Comment by ChicagoDave
14 hours ago
I like the post but I’d add senior is also the instinct to take risks. I was once at a client in NY with an ASP.NET code base that used the compile at runtime capability (like Java used to). The C# source was being pushed to the web server.
I ran a compile and the code was riddled with errors. So I went to the PM and explained the code needed to compile and I needed a day to clean it up.
I refactored the entire project to compile and deploy that way. After that the development went very fast.
The hilarious part was the three devs who’d gone on vacation came back and thought what I’d done was “wrong”.
But the client said we (consultants) had done in two weeks what they couldn’t do in six months.
That’s what a senior engineer does.
> But the client said we (consultants) had done in two weeks what they couldn’t do in six months.
I think this is more of a consultant vs employee thing than it is senior vs not-senior. There's this weird dynamic that happens where BizOps defaults to trusting and spending more on consultants, granting them more autonomy, such that they're wildly more empowered to take any risk. Employees are to be delegated to by BizOps, and BizOps doesn't like taking risks. It's paradoxical, because unless you come in with that authority or you were there extremely early, you're unlikely to acquire it, much more-so after the company's been around a few years.
This seems to me where the term "hired gun" comes from. You pay someone who's incentivized to solve a discrete important problem with their expertise quickly, whereas all of your employees are incentivized to do things for amounts of time reliably over however long, answering to product managers, implementing whatever crap to get the sale, answering to useless managers every two weeks, planning, reviewing, retrospectiving, blah blah. The consultant isn't about to go doing a broad-scale refactor if they're not paid to, and there's no reason an employee should either.
I would like to propose a counter perspective.
You mentioned receiving approval after providing a persuasive justification - to me it implies that you were not in the position of making the decision, rather it was up to someone else and under their supervision?
Should Senior then more correlate to the value of curating ideas, mining for conflict, gathering consensus, and execution; while operating tactfully and methodically within certain bounds of composure/temperament?
Definitely some truth to this, but I do believe there are parallels in being a hired gun and being senior. I’ve seen both variations: mid as consultant only doing the minimum and senior employee never challenging the status quo.
The core trait of senior is, “gets shit done.”
I'm not familiar with C# compile at runtime. Are you saying your change was to do an AOT compile locally?
When dotnet first came out, Microsoft tried to bridge the old to the new. They included the IIS compile time capability to mimic jsp (Java server pages) and asp (Active server pages) so programmers could more easily make the leap.
Most serious developers skipped this goofiness and deployed compiled and tested builds.
That's an old ASP.NET Web Forms / ASPX thing that was IIS-based. IIS would just compile .cs files into a temporary folder when first running. So the first request takes like 5s or something.
It's not the new .NET Core AOT feature, GP was building the DLLs and packaging the website locally.
Not GP but funny enough I ran into a similar problem with a team that also didn't know compilation and was just copy/pasting into a server.
>> So the first request takes like 5s or something.
I haven't worked with IIS in more than five years, but couldn't you change some setting to infinity so the thread never sleeps... or something like that? I remember the "5 second" thing being a problem with commercial IIS apps we deployed, and that's always how we avoided it.
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