Ask HN: What accomplishments would you propose for a senior dev?
My usual day-to-day duties of senior engineer are: work on my Jira issues, improve the state of our code bases, talk with stakeholders to gather/clarify requirements, talk with other engineers/PMs to push features that span more than one team's effort, mentor more junior colleagues, do tech interviews, keep our documentation up-to-date, and basically all be the insible glue that makes everything work... Now, this doesn't give you automatically a raise (it's a shame because it's hard work, and it's work none of my other colleagues does) since I have already used all of that to get a raise last year.
So, I've been planning my "accomplishments" for the next 6 months. I don't really mind doing silly/useless/useful/hard work; my goal is just to get a raise. This is what I came up with:
- introduce the team to TypeScript by "rewriting" one of our simplest and smallest services on it. 100% of the services we own are written in JS, so TS would be a win for everyone (devs: something new to show in their CVs, em: less bugs, system: easier to work with in the long term)
- introduce the team to Go. In our company some teams are already using Go for microservices. The gain here for the team would be to get to know another programming language and environment (so that would be good for their CVs), and for the managers the selling point would be: performance and attract more talent (since Go is kinda sexier than JS/TS somehow)
I'm a bit stuck for now in getting more ideas. I imagine that as time goes, I'll get more opportunities to work on something more visible (e.g., team X needs help with feature Y that has some relationship with out services... I would raise my hand to help them with that), but do you know some generic stuff that I could use to impress my eng. manager and get my raise?