Seonglae ChoBeing senior means focusing not only on hard technical problems, but also on opportunities to demonstrate meaningful impact.
A senior engineer often builds a kind of micro-framework (a workflow and system) that enables the team to develop effectively. They need to be a trailblazer.
Becoming an architect, project lead, product owner, or manager isn’t because someone “can’t code”; it’s the path of becoming the kind of person the organization trusts to own design and make sound decisions.
If you become senior only because you’re constantly chasing deadlines, that’s just a sign of insufficient skill. And when there’s work the team can’t deliver with its current capabilities, you should be able to take responsibility and implement it yourself.
- Technical leadership
- Execution/operational leadership
- A productivity advantage
- Solving genuinely hard problems
English becomes much more important as your career grows and you become a senior engineer.
You have to lead a team and represent it as a leader/manager to achieve key business goals—and represent your teammates during performance reviews and promotion committees.
Beyond “survival English,” you need polished, advanced English: to influence other teams, present your team’s achievements with confidence, and sometimes even deliver speeches that motivate people.
Five takeaways from looking for a new senior role in tech
A few months ago, I left SeatGeek without much of a plan of what to do next. My green card was finally issued in 2021, which means that I didn't have to scramble to find a new job in forty days.
https://philcalcado.com/2021/12/20/job_hunt.html
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미라클레터 인터뷰
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The Senior Shift
In most tech companies, the first few levels of an engineering career ladder are pretty straightforward. You must grow from someone who needs a lot of oversight to an independent engineer. You need to develop your best practices and have evidence that your code is of high quality.
https://skamille.medium.com/the-senior-shift-315f56b79d5
Software Engineer Titles Have (Almost) Lost All Their Meaning
Examining the Devaluation of Software Engineer Titles and Its Impact on Tech Industry Integrity
https://www.trevorlasn.com/blog/software-engineer-titles-have-almost-lost-all-their-meaning
A senior role is not about blocking every bad project, but rather strategically preserving credibility and using influence only at truly critical moments.
Why Senior Engineers Let Bad Projects Fail
When I was a junior engineer, my manager would occasionally confide his frustrations to me in our weekly 1:1s. He would point out a project another team was working on and say, “I don’t believe that project will go anywhere, they’re solving the wrong problem.” I used to wonder, “But you are very senior, why don’t you just go and speak to them about your concerns?” It felt like a waste of his influence to not say anything. So it’s quite ironic that I found myself last week explaining to a mentee why I thought a sister team’s project would have to pivot because they’d made a poor early design choice. And he rightfully asked me the same question I had years ago: “why don’t you just tell them your opinion?” It’s been on my mind ever since because I realized I’d changed my stance on it a lot over the years.
https://lalitm.com/post/why-senior-engineers-let-bad-projects-fail/