would probably not want someone with little experience in given language, to touch produ…

> You would probably not want someone with little experience in given language, to touch production codebase without review I wouldn't want anyone, in any language, with any level experience to touch production codebase without review. Not even K&R themselves. So that's a ridiculous straw man.

Yet it happens in many companies, when team is working on non-critical systems or in extreme cases, even on critical systems. I sometimes feel like some people in IT are detached from reality, not everything is mission critical system and not everything has high quality, because there's a lot of people in IT with all kind of background and there all kind of clients with different sets of requirements. It's business, not utopia.

Re: Senior engineers are living in the future

#216

Post by bluGill »

groby_b wrote: post #182
bluGill wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You might make the argument that managers don’t deserve higher pay than an individual contributor, but it’s clear enough that a manager has much higher potential impact than an IC — if you manage 100 resources, making them 10% more efficient than otherwise, you’re doing the effective work of 10 ICs Maybe. Supply and demand is always at play. If any manager can make 100 developers more 10% more efficient, but only a…

I mean... if you get your managers "from lots of different entry level areas", then you get exactly what you paid for. Any tech manager even remotely worth their salt should be able to function as a senior+ IC if necessary. If that skillset is lacking.. maybe you want to rethink your hiring. You'll likely never see the effect of a good manager if you don't. As for your argument that developer scarcity somehow makes m…

Management is not related at all to tech ability and there is no reason for a manager to have tech knowledge. Tech knowledge avoids some of the worst things i've had managers do, but my best managers have been completely non technical.

Re: Senior engineers are living in the future

#217

Post by danielvaughn »

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…

Hm, that's an interesting way to look at it, though I don't like framing it as ego fragility as that seems unfairly negative.

I've reflected on this point quite a bit because I really struggled with it when I was teaching myself how to code. It's extremely demoralizing in the beginning, because of a couple of root causes (IMO).

1. We place a lot of cultural value around "genius", and we often ascribe that quality to programmers, mathematicians, etc. While some of them undoubtedly are, it's not clear what that genius actually is, and a great deal of people mistakenly believe that they don't have the "right brain" for it, or are not "smart enough", because they don't feel like geniuses. When you make several mistakes when learning a new activity, every mistake reinforces that perception.

2. There are two relationships you can have with technology - that of a consumer , and that of the provider. As a consumer of technology, your perspective is that "technology works", and if it doesn't work, then something went terribly wrong. But once you become a provider of technology, that perspective is flipped. Technology is broken, and if it works, then something went wonderfully right. It takes time to develop that perspective, and so young engineers will have their programs break constantly, not realizing that "broken" is the default state of the world, and in fact now their job is to make things work. Of course it's broken.

Re: Senior engineers are living in the future

#218

Post by RobRivera »

Test0129 wrote: post #211
GolDDranks wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not everyone makes it to senior As a someone who isn't a junior, having two years of game development (in-house game engine dev) and five years of enterprise (mostly web-based internal tools & some data engineering with big data) development under my belt, but hardly a senior either, what do you think as the alternative to not "making it to senior"? Asking out of curiosity.

Being in the "optimal zone" I think. The best dollar-value-to-expectations is probably at the mid-level. Senior+ you take on a lot more responsibility, need to know a lot more, and you're not always compensated for all that knowledge. Having been at senior and above for a while now I can say that the juice isn't always worth the squeeze. Nothing is wrong with optimizing for actual life things. It's hard to not be a c…

strongly concur

Re: Senior engineers are living in the future

#219

Post by angarg12 »

GolDDranks wrote: post #161
_ktx2 wrote: post #107

Being a senior engineer is weird when looking retrospectively. I remember being a junior and experiencing what the author is talking about with respect to puzzlingly staring at my seniors when they could answer obscure questions. 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+ engineer…

> Not everyone makes it to senior As a someone who isn't a junior, having two years of game development (in-house game engine dev) and five years of enterprise (mostly web-based internal tools & some data engineering with big data) development under my belt, but hardly a senior either, what do you think as the alternative to not "making it to senior"? Asking out of curiosity.

Pretty much most big tech companies have levels Junior, Mid and Senior (and above). It gets confusing because many companies skip the mid level and call anyone with 1-2+ YoE Senior. However most often Senior eng at Big Tech is a bigger deal (think coordinating the delivery of complex systems involving more than 1 team). You could easily spend the rest of your career cranking up solid code as a mid level dev if you wished.
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