We had a conversation with Jonathan Cutrell that was so good it made two episodes!
Talking points
- what exactly does it mean to be a senior engineer?
- on being a great hammerer vs. solving problems using hammers
- why engineers who aren't quite senior get the senior title
- being a good partner to your product managers
- how showing up and caring beyond code gets you in the conversation earlier and lets you shape the roadmap
- bushwhacking for your team
- the PM is not your boss
- PM and Engineer team is like F1 driver and race engineer or golfer and caddy – you advise, they decide
- technical debt is a tool
- what senior engineers do for team morale
- steering your team out of rabbit holes
- why algorithms are the easy part of software engineering
- domain modeling is the actual hardest problem
- web performance is overshadowed by network latency
- senior engineers fail interviews because they don't know how to use their time effectively
- good interviews ensure you don't have enough time – we want to see what and how you prioritize
- senior engineers should have strong opinions
- how to avoid becoming the single point of failure on your team
- distributed ownerships
- the most common misconception that holds back your career and how to fix it
- having a long-term view of your projects
- working on the things leadership will notice
- how to get more autonomy by owning your mistakes
- making decisions probabilistically
All that and more in the Developer Tea interview about The Senior Engineer Mindset