Ask HN: What non-technical skills make a senior dev and how to develop them?

Senior devs in each of these types of companies have some skills in common and some that are particular.

The common ones, in my opinion:

* Ability to communicate with non technical folks

* Ability to estimate relatively accurately

* Willingness to do grunt work to raise team productivity

* Ability to work self sufficiently, own a big chunk of work, possibly leading small team

* Knowing when to raise an issue to higher ups

* Willingness and ability to mentor folks more junior

* Knowledge of the general software landscape for your domain, including what is buyable vs requires building

How to acquire?

* Seek mentors

* Always be learning

* Seek out folks outside of your department and learn what problems they face

* Attend conferences, technical meetups, or other online learning opportunities

* Help out

* Focus on solving problems and not on being right

Disclaimer: I have spent some time in larger orgs, but mostly as a contractor so my advice may not be applicable for those.

Some things that you would want to start focusing on:

1) Figuring out what projects come next, and designing them.

2) Figuring out what your team wants to work on, so you can shape future projects to be exciting to them. (We always have an infinite number of things to do, so you might as well pick the things that are most interesting!)

3) Doing detailed designs, so that work can be parcelled out to people that are gaining experience.

As you might guess, at this point you are doing more than working alone or working on engineering tasks that someone else defined. You are defining the tasks, and are starting to define the bigger projects.

Your individual contributions should be setting the standards for others that work with you. Write that extra test, clean up that documentation, don't launch a new service without monitoring. What you value will become what your team values, by your example.

How to get to this point? Hopefully the more senior members of your team are setting you up for success; allowing you to do some of these tasks until you're good enough to do them without supervision.

That could be removing roadblocks by flushing out designs and specs like other people have mentioned, or finding better processes and practices to make the team more effective. Of course, there is also the proper introduction of new technology or techniques to raise the company forward as well.