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

First off, I think you can actually learn _better_ from others, the odds you have a world class[1] Senior in your company, or even will work with on in your career, is pretty low.

Here's what I recommend:

1. Build a corpus of materials: Conferences (in person, and you can youtube them), books, courses. Cross product these concepts with tools/techs - DBs, coding tools like IDE and source control, programming languages, programming paradigms, software craftsmanship, network stack / protocols, debuggers, Observability and Ops, Peopleware / wetware. 2. Think of attending conferences as seed materials for future research, write down every term, subject, and technology you're curious about, never heard of, are scared of, think is out of your league/level. 3. Spend an hour a day on weekdays, and 2-4 on a sixth day, sharpening the saw[2] (learning) 4. Close loops on subjects by taking action. Eg: If you finish a chapter on a certain DB, install it, insert some data, learn to bulk insert, try some complex queries. If it's a language try to write a breakable toy[3]. If it's a paradigm, try a code kata and write the same one in multiple paradigms. 5. Remember: you read a text book a month in Uni, try to finish a text book (or equivalent effort) per quarter/half for the remainder of your career.

[1] - These are definitionally top .1 or even 0.01% engineers (amongst the engineering population, not the general population)

[2] - Sharpen the saw - https://www.franklincovey.com/the-7-habits/habit-7/

[3] - https://ilango.hashnode.dev/learning-by-building-breakable-t...

I’ve worked adjacent to data science for natural gas well services. You’re on the right track to be thinking about this as a problem; it’s easy in O&G to get sucked into solving a problem right this minute, and to hell with the long term. The advantage of being in your position is that literally nobody knows how long anything should take (although in O&G the answer is always “do it yesterday”) which potentially gives you some breathing room to explore new ideas. Bear in mind that your industry is notoriously prone to consolidation as well as newcomers cropping up like mushrooms after a rainstorm in response to boom/bust cycles. Keep your eyes open, nothing lasts forever in O&G, and forever is five years. You will need to be ready to move on when the time comes.

I was never mentored by any super great engineers. Worked with some brights ones, but never got formally taught by them.

The way I excelled from beginner to a higher level engineer was self learning, curiosity, building things so I could understand them. Example: when learning dependency injection, I found a tutorial on how to build your own DI container. So i built one and saw how it worked internally. That was SUPER useful.

I recommend Podcasts, YouTube Videos, Courses, Conferences, Participating in Open Source (even writing docs that are missing is helpful). Ultimately its about using what you learn and always being curious, learning patterns, and what is useful vs what is not.

Join an open source project with welcoming community and good practices. Shop around.

One of my best contributions was a 1 line fix in one of Microsoft's repos. It took me a day or two to understand the code and what it was doing but it was well worth it.