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> but it’s not long enough to have experience with the outcome of architectural decisions, natural staff or business partner turnover, or adjustment to greater

> but it’s not long enough to have experience with the outcome of architectural decisions, natural staff or business partner turnover, or adjustment to greater market trends (e.g. if your startup only existed in a boom market, you’ve only done cost engineering and customer acquisition in easy mode). Surely that assumes that you can only learn from seeing your actions play out over time. Within the first 3 years of my career, I saw good business decisions, bad business decisions, the fallout of bad business decisions that predated my involvement, good tech stacks, bad tech stacks, and tech stacks that had survived 99% staffing cuts. Now, I still wouldn't have called myself senior at that point, but I absolutely had the experience of seeing what the long-term impact of certain choices was, even if they weren't my decisions or even if I hadn't been there and had to work from second-hand accounts (and sometimes, code/docs).

Alupis 2y ago
Making good technical decisions isn't something you can learn by observation. You have to make them, fail, learn why you failed, and get better over time. There's an intuition you develop. There's so much tech out there, and it changes so fast. If you're not the type that can stay "with it", you'll perpetually make bad decisions, or worse... decide on what is familiar not what's best. My point is, there's no way (with a few exceptions of course) someone with 5 years of observational experience has enough real experience to make good decisions that impact the organization over the long term. The ones who can do/learn this within 5 years are exceptional, and tend to be the ones deeply motivated by technology, ie. it's not just a job to them. They go home and work on tech for funsies... staying up late and getting up early to build, read, learn. That's not your average engineer.

Alupis 2y ago

Making good technical decisions isn't something you can learn by observation. You have to make them, fail, learn why you failed, and get better over time. There's an intuition you develop. There's so much tech out there, and it changes so fast. If you're not the type that can stay "with it", you'll perpetually make bad decisions, or worse... decide on what is familiar not what's best. My point is, there's no way (with a few exceptions of course) someone with 5 years of observational experience has enough real experience to make good decisions that impact the organization over the long term. The ones who can do/learn this within 5 years are exceptional, and tend to be the ones deeply motivated by technology, ie. it's not just a job to them. They go home and work on tech for funsies... staying up late and getting up early to build, read, learn. That's not your average engineer.