The Drunken Wisdom of a 10-Year Engineer: Raw Truths About Tech Careers

A few years ago, a data engineer on r/ExperiencedDevs got drunk and wrote down everything he learned in 10 years of engineering. The original account is deleted, but the post captures something real — the kind of honesty you only get after a few glasses of wine. Preserving it here, typos and all.

I'm drunk and I'll probably regret this, but here's a drunken rank of things I've learned as an engineer for the past 10 years.

Career Advancement and Job Hopping

The best way I've advanced my career is by changing companies. Technology stacks don't really matter because there are like 15 basic patterns of software engineering in my field that apply. I work in data so it's not going to be the same as webdev or embedded. But all fields have about 10-20 core principles and the tech stack is just trying to make those things easier, so don't fret over it.

There's a reason why people recommend job hunting. If I'm unsatisfied at a job, it's probably time to move on. I've made some good, lifelong friends at companies I've worked with. I don't need to make that a requirement of every place I work. I've been perfectly happy working at places where I didn't form friendships with my coworkers and I've been unhappy at places where I made some great friends.

Management and Workplace Dynamics

I've learned to be honest with my manager. Not too honest, but honest enough where I can be authentic at work. What's the worse that can happen? He fire me? I'll just pick up a new job in 2 weeks.

If I'm awaken at 2am from being on-call for more than once per quarter, then something is seriously wrong and I will either fix it or quit.

Qualities of a good manager share a lot of qualities of a good engineer. Managers have less power than you think. Way less power. If you ever thing, why doesn't Manager XYZ fire somebody, it's because they can't.

Titles mostly don't matter. Principal Distinguished Staff Lead Engineer from Whatever Company, whatever. What did you do and what did you accomplish. That's all people care about.

Speaking of titles: early in your career, title changes up are nice. Junior to Mid. Mid to Senior. Senior to Lead. Later in your career, title changes down are nice. That way, you can get the same compensation but then get an increase when you're promoted. In other words, early in your career (<10 years), title changes UP are good because it lets you grow your skills and responsibilities. Later, title changes down are nice because it lets you grow your salary.

Code Quality and Engineering Philosophy

The best code is code that can be understood by a junior engineer. Great code can be understood by a first year CS freshman. The best code is no code at all.

The most underrated skill to learn as an engineer is how to document. Fuck, someone please teach me how to write good documentation. Seriously, if there's any recommendations, I'd seriously pay for a course (like probably a lot of money, maybe 1k for a course if it guaranteed that I could write good docs.)

Related to above, writing good proposals for changes is a great skill.

Almost every holy war out there (vim vs emacs, mac vs linux, whatever) doesn't matter... except one. See below.

The older I get, the more I appreciate dynamic languages. Fuck, I said it. Fight me.

If I ever find myself thinking I'm the smartest person in the room, it's time to leave.

Good code is code that can be understood by a junior engineer. Great code can be understood by a first year CS freshman. The best code is no code at all.

Programming Languages and Tech Stacks

I don't know why full stack webdevs are paid so poorly. No really, they should be paid like half a mil a year just base salary. Fuck they have to understand both front end AND back end AND how different browsers work AND networking AND databases AND caching AND differences between web and mobile AND omg what the fuck there's another framework out there that companies want to use? Seriously, why are webdevs paid so little.

Tech stack matters. OK I just said tech stack doesn't matter, but hear me out. If you hear Python dev vs C++ dev, you think very different things, right? That's because certain tools are really good at certain jobs. If you're not sure what you want to do, just do Java. It's a shitty programming language that's good at almost everything.

The greatest programming language ever is lisp. I should learn lisp.

For beginners, the most lucrative programming language to learn is SQL. Fuck all other languages. If you know SQL and nothing else, you can make bank. Payroll specialist? Maybe 50k. Payroll specialist who knows SQL? 90k. Average joe with organizational skills at big corp? $40k. Average joe with organization skills AND sql? Call yourself a PM and earn $150k.

Tests are important but TDD is a damn cult.

Work-Life Balance and Remote Work

Work from home is the tits. But lack of whiteboarding sucks. I've never worked at FAANG so I don't know what I'm missing.

If the company is half remote and half on-site, it's important to determine if the remote people aren't treated as second-class citizens. If major decisions are made "at the water cooler", then it's better to try to change the company culture (hard) or move on to a different company that treats its remote employees as first class citizens.

The second worst major downside of working from home is no whiteboard. The first major downside of working from home is that it's hard to learn from coworkers. Unless I'm (a) confident and assertive to ask questions and (b) the company has a culture where remote workers are equivalent to on-site workers, I think it was best that I worked on-site for the first 5 years of my career.

Money, Compensation, and Financial Wisdom

Options are worthless or can make you a millionaire. They're probably worthless unless the headcount of engineering is more than 100. Then maybe they are worth something within this decade.

Max out our 401ks. Be kind to everyone. Not because it'll help your career (it will), but because being kind is rewarding by itself.

I'm making pretty good money. Be grateful and appreciate. Also, save.

Industry Observations and Career Growth

I don't know why full stack webdevs are paid so poorly. No really, they should be paid like half a mil a year just base salary.

Linux is important even when I was working in all Windows. Why? Because I eventually worked in Linux. So happy for those weekend where I screwed around installing Arch.

Everyone knows that tech changes. The tech landscape of the past 10 years has changed dramatically. But fundamentals don't change very much, especially fundamentals that apply to my field.

Data Engineering Specific Insights

Fuck it I'm a data engineer so I might as well give more specific, target advice/experience

SQL is king. Databases like MySQL, Postgres, Oracle, SQL Server, SQLite is still supreme. Even if you work with new tech, most of it transfers anyway.

Most companies aren't doing streaming. It's hard and complicated. If you're 10 years into your career and you don't know how to work with 10k records per second, don't worry about it, there's still jobs out for you.

Airflow is shit, yes. There are other products out there, but fuck me if Airflow isn't the most widely used.

Machine learning projects are highly prone to failure. They're complicated and hard to implement. Don't believe me? How easy is it write fucking unit test a machine learning model? Yeah.

Our field is new. There's no good book on data engineering, just go and "do it". Can't learn it through a bootcamp and shit. This will probably change in 10 years as we all figure out what the fuck we're doing.

Life Lessons and Personal Growth

People die. Do you want your code to be your legacy? If yes, then spend a lot of time on it because that's your fucking legacy and you go! But if you are like me, your legacy is surrounded with family, friends, and people in your life and not the code you write. So don't get too hung up on it.

Good people write shitty code. Smart people write shitty code. Good coders and good engineers write shitty code. Don't let code quality be a dependent variable on your self worth.

I got into tech and coding because tech was my hobby. Now my hobby is is the same as work and work has ruined my hobby. So now if I want to enjoy tech I need to quit my hobby. Or I need to be OK that tech is no longer my hobby and find new hobbies.

Programming and computer science is like, what, 80 years old? Compare that with any other engineering discipline. Yeah, we collectively don't know what the fuck we're doing.

The Reality of Being a Senior Engineer

Being a good engineer means knowing best practices. Being a senior engineer means knowing when to break best practices.

If people are trying to assign blame to a bug or outage, it's time to move on.

A lot of progressive companies, especially startups, talk about bringing your "authentic self". Well what if your authentic self is all about watching porn? Yeah, it's healthy to keep a barrier between your work and personal life.

I love drinking with my co-workers during happy hour. I'd rather spend time with kids, family, or friends.

The best demonstration of great leadership is when my leader took the fall for a mistake that was 100% my fault. You better believe I would've walked over fire for her.

On the same token, the best leaders I've been privileged to work under did their best to both advocate for my opinions and also explain to me other opinions that conflict with mine. I'm working hard to be like them.

Fuck side projects. If you love doing them, great! Even if I had the time to do side-projects, I'm too damn busy writing drunken posts on reddit

Algorithms and data structures are important — to a point. I don't see pharmacist interviews test trivia about organic chemistry. There's something fucked with our industry's interview process.

Damn, those devops guys and gals are f'ing smart. At least those mofos get paid though.

It's not important to do what I like. It's more important to do what I don't hate.

The closer I am to the product, the closer I am to driving revenue, the more I feel valued regardless of how technical my work is. This has been true for even the most progressive companies.

Technology and Tools

Everyone knows that tech changes. The tech landscape of the past 10 years has changed dramatically. But fundamentals don't change very much, especially fundamentals that apply to my field.

Hacker news and r/programming is only good to get general ideas and keep up-to-date. The comments are almost worthless. There's a lot of vocal amateurs with strong opinions about technology. Even amateurs published on "respectable" journals and blogs. I found it to keep abreast of the rumors but to figure things out for myself.

I work at a cutting edge startup and we don't use the latest XYZ tech that was present at ABC cutting edge tech company. And it turn out, what they usually present is only a small percentage of their engineering department and that most of them are using the same tech we are. That being said, it's important to read the signs. If you want to work with modern tech and you're company is still doing the majority of it's development in jQuery, might be time to re-evaluate.

Fuck Jenkins but man I don't think I would be commuting software malpractice by recommending it to a new client.

That being said, git is awful and I have choice but to use it. Also, GUI git tools can go to hell, give me the command line any day. There's like 7 command lines to memorize, everything else can be googled.

Since I work in data, I'm going to give a data-specific lessons learned. Fuck pandas. My job is easier because I have semi-technical analysts on my team. Semi-technical because they know programming but not software engineering. This is a blessing because if something doesn't make sense to them, it means that it was probably badly designed. I love the analysts on the team; they've helped me grow so much more than the most brilliant engineers.

Dark mode is great until you're forced to use light mode (webpage or an unsupported app). That's why I use light mode.

I know enough about security to know that I don't know shit about security.

Final Thoughts

I'm drunk and I usually don't drink, so I would think that everything I say is probably cringy or terrible

I feel strongly that people should save and invest money. If you have a 6 figure salary, do your best to max our your 401k please.

I've become what I've always hated: someone who works in tech in a career but avoid tech in real life. Maybe that comes with being old.

r/ExperiencedDevs is a pretty cool community. Thank you mods. You get way less appreciation than you deserve. Seriously, thank you.

I probably owe my career, my salary, my life to Reddit. Reddit gets a lot of shit but the communities here have lifted me out of poverty (working at a gas station earning min wage) to learning Linux, SQL, python, C#, Python, and others to get me where I am.

Kids are great. I don't have kids by choice. Why? Because I love kids and I'm scared about what kind of father I would be.

Oh shit, is that too personal for a post here?

Once, someone asked me who I looked up to and I said Conan O'Brien, and they laughed at me. But I was being serous because on his last show on the Tonight Show, he told his audience to be kind and work hard. It happened during a difficult period of my life, and when I watched him say that, I said, you know what, I'm going to do just that. Because what would I have to lose? And you know what? I've met some brilliant people who I've learned from over 10+ years because I was kind to them. And I've grown a lot by working hard and not being afraid to try new things. And my life is infinitely, infinitely better because of those words. So yes, it might seem silly and even ridiculous to say that I've achieved a level of fulfillment in my life because of a late night talk show. But you know what, fuck it, it's my life and I will proudly say that I owe any success I've achieved because a fucking comic on late night television.

I'm highly intoxicated so please disregard anything I say. Also apologies for ranting.

I saved this because it's one of the most honest things I've read about our industry. As a data engineer with 10+ years in, I agree with almost all of it — especially the parts about SQL being king, tech stacks not mattering as much as you think, and the best code being no code at all. The only thing I'd push back on is the dynamic languages take. But hey, the man was drunk.