The "Other Skills" Needed for Senior Engineers
I am already good at programming and system design. How do I become a senior engineer?
I get this question a lot. Here is my latest attempt to answer the question around career progressions and skills needed to move from freshmen to a junior engineer to senior engineer levels.
A lot of brilliant engineers seem to not graduate from being freshmen engineers to senior engineers; some of these engineers are brilliant coders, they understand scale, performance, asynchronous processing and can also invert a binary tree ;-) Many of them need to develop these "other" skills:
📣 Communication
- Asking for help when they are blocked beyond a certain time
- Asking relevant questions so that they can learn more
- Raising red flags on delivery timelines
- Ability to explain technical designs/challenges to non-technical folks
- Highlighting potential risks on requirements and delivery - also suggesting alternate requirements
🤝 Collaboration
- Ability to work with product managers, product analysts directly for most stories
- Collaborating with other engineers to build larger solutions
- Understanding requirements business and technical requirements
- Building consensus for reversible decisions
- Building consensus for one-way decisions
❤️ Ownership
- Representing their team
- Recommending changes to processes
- Identifying and prioritizing tech debt
- Raising their hands to take on new challenges (also called opportunities)
🎨 Larger picture
- Mentoring, helping, and guiding other engineers - you need not have a senior designation to do this
- Thinking about the company and not just about their team
- Solving problems from a customer point of view
- Deliberate thinking between trigger and reaction
- Thinking about what will make life better for their team and their manager
Many of these are simple sentences that take us years to become good enough. Some of these are considered signs of maturity or of a high emotional quotient. I hope having this list will give you a way to assess where you are currently in your career journey. This is not an exhaustive list.
The pursuit to become a better version of yourself shouldn't stop once you become a senior engineer.