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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

#451

Post by giantg2 »

mr_toad wrote: post #393
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…

> SME didn't create documentation because they are "too busy". Because they keep getting shoulder tapped to put out fires. Because they’re the only one who knows the system. Because there is no documentation…

Basically. Except there were 3 other tech leads in that area. They didn't know that specific piece of functionality, but they could be given the new work to take stuff off that team's plate to make time for documentation. The leadership in that area didnt really care about anything other than delivering fast. Testing? Eh... Security issues? They're not that big of a deal - do them on an above and beyond basis (contrary to enterprise policy). On call documentation? Not even going to try to create it. I mean really, all you have to do is create a knowledge document out of the SNOW incident ticket. Then the next time it happens there will be a link to the steps taken. But no.

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

#452

Post by giantg2 »

ksec wrote: post #433
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…

>This is relevant because $120k + bonus/benefits is basically a FAANG new grad. Fairly normal for SV tech companies. There were a few post on HN recently about fresh grad asking for / being paid $200K and anything lower they felt they were feeling lowballed. For those of us outside US we could never quite grasp whether something is true or not. Salary across the pond is just incomprehensible.

I think they are being serious. If you're in silicon valley, I could see $200k being a new grad salary. I wouldn't move there for less than that. The cost of living is extremely high in that area. The vast majority of areas would have much lower salaries. My starting salary was less than $60k. After 9 years and a masters it's still under $100k in a medium-high cost of living area. Median salary for a developer is about $110k in the US.

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

#453

Post by giantg2 »

geitir wrote: post #411
giantg2 wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this is my situation. I am AWS certified and started working on a team that uses it, sort of. So maybe I can transition off of there in a year or two because the subject matter sucks.

Programming is programming no matter the language, don't let anyone tell you otherwise. They are all just tools. If you have a masters degree you should be able to pick up anything proficiently in a matter of a few months, just grok the existing codebase as much as you can.

The programming part is easy to pick up. The tools and ops parts are more difficult, mostly because there are so many. And we are a 'microservices' shop (read distributed monolith). I don't get to read/work a single system or language. One sprint/day I might be in ECS Java, the next might be Python Lambda, then no code stuff like Splunk and Tableau. There are a bunch of minor and bureaucratic tasks too.

The real problem is I deal with this sort of stuff. I started doing analysis about modifying a system to provide a new field to another system for the purpose of reporting. After spending a day looking at it, they pulled the story because they didn't actually need that field. And this isn't a one time thing - pulling back work. Then they give me BS stuff. They wanted me to increase the code coverage on an app that we were going to transfer to another team. The target percentage - 100%. It was already at 97% line 98% branch. Why am I wasting my time on this miserable task?

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

#454

Post by giantg2 »

tacticalDonut wrote: post #415
giantg2 wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this is my situation. I am AWS certified and started working on a team that uses it, sort of. So maybe I can transition off of there in a year or two because the subject matter sucks.

Dude run from your current employer. I actually transitioned into software dev after working as a Mech Eng after 2 years and I started at $120k. With you experience I feel like you could do way better.

Glassdoor's market rate/comp tool says I'm actually making market rate for the area.

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

#455

Post by giantg2 »

lostcolony wrote: post #417
giantg2 wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this is my situation. I am AWS certified and started working on a team that uses it, sort of. So maybe I can transition off of there in a year or two because the subject matter sucks.

So while some employers require X years of (specific tech), many, MANY don't. They expect X years of development. Broadly. Can program and are AWS certified? Start looking. And if there's nothing in your area, look remote. You can hit that salary and solid benefits (no pension) in most metro areas (I hit it with 5 years dev experience, and only a bachelor's, back in 2015 in Atlanta, for a non-tech company). You are a…

Glassdoor's market rate/comp tool says I'm actually making market rate for the area. One major downside to switching is that it involves more time to come up to speed, like putting in extra hours. I can't really commit to that because I have to watch my kid as soon as i log off of work (after 8 hours).

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

#456

Post by swader999 »

marcinzm wrote: post #242
daenz wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing wrong with making it up as you go, and I didn't mean to sound like I was knocking it, if I did. Sometimes everyone fumbles around trying to find solutions that work...it's a totally valid way to approach some problems. Sometimes it's a hybrid of knowing what you are doing but not knowing the implementation specifics. You know you need to connect high-level pieces A, B, and C with specific constraints, but it…

>I am concerned about how to effectively communicate visions to people, because it gets everyone rowing in the same direction. If nobody thinks that you have a vision, when you do, there is no reason they should choose your direction vs just do their own thing. I used to have visions. Now I have collaborative design discussions driven by some starting designs. I found that if people don't contribute to the overall de…

They are far less rigid at this stage as they haven't invested a lot of coding time.

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

#457

Post by Stranger43 »

thethethethe wrote: post #403
lostcolony wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe. I've seen the opposite, where no one takes responsibility for anything, and it's also bad. In fact, the situation you describe could also be a lack of anyone else taking responsibility for disaster planning and etc. I think what is needed is a culture of -ownership-. That's basically people saying "I'm responsible". Not one where everyone tries to avoid responsibility, and not one where peopel point fingers.

Why does someone need to take responsibility when you can have a culture of blameless postmortems where everyone focuses on making sure what ever happened never happens again instead? In blameless postmortem culture, everyone is responsible by default

The blameless postmortem an "legal fiction" that don't really mean that blame cannot be assigned just that blame cannot result in punishment or loss of face/standing.

At the end of they day you are going to have someone stand up and say: yep we should have planned for this, and we will correct this in x, y, z, ways.

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

#458

Post by npteljes »

dehrmann wrote: post #182
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…

I end up reading the source half the time, anyway; documentation is often incomplete, dated, and possibly incorrect. For code, I'd prefer the time go into designing a cleaner interface and making what calls do obvious. That said, I find high-level documentation for larger systems to be very valuable. I also find Python's docs to be lacking compared to Java's; I'm often left wondering about the definition of what type…

I agree. I'd like my documents to contain overview, intent, and exceptions. The actual implementation I can look up in the code. Also generated stuff is appreciated, like Swagger.

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

#459

Post by sanderjd »

gentleman11 wrote: post #327
sanderjd wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's a seg fault? I jest, but static languages have come incredibly far since C++ (where they are already less common than in C) and I truly haven't dealt with a segmentation fault in the past many years working with static languages.

My c++ code has so many someptr!= null checks it’s not even funny. But js has those same checks. What languages don’t?

Also, maybe it's pedantic, but leaving out null checks in js will not result in a seg fault, it will result in an exception.

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

#460

Post by [deleted] »

ksec wrote: post #432
bombcar wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See: https://danluu.com/hn-comments/ >HN comments are terrible. On any topic I’m informed about, the vast majority of comments are pretty clearly wrong. ... >And yet, I haven’t found a public internet forum with better technical commentary. On topics I'm familiar with, while it's rare that a thread will have even a single comment that's well-informed, when those comments appear, they usually float to the top. On othe…

Pretty much this. HN is still gazillion times better than everything else on the internet. And that is excluding the absolute gold comment from members that were part of those battle stories. It is also a reason why I dont want to mention or see HN links in mainstream media. Although I think most reporters sort of know this as well and tend to not mention or link to HN as source.

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