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Ask HN: How can I grow as an engineer without good seniors to learn from?

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Re: Ask HN: How can I grow as an engineer without good seniors to learn from?

#81
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not about "being taught". But if you are the only technical person around, who is going to show you what a good or bad practice *in your specific field* is? That you won't find on Stack Overflow or by asking ChatGPT. Being able to talk to an experienced mentor who knows the field you are working in is invaluable. Unlike learning some framework or design patters or what not, this information you won't find anywh…

You'd be surprised at how useful Stack Overflow and ChatGPT can be at helping to illuminate knowledge gaps. I've found that one of the harder aspects of being unguided is figuring out the unknown unknowns. You might stumble into a solution of sorts that mirrors a best practice but not know there's a "name" for that solution -- until you see it spelled out after googling around. That discovery can lead you down a rabb…

its the simple things

  fuzzing
  unittest
  scm
  code coverage
if youre programming without those, youre doing it wrong, and chatGPT isnt going to help

any more im missing?

Re: Ask HN: How can I grow as an engineer without good seniors to learn from?

#83
Technical lead (not even a Senior!) after 6 months? You must be either a genius with R&D knowledge or the company is having a really bad time. I've realized that to get the best learning experience you need to read a lot and get reviewed by experienced devs, who are not "stuck in the 90s".

Re: Ask HN: How can I grow as an engineer without good seniors to learn from?

#84
I have actually found that I learned the most when working without people who could/would help me, and have also seen this mirrored with others. You may think your current situation could stifle your growth, but I actually think it's an amazing opportunity to grow much faster than most of your peers (the main downside being that you might be allowed to make mistakes that wouldn't happen with the supervision of someone more experiened). You're going to be forced to learn how everything works, make high-level decisions like planning projects and deciding what tools/software vendors to use, and actually own the implementation/outcome of those decisions (which will be excellent feedback) - even many senior developers never truly get to this point and by comparison you're going to be building those skills very early in your career.

You probably do want to learn some of the basics and force yourself to adhere to them until you are experienced enough to know when to break the rules. Definitely use version control, look up typical styling/formatting/etc conventions for the languages and tools you're using, probably write unit or at least integration tests, prefer to use libraries when possible for non-trivial problems that aren't core to what you're working on. If you want exposure to this I recommend joining a quality open source project's developer discord/slack/whatever just to see how they do things. You could also maybe convince your boss to pay for consultants or for you to attend to conferences or whatever if you want individual feedback (if I were your boss, I'd see this as a good compromise - you get some level of senior supervision for $2k/yr instead of $200k/yr).

My number one advice is to NOT rely on LLMs for things that they're not smart enough for, and to always make sure you actually understand what it's doing any time it creates code for you. This is the number one issue I see inexperienced engineers making these days. ChatGPT is great for converting simple to moderately complex requirements into simple to moderately complex code under a certain size, but it's NOT GOOD at giving reliable high level advice that is "non-obvious" and unlikely to be in its training data. So please do not rely on it too much to explain complicated things to you (unless that thing is very well documented on the internet, which you would have to verify by searching for it anyway) and don't ask to eg tell you if your unit test is good. It can certainly save you a lot of time and is often right, but it's also often wrong in ways that are very difficult to spot unless you know a lot about the subject, and eventually (if not already) you'll need to advance to the point where it can't help you with your problems.

Re: Ask HN: How can I grow as an engineer without good seniors to learn from?

#85

Couple of important lessons that will keep you in good stead for a long time: 1. Learn how to learn well, continuously, and sustainably. Tech changes rapidly. And you will want to hop from one domain to another, just for keeping things interesting and to move with markets. This is both a blessing and a curse. It is a blessing because you can start late and still be in the top percentile if you have the brains and wor…

How do you learn how to learn well?

I tell myself to not adhd it and instead take time and read through a whole manual, experiment in a local sandbox, grasp the limits of knowledge and features and also where it gets deep.

Then in a regular work I explicitly detect where it pays off and feel “see I told you”. This creates a motivational loop to continue not-adhd-ing through tech.

Sometimes I still fly over the knowledge, but then may note that what I’ve been doing in a complex way could be solved with one parameter, if only I knew about it. This creates negative feedback against flying over.

This is ofc only one facet of learning, but I find this “see I told you” method very effective, cause my main issue with learning is unwillingness to learn for no clear reason.

Re: Ask HN: How can I grow as an engineer without good seniors to learn from?

#86
post #83

Technical lead (not even a Senior!) after 6 months? You must be either a genius with R&D knowledge or the company is having a really bad time. I've realized that to get the best learning experience you need to read a lot and get reviewed by experienced devs, who are not "stuck in the 90s".

> Our company is not a tech company

Re: Ask HN: How can I grow as an engineer without good seniors to learn from?

#87
A lot of these folks are saying positive things about the company, but truthfully having no seniors and having you make technical decisions with 6 months of experience is a red flag, not a nice situation.

It's probably not polite to ask, but I would try and form and answer the question of why that's happening - while it can be a learning experience you dont want to be the smartest person in the room (ever) when you are just starting your career.

Re: Ask HN: How can I grow as an engineer without good seniors to learn from?

#88
post #72

A few things come to mind: 1. Turn to online communities to help you learn. Find the appropriate Reddits and Discords, hang out on Stackoverflow, join Bluesky/Mastodon and follow a bunch of people in the same space as you. 2. Start teaching others. The best way to learn is to teach. Answer questions on Stackoverflow that you know the answer to, help people out in Discord. 3. Start a blog! Even if nobody ever reads it…

Discord servers are great, especially if they are tied to an open source project for grounding. Good ones might be hard to find; you might have to try one that isn’t directly related to your interests for a while until somebody there links you to a community or other Discord who has folks you would want to follow.

Branching out like this is critically important even if your company has senior folks who can give you helpful feedback, since your own company will have its own biases.

Re: Ask HN: How can I grow as an engineer without good seniors to learn from?

#89
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you learn how to learn well?

I tell myself to not adhd it and instead take time and read through a whole manual, experiment in a local sandbox, grasp the limits of knowledge and features and also where it gets deep. Then in a regular work I explicitly detect where it pays off and feel “see I told you”. This creates a motivational loop to continue not-adhd-ing through tech. Sometimes I still fly over the knowledge, but then may note that what I’v…

My issue with this method of learning is… deadlines. During work time, I often feel that I need to solve something “quick”, which then leads me to usually learn and really deep dive outside of regular work hours instead.

Now, I mostly actually enjoy doing this and thus it has not really limited me. But I wish I could just spend some actual work time on more ‘non adhd-ing’ what I learn.

Re: Ask HN: How can I grow as an engineer without good seniors to learn from?

#90

Couple of important lessons that will keep you in good stead for a long time: 1. Learn how to learn well, continuously, and sustainably. Tech changes rapidly. And you will want to hop from one domain to another, just for keeping things interesting and to move with markets. This is both a blessing and a curse. It is a blessing because you can start late and still be in the top percentile if you have the brains and wor…

How do you learn how to learn well?

Dr. Barbara Oakly is pretty renowned in this area of study and has a free online class.

https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn

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