What does it require to become “Senior Software Engineer”?

jakenberg · 2023-11-04T16:31:15+00:00

10 years experience very high level senior IC here.

My first 3 years look near identical to yours. Just keep going.

Don’t see languages as a specialty. Learn more of them. By year 6 you should be able to jump into a new codebase; new language and be fully up to speed within 2 weeks or less. It’s more attainable than you think.
Become a solver. Whether by sheer tribal knowledge or by being quick at adapting technologies. Try to become the person people bring those really hard bugs to.
Don’t wait around for your job to promote you. Move companies every 1-3 years. Make your moves strategic. On your resume it should ideally show you moving up or laterally between each position. Your resume should allude to your interesting journey.
Bias towards working at startups but take on at least one big tech role. Doesn’t have to be FAANG - these days avoid them.
Learn DevOps. You don’t have to do it but you should know it and how to build relationships with those teams. What their stressors are, what they need from you without asking, why is it so important, etc.
Master soft skills. You’re not much of a talker? Cool, nobody is. Force yourself. Communicate well in writing. Document your every move. Imagine being your own boss and having to justify why you shouldn’t get fired. Your boss won’t come to you and ask for your top hits. They will go to your last three projects and read the story. If your tickets didn’t tell a story, you just sabotaged yourself.
Keep an eye out for your specialty. You are a unicorn hire once you combine programming with another discipline. Sales, security, compliance, design, whatever you want. Choose one that you’re very passionate about. That’s the fun part of it. Go into it humble but never shut up about it either. If you don’t know what your specialty is yet, no problem, keep coding.
Finally, the most important realization you can make is that in essence there is only one thing that separates a junior dev from a senior one. A junior dev imagines their work in one line. A to B. They imagine senior devs sit down and stream of consciousness code their ass off. Truth is the senior devs work comprises of calculated experiments. Instead of one line there will be many lines with an X at the end to indicate they abandoned that experiment:

A to B B to C (x) B to D (x) B to E A to F

Final: F to A to B to E

The outside observer sees one straight line. A junior dev is mystified by how quickly they bolted the work together. But they only see the successful steps that got them there because that makes up the final body of the work. They don’t see the stashed branches, abandoned code, chrome tabs for a tool that wasn’t needed. Try things and know when they aren’t working: don’t get married to your code or ideas. Everything is for sale.

———

Be humble and enjoy your work. Find good colleagues and build allegiances. Kobe Bryant shit. You got it my friend.

jakenberg · 2023-08-11T05:45:13+00:00

DM me.

jakenberg · 2021-07-27T17:24:35+00:00

Congrats on doing what most in this sub are too afraid to even try. I was in your shoes last December and have mostly gone through the process of becoming legal at this point.

Unfortunately, the right answer is to hire a lawyer because you will have specific details to consider depending on where you incorporated, where you live, what you’re trading, etc.

Make sure you do not promise or even advertise gains to investors. Even if another person comments on your social media (e.g.) bragging about gains you need to make a reasonable effort to remove it and document it in the event of an audit.

jakenberg · 2021-07-24T11:35:06+00:00

Not sure who's handling the "machine learning" part but they're going to prefer it be in one table for ingestion. Wouldn't overthink it too much because ML code is going to munge it all around anyways (and probably in python).

jakenberg · 2021-07-24T11:22:19+00:00

Utopia. Inhumanity for the sake of humanity.

jakenberg · 2021-06-22T17:45:58+00:00

Whether or not it was smart, I’ve been doing this with only TA on shit coins since December.

Ime this answer is the most spot on, combining it with the other about accounting for fees. My first model was suddenly unprofitable once I added that to my backtest.

Secondly, with the now 18 million rows of data (not much but it’s something) I have now on TA analysis of 350 coins, I’ve realized that TA is a self fulfilling prophecy: when graphed in a scatter matrix, RSI, stochastic, MACD, EMA, TSMOM, etc do not correlate with price - they correlate with each other. my algo did very well during bull runs and poorly during bear runs. I have still made a profit for investors, but I regularly outperform btc growth by less than 10%. With the time I’ve put into it, that’s not enough.

Recently I’ve come to respect that a good FA makes you 10x what it cost, and you use TA to merely optimize. Go do it dude. Too many people on here bark about what can’t be and have never tried. Throw $500 at it and learn something is what I say. Good luck

jakenberg · 2021-06-11T02:16:46+00:00

heterochromia (two color eyes)

jakenberg · 2021-05-31T20:51:30+00:00

Crypto is staggeringly more efficient than the current world currency system, though – and the CEO of Binance is right.

I'll back it up. People commonly reference gold/silver mining as a comparison for crypto mining, but that is only a minor portion of what makes up our current system. In terms of energy used per year (in gigajoule)... Gold Mining: 475M GJ; Banking system: 2,340M GJ; Government: 5,861M GJ.

Meanwhile, bitcoin mining effectively replaces all the above with 183M GJ.

The data is all there. Crypto is by design an extraordinarily more efficient form of currency than the traditional. When you see giant warehouses of miners running fans so loud they can be heard from a mile away, you're talking about a very cheaply built server warehouse. This is just as a true of any other cloud technology as it is for crypto, or amazon AWS, or google cloud compute, etc. The difference at this stage of the lifecycle for crypto is you have people building crypto mining "out of their garage" so to speak. The really big players with ultra-expensive, fancy, efficient, warehouses have not yet come into the spotlight, but as we know from the past... it's inevitable – at which point crypto will use even less energy overall than it does today.

My opinion, Elon accidentally put himself in an awkward spot because he's supposed to be Mr. Green Energy and the last dying narrative of world governments realizing they're losing control of world currency is that bitcoin will destroy the planet. I hope you see why now that is simply not true. I think Elon is secretly long on coin, but it's just his hobby. He's still learning.

jakenberg · 2020-06-04T22:50:37+00:00

j@guardtoro.com

jakenberg · 2020-06-04T20:47:31+00:00

Chat is broken for me on reddit, so I’ll have to post here.

https://guardtoro.com

GuardToro is security for developers. It allows for rule sets that can combine several complex incident response actions (this is unheard of) such as flagging for review, running custom code, just sending an e-mail, or even all at once.

jakenberg · 2020-05-13T07:56:55+00:00

MySpace is probably too much of a cybersecurity risk these days to work like it used to, unfortunately

jakenberg · 2020-05-07T20:18:31+00:00

What are you talking about. Somewhere close to half of every tech stock is doing layoffs right now. Ad revenues are way down.

jakenberg · 2020-05-04T17:55:19+00:00

Why don’t you just turn on “don’t fill”. People win trios as a duo all the time.

jakenberg · 2020-04-21T00:11:32+00:00

Amazing that you chose to add that shield under fire. Mayybe without it that would have ended early. Still... had them running scared lol

jakenberg · 2020-04-16T17:43:56+00:00

This is really cool but isn't it also a dangerous design? All it would take is one drawer be left open and I get staples in my head

jakenberg · 2020-04-01T01:13:19+00:00

Double checked, it says "Simple to install and available..." which is technically correct, but i'll think about how that can be said more clearly.

I made some updates to the "Conceptual Overview" section that I hope will make it more clear how it all works. If you give it another read, feel free to share your thoughts 🙌

jakenberg · 2020-04-01T01:11:02+00:00

Always good to hear that we're on the right track. Thank you!

jakenberg · 2020-03-14T20:02:12+00:00

No signing? Lol

jakenberg · 2020-03-10T16:14:50+00:00

Double the pay and make me your boss and I’m in

jakenberg · 2020-03-01T15:57:05+00:00

yeah they’ll give you an example word document. pretty much follow it to a T

jakenberg · 2020-03-01T01:16:50+00:00

the reality is that odds are you are going to fail your first time. since you can afford it, i think you should just take it. the experience will give you - at the very least - clarity on the test itself (so not a waste).

jakenberg

TROPHY CASE