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Trying to impress people you don't respect

seangoedecke.com · 1,468 words · saved by 1 readers

In the first few years of my career, I knew next to nothing about how to do good work in a tech company. The senior and staff engineers I worked with seemed like magicians: they effortlessly solved problems that I couldn’t even understand. While I was learning how to save something to a database, they were struggling with scaling and design work on which the entire company depended. I wanted nothing more than to do the kind of work that would impress those engineers. Now I am a staff engineer. I effortlessly solve problems that brand-new engineers struggle to understand1. I am involved with high-stakes scaling and design work: not quite at “save the entire company” level, but certainly hundreds of millions of dollars of annual revenue are in the balance. I’m happy with where I am in my career. But climbing the ladder changes who you have to impress, and that can be a difficult transition to navigate. Before I became a software engineer, I wrote poetry. I started writing poetry because

In the first few years of my career, I knew next to nothing about how to do good work in a tech company. The senior and staff engineers I worked with seemed like magicians: they effortlessly solved problems that I couldn’t even understand. While I was learning how to save something to a database, they were struggling with scaling and design work on which the entire company depended. I wanted nothing more than to do the kind of work that would impress those engineers. Now I am a staff engineer. I effortlessly solve problems that brand-new engineers struggle to understand 1 . I am involved with

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