An incomplete list of skills senior engineers need, beyond coding

A lot of these resonate with me but I also bucket about half of them under the "someone else isn't doing their job but our collective failure will be my problem even if it's not my fault, so fine I will paper over both your and our org's dysfunction in order to still meet my expectations."

So, I dunno. All orgs are dysfunctional to some degree, and things fall through cracks and people don't do their job (usually through no real fault of their own, their incentives might just not be aligned the same way yours are, or they're juggling things, etc). So these skills will be useful no matter where you go.

But I was senior at my last place too and didn't need to use many of those "papering over dysfunction" skills and was generally happier with my work and results and life and such.

So, I think some of these skills are about being senior, and I think others are a lot more like "how to be senior [at a big dysfunctional sufficiently FAANG-shaped type company]". My last place was not very FAANG-y and my current place is quite FAANG-y.

So YMMV. Mine certainly did. But the faangier it is, the better it generally pays, so... cheers I suppose.

0. How to market yourself and get a job as senior engineer