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I draw a corollary to how graduate medical education works. You go into residency a fresh doctor with zero applicable skills. You may not even be CPR certified,
by pc86 5y ago
I draw a corollary to how graduate medical education works. You go into residency a fresh doctor with zero applicable skills. You may not even be CPR certified, but you're an MD/DO, and you've matched into a residency. You know less about actually helping people than a nurse who's been on the job for a month. You spend the next 3-7 years working 80-100 hours a week learning your chosen specialty. You become an absolute expert at your specific field. If you're in a surgical field you spend thousands of hours practicing and performing the surgeries you'll be responsible for. You may or may not specialize even further with a fellowship for another 1-4 years.
Then, when you graduate and can start making real money (probably), if you work at a hospital that does resident education, you're almost immediately expected to let the residents do as much as they can safely do, so they can learn. You go from working 80 hours a week performing surgery after surgery at a senior resident to working 30 hours a week watching the senior resident perform surgery.
Similarly (and admittedly it isn't a perfect analogy) as a junior and mid-level you're spending all this time learning how to write real software. Most of it's bad and especially at the junior level you're going to spend a couple years being more trouble than you're worth in terms of productivity. But by the time you're a senior, when you theoretically know what you're doing, you're going to have to spend most or a large portion of your time helping out the juniors in your org.
If you don't want to do that, you shouldn't be accepting senior positions. Or at least, go work somewhere where they don't hire juniors.
- wanderingmind 5y agoAnd yet a junior dev who LCd for a few months will get paid way more than a MD in residency. It might be interesting to see if the quality of people (measured with IQ) or some other simple metrics who pursue medicine relative to other fields have gone down over the past decade.
- thegrimmest 5y agoWhat if you just want to write software and not be responsible for mentorship? Why do capable individual contributors always have to be roped into leadership?
- BurningFrog 5y agoWork at places that don't hire junior devs.
- Nbox9 5y ago> Why do capable individual contributors always have to be roped into leadership? Training your replacement is how the cogs in the machine reproduce.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- indigochill 5y ago> What if you just want to write software and not be responsible for mentorship? At a certain point, you probably know considerably more about the work than the people working around you. You might say you develop "seniority". At that point, the balance of value between your individual contributions and the knowledge you can share with others reaches a tipping point. If you're limiting the value you're bringing to the company to only individual contributions, you're capping the value you can bring the company and by correlation the compensation you're due.
- pjerem 5y agoAs long as you are not your own boss (and even in this case, tbf), you are likely to not do only what you "want", because you are not the one defining what is your job. Honestly, it's a weird remark. Pretty much all jobs on this planet have aspects you wish you don't have to do. You work for your employer and your employer needs you to train the juniors. If you don't want to do that, change for an employer who only recruit senior engineers, if you can.
- thegrimmest 5y agoEmployment is a negotiation, always has been. Senior technical staff often negotiate from a position of strength.
- ljm 5y agoI'm not sure I see mentoring as leadership as much as I see it as passing the experience along to someone less senior than you. Or did you become a capable IC in a vacuum, without the guidance of more senior engineers? Beyond that, you could go into contracting. Do the work, point to your contract whenever someone asks something else of you, move on after 3-6 months, rinse and repeat.