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Ask HN: How to best position myself as senior developer leaves?

• freedomben 9y ago
  I would write down and/or record as much brain dump from the outgoing engineer as you can. Really good senior devs, particularly from early in the startup, also have a large breadth of knowledge surrounding all areas of the business. Try to learn a little bit about what everybody does.
• artpar 9y ago
  Try to get multiple Knowledge transfer sessions, focused on the following aspects: Current System === - End to end flow of the system (what is the first point of contact to your server for a HTTP request) - How is the architecture laid out (services talking to each other) - What are the front-facing services - What are the back services (crons/queue consumers) - How are the domains managed, how are all the domains setup - How is the deployment setup for across services - What are the background activities they were silently taking care of (manual crons) - What system is responsible for which business activity - What are all the 3rd party services your system talks to Future System === - What are the current parts of the system they were actively working on - How were these new services going to fit in the current architecture - Were they planning of refactoring some parts/services - Were they planning of rewriting any part of code
• partisan 9y ago
  Ask to take over their work. I was in the same situation and when I saw the opportunity, I went to the CTO and asked to handle all of the departing developers work. I knew nothing about it and I paid with months of struggle, but eventually I was doing what he used to do. That single decision has shaped my career for the past 8 years.
  • apohn 9y ago
    Absolutely this! Tell the right person you want to move into that senior dev position and say you'll work with the senior dev to make that transition. Approach the senior dev and tell them you'd like to move into their position at some point and want to learn what is needed. Ask for a knowledge transfer (artpar's recommendations are great) and include the non-technical stuff as well, including learning who the key people/groups they need to interact with to do their work. Since it's a small company, I assume the senior dev knows you and hopefully respects your work? If so, ask if they can recommend you for the job?
• le-mark 9y ago
  >> I also want to best position myself to become more experienced, take on new responsibilities, have input into key decisions, and be more visible to the leadership team and the rest of the business. Too late, you should've been doing this all along. For example, where you pitching in to help solve complex bugs or performance issues? Were you participating in deployments and monitoring the appications? Have you been helping with adminning third party apps like the ticketing system, CI servers, version control (git), etc? Were you building scripts to create minimal test database from nothing? Have you been implementing the tough parts of the system like payment processing? Bottom line is, if you really want to be "senior" you've got to put in the time. Sure some of these things are out of your control, but you've got to at least ask to take on more responsibility.
  • ragingblank 9y ago
    Actually yes, I've been doing all that and more - I don't shy away from the difficult tasks.