[HN Gopher] A Senior Engineer's Check-List (2019)
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       A Senior Engineer's Check-List (2019)
        
       Author : gautamsomani
       Score  : 186 points
       Date   : 2023-09-10 17:57 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (littleblah.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (littleblah.com)
        
       | crtified wrote:
       | Point 1 (" _Understand the business aspect of your work, and what
       | makes money. Eventually, only that matters._ ") is depressing to
       | me.
        
       | TensorTinkerer wrote:
       | Really digging the list, especially the emphasis on simplicity in
       | systems. Reminds me of that age-old principle: "What is the
       | simplest thing that could possibly work?" I've been on teams
       | where we battled convoluted systems. Sometimes a refactor, even a
       | daunting one, clears so much technical debt and revitalizes the
       | team.
       | 
       | The 'ask "why"' bit? Gold. It's not just about coding but
       | understanding the bigger picture. Feedback loops in software?
       | Amazing. Feedback in career growth? Equally crucial.
       | 
       | It's a solid reminder that our game isn't just code; it's the
       | soft skills too. They can seriously make or break your
       | trajectory. But as always, while guides are great, everyone's
       | path in tech is unique. It's like code; it evolves, iterates, and
       | adapts.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | sacnoradhq wrote:
       | > 8. Do not be adamant about your views.
       | 
       | I worked at a MAANG where this was not the case. The pecking
       | order of "seniority" was who was the most "right" and who could
       | poke the most holes in everyone else's ideas while denying
       | others' contributions while bragging about how essential and
       | important their work was in a semi-agro manner that discouraged
       | dissent and curiosity.
       | 
       | In my view, marks of intelligence include lacking strong biases,
       | comfort with ambiguity, be willing to propose hypotheses,
       | experiment, gather data, and be proven wrong.
        
       | shikshake wrote:
       | "Strive for deep technical expertise in technologies used"
       | 
       | In general, how would someone go about this? Is it just something
       | that should happen over time or is there a method/goal to strive
       | for?
        
         | Agingcoder wrote:
         | Read books, on a variety of topics, including the ones you
         | don't know about. A book will give you a much broader and
         | deeper understanding of most topics than random blog posts on
         | the internet. Make sure you read one or two a year, and think
         | about how you'd apply what you're learning at work. Even
         | better, find an actual application at work.
         | 
         | I've found that solving tricky problems ( horrible network
         | related issue, performance bugs, strange behaviour of
         | program/framework/os, someone you know deciding to use new tech
         | you don't know about etc ) is usually a good way of finding a
         | topic to explore.
         | 
         | Find someone who's interested in actively learning things, it
         | makes things a lot more pleasant, and it's easier to remain
         | motivated. You don't have to learn the same things - just share
         | the fun stuff you're learning.
         | 
         | Finally, and most importantly : it's ok if you're not learning
         | as quickly as when you were at university. It's not a
         | competition. You have a full time job, don't have a lot of
         | time, so just make sure that you enjoy learning, so that you
         | keep doing it !
        
         | kbutler wrote:
         | Continuing study and investigation after achieving functional
         | competence.
         | 
         | Learn more apis, dig in to implementation, read other people's
         | code, ...
         | 
         | There's a big difference between engineers who consistently,
         | proactively study and learn vs those who just leverage previous
         | knowledge.
         | 
         | And I've experienced both sides of that in myself.
        
         | renegade-otter wrote:
         | It's possible if you keep things simple, but it's a rather
         | naive goal in most places which have already grown in size and
         | complexity. Just knowing what's happening with the other teams
         | and how your work fits into it is already a full-time job. I've
         | spent DAYS on Slack without getting anything done - I had to
         | get up early in the morning.
         | 
         | I wrote about something related recently.
         | 
         | "I am not your Cloud person":
         | https://renegadeotter.com/2023/07/26/i-am-not-your-cloud-per...
        
         | alex_lav wrote:
         | Don't stop learning at the end of your use-case for a piece of
         | tech. If your team uses a tool, understand approaches you
         | didn't take, trade offs and ultimately why you chose the path
         | you chose. Understand even other pieces of tech and their
         | approaches. Also, deeply understand failure scenarios and how
         | to mitigate them.
         | 
         | Basically just dig in beyond "it works". You'd be surprised how
         | many devs never read a tool's docs if they don't absolutely
         | have to.
        
       | karol wrote:
       | It's the same as the problem of finding a good cleaner. If
       | someone is responsible, thorough, turns up on time, has attention
       | to detail, can handle delicate objects, is trustworthy around
       | children and has good manners - then that person is already too
       | good to be an ordinary cleaner and will get hired elsewhere,
       | become a manager or a business owner.
        
         | medstrom wrote:
         | I don't think the world permits so easy mobility. I have worked
         | with cleaners who ticked all those boxes, they were still stuck
         | in their job. Meanwhile not all managers tick those boxes.
        
         | Horffupolde wrote:
         | It's the eternal paradox of life.
        
       | GreedClarifies wrote:
       | A lot of Amazon in that list, that's not a bad thing, one of
       | Amazon's greatest strengths is its principles.
       | 
       | Did the author spend time at Amazon?
        
       | cratermoon wrote:
       | The only part of this I disagree with is "Couple of years of
       | Relevant Practical Experience" is senior. Intermediate, sure.
       | Senior should be at least five years AND at least two projects.
        
       | a_square_peg wrote:
       | Assuming technical competency is given, I think senior engineer
       | really needs to do two things well:
       | 
       | 1. Be able to make a design decision - among multiple options and
       | with incomplete data and uncertainties, a senior engineer needs
       | to be able to make a decision and be accountable for it in order
       | to move the project forward. I think a good interview question
       | would be to ask about their difficult design decisions.
       | 
       | 2. Be able to identify wrong solution (most of the time) - maybe
       | this comes with technical competency but a lot of resource is
       | wasted chasing solutions that with the benefit of experience,
       | should have been evident early on.
        
         | shortrounddev2 wrote:
         | Mentoring is as important as the technical output. You cannot
         | be a senior engineer without being able to mentor
        
           | f1shy wrote:
           | I think this is the most important: make the team grow.
        
         | f1shy wrote:
         | This HR idea of doing questions abput the past to "know" how
         | good somebody will be in the future, is doomed to fail
        
           | kqr wrote:
           | Source?
           | 
           | From what I can tell, that is the only good predictor we
           | have. See Tversky's work with the IDF or the available CTA
           | methods for studying expertise, e.g. CDM.
        
         | beebmam wrote:
         | Disagree. A senior engineer should make evidence based
         | decisions, as should any engineer. If there's missing evidence
         | for a conclusion, then a senior engineer should be able to
         | design experiments which gather more evidence to derive a
         | conclusion.
         | 
         | Senior engineers should not be con-men.
        
           | CapitalistCartr wrote:
           | That sounds great, but hard decisions are hard because there
           | isn't time, money, other resources to have all the facts, yet
           | a decision must be made. There might not even be any way to
           | know for sure without taking one path. Experience is all we
           | have to guide us. Progress is full of such decisions, made in
           | a gray fog. Fear of being wrong is paralyzing.
        
             | galaxyLogic wrote:
             | Exactly. My favorite metaphor for SW-development is playing
             | chess. When you make a move, a decision, new choices, new
             | decisions to make, open up and other ones may no longer be
             | practical.
             | 
             | What you decide and do now, affects what you can and must
             | decide next.
             | 
             | Except unlike in chess we don't really have the exact rules
             | of the game anywhere. Still we must make choices which
             | affect what moves can be chosen later.
             | 
             | It is also like building a house, once you decide how to
             | build the ground-floor and what it stands on, that greatly
             | affects how the floors above that can be built (not too
             | heavy, not too light etc.).
             | 
             | It is often difficult to understand all the consequences of
             | a design decision, what can be done and chosen after that,
             | until you actually implement that design.
        
               | aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA wrote:
               | Path dependence.
        
             | jldugger wrote:
             | > That sounds great, but hard decisions are hard because
             | there isn't time, money, other resources to have all the
             | facts, yet a decision must be made.
             | 
             | While I am sympathetic to the concept of reasoning under
             | uncertainty, the way you've framed it is hardly engineering
             | anymore.
             | 
             | Design projects come with a spectrum of data requirements,
             | and each has its own cost function for improved accuracy.
             | For example, knowing exactly how long the bridge you need
             | to build matters greatly, and the cost of surveying should
             | be pretty low. In contrast, measuring the soil at the site
             | you build on top of has a variety[1] of options with
             | varying costs. You can't ever be 100 percent certain that
             | your sampling was good enough, but the samples more you
             | have the more confident you can be. Depending on the
             | project and design, you may not need the most expensive and
             | most accurate option, but you probably don't want to just
             | rely on priors built through "experience."
             | 
             | Translating this to the world of software, we have a
             | variety of data collection strategies. A/B tests, canaries,
             | software instrumentation, tracing, offsite monitoring,
             | f-scores, beta tests, market surveys, and more. The best
             | thing you can do as an engineer making an uninformed choice
             | is to design the system to collect the data you are missing
             | and to make it easy to change your design later. Amazon
             | calls these "two way doors" versus "one way doors"; if your
             | decision was wrong you can go back and make a different
             | choice. As an example, if you are designing a caching
             | system, spending a bit of time to generalize the API will
             | allow you to swap between policies as you collect data
             | about cache hit rates. If you don't, the cost of changing
             | your mind goes up as more things depend on the nuances of
             | your API.
             | 
             | Rather valorize making uninformed decisions, I'd prefer to
             | valorize flexibility and continuous data collection. Seen
             | this way, the old adage "There's never enough time to do it
             | right, but always plenty of time to do it over" is a
             | coherent philosophy.
             | 
             | [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geotechnical_investigati
             | on#Soi...
        
             | f1shy wrote:
             | If you have to make decision, and lack information, time
             | and money to even try something to understand the best
             | decision, you are having problems bigger than technical
             | ones; and even the best engineer in the world will probably
             | not do better than a dice
        
           | MAGZine wrote:
           | > A senior engineer should make evidence based decisions, as
           | should any engineer.
           | 
           | ... sooo there is no distinction between a senior engineer
           | and a non-senior engineer? you've really said nothing in this
           | comment.
           | 
           | senior engineers have seen enough things to know what the
           | right solution is in many cases, without having to take a
           | bunch of time to collect evidence. that's what makes them
           | senior, not just 'good'.
        
             | f1shy wrote:
             | Then the problem is not missing information, as stated.
             | There is enough information, if you have enough experience.
        
             | beebmam wrote:
             | Disagree, profoundly.
        
             | lowercased wrote:
             | > seen enough things to know what the right solution is in
             | many cases
             | 
             | When dealing with uncertainty (nearly always) it's
             | generally easier to identify and rule out what 'wrong'
             | solutions are. There are often multiple obviously 'wrong'
             | options (no, we should not keep a user's password in
             | plaintext, even if the goal is to make it easy to recover a
             | lost password), but picking a 'right' one... from a
             | whittled down list, it may often come down to familiarity
             | or convention rather than an arbitrary "this is the only
             | 100% correct solution".
        
           | stinkbutt wrote:
           | A senior engineer should work in an organization that
           | actually enables this type of engineering
        
           | paulcole wrote:
           | There's _always_ going to be missing evidence. Almost all
           | business decisions can be made without 100% certainty. Make
           | your conclusion with what you have available and find out if
           | that's good enough. Don't dawdle trying to get more info
           | that's probably not needed.
        
           | Nevermark wrote:
           | An important series of skills would be:
           | 
           | 1. Identify every project dimension with risks. The big one:
           | project -> use -> user -> reward -> costumer fit? (Where user
           | and customer may, or may not be the same.)
           | 
           | Price cost economics? Technical complexity? Technical
           | experience shortfalls? Project resource availability?
           | Solution resource efficiency? Safety? Third party
           | dependencies?
           | 
           | 2. Identify each significant risk in each risk dimension.
           | 
           | 3. Identify the simplest question (or two) whose answer will
           | reduce or eliminate each risk.
           | 
           | 4. If a risk can't be mitigated by answering a single
           | question (or two), maybe it is really a combination of risks,
           | or risk dimensions. If so break them out, repeat.
           | 
           | 4. Craft the simplest research task to resolve each risk
           | question.
           | 
           | --
           | 
           | This sequence is a special case of focusing energy on
           | upstream tasks, before investing in downstream tasks.
           | 
           | Or as I like to say: _move slow to move fast._
           | 
           | --
           | 
           | A meta risk is loops in risk/work dependencies.
           | 
           | Classic example: Stakeholder wants to see something working
           | before you resolve risks of getting something working.
           | 
           | Identify the simplest, sparsest form of a loop is one way
           | forward.
           | 
           | Alternatively, break the loop. Identify alternate ways to
           | satisfy the stakeholder. Find a way to remove dependency on
           | the stake holder (constructively).
        
           | delusional wrote:
           | I can kind of agree with your sentiment. We should run
           | experiments, regardless of our skill level. We should, in
           | fact, regard anything we do as an experiment. Very few
           | decisions in the real world are irreversible. Doing
           | experiments doesn't mean there's no skill to it. The Senior
           | engineer will know what hypothesis is most likely to prove
           | true, and will start with a system design that will work out
           | well assuming that hypothesis to be true.
           | 
           | This is what the previous commenter referred to as "making a
           | decision without all the evidence". If the senior engineer
           | turns out to be right, and the hypothesis proves true, the
           | experiment becomes the system. If the hypothesis turns out
           | false, the system might still be workable, otherwise it's
           | refactored into some new experiment.
           | 
           | The senior engineer is better at making that initial guess as
           | the correctness of a hypothesis. Just like a senior
           | scientist.
        
       | johnea wrote:
       | #61: Shorten the checklist...
        
       | lr4444lr wrote:
       | Wow, 60 items and I don't disagree with any of them.
        
       | 29athrowaway wrote:
       | There is nothing about engineering in that list.
        
       | Aurornis wrote:
       | I've had the good fortune to hire and work with a lot of
       | ambitious engineers.
       | 
       | One trap with lists like this is that it can be easy to lose
       | sight of your core workload. On more than one occasion I've had
       | to ask senior engineers to pump the brakes on all of their
       | mentoring, leading, organizing, example-setting, and helping
       | activities because their own work was not getting done.
       | 
       | You only have so many hours in a work week. Get your priority
       | work done first, then layer in additional activities selectively.
       | Don't think you need to be doing all of these things on the list
       | all of the time.
        
         | fifilura wrote:
         | Then maybe that person has implicitly become a manager.
         | 
         | And to mentor and help others may very well be the best spent
         | time for the company as a whole. But then his biggest tasks
         | should be done by one of his more junior team-members.
        
           | Longhanks wrote:
           | If someone disregards his or her tasks without communication
           | to his or her superior, and fails to get the tasks he or she
           | was hired for done, a promotion is hardly the right answer in
           | my opinion.
        
           | proc0 wrote:
           | This is why most software companies tend to ship buggy messes
           | that need to be constantly patched and updated. Software
           | engineers never get to fully focus on optimizing software for
           | the long term because as they gain experience within the org.
           | they are moved away from engineering into management of other
           | engineers.
           | 
           | I think I get the motivation, an engineer managing a team of
           | engineers can achieve "more" in less time. However I put
           | "more" in quotes because a single expert engineer can build
           | better, faster, and more reliable than an entire team, once
           | they have mastered the systems and tools. That will never
           | happen if they rarely touch code and instead attend meetings
           | to talk about planning and scheduling.
        
         | kbutler wrote:
         | It can be hard to accurately measure the value of those
         | activities.
         | 
         | You may be getting a short-term benefit at a huge long-term
         | cost.
        
       | mellosouls wrote:
       | "Understand the business aspect of your work, and what makes
       | money. Eventually, only that matters."
       | 
       | Applies only to commercial organisations (and no, even with those
       | money is not the be-all and end-all) so not impressive as a
       | number one, at least with that wording. Understanding business is
       | clearly key though.
       | 
       | TBH that and the rather self-satisfied "it is useful to any
       | software engineer, it is especially useful to senior engineers."
       | on a rather enigmatic website lacking in other interesting
       | writing put me off considering it further.
        
       | dang wrote:
       | Discussed at the time:
       | 
       |  _Show HN: A Senior Engineer 's CheckList_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20914236 - Sept 2019 (143
       | comments)
       | 
       | (that shouldn't have been a Show HN! too late now)
        
       | quantum_state wrote:
       | Great list ... thanks for sharing
        
       | trav4225 wrote:
       | I always find advice like this a little confusing. A lot of these
       | things seem (to me) to be none of the engineers' business.
       | 
       | To me, engineers receive specs from management and implement
       | solutions that meet those specs. And that's it.
       | 
       | I suppose my personal experience must not be how things work
       | elsewhere! Kind of fascinating, and it makes me wonder if people
       | enjoy all this extra responsibility and how things go when
       | engineers disagree with management.
        
         | nuancebydefault wrote:
         | Sometimes (often) you feel like following the requirements is
         | not the correct way, because they look fine at first sight but
         | not so bright when doing a first analysis or design. Then you
         | tend to get involved with the "none of my business" business.
        
         | jkaptur wrote:
         | It's definitely interesting how people with the same title can
         | have such different experiences. I'll try to give the other
         | perspective, but please understand that it's a huge topic and
         | this is a simplification.
         | 
         | My experience has been an issue is raised - usually by
         | management or "the business", but sometimes by engineering.
         | "Our website is too slow!". Now _someone_ has to step up and
         | clarify things. Like: * what does  "fast" even mean for our
         | website? It would be great to have an objective metric. * Is
         | there such a thing as "fast enough"? * How much time / effort /
         | money is a given improvement worth? * How do we prioritize this
         | vs. everything else we could be working on?
         | 
         | A project spec comes out of those discussions, but the
         | discussions themselves have significant technical and business
         | inputs.
         | 
         | I don't view taking part in these discussions as "extra"
         | responsibility, I view it as a core part of the job. I've also
         | seen what happens when specs are written without technical
         | input: it makes implementing them a lot less pleasant.
        
           | proc0 wrote:
           | > A project spec comes out of those discussions, but the
           | discussions themselves have significant technical and
           | business inputs.
           | 
           | Then managers should learn whatever it takes to be able to
           | make these types of decisions. There seems to be a double
           | standard where engineers have to do all of these non-
           | engineering tasks, meanwhile non-engineers never have to
           | learn the systems in depth.
           | 
           | I think programming is a hard enough job that warrants 90% of
           | focus, at least to be able to reap the benefits of computer
           | science. At the dawn of generative AI, we can clearly see
           | software has no limits, yet limits are implicitly imposed by
           | re-prioritizing an engineer's time with "soft skill" tasks
           | and having them spend a huge amount of time thinking about
           | things that have little to do with computer science.
           | 
           | If a business needs that specific intersection of skillset,
           | perhaps it should be a new role, instead of stretching the
           | role of engineering and missing the opportunity to innovate
           | at the software level, which in the end would help the
           | business anyway.
        
         | iteria wrote:
         | What you're talking about to me is mid-level work. Seniors deal
         | with ambiguity and feasibility analysis. Non-technical people
         | often don't understand the level of tech necessary. They'll
         | say, "I want a bridge about this long" very nice, but but did
         | you consider the about wind that whistles through this area ?
         | Also, how many lanes? Yeah that many is too few because once
         | this bridge goes up we're not gonna be reasonably able to close
         | it even for maintenance. We need at least 4 lanes. Isn't there
         | a cement shortage? Hm.. maybe we can use this material instead?
         | No. I don't think building with wood for this length is a great
         | idea.
         | 
         | You get the picture. Yes lead developers exist, but they only
         | have so much time to do little battles and they're busy making
         | sure the big things are arguing correctly. Senior engineers
         | should be able to talk to design about a redesign necessary
         | because iOS just isn't capable of this it turns out or the cool
         | effect you saw is only available on a version we don't use and
         | can't update to right because complex reason.
         | 
         | If you're just taking your requirements and working without
         | having to negotiate with another person, you're probably not
         | doing senior work.
         | 
         | Some of it I the site I don't think is senior work really
         | unless you're a tiny shop, but they're not weird since these
         | are all skills a for senior adjacent roles that any senior
         | might be called on to take randomly. It's not uncommon in many
         | shops for leads to be a spontaneous and temporary role for some
         | project that disappears on major release.
        
       | donutshop wrote:
       | Relevant discussion from the past
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16367997
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | danwee wrote:
       | > Strive for deep technical expertise in technologies used
       | 
       | And that alone occupies most of my (working/free) time. Not sure
       | how I'm supposed to keep up with the rest of the list. To know
       | technologies is one thing, to have deep tech expertise in many
       | technologies is a completely different one.
        
       | tennisflyi wrote:
       | Glad number one was explicit. It might not be what you consider
       | but for most others it is.
        
       | jameshart wrote:
       | Not really a 'checklist'. Can anyone honestly go down this list
       | and mark any of the items affirmatively as 'complete'?
        
         | dbalatero wrote:
         | No, but you could keep checking in on them and seeing how
         | you're doing on a semi recurring basis.
        
         | helpfulContrib wrote:
         | You can certainly use the form that way, as your own instance
         | of a checklist, and it seems the site has the purpose of
         | providing such mini 'applications' in a local-store friendly
         | manner - see the Travel checklist on the same site, for
         | example.
         | 
         | Pretty nifty, if you think about it. Storage stays local, it
         | looks like .. but I am not an expert. I just like the form of
         | this.
         | 
         | 3-digit slashdot ID's notwithstanding, I hope we see a revival
         | of cute little cottage-/hobby sites like this, or a kind of
         | perpetually simple cache of folks who just render their genius
         | to static files, in cute ways, and leave it at that... over and
         | over for a few years.
        
         | donutshop wrote:
         | I agree with this. This is more of a list of reminders to keep
         | in mind IMO.
        
       | playingalong wrote:
       | I agree with the list and there is nothing wrong with it.
       | 
       | Though, I would like to emphasize this is clearly an Individual
       | Contributor kind of a perspective. There are hardly any bullet
       | points encouraging building and maintaining work culture, growing
       | other people, serving as an example to follow. Maybe a handful
       | out of the 60 fall into this bucket.
       | 
       | Thus don't consider this list anywhere near complete if your
       | career path envisions being a manager (of different kinds).
        
         | Aurornis wrote:
         | > There are hardly any bullet points encouraging building and
         | maintaining work culture, growing other people, serving as an
         | example to follow.
         | 
         | Well the title is literally about being a "Senior Engineer",
         | not a manager. That said, there are numerous bullet points
         | about mentoring others, leading by example, and setting work
         | culture. Number 18 is "Be a mentor to a couple of junior
         | engineers."
         | 
         | > Thus don't consider this list anywhere near complete if your
         | career path envisions being a manager (of different kinds).
         | 
         | While you're not wrong, I don't think anyone should expect a
         | checklist titled "Senior Engineer's Checklist" to cater to
         | management items. A manager's checklist would subtract a lot of
         | the IC items from this list.
         | 
         | Management isn't a superset of IC work. It's a different job.
        
         | jameshart wrote:
         | There's also some questionable stuff on here for ICs:
         | 
         | > Keep your manager up-to-date on people you have difficulty
         | working with
         | 
         | If one of my directs came to a one on one and shared their
         | updated enemy-list with me, I'd be pretty concerned.
        
           | cratermoon wrote:
           | If one of my directs _didn 't_ tell me about difficult-to-
           | work-with people, I'd be concerned. I want to know if there
           | are people everyone finds difficult work with, and the best
           | way to know is to hear from all ICs.
        
           | alex_lav wrote:
           | The fact that you equate "difficulty working with" as an
           | enemy list suggests to me you're probably not equipped to be
           | managing people. Respectfully.
        
             | jameshart wrote:
             | There's a difference between having some awareness of
             | interpersonal challenges my team have, versus one of them
             | having, among the list of 61 principles by which they
             | govern themselves, 'keeping me up to date on who they are
             | having difficulty working with'. I mean, I note that there
             | isn't a corresponding advice to 'keep your manager up to
             | date on people you enjoy working with'.
             | 
             | Overall, it just sounds like they plan on making problems
             | and then bringing them to me to resolve. Which, sure, would
             | require 'managing'.
        
               | alex_lav wrote:
               | > Overall, it just sounds like they plan on making
               | problems and then bringing them to me to resolve. Which,
               | sure, would require 'managing'.
               | 
               | Yeah...again, I'm trying to communicate respectfully, but
               | I really think these perspectives aren't fit for being
               | responsible for others' employment.
        
               | jameshart wrote:
               | You're clearly a very serious person. It might help you
               | to be aware that some other people take things, in
               | general, a little _lightly_.
               | 
               | Out of context guidance consisting of little faux-wise
               | aphorisms like that of the OP is just kind of inherently
               | amusing, especially when offered earnestly, precisely
               | because it is open to misinterpretation - and my
               | suggestion that it could be interpreted as advice to keep
               | your manager apprised of who's currently on your enemies
               | list was meant to illustrate that risk.
               | 
               | As putative advice to senior engineers for how to conduct
               | themselves, it struck me as something which some toxic
               | engineers might take as endorsing their superior
               | attitude. That makes it _bad advice_ , and that's why I'm
               | mocking it.
               | 
               | But how I react to the idea of this sort of thing being
               | offered as career advice, _respectfully_ , tells you
               | absolutely nothing about how I conduct myself in my
               | professional role.
        
               | alex_lav wrote:
               | > and my suggestion that it could be interpreted as
               | advice to keep your manager apprised of who's currently
               | on your enemies list was meant to illustrate that risk.
               | 
               | Yeah....again....not an enemies list.
               | 
               | > As putative advice to senior engineers for how to
               | conduct themselves, it struck me as something which some
               | toxic engineers might take as endorsing their superior
               | attitude. That makes it bad advice, and that's why I'm
               | mocking it.
               | 
               | Yeah...again...this perception is a toxic _manager_
               | trait.
               | 
               | > But how I react to the idea of this sort of thing being
               | offered as career advice, respectfully, tells you
               | absolutely nothing about how I conduct myself in my
               | professional role.
               | 
               | We can disagree, that's fine. Thankfully you don't work
               | in my organization, so your opinion is of 0 value to me.
               | I had (obviously incorrectly) hoped some sane feedback
               | might make you reevaluate your behavior, but alas
               | stubbornness prevails. Hopefully your reports can manage
               | working with you effectively.
        
           | fragmede wrote:
           | I... what do you you see as your job as a manager? Your
           | entire job as a manager is to manage your direct reports.
           | Knowing who they're working with, and who they're having
           | difficulty working with (and then to smooth it over so they
           | can continue to work together, or move people around so they
           | don't have to) is _core_ to the job of managing y 'know,
           | people.
        
       | nuancebydefault wrote:
       | Zooming in on check 4, ask 'why' until you find the root. For
       | some reason I tend to do this almost naturally, with mixed
       | results though.
       | 
       | Especially when reviewing code, you often see how things can be
       | done more simply, and asking "why" to the reviewee can sometimes
       | backfire because of touching a sore point.
       | 
       | Thinking about it, not only when reviewing code. Also, when you
       | question the used processes you often bump into "we found out
       | from experience this works best" or "why change a working
       | process". So always using the "why" tactic can be frustrating at
       | times.
        
       | karol wrote:
       | Flip prio to high, the list shrinks to 11. Tick all and
       | congratulate yourself.
        
         | cratermoon wrote:
         | You mean Company impact? I see "effort" and two categories for
         | impact - Career and Company. Also I notice that there's nothing
         | in the "managers" category that has high company impact. Seems
         | about right.
        
       | ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
       | _> Resist the urge to refactor major systems to achieve
       | simplification, because there 's a risk you will end up with a
       | similarly complex system after some time_
       | 
       | Word
        
       | [deleted]
        
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