Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer
&gt;Don&#x27;t meet your heroes. I paid 5k to take a course by one of my heroes. He&#x27;s a brilliant man, but at the end of it I realized that he&#x27;s making it up as he goes along like the rest of us.<p>I thought they were going to go the direction of &quot;he&#x27;s an asshole&quot; and was ready to accept that, but this particular criticism is actually disturbing. People with strong visions can often appear to be &quot;making it up as they go along,&quot; when really they are just subpar communicators.<p>Short story, I am helping my current company switch from a monolith to service-oriented architecture, and in the process have built a framework for spinning up new fully-deployable services from scratch that gets engineers 90% of the way there (minus the business logic). I have a strong vision for how it works and had a dozen-page RFC accepted by the engineering team for it. Yet there are engineers who think I am making it up as I go (I have been asked this indirectly), without any vision guiding the pieces into place. I have chalked up this feedback to me needing to improve my communication of the vision.<p>So the post&#x27;s response of &quot;I realized that he&#x27;s making it up as he goes along like the rest of us&quot; is disturbing because it makes me realize just how difficult communicating a vision is... if this hero that the poster paid $5k to go see can&#x27;t even convince one of their fans, what chance do normal people like you and I have of convincing people that we&#x27;re not making it up as we go?<p>&gt;EDIT: I realize that I am posting under the assumption that the person&#x27;s hero does in fact know what he&#x27;s doing. If he truly is making it up as he goes, the above doesn&#x27;t apply.