Senior Engineers are a thing of the past

My thoughts on Senior Engineering roles and the problem of frameworks.

[@plumbingphase]

future senior software engineering skills: plumbing, carpentry, HVAC, roofing, bricklaying

[@eyesopen6110]

The problem is zero respect - from "management", from juniors, from other "senior" developers...

[@classawarrior]

This is a great point. Ideally we use frameworks etc not because we *can't* implement that functionality ourselves, but because we have done so before, felt the pain points the framework was designed to solve, and then *choose* to use the framework for reasons of convenience or productivity. For this reason, if I'm training someone, I don't immediately start them at the end point. Rather than starting a new project by importing all of the frameworks and tools which we might use for a large-scale project, we start simple, build things, and only introduce the fancy tools and abstractions *when the pain point they were built to address actually manifests*. This way, their learning journey more closely mirrors the history of the industry itself, and the timeline of different technologies which were introduced. And so they understand more of the *how* and *why*.

[@TheRealStevenPolley]

CSS? Is that some kind of new tailwind framework?

[@EliSoftwareDeveloper]

computer super science

[@SimGunther]

Both y'all coming off funny, but the fact people wouldn't identify CSS as "cascading style sheets" is worrisome for the web industry. If people only communicate in frameworks and not fundamentals, think of how much tech waste we're creating by making literally the same fundamental concepts, but with a slightly different name that's tied down to a specific framework.

[@TheRealStevenPolley]

@@SimGunther Oh yeah 100%. I'm not a professional web developer, I work in infrastructure but encounter a similar problem there. Many people have vendor-specific knowledge such as "Cisco Switches" or "Palo Alto Networks Firewalls" but somehow still manage to have incredibly poor understanding of the fundamentals, the actual underlying technology that is general and transferrable to pretty much any scenario.

[@Netist_]

@@TheRealStevenPolley I've encountered this as well. I know multiple people who were completely baffled when I decided to build a homelab network from scratch using basic managed appliances and routing with a linux box using only iptables. They couldn't wrap their head around the idea of learning fundamentals. To them, it was alien that someone wouldn't just get a cisco cert.

[@xlerb2286]

I'm so glad I never did any front end development. Not that the business tier was any bed of roses either. You're spot on with we're building at an abstraction level now where we don't understand the basics. Some people get it and dig in, others are happy to stay at that higher level and never really pick up the knowledge they need to handle more complex development tasks. Everyone just thinks there's a package/library for that. And a lot of the time there is. If it works, if it does what you need, if you don't need to modify it, if it continues to be supported, the list of if's goes on. But that's all somebody else's problem now. I retired a few weeks ago and I'm happy to be out of the game. It's no fun anymore exactly because you don't have the opportunity to dig in and learn those things.

[@nicholascastro4175]

Great vid. Working with senior devs who knew internals and how to use different tools outside frameworks to solve issues was eye opening to me, very humbling.

[@JoeyJooste]

I think something interesting is that you are basically talking about abstraction. When new developers don't understand the fundamentals that make up the current level of abstraction that they are working with then when problems arrive they often don't have enough knowledge to solve them.

[@Netist_]

I've seen this constantly in my job. Management is partly to blame. Most of them are non-technical, and they're constantly pushing for more "abstraction" and "automation" without understanding what that means. They have this fantasy that they can somehow abstract away every single bit of tooling, until eventually new hires can just write code and throw it into the void where it will magically end up in production. And maybe that sounds great... Until something breaks and no one understands how any of it works. I've gotten so much push-back at work when I insist that new hires NEED to be familiar with our toolchain and they NEED to be trained on our specific infrastructure.

[@BillyraycyrusIII]

Can't code but the algo brought me here. You have a great way of communicating.

[@_techniker_]

One of the overlooked issues here is training issues. Every company and senior dev wants to complain about skill issues and jr devs who don’t understand the fundamentals, but companies, senior devs and higher education are all responsible for creating that environment. No one wants to train or mentor anymore. Every company expects everyone to know an extremely specific skill set but won’t provide any industry specific training. That won’t solve everything but it would certainly help and start turning the ship around.

[@lapulgaencuerayrabiosa9778]

I enjoyed this video. I've been experimenting by myself since 20 years ago, anything, programming, networking, cryptography, even reverse engineering, being from html/css to windows drivers (just because I was interested), Linux/Unix, I've been a programmer and a network engineer as well, I'm no better than anyone but I do believe that having the fundamentals completely covered and then experimenting a lot (just because it can be fun) has give me the edge in many circumstances because I can see the relationship between things. Looking forward to another talk from you.

[@joshuaaird4349]

I am recent Graduate in Comp Sci. I am super glad I saw this video.

[@boot-strapper]

I got to "Senior" in about 3 years. 2 of those years were writing payment services by myself, so I chock it up to that.

[@timmy7201]

As an embedded engineer, I mainly use C/C++, Bash, Python3, Assembly. I get massively frustrated, whenever I'm forced to team up with developers that solely use higher level languages. They don't understand pointers, lack networking knowledge, don't understand how (web)sockets work, etc... Most can't even come up with their own logical solution to a problem, without having to use a cheat-sheet with predetermined algorithms they learned at college or university! Their lack of Linux knowledge causes reoccurring dependency issues, but instead of solving their problem by learning Linux as a new skill, they just dump everything in a docker container instead... Some don't even understand the difference between a local LAN IP and a public WAN IP, nor the concept of port-forwarding, etc ... I'm one of the younger dev's at my current workplace, with 7 years of experience. However, I'm the one who has to explain basic knowledge to our senior dev's with 20 years of experience...

[@rockpadstudios]

they really aren't senior dev's they are lazy ass people

[@chriss3404]

There's a lot to this problem. I think so much of it relates to industry hype cycles. There's so much hype for abstractions that claim to challenge our development paradigm by tying things up in a bow for us, but there's so little excitement for C, POSIX shell scripting, SQL, the osi model, or computer architecture. Why? None of these things interest shareholders. They're the opposite of new. They're proven. Shareholders don't care about it (it's "priced in") -> managers don't hire for it -> universities de-prioritize it -> learners don't learn it (unless they go beyond their classes). As a sector, we've turned our best senior engineers into wizards by avoiding teaching learners fundamental skills -- all in service of furthering a collective delusion that how things work under the hood doesn't matter.

[@_jamesdphillips]

Mirrors my own experience coming up, though I’ll admit with much more humility. Good video!

[@justinrogers3720]

Early in your career it sounds like you also had the luxury of time to solve problems. In my entire career as a software engineer, every assignment feels like it was due yesterday, so your first half baked idea is what gets shipped, never to be rearchitected or refactored. Do you think this difference in our experience is due to time constraints changing over time? or perhaps it depends on the company size?

[@davidhart1578]

Yeah I think the demand on developers has grown massively. Building a complex dashboard with lots of state back in the jQuery days was really difficult, so they were somewhat uncommon. Now they're seen as a necessity, and companies assume they can be delivered in a few months like any other project. Even if you have a team of 3 developers, your company probably wants to compete with a huge org like Microsoft or Hubspot.

[@jonathanonwards2921]

Awesome and valuable insights and advises.

[@khana.713]

Thank you for sharing, good shit.

[@henrikjensen608]

Senior devs are those who survived enough of those impossible to solve tasks to come out a bitter, opinionated and short tempered git. The nice ones are still sociable. Architects are worse.

[@Th3Y4nnix]

Nice tought you are sharing on this topic :) Thank you very much

[@DarrylHebbes]

Add a fourth criteria’ the ability to communicate with other engineers

[@sushiConPorotos]

How old are you kiddo? What’s your experience in the industry? Have you ever built an entire software by yourself? In C, assembler? Do you know lambda calculus, Haskell? Dijkstra rings a bell? Turing?

[@EricLouisYoung]

senior only implies amount of time in service. "Software Architect" is the real title for a true beast.

[@ignotlichitikus9314]

pretty cool insight, fail often and learn especially patterns and the basics

Great video !

[@VagrantCode]

Bro takes a dig at Wordpress devs and then says he writes mostly CSS. Jk good video

[@davidhart1578]

Why push code when you can push pixels instead? 😂

[@NineInchTyrone]

It seems the Uni CS programs are inadequate

[@user-mz8oc8zs2r]

Thank you a lot!

[@Daniel-su4ml]

nice video, really enjoyed it

[@mindacid3274]

thank u for the tips

[@alexhichamk6630]

can you give me an advice about if to go for frontend then fullstack or change another line like cybersecurity. thank you

[@michaelh42]

I hear ya. The experience comes in handy in the weirdest of circumstances. This video reminded me of Joel Spolsky's The Perils of JavaSchools but maybe I'm just getting old. :)

[@davidhart1578]

Haven't seen that one before but I'm gonna check it out, thanks!

[@SonAyoD]

Great video

[@aikighost]

Great little discussion. As a total aside you remind me of an old mate of mine I knew from LARP. Have you ever used a shield and foam warhammer in anger? 🤣

[@davidhart1578]

Can't say I have but he sounds like a good lad 😂

[@aikighost]

@@davidhart1578 He was, but unfortunately the big C got him a while back. Eff Cancer ♥

[@Yourbosskid]

Cool video man 😊

[@One.manuel]

David. Where do you see cyber sec going in terms of getting more buln or less? Seems like there are so many more attack vectors nowadays. And the basics are not learned really.

[@davidhart1578]

Interesting question, I think the adoption of frameworks makes it less likely that a new developer creates a vulnerability in standard code (auth etc), but more likely in application specific code due to not understanding all the features. For example, I've seen developers use default routing for a page and not think to disable PUT or DELETE, meaning if someone tests those endpoints they can potentially delete important info. Also I feel that cyber security will always be needed even if development becomes much more secure, because it's a requirement for compliance audits. Big companies won't work with you unless your software is regularly pen tested and you pass ISO-27001 certification etc.

[@One.manuel]

@@davidhart1578 Thank you. I agree. I will try to talk about this in my channel soon. Bye for now.

[@ChadAV69]

There’s no Jr devs anymore either

[@bdubs85]

That's funny, I just saw a different video saying junior engineers are a thing of the past. Senior engineers too?

[@publicalias8172]

7:34 for fuck sakes man 😭😂 That sounded like hell, true war stories here thanks for sharing! I feel spoilt having never gotten into webdev.. I just never saw the appeal designing websites at the time, stories like that reaffirm the decision for me (wayy over my head haha) but the pay!! Ah well..

[@sergiocoder]

Finally someone speaks something useful about programming instead of mass-producing tutorials for beginners or reacting to someone else's reactions or a day in life of a software engineer. Keep it up!

[@leefull]

10:19 it's all still there.

[@jonshouse1]

As an embedded developer it annoys me when software only people use the term "engineer". I know "software engineer" is a title, but to me an "engineer" is somebody who has skill in some way with something physical not ten years as a web developer.

[@edubmf]

Now imagine junior developers using chatgpt "how do I write a website that...". Chatgpt scrapes it from one or more sources, as it's not real AI, then spits it out. Now your junior dev doesn't even understand the abstraction's outer layer.

[@salvatoreshiggerino6810]

Stupid question, but what's the actual point of "learning OSI"?

[@davidhart1578]

I find that a lot of developers I work with will immediately go back to their IDE when something isn't working instead of opening up dev tools and making sure all the requests are working correctly. They might spend 20 minutes looking for an error only to realise they haven't set up a route yet. When I learned the OSI model in college it was just a list of stuff to memorise, so most people forgot it afterwards. By "learning OSI", I'm more referring to understanding networking to a decent level. Is the service running, is the port open, how is my request routed, etc.

[@salvatoreshiggerino6810]

@@davidhart1578 Sure, but we're on the Internet Protocol Suite now, Open Systems Interconnection has no relevance to anything we do today.

[@davidhart1578]

Had a bit of a look into it and actually that just clicked for me. For whatever reason I've always thought OSI was the general model and TCP/IP was just the combination of those protocols, which led me to wonder why "UDP/IP" wasn't a thing 😂 probably an artifact of my scattered learning, so thanks for pointing me in the right direction

[@chriss3404]

@@davidhart1578 I'm currently going through the process of back-filling my more core conceptual skills. I'm very proficient (if not a bit out of practice haha) with programming, but I don't know where to start with networking. I have a decent grasp on application-side HTTP, TLS, TCP, UDP, DNS, and IP, but I fall apart on the less pedestrian bits of networking knowledge (ethernet, bgp, network topologies, network devices, etc.). Are there any resources you can recommend for understanding packet switching, routing, and the osi model better? (Also, is CCNA a good place to start?)

[@LionhartM]

Web dev jobs no longer even exist in my area. Starting to think people are right about AI taking over. Disappointing though cuz I love coding

[@7DuRd3n]

senior engineers in what ? U really think that AI has and will have yhe ability to maintain enterprise software? One main difference between AI and humans is that humans can think for themselves. May be we will come to a point where AI will have the ability to think for themselves. Majority of the code that is currently generated is some boilerplate shi that u can find on google. AI saves time that is what it is . if you cannot read and understand code how exactly are u gonna use AI in the first place ? When it comes to front end I agree. Because front end is tedious. But business logic, edge cases, databases, architecture fuck them all pseudo AI chatbots we got.

[@systemhalodark]

AI are mostly glorified data aggregators which may or may not synthetize an appropriate result to a given prompt.

[@7DuRd3n]

@@systemhalodark Yep. Nothing special about AI. right now. We have had AI for decades. I do not understand the hype about it.May be because wanna be devs who are not willing to put in the work actually think they are worthy.

[@davidhart1578]

Yeah absolutely agree. AI is essentially the next level of separation from these fundamentals. A higher level, more vague language that makes debugging near impossible. C/C++ developers have complained about the way higher level languages abstract too much away from you forever. They're largely correct, but I think the large scale adoption of frameworks and AI are much more extreme cases of the same problem. I may not fully understand how my program manages memory, but using an LLM generally means you don't even know your own business logic.

[@DEBO5]

I’m sorry what does knowing the difference between a switch and a router have to do with spinning up a cloud service?

[@ivangecov2008]

You are not an engineer. You are a web dev.

[@davidhart1578]

Well put! My old boss actually made the same point to me once, "we don't need engineers, we need web developers". There's a real sense of obsessing over code that becomes detrimental to building a good product.

[@dilutioncreation1317]

Great distinction. Engineers have education standards and professional licensing they can acquire. They design things that could endanger people's lives if messed up while they make half the money. It's always great to be reminded of this and sigh relief about how awful my life used to be as an engineer. Fuck that

[@BRichard312]

If you have worked on all of those technologies over your 12 year career, ummm you are a generalist at best. You aren't a SME in anything. I am an EXPERT in VBA, and an EXPERT Data Scientist. I've been in the game for 25 years. Maybe that's why you are saying that Sr Engineers are a thing of the past. Actually they aren't. YOU are a thing of the past because you never specialized in anything. The Data Science piece that supports my skill set is R. I'm probably close to an expert (relatively speaking) with that tool as well.

[@davidhart1578]

Yeah I'll be the first to admit that many skills I've picked up over the years are no longer directly relevant, but I think you've touched on something that feeds into this issue. It's sometimes said that Isaac Newton was the last person to understand all of science. As a field grows, it becomes impossible to learn everything. We are forced to specialise and that creates gaps. Data science itself has been through one of the biggest shifts from what I've seen with the introduction of AI. Like me, it sounds like you had the opportunity to become an expert in one or two fields early on. Newer data science graduates have a lot more to grapple with, potentially having to learn Python, Go and R. They have to become familiar with tools like Power BI and Alteryx Intelligence Suite. Similar to development, I think they're facing the problem of having to commit in one direction, rather than being able to learn everything. There's an incentive to go "mile wide, inch deep".

[@davidhart1578]

I'd almost equate it to learning linguistics instead of choosing a language to study. I have a decent level of German (~B1-B2), but other people can learn 10+ languages because they understand the principles behind them and can translate that into a massive advantage.

[@gyrate98]

Your hair "style" is a thing of the past. 😂

[@lucaxtshotting2378]

jesus you went yapping there, as if the more yapping the more right U're not right about any of this, you just have the nostalgia goggles on. Smart devs are smart and dumb devs are dumb, and that's all that has ever mattered and will always matter. I'm sure you could have the react dev in big company equivalent back then, and there's people writing engines today.

[@lucaxtshotting2378]

ure literally the back in my day meme here

[@mrcoldshower465]

Bro you need to practice your communication skills. I can't understand the thoughts your trying to convey in every single one of your sentences

[@Salsajaman]

This is honestly the hard truth that people don't want to hear, and it applies to almost any industry that people call "a thing of the past." The relationship of competence and the population of software programmers/engineers is like a normal distribution. You have nothing to worry about if you're on the right-hand side of the bell curve and are above average competence-wise. Abstraction is like a ladder that is never completely built, and just because you understand the bottom rungs of the ladder doesn't make you guaranteed to keep climbing up. You have be good at climbing, i.e. good at learning.