Choice quote: "I expect a “senior” engineer to be a mature engineer."
He elaborates at length about what that means in the post.
Choice quote: "I expect a “senior” engineer to be a mature engineer."
He elaborates at length about what that means in the post.
One thing I'd like to add is that a senior engineer works to build a culture and team where anyone--especially themselves--is replaceable. If you document your high-level thinking, if you break projects into lots of small manageable chunks, and make sure that at least one or two other people know everything you know, you will find that progress is a lot faster and that lots of bottlenecks magically disappear.
And ironically, for working to make yourself replaceable, you will probably find that you are treated better.
If somebody is not replaceable (and hence a potential bottleneck), they are by definition a risk. Therefore, it is in everyone's best interest to replace them and the system that enabled them, in order to harden everything against bad luck.
The cowboy coder who wrote most of the MVP in PHP in a month, for example, should be replaced forthwith if she can't document her work and get the rest of the team up to speed--if for no other reason than that she is a liability as the team grows and more things depend on her not failing.
It's kind of a counter-intuitive way of looking at it, but it makes sense.
"Mature engineers are empathetic"
Which to me means that most engineers are not mature, and not senior. Considering how much poor behavior I've seen by so-called "Sr" engineers I am hardly surprised. In a world where people are infrequently called to answer for their anti-social behavior directly, of course it will continue.
Ultimately I blame the internets for that. Cant easily have empathy online, no emotional feedback loop.