Become a next level Senior Engineer
Today's article will be a bit different then my usual technical focused ones. I will share how to stand out as a Senior Engineer.
We all know Senior Engineers could mean different in each company, by a general definition a Senior Engineer is the one who has deep understanding of teams projects, write design documents, mentor juniors, help team succeed etc. These are all very common and must have to be successful, however, in my opinion to take it to next level, we should think beyond these and work on things that can create more impact for the team. Some of my favorites' are mentioned below:
💡My experience is mainly in small to mid size companies, so this may not be applicable to you depending on culture, size and environment etc.
🚀Help Setting up Team Goals
Most companies have some kind of goal setting framework, I have mainly worked with OKRs. A Senior Engineer contributes in achieving Team Goals but does not usually take part in helping the Lead/Manager when setting Team Goals, this is a great opportunity to step up, however this highly depends on culture. A pure Top Down culture would limit this.
🔓Unblocking the Team
Senior Engineers can unblock Team in many ways:
Code Reviews
Design Reviews
Pointing to right information
Directing to right Individuals
Pair programming
And many more, these comes with experience and the more you help the better you become. Being their for team is highly effective and especially during critical times like incidents and postpartum.
🤝Cross Team Relationships
You may be working with many different teams but are you really building good relationships? These are very important, having good relations means you can get things done faster, you can get help when needed and you can influence decision when there is a conflict. This is also a step towards the Staff Engineer.
📖Recommended book: The Staff Engineer's Path
👨✈Leading by Example
You may already been doing code reviews, introducing best practices and standards across your team, however you can also take this further by embedding company's culture and values in yourself to become the leader and the right example for your Team. For example, the feedback culture is very hard to follow and you can be the one to start practicing it.
📈Understanding Business Value
We all have worked hard and solved the problems either for our learning purpose or for a internal scoped projects, connecting work with business value is a challenging thing to do especially when their is ambiguity and lack of transparency. As a Senior, your work should be easy to interpret in terms of business impact.
🧹Doing the Grungiest Work
When you are a Senior Engineer, it does not mean you will be working with newer and bigger projects all the time, most of the time you should take responsibility of some of the dirtiest and tedious work that can help your Team and no one is willing to work on. E.g. Refactoring a legacy codebase, depreciating XYZ service, etc.
🌟Leaving the Shiny things Behind
Most Junior and Mid Level Engineers want to work on latest shiny things This was me few years ago, however this is something that we should train our brain that latest trends are not the ultimate achievement. The goal is to solve a problem by leveraging existing tools in the best possible manner.
🖼️ Seeing the Bigger Picture
Instead of focusing on smaller scope projects, taking a step back and thinking it from a broader perspective opens lot of new avenues. Probably you can connect it to a broader business goal and help team achieve bigger longer term goals that may be vague initially.
👥Delegating Work
Sometimes it is very hard to delegate some interesting work that you think can be knocked off in few days, but the best is to let others handle those if they are willing and capable of, this not only frees your time to focus on more important work but also give your team the opportunity to grow.
🔊Sharing Work Publicly
This means sharing your work outside your team, giving recognition to team either within the company or through external blog posts. This approach helps other teams leverage your services, skills and expertise when needed. Learn more about benefits of Knowledge Sharing.
💡Some of the above are very good stepping stone towards the Staff Engineering Path.
I hope this was a a useful content, please provide feedback, I can also provide real examples from my experience for each one of the above.
For more focused content on career growth, check out these newsletters High Growth Engineer by Jordan Cutler and The Developing Dev by Ryan Peterman.