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The real truth is that none of these titles mean anything outside of a given organizational context. Hilarious that the author felt the need to add "can give fe

by k33n 7y ago

The real truth is that none of these titles mean anything outside of a given organizational context. Hilarious that the author felt the need to add "can give feedback without hurting people" to the senior engineer bullet list. So much wishful thinking here.

matwood 7y ago
> Hilarious that the author felt the need to add "can give feedback without hurting people" to the senior engineer bullet list. Why is that hilarious? Anyone can give feedback, maybe even correct feedback, but what is the point of feedback? It should be to help the person receiving the feedback improve. A senior engineer should be thinking about the team and not themselves. This includes their ego. If they are giving feedback to show off how smart they are in a way that hurts the team, that is not senior IMO.
BlargMcLarg 7y ago
There's some truth in your statement that most people do not wish to admit and are quick to dismiss as "rebellious, arrogant juniors". I generally see two kind of seniors. The first group is senior in terms of experience and hard work. The second group got there only through obligation, working for years without growing a lot. Unfortunately, I see most management puts a hard cap on minimum experience before being a senior, so the former group and the latter group become indistinguishable. Other problems include Peter principle, where because someone got promoted to senior, he is now attributed as a good leader, despite having no experience leading as a junior before. Skills that are at best orthogonal are attributed to seniority, despite the fact many junior and medior people may be better at teaching, leading and mentoring others than their seniors. Nothing in the track guarantees a senior ever has to practice or show their excellence in these skills, either. Furthermore, most people aren't doing interesting things. They get a revolutionizing experience at work maybe once a month at best, if not far longer. Couple that with an echo chamber and suddenly, they believe it is normal to take 3 to 10 years to become an expert on fairly trivial domain knowledge. We're not talking about top-of-the-line C++ programmers, ML experts, people driving innovation, veteran software architects or whatever. We're talking your average CRUD web programmer who did some backend, maybe some frontend. We're talking people who believe one can only be senior being able to deploy an application from scratch into a new environment, thinking this takes at minimum 3 years to learn when in reality, you could pick up a guide how to do this today. The only real thing you'll miss out are office politics and navigating in a group setting. The former is so volatile and context-dependent, you might as well learn it on the fly or wait until 15 years have passed by and pretty much any possible situation has come up. The latter is severely overstated in difficulty and most people will pick this up in no time, unless the team is dysfunctional to begin with.
- k33n 7y ago
  Really enjoyed your comment. Your comments about lack of innovation/interesting problems at most places are spot on. And "senior" developers being hung up on CRUD techniques is laughable to anyone who has solved truly difficult problems.

by k33n 7y ago

matwood 7y ago

> Hilarious that the author felt the need to add "can give feedback without hurting people" to the senior engineer bullet list. Why is that hilarious? Anyone can give feedback, maybe even correct feedback, but what is the point of feedback? It should be to help the person receiving the feedback improve. A senior engineer should be thinking about the team and not themselves. This includes their ego. If they are giving feedback to show off how smart they are in a way that hurts the team, that is not senior IMO.

BlargMcLarg 7y ago

There's some truth in your statement that most people do not wish to admit and are quick to dismiss as "rebellious, arrogant juniors". I generally see two kind of seniors. The first group is senior in terms of experience and hard work. The second group got there only through obligation, working for years without growing a lot. Unfortunately, I see most management puts a hard cap on minimum experience before being a senior, so the former group and the latter group become indistinguishable. Other problems include Peter principle, where because someone got promoted to senior, he is now attributed as a good leader, despite having no experience leading as a junior before. Skills that are at best orthogonal are attributed to seniority, despite the fact many junior and medior people may be better at teaching, leading and mentoring others than their seniors. Nothing in the track guarantees a senior ever has to practice or show their excellence in these skills, either. Furthermore, most people aren't doing interesting things. They get a revolutionizing experience at work maybe once a month at best, if not far longer. Couple that with an echo chamber and suddenly, they believe it is normal to take 3 to 10 years to become an expert on fairly trivial domain knowledge. We're not talking about top-of-the-line C++ programmers, ML experts, people driving innovation, veteran software architects or whatever. We're talking your average CRUD web programmer who did some backend, maybe some frontend. We're talking people who believe one can only be senior being able to deploy an application from scratch into a new environment, thinking this takes at minimum 3 years to learn when in reality, you could pick up a guide how to do this today. The only real thing you'll miss out are office politics and navigating in a group setting. The former is so volatile and context-dependent, you might as well learn it on the fly or wait until 15 years have passed by and pretty much any possible situation has come up. The latter is severely overstated in difficulty and most people will pick this up in no time, unless the team is dysfunctional to begin with.

k33n 7y ago
Really enjoyed your comment. Your comments about lack of innovation/interesting problems at most places are spot on. And "senior" developers being hung up on CRUD techniques is laughable to anyone who has solved truly difficult problems.