id: 1213,7A
title: Senior engineers need new skills to advance.
date: 2024-09-22

Senior engineers need new skills to advance.

To move into management or staff engineering, senior developers must develop further:rS12

  • Learn to scale scope: Combination of taking on more scope by prioritizing important things more carefully, but also by training others & working through them—with or without authority.
  • Managing ambiguity: Get better at picking tradeoffs & making bets by making & falsifying hypotheses, isolating uncertainty into specific problems, decomposing problems into subproblems, eschewing paralysis by making decisions with minimum viable information, & making choices flexibly against what’s volatile.
  • Influence without authority: Not really just the magic words people need to hear (persuasion), but personal connections, brand, negotiation.
  1. ↩

    Irina Stanescu, “3 Critical Skills You Need to Grow Beyond Senior Levels in Engineering,” April 8, 2024, https://www.thecaringtechie.com/p/3-critical-skills-you-need-to-grow. (See notes.)