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You really contradicted yourself when you said that 'one really good programmer can oversee 5 or 6 2-4 years experience programmers' - and then said that experi
by arcticbull 4y ago
You really contradicted yourself when you said that 'one really good programmer can oversee 5 or 6 2-4 years experience programmers' - and then said that experience counts for nothing. That experience is what allows you to oversee the junior folks. That's the value. And yes, it does increase logarithmically. But also the pool of junior folks who make it to senior and then staff and then principal drops off logarithmically too as they pursue management, or farming.
Career progression as an IC involves increasing not your technical output (although technical output matters) but primarily your blast radius and influence. You can get that by leveling up in multiple areas (iOS + Android + Server) or by pursuing that logarithmic growth in one deep technical area.
So yeah, you can only get so good at iOS development - but if you want to keep learning, pick up other complementary skills and leverage them. This is a choose your own adventure game and yes, you can fail.
I'm not particularly old, but I do mentor many staff engineers in the course of my work. Some a lot older than me, some younger, some the same age (although not too many younger).
- echelon 4y agoI don't think they contradicted themselves at all. You first learn how to program. Then you learn how to spot recurring problems, teach, and right-size your mentorship.
- arcticbull 4y agoYes but what you describe in the last sentence even here is experience gained over time.
- fdgsdfogijq 4y agoI am saying the 20 years of experience is mostly not needed. 90% of programming roles can be done by 2-4 years of experience candidates. With a bunch more in that percentage done by young talented people. The old candidates are discarded for good reason, they arent better than their younger competitors, even if they write solid code.
- dayvid 4y agoYes, the main killer factor for programming is being able to pair your coding skills with another skill (e.g. business/domain knowledge, management, marketing, etc.). Many programmers don't do only programming as time moves on. They add other skillsets or branch out.
- zepolen 4y agoAhahahhaahahhahahahahha You really don't know what you don't know.
- fdgsdfogijq 4y agoI've got ten years experience at two FAANGs.
- arcticbull 4y agoOut of curiosity, what level did you achieve? This isn't a criticism, I think it would help color your perspective. [edit] For instance this is the kind of thing I'd expect to hear from like an E3/E4. An E5 knows what to do to get to E6 and understands the value. An E6+ would never have achieved the level with this perspective.
- fdgsdfogijq 4y agoL6. I've just seen the pattern of a high performing engineer running a team of ten junior engineers. No more high experienced candidates needed over that one. This is on high TPS distributed systems. I've also seen two years of experience candidates writing code as good as anyone else. Domain specific for sure, took them two years on the team to get there. I've also spoken with many prinicpal engineers and think they provided no extra value over many other engineers. Its a level to aspire to, but most are just corporate strivers, many many people under them could replace them. These are on critical services.
- zepolen 4y ago