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Comment by MobiusHorizons | Hacker News Reader

I would consider it table stakes for an intermediate level engineer at a big company (which would have well defined processes for doing this safely) or a senior at any other company (on the assumption some of that infra has to be set up from scratch). If 10 years of experience hadn’t taught me this yet, I would personally be concerned how I’m spending my energy. I am roughly at the 10y mark, and I would estimate I have been competent enough to build a public facing application without embarrassing public access issues on my own for at least 4 years. Even before that, I would have known what to be scared of / seek help on for at least 7 years. I guess I could be more unusual than I think, but the idea that at 10 years anyone would be ok not knowing how to approach such a routine task is baffling to me.

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HN is a bubble. The expectation that your colleagues are /experts like you/ is unrealistic. To stand something up like this, which is entirely on bare metal - this is a task many would find challenging if they are entirely honest with themselves and put their egos to the side. Your typical swe thinks that nothing is impossible.

There was a recent comment which said along the lines of “I used to watch figure skating, seeing them race around and spin, and think no big deal. It was only when I went on ice that I realised how difficult and impressive what they were doing was” - this is exactly the trap SWEs are most guilty of. — /this/ is what you learn as a staff level.

You are talking to the ice skaters. They expect you to do up your laces. Setting a password on a database is a something I would expect of any company capable of asking for a credit card.

everything you say is true, but I don't think any of it actually applies to being able to safely deploy user facing systems. I would certainly not trust myself to do all possible aspects of setting up a user facing system completely from scratch (ie nothing but a libc on linux or whatever) I would not trust myself to write correct crypto, for example. But I have a good sense of what I can trust myself to build relatively safely. And of course i'm not claiming that "knowledge of where to trust myself" is by any means flawless. But Even in college I made applications for people that were exposed to the public internet. But I was very aware of what I felt I could trust myself to do and what I needed to rely on some other system for. In my case I delegated auth to "sign in with google" and relied on several other services for data storage. There were features that I didn't ship because I didn't trust myself to build them safely, and I was working alone. Now I would not necessarily expect every CS student to be able to do this safely, but a healthy understanding of one's own current limitations and being willing to engineer around that as a constraint is pretty achievable, and can get you very far.

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