The Swyx Mixtape [Weekend Drop] Going from Junior to Senior Q&A
This Clubhouse-style Q&A was held as part of my support for React Summit 2021 (https://remote.reactsummit.com/). Moderated by Robert Haritonov, CEO of GitNation.
Timestamps
- 2:30 How do you keep up with the changing landscape?
- 5:00 Balancing Learning Time with a Job
- 7:15 What are the top technical and soft skills to transition from junior to senior?
- 12:30 The Importance of Communication and How to Do it Well
- 17:30 Prioritization, Batching and Pair Programming
- 19:20 What can Seniors Do to Help Foster Juniors? Apprenticeships, Mentoring, Sponsorship and Allyship
- 23:15 How to convince older devs to try new tech? Address their concerns, do proofs of concept, know when to fold.
- 28:45 Nontraditional background. How to convince people to let you through the door? Networking and Personal Content Marketing.
- 34:00 How do you make technical decisions as a senior and avoid getting stuck? Innovation Tokens, Action Produces Information, Pay for Advice
- 40:30 Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution
- 42:00 Can you still be a fullstack engineer?
If you enjoyed this chat, you're welcome to check out our career community for 30% off!
Mentioned Links
- Chapter 5 - Junior to Senior (free PDF)
- Gergely Orosz's Tech Resume Inside Out
- My Podcast Recommendations
- Every Public Engineering Career Ladder
- Sponsorship: https://larahogan.me/blog/what-sponsorship-looks-like/
- Allyship: https://www.samanthabretous.com/blog/black-women-equal-pay-day-heres-how-you-can-help/
- Diversity Resources (this is a work in progress list, hence not yet published, but i've been sharing these with pple who ask): https://gist.github.com/sw-yx/7aeedbeac1bb81017cd4f9d66b223b63
- Ninah Mufleh Airbnb Resume
- Innovation Tokens
- If you'd like to see my React Summit talk, check out: https://youtu.be/yLgq-Foc1EE
Transcript
Robert Haritonov: [00:00:00] So yeah, I'll let you get to your Shawn just, go ahead as you please?
swyx: [00:00:03] Hey everyone. Hey, I'm Shawn, also known as Swyx on the internet.
I'm a React fan and but also a Svelte fan and one of my talks, that I speaking later on in an hour or so is seven Lessons to Outlive React. But this discussion room is a different topic. It's a non-technical topic. It's related to the book I published last year.
Basically talking about how people can go from junior to senior, how the non-technical elements of the software engineering job is very relevant for our career progression and something that we don't really talk about enough. And yeah, I'm very interested in sharing my experience, the experiences of the people that I learned from.
If you wanna check out the, the amount of research I did you can check out the site at LearnInPublic.org.
I'm going to just explain a little bit of what I wrote on the junior and senior chapter. So essentially part of what I was trying to do here was define what a senior engineer is.
And it's one of those things where everyone has a different opinion and it's more of a pay scale than it is a well accepted metric. To some people you have to have at least three years at a high growth startup. Others can take up to eight years to become a senior engineer.
Or there's, let's just say they don't care about the number of years, right? It's more about what you can do. And ultimately I think for me is what I really care about is for everyone to have the prerequisite skills enough of the prerequisite skills, and accomplishments that you can make a strong case for a senior developer, but then also market yourself as meeting enough so that people notice you and hire you whether, internal promotion or externally when you do a lateral transfer to another company.
And I think a lot of times it involves acting like a senior engineer before you officially become one. So it's a bit of a chicken and egg, right? And I think that's something that we have to recognize more and study more. . Because I don't think we have enough of a conversation about how to convert juniors to seniors and It's the biggest gap in the industry, everyone wants to hire seniors, but there are so many juniors trying to try to upskill themselves.
2:30 How do you keep up with the changing landscape?
I've just invited avocado Mayo. Are you able to speak hi, can you hear me? Hey, how's it going? Shawn? The eye. Good. Thank you. I'm a developer based in Canada. I am, I have a question for you a general career advice.
So I, I feel that the front end landscape is constantly changing and the web is constantly evolving. A question that I have for you is what are some ways that you kept up with the cutting edge so that your call I'll still the learning and what are some ways that you kept up with the changing landscape in development?
Great question. It's something I get a lot, but honestly I don't, I haven't really slowed down to like document a process. I just do whatever comes to mind. So this is a bit off the cuff. So something I care a lot about I think it would not be an exaggeration to say that I do get a lot of my tech news off of Twitter and the things that, so I tend to do this strategy, which I call following the graph, which is like figuring out what the smart people that have effect they have built, the things that you use, like the reacts and the babbles and the WebEx, figuring out what they, how they got where they are and what they're working on today, because they're also excited about other things they didn't stop just because they were done working on, on, on the tool.
So I follow the graph, like I follow who they follow, and then I figured out who their influences are and try to understand the historical context of where these technologies fit in. And that's all an attempt to try to figure out like what themes I should focus on for the future. So every now and then I try to step back and go okay what am I interested in?
Because I think honestly the reality is that there's too much to keep up on. And I think if you try to keep up on everything, it's a full-time job and you'll never go deep on any particular topic. And that's also really bad. It's not enough to just know the names of every project.
You actually have to have tried it out to know the philosophy. You have an opinion when you're, in your company, you're asked for it. So that's why I try to do I tried to have a thesis. I tried to inform it by following people who I think are doing interesting things in the ecosystem. I think attending conferences actually really helps a lot because the people who are ex...