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Makes a lot of sense from a business perspective. If a senior person can train 10 more junior people, who then produce higher quality work and stick around at t
by jakear 7y ago
Makes a lot of sense from a business perspective. If a senior person can train 10 more junior people, who then produce higher quality work and stick around at the company to become senior, everybody wins.
- n4r9 7y agoNot everyone, if the senior person is spending a lot less time doing something they truly enjoy.
- jakear 7y agoOh well if they don’t like doing that then obviously. At my company the IC -> Manager transition is always opt-in. At least from what I’ve seen.
- dekhn 7y agoit's not a IC->manager transition. Many people in my SWE community are in a similar role as me- senior or staff SWE, usually tech lead, but not manager. Manager role is very different from "advisor of junior SWEs". Some overlap.
- n4r9 7y agoRight, especially in small-medium companies it's not practical to isolate yourself completely. Eventually - even if it's years - you end up spending a fair amount of time mentoring juniors.
- unlinked_dll 7y agoidk about y'all but I do spend a lot of my time trying to write less code, not more. And not in a, "I want to minimize my effort" way, but in that I write more code related to code generation and task automation than I do on implementing any product in particular. I like thinking about and solving problems - writing code is the tedious part of implementing a solution to me. The less I have to do of that, the more time I can spend on new problems and new solutions.
- dekhn 7y agomy goal now is to spend more time writing good tests and less time writing feature code. I get a lot more enjoyment out of a good test- it means people can add new features with confidence, and I often find bugs in the course of writing tests (typically not even related to the test I'm writing). In fact, my number one advice to junior programmers I advise is: write better tests. Write tests that prevent production bugs. Write tests that allow people to add a new feature with confidence they aren't breaking an old one. Write tests that give 99% of the signal required in 30 seconds, etc, etc. That said, I often do love writing code- when it's something I'm interested in, that nobody else has done before, and I know once the code is done I'll learn a fact nobody else in the world knows (I work in scientific ML). That's a dopamine hit that is hard to match. But, after a while of advisor really top-notch juniors, I've learned to enjoy the pleasure of... not having to do everything myself, and seeing smart people do things I couldn't have done, in shorter time.