When is a senior engineer not a senior engineer?

http://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/2812

by mooreds • 8 years ago

48 41 8 years ago

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didgeoridoo• 8 years ago

You can’t find someone who is good at everything, so what do you really need? What does your organization need?

It’s amazing how rarely this question is asked outside the context of specific technology skills.

mooreds3• 8 years ago

I think it is a harder question than just "what technical skills are needed", but good hiring managers and team builders think about it.

thisisit• 8 years ago

I have never understood the need for a moonshot applicant - someone who is good at everything.

Most of the time people spend hours interviewing lot of people looking for that one brilliant engineer but as the reality dawns on them, they end up hiring who has some essential skills.

Later they bemoan that he/she is not good at an non-essential skill. At that time when you say, well, why don't we hire someone with those non-essential skills? It comes down to money.

marcinzm2• 8 years ago

I think more broadly people just don't think as much as they should about what they really (and realistically) need in a hire and if their hiring process actually selects for that.

codingdave• 8 years ago

This question gets rehashed a lot, and I like some of the answers posted. Personally, I mostly go with "It depends." But the one thing I hold to is what a senior engineer is NOT. An amazing coder who doesn't help the team, doesn't step up at crunch time, and/or chooses their own path to the detriment of the needs of the business... is not a senior engineer.

mooreds3• 8 years ago

Good point. What would you call them?

angarg12• 8 years ago

Rick.

https://medium.freecodecamp.org/we-fired-our-top-talent-best...

icc97• 8 years ago

I've also heard them called them simply assholes. I think it was a the Pinterest CEO talking about their hiring a few years ago, ie "we don't hire assholes".

bitL7• 8 years ago

Yeah, those are usually called principal/distinguished engineers or technical co-founders.

stephengillie• 8 years ago

One team's senior engineer is another team's junior engineer. Some companies feel like "training companies", with low technical standards, lenient management, and forgiving customers. Often, the senior engineer here is tasked with being the person to learn a new technology and evangelize/disseminate. "Senior" here indicates technology generalist leadership.

Other companies, with higher standards, demanding management, and highly productive customers, mandate the domain experience - if by sheer job task difficulty alone. "Senior" here indicates siloed domain experience.

It can be good experience to oscillate between the 2 - join a team needing a generalist to learn how everything works, then leave for a team needing a specialist in a specific domain. Because silos are constantly becoming general standards, being a "block-shaped" engineer means being "T-shaped" in different fields.

UK-Al052• 8 years ago

I've seen this used as an excuse to hire people at lower level. Only to find out the company is even worse technically.

bitL7• 8 years ago

Exactly, if you see this kind of rhetoric, run.

UK-Al052• 8 years ago

The reality seems to be almost completely arbitrary. Does the manager get along with you enough in the interview to push you in to a higher pay grade?

Do they think your going to leave but have legacy knowledge which they need you for?

0x445442• 8 years ago

To me a senior engineer is one who can lead a team in the design, documentation, implementation, deployment and maintenance of a system which realizes a quantifiable ROI for the organization and they've preferably done this with different tech stacks.

These can be internal systems which focus on more efficient processes for the organization or external facing systems which generate revenue.

I've worked with a LOT of engineers that have never built and delivered anything of real value. That's not to blame them, as there's a tremendous amount of waste in both the public and private sector driven by middle management layers.

But in my book, if one wants the title Senior Engineer then one has to have built and shipped something that generates more revenue (directly or indirectly) than what the system cost to build and maintain.

doorbumper• 8 years ago

But in my book, if one wants the title Senior Engineer then one has to have built and shipped something that generates more revenue (directly or indirectly) than what the system cost to build and maintain.

Wouldn't that eliminate engineers at companies that never found product market fit, or figured out their monetization strategy? Many projects get shipped, delivered, and used without generating revenue.

zantana• 8 years ago

I would add in larger organizations its merely pay grade issue where senior engineer is typically one pay grade and regular engineer is typically a lower pay grade.

In the organization I currently work the salary level for a regular engineer is generally too low to get good candidates so everyone tends to be a senior engineer or better.

marcinzm2• 8 years ago

To me a Senior Engineer is one I can trust to implement a successful project end-to-end with minimal hand holding.

In some environments that means technical leadership or project management over a team. In others it may mean being a domain and tech stack expert who can do it themselves. Other times it's someone who can quickly jump into a new domain and get things done.

gurkendoktor• 8 years ago

I think this minimal hand-holding is also my "pet criteria".

A senior developer can get stuck, but never gives up. There's always a way. Read source code, google around, be creative, trust your intuition (which is really just accumulated experience). Come up with a plan and make good use of available resources.

mooreds3• 8 years ago

That is a very good definition, which has the virtue of being flexible but the vice of being all things to all people.

tkxxx7• 8 years ago

Development support/operations/devops: this is the glue around your application that helps your application function. These tasks can range from developer focused tasks like a coding style guide or maintaining the developer docker image to operations tasks like setting up the monitoring system to devops tasks like debugging the failing jenkins job.

So either developer-tasks, operations-tasks, or developer-operations-tasks, if we were wondering.

aisofteng• 8 years ago

I generally understand the title of senior engineer at an organization as indicating that the so titled person can be relied on to solve the majority of engineering needs of that organization - essentially, a senior engineer is the person you ask how to do something when you don't know how to do something.

mcnamaratw2• 8 years ago

"Senior engineer" is just a boilerplate pay grade description for someone who isn't straight out of undergrad school. Some of these people know what they're doing and some don't. Some of them want to do what really needs to be done, and some don't.

When is a senior engineer not a senior engineer?

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