Swizec Teller started his career coding PHP websites for $5/hour, now he leads teams at hyper growth startups in Silicon Valley. Along the way he learned a new senior mindset focused on business outcomes and ownership. He learned what makes these startup engineers special. Why they make those crazy salaries despite not being any better at writing code. Now he wants to share that with the world at SeniorMindset.com.
Talking points
- how Swiz got into coding
- the hilarity of flopping around as a total novice while working on UIs for a nuclear power plant
- first trips to Silicon Valley
- how the startup mentality applies to engineers
- why feedback beats perfection
- Swiz describes a popular meme pic in audio (and nails it)
- where coding education falls short
- what's the incentive to improve, if bad code works fine
- how do you improve anyway?
- how much does technical debt matter
- what inspired my Senior Mindset journey
Quotable quotes
"everyone's really going for a certain kind of attitude towards coding, but they don't really tell you what it is" ~ LN
"you will have time to build it twice later. And this took me a really long time to grasp" ~ ST
"it's not necessarily about trying to get it perfect. It's really just trying to get it done" ~ LN
"you would rather have an imperfect, barely working feature next week, than the perfect version of that feature two months from now." ~ ST
"it's all about getting fast feedback cycles" ~ ST
"You see optimization in your own messes when you're first kind of writing drafts" ~ LN
"the problem in studying CS is that you're never writing code that you will ever have to maintain" ~ ST
"if you're coding at your cleverest and how will you ever be smart enough to debug it" ~ ST
"You get exposed to a lot of very interesting things, but you're also the one who is getting hit over the head and banging your head against the wall, trying to break through" ~ ST
"you can simulate mentorship by swallowing your pride and putting things out there in public and seeing how people react and getting feedback" ~ ST
"there's no right or a single way to go about coding it all depends" ~ LN
"I thought I was crushing it. And then I got a performance review and they were like, dude, you're the best engineer we have. But all the other stuff that makes a senior ... oof" ~ ST