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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?

#251

Post by hinkley »

jugg1es wrote: post #242

I think the most effective way to learn is to stay at a place long enough so that you are still there when (not if) your decisions a couple of years ago come back to bite you. You need to experience full feedback cycles to become a great engineer and that can take 2-3 years after first shipping code to become apparent. I never had a mentor either, but I stayed at my first job for 11 years and I would never replace th…

Many of us are clever enough to keep the wheels on pretty much any strategy for about 18 months. Including process. I think the industry was done considerable injury not by developers job hopping every two years - although that’s also bad - but by managers doing so.

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

#252

Post by hinkley »

crystal_revenge wrote: post #92
spike021 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everybody has different learning styles and it's almost condescending to say "well, this method that works well for you is a fallacy, try my method".

> "yodas" who guide you is not a fallacy because it doesn't work, it's a fallacy because such teams rarely exist . I have worked on one or maybe two such teams in my career, but the truth is to get on a team like this you already have to be exceptional . If you require a team of elite experts that are not only technically excellent but also love teaching untrained juniors in their ways, then you it may take you longe…

On the topic of mentoring, I focus on people who ask good questions. I know how to teach a lot, but not that.

I started tutoring my roommate in college, and random people in the computer lab while he was finishing his homework. So I’ve been doing it longer than I’ve been professionally programming which is a long time.

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

#253

Post by roeles »

humanfromearth9 wrote: post #232

I'll speak for software development, but in principle it's the same for any other domain. 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 every…

> Application of theory is key.

What works for me is deliberately testing something that I recently read in a project. Even if it is something that works, rewrite it from the perspective of what you just learnt.

This makes you look at problems from different perspectives. And if you get stuck, it's easy to ask for help.

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

#254

Post by hinkley »

Joel_Mckay wrote: post #161
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 explos…

So they don’t have lockout systems on oil rig equipment yet?

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

#255

Post by __loam »

jjice wrote: post #235
humanfromearth9 wrote: post #232

I'll speak for software development, but in principle it's the same for any other domain. 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 every…

> Application of theory is key. I often see people either get caught up in theory without practice, or proclaim that it's all about experience. Actual time spent writing code is probably the most important thing, but having some foundational ideas and getting to skip some things you've have to painfully learn yourself by reading and then getting to apply them directly is huge.

I believe it was Knuth who said practice informs theory and theory informs practice. You need both.

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

#256

Post by FpUser »

dfex wrote: post #151
FpUser wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are one lucky dude. I think you do not need anyone's help. You can learn by doing what you do and some reading / experiments.

Came here to say this. The Oil & Gas industry is not sexy and never will be, but it pays well above market and people with niche skills will do very well there (as you have no doubt now seen). Technological progress in the space tends to move pretty slowly (especially on the Operational Technology side of the business) owing to many factors, but mainly risk avoidance. The flip-side of this is that once one company ad…

Amen.

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

#257

Post by conductr »

Ask your manager if you can have some budget per month for career development and hire a senior consultant to discuss your work with. It may not always be real time feedback to help you through a problem (but maybe it could be) but you could have post-mortem conversations with them about how problems were presented to you and how you thought through the solutions and implemented them. It sounds like this is the feedback you crave if I'm reading correctly.

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

#258

Post by sevensor »

__loam wrote: post #255
jjice wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Application of theory is key. I often see people either get caught up in theory without practice, or proclaim that it's all about experience. Actual time spent writing code is probably the most important thing, but having some foundational ideas and getting to skip some things you've have to painfully learn yourself by reading and then getting to apply them directly is huge.

I believe it was Knuth who said practice informs theory and theory informs practice. You need both.

See the recent threads about Heaviside and Category Theory for interesting perspectives on practice informing theory (Heaviside) and theory informing practice (Category Theory naturally).

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

#259

Post by Loic »

I have been serving the oil & gas industry for the past 20 years as a consultant. I always enjoy sharing my experience with others (maybe I should write a book at some point), if you need some help, just ping me, my details are indirectly on my profile.

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

#260

Post by aylmao »

In my experience;

- Learn other frameworks and/or programming languages. It gives you a wider and unique perspective on other "correct" ways of doing software. Through finding commonalities one can arrive at things that are good practices regardless of the tool being used. Through finding differences, one can better understand what might be dogmatic to a specific language/library/etc.

- Dig deep. If something isn't working, as much as possible, make it your goal not to fix it, but to fix it and understand why it was broken in the first place. Trying things until something works is a tried and tested way of fixing things, but digging through the abstraction layers and confirming why that suggestion one found online is very valuable. I think a lot of knowledge from senior developers boils down to having experience at lower levels of abstraction.

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