Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer • Hacker News Board

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

#311

Post by alexeldeib » Sun, May 30, 2021, 10:28 PM UTC

giantg2 wrote: post #301

alexeldeib wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 knowled…

I'm an intermediate dev, masters degree, 9 years experience, non-FAANG, higher cost of living area (not SV, NYC or NVA), and work with obscure tech and proprietary tools. It sucks that I suck. Oh well.

I really didn't mean for the comment to come across that way. I fully agreed with "it sounds great because it is great". I just wanted to provide another perspective too.

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

#312

Post by l0b0 » Sun, May 30, 2021, 10:40 PM UTC

josalhor wrote: post #305

> Tests are important but TDD is a damn cult. I don't see people commenting on this one! That may be a good thing because it means people are not questioning it :)

Techniques aren't culty, people are. I've been practising TDD for years, but I've only ever heard of this cult in web forums.

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

#313

Post by robocat » Sun, May 30, 2021, 10:42 PM UTC

ridethebike wrote: post #286

>> 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.

The same dynamic occurs with real estate agents. A successful agent optimises for quick sales, while giving the appearance of trying to get the best price. Very important to know when dealing with agents if either selling or buying a home.

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

#314

Post by gentleman11 » Sun, May 30, 2021, 10:43 PM UTC

ridethebike wrote: post #286

>> 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.

Recruiters are like men on dating apps: spam as many people as possible without reading their profiles, treating people like objects

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

#315

Post by lordofgibbons » Sun, May 30, 2021, 10:48 PM UTC

gentleman11 wrote: post #314

ridethebike wrote: post #286

>> 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.

Recruiters are like men on dating apps: spam as many people as possible without reading their profiles, treating people like objects

Who hurt you??

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

#316

Post by gentleman11 » Sun, May 30, 2021, 10:52 PM UTC

vsareto wrote: post #128

>I don't know why full stack webdevs are paid so poorly. No really, they should be paid like half a mil a year just base salary. Fuck they have to understand both front end AND back end AND how different browsers work AND networking AND databases AND caching AND differences between web and mobile AND omg what the fuck there's another framework out there that companies want to use? Seriously, why are webdevs paid so l…

What common position pays better than full stack?

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

#317

Post by blandflakes » Sun, May 30, 2021, 10:53 PM UTC

fmakunbound wrote: post #163

> front end AND back end AND... AND... AND... AND... AND... AND... Seriously, why are [full stack] webdevs paid so little. Two reasons: 1. everyone calls themselves this these days, and 2. they are often quite weak in each of those parts of the “full stack”

YUP. They're "two jobs", but I've yet to work with a full stack developer who is master of either. Most commonly they're great at front end, and have a very superficial understanding of how to do anything on the backend, and even then the backend basically has to be node.js for them to contribute. No way am I getting them to change the database schema or build a new service.

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

#318

Post by routerl » Sun, May 30, 2021, 10:53 PM UTC

mancerayder wrote: post #310

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…

Exactly. That's not a documentation problem, that's a writing problem. A lot of tech people don't enjoy writing, but also they're sometimes not very good at predicting or empathizing with the future reader of their writing. Sometimes that's also manifested in speaking, and failing to context frame concepts, arguments and ideas before jumping into excruciating detail. Senior managers notice this, and this limits your…

> A lot of tech people don't enjoy writing, but also they're sometimes not very good at predicting or empathizing with the future reader of their writing.

Agreed, wholeheartedly. Will hitchhike on your comment to recommend two things: Brett Victor's pdf stash [1] and, specifically, the Walter Ong essay "The Writer's Audience is Always a Fiction"[2].

Long story short, we form our audiences by subjecting them to our writing. In writing software documentation, we are implicitly informing the next generation's thought by the simple power dynamic that underlies all technical documentation: "you must understand this in order to do your job properly".

It is no wonder that "form", "inform", and "information" are such closely related words.

We dictate the level of rigor and intelligibility we expect out of our technical documentation, when we write technical documents. It almost sounds like a tautology when put this way, but "bad docs" are exclusively the result of a professional culture that puts up with the existence of bad docs. I've been there; too tired and overworked to care about writing something properly, or wanting to avoid writing a doc enough that I setup some autodoc thing and called it a day. We literally don't get paid for writing documentation.

But good documentation is what made us into good developers (if we are good developers). We should get paid for doing that...

[1] http://worrydream.com/refs/

[2] http://worrydream.com/refs/Ong%20-%20The%20Writer's%20Audien...

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

#319

Post by gentleman11 » Sun, May 30, 2021, 10:54 PM UTC

734129837261 wrote: post #296

odiroot wrote: post #178

> The older I get, the more I appreciate dynamic languages. Fuck, I said it. Fight me. The other ones are quite obvious but this is the one that really resonated with me. People, with experience, tend to get more pragmatic and less "academic".

I keep getting downvoted on Reddit for stating that I personally hate TypeScript to the max. It ruined the beauty of JavaScript (once you know it, anyway, I understand there are difficulties for JS-novices) and I honest to goodness 100% do not EVER find myself thinking: "Gosh, thanks TypeScript!" - on the contrary, it's always: "For fuck's sake you stupid POS TypeScript, you're wasting my time for no benefit at all."…

It might be your strong wording that people are responding to

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

#320

Post by humbleMouse » Sun, May 30, 2021, 10:55 PM UTC

anyfoo wrote: post #186

odiroot wrote: post #178

> The older I get, the more I appreciate dynamic languages. Fuck, I said it. Fight me. The other ones are quite obvious but this is the one that really resonated with me. People, with experience, tend to get more pragmatic and less "academic".

Pragmatic for me is knowing what’s wrong at compile time, and not being told much much later at runtime that I nested this array in a dictionary in an array wrong, or that my string is an integer. I got older, stopped using python for exactly the reasons above (I just really felt that it was wasting my time for trivial reasons), and found mypy which made it bearable again.

Groovy is a dynamic language that runs in the JVM, it lets you put @CompileStatic at the top of every class.

I believe typescript also has options for compiling statically.