GrumpyYoungMan

You describe impact based on the scope of your job role. Most of the things you do day to day could conceivably be phrased of "I am doing my job and I overcame unusual challenge X / did Y to prevent the problem from occurring next time / taught Z to my coworkers to improve the team." List out those things, take out "I did my job..." part (because doing your job is the bare minimum) and put out those extra things on your resume as your impact.

Contrary to what others say, don't make stuff up unless you're a particularly skilled liar. If you have to ask the questions you are asking, you aren't.

The author's other videos are also worth a look for those interested in physics, particularly the ones that visually show what occurs under various conditions at relativistic speeds. It is astonishing, not to mention trippy, to see the contortions of space-time differing depending on which direction relative to the axis of travel that one is looking.

No, they are managers; management and leadership are different things. Being a manager is a set of things that a person is authorized to do on behalf on their employer, "hire, command work and fire" as you said being examples. Leaders nurture their staff so that they work together effectively as a team to achieve goals. Very few managers are good leaders.

> "I assumed that people who enjoy software would be into intellectual stimulation but I've learned that this is wrong."

It was truer in the 1980s-1990s, when programming was not a prestigious or high paying job and computers were much cruder and required much more skill to get adequate performance from them. Generally, aspiring hackers were very well read people.

There were, of course, corporate programmers doing business programming back then too but they weren't considered hackers and wouldn't even have wanted themselves to be considered hackers.

In what way? RF test equipment is costly and so is building a home electronics lab.

> "...stuck with hardware out of passion..."

At least you don't hate your job, I hope? The recent maturation of AI revealed how many people in software seemingly loathe their own profession.

> Fred Brooks "throw one away" philosophy

Everybody remembers that soundbite but nobody remembers that he changed his mind about it later and switched to advocating iterative refinement.

Developer testing is checking whether the code does what the developer themself thinks it should. QA testing is checking whether the code does what the customers / users / rest of the world thinks it should.

My frequent "senior moments" are what make me senior. (ba-dum-tish)

Terry Pratchett's Going Postal seems particularly apropos these days as we have Reacher Gilts aplenty in tech news headlines.

Obscure and a bit dated but Bruce Betkhe's Head Crash is hilarious if you've been deeply immersed in the software industry.