5 ms·

I agree with this perspective of the world (that senior+ software engineers need to be able to express themselves more fluently to be able to be impactful) but…

by pm90 5y ago

I agree with this perspective of the world (that senior+ software engineers need to be able to express themselves more fluently to be able to be impactful) but… just as a thought experiment, I wish it didn’t have to be that way. Writing is hard and not much fun (to me). Building systems that do something is hard but its a lot of fun. I just want to spend most of my time doing the latter. I just don’t give a fuck about impact or convincing others to work on my idea. If you are building something cool, show a little bit of it to me, and I like what I see, I would love to be able to drop everything else and work with you to complete it. Or if I think of some automation to reduce toil, I just wanna go tinker without having to think it through too much. If I run into constraints when building it, so be it, its a learning experience, but even failing is fun. Obviously a rant. I just didn’t become a software engineer to be a good writer. I always wanted to build first and learn the constraints through mucking around rather than giving it so much thought before a single line of code is written.

dls2016 5y ago
> I just don’t give a fuck about impact or convincing others to work on my idea. Then you're talking about a hobby project. /seinfeld Not that there's anything wrong with that!
lliamander 5y ago
I actually like writing a lot, but I still think that often post-senior roles downplay the importance of still being an actively involved in building things. There's a lot I have gained by having the chance go work on systems built by brilliant people. That kind of learning just can't be captured by prose. Some learning and knowledge sharing can only be done through the software itself. People ultimately want those post-senior roles not so that they can stop coding, but so they can have more autonomy over what they code. That mismatch between IC and management expectations.
ZephyrBlu 5y ago
I think this is mostly an organizational constraint. Having a lot of people going off doing whatever they want and not communicating about it sounds like a nightmare in a large organization. Smaller companies probably have less of this organizational overhead. > I just don’t give a fuck about impact or convincing others to work on my idea I'm curious what you think a Senior+ role should entail in your ideal world. I'm not sure how you can get away from impact, since otherwise I'd perceive that as authority without responsibility.
- pm90 5y ago
  > I'm curious what you think a Senior+ role should entail in your ideal world. I'm not sure how you can get away from impact, since otherwise I'd perceive that as authority without responsibility. The technical expertise Ive gained over the years makes me pretty confident of executing on building complex systems that a younger me probably couldn’t have done. So it feels like a waste to me that Im not leveraging that experience to make more things but instead writing proposals and debating them with other senior engineers.
  - Jensson 5y ago
    What I did was just build a lot of prototypes and then show those prototypes. It is very hard for people to say that something wont work when you have can show it working right there in the presentation. You can put that prototyping work under "making presentations and documents in preparation for design discussions", because that is exactly why you prototype. Discussions gets much easier when you are well prepared, so when someone asks about performance you can show them benchmarks, if someone asks about alternatives you can show the difference in benchmarks and code complexity etc. A few hours coding can save weeks of meetings discussing these things.
- Jensson 5y ago
  > Having a lot of people going off doing whatever they want and not communicating about it sounds like a nightmare in a large organization. Why? As long as what they do doesn't interfere with others work why does it matter if they don't communicate everything immediately, rather than at a meeting at a later date? If they don't deliver anything useful you put them on a PIP and ultimately fire them, just like everybody else, I don't really see what changes here.
  - ZephyrBlu 5y ago
    Disclaimer: this is from the perspective of someone who is NOT a Senior engineer. My experience so far has been that there is very little work in a large organization that doesn't affect multiple teams at some point. So if you're a Senior+ engineer building a complex system, it's highly likely to impact a lot of other people in the company. Building something like that without getting impacted teams onboard with the idea seems like a recipe for organizational strife. Another thing that comes to mind is organizational goals. If the company has high level goals they want to achieve, having people (Esp very Senior people) working on multiple things unrelated to those goals doesn't seem conducive to success. Also, the more senior you are the more visible you tend to be. So what you work on is probably going to be noticed more. I know that I would find it weird if I found out a Staff or Senior Staff engineer was off working on random things instead of leading an important project. I definitely think Senior+ people should have some freedom, but absolute freedom doesn't seem like a good idea for anyone. When you're at a certain level what you do affects way more people than just yourself. Titles have a lot of weight to other people.
zmgsabst 5y ago
> I just want to spend most of my time doing the latter. I just don’t give a fuck about impact or convincing others to work on my idea. SDE 2 is a career position at Amazon — and it sounds like that’s what you want: to stay at that level, but working as the “point man” on increasingly important technical systems. I would say that SDE 3 (senior) and SDE 4 (principal) are fundamentally political — you’re responsible for aligning the technical vision between teams and across whole organizations, as well as training SDE 1s and SDE 2s. You’re going to need to communicate, a lot, to do that. Those roles aren’t management, but you’re also not an IC at SDE 3/4 the same way you’re an IC at SDE 1/2. I think it’s okay to turn down promotions you don’t want.
- danielrpa 5y ago
  Big tech has some specialized, high level/pay roles where someone can be successful just by being an excellent engineer, even with average communication skills. I've seen these in areas such as Compilers and Operating Systems Kernels, for instance. These jobs are, however, highly specialized and require extraordinary and domain-specific technical skills.
- closeparen 5y ago
  If you are unusually good at being an SDE 2, there's not really a way to leverage that into pay or recognition or harder projects. Until you get the promo you will just be doing the same borderline-menial work any SDE 2 can do, a fungible story points resource. Although it's great that the engineering IC ladder provides an alternative path to people management, there is no alternative path to being a professional meeting-talker. We do not allow unusually capable individuals to write code that the median engineer couldn't write (because then the median engineer definitely couldn't maintain it). Instead we ask them to supervise and direct the work of the median engineers. I actually think the best way to leverage mostly-solo intellectual work into business results and recognition might be data science. Models and analyses are allowed to be arbitrarily sophisticated and as long as the rest of the org understands the inputs/outputs/performance characteristics, they're content to treat the internals as black box. So data scientists can really go all out intellectually on their technical artifacts in a way that engineers can't.
yakshaving_jgt 5y ago
I enjoyed learning your perspective. This could only have happened because you wrote about it in your comment.

by pm90 5y ago

dls2016 5y ago

> I just don’t give a fuck about impact or convincing others to work on my idea. Then you're talking about a hobby project. /seinfeld Not that there's anything wrong with that!

lliamander 5y ago

I actually like writing a lot, but I still think that often post-senior roles downplay the importance of still being an actively involved in building things. There's a lot I have gained by having the chance go work on systems built by brilliant people. That kind of learning just can't be captured by prose. Some learning and knowledge sharing can only be done through the software itself. People ultimately want those post-senior roles not so that they can stop coding, but so they can have more autonomy over what they code. That mismatch between IC and management expectations.

ZephyrBlu 5y ago

I think this is mostly an organizational constraint. Having a lot of people going off doing whatever they want and not communicating about it sounds like a nightmare in a large organization. Smaller companies probably have less of this organizational overhead. > I just don’t give a fuck about impact or convincing others to work on my idea I'm curious what you think a Senior+ role should entail in your ideal world. I'm not sure how you can get away from impact, since otherwise I'd perceive that as authority without responsibility.

pm90 5y ago
> I'm curious what you think a Senior+ role should entail in your ideal world. I'm not sure how you can get away from impact, since otherwise I'd perceive that as authority without responsibility. The technical expertise Ive gained over the years makes me pretty confident of executing on building complex systems that a younger me probably couldn’t have done. So it feels like a waste to me that Im not leveraging that experience to make more things but instead writing proposals and debating them with other senior engineers.
- Jensson 5y ago
  What I did was just build a lot of prototypes and then show those prototypes. It is very hard for people to say that something wont work when you have can show it working right there in the presentation. You can put that prototyping work under "making presentations and documents in preparation for design discussions", because that is exactly why you prototype. Discussions gets much easier when you are well prepared, so when someone asks about performance you can show them benchmarks, if someone asks about alternatives you can show the difference in benchmarks and code complexity etc. A few hours coding can save weeks of meetings discussing these things.
Jensson 5y ago
> Having a lot of people going off doing whatever they want and not communicating about it sounds like a nightmare in a large organization. Why? As long as what they do doesn't interfere with others work why does it matter if they don't communicate everything immediately, rather than at a meeting at a later date? If they don't deliver anything useful you put them on a PIP and ultimately fire them, just like everybody else, I don't really see what changes here.
- ZephyrBlu 5y ago
  Disclaimer: this is from the perspective of someone who is NOT a Senior engineer. My experience so far has been that there is very little work in a large organization that doesn't affect multiple teams at some point. So if you're a Senior+ engineer building a complex system, it's highly likely to impact a lot of other people in the company. Building something like that without getting impacted teams onboard with the idea seems like a recipe for organizational strife. Another thing that comes to mind is organizational goals. If the company has high level goals they want to achieve, having people (Esp very Senior people) working on multiple things unrelated to those goals doesn't seem conducive to success. Also, the more senior you are the more visible you tend to be. So what you work on is probably going to be noticed more. I know that I would find it weird if I found out a Staff or Senior Staff engineer was off working on random things instead of leading an important project. I definitely think Senior+ people should have some freedom, but absolute freedom doesn't seem like a good idea for anyone. When you're at a certain level what you do affects way more people than just yourself. Titles have a lot of weight to other people.

zmgsabst 5y ago

> I just want to spend most of my time doing the latter. I just don’t give a fuck about impact or convincing others to work on my idea. SDE 2 is a career position at Amazon — and it sounds like that’s what you want: to stay at that level, but working as the “point man” on increasingly important technical systems. I would say that SDE 3 (senior) and SDE 4 (principal) are fundamentally political — you’re responsible for aligning the technical vision between teams and across whole organizations, as well as training SDE 1s and SDE 2s. You’re going to need to communicate, a lot, to do that. Those roles aren’t management, but you’re also not an IC at SDE 3/4 the same way you’re an IC at SDE 1/2. I think it’s okay to turn down promotions you don’t want.

danielrpa 5y ago
Big tech has some specialized, high level/pay roles where someone can be successful just by being an excellent engineer, even with average communication skills. I've seen these in areas such as Compilers and Operating Systems Kernels, for instance. These jobs are, however, highly specialized and require extraordinary and domain-specific technical skills.
closeparen 5y ago
If you are unusually good at being an SDE 2, there's not really a way to leverage that into pay or recognition or harder projects. Until you get the promo you will just be doing the same borderline-menial work any SDE 2 can do, a fungible story points resource. Although it's great that the engineering IC ladder provides an alternative path to people management, there is no alternative path to being a professional meeting-talker. We do not allow unusually capable individuals to write code that the median engineer couldn't write (because then the median engineer definitely couldn't maintain it). Instead we ask them to supervise and direct the work of the median engineers. I actually think the best way to leverage mostly-solo intellectual work into business results and recognition might be data science. Models and analyses are allowed to be arbitrarily sophisticated and as long as the rest of the org understands the inputs/outputs/performance characteristics, they're content to treat the internals as black box. So data scientists can really go all out intellectually on their technical artifacts in a way that engineers can't.

yakshaving_jgt 5y ago

I enjoyed learning your perspective. This could only have happened because you wrote about it in your comment.