While the practice of doing crap pull requests and letting your teammates correct you is questionable, and this whole story might be bogus to begin with, it does strike a chord with me. From my experience, the developers who want to spend weeks reading docs and doing tutorials before writing any code, end up not writing much code in the long run. Jump in, break stuff, ask questions! The best devs will have a PR on the 1st day: fixing some crap sample code, tutorial or how-to that no one bothered to update for a while.
Back at Meta, I worked with a 10x engineer who grew from senior to staff in just 1 year, 5x faster than average. Here was his secret for insane growth: Embrace looking like an idiot. This engineer joined my team, which entirely did Android. However, he came from an iOS background and had never written Android code before. Instead of spending months doing tutorials and reading docs, he just started hacking code together, putting out a PR within his 1st week. It was literally some of the worst Android code I had ever seen. So I left a lot of feedback. And several other engineers left a lot of feedback. His mountain of mistakes didn't phase him at all, quite the opposite. He happily took all the feedback and asked follow-up questions, eager for more. He repeated this process constantly, and after ~2 months, he was writing more code than 95% of the team, including me. You couldn't even tell that he was new to Android. If you want to grow fast, completely let go of your fear and ego. To learn the other tactics this engineer used to learn so quickly, check out my in-depth explainer here: https://lnkd.in/giW8N4FP #techcareergrowth #softwareengineering #staffengineer #growthtips #meta
VP Technology at Codacy
5moI started hacking around with our IDE extension, which has taught me Typescript, a bit. What actually helped, since most of our real developers are busy, is both chatgpt as a rubber duck and Codacy itself running ESLint and various other scanners (and putting the results right in the IDE, that's what I was doing!) giving me static analysis issues to resolve that improved my programming skill before I even got to human review.