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Comment by alexpotato

10 hours ago

Being senior, to me, is best illustrated by a story:

Me: "Sometimes I feel like I'm psychic"

Co-worker: "How so?"

Me: "Many times on projects, I can tell at either the planning stages or the very early implementation steps if it's going to go well or be a disaster. e.g. people will say they love templated configs but they don't account for what can go wrong when there is a bug in the template etc etc"

Co-worker: "I don't think that's being psychic. That means you are a senior engineer who has seen so many projects that you can quickly pattern match on if the project is going to succeed or fail based on only the first 20% of the project."

14 comments

alexpotato

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therobots927  6 hours ago

Ironically this can cause a lot of senior engineers to double down on conservative practices and fail to innovate or take risk imo. I’ve worked with several people at a higher level than me with more work experience who were for all effects and purposes complete idiots.

  • albert_e  1 hour ago

    Not trying to counter your post but this reminded me of this --

    "Have you ever noticed that everyone who drives slower than you is an idiot, and everyone who drives faster than you is a maniac?"

    Though I agree there are some folks who resist change while others who seem to jump into new things without enough care about hard lessons of the past. And sometimes you are the one trying to keep things sane and mitigate risks while majority of your team seem to treat you as a joyless guy who always sees risks and drawbacks.

  • bravetraveler  3 hours ago

    'Principal' engineer here, looking to perfect being the idiot! Knowing how to do things, and being known for it, has been an endless source of heartburn. All to say, I think there's wisdom at play. Even there.

    Having 'innovated and taken risk', juice is rarely worth the squeeze. Watercooler is too crowded and layoffs too arbitrary. A middling job rewards exactly as well. Reliably.