#Gangstas move in silence how to#

As they progress from junior to mid-level, they begin to deliver well-scoped work better and faster than anyone expected. Heroic junior engineers can swoop in and exceed all expectations. They like being the one to swoop in and rescue the situation. It’s not uncommon for this person’s ego to get tied up with a sort of heroism. These folks are often the “rock star” juniors who became super strong technical contributors. Often an engineer doing this kind of disruptive work is doing it because they’ve really enjoyed being bad ass. Occasionally it’s completely naive productivity that just happens to create a pinch point for the team, but that’s much less common than the engineer gunning for recognition. This senior engineer wants the glory and reward for solving the problem.

Sometimes there’s a cynical, self-serving edge to this approach. The sense of urgency in these cases is usually driven by the engineer’s own satisfaction at a problem well-solved. Why did this problem exist? Was it a known problem? Did the managers involved know about the problem already? Who was working on this problem? Were they already trying their best? Was the situation the result of everyone trying really hard and doing the best they could possibly do? Did this engineer absolutely have to intervene? Would the company fail if they didn’t intervene? The problem with this type of contribution is that it’s completely unaware of team issues at all.

This engineer dives in and solves the problem and then throws their solution into the broader team like a hand grenade. To the first-degree senior contributor, a moment like this is one they can’t resist.

They’re used to being rewarded for their technical contributions. They’re faster at coding than most people. The Heroic Senior ReactionĪn average senior engineer will see a problem and decide to solve it themselves. When a senior engineer - a real senior engineer - spots a problem, the very next thing that they do will tell you loads about how senior they are. If you don’t have perceptive, interpersonally strong, technically senior people on your team, you’re at massive risk of hiring these kinds of engineers. They don’t know the difference between a real problem and something they just feel opinionated about. They are among the most dangerous people you’ll ever hire. Side note: It’s quite common for highly confident, rhetorically gifted junior engineers to masquerade as senior engineers. If you don’t have people at this calibre in your team, you’re gonna have a bad time. They have the antibodies required to prevent bad things from happening. The hallmark of a senior engineer is that they’ll catch wind of something that isn’t right and will have the instinct to fix it. Junior engineers are working hard just to catch up to where things even are. They start to see how things ought to be.

As engineers trend more senior, they usually acquire a strong technical opinion. Junior engineers usually don’t have a clue when something is built badly, so they won’t factor into this discussion. For the purposes of this discussion, let’s say that our senior engineer sees that some important piece of the technical infrastructure is built in a clumsy, fragile way. You can differentiate an exceptional senior engineer by how she reacts when something is broken.

#Gangstas move in silence how to#

Exceptional senior folks think a lot about team alignment and how to affect the right change in the smoothest way possible. This huge differentiator between senior engineers and exceptional senior engineers is equal parts technical and management. The aspect of this diagram I want to focus on in this post is the “ Don’t create drama within the team” bit right at the top. A completely not exhaustive diagram of how senior engineer, junior engineer, and manager job roles intersect.Instead, I think there’s huge overlap in the Venn diagram of senior engineering and management. The drama hinged on the argument that management is a completely different skillset from engineering. To be honest, it was quite a dramatic conversation (by the standards of smooth operating engineering management types). I was in a discussion a few weeks back about how directly technical we can expect managers to be. It also applies to senior engineers and managers. Lil’ Wayne really captured something important in that line.