{"id":1210,"date":"2013-04-22T16:46:20","date_gmt":"2013-04-22T23:46:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/?p=1210"},"modified":"2013-04-22T16:46:20","modified_gmt":"2013-04-22T23:46:20","slug":"on-being-senior","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/2013\/04\/22\/on-being-senior\/","title":{"rendered":"on being senior"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>John Allspaw wrote a great blog post titled <a href=\"http:\/\/www.kitchensoap.com\/2012\/10\/25\/on-being-a-senior-engineer\/\">On Being a Senior Engineer<\/a>. \u00a0I read it, nodding along, and realized that his post isn&#8217;t really about being a senior <em>engineer<\/em>. \u00a0As Allspaw puts it, &#8220;I expect a &#8216;senior&#8217; engineer to be a mature engineer&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>He&#8217;s totally right. \u00a0A senior engineer, or a senior user experience professional, or (I think) a senior anything is about maturity. \u00a0It&#8217;s not just about the number of years that you&#8217;ve worked with a given technology or done a particular job. \u00a0It&#8217;s about how well you get your job done. \u00a0These items from his post particularly resonated with me:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>seek out constructive criticism of their designs<\/strong> &#8211; When you&#8217;re senior, you know that your work isn&#8217;t automatically perfect. \u00a0You know that others have valuable perspectives, that they have knowledge that you don&#8217;t have, that others can be the source of a valuable insight that you wouldn&#8217;t get otherwise.<\/li>\n<li><strong>understand [&#8230;] how they are perceived<\/strong> &#8211; Allspaw said it well here: &#8220;Mature engineers know that no matter how complete, elegant, or superior their designs are, it won\u2019t matter if no one wants to work alongside them because they are assholes.&#8221; \u00a0Oh, and this too: &#8220;Be the engineer that everyone wants to work with.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li><strong>understand that not all of their projects are filled with rockstar-on-stage work<\/strong> &#8211; There&#8217;s a lot of work to get done. \u00a0Being willing to do the work that needs to get done, not just the high-profile work, is one of the ways that you become senior. \u00a0This is related to, but definitely not the same as, being the person who everyone who everyone wants to work with.<\/li>\n<li><strong>lift the skills and expertise of those around them<\/strong> &#8211; One of the most important things that you can do in a senior role is to help your team be better. If you&#8217;re the rockstar on your team, but everyone else around you is floundering, you&#8217;re not senior. \u00a0You need to help those around you so that they can be rockstars too. \u00a0Create a team of rockstars, and that&#8217;s one of the ways that you become senior.<\/li>\n<li><strong>make their trade-offs explicit when making judgements and decisions<\/strong> &#8211; Nothing is perfect. \u00a0Life is a balancing act. \u00a0When you&#8217;re making trade-offs, document them. \u00a0It will help others understand your thinking, which makes the team better and which helps with gathering constructive criticism. \u00a0It will also help yourself in the future so that you remember why it is that you decided on one thing over another.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Allspaw makes a lot of other awesome points, and I feel like I&#8217;ve lifted enough from his post as it is. \u00a0His blog post is one of the most insightful and thought-provoking that I&#8217;ve read in quite some time. \u00a0It&#8217;s long, but I recommend reading all of it and thinking about how it applies to your career and your life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>John Allspaw wrote a great blog post titled On Being a Senior Engineer. \u00a0I read it, nodding along, and realized that his post isn&#8217;t really about being a senior engineer. \u00a0As Allspaw puts it, &#8220;I expect a &#8216;senior&#8217; engineer to be a mature engineer&#8221;. He&#8217;s totally right. \u00a0A senior engineer, or a senior user experience &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/2013\/04\/22\/on-being-senior\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">on being senior<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1210","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ux"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1210","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1210"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1210\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1211,"href":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1210\/revisions\/1211"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1210"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1210"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nadynerichmond.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1210"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}