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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

#381

Post by whateveracct »

OJFord wrote: post #333

> Hacker News and r/Programming is only good to get general ideas and keep up-to-date, the comments are almost worthless That's a weird one. I don't know anything about that subreddit, but HN comments are frequently great. I submit stuff because I want there to be HN comments on it for me to read. I typically read the comments first and only bother opening the link if they were interesting.

I frequently bookmark both an article + its HN thread when the comments are full of related opinions, info, and links.

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

#382

Post by ipaddr »

steindavidb wrote: post #160

> 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.) Highly recommend a journalism class at local community college.

I recommend a class on instructions.

Learning how to write proper instructions is the gateway to proper documentation.

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

#383

Post by whimsicalism »

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."…

The benefits of typing are, imo, largely unrelated to needing to manage memory

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

#384

Post by OminousWeapons »

nojokes wrote: post #378
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…

So how did it play out? Please, do not let me hanging here.

Honestly, I don't know; I unknowingly followed the author's advice. About half a year after the last incident, a friend who I went to school with called me up and offered me a job at his fledgling biotech. I accepted and never looked back.

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

#385

Post by peteretep »

zdragnar wrote: post #374
peteretep wrote: post #371

> How do you know if you have a good [recruiter]? If they've been a third party recruiter for more than 3 years, they're probably bad. The good ones typically become recruiters are large companies. That's ... that's not at all how that works.

No kidding. I've been hired through third party recruiters twice, and both times were fantastic. I am just guessing, but I got the distinct impression that both were doing better and were better compensated working independently (one owned his own business, the other was highly placed) than if they were recruiters for a large company. OTOH, my experience with same-company recruiters was that they merely existed to ac…

Exactly. An excellent recruiter will build up a pool of candidates and clients who want to work with them, and will start their own agency where the compensation is usually a multiple of what they'd get in-house.

In-house recruiters tend to be one of:

* HR professionals who do some recruitment as part of their job

* A surprising number of people who end up taking on some recruitment responsibilities as part of their secretarial or admin work, and then end up doing it full-time

* Agency recruiters who didn't enjoy or could cut it being agency recruiters

I know a small number of excellent internal recruiters, but they're really the exception not the rule.

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

#386

Post by wiml »

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.

I think Tacitus had a similar anecdote about the Germans.

(Even without getting drunk, I've always found it useful to consider a hard decision once analytically and once intuitively, and if I don't agree with myself, think about it some more.)

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

#387

Post by b20000 »

fouc wrote: post #372
b20000 wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

which is why leetcode makes no sense, as it focuses on premature optimization and writing the most advanced code possible which no freshman will be able to understand, at least not without dissecting it for a few hours first.

Isn't leetcode more about "passing" the technical interview white board questions? Not a reflection of what real world code looks like.

exactly, and that is the problem

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

#388

Post by personjerry »

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…

Effective communicating is a crucial part of every job. I think in software engineering, a lot of us are introverts who want to deprioritize this soft skill, but the truth is still that people matter more than the code.

And communicating gets even more important the higher up you move in your seniority.

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

#389

Post by granshaw »

totorovirus wrote: post #355

"My self worth is not a function of or correlated with my total compensation. Capitalism is a poor way to determine self-worth." This is gold. I think the whole industry is failing to value an engineer. For 5+ yoe, I think performance is a function of eagerness to code and innate intelligence. Yet the industry is paying engineers largely on function of yoe

Is this true though? I think engineering salaries very definitely plateau at a certain point, much more so compared to other professions even

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

#390

Post by tomnipotent »

daenz wrote: post #18

>Don't meet your heroes. I paid 5k to take a course by one of my heroes. He's a brilliant man, but at the end of it I realized that he's making it up as he goes along like the rest of us. I thought they were going to go the direction of "he's an asshole" and was ready to accept that, but this particular criticism is actually disturbing. People with strong visions can often appear to be "making it up as they go along,…

In your particular instance, I would have collaborated with a single team to work on converting a single service over to the new framework. Once some success was made, it would be much easier to make traction with other projects and teams. Also, a vision or a plan doesn't mean you're not winging things as you go.
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