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Updated August 7, 2023In addition to being able to cut through ambiguity to deliver results, senior engineers are expected to be accountable to others and themselves. They are responsible for project timelines and ensuring that the features shipped to production meet all of the projectโs requirements.
Junior engineers sometimes blame the quality assurance (QA) engineers or other devs who reviewed their pull requests for not finding a bug in their code, rather than accepting responsibility for it being there in the first place. Senior engineers, on the other hand, accept that responsibility and take full blame for letting bugs slip through, even the ones that arenโt caught by peer reviews and QA engineers.
When senior engineers make mistakes, they treat their peers as teammates, rather than adversaries. Being able to accept responsibility for your mistakes and work with your team to identify and fix the root cause is a sign of maturity, and it shows that youโre ready for a senior role.
Managing time effectively is one of the common traits among senior software engineers, and itโs also one of the hardest skills. As you write more code and build up more domain knowledge, youโll start to become an integral part of your team. Youโll become the expert on certain features and areas of the codebase, and people will come to you with questions about how something works or if itโs possible to extend something you wrote with new functionality. Youโll spend more time tracking down bugs, planning new projects, building out feature specifications, and possibly even helping to interview candidates to join your team.
Time management gets harder the more senior you get. Your team will become increasingly reliant on you to keep things moving, so itโs important to get things done while not wasting your time.
As a junior engineer, itโs good to be generous with your time, because anything you work on will help you learn. But as you prepare for a senior role, youโll need to learn to be careful with your time because itโs your most limited resource. Senior engineers know how to work smarter, not harder, because they know that using their time wisely gives them leverage.