Senior Engineering Traits: Diving deep

Learn why the ability to break down vague problems and deliver results is crucial for a senior engineer, and how can you develop this engineering muscle?

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A common way of looking at career progression for software engineers is their ability to tackle wider scope and create impact. Below are some common high level heuristics that leaders apply to the reason about where an engineer is in their career progression. This is not comprehensive by any means but does represent gut feel intuition broadly.

1. Entry level: Can handle well defined, bounded problems often with guidance from senior engineers. Generally works on small independent features within a workstream.

2. Mid level: Can handle loosely defined, ambiguous problems with minimal guidance from senior engineers. Works independently on multiple features within a workstream.

3. Senior level: Can handle vague and ambiguous problems, often with unavailable reference solutions. Works closely with the team and cross functional partners/stakeholders and handles multiple projects within an area.

4. Staff+: able to deal with more ambiguity, tackle larger problem space across multiple teams with higher degree of collaboration.

So naturally, a key inflection point in your journey to progress to a “Senior engineer” is your ability to dive deep and be able to craft scalable solutions to vague and ambiguous problems.

The nature and shape of the problems could be different, it could be deeply technical, an organizational process problem or even a vague mix of navigating organizational chaos, team dynamics and people relationships.

People’s problems are hard and nuanced, we’ll work through those in a future blog, but for this blog I want to focus on how you can dive deep and solve problems which are technical in nature.

As an early career or even mid career engineer, you often have the luxury and cushion of looking up to your “seniors” for answers, even being a bit non committal. When faced with a problem, you can often safely complain and vent out and say, “X is so bad, somebody should do something about it”.

When you reach senior level. You cannot ask the “adults in the room” to help you solve these. In most cases, you are the adult in the room. 🤷

So what can you do?

If you don’t develop and nurture the capability of being able to dive deep into problems and power through them on your own with limited support, it would be a tough journey ahead in your career and may limit your growth.

Does this mean you have to solve everything on your own?

Not really, you are expected to be able to work with and motivate a group of people to accomplish a goal but largely you own the end to end solution, creating clarity, sheppard the project execution with sound planning and tracking progress with milestones and are expected to tackle the hairy, hard parts of the problem which are a bit out of reach for other early career engineers on your team.

You also own the outcomes and impact in the long run. Remember, you don’t get a lot of brownie points for shipping something fast, dirty and low quality that tanks in production as well, so ensuring the design is sound, scalable and of high quality is important.

When faced with ambiguity, sometimes you can lean on your manager or skip manager for help, but honestly, at this stage in your career, they pretty much expect you to be able to own and solve it. They also have their own set of burning priorities to take care of.

⚠️ A word of caution: The world does not take kindly to a Senior engineer who needs a lot of “hand holding” and is high maintenance (i.e. complains without providing solutions).

I’ve written a few articles on these nuanced topics which may help your internalize these better.

1. Senior Engineering Traits: High agency and ownership

2. Senior Engineering Traits: Come with solutions not problems!

3. Managing up as a Software Engineer

So how can you develop this muscle of being able to dive deep?

The simple advice I can give is to put yourself in environments and situations that demand you to figure out hard problems mostly yourself. The more you do so, the more you develop your own intuitions on how to do creative problem solving.

But just like everyone else, there is a method I personally follow, that I’m happy to share here.