[HN Gopher] Ask HN: What are some educational resources for more...
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Ask HN: What are some educational resources for more senior
engineers?
I recently had a more junior coworker take an AWS Solutions
Architect course, and I realized I am missing out on my company's
personal development resources, but I am not all that interested in
an AWS Solutions Architecture course, in part because a) I don't
want to, and b) I know a bunch of AWS stuff by now anyway So I am
curious what are some interesting educational resources for people
in more advanced engineering roles? Courses or resources that might
help one move to an Architect or Principal/Staff role?
Author : irishloop
Score : 56 points
Date : 2023-06-22 20:29 UTC (2 hours ago)
| wizzerking wrote:
| I concur with warrenm I got into deep learning because of the
| opensourcing of Tensorflow, PyTorch and FOSS and BECAUSE I had
| worked with Neural Networks before they became convolutional. I
| did not want to do the same old thing Principal Component
| Analysis. For more senior engineers I always advocate for learn
| train and see what in your past should be updated. If your goal
| is Architect then learn algorithms and interconnections. If the
| goal is Principal Engineer then processes. Are you able to
| combine these roles into a new role a Principle Architect ?
| warrenm wrote:
| I answered a similar question[0] back in April. Quoting[1] from
| it:
|
| >"Fairly senior experienced" people learn in a variety of ways
| ... but mostly we learn via diffs
|
| In other words, we have a baseline of knowledge, and we're
| looking for what has changed / is new / is different
|
| >This can come from videos, books, papers, blog posts, one-on-one
| examples, seminars, conferences, etc
|
| >The best folks then take what they think they have learned,
| synthesize it into a teachable format, and teach others the "new"
| thing (crystallizing it in our own minds)
|
| As for _specific_ resources, what _are_ you "interested" in?
| Re:AWS in particular ... if you "know a bunch of AWS stuff by now
| anyway", why not go take the exams and get the certs (especially
| if $WORK will pay for them)?
|
| What _kind_ of "Architect or Principal/Staff role" are you
| looking for?
|
| --------
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35724696
|
| [1]
| carom wrote:
| This is something that the computer security does amazingly well.
| At most conferences, the core money maker is trainings. You have
| advanced topics, taught by experts, usually 2 to 5 days of
| training. Topics like program analysis, reverse engineering,
| obfuscation, exploitation, fuzzing, etc.
|
| I have my foot in both industries so I am happy to have these,
| but I have always wished for an equivalent for software
| engineers. Stuff like show up for 5 days and learn the concepts
| to write your own SMT solver, or implement a neural net framework
| from scratch in the language of your choice. This could be
| applied to any flavor of development - graphics, games, mobile,
| web, GPU, etc. Basically crash courses for competent people to
| get up to speed in an advanced area.
| tetha wrote:
| In my book, if you want to go for architect/principal/staff, you
| will have to work on communication, documentation and leadership
| skills. At work, the group of most senior engineers has a couple
| of roles:
|
| - They need to collect the needs, challenges and plans of
| different teams across the company. Based on this, they have to
| use deep technical knowledge of the stack to distill this into a
| technical direction for the overall environment to move towards
| (together with other experts of course). This will usually
| require implementing some principal cases and some hard edge
| cases, but then they'll have to document and hand this over to
| the posse of other development teams to push.
|
| - They must support the trailblazer teams coming after them with
| hard technical problems. Even if you have a few strong PoCs, if
| an early adopter of a proposal gets stuck badly and you can't
| support them, you will lose trust. Call it politics, but losing
| this trust is very bad in the grander context. The direction they
| chose with the other principals must be true and trustworthy
| within a small margin of error.
|
| - They often need to bridge the gap between the business world
| and the technical world. Technical decisions are technical
| decisions, but beyond a certain point, they have to be able to
| translate technical decision into required manpower, required
| money and tradeoffs to management. Like, we've been asked what
| the different tradeoffs between manpower investment, money and
| development velocity a windows-on-prem deployment for a solution
| would cost us and to compare this to potential revenue from a
| number of customers.
|
| - They have to be able to say no, and maintain no. As other
| comments have said: Holding difficult situations. Understand what
| they need, understand that their need is stupid, and then start
| guiding them into a discovery process that their idea doesn't fit
| where we're going.
|
| All of this is skillful communication, understanding and leading.
| On top of knowing your technical domain very well.
| throwaway019254 wrote:
| The Staff Engineer's Path - Tanya Reilly
|
| https://staffeng.com/
|
| https://leaddev.com/staffplus-new-york/on-demand
| brailsafe wrote:
| I don't know if anyone would consider me senior in terms of rank
| on any team, but I've been a professional developer in some
| capacity for ~10 years, depending on how you count time between
| jobs.
|
| What I've learnt as someone who's mostly self-taught, is that
| while I can probably pick up the important bits of any tech I
| need for getting a job done, much of my knowledge is incomplete,
| and it can be interesting to fill out the nooks and crannies in
| any given domain by applying some rigor and going through a
| course or reading a book end-to-end.
|
| Take Postgres for example. Yes I understand what I need to work
| with it, do basic data modelling, maintenance, backups etc.. but
| until I picked up a book I didn't know about inheritance or
| third-party data wrappers (don't recall their actual name)
|
| In terms of what would be useful for your job, I think it would
| be great to simply find where you can improve you/your team's
| developer experience, perhaps by evaluating tools that fill
| invisible gaps, or writing them yourself with skills you pick up
| in those courses.
|
| Maybe you suck at interaction design and you can get your company
| to fund a degree in it
| bradly wrote:
| >third-party data wrappers (don't recall their actual name)
|
| Foreign Data Wrappers. We used them quite a bit on my team at
| Apple.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| * Networking - (routing and switching) Start by studying for the
| CCNA (many text books) and then move onto advanced switching with
| routing for L3 switches as required for the CCNP
|
| * Security - Start with text books studying for the Security+ and
| work your way up to CISSP (security management)
|
| * Accessibility - WCAG 2.0
|
| * Psychology - Start by studying emotions, motivations, and
| intentions from academic literature. Learn about OCEAN in applied
| contexts
|
| * Architecture - Best learned from fully separated parallel means
| of applied process refinement put together (refactoring) and do
| it all again many times. What shakes out is a vision for scale
| applied through simple schemes of organization.
|
| * History - The best way to avoid catastrophic mistakes is to be
| aware of past failures, understand human motivations, and avoid
| troubled organizations
| thelastparadise wrote:
| At the senior and beyond level, the universe itself becomes the
| best teacher.
| godelski wrote:
| I don't know about AWS Solutions Architecture specifically, but
| I've found that advanced learning typically doesn't come from
| "courses" in the traditional sense. More typically blogs,
| research papers, self-contained lectures, and textbooks. One
| unfortunate aspect of these is that they often tend to be filled
| with extreme levels of technical language and so there's often a
| difficulty finding that middle area, especially when you know
| enough to skim or skip intro works to a subject.
|
| These seem particularly difficult to find though. Maybe someone
| knows of a listing that these can be found in aggregate and built
| by the communities? If not, might be worth building.
| ilc wrote:
| The biggest resources you have access to:
|
| 1. Your manager. Simply expressing that you want to advance is
| important.
|
| 2. The example of people in those positions. Especially the
| people in those positions you RESPECT.
|
| 3. Start working on your interpersonal skills. Books like:
| "Getting to YES" and "Difficult Conversations" are important to
| learning critical skills you will need at the next level.
| Understanding how to work ethically in a win/win way will move
| you forward in ways you can't imagine.
|
| 4. Realize leadership is a learned skill. People talk about
| natural born leaders. Bullshit. Leadership is taught. I was
| taught how to lead. It took some time for me to find my personal
| leadership style based on my personal strengths. But now that I
| know it... it ain't hard for me.
|
| In the end: Engineering stops being about silicon and software,
| and starts being about the "ugly bags of mostly water".
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAlqp0_a0tE ;)
| ssss11 wrote:
| It will depend if you're learning for curiosity or for your
| career path. I too have training available at work but the work
| endorsed courses for my career path aren't as interesting as
| learning about adjacent business areas...
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(page generated 2023-06-22 23:00 UTC)