In hindsight what were the best career moves you made that really leveled you up as an engineer (i.e made you a much better engineer).
Veteran engineers (10 yrs exp+) advice needed
1–10 of 44 posts
Re: Veteran engineers (10 yrs exp+) advice needed
#2None. My choices where all terrible and held me back. Stuff like naively believing the company promises, working with obscure tech, switching stacks multiple times, stuck with the same company, etc.
I guess I'm a good example of what not to do.
Re: Veteran engineers (10 yrs exp+) advice needed
#3None. My choices where all terrible and held me back. Stuff like naively believing the company promises, working with obscure tech, switching stacks multiple times, stuck with the same company, etc. I guess I'm a good example of what not to do.
did u stay with a company for long periods of time (4+ years) or did u frequently move from company to company ( switch every 1-2 years)
Re: Veteran engineers (10 yrs exp+) advice needed
#4None. My choices where all terrible and held me back. Stuff like naively believing the company promises, working with obscure tech, switching stacks multiple times, stuck with the same company, etc. I guess I'm a good example of what not to do.
did u stay with a company for long periods of time (4+ years) or did u frequently move from company to company ( switch every 1-2 years)
All 10 years at one company
Re: Veteran engineers (10 yrs exp+) advice needed
#5I've been in my current role for nearly 9 years, working in the field for 12+. I'd say that the one piece of advice is to not get stuck to a certain stack if you have the authority to make those decisions.
You're definitely going to make the wrong decisions about the stack you choose, or the way you design elements of your code, but that is how you learn.
Good problems to have, like scaling to thousands of concurrent requests, have been the greatest opportunities to learn. You may not get the answers right away, but they will come.
Before I get comfortable with learning any new language, look into the best practices for caching, or how easily that is handled. Your ability to know how and when to cache whether it's in memory if the language you use supports that, or through memcached/redis is going to make it less likely that you're going to need to do a complete rewrite in the future.
I first started programming 20+ years ago before I was 10 years old, with Visual Basic and the demo. Eventually moving to access, and PHP in the early 2000's in my later years in high school. Today, some of the larger apps I've written have been written in Go. Lately in the last few weeks, I've really come to love Ruby/Ruby on Rails, and for apps that I don't need to scale, that is going to be my go-to language for my own projects and client projects.
Would I suggest we rewrite everything or utilize Rails in my day job? Not a chance, because 1) my productivity is not worth it and 2) it's not the right tool for the job. Maybe if we had to write some back office software I'd recommend it, or I'd use Sinatra for a basic API/demo.
Re: Veteran engineers (10 yrs exp+) advice needed
#6(I'm a dev with 16 years experience)
I joined a startup (20+ employees) and it was a great way to grow my career. In 4 years I went from Senior (in a team) to Lead (for a team) to Technical Lead (shaping technical decisions for all dev teams). Wore a bunch of different hats and got experience in many different areas.
Working-from-home was a really good fit for me. I can get hot-headed (not proud of it) and being away from colleagues and communicating in an asynchronous way gives me enough time and distance to cooldown and (most of the time) put forward the best version of my argument that I can.
Started contracting around the same time as wfh and in a weird kind of way, it also provided some distance. You just think differently about your relationship with any company. It can be scary at first because you know you're first on the chopping block when downsizing needs to happen but the upside is that you'll probably earn enough to set some aside as contingency.
Some people will say not to switch stacks but I've done it a few times (C# -> Ruby -> Node.js -> Python/Go) and I don't think it's hurt my career. My recent switch to Python/Go has really just been me getting bored at work with Node.js and wanting a change. Another side of it is that if you want longevity as a developer, you'll need to be able change stacks a few times in your career to remain employable.
Re: Veteran engineers (10 yrs exp+) advice needed
#7I've been in my current role for nearly 9 years, working in the field for 12+. I'd say that the one piece of advice is to not get stuck to a certain stack if you have the authority to make those decisions. You're definitely going to make the wrong decisions about the stack you choose, or the way you design elements of your code, but that is how you learn. Good problems to have, like scaling to thousands of concurrent…
i see people around me jumping ship every two years for various reasons, but you've been with a company for almost 10 years, do you think that steadiness has helped you become a better engineer or has detracted from helping you gain experiences?
Re: Veteran engineers (10 yrs exp+) advice needed
#8Re: Veteran engineers (10 yrs exp+) advice needed
#9None. My choices where all terrible and held me back. Stuff like naively believing the company promises, working with obscure tech, switching stacks multiple times, stuck with the same company, etc. I guess I'm a good example of what not to do.
Bad experience are even more valuable than good ones. I think that because you probably can tell what and why happened, and what you could and couldn't to prevent that situation.