Gosha The Engineer (ep 7)

Senior Engineers

When Gosha started his career fresh out of college, he immediately realized he wanted to be a senior engineer. Being a senior engineer was cool from all perspectives: it meant more power and respect, a bigger paycheck, more freedom to choose what to work on.

It was also relatively clear to Gosha how to become a senior engineer: you had to be smart, work a lot, have a lot of impact, get along with your teammates and your manager and have a lot of patience.

But what really distinguished a senior engineer from an even more senior engineer or from a really very senior engineer (those levels tended to have slightly different names in different software companies where Gosha worked).

Was it about knowledge and experience? Was it about a track record of achievements? Was it about connections, or tenure, or working really long hours? Did it have to do with a personal charisma or self-assertion?

Well, frankly speaking it had to do a little bit with all of that. Meaning that the seniority level definitely had a certain positive correlation with all of those factors, but at the same time Gosha quickly realized that none of those factors were defining.

Admittedly, all good senior engineers had a few qualities in common. They knew how to get along with people. They were self-motivated and persistent. They were smart, ambitious and hard-working.

But if there was one quality that defined a senior engineer it was this: the ability to recognize patterns that mattered.

A less senior engineer, regardless what formal level they had in the company, could spend hours arguing about what language was to be used for a new subsystem. A truly senior engineer knew the pattern. They didn’t care about the argument, but they insisted that whatever language choice the team makes, they should prioritize investing into an end-to-end testing system early on. Senior engineers have been there and done that. They have gotten their fingers burnt multiple times, they suffered multiple professional traumas, but they rationalized those experiences and they learned how to avoid those pitfalls. They learned how to recognize patterns when nobody else yet saw any signs of trouble.

Gosha observed a fun fact: typically when a senior engineer stated their opinion, it wasn’t something terribly complex, or novel, or unexpected. It was never something like “We will rewrite that subsystem in Haskel with wrappers in Javascript”. On the contrary, very often it was a simple truth, something that everyone knew but avoided to admit. Senior engineers told their teams simple things like “We should focus on testing and make sure our system can scale”. And everyone went like “Sigh.. Alright, alright, this is true”, and followed their advice.

Senior engineers were bearers of common wisdom, the things that you can read in a textbook. But the wisdom was alive in them in the form of internalized rationalized pain and frustration.

And that was what made senior engineers so valuable.