Senior engineers and interpersonal skills
How can individual contributor engineers advance in their careers? My favorite article on the subject is John Allspaw’s “On Being a Senior Engineer.” In arguing that engineering seniority goes beyond technical skills, he states, “I expect a “senior” engineer to be a mature engineer.”
His idea resonates with my experience. The best senior engineers I’ve known have a way of making big things happen. They don’t just know stuff. They don’t just get things done. They can change an entire team’s approach to a problem and they can do it quickly. I’ve sometimes struggled to explain what it looks like for someone to wield that power.
We recently did an analysis of our career ladder that suggested a similar conclusion: engineers who are more senior don’t derive their impact from superior technical knowledge alone. They exhibit a skillset that makes others around them better.
Some years back, we adopted a slightly modified version of Artsy’s career ladder. To make it easier to understand, Maria Dunn, our VP of People and Culture, suggested that we group the 45 competencies into themes. We found seven categories: Knowledge of engineering practices, Knowledge of Managed by Q systems, Execution skills, Mentorship, Impact, Technical strategy, and Evangelism.
It was fascinating to zoom out on the categorized career ladder. The knowledge and execution criteria, such as “Acknowledged as an expert in a particular service or technology area,” were clustered towards the more junior roles. That is, early in a career, advancement depends on knowing more stuff and on getting things done. But towards the middle of our career ladder, more criteria started to map towards the “influence” roles: Mentorship, Impact, Technical strategy, and Evangelism.
This lesson is similar to the lesson from John Allspaw’s post: interpersonal, non-technical skills are essential for individual contributor engineers to advance in seniority. I don’t mean to say that technical and execution skills are unimportant — the skill required to build something like Google search is obviously extraordinary. But even at that level of technical complexity, the ability to communicate ideas and influence others is essential.
Have a look our at our categorized career ladder here. (For what it’s worth, this ladder will be short-lived. Shortly after we categorized our career ladder, we were acquired by WeWork. WeWork’s ladder has principles that are similar to our seven categories, which made it easier for us to adopt their system.)
