I feel like a failure after reading this list.
Is there a difference between a "senior engineer" and a "highly productive engineer with a long rap sheet of experience, that constantly feels like it's never enough"?
Is there a difference between a "senior engineer" and a "highly productive engineer with a long rap sheet of experience, that constantly feels like it's never enough"?
Seniors should be technical enough to jump in if necessary and they should guide junior engineers as needed but execution is not the main focus of the role.
[0] The exceptions are generally people with deep expertise in domains where that's a rare attribute
At good companies, these two jobs run parallel, not one on top of the other. Management should be viewed as a sidegrade, not a promotion.
A lot of these are super redundant in my opinion.
If you boil them down I bet a lot of these would be mirrored in one living ones life in general. Some of them can be taught but so much more is earned by grit and experience.
I am not pooping on this site at all ... just remember everything in the modern world is made by a human hand. Frail and limited and built on billions of failed attempts. Life is iterative and unpredictable. It is a journey after all. Cruel and wide, with beauty written large everywhere in plain site.
> How to influence another team to use your solution instead of writing their own
> How to give up your baby, that project that you built into something great, so you can do something else
> How to communicate project status to stakeholders
> How to convince management that they need to invest in a non-trivial technical project
> How to craft a project proposal, socialize it, and get buy-in to execute it
> How to get information about what’s really happening (how to gossip, how to network)
There is also PM work in there but that I would say hits a little closer to the senior engineer.