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Leitura de 9 min

What Defines a Senior Developer? - Difficult Does Not Equate To Valuable

Summary

This episode continues the discussion on traits of senior engineers, focusing specifically on how they approach their work and time management differently than junior developers. The host explains that early in a career, engineers often equate difficulty with value because they’re rewarded for overcoming challenging tasks, creating a mental association between hard work and worthiness.

The critical insight for senior engineers is recognizing that difficult things are not inherently valuable, and valuable things are not always difficult. This understanding allows them to break free from the “difficulty equals value” fallacy that often traps junior developers who seek validation through tackling complex problems.

Senior engineers learn to identify and pursue high-leverage activities—tasks that may not be particularly difficult but produce significant value. This represents a fundamental shift in mindset from working hard to working smart, where the focus is on impact rather than effort. The episode introduces the concept of acceleration versus velocity in learning, where junior developers experience rapid learning (acceleration) while senior developers apply existing knowledge effectively (velocity).

This approach to identifying valuable but not necessarily difficult work is presented as a key characteristic of senior engineering roles, including staff and principal levels. The host emphasizes that value creation doesn’t care about intentions, capabilities, or intelligence—only about results achieved through efficient, high-impact actions.

The episode concludes by inviting listeners to continue the discussion in the Developer Tea Discord community, where topics like the value of coding in flow state are being debated among software engineers.

Recommendations

Communities

  • Developer Tea Discord Community — Mentioned at the end as a place where software engineers discuss topics like the merits of coding in flow state and other engineering subjects beyond just the host’s perspective.

Topic Timeline

  • 00:00:00 — Introduction to senior engineer traits and time management — The episode continues the series on senior engineer characteristics, focusing specifically on how senior engineers spend their time differently than junior developers. The host introduces the concept that early career engineers often seek out learning opportunities that feel difficult, creating an association between difficulty and value.
  • 00:01:00 — Acceleration vs velocity in learning and career progression — The host explains the difference between acceleration (rapid learning of new skills) and velocity (applying existing skills effectively). Junior developers experience high acceleration as they learn quickly, while senior developers maintain high velocity by applying their knowledge, even though their learning pace slows down.
  • 00:02:06 — The fallacy of equating difficulty with value — Early career rewards for difficult tasks train engineers to believe difficulty equals value. This is compounded by cultural narratives that celebrate hard work. The host identifies this as a critical error in thinking that senior engineers learn to recognize and overcome.
  • 00:03:52 — Senior engineers seek valuable but not difficult work — Once senior engineers recognize that difficulty doesn’t equate to value, they actively look for work that is highly valuable but not necessarily difficult. This represents a fundamental mindset shift from junior to senior thinking patterns in software engineering.
  • 00:04:27 — High leverage activities as a theme for senior engineers — The host introduces high leverage activities as a key theme for senior engineers. As engineers progress to staff or principal levels, they must increasingly focus on actions that produce maximum value with minimal effort, moving beyond the “work smarter, not harder” cliché to truly understand value creation.

Episode Info

  • Podcast: Developer Tea
  • Author: Jonathan Cutrell
  • Category: Technology Business Careers Society & Culture
  • Published: 2023-03-04T08:00:00Z
  • Duration: 00:06:28

References

Podcast Info

Transcript

[00:00:00] We’re continuing our discussion on the traits of a senior engineer.

[00:00:14] And in today’s episode, I want to talk about how you spend your time as a senior engineer.

[00:00:21] Your intuition as a young engineer, as a junior engineer, might lead you to seek out learning.

[00:00:32] And in the beginning, most of what you learn might feel difficult.

[00:00:38] Now you get a rush from this, most people do at least, a rush of learning things quickly.

[00:00:47] If you think about it, you’re learning at a rapid pace when you begin your engineering

[00:00:51] career.

[00:00:52] This also happens if you start at a new company.

[00:00:55] You get the opportunity to learn a lot in a very short amount of time.

[00:01:00] We’ve talked about this in the past on this show as a source for imposter syndrome.

[00:01:08] The reality is that your pace of learning feels very different than your use of that

[00:01:15] learning.

[00:01:16] The analogy we’ve made in the past is acceleration versus velocity.

[00:01:21] Acceleration is your rate of change in your learning.

[00:01:25] In other words, you’re learning at a fast pace, you’re gaining new skills quickly versus

[00:01:31] velocity being that you already have those skills and you’re simply applying them.

[00:01:38] You’re not necessarily learning nearly at the pace that you used to learn.

[00:01:42] And so your acceleration slows way down even though you’re moving quickly.

[00:01:47] But in this early phase of your career, that learning is also tied to difficulty.

[00:01:54] In other words, you begin to succeed, you’re given some kind of reward for doing difficult

[00:02:01] things.

[00:02:03] So let’s think about this thoroughly here for a second.

[00:02:06] Early in our careers, we are given a reward for doing difficult things.

[00:02:10] And so we’re trained, whether consciously or unconsciously, that doing difficult things

[00:02:17] is worthy, it’s reward worthy.

[00:02:20] And we replace reward worthy in our minds, we do a quick substitution for valuable.

[00:02:27] This is also compounded by the fact that most of pop culture rewards things that are difficult

[00:02:33] to do.

[00:02:34] This is especially true in things like sports.

[00:02:37] People who are extraordinarily talented have to work very hard and that is very difficult.

[00:02:44] And so we attach some value to doing hard things.

[00:02:49] But there’s a critical error in our thinking.

[00:02:51] And this is one of the traits of a senior engineer.

[00:02:54] They learn what this error was, they learn that difficult does not directly equate to

[00:03:02] valuable.

[00:03:03] A more formal representation of this might sound like this.

[00:03:07] Just because valuable things sometimes are difficult to achieve, does not mean that difficult

[00:03:14] things are valuable.

[00:03:16] Now, of course, we’re not going to dive into how to define value in this discussion.

[00:03:22] You can kind of substitute whatever your particular picture of value is.

[00:03:26] You could substitute what your company or your boss thinks is valuable.

[00:03:30] Or if you want to substitute the monetary value as what we’re talking about when we

[00:03:35] say valuable, all of those things will still track for this definition.

[00:03:40] Things that are difficult are not necessarily inherently valuable.

[00:03:46] Now the second part of this, the kind of response that a good senior engineer will have, is

[00:03:52] to recognize that if this is true, if not all valuable things are difficult, and difficulty

[00:03:59] doesn’t represent some direct tie to value, then a senior engineer is going to seek out

[00:04:05] the things that are not difficult and are also valuable.

[00:04:11] This is very important to capture, very important to understand.

[00:04:14] Senior engineers are going to look for things that are not difficult but are also highly

[00:04:20] valuable.

[00:04:22] This is one action in a theme of actions that’s really critical to understand.

[00:04:27] This is a theme that senior engineers absolutely understand, and that is high leverage activity.

[00:04:34] When you are a senior engineer, especially when you start getting into upper senior level

[00:04:38] like staff or principal, depending on where you are, the way you spend your time needs

[00:04:43] to converge further and further towards high leverage.

[00:04:47] That means the value that you produce with a given action needs to outpace the value

[00:04:52] that you used to produce with a similar amount of energy.

[00:04:56] This will be a theme that comes up over and over in this series, but this is the first

[00:05:02] way that this is likely to show up.

[00:05:05] You may hear the old adage, work smarter, not harder.

[00:05:09] Interestingly, even embedded in that is a misunderstanding.

[00:05:13] Even being smarter does not necessarily mean that you’re going to equate your work with

[00:05:19] added value.

[00:05:21] The important thing here is to recognize that value does not care about your intentions.

[00:05:27] It doesn’t care about your capabilities.

[00:05:30] It doesn’t care about how intelligent you are.

[00:05:33] If you can achieve value through a simple set of actions, then you are focusing on high

[00:05:40] leverage, and that is a trait of senior software engineers.

[00:05:45] Thanks so much for listening to today’s episode of Developer Tea.

[00:05:49] If you enjoyed this episode, if you want to carry the discussion further, we’ve been having

[00:05:52] a great discussion, for example, on the merits of coding while in flow state.

[00:05:59] There is some good disagreement happening in the Discord community on whether or not

[00:06:03] that is actually a valuable state to be in while you’re coding.

[00:06:06] If you want to go and learn more about what other people are saying, not just my word,

[00:06:11] but what other smart software engineers have to say about these subjects, join the Developer

[00:06:15] Tea Discord community.

[00:06:16] That’s developertea.com slash Discord.

[00:06:19] Thanks so much for listening, and until next time, enjoy your tea.

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