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> Modern development requires knowing the toolchain framework, idiosyncrasies, foot guns, best practices, etc. All this stuff is the same as learning the detai

by jmull 3y ago

> Modern development requires knowing the toolchain framework, idiosyncrasies, foot guns, best practices, etc. All this stuff is the same as learning the details of the language. Once you know the pattern it’s not hard to use it in a context with incidental differences in details. It’s usually more than days, but can easily be weeks or months — it depends on how well you really know the patterns. If you really know them it is just days. But being hired is a completely different thing. Hiring managers (1) don’t understand any of this, generally; and (2) in any case, have no way to directly determine whether a candidate really knows all the relevant patterns. They use past direct experience with the technology as an approximation (a pretty poor one, but it’s easy). Personally, I’ve done many jobs successfully on stacks I didn’t have previous experience with, almost always as lead or sole. But of course, I got these jobs through people who know me, not a random hiring manager. (BTW, the skills most important for a lead/architect type have nothing to do with specific technologies. You’re making sure the project/team/product/business doesn’t run into dead ends and progresses efficiently, daily, in the short term, the medium term, and the long term, and balancing their conflicting needs. Probably less than half of this is tech at all.)

malux85 3y ago
I’m a senior dev, having coded commercially for 20 years now, and I think you are correct. In my time, I have been an embedded C developer, a kernel developer, MFC C++, then J2EE, then Mobile C# .NET, then Python we dev, Python DS, Python Scientific, DevOps, WebDev These aren’t trivial projects, but entire systems, E.g. I solo built https://atomictessellator.com https://atomictessellator.com just to scratch my own itch learning quantum chemistry simulators. I think you are 100% right, at about the 10-15 year mark learning new languages and tooling really is a matter of days, maybe a week if the tooling is very different. That’s 1 week from no experience in a language to “employable, productive member of a team” At some point it all just clicks, I suspect the people above who are disagreeing and likely devs with maybe only 5-6 years experience who this hasn’t happened for yet.
- scarface_74 3y ago
  Were you able to mentor juniors in best practices and see the foot guns that could happen based on your experience? BTW, I’m using the definition of senior developer as defined by large tech companies - the whole “scope”, “impact”, “dealing with ambiguity”, “leading initiatives” metrics not “I code really well”. My experience on the enterprise dev side (1996-2020 and going back on that side now), is that titles mean very little outside of tech companies with leveling guidelines. BTW, the last time I had only six years of professional experience was 2002. The last time I only had six years of programming experience was 1992. By then I had done assembly language programming as hobby on four architectures (65C02, 68K, PPC and x86)
scarface_74 3y ago
My job as a lead was three fold and from my recent interviewing based on the jobs I’m currently looking at it’s the same (cloud+app dev) 1. Working with external/internal stakeholders to define business outcomes and deal with ambiguity and doing project management - from my experience at AWS (ProServe) you can be really good at this with hardly any technical proficiency 2. Determining what is the right service or combination of services to use and the overall architectural design. I could do this without any specific platform knowledge - I know what type of database I need. I know I need a messaging bus. I know the trade offs of different types of technologies. I was able to go from never opening the AWS console to working at AWS in the cloud consulting department within 2 years. But I sucked during those two years while I was learning the ropes. 3. Using the “right” one of the literally 100+ services and being able to mentor junior consultants and help them troubleshoot complex issues. The 3rd bullet point is where you need someone who has the specific skillset. My experience at the second bullet point is the downside of hiring someone based on “potential”. The CTO who hired me threw me at the cloud initiatives without experience and let me figure it out. But paid me $30K less than he would have had to pay someone with experience. He would have never been able to push through the 20%+ raise I would have been looking for when I left 2 years later if I had stayed on that side of enterprise dev/BigTech compensation side. He definitely couldn’t push through the 50% raise I ended up getting at BigTech. Now that I did my bid and the pay/bullshit ratio is going too much in the wrong direction, I can go back to my former company (since been acquired) and ask for about the same I would have been asking for three years ago (a lot less than I was making at BigTech)

by jmull 3y ago

malux85 3y ago

I’m a senior dev, having coded commercially for 20 years now, and I think you are correct. In my time, I have been an embedded C developer, a kernel developer, MFC C++, then J2EE, then Mobile C# .NET, then Python we dev, Python DS, Python Scientific, DevOps, WebDev These aren’t trivial projects, but entire systems, E.g. I solo built https://atomictessellator.com https://atomictessellator.com just to scratch my own itch learning quantum chemistry simulators. I think you are 100% right, at about the 10-15 year mark learning new languages and tooling really is a matter of days, maybe a week if the tooling is very different. That’s 1 week from no experience in a language to “employable, productive member of a team” At some point it all just clicks, I suspect the people above who are disagreeing and likely devs with maybe only 5-6 years experience who this hasn’t happened for yet.

scarface_74 3y ago
Were you able to mentor juniors in best practices and see the foot guns that could happen based on your experience? BTW, I’m using the definition of senior developer as defined by large tech companies - the whole “scope”, “impact”, “dealing with ambiguity”, “leading initiatives” metrics not “I code really well”. My experience on the enterprise dev side (1996-2020 and going back on that side now), is that titles mean very little outside of tech companies with leveling guidelines. BTW, the last time I had only six years of professional experience was 2002. The last time I only had six years of programming experience was 1992. By then I had done assembly language programming as hobby on four architectures (65C02, 68K, PPC and x86)

scarface_74 3y ago

My job as a lead was three fold and from my recent interviewing based on the jobs I’m currently looking at it’s the same (cloud+app dev) 1. Working with external/internal stakeholders to define business outcomes and deal with ambiguity and doing project management - from my experience at AWS (ProServe) you can be really good at this with hardly any technical proficiency 2. Determining what is the right service or combination of services to use and the overall architectural design. I could do this without any specific platform knowledge - I know what type of database I need. I know I need a messaging bus. I know the trade offs of different types of technologies. I was able to go from never opening the AWS console to working at AWS in the cloud consulting department within 2 years. But I sucked during those two years while I was learning the ropes. 3. Using the “right” one of the literally 100+ services and being able to mentor junior consultants and help them troubleshoot complex issues. The 3rd bullet point is where you need someone who has the specific skillset. My experience at the second bullet point is the downside of hiring someone based on “potential”. The CTO who hired me threw me at the cloud initiatives without experience and let me figure it out. But paid me $30K less than he would have had to pay someone with experience. He would have never been able to push through the 20%+ raise I would have been looking for when I left 2 years later if I had stayed on that side of enterprise dev/BigTech compensation side. He definitely couldn’t push through the 50% raise I ended up getting at BigTech. Now that I did my bid and the pay/bullshit ratio is going too much in the wrong direction, I can go back to my former company (since been acquired) and ask for about the same I would have been asking for three years ago (a lot less than I was making at BigTech)