Swizec Teller - a geek with a hatswizec.com

Senior Mindset Book

Get promoted, earn a bigger salary, work for top companies

Senior Engineer Mindset cover
Learn more

    Developer Tea interview about The Senior Engineering Mindset

    We had a conversation with Jonathan Cutrell that was so good it made two episodes!

    Developer Tea – Mar 21, 2022

    Developer Tea – Mar 23, 2022

    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

    Created by Swizec with ❤️