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Senior engineers are living in the future

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Re: Senior engineers are living in the future

#131

Post by bckr »

triyambakam wrote: post #81

Where I am often hung up in comparison is due to age. I dropped out of college and spent my early 20s learning agriculture and construction. Now I work in software engineering and my current manager is younger than me. Not only is he younger than me, but he's been able to climb up to an engineering manager in a shorter amount of time than I've been working as a SWE. So I feel really lame - wasted so much time early i…

Hey, I'm right there with you. I think this industry is skewed young, but not as much as we might think. For me, the redeeming quality of my early 20's is that I matured dramatically. I'd encourage you to take a good, long (I mean months long) look at your motivations over the last decade and find a way to honor the part of you that was curious about agriculture & construction, and find a way to bring that part of you to life in the here and now. The word for releasing the tension between being and doing is "play".

Re: Senior engineers are living in the future

#132

Post by nobodyandproud »

triyambakam wrote: post #81

Where I am often hung up in comparison is due to age. I dropped out of college and spent my early 20s learning agriculture and construction. Now I work in software engineering and my current manager is younger than me. Not only is he younger than me, but he's been able to climb up to an engineering manager in a shorter amount of time than I've been working as a SWE. So I feel really lame - wasted so much time early i…

Management is a different job.

I’ve been an engineering manager for over three years; and the skillset is completely different. So much so that I recently flubbed some easy LC questions.

Businesses may treat it as a promotion, but don’t make the mistake of thinking it really is one.

Re: Senior engineers are living in the future

#133

Post by adra »

kevinventullo wrote: post #121
triyambakam wrote: post #81

Where I am often hung up in comparison is due to age. I dropped out of college and spent my early 20s learning agriculture and construction. Now I work in software engineering and my current manager is younger than me. Not only is he younger than me, but he's been able to climb up to an engineering manager in a shorter amount of time than I've been working as a SWE. So I feel really lame - wasted so much time early i…

In your next 1:1, ask him how he did it.

Ugh, one off data points are just as often wrong as they are right. What adage they give of their success could have just as aptly worked in reverse for you. Luck/timing (aka no strong correlation to actions) is a real thing, and are all too often ignored by the winners who always reward their achievements by "hard work" (clearly working hard is often needed as well to succeed).

Re: Senior engineers are living in the future

#134

Post by layer8 »

revskill wrote: post #8

Senior means two things: - Have experience - Self learning though above experience. I met many experienced developers, but most of them failed at step 2. To me, they're still junior.

I would reformulate #2 as learning to figure out things on your own, i.e. not to bail out as soon as something is outside of what you’re familiar with. The ability to go one level deeper to find out how things work under the hood. The ability and interest to extend your horizon, to pick out the learning material you need for familiarizing yourself with something new, without needing it to be served on a plate by someone else.

Re: Senior engineers are living in the future

#135

Post by emaginniss »

triyambakam wrote: post #81

Where I am often hung up in comparison is due to age. I dropped out of college and spent my early 20s learning agriculture and construction. Now I work in software engineering and my current manager is younger than me. Not only is he younger than me, but he's been able to climb up to an engineering manager in a shorter amount of time than I've been working as a SWE. So I feel really lame - wasted so much time early i…

Do you want to be a manager? SWE -> engineering manager is not a natural and guaranteed progression. It is a shift from individual contributor path to a management path. A good company will allow you to become a more and more senior IC (senior -> staff -> principal -> distinguished) without a requirement to become a manager to increase your pay.

Re: Senior engineers are living in the future

#136

Post by co_dh »

sp332 wrote: post #20

One of my classmates in college couldn't handle this. I'd glance at some awful Visual Studio compiler error and then point out a missing semicolon. He ended up feeling stupid, but I was trying to be encouraging because his code was pretty good aside from some missing punctuation, which will come with practice. He ended up switching majors.

I put semicolons at the beginning of line.

Re: Senior engineers are living in the future

#137

Post by yourapostasy »

rambambram wrote: post #89
triyambakam wrote: post #81

Where I am often hung up in comparison is due to age. I dropped out of college and spent my early 20s learning agriculture and construction. Now I work in software engineering and my current manager is younger than me. Not only is he younger than me, but he's been able to climb up to an engineering manager in a shorter amount of time than I've been working as a SWE. So I feel really lame - wasted so much time early i…

Don't think like that. It might not have happened yet, but I'm sure in the future you'll be glad you can apply knowledge from agriculture and construction into your SWE role. And maybe not in your SWE role, but at least somewhere in your life.

triyambakam needs to take this advice to heart. Software engineering shares many troubleshooting patterns with agriculture and construction. While the cross-fertilization isn't 100% efficient, it doesn't need to be to be effective because the bar fortunately doesn't demand a global maxima only a local one: fix the current problem in a business-acceptable timeframe and cost, and you're adding value. Onto the next problem.

Re: Senior engineers are living in the future

#138

Post by zibby8 »

soco wrote: post #98
zibby8 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps this is really stupid and juvenile, but the show Adventure Time had an episode where one of the characters said “sucking at something is the first step to being kind of god at something.” I think that’s an important lesson a lot of people should learn. Going out and sucking it up is awesome if it means you’re getting better at something.

On the other hand, toxic positivity sounds exactly the same. So which is one and which is the other? What to do when you suck at something? Persevere or pivot? Both are praised in TED talks, but you just can't pursue them at the same time.

Sucking at something is the first step to being kind of good at something. It's impossible to not suck at something new, unless you are a prodigy. Whether or not you want to persevere in the face of prolonged sucking is a personal decision.

Re: Senior engineers are living in the future

#139

Post by ghaff »

adra wrote: post #133
kevinventullo wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In your next 1:1, ask him how he did it.

Ugh, one off data points are just as often wrong as they are right. What adage they give of their success could have just as aptly worked in reverse for you. Luck/timing (aka no strong correlation to actions) is a real thing, and are all too often ignored by the winners who always reward their achievements by "hard work" (clearly working hard is often needed as well to succeed).

If someone asked me "You seem pretty successful. How did you manage your career?" my story would be (other than some generalities) perhaps interesting but utterly unactionable for anyone else. And that's probably not unusual for anyone who hasn't followed a pretty conventional path.

Re: Senior engineers are living in the future

#140

Post by ghaff »

marcosdumay wrote: post #111
didgetmaster wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even very senior engineers can make simple mistakes that can bruise their egos. Several years ago I was called into the office of the chief architect. I was also a senior engineer with a lot of experience, but he was quite famous (at the time) in the industry for his technical skill. He was convinced he had found a compiler bug. He had some c code that he had traced through the debugger at the assembly level. It was…

> I'm sure he felt stupid when I pointed it out. He certainly did. There is no amount of experience that makes people not feel stupid about those. What changes is that you learn to not be affected by it, because you know that it's not a personal flaw (at least not one specific to you), and while you can improve on it, you can't completely fix it. But the alternating between feeling like the dumbest person on Earth an…

You develop tunnel vision and, whether someone points it out to you or you look at it with fresh eyes in the morning, it's a head slap "Duh."
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