How to grow when you are already Senior
Senior Software Engineer: the fork, the branches, and how to walk them
Slide contents
1. How to grow when you are already Senior
Senior Software Engineer: the fork, the branches, and how to walk them
2. Alexander Polomodov
I lead digital ecosystem development at Tinkoff
I own architecture questions across the company
I curate our System Design Interviews
I interview technical leaders on management
I run troubleshooting interviews for SRE engineers
3. From the fork after Senior to goals and learning
What we'll cover
Why growing past Senior is a problem at all
The two branches: team and tech
Approaches to learning and to motivation
My recommendations for the technical branch
4. 01. What standard growth looks like
Levels against a timeline
5. The rungs are clear right up to Senior
What standard developer growth looks like
Schoolboy — 10 years
Student — 4 years, then Scientist
Junior Engineer — 2 years, then Middle
Senior Engineer — and the ladder ends
6. 02. Growing into management
Why a team lead exists, and what comes after
7. The team lead is the team's interface to the customer
Why a team lead is needed
A cross-functional team closes the whole loop
The loop: idea → requirements → design
…development → deploy → operations
The customer brings the idea and gets the results
8. How I answered this for myself ten years ago
Why a Senior Engineer would want this
More influence over the end result
…both in quality and in quantity
Improving the development process inside the team
Raising the level of total compensation
9. The CTO role moves along three axes, not a ladder
What comes after the team lead
Process Orientation and Technical Capabilities
The third axis is Scale: ~10, ~50, ~150
Startup Coder, Engineering Manager, org structure
Delivery manager and Architect are axis extremes
10. 03. Growing into the technical branch
Individual contributor grades
11. Four grades above Senior and five axes beneath them
High levels of individual contributors
Principal and Senior Principal Engineer
Distinguished Engineer and Technical Fellow
They differ by scope of influence and complexity
Scored on the SDE matrix: five criteria
12. 04. Motivation and goals
How not to quit halfway
13. Growth is important and never urgent
How to keep yourself motivated to grow
Urgent and important — Do First
Important and not urgent — Schedule
Urgent and less important — Delegate
Neither — To /dev/null
14. Set the goal — then get it out of your head
What to do with important but non-urgent tasks
Set a goal that serves several sides of your life
Make a clear and achievable plan
Get the goal out of your head so it stops demotivating
Move forward, enjoying the small steps
15. Plan from the goal, not from today's self
How to set goals and build plans effectively
People look at where they are, then invent a goal
Then they invent how to close the gap
The problem: the thinking stays boxed in
Backcasting runs from the goal back to the start
16. The kind of problem decides the kind of answer
The Cynefin framework
Obvious — best practice, sense-categorize-respond
Complicated — good practice, sense-analyse-respond
Complex — emergent practice, probe-sense-respond
Chaotic — novel practice, act-sense-respond
17. 05. How engineers should grow
You build it, you run it
18. An engineer owns the system end to end
What «you build it, you run it» means
Can design
Can implement what was designed
Can handle incidents in their own systems
19. Three tracks, each with theory and practice
And how an engineer should level up
System Design: principles and classes of systems
.NET: the platform in depth and production code
Troubleshooting: the SRE Book and postmortems
And practice in each of the three
20. There is no ladder after Senior — there is a fork
What to take with you
Standard growth ends at Senior
Past it comes a fork: the team or the tech
The tech branch has its own grades and matrix
Set goals backwards from the goal, not from yourself
Growth is always important and never urgent
21. Links for further study
The sources from the talk's closing slide
An article based on this talk
On motivation: «The Motivation Myth», «Peak Performance», «Lifelong Kindergarten»
On System Design: two articles and a public interview
On troubleshooting and on growing into management
22. Thank you!
polomodov.tech
All slides and links are in the Telegram channel
Alexander Polomodov, Technical Director & Fellow, T-Technologies
@book_cube