Ask HN: How to improve being the most senior in your team?
Apart from the obvious 'change job or change teams'. At the moment conditions are not the most favourable for me to change jobs, the job market is not the best right now and it's not feasible at all a change of teams, as I don't work in a tech/software company but rather am the Software/AI branch of an engineering company.
My manager is completely non technical with no coding background, but contacts and good knowledge of the business.
In the team of 8 I am the most experienced having 1 year as an intern/junior in another company before this one (I am now 2 years in this job) because I spend a huge amount of time teaching myself, and doing side projects, and enjoy coding outside work.
The company sees AI as R & D outside the core business and committed in hiring people with no experience to not spend much on the salaries of the team.
This has led to the half blind (me) leading the blind (the rest of the team) teaching concepts I've investigated and learned on my own time, and asking AI to continuosly roleplay as a FAANG Staff Engineer and critique my code.
This has led me to start implementing logging, unit tests, integration tests, e2e tests, design patterns like router-service-repository, etc...
We are a pure Python shop mainly composed of data scientists, I tried introducing Go for CLI's and backends met with huge resistance, as well as basic JS (typescript is out of question) for frontends mainly Vibe coded.
I have a lot of freedom on how I implement my own projects (positive of my manager being non technical) and have set precommits on my solo projects were I can't commit without full linting, 80% test coverage, and tests passing (despite these standards not being needed at all).
Given these circumstances, those who don't have the chance of having a mentor, I'm sure I'm not the only one, what's the best way to keep improving so I can be set up the best by the time the job market improves? A reading group is one approach. Regular reading of software development blogs, even older ones, will teach you a lot. Expand your professional network by using local meetups or other professional events to find a mentor.