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Comment by sayinbu | Hacker News Reader

"Working in the industry for a long time doesn’t automatically bring seniority either" I can't emphasize this point enough. Most engineers, who are doing the same basic tasks every day over and over again for years, identify themselves as senior engineers. I understand that people like to stay in comfort zone when there is no need to get out, really. This is something I do too. However, this bothers me when these kind of engineers block and mock their colleagues(especially juniors) by convincing them he/she knows better, when they try to get out of their comfort zone and learn/do something new.

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Several of my favorite coworkers are in the few fucks given category. They don’t want to be in charge. It’s too much work and too little return.

I’m not sure they’re wrong. If most of our problems come in the requirements phase, and we don’t have all that much control over those (some businesses the sale people sell things before we have a chance to veto) then you can be as efficient as you want and still be ineffective as hell.

And there’s always bad luck.

Probably they’ve figured out that tying your ego to your job means every bad turn becomes an existential crisis and that’s often a lot of wasted energy.

I spend a lot of time trying to put people in a place to solve their own problems. To me that’s always been the role of the lead, but some people think it’s all about them.

Indeed. As I've had to remind many people over the years, "doing the same basic work you learned in your first year repeatedly for 10 years is not 10 years of experience... it's 10 of the same one year."

There's a term for that ..."expert beginner"

yes, and tomorrow you'll be extolling the virtues of software development where every new project is unique and you learn something new from it, yet somehow this senior person you disagree with just had 30 years of the same experience.

This sort of argument is silly and dismissive.

Will I, especially since I'm actually the engineer with 30 years of experience?

Jumping from new hotness to new hotness isn't a means to achieving real experience, it's often a quick way to 10 of the same one year since you never gain depth of understanding by flitting from one thing to the next.

Nowhere did I claim that you must have new projects/tools/stacks/toys/whatever to gain real experience.

THAT is a strawman.

I disagree a little. 10 years after you start painting you’re still doing the same thing mechanically: putting paint on the brush on the canvas. But you are in a whole new game.

Too many programmers measure themselves by whether they’re leveling up in the tools they’re using and the kinds of problems they’re solving. In some cases I think they’re deluding themselves. They’re on easy mode, creating a sensation of movement for themselves without ever getting into the hard stuff, which is not glamorous, it’s things like naming and restraint and kindness and caching patterns.

I have kind of spent my whole career learning how to solve the same problems better. It’s still the same DIVs and HTTP requests I was manipulating 20 years ago. But the game I am playing within an organization and within a platform is fundamentally new.

I can see how from the outside it might not look like I have “leveled up” but I think I have leveled up in my methodology.

I'd agree with your criticism of tool/new hotness as a bad metric for measuring leveling up. It's too easy to get the dopamine hit from novelty or being busy rather than putting in the real work that provides value.

We learn to solve the same problems better because we're exposed to the limitations of our initial naive understanding of those problems and the methods we choose, which may be sufficient in the first year, but over time that understanding becomes deeper and the methods become more elegant, reliable, and maintainable.

The wisdom and methodology improvements are necessary components of achieving 10 years of experience, but the 10 years of the same year approach literally is staying at the same level of understanding no matter the number of projects.

This is the key, or should be. Where I work it is often repeated that what you’ve done to get “here” isn’t going to get you “there” so doing more of it isn’t going to help.

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