Senior Engineers are a thing of the past

future senior software engineering skills: plumbing, carpentry, HVAC, roofing, bricklaying

One of the overlooked issues here is training issues. Every company and senior dev wants to complain about skill issues and jr devs who don’t understand the fundamentals, but companies, senior devs and higher education are all responsible for creating that environment. No one wants to train or mentor anymore. Every company expects everyone to know an extremely specific skill set but won’t provide any industry specific training. That won’t solve everything but it would certainly help and start turning the ship around.

CSS? Is that some kind of new tailwind framework?

I agree with you wholeheartedly, but I need to see 12 years youtube experience before I can like.

The old question, "Do you have 10 years of experience or 1 year of experience 10 repeated times?"

The trick to being a good engineer is to always be curious. Never lose your curiosity and you will always learn. The learning will never stop

Early in your career it sounds like you also had the luxury of time to solve problems. In my entire career as a software engineer, every assignment feels like it was due yesterday, so your first half baked idea is what gets shipped, never to be rearchitected or refactored. Do you think this difference in our experience is due to time constraints changing over time? or perhaps it depends on the company size?

The one issue with this is that there’s always another layer. You can’t just say “learn the fundamentals” indefinitely without burning through rabbit holes all the way down into quantum physics. Be a bit curious, but at some point you have to say “this is good enough”. Have some interest but don’t let your curiosity consume you.

I think something interesting is that you are basically talking about abstraction. When new developers don't understand the fundamentals that make up the current level of abstraction that they are working with then when problems arrive they often don't have enough knowledge to solve them.

I'm so glad I never did any front end development. Not that the business tier was any bed of roses either. You're spot on with we're building at an abstraction level now where we don't understand the basics. Some people get it and dig in, others are happy to stay at that higher level and never really pick up the knowledge they need to handle more complex development tasks. Everyone just thinks there's a package/library for that. And a lot of the time there is. If it works, if it does what you need, if you don't need to modify it, if it continues to be supported, the list of if's goes on. But that's all somebody else's problem now. I retired a few weeks ago and I'm happy to be out of the game. It's no fun anymore exactly because you don't have the opportunity to dig in and learn those things.

You're a senior engineer when it doesn't matter what the problem is and you can solve it. Language, OS, frameworks are irrelevant. I have been at it 45 years and have held the title for 35 years.

The best way I can explain career progression is this: I want to be part of the meeting. Do I need to be part of the meeting. Just give me a summary of the meeting.

One of the downsides of modern software development is "standing on the shoulders of giants" a lot of people skip fundamentals and start with high level abstractions instead of starting from the bottom. This results in many of new industry entrants lacking the required skills to troubleshoot and debug their stack beyond their abstractions.

Can't code but the algo brought me here. You have a great way of communicating.

This is a great point. Ideally we use frameworks etc not because we can't implement that functionality ourselves, but because we have done so before, felt the pain points the framework was designed to solve, and then choose to use the framework for reasons of convenience or productivity. For this reason, if I'm training someone, I don't immediately start them at the end point. Rather than starting a new project by importing all of the frameworks and tools which we might use for a large-scale project, we start simple, build things, and only introduce the fancy tools and abstractions *when the pain point they were built to address actually manifests*. This way, their learning journey more closely mirrors the history of the industry itself, and the timeline of different technologies which were introduced. And so they understand more of the how and *why*.

Programming is increasingly becoming a great hobby and a horrible career. You are expected to live, eat and breathe software. You are expected to spend a great deal of time outside of work keeping on top of new developments. Many people don't take into account why they feel a compulsion to continuously learn new things as a software developer. It's usually not something you actually want to do (although many of us fooled ourself into thinking that), but rather something being done to avoid being rendered obsolete. When you take into accout that you must live the lifestyle of a software developer in order to make a living, I find that it is not worth it. You don't see this in other career paths to the extent that it's found in this field. It takes over your thoughts in and out of work, your YouTube algorithm, your interests, your hobbies, engulfing your time for what? Money. If you value money and like working in this field, I recommend adding up all the time you spend thinking about software development outside of work and factoring that into your hourly pay. You will find that it's not as much as you thought it was, and that perhaps it's not even worth being consumed limb from limb by a field that is experiencing a potential mass extinction event in the near future.

Senior devs are those who survived enough of those impossible to solve tasks to come out a bitter, opinionated and short tempered git. The nice ones are still sociable. Architects are worse.

I enjoyed this video. I've been experimenting by myself since 20 years ago, anything, programming, networking, cryptography, even reverse engineering, being from html/css to windows drivers (just because I was interested), Linux/Unix, I've been a programmer and a network engineer as well, I'm no better than anyone but I do believe that having the fundamentals completely covered and then experimenting a lot (just because it can be fun) has give me the edge in many circumstances because I can see the relationship between things. Looking forward to another talk from you.

3:11 "Im gonna act like Im paying you $500 Euros a days, hoping one day you'll be worth that amount of money" powerful thing to hear from someone who's in a position you would like 💪

Nicely said at 17:18 - "I cant lay out the exact path for you because the path I walked through is now closed"