7 ms·

I disagree, unless you and I have radically different definitions of what "comfortable" means. If I'm hiring an engineer with the seniority I'd expect them to h

I disagree, unless you and I have radically different definitions of what "comfortable" means. If I'm hiring an engineer with the seniority I'd expect them to have at 20, 30 or 40 years in industry then I want them to ramp up inside of a year. I'm not going to expect them to be completely self-sufficient within a month. But they should be capable of implementing performant solutions to nontrivial problems with autonomy and collaboratively reviewing code with their peers. Stated another way - what are they doing for 2 - 3 years before they're comfortable that isn't worth it to hire them?

Double_a_92 8y ago
I meant comfortable as in knowing exactly how to solve something, instead of first having to read and debug through (legacy) code for 1-2 days everytime you touch some new area of the application. For me personally the worst unsecurity is not knowing where to put new code, without messing up some architectural separation that I'm not aware of.
- b_t_s 8y ago
  I think that level of security is only even possible at companies with small codebases or a high degree of siloing. I totally fit this description as a junior with 2 or 3 years experience at my first job where I wrote half the product. At my current job where I've been for 7 or 8 years I can't imagine anyone on any team ever achieving that. Maybe for a little while when you're working in some corner of the codebase that you happen to know really well, but not long term. There's just too many devs making too many changes and nobody "owns" any area. I bet a third to a half of the code I wrote 3 years ago is gone or heavily modified already.
- JustSomeNobody 8y ago
  I once worked on a very large project in the healthcare industry. During code reviews you had to provide evidence you did a full impact analysis because the system was so large that not a single person could keep it all in their head. We're talking millions of lines of code. Being senior doesn't make you a superhuman.

Double_a_92 8y ago

I meant comfortable as in knowing exactly how to solve something, instead of first having to read and debug through (legacy) code for 1-2 days everytime you touch some new area of the application. For me personally the worst unsecurity is not knowing where to put new code, without messing up some architectural separation that I'm not aware of.

b_t_s 8y ago
I think that level of security is only even possible at companies with small codebases or a high degree of siloing. I totally fit this description as a junior with 2 or 3 years experience at my first job where I wrote half the product. At my current job where I've been for 7 or 8 years I can't imagine anyone on any team ever achieving that. Maybe for a little while when you're working in some corner of the codebase that you happen to know really well, but not long term. There's just too many devs making too many changes and nobody "owns" any area. I bet a third to a half of the code I wrote 3 years ago is gone or heavily modified already.
JustSomeNobody 8y ago
I once worked on a very large project in the healthcare industry. During code reviews you had to provide evidence you did a full impact analysis because the system was so large that not a single person could keep it all in their head. We're talking millions of lines of code. Being senior doesn't make you a superhuman.