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Agreed. I don't accept that someone who has, as another commenter wrote: "done the same old crap for 20 years" is unlikely to be a senior engineer. I'm one of

by porker 5y ago

Agreed. I don't accept that someone who has, as another commenter wrote: "done the same old crap for 20 years" is unlikely to be a senior engineer. I'm one of those. I don't know the latest JS frameworks. Or the ones that came before. But I can spot the problems in the project (e.g. performance, authentication, authorization), the security holes in the design before it's built, and coach newer developers on how to solve them. And I can make the case upwards for time/funding and make business cases for work.

moonchrome 5y ago
That really makes no sense at all. How transferrable is the experience of an embedded developer to web development ? Or game development to enterprise applications ? I've seen people stuck in very domain specific stuff/isolated on some small part of a huge project that doesn't really translate to much outside of being a junior developer. In my professional career I've went from C++/3D graphics -> .NET -> Angular -> RoR -> React -> Django -> Flutter -> .NET Core. I've also used Python extensively for scripting and personal projects, Clojure on a large personal project, F# and Rust on minor ones, Node.js and PHP side gigs, etc. Which is to say I've hopped a lot of stacks and technologies between jobs and side projects. And without a doubt I can say that the ramp up time, even between similar stacks was non trivial. It took me a year to get "comfortable" with RoR even when I had >5 years of experience with ASP.NET MVC and a year with Django/Python. You say you can give estimates for time and funding and yet you don't know the library landscape and what work needs to be done vs. what can be handled by the platform/libraries ? And that's not even mentioning stuff like cloud providers - where there's so many cloud specific offerings you can glue together that vary wildly between providers. You mentor people about best practices yet you don't have real world experience with the particular tech stack ? You haven't tested your ideas and how translatable they are at all and you're just assuming it translates - I've been bitten by this a few times. So yeah I disagree, when I interviewed people I like to go over some code, ask some questions, get a feeling of how much actually relevant experience a person has and how much potential they have in transferring skills/learning - but there's no replacing relevant experience. And being interviewed like this gave me some insight into their expectations so I could judge if I'm a good fit or not.
- porker 5y ago
  > That really makes no sense at all. How transferrable is the experience of an embedded developer to web development ? Or game development to enterprise applications ? Why would you even look at stuff that far outside your specialism? That's like saying because I'm a consultant orthopedic surgeon I can be a consultant psychiatrist. As your career progresses you will be more restricted in the fields you can enter without beginning a new career. And yet even in these way-out examples you gave there will be transferrable experience. Data driven design from game development; memory efficiency approaches from embedded? (I know nothing about it). It won't make you senior because you're way outside your field, but that experience is valuable. > You say you can give estimates for time and funding and yet you don't know the library landscape and what work needs to be done vs. what can be handled by the platform/libraries ? How do you think a manager does it? They talk with their team. A senior developer is no different except having more technical expertise than many managers. You seem to take a very indivdualistic view of the role of senior developer. > You mentor people about best practices yet you don't have real world experience with the particular tech stack ? I said "JavaScript framework" you broadened that to "tech stack". I don't need to know the ins and outs of React hooks - there's a reason I have developers in my team who are programming that stuff and not me. I was writing vanilla JS, then KnockoutJS, then Angular 2 so the principles are familiar even if I'm not mid-level in my expertise with React 18. Mentoring is a lot broader than "teaching how to program framework X". It's about developing skills, helping them figure out career progression, and advice and guidance. Tech is the least important part of mentoring - they can go get training for that. I detest the phrase "transferrable skills" but they are central to mentoring. > Which is to say I've hopped a lot of stacks and technologies between jobs and side projects. Yes. Why didn't you stick with something?
  - moonchrome 5y ago
    I'm just saying a lot of people specialize in stuff that's not very transferrable. I disagree about Angular being transferrable to React, really they take very different approaches to frontend development and reading React code of a Angular dev that just started with React is full of non-idiomatic code (seen first hand when migrating one project from AngularJS to React and getting the existing team to start porting) It seems to me like we disagree on the role of senior developer - in my view senior developer is still an individual contributor and not a manager - sure you support junior staff, but you're the guy they go for technical stuff, reviews, better approaches - not the other way around. What you're describing sounds more like tech lead/architect role to me. > Yes. Why didn't you stick with something? Options available at the time, boredom with projects I was working on, generally liking to learn new stuff. A mistake in retrospective, but I'm transitioning away from development to a position where the breadth is an advantage.

by porker 5y ago

moonchrome 5y ago

That really makes no sense at all. How transferrable is the experience of an embedded developer to web development ? Or game development to enterprise applications ? I've seen people stuck in very domain specific stuff/isolated on some small part of a huge project that doesn't really translate to much outside of being a junior developer. In my professional career I've went from C++/3D graphics -> .NET -> Angular -> RoR -> React -> Django -> Flutter -> .NET Core. I've also used Python extensively for scripting and personal projects, Clojure on a large personal project, F# and Rust on minor ones, Node.js and PHP side gigs, etc. Which is to say I've hopped a lot of stacks and technologies between jobs and side projects. And without a doubt I can say that the ramp up time, even between similar stacks was non trivial. It took me a year to get "comfortable" with RoR even when I had >5 years of experience with ASP.NET MVC and a year with Django/Python. You say you can give estimates for time and funding and yet you don't know the library landscape and what work needs to be done vs. what can be handled by the platform/libraries ? And that's not even mentioning stuff like cloud providers - where there's so many cloud specific offerings you can glue together that vary wildly between providers. You mentor people about best practices yet you don't have real world experience with the particular tech stack ? You haven't tested your ideas and how translatable they are at all and you're just assuming it translates - I've been bitten by this a few times. So yeah I disagree, when I interviewed people I like to go over some code, ask some questions, get a feeling of how much actually relevant experience a person has and how much potential they have in transferring skills/learning - but there's no replacing relevant experience. And being interviewed like this gave me some insight into their expectations so I could judge if I'm a good fit or not.

porker 5y ago
> That really makes no sense at all. How transferrable is the experience of an embedded developer to web development ? Or game development to enterprise applications ? Why would you even look at stuff that far outside your specialism? That's like saying because I'm a consultant orthopedic surgeon I can be a consultant psychiatrist. As your career progresses you will be more restricted in the fields you can enter without beginning a new career. And yet even in these way-out examples you gave there will be transferrable experience. Data driven design from game development; memory efficiency approaches from embedded? (I know nothing about it). It won't make you senior because you're way outside your field, but that experience is valuable. > You say you can give estimates for time and funding and yet you don't know the library landscape and what work needs to be done vs. what can be handled by the platform/libraries ? How do you think a manager does it? They talk with their team. A senior developer is no different except having more technical expertise than many managers. You seem to take a very indivdualistic view of the role of senior developer. > You mentor people about best practices yet you don't have real world experience with the particular tech stack ? I said "JavaScript framework" you broadened that to "tech stack". I don't need to know the ins and outs of React hooks - there's a reason I have developers in my team who are programming that stuff and not me. I was writing vanilla JS, then KnockoutJS, then Angular 2 so the principles are familiar even if I'm not mid-level in my expertise with React 18. Mentoring is a lot broader than "teaching how to program framework X". It's about developing skills, helping them figure out career progression, and advice and guidance. Tech is the least important part of mentoring - they can go get training for that. I detest the phrase "transferrable skills" but they are central to mentoring. > Which is to say I've hopped a lot of stacks and technologies between jobs and side projects. Yes. Why didn't you stick with something?
- moonchrome 5y ago
  I'm just saying a lot of people specialize in stuff that's not very transferrable. I disagree about Angular being transferrable to React, really they take very different approaches to frontend development and reading React code of a Angular dev that just started with React is full of non-idiomatic code (seen first hand when migrating one project from AngularJS to React and getting the existing team to start porting) It seems to me like we disagree on the role of senior developer - in my view senior developer is still an individual contributor and not a manager - sure you support junior staff, but you're the guy they go for technical stuff, reviews, better approaches - not the other way around. What you're describing sounds more like tech lead/architect role to me. > Yes. Why didn't you stick with something? Options available at the time, boredom with projects I was working on, generally liking to learn new stuff. A mistake in retrospective, but I'm transitioning away from development to a position where the breadth is an advantage.