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Weak Soft Skills: Why you are stuck at the Senior engineer level

pathtostaff.substack.com

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Re: Weak Soft Skills: Why you are stuck at the Senior engineer level

#11

Post by disattention »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #2

I have observed that a Staff engineer has mastered these three skills: Communication, Adaptability, Challenging Situation Management Normalize being just a really productive IC. Not everyone wants to spend their energy on these facets of a job; some folks just want to build awesome stuff -- and that should be fine.

I think it's unwise to dismiss soft skills as getting in the way of that goal. As responsibility increases, and the complexity of your work increases, you'll have to lead people at some point. You can absolutely remain an überproductive IC forever, but you will cap out on what you can achieve -- and most importantly, what you can control -- by virtue of almost all great accomplishments being realized by more than one person.

Wanting to remain as technical as possible and be paid for your ability is valid, but soft skills will multiply your knowledge (and therefore value) across a team. In fact, I would argue soft skills are necessary to actualize your own potential as an IC within a team

Re: Weak Soft Skills: Why you are stuck at the Senior engineer level

#13

Post by balls187 »

Who is this guy and why are we listening to his advice?

Edit to add:

None of this advice really holds. At the end of the day, your technical ability is what matters. If you're gunning for a promotion, figure out what your manager needs to achieve their annual performance bonus, and make sure you are instrumental in helping them achieve that.

Otherwise, find a staff level position elsewhere, and apply for that.

Soft skills aren't what holds engineers back from advancing.

Re: Weak Soft Skills: Why you are stuck at the Senior engineer level

#14

Post by brigadier132 »

It's not just being able to communicate, you need to adopt a persona.

As a more experienced engineer that is actually extremely passionate about my work, the difference in the way I'm treated when I adopt a calm, cool persona speaking with a calm voice vs being excited, passionate, and appearing happy is significant.

I can communicate the same idea effectively using both personas but being detached, calm and cool just seems to garner respect more easily.

Re: Weak Soft Skills: Why you are stuck at the Senior engineer level

#15

Post by drblastoff »

I’m constantly torn by the natural inclination to climb the ladder and enjoy the financial rewards, but I have little interest in the day-to-day tasks of my staff engineer coworkers (mostly sitting in meetings and writing emails, very rarely writing code because that’s considered beneath their pay grade and they’d likely be chastised for it at my company). If I had a family to provide for, I think it would be a much easier decision to take the money.

Re: Weak Soft Skills: Why you are stuck at the Senior engineer level

#16

Post by ozim »

vunderba wrote: post #9

From the article: "Watch how your audience reacts. You have the benefit of being able to see how people in the audience react. See if they're engaged or falling asleep, and tailor your delivery." Tips like these are becoming increasingly less applicable in the advent of remote only jobs.

Unless everyone has webcam off and are muted and stop participating - I still can see people rolling their eyes when someone is saying something silly, I still can see someone is unhappy with decision we just made. I still can get some stuff from tone of voice when person disagrees even if they have webcam off.

Re: Weak Soft Skills: Why you are stuck at the Senior engineer level

#17

Post by balls187 »

svaha1728 wrote: post #3

Nothing wrong with the senior engineer level. I’ve had the experience of managing 75 developers and I enjoy the fact that right now I’m “just” a Senior Software Engineer.

Back in my day, Staff was below Senior.

But staff engineer wasn’t really used, and title inflation started giving out senior level titles for 3 years experience, so I guess Staff got rebranded as more senior than senior.

Re: Weak Soft Skills: Why you are stuck at the Senior engineer level

#18

Post by jph »

> "Do not share a half-assed draft."

It turns out that an important soft skill is knowing how to make these kinds of drafts work in your favor, especially with internal stakeholders, by doing drafts that are annotated with where you want help and input.

As one example, "We want to work on the foobar because [get exact wording from team] to improve throughput [%]. We will request [#] team members for the next [n] months. We're working on decision records for our top 3 options which are [1, 2, 3]." Share these one-on-one with each stakeholder, gather feedback, and hone the draft.

For technical work as described in the post as "write a technical spec for engineers in & outside of my team", I recommend trying an architecture decision record, and sharing drafts early/often with stakeholders.

https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/architecture-decision...

Re: Weak Soft Skills: Why you are stuck at the Senior engineer level

#19

Post by convolvatron »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #8
convolvatron wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

these aren't exclusive. ultimately our ability to function as engineers has to be in the broader context of the organization. to build thing that are designed to solve customer or organizational problems. to do so in a way that slots in with existing systems and cultures. the function sympathetically as part of broader team. but _that_ should be enough. more than enough, and in any organization larger than 50 people…

Sure, but the premise of the article: Welcome to the very first post on Path to Staff Engineering! Subscribe, and I will teach you the skills to level up to Staff faster Is basically "here's why you can't get promoted" . This is the classic "Maker vs Manager" dilemma that we've created with regards to technical career path ascension. A staff ENGINEER is still an engineer; reserve that role for your strongest ICs. Mak…

I don't care about promotion. what gets lost here is how we drive the product. we vest all the authority to a manager, and the manger rightfully sees their role as mataining the culture and the group. how do actual engineering decision get made. how to we decide how to evolve the product? thats not in the wheelhouse of the manager. increasingly ICs are encouraged to see their work in isolation - they get a task, they get to decide how to do it, and retire it in two weeks or less. How do we set direction as a group? How do we actually make a cohesive design rather than just dig a pile of feature requests. mostly it seems we just don't.

as an engineer I don't want to deal with scheduling people's vacations. I do think there is a real need for a manager to build and shape a group. To treat people like people instead of just contributors. but broadly as an industry we are totally failing to make decent strategic technical decisions and follow through.

Re: Weak Soft Skills: Why you are stuck at the Senior engineer level

#20

Post by linuxftw »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #2

I have observed that a Staff engineer has mastered these three skills: Communication, Adaptability, Challenging Situation Management Normalize being just a really productive IC. Not everyone wants to spend their energy on these facets of a job; some folks just want to build awesome stuff -- and that should be fine.

Nah, you're supposed to play PM and manager so those people can do less than nothing.
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