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

Read about your technologies. A lot.

When I started working (about 3 to 4 years) , I spent 20-30 minutes a day reading DZone articles about Java, software design, architecture, OOP. Persist and do it daily. Repetition and habit are key.

And be focused. Understand everything in every article, do not accept not understanding everything. For each article, try to find out whether it makes sense, try to understand what the author wants to tell you. Think about how you would have done it. When possible, apply what seems to be useful and overcome the limitations of what is written /proposed in the article.

Occasionally, do the same with IT books instead of articles.

Then explore further, for example, find out how certain popular OOP patterns may be replaced by other, equivalent, patterns in FP. Think about how OOP classes are equivalent or not to closures in FP.

Also, become an expert in fundamental practices, like transaction management.

Application of theory is key.

That's how you do it.

Read books. Watch conference talks. Attend conferences. Find local meetups.

One benefit of this for you is that you have to take full responsibility for your own advancement. As you find things about your work that interest your or that are complicated problems, get excited about the opportunity to solve them because that’s where seniors really come from; deep experience solving and understanding problems.

Good luck!

I think Will Rogers and Rita Mae Brown are credited for using it.

> However, I have some strong FOMO about not being able to learn much technical stuff from my peers or seniors. I am trying my best to learn and pick things up on my own, learning design principles, getting code reviews from ChatGPT, etc. But even then, I'm afraid I am not producing the software to the highest standards of the industry since we don't have any rigorous cross-checking, and might be missing out on a lot of learning.

On having the right mentors:

This sucks, and I think the rest of the comments have good advice (look to open source, read more, etc.). I'll also say, think of the upsides. You have a lot of autonomy. You have a lot of latitude to implement your ideas. You have the ability to ship something and see it fail, learn from that, and improve it.

At some of the big companies, there are so many talented people hungry for good jobs or empire building that it’s really hard to have your ideas implemented.

On high-tech quality:

I spent many years working at Airbnb and Amazon. I have friends at Facebook and Google. The honest truth is that all of these places have lots of bad code. The entire industry is held together by duct tape and glue. If Google (clear tech leader of the 2000s-2010s) and Airbnb (Tech-darling built in a post-AWS environment) both have "bad" code, where is there "good" code?

1) Companies that succeed solve business problems and don't focus on fixing tech debt that doesn’t fundamentally matter to customers.

2) Real businesses are complex and don't fit nicely into good design patterns. Every big refactor and rearchitecture I saw at Airbnb started with good design but got complicated once they hit reality.

3) Good engineers deliver good results despite bad code. Take the time to deeply understand your tech stack. Figure out which parts of the code are brittle and figure out ways to improve them. Make the case to your business partners that fixing things will improve developer time, reduce mistakes, and save them money.

And you’re in your first job, not your last job. Take the time to learn the ropes, and when you feel like you've outgrown your role, find a new one. There’s always something to learn.