There's this great post by John Allspaw called "On being a senior engineer". I originally read it 4ish years ago when I started my current job and it really influenced how I thought about the direction I wanted to go in.
Rereading it 4 years later, one thing that's really interesting to me about that blog post is that it's explaining that empathy / helping your team succeed is an important part of being a senior engineer. Which of course is true!
But from where I stand today, most (all?) of the senior engineers I know take on a significant amount of helping-other-people work in addition to their individual programming work. The challenge I see me/my coworkers struggling with today isn't so much "what?? I have to TALK TO PEOPLE?? UNBELIEVABLE." and more "wait, how do I balance all of this leadership work with my individual contributions / programming work in a way that's sustainable for me? How much of what kind of work should I be doing?". So instead of talking about the attributes that a senior engineer has from Allspaw's post (which I totally agree with), instead I want to talk here about the work that a senior engineer does.
- Read on jvns.ca/blog/senior-engineer/
I like this write up as much for what Julia says not to do.
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