Stay Close to the Code
Everyone wants to progress in their careers. To go from junior to senior; from associate to partner. Maybe you want to move into management.
It’s a noble pursuit, and for most of us, with enough work and skill, we will get there.
And as we do, there is a phenomenon that happens: we spend less time doing and more time deciding. As Ryan Holiday writes in his book Ego is the Enemy:
As you become successful in your field, your responsbilities may begin to change. Days become less about doing and more and more abouthing making decisions. Such is the nature of leadership.
As a senior engineer, I can attest that this is true for engineers as well. As we progress, we find ourselves reviewing documents, thinking about long-term strategy, and maybe even starting to look at those dreaded budgets.
And while this is good and important to our career development, we often stop paying attention to the very thing that helped us progress in the first place: the code. We aren’t “getting our hands dirty” as we once did. We become distant from our codebases, not understanding the nuances or gotchas of the code our teammates are working on most of the time.
I think this is a pattern to change. We have to stay close to the code as long as we can before our responsibilities truly dictate we move away from day-to-day coding entirely. Here are some of my reasons why and ways you can stay close.
Most Mentorship Involves Coding
As a senior engineer, part of your role is helping level up the other engineers on your team. We often call this mentorship.
And what are the ways you are most likely to help your team immediately improve? By helping them grow as a coder. Why? Well, quite simply, this is what consumes the majority of their time. They were hired to code.
Yes, you can help them learn to make better architectural decisions. Yes, you can help them improve their communication skills. But often, these are areas they can improve on with less direct mentorship. For instance, there are many great resources on how to grow as a writer, speaker, and even non-verbal communicator. But when you look at the resources for learning to code, they are often focused on who? The…
