The Manager's Guide – #82

Jun 17, 2024

3 Critical Skills You Need to Grow Beyond Senior Levels in Engineering

💡 Advancing beyond the senior level in engineering requires developing critical skills like scaling yourself, navigating ambiguity, and influencing without authority
🌟 To scale yourself, focus on maximizing what you can do on your own by prioritizing, pushing back on low ROI activities, and teaching others to delegate effectively
🔍 Navigating ambiguity at higher levels involves turning the unknown into known, making tradeoffs, and isolating uncertainties to systematically solve problems
🤝 Influencing without authority is essential for career growth, requiring building credibility, personal connections, and learning to negotiate and find mutually beneficial solutions

💰 Approximately 16% of software engineering compensation data points in the US were submitted by women
📊 Representation of women in STEM fields in the US is around 24%
🏢 Percentages of men and women in tech roles at large companies globally vary
💼 Men generally earn higher median salaries compared to women in software engineering
📈 Gender pay gap tends to widen as employees progress through their careers
🔍 Gender breakdown of submissions shows a higher percentage of men at every career level
🔍 Societal practices and fewer women in higher positions contribute to the gender pay gap

💼 Leadership is a never-ending quest with always more work to do
📊 Leaders need to constantly improve themselves and their teams
🔄 Teams should run retrospectives and conduct engagement surveys for improvement
🛠️ Technical leaders must set expectations for a certain amount of "toil" budget
🚀 Celebrate progress and success regularly to avoid feeling demotivated
🦅 Great leaders operate strategically while staying connected to their team
🧩 Find a low-risk approach to experimentation for innovation while maintaining consistency
⚖️ Finding the right balance is crucial for leadership success

⭐️ Engineers get paid well because they scale their impact across machines
💡 To maximize impact, engineers should solve impactful problems and build simple, efficient code
🧠 Success as a software engineer involves understanding who pays and why, navigating job descriptions, and aligning personal goals with organizational goals
💼 Differentiate between software companies and companies that use software
🔄 Career success often involves switching teams, jobs, or even careers to find personal alignment
🏗️ Reimagine past experiences to showcase understanding of vision and contribution
🔀 Embrace career pivots and take risks to find better personal satisfaction in tech jobs

💡 Understand the importance of your role in providing progress updates
🔄 Add randomness to the cadence of your updates for better reader engagement
📰 Focus on headline-driven development for effective updates
🌟 Include pleasant surprises in your updates intentionally
⚠️ Handle unpleasant surprises by informing individuals privately first
🔄 Acknowledge changes explicitly to maintain trust
❌ Avoid insulting anyone in your updates
🎙️ Maintain a steady and professional tone in your updates
🤝 Make updates about the work, not about personal evaluation
❓ Identify and address the top questions your audience may have
💭 Include a section for worries and failures in your updates
📊 The goal of updates is to keep your audience informed without them needing to ask

💡 The more controversial the idea, the higher the burden of proof.
🧠 Update your assumptions about how you add value.
🤔 Share where your hunch is coming from—because it’s coming from somewhere.
🗣️ Describe why the problem matters, so people understand why you’re speaking up.
📜 Don’t rely on your credentials. Your idea should make sense on its own.
🛡️ Use language that accurately reflects your level of certainty.

I hope you liked it, and you’ve learned something — if you did, don’t forget to give a thumbs-up and share this issue with your friends and network.

See y’all next week 👋