This is a Wednesday Wisdom “Shorts”. What are shorts? In short: It is a Wednesday Wisdom article that is shorter than usual. Why shorts? Well, sometimes the topic that I want to write about really does not require an expansive article with examples and anecdotes. Sometimes short is just beautiful.
In 1991 I was backpacking through Australia and I fell hopelessly in love with a young Australian woman. These things happen. She introduced me to a children’s TV show called “Bananas in Pyjamas”, which with the benefit of hindsight sounds more like an inspired prompt for an AI image generator rather than the title of an inspiring kids TV program. In one of the Bananas in Pyjamas episodes, B1 and B2 (the bananas) have no money for a holiday and so they decide to go on holiday in their living room. They lounge around in beach wear, blow up a beach ball, and throw it in the air. At the end of the episode they conclude: “It doesn’t really matter where you go on holiday, as long as you do holiday things” (cue song).
At this point in the article you would be forgiven for thinking: “Where in the hell is this going?” Have faith dear reader! It will start to make sense shortly…
Recently, I wrote an article on how to become a tech lead, but upon reflection I probably forgot to stress one very important thing: Much like the bananas enjoying their holiday in their living room by doing holiday things, seniority is a mindset. It is not a particular type of work or a job title; it is what you do, when you do it, and how you do it that shows your seniority. Seniority shows in even the mundanest things that you do.
Many junior people aspire to a more senior role because they want to make the big decisions in projects or take on bigger responsibilities, such as writing the design doc. However, for most senior people, the high falutin parts of their jobs are the ones that take the least time, maybe only 20% on a month-by-month basis. Most of the job is taking on the hardest tasks that nobody else wants to do, no matter how menial these tasks are. Such are the spoils of seniority.
Years ago, my diving club went on survival training in the Maritime Training Center in Rotterdam. This is the kind of training that people who work on oil rigs in the North Sea have to complete before they get choppered out to their place of work. We did lots of fun things such as simulating a helicopter crash by sitting in a chair in a helicopter body, neatly strapped in, while a crane submerged said helicopter body in the big ass pool they had and rotating it 180 degrees, so that everybody hung upside down in their chairs, ten feet underwater. The recommended strategy at that point was to get out of your seatbelts and leave the helicopter before you ran out of whatever air was still left in your lungs.
In another exercise, we were simulating being shipwrecked; here the plan of attack was to get on board of the big orange life rafts that were floating around. That is much harder than it sounds. The first person to scale the liferaft has a hell of a job climbing the rope ladder on the bouncy waves with, in our case simulated, wind and rain. Once inside, they can pull in the next person and together you pull in the rest. As the highest qualified diver of the lot, it befel to me to be the first one to climb the raft and I struggled mightily to do so. See here the privilege of seniority: Doing the hardest job that nobody wants to do so that everyone else has an easier job.
Senior people behave professionally in everything they do and doing so is in fact unrelated to your actual job title or set of responsibilities. You can be professional in every code review and every meeting. If you know how to do something well, that’s the way you need to do it.
Here is a simple example: Like most people I have a weekly 1:1 with my manager. We have a shared Google document that we use to collect agenda items and tasks that need attention. Every week, on the day leading up to this 4pm meeting, I prepare the document with an overview of what I have been up to, things that I want to inform him about (such as upcoming PTO), and questions to which I need an answer. A few weeks ago, at the start of the meeting, my manager sighed: “Wow, you are always so well prepared.” That is because I am a senior engineer and I am not messing about. If anything, being a senior engineer means that you have excellent professional work skills, so of course you are prepared for whatever meeting you go to.
Being senior means that you have lots of knowledge and experience, and you use all of that knowledge and experience to be more efficient and effective.
One of the advantages that seniority has given me is that I know that I can solve any problem as long as I have root and access to the source code. Because of this I never despair because I know that as long as I apply myself, I will solve this problem. Junior people are often not sure about this. I see this play out regularly when it comes to oncall. For junior people, oncall is super scary because you can literally find yourself in charge of solving some unknown problem in the middle of the night, all alone in the dark.
This scares the hell out of many people because they know that they don’t know everything about everything and how can you be oncall if you don’t? This frequently leads to calls for better documentation, which is of course a fool’s errand because it is impossible to keep documentation in a decent shape in the best of circumstances. Most documentation is fiction. If it is a design document, it is a weird combination of science fiction and alternative history, much like “The Man in the High Castle” (the book, mind you, not the TV show, which by the way is also excellent).
Senior people know that they are not expected to be able to solve all problems of all systems that are under their purview. Really, the only duty of the oncall is to pick up the phone and give it an honest attempt, before escalating to someone with more knowledge than they have about this particular subsystem. In fact, the only piece of documentation that needs to be up to date is the list of phone numbers of everyone in the team. Obviously, post mortems will be uncomfortable if it turns out that the oncall engineer didn’t know anything, but I have literally never seen that happen. Everyone knows that nobody can be expected to know everything about everything and your performance as an oncall engineer is (should be) measured against what you can reasonably be expected to know and do.
Even in my heydays as a principal engineer I did not spend my entire day writing difficult design documents or leading complicated big projects. Sure, I have done that and it is typically a lot of fun. But more often than not, I would do about the same things as a more junior engineer, but with a senior mindset, which often comes down to making better judgment calls on what to do, where to spend my time, and when to leave an avenue that is not being fruitful. Junior engineers are like a litter of puppies coming into a room, bouncing around and looking in all the corners. Senior engineers come in, look around a bit, and then beeline for the corner where the food is. The difference between an L4 and me is not that I can code better…
Senior engineers not only have lots of experience, they have learnt from that experience. It is that last thing that sets them apart. Even if you don’t have a lot of experience yet, you can have learnt from it and then apply that going forward. Senior engineers have a large catalog of solutions that they have seen work, but it is having the catalog that matters, much more than the size of the catalog. I don’t care if you have fifteen years of experience, unless you learned something in those years.
So if you want to be a more senior engineer, start by doing senior things, because seniority is a mindset. Once you do that, the promotion should be easy.
