What Makes A Senior Software Engineer

The text argues that the jump from junior to senior lies in moving from building on what already exists to creating the foundation others will use. A senior engineer multiplies their own work by designing technologies and architectures that enable others to write better code.

Reading notes

#

• The central distinction between junior and senior is summarized as building on the rails versus building the rails.
• A junior works on top of what more experienced engineers have already done; a senior expands the work by creating structures that help other engineers.
• The example of XMAs shows this role: a small change in the backend and one in each client was enough to create new types of messages.
• Before that, adding new message types required changes across the entire stack, in several layers of abstraction, in the clients, and in the backend.
• With XMAs, developing new features became simpler and developers’ productivity increased.
• The text says that XMAs technology was based on Story Attachments, which had been created by another Facebook engineer.
• This other engineer is described as someone who operated at a level above senior because he enabled other engineers to enable even more engineers.
• The conclusion links growth in engineering to the ability to get more and more engineers to accomplish more work.
• The suggested question at the end is how to enable other engineers to be better.