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

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

#161

Post by Joel_Mckay »

prathameshgh wrote: post #119

Hi all, just to clear some misconceptions: - I'm quite well paid here (4x more than my peers) - I have been hired full-time, and get all the company benefits as well. - The work life is great, and I don't work more than 8-9 hours a day. - The manager/director is great and super supportive. - I'm not being exploited by any means :) Kindly upvote so the disclaimer stays on top of the post!

In general, read the NASA workmanship standards guides for wiring/crimps, and failure analysis documentation like tin-whiskers/shock/vibration/ignition.

When working in an industrial setting priorities need to shift away from cost optimized garbage people obsess over like chatGPT, and understand when you mess up people may get seriously injured or dead.

Understand shell-offshore standards compliance rules, and explosion rated equipment certification process. Also, integrate the safety procedures in place so when accidents do happen people know the steps to enter safe-mode, and who to phone etc.

There are a lot of unspoken rules, and corruption is commonplace in many places.

To be honest, understand most petroleum related work will be a knock off of Kongsberg and or Rockwell Automation products. There are also dangerous crazies insisting they know something by skimming stolen CVs etc.

Consider the clowns that accidentally cut someones arm off naively touching a hydraulic control-system under maintenance (true story.) Inherent safety is the #1 skill you need to work on, catch the worst case failure modes with sanity checks, and user interaction logging for accountability.

YMMV, and no I don't work for free... Have a great day, =3

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

#164

Post by xiphias2 »

,,I am not producing the software to the highest standards of the industry since we don't have any rigorous cross-checking''

Standards can slow you down, which is fine in a big tech company, but probably not good for building value for your company.

It's better to think more about what may break in your code base that could be emberassing for your company and build integration / othere tests for those important cases.

Otherwise generally simple code is good code, keep building and have fun in life. Lot of those ,,standards'' just overcomplicate things and may hurt your company.

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

#165

Post by redleader55 »

It depends on how you want to develop your career, but the generic advice, since you are in charge of hiring: hire A players(Google for "Bozo explosion"). Don't decide yet if you want to be an IC or a manager and keep your options open by doing deeply technical stuff.

Because you might feel unsure of yourself, you will be tempted to hire folks who are less junior than you - resist that. Hire senior people (budget allowing) and start your interviews with them by asking if they are comfortable reporting and working with someone with less experience than them. As long as you are humble and want to grow, you will.

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

#166

Post by MichaelRazum »

iepathos wrote: post #150

I was in a similar position for the first half of my career. 1) Start contributing heavily to a popular open source project you're familiar with and use. Try to make your PRs as high quality as possible. You'll get free code reviews from some of the best engineers in the world doing this. That'll be a million times better than ChatGPT code reviews and you'll be able to learn a ton from it while also getting your code…

1) Is this really the case? I mean some of the popular open source project are kind of mature. So you would get some feedback, regarding some specifics of the frameworks. For sure you would learn a bit. On the other hand they are kind of "done" software, so you would not really learn how to build something new from scratch.

Not sure about the other points.

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

#167

Post by Joel_Mckay »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #149
tsegratis wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

its the simple things fuzzing unittest scm code coverage if youre programming without those, youre doing it wrong, and chatGPT isnt going to help any more im missing?

What percent of developers do you think are actively using fuzzing? I would be shocked if more than 1%. Please do not read this as I do not think fuzzing is important! It is very important for system-level software.

I often include valgrind tests before Beta releases, as it is usually going to point out suspect areas needing inspection.

Fuzzing is only really useful for a very narrow range of analysis scenarios. If people understand threading properly: code should be able to take getting hammered, exiting gracefully, and cleanly get re-instantiated.

Also, banning hosts/accounts with an error-rate quota system is more common these days. =3

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

#168

Post by unfixed »

serial_dev wrote: post #134

Your position, as you describe it, honestly sounds quite interesting. If you have the ambition, you can grow a ton in this environment as well. I know it’s cool to chase the higher and higher levels at a FAANG company, taking on unnecessarily complex projects just to pad your resume, but what could also be interesting is do a better and better job everyday, and get higher and higher within your industry, meaning oil…

Underrated comment here.

Despite the technical knowledge is important, the domain where this is applied is even more important. It is always good idea to keep oneself in and field, instead of going from fintech jobs, to retail, to B2B SaaS...

One of my colleages has always been working in the energy market field, and he is way more knowledgeable about everything involving the business than any other technical peer. Also, he has a name in the industry, and is known in most of the energy vendors of the country. It's reputation alone has made more than one contract for my current company, so it really pays off. Of course, he is also paid well above any of us.

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

#169

Post by underdeserver »

em-bee wrote: post #159
underdeserver wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true, he should be comparing with software engineers in his COL area, but not with other people with random jobs in his office.

actually he should be comparing with other software engineers in his industry

Unfortunately the world we live in is one where not everyone can find a job that pays silicon valley salaries where they want/need/are able to live.

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

#170

Post by ptero »

redleader55 wrote: post #165

It depends on how you want to develop your career, but the generic advice, since you are in charge of hiring: hire A players(Google for "Bozo explosion"). Don't decide yet if you want to be an IC or a manager and keep your options open by doing deeply technical stuff. Because you might feel unsure of yourself, you will be tempted to hire folks who are less junior than you - resist that. Hire senior people (budget all…

> start your interviews with them by asking if they are comfortable reporting and working with someone with less experience than them

I think the recommendation to hire seniors and learn from them is great, but I would not muddy up waters by asking the above.

Most senior engineers have reported or saw colleagues report to non-technical leadership. Senior is practically synonymous with being able to make technical decisions without technical guidance (only business guidance). Asking that as a minor question in the middle of the interview is OK. Making that sound too important may just raise worries that the interviewing company had some people issues and might be a mess to step into. My 2c.

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