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

#51

Post by CharlieDigital » Mon, Aug 05, 2024, 7:17 PM UTC

michaelrpeskin wrote: post #39

disattention wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 responsib…

    I probably only commit 100 lines of new code a year

You're a manager, not an IC.

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

#52

Post by thefz » Mon, Aug 05, 2024, 8:30 PM UTC

oceanplexian wrote: post #38

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 a…

I have observed that while having some can be beneficial, usually banging the "soft skills" drum are those that do not have the capability to learn much else anyway, as soft skills are the lowest hanging fruit.

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

#53

Post by pc86 » Mon, Aug 05, 2024, 8:32 PM UTC

CharlieDigital wrote: post #51

michaelrpeskin wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 responsib…

I probably only commit 100 lines of new code a year You're a manager, not an IC.

No?

Firstly, they say right before the line you cherry-picked that they're not an individual contributor. But your statement makes the implicit assumption that you are one or the other. If you're not a manager, you much be an IC, if you're not an IC, you must be a manager.

The best organizations I've ever worked for have had their front-line managers still responsible for significant IC-type work. If you work somewhere where the lowest management level has a dozen direct reports and spends all day every day doing "management things," run away as fast as you can because they have no idea what they're doing. The lowest management level at my current role can expect at most 2 reports if they're managing a different team than what they came from, and at most 3 if they're getting moved from IC to management on the same team. The other ~60% of their time is spent writing code and doing these "Staff+" tasks. There can absolutely be a gray area and in the best organizations there definitely is. The top 2-3 IC levels and the bottom 1-2 management levels will be nearly indistinguishable from each other with the exception of whether or not you have direct reports.

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

#54

Post by surgical_fire » Mon, Aug 05, 2024, 10:13 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 am "stuck" at the senior engineer level by choice, Having been asked by multiple managers to apply for promotion.

I declined every time. I see no benefit in going further, and I see plenty of potential downsides.

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

#55

Post by drblastoff » Thu, Aug 08, 2024, 1:36 AM UTC

pc86 wrote: post #40

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.

This assumes the staff engineers work more hours (not my experience)