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> The bar for a senior engineer should be identifying the biggest problems plaguing an organization, and successfully tackling them. You're missing the crucial
by phamilton 9y ago
> The bar for a senior engineer should be identifying the biggest problems plaguing an organization, and successfully tackling them.
You're missing the crucial step of advocating for these problems to be solved. Until you know this is actually something important to the organization, you're just scratching your own itch.
In OPs example, did it really matter that the data was occasionally bad? Quite often analytics exist to check a box in a sales pitch, but nobody actually looks at them. OP couldn't quantify this impact for the promotion committee because they likely didn't quantify it for anyone but themselves.
- NTDF9 9y ago>> In OPs example, did it really matter that the data was occasionally bad? Ok. Let some apps choke to death. Once it dies, you'll have your response to "Did it really matter"
- phamilton 9y agoYep. I'm not kidding. I worked on one such app. It was lost in the cross fire, I was asked to try to fix a bug. I came back and said this wasn't a bug, it was a badly built system. If they wanted me to work on it, I'd need a few sprints dedicated to it. They passed. A month or two later, it was impacting some crucial flows. We revisited it and funded it. I AB tested the rewrite against the original and saw a statistically significant improvement in user behavior. We retired the original, I presented my findings to our product team. They agreed it was impactful.