The humble senior developer

While conducting interviews at one of my previous jobs, I asked my manager: “How come we never get to interview Senior Developers?” He explained that we were only considering mid-level and junior engineers and interns. This surprised me since I thought senior engineers are the biggest catch in the pool of engineers.

While conducting interviews at one of my previous jobs, I asked my manager: “How come we never get to interview Senior Developers?” He explained that we were only considering mid-level and junior engineers and interns. This surprised me since I thought senior engineers are the biggest catch in the pool of engineers. Instead, he said that senior engineers are already made, and that they can be “hard to bend” and may not adapt to another company’s work environment.

While the answer also had a financial aspect (senior engineers being more expensive), I couldn’t help but recall several instances where my team and I had to collaborate with engineers who out-seniored all of us. Many of them were, in fact, difficult to work with. For example, our team had certain practices we believed were the best but that didn’t align with the senior engineer’s experience. For the sake of this example, let’s call him Ben. We tried making our case, but Ben considered our way of doing things wrong and messy, and he just wouldn’t…bend. Eventually, we realized the path of least resistance was to adapt to his way of working.

Was my manager entirely correct? Are we, as senior engineers, really that hard to bend once we’re made?

Ben is just one of many senior engineers that I have worked with; I’ve also worked with senior engineers that were an absolute pleasure to work with. For most of them, it truly felt like they were trying to understand and help, and not to steamroll everything we were doing. Their approach reminded me of those movie scenes where a traveler arrives in a foreign land bearing gifts, a gesture of humility and respect. There is a certain kind of humbleness to it. Since I am now a senior engineer myself, I’ve started reflecting on what kind of senior engineer I want to be.

In this blog post, I’ll draw from my own personal experiences to describe 5 outstanding qualities of a good, and humble, senior engineer.

Has time to explain and cares that you understand

I once asked a senior engineer (let’s call him Homer) a quick question on Slack, and he suggested having a quick call. What was meant to be a brief chat, ended up being a lengthy call about a certain aspect of the new architecture. I felt slightly uncomfortable since I knew how valuable his time was. The vibe around the call was: This part of the architecture is important for you to understand because you will need it later. He wasn’t trying to instruct me on how I should do my job, but rather on what important aspects I should consider and why they matter.

I appreciated several things about this call:

• He was willing to go back to the whiteboard with me even though he probably had more important things to do.
• He wasn’t there to show off his knowledge or presentation skills; he wanted to make sure that I understood something important.
• He gave me the freedom to implement the solution that I deemed to be correct.

Does not disparage other people’s work

We should never disparage another person’s work. Even when a codebase is a non-standard mess or when another developer’s work does not meet our standards, we should approach it with professionalism and respect. Ben often criticized other people’s code, calling it a mess. At first, it seemed fun since I also had high standards and I was never on the receiving end of Ben’s comments.

As you get older however, you realize that not only is that kind of behavior arrogant, it also shows a lack of understanding. Every codebase was started with good intentions; nobody sets out to write messy code. A codebase becomes a mess due to tight deadlines, shifting team priorities, acquisitions and mergers, special requests or for a myriad of other historical reasons. Writing code is hard, maintaining code is even harder.

I am not saying you should never share your frustrations with others. Instead, I’m suggesting to be mindful of how you present yourself when doing so. Are you coming across as being arrogant, or are you handling yourself with professionalism?

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