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by OliverJones
3144 days ago
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Senior engineers are, by definition, survivors in the engineering trade. We weren't driven out to open pizza shops or become midlevel product managers. Most of us senior engineers have made our share of mistakes. We've had people help us understand and correct our mistakes. "rollback!" The job of any engineer is to work ourselves out of every job, so we can do other jobs. Our job as senior engineers is this: give junior engineers the power to become senior engineers. Help them use their fresh-out-of-school knowledge to solve real problems in sustainable ways. When they make mistakes, don't punish them. Instead help them correct the mistakes, learn from them, and move on. They will have to live with the consequences of their decisions Help them gain perspective on broad systems and industry issues. In this article's example, that might be by asking the question "PERL, huh? Maybe you should take a quick look at job openings for PERL folks. When your system becomes totally mission critical you'll want to hire somebody to help you." You could say the truth: "PERL sucks, I know because I hacked PERL for three years when I was a wee little lad." But saying that doesn't help somebody beccome a senior engineer. This all is especially true when we have the privilege of following the rule, "never hire anybody unless they're smarter than you." |
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I always wonder why waste the best and most creative years of young people at school teaching them things that they will not use in real world work environment. Is it not much better if the novice programmer enters the work environment without going to school first and learns the job by doing?
I especially object to the academic way of teaching a subject which requires the student to learn the whole field before issuing him a license to practice. This is like teaching someone who wants to tend to his small garden the entire science of botanics and require him to know all the plants in the world before allowing to play in his backyard garden.
Sorry for off-topic comment.