
On Being a Senior Engineer - quodestabsurdum
https://www.kitchensoap.com/2012/10/25/on-being-a-senior-engineer/
======
NTDF9
Part of the problem is the interview process.

So so so many "senior engineers" get hired because they can traverse trees
with their eyes closed but when it comes to writing solid designs and the
desire to dig deep, they fall short.

There was a time when senior engineers could wrench open a compiler to figure
things out. Now, these guys are useless without some rockstars maintaining the
underlying infra.

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luckydude
To me, senior engineer is that point when you have hit your stride, you are
very good at what you do, and the next level is where you start to mentor
younger engineers and let them take credit for your ideas/insight.

That's what Steve Kleiman (Sun/Sparc/vnodes/threads) did for me and he was
definitely well past what we called senior staff engineers.

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solotronics
If you are the captain of the boat or even one of the officers that comes with
risks and rewards. My perspective is that there is increased exposure to
potentially career ending outages as you move to the top technical positions
and that should be recognized.

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rrhd
> Generation X (and even more so generation Y) are cultures of immediate
> gratification

uh huh. thanks for that.

Does this guy even remember his 20s anymore?

> I’ve worked with a staggering number of engineers that expect the “career
> path” to take them to the highest ranks of the engineering group inside 5
> years just because they are smart. This is simply impossible in the
> staggering numbers I’ve witnessed

Pretty common at the big companies. 5 years is quick, but it's the start of
when people start to hit senior in larger numbers.

If you won't give them something, someone else will. Remember that, and maybe
reconsider your biases.

> What then? “Super engineer”? Five more years? “Super-duper engineer

Depending on where you are,
staff/principal/distinguished/fellow/partner/etc...

If your engineering ladder ends at Senior that's a failure on your part
honestly.

When is it appropriate to call someone a senior engineer? When they hit 65?
When they are the most experienced engineer left? When they come in and
announce that they are no longer going to attempt to expand their skills in
any way?

If you want to stick in SE 1-6 before senior then go ahead. It seems like what
the complain is really against the the typical bands we see at a lot of
companies nowadays.

~~~
dozzie
It's really nice to be able to call yourself _senior_ after mere five years,
when you haven't even seen a quarter of the possible deployment scenarios,
much less seen their long-term results. You can't find anything like that in
any other skill-based profession.

~~~
rrhd
And yet companies worth hundreds of billions had put the title to people after
that long every cycle.

Complaining about this is putting way too much emphasis on naming.

~~~
bradknowles
The rule in computer science is that naming is one of the two hardest problems
that we face.

Which is why it is really important to get it right, or at least make a
serious attempt to do so.

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draw_down
Well, there is a lot here that I think is good. A lot of this is about what a
good developer should and shouldn't do, so I think some attention to what
their employer should and shouldn't do is in order.

A good developer should be okay with making estimates in order to be relied
upon to build important things- so far so good. But if you're the only person
left, who handles a workload that should be enough for three, and random shit
pops up all the time where someone is yelling at you that this must be dealt
with, and nobody actually knows what they want so the idea of what is being
estimated upon will change 4 times before it's done, and oh yeah our dev
infrastructure is broken in various ways........ you see what I mean. There is
a point at which committing to ship something in a given amount of time, even
when all that other shit happens, is really just a brick in the wall of
burnout.

Point made. But more generally there is little thought paid to what employers
should be doing to hold up their end of the bargain, and ever more paid to
what employees should be doing better.

