What senior engineers do: fix knowledge holes

I had a bad week a few weeks back, and got together with a friend and former colleague. We started trading war stories. He mentioned one time when he was working for a company which had both a desktop client and a server component. The communication between the two pieces of the system was completely, utterly undocumented. The original engineers who had written each piece of the app had departed. The system was key to the companies business (it was what they sold!).

This “knowledge hole” was identified by my friend. He was a software engineer. This was a key piece of software, but was unknown. The problem was not getting solved.

So, he solved it.

He installed the client and a TCP sniffer, and clicked around the client. He recorded all the traffic. He literally reverse engineered the client/server communication protocol. He then documented what the communication protocol was, so the the next group of engineers could benefit. He was was a software developer who was responsible for the back end systems. I don’t think he was directly responsible for the client/server protocol and the client was, I believe, outside his purview. (Updated 7/20) Note, he was a software engineer, not QA or a network engineer. But he didn’t let the role definition stop him.

I thought to myself, this is the textbook definition of a senior engineer. You see a problem, you solve it (thoroughly), you document it and you level up your team.

It was pretty awesome to hear about.

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