Some skills/habits that I wish I had or would still like to improve as a Software Engineer.🧵
I’ll pin this to my profile and add more because there are some skills I am yet to discover.
All this happened in 2022:
- Settled in Barcelona
- Partner also got a android dev job paying €
- Travelled to 3 countries
- Can speak basic Spanish
- Learnt to Ski
- FAANG
- Skydive, Scuba 13m deep
- Shipped 2 apps as indie dev
Thanks to everyone involved
#gratitude
Folks please don’t ask me for the CTC breakup. All his offers are from India offices and 1.35Cr from a public company in any breakup is a lot of money. The breakup won’t benefit you in any way.
A really really close friend is getting laid off from FANG after working there for ~6years. He is one of the best engineers I know.
Which companies are hiring in India?
In Spain, I met an engineer from Brazil who followed a similar path.
- Retired after being a CTO
- Had 25 yoe in total
- Joined new org as a backend SDE2
- Has 3 kids and likes riding his bicycle. Rides 500km/week
- Has a physique of a high performance athlete at the age 52
@championswimmer
A good goal in tech would be to get to a point of retirement by 40 and then have fun. I spoke to a CTO once and his expectation for next job was to be a junior dev playing around with new technology.
@cto_junior
Same, with Uber having some layoff history I would prefer not joining them at an “unsustainable salary”. I would happily downlevel my expectations for Google. Suggested the same to him.
I'm disappointed when my mentees constantly message me with minor issues. This behavior signifies low growth potential and a lack of self-awareness.
It's surprising that junior and even mid-level engineers expect me to drop everything to respond to their Slack messages, despite
Layoff news keep coming. A reminder to all SWEs to focus on things that matter, things that bring money into the company. Ship features, ship quality code and ship faster. Write a lot of code and keep sharpening your skills.
Every once in a while I meet some senior tech janta who makes me believe I am doing great and then comes random young tech janta that destroys my peace with their extraordinary knowledge depth.
Okay don’t judge me but I’ve been tracking a weird detail for some time, the battery health of my iPhone. I’ve been an iPhone user for 7-8 years now and haven’t been able to figure out when does the battery health go down. Perhaps now I do:
Went to an Indian restaurant today and spoke to the manager in English.
Spanish man on the next table: You do know that the manager is Indian and knows Hindi.
Why are you talking to him in English?
Me: 😐😐😐
I highly admire Arpit and his curiousness. What he does on a regular basis takes a lot of effort and dedication. Arpit is a true 10x. Follow Arpit not just on Twitter but in general.
I have been able to understand and talk about varied concepts because I follow one simple rule ⚡
I optimize for the concept recall and not remembrance 🙃 let me explain...
For example, while reading DDIA, I never try to remember the points mentioned, nor do I test if I can
@warikoo
Few years ago I read a book: The Unfair Advantage, it explains how some people fail to acknowledge their privileges and others who compare themselves with them fail to see the head-start they had.
There are other great privileges that we inherit: location, education, network
Ever noticed how some folks in engineering teams get hung up on tiny details and edge cases? They can't see the big picture and end up wasting everyone's productive time.
On the other hand, the smarter ones focus on delivering real value, make the right tradeoffs and know when
@striver_79
Always check how frequently the trading window opens and other liquidity events happen.
At Meta for ex, there’s no cliff period and trading window opens almost every 2-3 months. Big tech stocks are free money.
Will be in London next week. Its a short work trip as a remote employee. Will be enjoying the free benefits of big tech for the first time, thinking of creating a Tiktok video.
I am eagerly waiting for a
@Google
One plan that includes storage(photos and drive), youtube premium, music and something like
@Apple
arcade for paid games.
Why are they not doing it?
I’ve been trying Golang for some web dev work, I love it. The dev process reminds me of Flask where you get so much control from the ground level to the way up. Frameworks like Django takes that control away.
2. Get better at estimating your work.
No matter how good you are at this, there is always a scope of improvement.
If in doubt, always estimate higher, aiming for a late release is better than missing the deadline. You’ll get better at this if you get better at
#1
.
At a very difficult stage where I have to choose between two very important things.
1. Go to India for Diwali
2. Go to California to meet the team.
Want to do both. Desperately need time travel.
Me: Hey, how are you? What’s up?
4yr exp dev: I am good, just got promoted, I am a staff engineer at X.
Me: judging and under valuing myself still as a senior dev.
Me: checks his LinkedIn, he’s a “Member of Technical Staff” at X
Me: Areeee🤦♂️
There is an important point that Raj mentioned here about working long hours even after the manager asked him not to.
This is exactly what I was saying in my previous 10x eng tweet. There’s no way you can compete with an engineer of his ability without spending additional hours
At Google, I have got the best possible manager I could have asked for.
I wanted to write it on Linkedin, but he follows me there, so writing it here.
▪️I onboarded to the team, when I had 0 idea about frontend, he gave me ample time without putting any additional pressure.
This is totally fine. In a company a lot of people do similar things and these can be counted as “better engineering practices”, “code consistency”, “taking ownership”, “taking initiative”.
Even if its not a huge change, why didn’t you do it?
Don’t know how OP defines mastery. I have been developing apps with Swift for 5 years now and I still don’t consider myself a master in it.
Spend at least 1 year with consistent practice to become good at any language.
7. Be business driven.
Focussing on tech and clearing tech-debt is great, but these are of no use if you do not have enough users or if the business isn’t making money. Your module won’t have 5k tps if you have 1k users.
1. Thoroughly read and understand PIDs and RFCs.
A good understanding of the product and software design significantly speeds up development. Participate in improving them: question, criticise and complement.
@SergioRocks
This question is valid from candidates as well. I have asked my interviewers about the weekly work distribution and they were happy to answer it.
@shreyas
@GergelyOrosz
Not just with companies, it happens with users as well. Like in software instead of paying for an existing tool devs just tend to build an alternative side project on their own, open-source an incomplete version and give up eventually.
In the initial years of my software engineering journey I worried about choosing architectures and kept procrastinating.
Growing up it has come down to just getting it done and sticking to the basics.
3. Know it all.
Managers love devs who have answers, if you don’t have an answer tell them upfront and then find the answer and let them know before they ask. Understand your company’s tech stack. Know what they are doing differently.
I always advise iOS devs or any SE to avoid using high level frameworks and libraries at the beginning of their career.
Here is one such example:
UIKit animations consume CPU cycles. Same thing with a little more code on CoreAnimation puts it on GPU and gives more control.
4. Be data driven
Whatever you do, see how it is impacting your team or company OKRs. Keep monitoring errors in your code that is impacting business. Fix them!
Built this prototype for a fully speech driven end to end flights booking experience.
I'm super close to hooking it up with a flight booking API and getting payments up and running.
Can't wait to share more updates as I bring this project to life!
Let me know your thoughts!
@swpnlbrkr
@TheRanveerShow
An average content consumer isn’t as smart as you. And average is the “majority”. Delivering what your major consumer base wants is not dumb, its smart!
A heap is a special kind of binary tree. It maintains the "heap property". There are 2 types of heap:
1. Max Heap : Where the root is the largest and its children are the smaller
2. Min Heap: Where the root is the smallest and its children are larger
Whether we're inserting,
5. Suggest features and improvements.
Be it design, product or engineering, people can make mistakes. If you are part of team you are also responsible for the quality of your product. Aim higher, collaborate in achieving bigger goals.