Ask HN: How can I grow as an engineer without good seniors to learn from?

Read and write a lot of projects. Early career you need to get out there and see things. If you find stuff others are working on too all the better (e.g. OSS but there are other things like charity or public projects too)

Strongly agree. I have been doing data engineering for 14 years and, in my experience, new grads need a lot of on-the-job training. There are a lot of real-world problems (e.g. consistency problems, scale problems, distribution problems) that benefit from a little bit more than just theoretical knowledge. A lot of data systems are full of problems because they were designed and implemented by inexperienced people. People don't know what they don't know and there are a lot of teams that say things like "oh yeah, this takes 3 days to run because it's pretty big" or "we release code daily but it would be too expensive to re-process past data to fix bugs" or even "what's a schema?".

YMMV, though. Some data engineers are writing basic SQL or playing with Azure Data Factory and there isn't too much complexity. Read Designing Data Intensive Applications. If that sort of thing resonates with you then find someone to work with who has experience with those kinds of problems!

[Edit: no disrespect to ADF! Just pointing out that the data engineering discipline is broad and different practitioners will have different expectations of complexity]

There’s no better teacher than running code in production.

I am self taught and had no mentors for the first decade of my career. During that time I did things nobody else could do, things I was told were impossible.

Eventually I read some books and they added useful tools.

Read all the books from SICP to Superintelligence (ie concrete to speculative fiction).

But nothing is as educational as putting what you read into production, or putting it into production and fucking it up. I’d rather work with someone who has deleted a production database (ideally a preproduction database to be fair) than someone who hasn’t.

Also, try to find people to speak to that have built major projects.

Ask them what the original goal was, how that changed, what proved to be important, what was unexpected.