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Re:Things I Learned to Become a Senior Software Engineer by mettamage on Monday September 07, 2020 @07:00AM (#24398506)
> Two years to become a senior engineer out of college is a joke.

Sure

> After a University degree, you only really know what page in your textbook to turn to when you recognise a problem.

No.

My first job during college was to create an iOS app for a researcher (an extensive multimedia questionnaire). What I did: take Hegarthy's course, and understand it. After that, I simply could create the app by thinking logically. I didn't refer back to the course while I created the app.

My first job out of college was upgrading some Java CRUD app. I had the fortune of teaching at a coding bootcamp (as I self-taught NodeJS and then taught it). That NodeJS experience, including with having familiarity with the Java syntax was enough to edit files for a Spring Boot application. Simply by reading the code, I understood what happened and how they wanted me to design things.

No textbook required.

> don’t harm someone with your shitty design.

It's possible that might've happened.

Re:Things I Learned to Become a Senior Software Engineer by aronpye on Monday September 07, 2020 @07:06AM (#24398530)
You may have had the ability to create a fairly simple app or add to an existing one with low stakes / impact. But, it takes time to be able to quickly reason from a fundamental, first principles levels in order to engineer robust solutions to problems.

On a side note, I don’t agree with bootcamps as they don’t teach the core principles of computer engineering and software design. Coding is just a skill, and you need some fundamental knowledge behind it in order to execute it safely and robustly.

Re:Things I Learned to Become a Senior Software Engineer by mettamage on Monday September 07, 2020 @08:39AM (#24399013)
You're making a lot of assumptions about my situation that you can't backup with evidence. It might be true. It might not be. But you seem to make a strong stance for that I worked on apps with low stakes/impact and that they were fairly simple. You don't know that, so why paint that view so strongly?

> On a side note, I don’t agree with bootcamps as they don’t teach the core principles of computer engineering and software design.

I did both. I studied CS and happened to work as a teacher at a coding bootcamp while studying CS.

> Coding is just a skill, and you need some fundamental knowledge behind it in order to execute it safely and robustly.

Emphasis mine.

I disagree with this. I've seen many experienced software engineers knowing nothing about how to hack (important for safe code execution), I've had a couple of courses in it and did some hackthebox.eu after that. So I know as much about hacking as I know about software engineering, I'm a junior in both cases. Nevertheless, I am the one that finds major security vulnerabilities in the code of the company I work for.

A lot of security issues isn't fundamental as the "fundamentals" are things like: "look for configuration errors" or "look for hardware bugs that hardware vendors haven't looked deeply enough yet" or "look for a place where humans are careless" (e.g. the suidbash vulnerability is an example of the last one). That's a lot fuzzier and vague than CS fundamentals.