I don't agree with the author's stance on everything but I do think that programming skill is the most important skill for a senior software engineer/developer, for a few reasons:
- Code that is confusing/hard to approach for others (including future you) is bad code, so no "seniors" or "architects" that write crazy complex code aren't good at what they do -- true masters make complex things simple.
- Identifying the right problem to solve is not the engineers job -- this is squarely in business planning/project management domain, which is rightfully a different specialization
- Like the above, engineers shouldn't even be wasting time chasing down requirements, this is the job of project management, making people who have and specialized their craft over years spend time playing politics is wasteful.
I do recognize the need for the other skills you noted in a modern business, but maybe we should be calling those skills + programming skill something different. As far as I can tell with your response and others, a non-exhaustive list non-code metrics for "senior"s are:
- Business value understanding/delivery
- Guiding junior engineers
- Navigating politics
Maybe we can call that "Senior Engineering Project Lead" instead and make the required skill sets more distinguishable. The fact is that if you start optimizing for some of these other skills you're going to take a hit on architectural/programming skill -- time and attention is limited. If what the position requires is someone who spent 60% of their time honing their craft, and 10% learning to navigate politics and 30% focusing on business-level understanding, then maybe we should signify that with a more descriptive title. I guess the crux of my argument is that "Senior Software Engineer" is a misleading title.
As a side note, I think this is just yet another way for companies to extract more value from employees -- build in more and more requirements into an role denoted to be strictly for engineering, make another rung on the bullshit internal payment ladder to climb. I also would be more sympathetic to the "business impact" if more of the "business reward" was shared with those producing the value, and FAANG didn't actively collude in the last decade to reduce employee wages.
> identifying the right problem to solve is not the engineers job
But the senior engineer has a vital role in advising which problems are solvable. Either in terms of technology, skill, time or budget. That input needs to start at the commencement of a project.
Here's my rough delineation: a Senior knows why a particular requirement is in the Func Req Doc. A Junior doesn't.
> [and if] FAANG didn't actively collude in the last decade to reduce employee wages
I laughed at that. FAANG salaries are so out of context of most around the World that they are irrelevant. As a 15-year Senior in the UK I was earning $50,000 equivalent. And no stock options. I don't think FAANG salary ladders even start that low.
> But the senior engineer has a vital role in advising which problems are solvable. Either in terms of technology, skill, time or budget. That input needs to start at the commencement of a project.
> Here's my rough delineation: a Senior knows why a particular requirement is in the Func Req Doc. A Junior doesn't.
I still think this makes sense if the problem is an engineering problem. The problem is rarely whether you can or can't do something (unless you're doing some suuuper cutting edge tech) -- it's whether you should or not, and that's a project management/business/product person's job to decide, when they draw up the plan for the project.
I know this isn't how it will work in the real world, but the senior engineer should be called on to clarify parts of the plan, not to start doing the planning & figuring out how to maximize business value. Once you start bringing in those other aspects, it's no longer about the engineering discipline -- so the job title should reflect that -- It's obvious that a "senior engineering project lead" knows why a particular requirement is in the functional requirements -- it's less clear to me (at least) that a "senior engineer", all I expect from that person is engineering ability.
Maybe it's just pedantry/semantics but it seems like a distinguishable difference to me.
> I laughed at that. FAANG salaries are so out of context of most around the World that they are irrelevant. As a 15-year Senior in the UK I was earning $50,000 equivalent. And no stock options. I don't think FAANG salary ladders even start that low.
I can't argue with your context, but I bet FAANG's profits are also out of context compared to the companies you're thinking about in the UK as well. Tech is literally one of the US's biggest (if not biggest, I think the entertainment industry might be the biggest) export. Just because there was more money to go around doesn't mean what they did wasn't wrong and extremely employee-hostile.
As a side note, maybe you should move to another company/industry? No one is forcing you to be paid less, especially with 15 years of experience... Go to one of the companies with enough money to pay you lavishly.
- Code that is confusing/hard to approach for others (including future you) is bad code, so no "seniors" or "architects" that write crazy complex code aren't good at what they do -- true masters make complex things simple.
- Identifying the right problem to solve is not the engineers job -- this is squarely in business planning/project management domain, which is rightfully a different specialization
- Like the above, engineers shouldn't even be wasting time chasing down requirements, this is the job of project management, making people who have and specialized their craft over years spend time playing politics is wasteful.
I do recognize the need for the other skills you noted in a modern business, but maybe we should be calling those skills + programming skill something different. As far as I can tell with your response and others, a non-exhaustive list non-code metrics for "senior"s are:
- Business value understanding/delivery
- Guiding junior engineers
- Navigating politics
Maybe we can call that "Senior Engineering Project Lead" instead and make the required skill sets more distinguishable. The fact is that if you start optimizing for some of these other skills you're going to take a hit on architectural/programming skill -- time and attention is limited. If what the position requires is someone who spent 60% of their time honing their craft, and 10% learning to navigate politics and 30% focusing on business-level understanding, then maybe we should signify that with a more descriptive title. I guess the crux of my argument is that "Senior Software Engineer" is a misleading title.
As a side note, I think this is just yet another way for companies to extract more value from employees -- build in more and more requirements into an role denoted to be strictly for engineering, make another rung on the bullshit internal payment ladder to climb. I also would be more sympathetic to the "business impact" if more of the "business reward" was shared with those producing the value, and FAANG didn't actively collude in the last decade to reduce employee wages.