What makes a senior engineer? Writing software vs. building systems
There's a meme I've seen making the rounds that is something like - junior engineer: screenshot of code, engineer: screenshot of code, senior engineer: screenshot of zoom.<p>To me, what a non-senior engineer and a senior engineer do are so different that they ought to be different career tracks, but this progression seems depressingly organic and inevitable. The more experience you get, the more people come to you for answers. The more people who come to you for answers, the more involved you are in the big things. The more you involved you are in the big things, the less time you have to code.<p>It seems crazy to me that you would spend so much time and effort mastering the arcana of coding only to let it go unused later in your career. It's like if a virtuoso musician were told that he can't play music anymore. He needs to move on to conducting, and after that composing. And he can't just stay at his current level and keep doing what he's been training for years to do. If he wants a future with this orchestra, he needs to exhibit career growth. The expanding business has no place for stagnant employees.<p>Some business somewhere ought to make an effort to let the virtuoso coders keep doing their thing, and break out the engineers who want to go into system design as a separate career track.