Traits of a Senior Software Engineer

For a long time, I wanted to compile my list of qualities of a senior developer. How do you become one? What do people expect from a senior developer? This post is my first attempt.

There are many angles to approach the topic. Here are some of the sources I found interesting:

• John Allspaw's On being a senior engineer

• Camille Fournier's Career ladder of RentTheRunway and An incomplete list of skills senior engineers need, beyond coding.

• Soft Skills Engineering Podcast, where a listener once asked, "Can I call myself a senior developer after X months in the industry?", and the host answered: "I'm afraid, you didn't make enough mistakes yet".

• A recent Twitter thread (in Russian), where the author says that to him seniority is not about hard skills (languages, frameworks, technical stacks), but more about professionalism, responsibility, decision-making, and ability to solve business problems.

In this post, I'm writing down my answer. I wish I wrote it a couple of years ago to compare how my views have changed. I'm sure I will give a different answer in a couple of years. Here I just list the points, and I plan to elaborate on some of them later.

Important Senior developer traits (2021):

• Hunting for business knowledge - actively search how the product works, how users interact with it, why it works as it does;

• Being able to discuss without raising the voice;

• Express opinions and support them with arguments;

• Gut feeling - listening to your intuition;

• Remember stuff - writing down, documenting, keeping lists of things, organizing information inputs and outputs;

• Knowing the processes of working with people in Software Development;

• Knowing the next step and the one after that;

• Pushing a task till the end or passing it to another person;

• Changing processes when needed (supported with an opinion and arguments);

• Looking at things from the team point of view;

• Seeing people as collaborators and contributors (or at least parts of a solution), not obstacles;

• Solving the unsolvable problems;

• Experience in putting out fires;

• Experience in breaking things (build, CD, production).

Cover image by Valeria Cerbu on Unsplash