Ask HN: Senior engineers, advice for 1 year, 5 year and 10 years of experience

What advice do you have for people with the aforementioned years of experience. Can be about programming, engineering in general, life, whatever you want

1 year:

Be mindful of politics. You'll most likely encounter situations that make no sense from a technical or commercial point of view - they happen because someone high up (or their friends) will be benefiting at the expense of the company. At that stage of your career, you're probably better off keeping quiet and playing the game rather than try to make things right (unless the problem is serious like the company breaking the law or regulations). I have been in this situation before, pushing back against a "solution" based on (correct) technical reasons, completely missing the big picture - ended up being fired on a totally unrelated technicality because I've made enemies with someone high up. It worked out very well for me regardless, but this all depends on your own situation, so keeping this in mind is important.

5 years:

I would recommend branching out beyond programming and exploring related fields such as networking and security. From an engineer with 5 years' experience I would expect good knowledge of the UNIX shell and OSes in general (you should know your way around a Unix box), basic networking knowledge (DHCP, DNS, etc - if I gave you a Unix box with 2 interfaces to act as a router I'd expect you to be able to set that up via the command-line, at least with static IPs everywhere) and security (managing TLS certificates, HTTPS and how it works at a general level, common security vulnerabilities for web applications, etc).

10 years: not there yet, but so far my observation would be that at that point people and relationships become more important than engineering. As an individual contributor you can get away with no people skills if your technical skills are good, but if you want to go beyond that and into management, people skills become paramount. I'm not saying that after 10 years you should go into management, but having the skills to do so is useful; even if your desire is to stay as an individual contributor you might face just the right opportunity (either in terms of work, as in a healthy mix of management and code, or money where the financial upside more than makes up for the downside of having to do management vs programming) and having the option to take it is good.

> Be mindful of politics. You'll most likely encounter situations that make no sense from a technical or commercial point of view - they happen because someone high up (or their friends) will be benefiting at the expense of the company.

This never changes. The names change, but the characters don't.

Just one minor revision - replace dev with people. Learned lots of neat things that translated well into software even when they are not devs :)

1y. Learn to type really, really well. Do code problems. Focus on the fundamentals. Learn git. Learn a FE framework and a backend tool very well. Slowly progress into harder problems.

5y, scratch that - 2y. Too late. Consider this the two year mark - learn architectural patterns, learn DB stuff decently, learn a couple more languages/tools/frameworks.

5y get promoted to senior sometime before this, get K8S/Cloud certs.

10y director of IT, etc