On Seniority
Now This?????
Well I've got to tell you a little something that I've been holding close, this humble bragging needed to build a personal brand... yeah... ????????... It's not going too well, who could've guessed right?
Constantly promoting one self is tiring, I don't wanna collect a 10 or even an odd number, "13 AI tools post that are going to change your life" or something dramatic. And the truth is that I feel left behind, I'm really not that good at putting lists together, much less predicting the future based on a thin regurgitated collection of things. To my knowledge, as of this day, AI generally available is just a fancy fortune teller that we're trying to connect into everything in our lives, in order to do less. No small feat of course, it has gotten everyone on board, even the crypto bros are all AI experts, it's amazing how fast these people change hats and industries. I wish I was half as fast, even within industry, I've been stuck for months on a testing course I just can't get myself to finish, and that's a relevant and important part of my job (yeah right... kidding ??... not kidding ??... yeah kidding ??... but am I? ??). In that sense I wonder where do all these energy comes from? like how do people stay motivated through the unrelenting stream of information that just made you obsolete:
" Oi, you with your list, only 10? well I have 12!, ha!. "
And they're like: "oh well, you never gonna believe what happened to your 10 items list that made this woman call the cops... aha, yeah. "
It's maddening, I can't and also I've been wondering, say you get a couple of lists and then you get people to follow you... you just keep making lists? like: "here are the next 15 vegetables that will make Ai obsolete and forgotten and doomed and oblivious." Like what's next for you? actually reading a book about training a model? or just keep browsing and scrolling until the next polemic subject comes?
I mean even this social network (or professional network? what is it anyways?) has been stormed by all the people in here telling you how you're doing it all wrong cause you're not using this new extension that came out in a browser you don't even have installed or maybe even heard of. How you are now whispering to the AI incorrectly.
But enough of that, I do have to say that this is for sure not a criticism to AI at all, I've been using it myself and so far so good with its own ups and downs, like everything I guess... Or maybe I haven't read enough "why you're using chatgpt" posts and lists, I'm probably missing the 15 list I've scrolled by this morning... WHOOPSIS ????. I just realized It's the "if you don't forward this you'll get bald and bad luck" trend all over again...
I've been using it with skepticism, I'm being very careful of how much control I give it, I go line by line rewriting myself (you may argue this slows down the process, but to the day, my employers pay me for quality code and not volume), trying to not give it too much context, based on some valid concerns about liability and intellectual property, and then I try to validate as I go that each line works cause I've tried the ol' cmd+c -> cmd-v only to get an error cause a function or a library doesn't actually exist,
-"oh but it looked so good there, if anything it should be written"
I hear ya chatGPT, it just doesn't, sorry.
So I'm threading carefully that road, but even AI cannot get me out of lack of motivation and apathy I feel sometimes, I can't help to feel overwhelmed by what I mentioned above and wonder if the loudest list makers might be right, that my job is as good as gone.
Threading carefully ??
I could only imagine what a newcomer might feel, I still get to spot errors in code that AI generates and sort the out as I have for the last couple of years, that's business as usual, but maybe for someone coming into the field might feel impossible. I still think that tech has a lot of twists and turns ahead and probably most of them for the better, so now it's really as good as any moment to get into it, uncertainty is there for good, has always been, and as long as you understand that you have to do some ground work, as AI's tend to lie and misdirect you, a lot less than say google, or at least that's what I can say in my very short couple of months experience of working with augmented development.
And so in that same pool of thoughts is that I think of when I came into the industry and was always hungry for more recognition, more work, more projects and specially, more seniority. I used to think, hey I've been 2-3 years doing this, like where is my nobility title? Why aren't people calling me ser? And really that's a reflection of not having a mentor early on, that's an issue that would've probably surfaced easily with someone with more experience, it didn't help that the companies I started working at didn't have engineering paths well defined, roles or levels were almost non existent, and so senior was freely and loosely used, and I think that poisoned my mind at the time, up until recently, if not up to this point: ??.
Oh drama sweet drama, the salt and pepper of small pieces of writing like these.
领英推荐
Oh sweet Seniority ????????
Really I think I should've avoided the senior role for as long as possible, today I don't feel senior at all, I imagine the 10 year mark would probably make a good point in anyone's career to start asking yourself if you are really one, and that's just a speculation as I'm still 3 short of that.
I've come to realize that the more knowledgeable you feel, the less you'll feel like you want to know more and validate your knowledge and that might be a good thing in terms of certainty and self esteem, but really for an engineering based field, probably not the best. One of the core principles of any science field is uncertainty, you're only making an observation as good as your tools and no tool is perfect. As no algorithm is, as no block of code, heck as no language is. And that is something that one should have in mind at all times, not to doubt yourself or second guess everything, but to know that everything is perfectible and not only that, straight up can be better, smaller, faster, more readable, more scalable, although probably not all of them at the same time.
Seniority in reality, I think, should reflect mastery in ones craft, and to me coding is a craft, is a very specialized field that requires, for the most part, the same set of expertise and experience such as skills that a cabinet maker or a submarine welder have, and with experience comes doubt also, the more you know about something, the more ways you know in which it can fail, so in reality mastery, seniority is a measure of how easy it is for you to spot, to think ahead of, and to identify trade offs. To embrace doubt, to understand that only unwritten code is Perfect code. To be able to say:
"This solution works for these reasons but it also may fail for these other reasons"
And to clarify, these are mere observations I've been making from what I've identified as seniors in my immediate environment. There is a running joke that goes that seniority is identified the moment a software engineer responds: "it depends" to any estimation or question and really that's an oversimplification but is not wrong in my eyes.
And don't be fooled these observations almost always come as tedious or odious for project managers, some ex-coders, that say: " but there's gotta be an unequivocal answer for these set of problems" (and why would it take so long ??) only to be confronted a little later by a concern crystalized as an issue. And really senior engineers and developer for the most part, at least the ones I respect, don't actually enjoy being right (that's why probably I won't ever be one jajaja) they mostly acknowledge and then of course respond since they raised the concern in the first place right, so their mind was already preparing for these scenario. So it's definitely not being right all the time, or that everything they do is perfect, is more like they know how to handle shit, they know how to get their hands dirty, they know how to suck it up, do what's needed and then work on a more concise or longterm solution and they're almost always out of enthusiasm (jajajaja).
It's true! I said almost, for most of the ideas pitched by product teams they probably implemented it elsewhere and know that is going to be a nightmare, cause it always is, tech at a certain scale is messy and imperfect and unpredictable and they know it, that's why the don't flinch when presented with something and they also don't flinch when that something fails, they're usually hardened and tested by fire. And as cool as it sounds, the closer I get, the less enticing it is ??. Cause it's a game of how many systems can you take care of, even for large teams, the best systems have some degree of ownership by seniors who either built it or maintain it.
And so that is the way of the samurai ???????? ...at least from the bushes where I take a peep at their training grounds.
If I have seen farther than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.
Sir Isaac Newton ??
You'll be surprised to learn that this entire issue was created by a Human Interface known as Luis (hi there! ??) which leads the score as follows:?
Luis - 8
chatGPT3/4 - 0
Now before you leave, let me tell you about some other projects I have in store just for you ??
To the last point, would you be interested in a stream of me recreating say the game wordle in typescript and react, would that be of interest to anyone? I could bring server components, or do it in nextjs, use prisma, something fun and that an intermediate or beginner would benefit from... wdyt?
Well that's all for now! my motivation is a little under the weather but I won this time, let's see how it goes next time.