We found a DOGE guy at NASA because his Google Calendar was public | Hacker News Reader

We found a DOGE guy at NASA because his Google Calendar was public

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34 pointscratermoon24 comments

If I was Russia or China, I'd have entire teams focused on exploring the spoils of everything DOGE is doing. The sheer velocity alone should be enough to wreak havoc and create many exploit opportunities.

Given the kids active at DOGE, the "move fast and break things" mentality, shown lack of regard for security, and the ridiculous level of access they have, the entire agency has to be the biggest and softest attack surface of the entire American government ever. Russian and Chinese hackers are having a field day, I'm sure.

Riley Sennott, 26, is listed as a "senior advisor"

Senior? At 26?!

I've seen it asserted with a straight face (and confirmed by real promotions) that as little experience as 3 years, and definitely 5, is qualified for "senior".

That argument has been had right here on HN many times. So many people will defend someone with just a smidge of experience as being Senior or equivalent in their organization. The issue is there's no industry standard, so one company's Senior is another company's Junior.

I'd argue without compromise someone with less than 5 years of experience cannot possibly be Senior-anything. Probably should be closer to the 10 year mark... but many will disagree and cite ridiculous company title-scales, including "Level" this and that.

There's tremendous pressure to inflate people's titles to make them feel important - which realistically means people's titles are useless. Hence, "Senior" Engineers complaining about being asked to do L33T code assignments in interviews...

If nobody can be "senior" at less than 5 years, your skill threshold for senior precludes 99% of engineers from ever being senior.

I don't follow. Are you suggesting people retire and/or change industries as they hit the 5 year mark?

If you're going to spend a 30-40 year career doing something, it should take a long while before you can be considered "Senior". At 5 years, you're probably still making rookie mistakes and having actually experienced engineers clean up after and/or guide you.

What I'm saying is that the very best engineers are at a higher level with 5 YOE than 99% of engineers are ever capable of reaching.

e.g. Linus Torvalds was 21 when the first version of Linux was released. I couldn't come close to that now with 10 YOE.

I fundamentally disagree. I regularly interface with people that have more than 5 years and are entirely unequipped to code their way out of a paper bag, let alone work unsupervised, lead a team, understand the overall system that's being designed, and more. They have little knowledge outside whatever pet language they've sunk all of their time into, and even then, little knowledge outside of a narrow set of tools/practices.

That's not "Senior". That's someone getting their feet wet in an ever-changing industry that requires a certain level of thirst for knowledge and continued learning.

There's always exceptions - and some people are stellar in every way. But on average, 5 years of experience is still training wheels for a great deal of people.

> Linus Torvalds was 21 when the first version of Linux was released.

This is like pointing to Bill Gates or Michael Jordan and saying everyone can do that... Linus is the fabled 10X Rockstar of programming.

You have moved the goalposts from

> I'd argue without compromise someone with less than 5 years of experience cannot possibly be Senior-anything

To:

> There's always exceptions - and some people are stellar in every way. But on average, 5 years of experience is still training wheels for a great deal of people

So we are in agreement.

Being senior arguably involves more than technical skill on a one-dimensional scale. I'd say Linus Torvalds was no senior at that time although the technical feat was certainly impressive.

Am I understanding you correctly? You're saying because 1% of engineers are as good at 5 years as most engineers will ever be, that 5 years is a reasonable gauge for "senior"?

If nobody is lasting longer than 5 years, you need to work somewhere else. 5 years might seem like a while if you’re just starting your career but it’s not long enough to have experience with the outcome of architectural decisions, natural staff or business partner turnover, or adjustment to greater market trends (e.g. if your startup only existed in a boom market, you’ve only done cost engineering and customer acquisition in easy mode).

> but it’s not long enough to have experience with the outcome of architectural decisions, natural staff or business partner turnover, or adjustment to greater market trends (e.g. if your startup only existed in a boom market, you’ve only done cost engineering and customer acquisition in easy mode).

Surely that assumes that you can only learn from seeing your actions play out over time. Within the first 3 years of my career, I saw good business decisions, bad business decisions, the fallout of bad business decisions that predated my involvement, good tech stacks, bad tech stacks, and tech stacks that had survived 99% staffing cuts. Now, I still wouldn't have called myself senior at that point, but I absolutely had the experience of seeing what the long-term impact of certain choices was, even if they weren't my decisions or even if I hadn't been there and had to work from second-hand accounts (and sometimes, code/docs).

Making good technical decisions isn't something you can learn by observation. You have to make them, fail, learn why you failed, and get better over time. There's an intuition you develop. There's so much tech out there, and it changes so fast. If you're not the type that can stay "with it", you'll perpetually make bad decisions, or worse... decide on what is familiar not what's best.

My point is, there's no way (with a few exceptions of course) someone with 5 years of observational experience has enough real experience to make good decisions that impact the organization over the long term.

The ones who can do/learn this within 5 years are exceptional, and tend to be the ones deeply motivated by technology, ie. it's not just a job to them. They go home and work on tech for funsies... staying up late and getting up early to build, read, learn. That's not your average engineer.

You can make it to Senior Airman (the 4th enlisted rank) in the US Air Force in just two years. Take that, software devs.

Amended: The tech company I'm in now doesn't really hire any engineering position at less than Senior with 5~10 YOE except interns and in departments that they are desperate to fill seats. (Now is a GREAT time to be an AI engineer, you can pretty much name your price.)

the 4th enlisted rank is E-4, out of 9, which makes that rank roughly upper junior to low mid-career. If you take into account the officer ranks, where all the leadership decisions are made, an E-4 is barely above entry level.

In consulting/finance isn't everybody started at VP level to make clients feel at ease.

Long time ago the European company I worked for tried getting into the US market. They embarked on looking for potential clients and partners. Soon after they discovered that the American counterparts wouldn't even want to talk to them let alone schedule formal meetings if the titles were "project manager", "product manager" or similar. The company started changing roles renaming most managers to VPs.

Kinda reminds me of how I'd bump into 21-year-old Mormon "elders" on the train.

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