Today we asked ourselves: What makes a senior engineer? And why is Tarek not a Senior Innovation Engineer? 20 years of experience and still not a real senior! How many programming languages do you need to speak and why does scrum not allow speaking with me. Is it about money?

Show Notes

• 6:20 Social intelligence, good communications skills, intrinsic motivation? I don’t care - do you need Java, C or Python developers? 
• 7:00 The number of programming languages is not a good metric for being a high level senior engineer. And recruiters don't want to hear that.
• 8:05 Seniority comes from your skills to teach others and to communicate
• 8:35 Working software is only a byproduct for achieving business goals and those are the things young engineers don’t want to hear
• 9:40 What are you actually doing in your job? Programming? That’s not true, you are trying to create a product.
• 10:20 STFU The scrum process does not allow you talking to me
• 11:10 I love the netflix culture team, companies are like professional sport teams
• 11:20 Each young engineer should aim to be a CTO
• 12:50 The thing I’m doing right now without titles is way more fun than being a senior c level manager
• 15:50 Is it about a promotion, or about money? Oh, I can give you a title instead.
• 18:45 Specific titles are like blue blood - you become a royal
• 19:50 You can think of it as an investment into the future
• 21:10 Titles lose their magic, I actually want more flexibility and a 4 day workweek 
• 21:50 I heard you are a TikTok star in secret → fun with facts
• 25:00 The European market is following the American, and the US market is more strict and has more hierarchie → The level system of American companies and why is it so strict? Check FANG who defined those levels levels.fyi
• 27:40 What does it mean to be a level 5 engineer?
• 28:45 Try to hire good people and see where they fit
• 29:10 One piece of advice on how to become a senior developer: The Clean Coder from Robert C. Martin  for understand what makes a professional developer 
• 31:05 The Lean Startup, you are not payed to write code, you are paid to grow a business
• 32:00 its kind of a disease, a senior engineer loves the problem, not the solution
• 32:40 What makes a senior engineer?
• 35:50 bad presentation because he is unstructured
• 37:30 if I ever write a blog post I’m just going to quote you

Stuff we mentioned

• The Netflix Culture Code, a famous slide deck which cause uproar in the valley 
• And a book from Netflix explaining this culture: No Rules Rules 
• Domain Driven Design, that one famous book, but maybe read this shorter summary  
• The Clean Coder, the book Tarek bought for each new engineer he hired 
• levels.fyi shows the level systems of different companies and how much money your are missing on right now
• The Lean Startup, the book which started all this talk about lean and startups
• Did we miss talking about gadgets this week? So sad. Try my new favorite bone conduction headset instead. I also have a cheaper and older model, it’s nearly as good.

What should we talk about next?

• YouTube:  The Innovation Engineer
• Leave a review/comment on YouTube; it's like podcasts, but with video.

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