A few years ago I wasn’t sure, who was going to win, Golang seemed to be popular, and still is for that matter. When I first wrote a little Golang (~2+ years ago) I was just trying to see what the hype was all about. The funny thing is, at the time, and today, it seems like the Golang syntax is much simpler than Rust, easier to learn and pick up by far.
Being Data Analytics is a meat grinder, it’s the worst job ever. Horrible it is. It will crush you.
It’s probably what every single person wants to accomplish first after they’ve been writing code for a year professionally. How do I get to Senior Engineer? What skills do I need? “I am a good coder, give me the Senior Engineer title.”
Sadly, most Junior and Mid-Level Engineers think that being a Senior Engineer is all about coding, when in fact, it’s not. Being good at writing code is only the first step, the are many other way harder skills to learn to grow from Junior to Senior Engineer.
I recently did a post on Linkedin and Reddit about Databricks removing Standard Tier and forcing folks into Unity Catalog. The post got big traction and blew up, more than I thought. Enough for the Databricks folk to hunt me down at work and tell me I’m naughty.
I will be writing a more in-depth post soon on Substack about the downsides of Vendor Lockin and how Data Teams should think about such things.
Want to know how to grow to the Senior Engineering position? Take a look.
Most Software Engineers think of themselves as too smart. They think they are the best and brightest coder alive or that has ever lived. Doing so, they stunt themselves from becoming Senior Engineers and become hard to work with, the nightmare of the PR process.
You don’t need to be the smartest person in the room.
You probably think this is another internet clickbait title uh? Just trying to get you to clickty clickty and sell you some Google Ads. Two problems. I don’t have Google Ads, and I know a small percentage of people will actually listen to this advice. Whatever. There is a reason some developers struggle to move past the Senior role.
Instead of making you scroll to the bottom to get what you can for, I’m going to give it to you off the top. How nice of me.
There is a great evil Spirit that is haunting the streets of code in the land of programmers. It’s a Spirit of obfuscation and twisting things into what they are not. The Spirit wanders around on the loose looking for someone, and it finds ready victims among the ranks of new programmers and the innocent young minds in University. It also finds a few old wizened souls that have been lost wandering for decades around the halls of some musty Fortune 500 company.
It’s the Abstraction Problem.
Ok. Get off your high horse. You are human just like the rest of us. Just like your ancient ancestors who were throwing rocks and sticks at each other a thousand years ago … you are looking for a leg up on the competition. Isn’t that the world we live in? At the end of the day, no one is looking out for you, besides you.
Do you know what all those famous “influencers” have over you? Those you look at with boiling bitterness buried somewhere inside you. Besides a smattering of luck here and there, there is one other trait they have that most people don’t.
There are general branches and streams of actions that come off that main branch. But without that central drive, all else is useless.
What is it that apparently 1% of the data population has that the 99 don’t? Simply put, in the words of your grandparents, hard work.