Flip did the best jobs with zoom in

I thought I was a junior developer until I was told I have the most responsibilities among the developers in our company and is considered one of the top developers. Now I just have impostor syndrome.

Days since Flip has rebelled: 0

I’m a “senior” right now and working on all of the above: debugging and refactoring mundane legacy code, architecting a cutting edge new system, reviewing random code changes from both junior and senior devs…in my experience seniority is just a function of having seen a lot of stuff and how much responsibility/expectation is put on you. It has nothing to do with being proficient in vim, or any other specific technology

I think being a senior developer is not about already knowing it all. It's more about being able to consider long term side-effects of decisions you make for the project. Sometimes a quick hack is all you need, sometimes a quick hack now would bite your ass in the future and typically it's the senior developer that can tell the difference.

Flip trolling

Ever since I joined my current company as SE3 I’ve always dreamt about Principal SE position because every PSE in our company seemed to be so good and had so many fun things to do. Since few weeks ago, I’m one of them. And you know what? Having a time to sleep felt better lol.

The most important thing about being "senior" is learning what you do know, and more importantly what you DONT know and where to find the answer.

"Endless meetings" I had a strategy meeting for an upcoming meeting, followed by a client meeting, followed by a review of the previous meeting. We scheduled another meeting in the last meeting so we could more widely discuss the topics. My calendar has an average of 3 hours of meetings a day, and of the people I've talked to, that's actually less meetings than many.

"Many junior developers dream of working exclusively with the latest frameworks and tools." So they finally managed to mix LSD into tap water.

"anxiety is a you choice" - the primeagen, 2024

@8:50 Juinor developers: "We're going to work with the very latest technologies! We're going to push the envelope! We're going to INNOVATE!" Senior developers: "Praise the Omnissiah!"

Heck, I just realized (thanks to the author mentioning Linux skill issues) that I had an XY-problem. I was so concerned about how to run `go` with sudo, that I didn't even think to just build it and then run the executable with sudo.

Your highlighting is very satisfying. ADHD approved!

Being a senior is about responsibility, and to be an accelerator. I frequently go a week without writing code, but I probably 3x'ed my team's output by helping to find solutions or point out some obscure edge case behavior in the compiler. My best days is when I develop a testing harness, or some abstraction that will guide my colleagues' decisions on how to use messaging, (Azure Service Bus SDK is the best example of an SDK that needs to be wrapped for simplicity if you want any consistency of usage in a complex distributed system)

Being a senior has a lot of gray area. You can have seniors that are actually overpaid jr's, you can have superhero seniors, and you can have anything in between. Where I work, Senior Software Engineer is only one step up from a Jr dev and is below Staff and Senior Staff software engineer. In other words, being a senior is not the end all be all. It's more like step 2 in your career. There are also principal engineers, architects, reliability engineers, etc. all which can feel overwhelmingly distant for any Jr./Sr. dev. Your experience may very based on company.

I’ve been coding for about 35 years (started at age 7, zx spectrum), and I still don’t consider myself a senior. I don’t know if I want to be, it means I have to write proper code, and the only reason I code is because it allows me to be creative, create anything I want. Made quite a bit of money doing it too, but I want it to remain new and exciting, not something where I follow rules and guidelines.

Us Midlevels know the magic cloak is senior devs have access to permissions and either hoard them or don’t know how to use them

Best part about this whole thing is the anguish that the higlightist must have felt during every -1 highlight after bringing it up.

This sounds like someone just imagined that becoming senior would make you a wizard

There are many journeys starting from Junior. This author sounds to me like he still has a lot of journeys to take. Over my career, periodically I look back at myself 2 years ago and laugh. Always be looking to make your life easier.

I'm at the beginning of the video, but I've noticed that the "Senior Developer: 'I don't know what I'm doing'" meme is normally due to companies promoting developers based on time in the job instead of, for lack of a better word, merit. In my own company, our developer levels document says that 3-5 years of experience is one of the criteria for the senior level. It leads to people simply expecting to be promoted after a certain amount of time without focusing on growing as a developer. And while I'm on the subject... I really don't like that a lot of companies also say that a senior developer can implement complex code while entirely leaving out the ability to simplify complex code in the first place. It leads to people developing terrible spaghetti and then getting promoted because of it. It's analogous to how a good professor can communicate complex topics in simple terms. We're not trying to promote the development of JDSL here guys.

To me it seems the article is describing a lead developer. Not necessarily all seniors are leads. And it also seems that ThePrimeagen is not a lead developer in most of his projects. Which could explain his perceived differences. Because yes, a lead developer is mostly doing the anoying stuff (if they don't identify as a software architect 💀). But most seniors are just part of the normal work force who do the same things as everybody else but with a bit more experience. And everybody seems to forget the inbetween: Being a normal developer. Neither junior nor senior (sometimes called professional). They do mostly the same stuff.

"Absolutely I do it on purpose, I like highlighting things that way." - Senior criminal

flip doing flips

Flip just looking for the "the name, is the rando-agen" moment, cutting and posting

I watched your be a Sr dev vid, thank you for helping us understand that all these ppl are human like us even if they have a bit more experience.

Junior devs are just Senior devs without the cojones to ask for a promotion.

That's some wisdom on 21:00. It the hard truth that you can't sell promises or ideas written as a document. Only MVP and real stuff that works.

This article is voicing all my insecurities as a new senior thats not allowed.

I’m still learning software engineering but that last point was pretty interesting. Picking up skills outside of programming throughout your career is a good idea

Important topic. I'm a 55yr-old junior dev. And I seriously respect senior devs even if they happen to be 25yrs. *It's all about putting our minds to work, irrespective of age. AI is catching up to coding incredibly fast... so we need to work with that or fall behind*

As a senior I worked on a research project for 5 years, which end up with a successful launch and a eventual sunsetting to the current state of being an unmaintained open source project that works and many people use anyways. Then now I'm working on a legacy system for 2 years already, which I am the only trusted person to work on it, even if there's less experienced people who even started the project in the company. I did do some new projects but included some modifications to the legacy system as well.

For me, when I run into someone who THINKS they know everything, I seriously doubt them.

I legit know a junior eng who just doesn't know what fear of failure is. Meanwhile I'm shaking in my boots scared about getting fired because I always have to ask someone for help, and can rarely tell what the end result of a feature should look like based on the description on the ticket + the "product owner + CTO + senior engineer" guy is really hard to communicate with.

Senior Developer Rizz is indeed real.

Regarding "Seniors being better at junior tasks" -> I think we just know that there is no way around it so we just do the thing.

I think, im probably putting in half the time as I was as a Jr. But I came from actuarial, the hours were like 60-78 hours per week on work and study... on the last 2 months leading up to an exam. I think I probably spend 8-12 hours "learning" outside of 40 hours per week. I try to put 2-3 hours into refinement of my process, per week. I also try to study some maths when I'm not sad. Do some low level programming. I've been recently building myself tools to help build intuition for mathematical objects. Idk I think investing ~ 5 hours per week in learning something new, getting better... after 16 weeks, that 5 months is less than ur efficiency gain. And u just keep doing that

prime: flip, zoom in! flip: yeah, right :D

I like highlighting off-screen and working my way back to where I want to be from wherever the UI takes me.

I would think it's easier to call yourself Junior so that you never say something wrong and get known as the "Senior who is really a Junior." That being said, I still consider myself a Junior, so maybe I don't know what I'm saying.

12:20 Dude on chat was like: I'm gonna use "ageism" to sound smart even tho I have no idea what it means

My biggest frustration with Juniors (not all obviously) is the "I have been a junior for two years now - I should be a senior". It's not a function of time champ.

So I managed to go from Junior to "Senior" in 5 years at the company that I work for. My responsibilities? Haven't changed that much. I probably have got a bit more leeway to do stuff the way I want it to be done. However, since my junior times I have been dealing with code reviews, debugging, legacy, greenfield stuff, architecture, you name it. Regarding the meetings - it depends on the project. Some projects that I used to be working on had a lot of meetings, some had just daily standup in the morning. The amount of meetings wasn't impacted on my "seniority".

16:55 knowing when to cut corners because you know in the near future that whole subsystem will be rewritten and/or replaced

Being a senior: Hey, there is a bad performance bug in this iOS app that’s supposed to release this week, can you help? I don’t really know that language, but I have my developer license. A few hours later: it’s this line here, but I don’t know how to fix it. Still don’t really know how I found it (and why our mobile team hadn’t yet), but I have the confidence that I could stumble through and figure it out again.

hey @theprimetime, It's promotion season at a lot of companies right now as we go over EoY results. I just got passed up for Staff (security) engineer. Can you maybe go over how to deal with the emotions of getting passed over for a promotion and what you believe might be some keys that a lot of people overlook when it comes to evaluating their own performance retrospectively? What do people focus on that just doesn't make it into promo docs? What are some good ways to stand out as a dev/engineer? What would you look for?

I gave up on memorizing SDK and APIs quickly. I know what I’m trying to do and what I’ll likely need to do it but I don’t bother memorizing specifics.

Junior: fight to make technology do what you want Mid: fight to do technology the best way possible Senior: fight to solve business problems and it just happens that you're using tech to do so

The senior meme relates to the new hires that replace the existing wizards who know how the tower was formed and where all the demons/dragons are located.

The truth is no one knows what they are doing. In life, in software, etc. When you have to face a challenge you've never seen or don't know where to start, how you respond is what makes you an adult or a "senior" developer. I may not know how to do something, but I am confident that I have the skills and experience to figure it out. Im a senior SE btw

When I first watched a couple of your videos I was unsure, but watching more you seem based. Respect.

Felt the seniority heat 😂

Seniors should be able to plan out solutions breadth-wise, plan for scale, assume what might happen down the road that will need to be solved, etc. Seniors have to demonstrate that they've been there, that they've gone through the same crap that Juniors and Intermediates have.

To become a Sr Dev you must master the phrase, "Good question. I'm not sure. Let me get back to you on that."

that was great flip.

Narrator: Flip did in fact not zoom in.

The point of the "I don't know what i'm doing" meme is exactly that neither knows every step of the way even for moderately complicated stuff. The difference is that the junior without help gets stuck on not knowing, and basically "lies down and dies" (figuratively) The senior on one hand has fewer gaps, but is also like "cool, finally something interesting", then goes on to find what they need. When the junior goes to the senior, the senior can a lot of times be like Action: Clicks on link to check the error. (Inner thoughts: "What the hell is this?"). Copies error into google, clicks on first result, reads it in 1-2 minutes and writes the answer in 1-3 sentences to the junior Junior: "This grumpy god knows everything as long as enough coffee is sacrificed at his table, I wanna be like him"

Panel 5 of the goose comic is "Breaking news: A commercial passenger plane makes an emergency landing in the Hudson River."

I was a netflix custumer when they send dvds in the mail. It was awsome. I used their free trails. I rented DBGT and Roots and North&South.

I have a lot of responsibility right now, and when I think if I am mid or senior, I ask myself a question: do I know several ways of solving said problem (like different languages, frameworks and such) and know pros and cons of each one, and know which to choose for this task with these resources? I don't know that, since I haven't tried enough tools with meaningful variety to be an expert. So I am not a senior.

A senior doesn't know everything, but they know how to know anything they need. They also work outside the context of the code, they know to make decisions on what provides best cost-benefit first, "bad" code solutions may be perfect for the needs and capacity of the business

05:45 easy to do at netflix lol

15:54 - One thing I hate: “But you’re free, right? It’s just a quick chat.” Sometimes it’s totally legit, especially if it’s ad hoc or whatever, but if it’s totally unrelated to what you’re working on and you’re 95% certain it could be async (email, Slack, etc) and they just don’t want to take the time to write it out, then it’s a bit annoying for sure. The main reason is: Focus. Gotta have that uninterrupted focus time to allow you to mentally ramp up on what you’re working on.

I totally thought my senior devs didn't make as much mistakes as I did, until the new dev lead starting doing code reviews and they got just as many comments as I was (some times more :D)

about the endless meetings, I think it's generally less true nowadays. As Michael mentionned, ensuring meetings are useful and protecting the team's time is a priority. However if you end up as a senior dev and turns into a manager (team lead and above)... well it's true there's going to be meetings and it should be your priority to shield your team from them as possible. In my team, we actually added 2 short weekly "team banter" meetings for social purpose because we actually ended up not having enough chances to talk to each other for non-work related stuff. Otherwise beside a weekly sync, most meetings people in my team do are usually directly with other expertise counterparts so they can solve/help or communicate issues. Also with remote meetings, it also get easier for optional people to just carry on working and get poked to join the call if it's relevant for them to intervene. it's so much better than wasting your time being physically present in a long meeting not relevant to you just in case needs someone to answer a very specific tech question (like before the pandemic).

As someone that’s been in the infosec world for a few decades, you are absolutely going to get hacked at some point in time. One of the goals is to make it take harder to get in to, faster to recover and limiting the blast radius so when it happens the damage is limited.

There is still code running in production that I wrote as a one off to plug a hole temporarily with the belief that it would be replaced in 6-12 months... it has been years and that piece of trash i threw together in a day is still chugging away... and still used and still not replaced... How it has not broken yet is another mystery to me... There is 0 documentation, the code is not well formatted... there is no process for it at all... its just there...

10:15 I think the highlighting without starting and ending on word boundaries is bad for viewers with OCD. If you start the highlight with a double click, your browser will automatically extend the selection boundaries to full words.

My company came to believe these "falsehoods" and now our product is majority junior devs (5:1 ratio). They can't reliably do anything above the lowest of low-hangers. Basically, we've become an incubator instead of a real team. I spend more time walking them through programming basics like destructuring than I do problem-solving collaboration.

I don't assume everyone knows more than me but I do assume that good ideas can come from anywhere. Back when I used to assume that people knew more than me it would always cause suffering when that turned out to not be the case.

3:20 - I mean, senior devs generally are just winging it. They just wing it faster and skip to asking the juniors what they're stuck on and why they haven't figured it out before diving into their own pool of experience to pull a solution out of their ass. >D 13:10 - So why does every job want someone with 5 years of experience in a framework that hasn't been out for more than 2 years? 16:20 - My favourite meetings are the ones scheduled to take a specific amount of time, because they always end in that timeframe. I appreciate those. We get things done, we have a defined solution by the end (if we're problem solving), everyone leaves enriched. The meetings that the guy's probably referring to are the "don't worry, it's a quick meeting, just going to talk about X" meetings which are never quick and continue until someone pops their head in to ask about the progress on task Y that someone (possibly you) were supposed to be working on instead of doing a meeting. This kind of meeting is subject to the leadership of the company. My last job, there was effectively no leadership, so this kind of meeting happened too often. 19:30 - Oh definitely, that first paragraph is me at every new company within the first month. The difference is junior devs think their way is better, senior devs ask why people are doing it that way before offering their solution. Sometimes things are the way they are for legacy or legal reasons and you just can't change anything. You just have to accept it. And the senior devs will nod and move on while the juniors will plot and scheme and squeeze extra time to work on a proof of concept in lunch breaks to show someone their way is better, ultimately wasting their time. 27:10 - In the jobs I've had, there is a focus on legacy code bases. It's just a thing with many "non-tech centric" businesses. Ironic for a tech focused job. But consider, management's focus is on advertising; they treat the company as a classical ad company rather than a tech company that supports advertising, simply because they understand ads and don't understand computers. You can't work on a replacement platform without having extra manpower. But nobody wants to pay for the extra devs. So you instead get an overworked team making revisions to legacy code to try and add new features. Yes, you are making new features. But you are doing it to old and fragile code that nobody in the "actual decisions department" wants you to replace because "it works, doesn't it?" 28:17 - This has been my experience. Your time shifts from "alright, my boss told me to make a new feature! Time to crack open an editor!" to "my boss told me to implement NFTs because he heard they were the new hot tech, but there's nothing we can use NFTs on in our company and won't listen to me when I tell him it doesn't make sense..." 30:10 - Nope, happens at any scale from 10 people crammed into a 5 person room rented from a communal office space to 500 people between three buildings in an industrial complex. I imagine it happens at megacorps like Google the same way. You're questioning the validity of this article as a senior dev looking back while sitting at honestly a progressive company which seems to have reasonable management. But fresh faced, I can say a lot of this applied to me, and I see it in my more junior peers as well. The expectation that when they get to my position they'll be better off somehow at a company with "business majors" in charge (rather than technologically intelligent people with feasible design ideas). Financially, yes, but as you said, and as this article relates, that can't be further from the truth.

Agreed. I hate that take too. As a senior I don't know everything but I know far from nothing. Senior means you know ROUGHLY which direction to go and how to understand feedback to change the direction of code.

3:45 I appreciate the Sledgehammer reference

24:30 now I totally think I wrote this article in sleep... this is a plaque I deal with every day for last year and a half. ours do not care.

I think that this post conflates Senior Engineer and Manager. The two often coincide, but not always.

TL:DW "It doesn't get easier you just get faster." -Lemond

I wish I could have been on the stream for this one. I have thoughts on the topic.

Putting this out here in case @ThePrimeTime can see or someone with experience or constructive criticism/suggestions. I'm 10 YOE on tooling-esche software development all spent in a small company. Been feeling stagnated (for some years) on my current job and maybe overpayed. Never got mentorship. Any ideia on how's the best way to assert if I'm suffering from impostor syndrome or actually a 1 YOE junior x10 years and need to take a few steps back?

I make a comment for flip to know that him rebelling increases the likelyhood of me interacting with the video.

12:04 you mean jq and xargs/parallel didn’t cut it?

Been working as a web developer for 2.5 years. I've got 10 years of experience.

"...just not nearly as good" PrimeTime 2024, 6'03"

0:28: 💭 Misconceptions about senior developers held by junior developers and the reality of climbing the ranks in software development. 3:57: 🧠 Misconceptions about senior developers and the constant learning in the tech industry. 7:37: ⚙️ Challenges of working with legacy systems and new technologies while balancing growth concerns. 11:32: ⏱️ Efficiency in problem-solving: Experienced developers can quickly solve issues by analyzing pictures instead of using automated methods. 15:43: ⏳ Challenges and benefits of meetings and code reviews for senior developers. 19:22: ⚒️ Importance of diversifying skills and staying updated with new technologies as a senior engineer. 23:17: ⚖️ Balancing work and personal life as a senior developer involves juggling various responsibilities and knowing when to say no. 26:48: 💡 Misconceptions about senior developers' roles and responsibilities. 30:50: 💡 Misconceptions about job security for senior developers debunked. Timestamps by Tammy AI

So, to summarize: "If you are in charge of security, you're probably getting hacked" "Don't ever fear failure... I just assume I can always do it"

16:00 Most decision makers will understand that having yet another meeting doesn't make sense when you explain how many dollars are wasted during that meeting when people are not doing productive work. (Simply multiply the salary of every meeting attender with the length of the meeting + some extra because attending the meeting will destroy your flow every time.) If the meeting cannot provide at least that much extra value, do not have the meeting at all.

I always tell the juniors at my work (particularly when they have imposter syndrome) that the only difference between juniors and seniors is that seniors have made and learned from more mistakes than them

It's gotta be very biased based on where you worked and whether or not you were appropriately awarded for your work. Ever since I was an intern I had job responsibilities matching your average "intermediate" level developer. As a Junior I was pretty much already doing Senior level work, just without the pay. As a mid level, I was operating at "lead" level, being much more of a lead in my department than my actual lead, but again, without the pay or recognition. And I mean that in the broadest sense, anything you can possibly think of that a lead might do, he didn't do any of it, it was all me, as an intermediate. From setting the code standards, to leading the team, to planning and leading product development, to creating most of the things, to bug fixing most of the things. I also made our company's intake assignments, and conducted job interviews for our department. Now I finally made it to senior, but it's just a job title and more pay, nothing more than that. I never had this "dreamy" idea of a senior. When I joined the company as a junior, I was already feeling equally competent to most seniors. Now that I am officially a senior, I just feel like the promotions came awfully late. And still, I am operating as de facto lead, just without the recognition or pay. I will probably leave the company before they finally decide to properly acklowedge how crucial I've been in the past years of the company's operation.

the vimagen villain origin story

The diference between jr and sr is how much booze you drink to get through the day

33:00 Prime the platypus??

Maybe the comment about not highlighting the whole line @9:40 meant how you are doing it. I'd get not wanting to select "precisely" select the text, but you could just double click to select the word and triple click to select the paragraph (between the line breaks; it's more accurate and takes less work). I know it's bothered people in chat when other devs click around a bunch too, so you can't make everyone happy.. just my two cents.

Prime is a funny guy, but Flip not zooming in even once ever is the funniest

damn, netflix is 25 years old

I *feel* like I’m a Jr dev, but everywhere I work I end up being the go-to guy to solve the hardest problems… It’s simultaneously flattering, frustrating, and confusing. I feel like most of being a Sr engineer is just about having the determination to understand how things work rather than being a mere user. When you know how something works under the hood, no problem cannot be overcome. Mazes are much easier to solve when you start from the exit. That and ADHD. You write much better software when your mind instantly branches out to find 538 ways your code could break…

Love how every single time he asks for a zoom in or literally anything to do with editing, Flip Flips the script and is just like "Don't tell me what to do weird Technology Mustached Man-Child." Somehow this is the only KZfaq Channel where there's another character, but he's hidden and we won't see him till Season 2-3. He may even be the real Villain.

I think I have at least some "fear of failure" but that's for having a bug that corrupts end user data in some yet-unknown way so I cannot even test for it. Preserving existing data is the most important task in my opinion, especially if the data was manually created by the end user. And I'm not afraid of losing data because I have backups. I'm afraid of the new feature that the end user uses modifying the existing data as a side-effect when user intentionally makes some related change to data. For example, if you have rich text data and you want to add a new feature to the rich text editor, how can you be sure that the new feature doesn't cause problems with existing content? If the end user modifies the content with your new & buggy editor, there may be no way to fix the result without either losing the intended change (that is, revert to last known good version) or having corrupt state (that is, you want to keep the intended change but part of the historical content is now corrupted and the end user must manually fix it). I guess I'm afraid of wasting end user time because of a mistake I make (which doesn't get caught in testing or QA).

I have 13 years of Dev experience, I know many languages and patterns, full stack, microservices and so on, but sometimes I feel like a junior dev One thing that became very important to me and the last 3 years is to make the code that a junior dev can understand, because this way I can use GPT more easely and delegate functions to other people easely

I’d say I’m a senior in terms of full-stack web dev stuff, I’m not senior when it comes to game development or things like kernel development… I’m probably very, very junior in those things. Especially kernel development stuff.

Being a senior does not mean you can solve every problem instantly. Often enough it only means that you have more ideas about what to try to fix the problem.