Weak Soft Skills: Why you are stuck at the Senior engineer level • Hacker News Board

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

#31

Post by SoftTalker » Mon, Aug 05, 2024, 4:24 PM UTC

balls187 wrote: post #17

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.

Same. "Staff" was entry level. The word "Junior" was not used in job titles, and I still think it sounds belittling.

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

#32

Post by pc86 » Mon, Aug 05, 2024, 4:24 PM UTC

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.

People want to be "a really productive IC" and just churn out tickets and never have any meetings and be short with their peers. That's fine if you accept that there is a ceiling to your career if you behave that way, and that ceiling is far below Staff level both in terms of respect and also impact and compensation, and rightly so. But expecting to continue to get promotions and buckets of money for churning out JIRA tickets is not something that should be "normalized."

At some point you have to be nice to work with, be able to communicate to a group why you want to make the changes you want to make, be able to adapt those changes to fit in with changing demands from leadership, and/or be able to convince your boss's boss why it's worth pushing back on those changing demands. That's all still IC work. "Doing tickets" is great but is a small part of a bigger picture.

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

#33

Post by javier_e06 » Mon, Aug 05, 2024, 4:25 PM UTC

A world filled with MS Power Point presentations with lots of bullet points and sprint velocity charts and 2 hour technical meetings is a sad world.

Stuck? Hardly. I protect my mental well being by working on mid size companies where where science and politics are important and yet, separate and equal concerns.

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

#34

Post by SoftTalker » Mon, Aug 05, 2024, 4:27 PM UTC

jph wrote: post #18

> "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] mont…

Well there's a differnece between half-assed and incomplete.

Your example still shows that you've put some thought into the draft, you know what you need to say, and where you need help filling in the details.

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

#35

Post by fishpen0 » Mon, Aug 05, 2024, 4:27 PM UTC

balls187 wrote: post #17

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.

The difference is often that “Member of technical staff” and “Staff” are two different things. Lots of companies have “member of staff” ~= swe 1 and 2 but then simultaneously also have staff above senior.

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

#36

Post by jayd16 » Mon, Aug 05, 2024, 4:32 PM UTC

drblastoff wrote: post #15

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…

> writing code because that’s considered beneath their pay grade and they’d likely be chastised for it at my company)

Make certain the planning people have no idea what the project actually looks like. Recipe for success, no doubt.

Sarcasm asside, I do understand not assigning coding tasks to someone who doesn't have the bandwidth but to be chastised for pitching in seems non-ideal.

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

#37

Post by pc86 » Mon, Aug 05, 2024, 4:33 PM UTC

richardwhiuk wrote: post #5

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.

It is - it's just that a really productive IC is a Senior Software Engineer. That's usually considered a fine place for a persons career to plateau.

I don't know when people started conflating "being a really productive IC" with "getting to the top of the IC ladder but not having to do anything I don't want to do."

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

#38

Post by oceanplexian » Mon, Aug 05, 2024, 4:36 PM UTC

Personally I'm going to be the devil's advocate and say that soft skills are vastly overrated. Usually it's the "soft skills" people getting in the way of engineers, and as someone who's been on the other side of the fence purchasing a $1M/yr SaaS product, I want the sales people to get the hell out of the way and connect me with a real engineer.

Soft skills are a commodity. I can go to a small town used car dealer and find more soft skills than the entire C-Suite at most tech companies. If you're a good engineer, embrace the unique value you actually bring to the table.

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

#39

Post by michaelrpeskin » Mon, Aug 05, 2024, 4:36 PM UTC

disattention wrote: post #11

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…

I think it's even MORE important to have good "soft" skills to graduate above a senior engineer. If you go to a management track, you kind of have the prestige of "being the boss" that means you can be pretty bad at soft skills and still have people listen to you.

My company does it great, we have a full engineering-not-managing track.

I'm a principal engineer, and because I have "engineer" in my title, I'm responsible for engineering. Though, that doesn't mean I'm an IC. I probably only commit 100 lines of new code a year - just the stuff that's clearly my expertise (and we use that as a learning experience by having the juniors responsible for reviewing that code).

I do need to lead the engineering effort of the team. I'm not their manager, they don't need to do what I said just because I said so. So, I need to be able to communicate well which means both being technically correct and persuasive so that the engineers who actually do write the code, right the correct code.

It's almost all soft skills needed to shape the direction.

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

#40

Post by pc86 » Mon, Aug 05, 2024, 4:37 PM UTC

drblastoff wrote: post #15

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…

This assumes that working 40.0 hours a week of $x/yr is going to be worse for your family than working 60.0 hours a week for 15% or 20% more. If you're already making $175k/yr in Omaha it's very unlikely that making $205k/yr but missing dinners and school functions and not being able to chaperone class trips is going to give you such a huge quality of life increase that it's worth it.