On lead/senior, and staff, engineering

An On X.

A senior software engineer is an amorphous title. Companies will often use their own term, or invent further terms above or below “senior”. The definition or requirements will be different for each person you ask.

I’ve sought out common traits of “senior” roles and collected them here to help guide me as I try to get good. I expect a majority of these traits are common for all senior roles — software engineer or otherwise.

Incorporate Sources; expand

• (Allspaw n.d.)
• (littleblah 2019)
• Ben Kuhn | Be Impatient
• Tanya Reilly | The Staff Engineer’s Path
• Zach Tellman | Senior Engineers Reduce Risk
• John Allspaw | On Being A Senior Engineer
• Kamran Ahmed | Levels of Seniority
• Cedric Chin | Expertise Is ‘Just’ Pattern Matching
• Tom Limoncelli | What Makes a Sysadmin a Senior Sysadmin?
• Becoming a Staff Engineer (a)
• Understand the context before taking action or giving advice. This may involve taking preliminary action (Just start, Feedback loop) to gather the appropriate contexual information. The right decision, answer, etc, is always “It depends”.
• Understand the flow of data through the system; 10,000 foot view
• Understand the fundamental problems that your solution addresses
  • Enables comprehension of which new features are important and when to prioritize X over Y
  • Follow up question: How well does it address the problem, and could it be better?
• Understands the distinction between ‘done’ and ‘done-done’
  • ‘done’
    • AKA code complete
    • Not totally done. Done with one or more asterisk.
  • ‘done-done’
    • Actually done
    • All bugs/tickets closed or otherwise treated appropriately
    • Documentation written
    • Processes followed through to completion
    • Retrospective performed
    • Stakeholders informed
    • Hacks fixed
• Camille Fournier | An Incomplete List of Skills Senior Engineers Need, beyond Coding
• Sabrina Leandro | So You’re Staff+ … Now What?
• Manage their time effectively; James F. Kile, Donald J. Little, Samir Shah | Busy Person Patterns
  • Work on things that matter
  • Avoid busywork, etc
  • Delegate whenever possible to ensure you’re working on something that only you can do
• Networking
  • Maintain mutually beneficial relationships with peers within your organization, company, and externally
• Senior engineers manage scope
• (“16x Engineer” n.d.)
• (NO_ITEM_DATA:StoriesReachingStaffplus)

Just accepted my first team lead position. Any sage advice? (a)

How do you shine when you working amongst really smart people? (a)

Bibliography

Backlinks

• Dan Moore | Cultivate the Skill of Undivided Attention, or “Deep Work”