True or False EDIT: I am seeing lot of people arguing that coding is a great skill to have. I agree, it does make you highly employable and open the gates when you may find your self into tough job situations. However, to what degree will they help you grow in your career ladder? Someone who is director is not going to be leaning on his coding skills when out of job. Real question is, how did they reach to the exec level, I highly doubt it was even slightly dependent on coding skills. #tech #softwareengineer
when there's an important decision to be made, no one's looking for a person who can invert a binary tree (substitute your fav LC question here)
Voted yes but disagree here actually. No one inverts a binary tree _ever_. The point of that exercise is to push your brain and your programming expertise, and those things do make you a better thinker and better poised for long career growth
Hmm... surprisingly most powerful people in the world today haven't gone through that exercise ever and their careers are great. When Musk was at PayPal many engs found his code shitty.
I wouldn't say it's overrated. Everyone I know preaches about how soft skills get you promotions. LC proficiency in combination with those gets you company jumps. So yeah, how well you actually do your job does not matter nearly as much.
It could be a gateway to a great career. Always helps when you find yourself in the job market unexpectedly.
I think this is going to be one of those things that's highly highly dependent on where you work. I think HFT firms will place a high value on development, probably some specific teams in the bigger firms. And then places where there aren't that difficult problems to solve will reward other things at a skew like "leadership," "leading projects", etc...
I've noticed that the people who grow are the worst coders. if you are a great coder, those people will accuse you of over-engineering things and push you down. good coding == clean, lean, well designed, maintainable, tested good coding != half-assing LC
True. It's equally (or more) about showing your skills, making presentations, connections etc. But most engineers just think those things mean the person doesn't know how to code.
Define career growth, as an IC or as a manager?
Towards C-exec
ah in that case it’s luck and being born rich, or being able to screw over enough people on your way to to top.
Agree. Coding is not needed to grow your career. I know a lot of people who could not or didn't care to code and still did good. All you need to grow in career, when coding is not your cup of tea is - manipulation, lies, bluffs, politics, cheating etc. Someone who has never been a good developer will never be good at anything in this industry.
So how did Sundar Pichai make his way up? Pretty sure he wasn’t a coder and he definitely wasn’t a cheater or a manipulator too (or doesn’t obviously seem like one).
Sundar was never a SWE. He started on the PM path. Dumb comparison.
If that person became a director starting from the SWE IC path, then I promise you they are a much better / more hardworking coder. Eventually once you hit L6 the interpersonal skills start to matter more, but you will never hit that without being a great coder. If the director started on the PM path, then coding was never very important for them.
You obviously don’t know how softwares work
I am specifically referring to personal career growth and not generic requirements of a software. Great coders are needed to build a slick and performant software, but it doesn’t guarantee great trajectory for the growth of those engineers.
Coding is core skill initially for a career in software , otherwise you will have to depend on skills of others to get ahead. IMO It is going to be increasingly difficult for non-coders with less experience to make an impact which can ride them promotion