#thoughts
Some half-thoughts on senior engineers.
As your seniority grows, you go from completing tasks, to providing business value.
Instead of asking what card to pick up, you help create and refine cards. [[20211007190845-what-to-do]] Instead of blindly completing a task, you ask questions [[20220411123326-owning-projects-senior-engineer]] Instead of siloed work, you force multiply to get projects done [[20220411123138-senior-engineers-get-nothing-done]] Instead of doing what's told, you check if it's urgent [[20220704122153-check-if-work-is-urgent]]
You start to help with bigger projects, work on strategy more than code, and help others achieve broader team goals, rather than your own.
This aligns with how you can sell yourself to prospective companies too. You don't just write code, you provide value through code and knowledge.
You're not paid for effort - you're paid for the value you bring.
I sometimes think of this as "product thinking", but that's not the best term for it - I just haven't found a better one. Anecdotally the people that exude product thinking are the ones that get promoted.
To categorise things, maybe 'business' is large scale and product is slightly smaller? Anecdotally I'm better at the latter. As you become more senior, your scale gets larger. Product managers naturally have a larger scale too as that's their job. When you are more junior, you need to consider more things like small technical tradeoffs.
Either way you still need to consider the justification of why you're doing something. Ask the right questions, make the tradeoffs, thinking about effort/reward. [[20231006045323-five-whys]]
[[20250728012225-valuable-work-done]]