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

But aren't needed to grow (but make growing so much easier and as such allow you to grow more over the same time frame).

The most important part are:

- self reflect on you work, importantly do take a emotional step back before doing so to (hopefully) have a objectifish self reflection

- if you do mistakes try to understand _why exactly_ things went wrong, instead of just finding a solution or a target of to put blame on. E.g. if some system lead to some issues don't just put if of because "that system is bad designed" but try to understand which aspects of the design are the problem and dig deeper to find out e.g. if there is a reason it's designed that way.

- in general try to learn the underlying principle independent of the fancy branding and terminology it's backed in. E.g. people all the time reinvent and rediscover long term known concepts and them give them new names and say it's something completely different even if it's not. (But also new impl. of old concepts can sometimes make the difference between unusual and a grate solution). E.g. rail track programming (e.g. in swift) is just a reinvention using Monades for error handling.

- there a many seniors sharing their knowledge freely on the internet, the tricky part her is that not everyone pretending to be a expert is one and not everyone who is a expert in one area is one in another. So never blindly follow their advice.

- when you get advice, especially from less trustable sources like the web, understand _why_/_how_ this advice is going to help instead of just following it. Also question the advice, try to find out when the advice might be a bad idea even if it seems to always be a good idea.

- reading documentation instead of just googling (or LLM generating) solutions can help with understanding (through not always, a lot of doc is terrible bad). Now speed wise you might not have time for that but double checking found solutions by checking them against the documentation is something you often should do anyways.

- be aware that even if you feel you are a senior there is a lot of thing you don't know, more importantly a lot of thing you don't know you don't know.

- don't just reflect on work you recently finished go back to older work

- if it's your thing, keep notes in a well organized way and go back to them to reflect how you understanding might have changed

there is more but I have to go

Real Q is, do you care about oil and gas? Probably answer is no. This sucks too.

The skills you gain from autonomy might translate into, you have a good idea for a new business, you ask your rich boss for a $25k-$100k check investing in your new thing when you leave. I assume it will not be in oil and gas because nobody really cares about mineral extraction sincerely.

This deal sounds nice but in reality there are millions of people your age who get a $25k-$100k check every year from their parents to do something they care about, as opposed to some boring ass business.

Your instincts to find mentors are good. The hard truth is you will have to quit to find them, you have correctly ascertained that you are hitting a ceiling, and developing a relationship with these guys is kind of worthless.

This is the real value of “Google” and “Airbnb:” they’re so big and they’re household names, even if you worked on some bullshit meaningless thing there, you can get a lot of people to pay attention to the new thing you want to do that you are actually excited about. The skills you develop will not be useful for getting hired at these companies, unfortunately that is a huge crapshoot right now, and you’d have to do a career reset by taking grad school or something, because I cannot emphasize enough how little people care about mineral extraction.