61–70 of 120 posts
To me being a senior software engineer means that when your production system goes unstable from gremlins or cosmic rays or other mysterious sources of chaos and the business that pays for your food is in jeopardy, there's nobody to pass the buck to. You just have to buckle down and figure it out or update the resume and start working on your excuses or apologies to newly unemployed coworkers and their families.
>Avoiding responsibility for estimates is another way of saying, “I’m not ready to be relied upon for building critical pieces of infrastructure.” There's potential for significant nuance in such a scenario and to reduce it to this silly quote hurts the piece, IMO.
>Avoiding responsibility for estimates is another way of saying, “I’m not ready to be relied upon for building critical pieces of infrastructure.” There's potential for significant nuance in such a scenario and to reduce it to this silly quote hurts the piece, IMO.
The quote sucks and I completely disagree with the author. It puts the whole responsibility on the engineer to predict how long a thing will take. There are much better approaches though. We can focus on allowing the team to create lots of small tickets (can be done in a few hours or 1-2 days), massively improving our prediction estimates. The author seems to suggest we should be able to predict the future no matter…
A bit of a cynical take (on Hacker News no less) but after being in the industry for a while, my view is that the best definition of “level” is self-referential: it corresponds to the ability of a person to convince others that they are at that level. I also have a definition of what I think level should ideally represent: the marginal contribution of a person’s influence on the outcome of a company, relative to the…
I agree on paper that this is a great heuristic, but an employer would be more than happy to pay you a junior or mid compensation while extract senior level contributions from you. I see your point, though, and I agree for the most part.
> In other words, you can consider two hypothetical futures for a company: one with a specific person and one without that person.
This another tricky one - I agree on principal but I have seen this not work out in practice. For example, I have seen very senior people leave suddenly (like no notice period) and the business does not even skip a beat. In some cases, things get more efficient. My point being - employee level and comp sometimes do not map to contribution + business value.
That being said, I observed the above at big companies, where inefficiencies can hide in multiple levels of hierarchy and bureaucratic red tape. Its also why I hate working at big companies.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I also have a definition of what I think level should ideally represent: the marginal contribution of a person’s influence on the outcome of a company, relative to the counterfactual situation where that person never worked there, adjusted for a specific threshold of risk tolerance. Doesn't this tie back to the self-referential nature. If you can convince others of your "level", then you can also affect more change,…
Yeah, I hesitated to mention that as the post was already getting a bit long. I’ve always wondered what would happen if you took a random high performing junior engineer and just immediately gave them control over a large part of the company. Or vice versa—a level 8 engineer pretends to be a junior engineer and joins another company at level 3. I suspect the degree of comfort and familiarity that people have in these…
A "senior" cosplaying as junior can easily turn into conflict and deadlock when people feel their toes being stepped on by someone beneath them.
A junior cosplaying as senior reflects a situation with nepotism or favouritism. They are typically routed-around, quietly, by the people with relevant competence and jobs to do.
Real believable seniority is actually important in eliminating friction.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You’ve semi reinvented WAR (wins above replacement) https://www.mlb.com/glossary/advanced-stats/wins-above-repla...
They've actually described the marginal revenue product of labor. In general, all of those counterfactuals fall under the concept of opportunity costs.
In my experience, especially in web development, senior developer just means excellent with boilerplate and an awareness of many tools. Thats it. The problem is nobody bothers to define competency and very few people can actually program for the web. I mean almost nobody. Countless times here on HN I have had hiring managers tell these people don’t exist. The way I would define competence in web development is super…
A bit of a cynical take (on Hacker News no less) but after being in the industry for a while, my view is that the best definition of “level” is self-referential: it corresponds to the ability of a person to convince others that they are at that level. I also have a definition of what I think level should ideally represent: the marginal contribution of a person’s influence on the outcome of a company, relative to the…