Comment by ravenstine | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ravenstine | Hacker News Reader

I know I'll get blowback from this as always, but what the author is talking about here is another symptom of how, although we pretend that so many aspects of what we do have objective answers, the vast majority of everything we do in tech is opinion-based.

There is little if any authority. As one "best practice" can be verboten to some other team, one company's "senior" engineer is another company's mid-level developer. A legendary developer at one company is another hiring team's "bro, do you even fizzbuzz?" It's not that there's no utility at all to using designations, since at the day we are only left with choices to make, but so much of this shit's made up that it's difficult to take anything seriously beyond the immediate task at hand.

I'm glad to be a software developer, and feel fortunate, but sometimes I envy other careers where the chain of command means more. Sure, other industries have their own subjectivity, nepotism, ass-kissing, and so forth, yet for some reason their titles and practices seem to have a legitimacy that lacks in software. Having had my share of ridiculous interviews, I find it gloomy how much an individual's career progression is determined by mere opinion; actual experience is virtually irrelevant. It doesn't even matter if you've written a framework used by big tech to power sites with millions of active users; I know of one of these cases where they were rejected by one of said big tech companies because they "couldn't code."

So although I feel some consolation having achieved the senior role, it's a participation trophy and a "you're a tolerable coworker" trophy wrapped up in one.

It would be nice if the software industry had some form of greater authority to "calibrate" our individual careers. Even companies like The Google have failed to be such an authority.

And no, I'm not suggesting that things were ever different.

The adage of "It's who you know" applies in all industries, even tech. you are right, it's opinion based. Depending on the values of your team or organization the criteria for success will change.

My principal engineer values "The best possible solution" while I value delivery even if there are some short term tradeoffs. We are often at odds and since he's a level above me, he wins (generally speaking). Because he is a core feedback provider to my promotion I have a harder time getting the feedback I think I should as I'm expected to be his version of a principal engineer, and not mine.

As you move up the ladder it seems convincing people you are successful is more important that actually being successful.

And as much as you can try to push for everything to be measured and to make data-driven decisions, at the end of the day everyone has their insecurities and somebody up the line that you need to convince thinks they're an underperformer.

I came from (real) engineering and now I program. (the pay is 2x better)

Its a stark difference in what is considered Truth. Opinions of authority, tradition, beauty of code, all had an impact on how I code.

In Engineering, there wasnt really freedom like that. There was always 1 correct way, it was the cheapest and hit all the metrics.

Basically if you do a good job, everyone comes up with the same design.

I've adjusted to the gray aspects of programming, but it always irks me when people call this engineering, or think there is something correct when we are dealing with non safety critical C.

>but so much of this shit's made up that it's difficult to take anything seriously beyond the immediate task at hand.

Not necessarily made up. It just really depends on what your skillset is and what the company values. I as a systems engineer isn't going to be valued if all a company needs is a functional website for their non-tech services. But that supposed "rockstar" front end dev at that same company who may be devoured like a guppy if they tried to apply to a full stack role.

That's the one downside to an industry that lacks licenses or accredibility: all the companies have to snuff out that skillset themselves, and often in arbitrary ways (I am way beyond done with the Leetcode interview as someone almost 8 years into industry). But at the same time they treat their test as some secret code so they don't exact talk about WHAT an engineer should study* if they want to reach that level.

*(I should note that this mostly applies to non-FAANG jobs. On the contrary, Amazon and Google had entire interview packets for that stuff. Maybe a bit too much in the other direction, but better than guessing if I need to study C++, algorithms, domain specific knowledge, make personal projects, or many other topics).

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