Posted by nsavage 2 days ago
In a place operating with SCRUM you're often expected to be shipping things every sprint, and sometimes with a large and important piece of work the experimentation, and the building of the thing, doesn't fit in a sprint, and if you tried to ship incrementally you'd just be shipping junk.
So you're going to end up giving some standup updates that do not inspire confidence for a bit. "I tried this thing, didn't work out", "still working on X, tried another thing", etc.
It's possible at the end of it you figure it out, and the result justifies the time investment.
The spiral is friction with a system that disincentivizes taking on ambitious goals.
I wouldn't just blame the engineer for not shipping smaller things, being less ambitious, talking more instead of working, I'd blame the company culture for disincentivizing deep work and ambitious goals.
Obviously there's a limit to this. You do need to ship something useful eventually. It's possible you spend extra time and still fail to accomplish the thing you wanted. It might be damaging to your reputation. You win some you lose some.
With AI there's less time between having the idea to do something or try something, and it being done or ruled out, so I see this being less of an issue now. The main barrier is knowing what to do and describing it.
... or you don't care about these expectations, and give a big "f*ck you" to them.
It's clearly a deliberate affectation that they're putting on because other words are properly capitalise (COVID, PIP, I, his own name, etc.). The author's other posts are properly formatted so I assume this was a a stylistic choice they made to illustrate their point on it being stream-of-consciousness.
I just find it more annoying on tweets because they've clearly fought the phone keyboard to override autocaps just to sound down with their fellow kids.
His prescription to avoid this is to keep checking in and show some progress on something every day so you don't lose touch.
(My analysis: I don't think this is particularly a senior engineer problem, to me it just reads like ADHD-coded problems with time and interests)
Combined with the inner monologue stream of consciousness style, and it is certain that this article is devoid of insight
Moreover, the lack of capitals in this article is accentuated by the stream of consciousness writing style. It requires a very significant amount of effort to parse, so simply isn't worth it.
I remember having a phase as a teen where I didn't capitalize the first letter of sentences because it just seemed redundant. Periods are there; why need another signal that another sentence has started? It was like a redundancy = bad phase.
SDL_BlitSurface((player1?smallcross:smallcircle),NULL,screen,&curpos);This is a perfect analogy. Just as we have coding standards, we have grammar and punctuation rules so that people can effectively communicate with each other.
Anyone who refuses to follow coding standards or punctuation rules is just an asshole. Obviously we relax them based on context - a comment here or text message are different from a blog post which is different from an academic paper. But surely publishing articles/essays on your blog, which you preusmably hope people will read, requires at least some minimal respect for language rules.
Evidently this person doesn't feel that way, so they have to accept (whether they do it consciously or not) that some people are just going to lint themselves away from reading it. Not worth the hassle.
it's kind of rude not to capitalise people's names, regardless of ones' stylistic preferences
I wish that I could travel back in time and tell my 25-year-old self this information.
This is probably an example of the Peter principle:
The Peter principle is a concept in management developed by Laurence J. Peter which observes that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to "a level of respective incompetence": employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent, as skills in one job do not necessarily translate to another.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
There's a huge amount of title inflation going on in the industry. We're now seeing the "Principal Engineer" title being given to people with 3 years of professional experience.
Unfortunately, this is simply not enough time to be very good at all, no matter how much raw talent you have. It takes a decade of experience just to know how to manage yourself effectively, let alone mentor others and lead large projects.
Maybe it helps you to know that early in my career I was also sometimes promoted into roles that were beyond my abilities.
Answer: No.
obviously, more senior ICs should be creating/defining/delivering their own work. But either way, alignment with director or TL seems like a good idea to reduce anxiety
Also there isnt much above senior/lead engineer these days, there is no straight line career progression above that. You can try to get into architecture but thats mostly paperwork, or management which is mostly dealing with people.
If you want to call your own shots as an engineer the world is your oyster, start your own company and build it. There is not much worth "being in charge of" in corporate dev shops that I can see or would want to be a part of. Most of it is retread, make work including FAANG.
If someone needs close supervision to ensure they don’t get stuck like this and spiral, they probably aren’t ready to be a senior engineer.
It's simple: just don't do it.