Seniority in Software Engineering
I’d expect a senior engineer to be a technically capable individual who thinks and understands human psychology, has good self-motivation skills that would ignite the team motivation as well and is dependable. I wanted to pour some thoughts, think out loud about seniority and to reflect on some discussions I’ve had with some friends recently.
What Doesn’t Make a Senior Engineer
There may be multiple things to mention as pitfalls to understand if the subject individual is senior or not in a broad sense, but there is a common theme I see companies and teams fall into, and some of the characteristics of those mistakes seem important to discuss here.
Strong technical skills are important, but not everything. I believe this is such a common misconception in growing companies that anyone that can develop some basic features starts calling themselves “senior engineers”, which damages the “senior engineer” image of the company in the employees’ eyes. An experienced engineer may be able to develop a lot of software, but that shouldn’t bring seniority automatically as that doesn’t imply that the individual understands about business, can motivate self and the ones around or can be relied upon. Overall, if I were to list traits of a senior engineer, technical skills wouldn’t be in the top 3 on that list.
