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There is such a thing as a Mendoza line, though. Being mediocre at coding is fine if you can make up for it with other skills. Being downright bad is not. Sam

by qsort 5y ago

There is such a thing as a Mendoza line, though. Being mediocre at coding is fine if you can make up for it with other skills. Being downright bad is not. Same thing for running meetings, writing passable English, being able to explain technical concepts to laymen and so on.

ipaddr 5y ago
If you are running meetings I'm not sure you are still in the senior developer category. These are more lead developer skills.
- walshemj 5y ago
  I think the author means "senior" as a concept (For varying levels of seniority, from senior, to staff, and beyond.) and not just a point on a progression path. #1 Running meeting and knowing how they work is a really good skill for every one to have
- Mehdi2277 5y ago
  Junior level developers at companies I've worked at are often taught to run meetings as part of helping them grow. If a couple junior developers work on a project then having them take turns facilitating the meeting was common. My team's meetings at my last company we also had everyone take turns facilitating it. There were some pre-meeting tasks that the facilitator was also responsible for like organizing some documentation related to last week on-call alerts + commenting on any product metrics for the main product we worked on (most of the time it was looks normal). A lot of growth I've seen is about having people get opportunities to do things more commonly done by people at higher levels. While most design documents are written by seniors or above sometimes mid level/junior engineers get an opportunity to write one and all design documents get a lot of feedback anyway.
- tayo42 5y ago
  That doesn't make sense, leading meetings is a basic skill. Unless you mean something else then what I think you mean by meetings. This is stuff we've been doing through high school and college doing stuff like group project meetings. Personally I've lead meetings at all levels in my career so far
cognaitiv 5y ago
The Mendoza Line is an expression in baseball deriving from the name of shortstop Mario Mendoza, whose poor batting average is taken to define the threshold of incompetent hitting. The cutoff point is most often said to be .200[1] (Mendoza's career average was slightly better than that, at .215)[2] and, when a position player's batting average falls below that level, the player is said to be "below the Mendoza Line". I was not familiar with the term, but useful concept. Reminds me of something I read recently about the “Goat”, the West Point cadet finishing at the bottom of his class.

by qsort 5y ago

ipaddr 5y ago

If you are running meetings I'm not sure you are still in the senior developer category. These are more lead developer skills.

walshemj 5y ago
I think the author means "senior" as a concept (For varying levels of seniority, from senior, to staff, and beyond.) and not just a point on a progression path. #1 Running meeting and knowing how they work is a really good skill for every one to have
Mehdi2277 5y ago
Junior level developers at companies I've worked at are often taught to run meetings as part of helping them grow. If a couple junior developers work on a project then having them take turns facilitating the meeting was common. My team's meetings at my last company we also had everyone take turns facilitating it. There were some pre-meeting tasks that the facilitator was also responsible for like organizing some documentation related to last week on-call alerts + commenting on any product metrics for the main product we worked on (most of the time it was looks normal). A lot of growth I've seen is about having people get opportunities to do things more commonly done by people at higher levels. While most design documents are written by seniors or above sometimes mid level/junior engineers get an opportunity to write one and all design documents get a lot of feedback anyway.
tayo42 5y ago
That doesn't make sense, leading meetings is a basic skill. Unless you mean something else then what I think you mean by meetings. This is stuff we've been doing through high school and college doing stuff like group project meetings. Personally I've lead meetings at all levels in my career so far

cognaitiv 5y ago

The Mendoza Line is an expression in baseball deriving from the name of shortstop Mario Mendoza, whose poor batting average is taken to define the threshold of incompetent hitting. The cutoff point is most often said to be .200[1] (Mendoza's career average was slightly better than that, at .215)[2] and, when a position player's batting average falls below that level, the player is said to be "below the Mendoza Line". I was not familiar with the term, but useful concept. Reminds me of something I read recently about the “Goat”, the West Point cadet finishing at the bottom of his class.