14 life sentences isn't "life in jail" in the UK, where murdering 270 people isn't too much for "compassionate release."
SuperNerd
joined 1 year ago
It's fine for the usual straightforward and easy problems -- problems that common developer tools and paradigms have solved. Like a product that reduces to CRUD with a few boolean expressions, joins, and simple algebra mixed in. But I think it's inefficient maybe even unworkable for harder problems. And hard can be scale, like moving up two orders of magnitude in throughput or entities, or down in latency. Or hard can be algorithmic stuff.
I highly agree with what others have said here, that a culture of "fungible engineers" can alienate those who want to go deep. Some folks enjoy being subject matter experts or are drawn to a craftsmanship aesthetic. And, IMHO, a healthy org culture should work for all kinds of people -- specialists and generalists. I think you should aim for and encourage people to grow to be T shaped rather than fungible cogs.
Ask former coworkers to say how great you are on LinkedIn. :)
Social proof can help.
Hey, don't be discouraged.
You are a treasure and rare. There are places for folks like you. I hope you can find one where the culture fits you and knows your value.
Until then. You can try to change the culture. But if that's possible depends on more than I know for your context.
With small teams it's easier. Demonstrate competence, gain trust of everyone around you, then sell a better tomorrow where ... Stuff just works. Faster velocity, more features, fewer bugs, etc.
This is a very valued message in some places, and totally not in others.
I have a feeling that infrastructure/platform/core teams -- those making tools for other engs -- are probably more naturally aligned to quality and lower defect rates. That may be a direction for you if you aren't sure where to start aiming towards.
Dang, sorry. Maybe your manager sucks and isn't teeing you up for it or being clear about it? Or heck maybe your org just sucks.
Is this for interviewing or promotion?
At my org the formal definition is "[demonstrated] ability to lead projects at x scope." This is how people leaders frame it.
But to individual contributors (engineering track) folks, I think we are looking for:
- Thinks. Applies themselves to the hard work of figuring things out. Reads documentation for libraries and languages to get how to use them. Doesn't vomit up random groupthink (from the wider org or web) without understanding it.
- Curious: doesn't take "this is how we've always done it" as a thought stopper -- wonders if there's a better way. Flexible, open to learning.
- Teamwork skills: communicates own level of certainty, listens to others and tries to understand -- not stubborn: honestly tries to figure out the best solution rather than trying to look smart in front of others. Has a feel for how to help everyone be heard and add their thoughts to the group decision.
- Communicates clearly-- excellent written documentation for spikes/designs/decisions is a clear stand out here. (easy win with high visibility)
- Can start to participate in meta/scope and product type conversations around "hey this is stupidly hard why don't we just do this slightly different thing that's way easier" (extra credit at this level)
How to show this when interviewing vs getting promoted is different.
I feel their business side is run by morons. I tried to setup a small business with them, and gave up when I couldn't wrestle a price out of their sales folks after two weeks of back and forth emails.
I'm dealing with a new service written by someone who extensively cut and pasted from ChatGPT, got it to "almost done -- just needs all the operational excellence type stuff to put it into production", and left the project.
Honestly we should have just scrapped it and rewritten it. It's barely coherent and filled with basic bugs that have wasted so much time.
I feel maybe this style of sloppy coding workflow is better suited to front end coding or a simple CRUD API for saving state, where you can immediately see if something works as intended, than backend services that have to handle common sense business logic like "don't explode if there is no inventory" and etc.
For this dev, I think he was new to the language and got in a tight feedback loop of hacking together stuff with ChatGPT without trying to really understand each line of code. I think he didn't learn as much as if he would have applied himself to reading library and language documentation, and so is still a weak dev. Even though we gave him an opportunity to grow with a small green field service and several months to write it.
Sorry, I can't find the specific paper-- NASA wrote so much about this (it was a big problem, plus astronauts had to save their poop-- which was then analyzed and copiously written about) that I just got lost looking. Search for "NASA low residue diet" and things like "preflight", "fecal collection assembly", "waste management system", and etc -- from Gemeni through Apollo.
There's pictures online of the bags. They were taped to the butts to help make a seal.
Now I want to read the preflight diet study again, so please write if you find it.
NASA has a paper on how to not poop for days. It's on the Internet. Before space toilets there was only a space bag with finger scissor/scoop holes. It didn't work, poop got everywhere. The paper goes into detail about fecal matter being everywhere after early multi-day missions.
So they figured it out. Their system works -- I've also had my own reasons.
It's not your fault. Tell someone. You'll survive.