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We don't have senior engineers anymore

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Re: We don't have senior engineers anymore

#81

Post by jnovek »

protomolecule wrote: post #77
bee_rider wrote: post #45

I don’t really get the first example. > Why do we need variables? > How variables are really stored? > The type of variables matter? These aren’t questions that a junior engineer couldn’t answer. These are questions that somebody who has passed a single programming class ought to be able to answer. Then they have questions about this vite platform, which I’ve never heard of, but it seems like they are asking “does so…

So why do we need variables?

I hope the question isn’t intended to have a single “right” answer because it’s very vague.

Re: We don't have senior engineers anymore

#82

Post by make3 »

Selfcommit wrote: post #23

I respect some of what’s being said about “mappers” vs “packers” - but the article presents the idea that there are 2 kinds of programmer and you’re one or the other, largely based on growth as a “real” mapper. I think a more realistic description is that everyone is a mapper. There isn’t a single body of knowledge that is “software engineering” - so it’s ok to encounter something new, “pack” it, then map it if it’s…

yes the article creates a tik tok level dichotomy between two things that everyone with any amount of experience is obviously both to a pretty advanced degree

Re: We don't have senior engineers anymore

#83

Post by neon_electro »

danielvaughn wrote: post #57

[front-loading this caveat: I'm speaking from the POV of a web developer] It's hard not to agree with the general premise of the article - anyone can see the trend. But as always, there's some nuance that I think the article leaves out. Thinking of it as "two different types of programmers" is reductive and encourages you to have a fixed mindset about people (i.e. I "am" a packer vs I "am" a mapper). Really, these ar…

Thank you for saying this, I've had a similar experience to yours and the constant churn of JS technologies and employers' expectations around what it means to be "qualified" has really messed with me the past couple years.

Re: We don't have senior engineers anymore

#84

Post by marcosdumay »

bee_rider wrote: post #45

I don’t really get the first example. > Why do we need variables? > How variables are really stored? > The type of variables matter? These aren’t questions that a junior engineer couldn’t answer. These are questions that somebody who has passed a single programming class ought to be able to answer. Then they have questions about this vite platform, which I’ve never heard of, but it seems like they are asking “does so…

Honestly, are those tricky questions the author had a too superficial knowledge to identify?

> Why do we need variables?

Do we even need them? You mean variables that vary? If so there are many languages that don't have them at all. Or you mean just naming values?

> How variables are really stored?

That is incredibly complicated. Variables don't exist on the executable like they do on your source code. They are just an abstraction.

> The type of variables matter?

Well, what "type" even means? There are PHD thesis written on this.

Re: We don't have senior engineers anymore

#85

Post by projektfu »

Selfcommit wrote: post #23

I respect some of what’s being said about “mappers” vs “packers” - but the article presents the idea that there are 2 kinds of programmer and you’re one or the other, largely based on growth as a “real” mapper. I think a more realistic description is that everyone is a mapper. There isn’t a single body of knowledge that is “software engineering” - so it’s ok to encounter something new, “pack” it, then map it if it’s…

I think it's hard to develop a deep understanding of what's behind all the interfaces that are used now in software development. When I was starting out, if you wanted operational complexity you went the mainframe route, and most of us would instead have been working on a deep understanding of Turbo Pascal/DOS or Mac Toolbox or something of that nature. Things change and now we can call forth powerful distributed networks in seconds, run them for minutes to years, and tear them down instantly. Instead of running a main application and a few things on the side, the majority of the runtime of common systems is pre-fab with a veneer of glue that is supplied by the programmer. It's great, but it forces a different skill set. People with my personality could spend 6 months reading, tinkering with, and understanding Docker before becoming as minimally productive as a person who would be described as a "Packer" in this essay would in a couple days. While they might plateau and be unable to fix a problem, the "Just Mapper" might not be gainfully employed in that niche anymore.

I will say that I heard and probably paraphrased this rant before, when I was dealing with similar cookbook-style code on much simpler systems. People with deeper understanding, who can make sense of a disassembly or Wireshark output, do get called in to figure things out if another layer of copypasta isn't fixing things. But the market has shown that the packer has more fitness to the environment.

I do agree, though, that the term "senior" has become meaningless. This is true in other disciplines like veterinary medicine, where only a naive person would become a medical director.

Re: We don't have senior engineers anymore

#86

Post by patrick451 »

bee_rider wrote: post #53
distortionfield wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But now you’re just moving the goalposts and inevitably someone else will make the same declaration about principal engineers and will instead insist that only Chief Architects (or whatever next step up the corporate ladder of madness is) are the really truly experienced class of engineers. It’s a pointless challenge to try and bucket engineers by skill levels like that. Titles are for compensation and rank, and noth…

When I worked on a project that had a dedicated architect, they really seemed like they were the only one doing engineering work (design). The rest of us were assembling their design, like technicians do.

If drawing over-simplified block diagrams of software components is "engineering", we'd be better off just letting the technicians follow their intution. My experience with principals engaging in this sort of naval gazing is they just fuck everything up. The project was in much better shape before they came along with their fancy engineering ideas.

Re: We don't have senior engineers anymore

#87

Post by thdc »

neon_electro wrote: post #71
weego wrote: post #62

Maybe I'll burn some Internet points here but How the computer works, from electrons to transistors, to CPU, assembly, and high-level programming languages. How the internet/network works, how you send some information from one computer to another, all OSI 7 Layers. Engineers who fixate on this kind of detail are useless to most businesses most of the time. If you structure everything on reducing, and value people on…

Can you elaborate on "within minutes of being asked"? Is "I need a few hours to chew on this" unacceptable?

I think this is a perfect example of why "We don't have Senior Engineers anymore".

It's hard to show the thinking process to others, so the person who says an answer faster is assumed to be better/more senior.

Re: We don't have senior engineers anymore

#88

Post by bob1029 »

Titles have always been meaningless to me. I have seen CTOs that are amazing humans and fully capable of performing code review over their company's codebases. I have also seen CTOs who are late to meeting/no-shows, less competent than junior developers, etc.

Titling nonsense aside, what passes as "senior" today would be a no-hire decision for a junior developer slot in 2005. Things have slid pretty far in my view. There aren't many "developers" out there who are willing to push as hard as you had to 2 decades ago. ChatGPT basically shoves the tutorial & job offer down your throat these days. In the 90s you had to drive to the fucking library to learn about what a computer is - If you were lucky, they'd have a box of AOL trial CDs on the checkout counter.

If you want to get as good as some of the greybeard crowd, you are going to have to invent your own hell and then practice inside of it. No one will do this for you. I feel like those of us constrained by dial-up (or worse) were actually really fortunate in some ways. This wall was a fantastic filter. It really made you think "is this interesting enough to suffer through, or should I just observe it in the news?" Imagine spending a month debugging a problem without the aid of google, stack overflow, et. al. Most "developers" today would laugh and walk away from the industry if they experienced this.

For me, front-end / back-end job duty separation is the #1 canary pointing towards a weakening of general expectations for "software people". Not saying that the developers need to know how to use photoshop to design & iterate sophisticated UI designs with the client's marketing team, but when I first started out I was expected to take a final PSD and convert it to a reasonable HTML/CSS layout - in addition to all other backend/database/hosting/infra work.

One might make accusations that someone who manages all of these things is mediocre at all of them, but I would counter that shipped products are infinitely more valuable than things that never ship. I have observed that in companies where you have to assemble the entire justice league & merge 10+ PRs to update a dropdown list's contents, things usually aren't shipping very rapidly.

Re: We don't have senior engineers anymore

#89

Post by vineyardmike »

romanhn wrote: post #59

I hate these kinds of articles, which come off as "I read about a bunch of these things and if you don't know all the same stuff, how dare you call yourself senior". I typically see this in mid-level engineers who haven't gotten humbled by experience yet. The premise is bogus - most people are a mix of mappers and packers, rather than landing squarely on one end. And you can absolutely be a wonderful senior without k…

The article is pretty bad, I agree. Everything you said, I agree.

I think this sentiment, “engineers aren’t what they used to be… they don’t understand the why as much”, is a very common sentiment today. I think there’s some truth. I know plenty of “cloud engineers” that can tell you the best practices of architecting on AWS but not the why those are best practices, not why distributed systems are hard, etc.

The reality though is that this is often fine. Most problems aren’t novel. Most people shouldn’t need to re-derive knowledge from first principles as part of the job. You learn that in school, and then you go to work and solve the problem asked of you. Not every problem is Google scale we know this, but also not every problem requires a phd and ends in patents. Sometimes it’s just a low traffic crud app with a react front end.

The CTO probably wants to be a thought leader or something. I don’t know peoples motivations. It seems like they read an article on pack/map and applied it to why their employees suck?

Re: We don't have senior engineers anymore

#90

Post by projektfu »

Raed667 wrote: post #7

Reminds me of a friend -who upon graduation- went from intern directly to "CTO" of a web agency. He was their 2nd developer and only engineer.

A one-person housecleaning startup has a CEO if they incorporate. But it says something about a company if their chief is just out of school, and it usually says the company is new and small. It might be the next Facebook, or it could more likely be just another new company with young founders.

I've seen CFO-as-a-service but haven't seen that yet for CTO.

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