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Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

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Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

#281

Post by tolbish »

giantg2 wrote: post #273
OminousWeapons wrote: post #268

> If people are trying to assign blame to a bug or outage, it's time to move on. This is one of my favorite excerpts. I once worked in a lab where we would have frequent catastrophic failures because there was never any disaster planning or contingency management plan. I personally triaged 3 such incidents alone or with people who happened to be there when the problem arose and attempted to disseminate some suggestio…

I was on call as a new developer on a system. I was not given any procedures or trouble shooting documents. I got a call at 1 am, missed it, and waited one minute to see if there was a message. I did see a voicemail, so I started listening and logging on. Before I could even get halfway through, the person called again (why not leave the voicemail on the final attempt?). So I'm looking for the issue/fix for 5 minutes…

How was the interview process before you got hired on? Any warning signs that seem obvious now in retrospect?

Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

#282

Post by gabereiser »

giantg2 wrote: post #264

"Sure, $120k + bennies + pension sound great, but you'll be selling your soul to work on esoteric proprietary technology." It sounds great because it is great. I don't make that much and I work on boring systems. I guess those numbers also explain why the author can recommend maxing out the 401k. People supporting a family on less than $100k don't have $19.5k per year to put into it.

This rings home for me as well. I remember my (now ex) wife saying she was going to quit working and be a stay at home mom the day I hit $100k salary. Effectively cutting it in half economically. I feel like folks who say these kind of recommendations also need to preface the fact that not everyone can afford to. I couldn’t afford to put anything in a 401k for years.

Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

#283

Post by rewgs »

gautamnarula wrote: post #254
frereubu wrote: post #17

This, and the current “sober” posts on r/ExperiencedDevs, makes me think of Herodotus describing the way the Persians made important decisions - once sober, once drunk, and if the drunk and sober decisions were the same they knew it was a good one.

Reminds me of Hemingway's "Write drunk, edit sober."

I find “write sober, review drunk” to be much better advice.

Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

#284

Post by ljm »

vageli wrote: post #3

> The most underrated skill to learn as an engineer is how to document. Fuck, someone please teach me how to write good documentation. Seriously, if there's any recommendations, I'd seriously pay for a course (like probably a lot of money, maybe 1k for a course if it guaranteed that I could write good docs.) I agree but think it is more than just _documentation_: effectively communicating ideas through text was one o…

Documentation can also be anything. Is it your initial RFC or ADR, or is it a spec? Is it a set of product requirements? Is it inline with your code so it produces a manual when you build it? Is it a set of articles or tutorials written after the fact? Is it a README?

Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

#285

Post by convolvatron »

MikeDelta wrote: post #114
user_50123890 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because good senior programmers are rare (as can be observed if you post a job listing). Most of this stuff comes from students / junior developers, where yes, they probably visit stack overflow every 20 minutes

They should try programming on an airplane or without internet connection. For some the productivity drops to zero without stack overflow.

i grew up a long time before stack overflow. actually used man pages and read books. there is just _no way_ to program in Rust or Go without access to a search engine and the package libraries.

Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

#286

Post by ridethebike »

>> Third party recruiters are leeches

Can confirm this and it was surprise for me when I discovered it. I assumed they would try to maximize $$ in my offer in order to maximize their profit. Yet most of them were trying to get offer accepted as quick as possible. Seems like more offers with less money in each is preferred over less offers with more money in each.

Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

#287

Post by durandal1 »

3pt14159 wrote: post #210
anyfoo wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I said in another ranty response in this thread, I do not understand how people enjoy spending time debugging trivial issues, that even a simple static type system would just plain tell them at compile time.

I've been programming for over 20 years too, and I like dynamic languages. I like them a lot more when they're properly tested and well architected, but even the tire fire codebases are at least debuggable. The compiled stuff helps with types catching the trivial bugs, yes, but it's way too complicated to quickly debug things like seg faults. Dynamic languages let you introspect and modify things way more easily, and…

You're a python dev and never had to investigate a segfault in some buggy C module?

Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

#289

Post by giantg2 »

tolbish wrote: post #281
giantg2 wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was on call as a new developer on a system. I was not given any procedures or trouble shooting documents. I got a call at 1 am, missed it, and waited one minute to see if there was a message. I did see a voicemail, so I started listening and logging on. Before I could even get halfway through, the person called again (why not leave the voicemail on the final attempt?). So I'm looking for the issue/fix for 5 minutes…

How was the interview process before you got hired on? Any warning signs that seem obvious now in retrospect?

The hiring process for the company wasn't special. Of course half the stuff they claimed in the interview changed later (was hired as a Java dev but was assigned to Filenet, they said rhet dont outsource or layoff but have started doing both).

This was an internal transfer. There were definitely warning signs in that interview. I was desperate because they were outsourcing my job in an obscure tech (Filenet) and we were expecting a kid.

The hiring manager said something to the effect of, "I was surprised anyone internal even applied to this job".

'Warning flag' doesn't do this justice. I have no idea what to call it, but desperation required I ignore it.

Re: Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer

#290

Post by alexeldeib »

giantg2 wrote: post #264

"Sure, $120k + bennies + pension sound great, but you'll be selling your soul to work on esoteric proprietary technology." It sounds great because it is great. I don't make that much and I work on boring systems. I guess those numbers also explain why the author can recommend maxing out the 401k. People supporting a family on less than $100k don't have $19.5k per year to put into it.

You have a great point, but let's balance this out with a few of the author's other comments.

- OP uses the phrasing senior engineer.

- Never worked for FAANG. This is relevant because $120k + bonus/benefits is basically a FAANG new grad. Fairly normal for SV tech companies.

- Those numbers likely provide a solid standard of living, but as a senior engineer you are likely underpaid.

- Esoteric and proprietary knowledge means if you choose to go elsewhere, you will be at a competitive disadvantage compared to using industry standard tools. There are of course tradeoffs and lots of general learning that comes with experience, but all other things equal it's a disadvantage.

> I guess those numbers also explain why the author can recommend maxing out the 401k

Yes, but again fairly typical for the target audience I think. There are even startups trying to target this market to optimize the flow of money from salary -> 401k -> post tax contributions/megabackdoor -> other investments, brokerage accounts, etc., e.g. https://www.helloplaybook.com/

Just as a sanity check, BLS suggests the median SWE wages work out to ~$110k.

https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...

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