Career | Skills Needed by Senior Engineers Besides Coding Skills

An incomplete list of skills senior engineers need, beyond coding / by Camille Fournier / Medium

  1. How to run a meeting, and no, being the person who talks the most in the meeting is not the same thing as running it123
  2. How to write a design doc, take feedback, and drive it to resolution in a reasonable period of time
  3. How to mentor an early-career teammate, a mid-career engineer, a new manager who needs technical advice1
  4. How to indulge a senior manager who wants to talk about technical stuff that they don’t really understand without rolling your eyes or making them feel stupid1
  5. How to explain a technical concept behind closed doors to a senior person too embarrassed to openly admit that they don’t understand it1
  6. How to influence another team to use your solution instead of writing their own1
  7. How to get another engineer to do something for you by asking for help in a way that makes them feel appreciated1
  8. How to lead a project even though you don’t manage any of the people working on the project1
  9. How to get other engineers to listen to your ideas without making them feel threatened1
  10. How to listen to other engineers’ ideas without feeling threatened1
  11. How to give up your baby, that project that you built into something great, so you can do something else
  12. How to teach another engineer to care about that thing you really care about (operations, correctness, testing, code quality, performance, simplicity, etc)
  13. How to communicate project status to stakeholders1
  14. How to convince management that they need to invest in a non-trivial technical project1
  15. How to build software while delivering incremental value in the process
  16. How to craft a project proposal, socialize it, and get buy-in to execute it1
  17. How to repeat yourself enough that people start to listen
  18. How to pick your battles
  19. How to help someone get promoted
  20. How to get information about what’s really happening (how to gossip, how to network)
  21. How to find interesting work on your own, instead of waiting for someone to bring it to you
  22. How to tell someone they’re wrong without making them feel ashamed1
  23. How to take negative feedback gracefully1

  1. Join Toastmasters International. Learn how to create meeting agendas and keep meetings on track. Ralph Hightower, District 58 Area 33 Governor 2006-07 – 2007-06; District 58 Division C Governor 2007-07 – 2008-06, Division Governthe Year 2008. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8 ↩9 ↩10 ↩11 ↩12 ↩13 ↩14

  2. There was one person at South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control who thought that she was project manager extraordinaire. With meetings that she called, she would enter the meeting room at the appointed time, and then burn 🔥 the next ten minutes futzing with her laptop 💻, plugging it into the network, booting up her laptop, logging into the network, hooking up the projector, aligning the projector, looking for her PowerPoint file, and then, the meeting could begin. She had scheduled 📅 a one hour meeting that would end fifteen minutes after the close of business. For the first ten minutes, she had the on-site meeting participants crawling around on the floor looking for a live phone jack to start the conference call. However, I had to leave at COB to make it home on time to take one of our dogs to the veterinarian. I got up and walked out the door at 4:45 PM. She shouted “You can’t leave!” I didn’t respond. I asked my manager the next day about when the meeting ended. He said that it ended shortly after I left. ↩

  3. Be prepared to start the meeting on time. Chairing the weekly Change Control Meetings rotated among the developers each month. The laptop used to review the week’s submitted changes was ancient and slow. Ten minutes prior to the start of the 9 AM meeting, I would get the laptop and projector, go to the conference room, get the laptop booted, logged into the network, set up the projector, and log into the Change Control Meeting system for review, and call the conferencing number so all off-site meeting participants would be able to voice their approval, disapproval, or suggestion for improvements. ↩