Being Senior Is Not About Code

We were all once lords or someday we will become lords.

At the same time, perhaps the most unusual feeling that you experience when you become a Senior Developer is that the quality of your work is now determined not by the number of tasks completed, but by something deeper.

In essence, there is a shift of focus, you are no longer expected to carry out everyday business tasks, but to correctly set priorities, develop a technology development strategy and, if the process is not of the highest quality, put out fires.

And when you reach a new level, it's worth thinking about how you work and whether your previous practices are suitable for the new role.

I often notice that a certain pool of developers doesn't think about how they can make their work more efficient. They spend time manually parsing pull requests, raising a project from 0 without using boilerplates, using the mouse rather than shortcuts, etc.

Overall, the question of your effectiveness is one of the most important parameters that your management pays attention to. After all, now you are paid money not for solving business problems as before, but for speeding up the development process, making it more reliable and stable.

You become more mature and, before you start developing something, you think about what benefits the task brings and how it can be implemented. You discuss the implementation with colleagues and other developers, and then write the coveted line that brings the company millions.

Perhaps at this stage you may feel that you are tired and that work does not bring the same joy as it did before. When I became a manager, this was one of the main discoveries for me: your work is no longer assessed by the current day or week, but by months or even years. There is no "light" dopamine from completing a task.

At this stage of your career, the most important thing for you is stability or even what in English is called sustainability (the word "sustainability" seems to have a slightly different meaning).

It is more important than ever, at this moment, to structure your work so that you can focus on real problems, and not some endless little things. This will help you deal with burnout and improve the quality of your project development process. You need to ask the team and management for opportunities for technological improvements, but always come with motivation: how it will help in the future and what it will save your project from.

Stabilize everything that can be stabilized, so that at any moment you can calmly go on vacation and not think about how an unsuccessful pull request breaks your production. Remember that you are now a senior developer.