How do I get a Senior SWE promotion if I work at a client based company where projects change every few months and my manager is the same age as me (26)?
Hello!
I used to work for a large fin tech company but recently got a job at a client-based company. They flew me into the office for an onboarding week and the culture and people are fantastic. I even made a decision to move from DC into the Houston office just cause of the people and weirdly I realized that my personality is a bigger asset than I realized. I enjoy chatting with people, and a Director of Product even told me "I don't usually hold 1:1s with the new folks but your personality was shining so bright!"
I only give this info cause I'm not very confident in my technical skills. While I got a great performance review in my last company, it was because of my determination, my willingness to go full stack when no one wanted to, and cause I was very close with the Product and Design team. Tbh that's also cause I don't really nerd out about state management or the newest framework or whatever like everyone else seems to. I enjoy frontend cause I like making pretty things and that's it. I'm not the person who is constantly thinking about how to make our testing process or pipelines better. I can learn those things if I need to but it doesn't come naturally to me.
I have admitted some of this to folks at my new company and they've been super cool about it. They even suggested I dabble into a Technical PM role. That's still something I'm chewing on cause while it's silly, I love typing things on my pretty little IDE and I like fewer meetings. But I don't imagine coding forever. In my company, a senior engineer gets to lead a project, manage people, and talk to clients. I'm aiming for a senior role cause I think it aligns more with my natural skill sets as I believe my soft skills are stronger than my technical skills.
My manager became a senior recently and told me it was because he was willing to do whatever client project came in whatever language that was required. He's the same age as me and only started coding 3 years ago after a BootCamp. This is his only company but I'll admit, I feel like he's a stronger engineer than I am. I've been in the company for a few weeks, and I've been getting my stories done quickly even though their tech stack is new (but everyone is fast) but I'm not sure how to even become a Senior since I don't know if I will be able to become the rockstar engineer that my manager is. I will move earliest in September so I'm remote until then. Projects also come and go so fast. Any ideas on how to standout?
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Discussion
(4 comments)- 2
9 months agoEngineer @ RobinhoodGenerally, people of certain levels will group around certain behaviors. Junior and mid-level behavior is generally very individualistic, focusing on the raw impact of code or tasks. When it comes to senior, the main jump that needs to happen is providing value to people around you beyond your individual output. The most standard path for this is serving as a project/tech lead: providing value through a mix of program management, designing architecture, and individual coding output. If your name is the first one people associate with projects, then that'll be a clear indicator that you're progressing towards senior.
As a recently-promo'd senior engineer and someone who's roughly your age, your manager would be a great starting point to figuring out what your path is to senior engineer. Work with them to figure out what deliverables and behaviors would they expect from a senior engineer and see if they can share some stories about their path to senior engineer.
- 2
9 months agoTech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course HeroI have mentored a ton of engineers from mid-level to senior at lightning speed (almost all of my E4 mentees at Meta got promoted to E5 within just 1.5 years). The first thing I always forced them to do is to sharpen their code quality to the extreme. I recently compressed all that knowledge into my new Code Quality course: [Course] Level Up Your Code Quality As A Software Engineer
A lot of engineers have velocity but very few have top quality. Even at top companies like Meta and Robinhood, my code quality stood out and was a big contributor towards me being a high performer there. While I do think you should implement the tactics in your current company (and any company really), I admittedly am a bit worried that a client based company won't value the quality too much.
After you master all the code quality principles, there's a variety of paths you can take. You can try going faster and more broad like what your manager did or you can play to your strengths and become more of a "glue person" between engineering and product/design (this seems like a good fit for you if you have the scope).
Here's our mid-level to senior playlist as well: [Taro Top 10] Mid-Level Engineer To Senior Engineer (L4 To L5)
- 28 months agoMid-Level Software Engineer [OP]Taro Community
appreciate your response Alex! I saw you release that course and I'm eager to go through it. I also misspoke about code quality. Code quality is given high importance but projects come and go so fast that we don't spend many years on a repo to see what can be improved. My PRs seem to be landing pretty fast so I think I'm not too shabby with code quality but of course still have much to learn. I've learned a lot through your masterclasses on how to have a great PR/code review/how to ask better questions. Could you please elaborate on how I can be more of a "glue person" between engineering and product/design?
- 28 months agoTech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course Hero
Could you please elaborate on how I can be more of a "glue person" between engineering and product/design?
Of course! "Glue", as the name suggests, is doing the work to make sure that different groups of people collaborate frictionlessly with each other. The concrete way to measure someone's performance as a "glue" person is how often and how efficiently they are able to clear non-technical blockers on the team:
- Product requirements aren't clear? - You're the one who talks to the product manager to disambiguate and polish the product spec.
- The designs are missing several less core user flows? - You're the one who talks to the designer to get those in, making sure that they're both engineering feasible and aesthetically pleasing.
- Success criteria of the project is undefined? - You're the one who talks to the product manager and data scientists to figure out a logging strategy for the feature, updating the engineering spec with an analytics section.
Better yet, do all of these things proactively. Instead of letting the product spec get to engineering in an unfinished state and reacting after the engineers complain, work with the product manager before the project tickets are even made to make sure that the spec they hand off is 100% polished and thorough.
"Glue" work is generally how engineers go from mid-level to senior, particularly at bigger companies like FAANG. More advice here: [Taro Top 10] Tech Leadership
