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What I learned working with a senior engineer as a new grad

tanishqkancharla.dev

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Re: What I learned working with a senior engineer as a new grad

#71

Post by yodsanklai »

tom-thistime wrote: post #68
yodsanklai wrote: post #44

I've noticed many of these articles about what it takes to be a good software engineer talk about code quality. I recently started to work in a team of very senior engineers (with relatively little experience) and what I've noticed is that code quality is rarely mentioned. Everybody write "good enough" code and there's never much discussion around code quality (occasionally a few remarks in code reviews) or design. G…

For benefit of a friend new to HN (and anyone else who might be new here): Yes, the comments and the articles are almost separate, parallel discussions. The articles can be interesting in themselves, but for purposes of reading the comments, the articles are often just kind of inspirations or writing prompts. So, yeah, the OP doesn't even mention code quality. The comments do. That's ok. It's just how the site works.

Article start with variable names (which pertains to code quality)

> Variable names are important because they communicate to the reader what’s happening. That’s their only job in code, so it’s important to name them well. Long verbose names don't cost anything:

Re: What I learned working with a senior engineer as a new grad

#73

Post by ChadNauseam »

tanishqkanc wrote: post #59
anotherhue wrote: post #20

No content with Javascript disabled. Hardly unheard of among a technical audience.

Ah! That’s unfortunate . All that work of pre-rendering, and it won’t even work with javascript disabled. To be clear, I use a very very tiny bit of javascript only to animate the article elements after render.I guess when that fails, it just doesn’t animate the opacity to 1…hm...

Haha, same thing was pointed out to me when my site was posted to HN. My advice: use a css transition instead of js

Re: What I learned working with a senior engineer as a new grad

#74

Post by mupuff1234 »

pjmlp wrote: post #48
yodsanklai wrote: post #44

I've noticed many of these articles about what it takes to be a good software engineer talk about code quality. I recently started to work in a team of very senior engineers (with relatively little experience) and what I've noticed is that code quality is rarely mentioned. Everybody write "good enough" code and there's never much discussion around code quality (occasionally a few remarks in code reviews) or design. G…

Make it work, then make it pretty. Undelivered pretty code doesn't deliver any business value. Same applies to 100% code coverage that isn't running on customers computers.

I don't care if it's pretty.

Make it work and make it as straightforward as possible.

Re: What I learned working with a senior engineer as a new grad

#75

Post by ebiester »

yodsanklai wrote: post #44

I've noticed many of these articles about what it takes to be a good software engineer talk about code quality. I recently started to work in a team of very senior engineers (with relatively little experience) and what I've noticed is that code quality is rarely mentioned. Everybody write "good enough" code and there's never much discussion around code quality (occasionally a few remarks in code reviews) or design. G…

It's certainly there, but it comes in different avenues: tech lead meetings (where is our technical debt?), early in projects (as everyone is building a consensus for the project), and code reviews (where they're talking about a facet to make code more understandable or testable or otherwise fulfilling non-functional requirements.)

The conversations aren't about code quality -- they're about a finer point of it and in concrete terms rather than in beginner terms.

Re: What I learned working with a senior engineer as a new grad

#77

Post by tiahura »

fake-name wrote: post #5
mierz00 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really that weird? In the military 6 years is definitely considered senior and I’m sure that’s also the case in a lot of other fields.

I know the EE & ME worlds, senior generally implies at least two decades of experience. I'm pretty sure the same is also true for civil engineering, and most of the other "hard" engineering practices. It seems like (at least outside of the military) the duration to being senior and the importance of things not going wrong are correlated.

No post body was provided.

Re: What I learned working with a senior engineer as a new grad

#78

Post by pcthrowaway »

lopkeny12ko wrote: post #31
fake-name wrote: post #2

> senior engineer > been a professional engineer for 6 years Man, the software world is just weird.

Yeah, I stopped reading after this line. Sorry, but if you call yourself "senior" with 6 years of experience you've lost all credibility in my book.

Years of professional experience isn't a great metric of time steeped in software practices. There's a difference between someone who did a bootcamp and worked for 6 years compared to someone who started contributing to open source software at the age of 12, studied computer science, and then went into the industry. The latter might be more experienced at 1 year than the boot camp grad at 6 years.

Re: What I learned working with a senior engineer as a new grad

#79

Post by karmicthreat »

tpoacher wrote: post #69
pjmlp wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Make it work, then make it pretty. Undelivered pretty code doesn't deliver any business value. Same applies to 100% code coverage that isn't running on customers computers.

The counterpoint to this is "Rough Prototypes have a bad habit of being shipped out as End-Products". And technical debt 'does' kill products. There's probably an optimum somewhere in the middle of each philosophy, but it's certainly not close to either extreme.

I would say technical debt is a better problem to deal with. At least the project is alive at that point and you are able to get feedback from actual users.

Re: What I learned working with a senior engineer as a new grad

#80

Post by foobarian »

goodpoint wrote: post #63
mierz00 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really that weird? In the military 6 years is definitely considered senior and I’m sure that’s also the case in a lot of other fields.

In most engineering it takes 15 if not 20 years. Otherwise the term "senior" gets completely watered down.

Many software companies have official ranks where "senior" is a step up after "junior," to be followed by "principal," "senior principal," and/or "staff." "Staff engineer" may not sound as impressive as "senior" to a layperson, but at say Google those people are like minor deities.
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