Ask HN: Advice to become a better Software Engineer (transferred from Hardware)

1 points by joe_lin ↗ HN
I'm in a bit of a unique (and lucky!) situation -- my company was acquired by a large FAANG(software company). I'm going to stay for a couple years. My background is in robotics / mechatronics (PhD), so while I can write code I'm not a traditional SWE.

However, they had me do an "evidence based" ladder transfer to SWE, and we used firmware that I wrote (in production) as the evidence. I'm currently at Senior Staff level, so I'm primarily managing SWEs who do most of the coding / checking in code these days.

Any advice on how I could use my position to become a better programmer / learn skills for my next startup? I have a decent signal processing background, proficient in python, and can do stuff in C (can hack stuff in C++). I've been learning some swift for IOS.

At this point I'm pretty sure I'd fail any classical SWE / Leetcode interview, but I don't even know if that would be expected of me in the future. Definitely not if I do another company...

Maybe spend time getting better at UI / UX design? Any advice would be greatly appreciated! I'd like to learn whatever I can while I'm at this company...they can also pay for classes. Thanks!

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