John Allspaw wrote a great blog post titled On Being a Senior Engineer.  I read it, nodding along, and realized that his post isn’t really about being a senior engineer.  As Allspaw puts it, “I expect a ‘senior’ engineer to be a mature engineer”.

He’s totally right.  A senior engineer, or a senior user experience professional, or (I think) a senior anything is about maturity.  It’s not just about the number of years that you’ve worked with a given technology or done a particular job.  It’s about how well you get your job done.  These items from his post particularly resonated with me:

• seek out constructive criticism of their designs – When you’re senior, you know that your work isn’t automatically perfect.  You know that others have valuable perspectives, that they have knowledge that you don’t have, that others can be the source of a valuable insight that you wouldn’t get otherwise.
• understand […] how they are perceived – Allspaw said it well here: “Mature engineers know that no matter how complete, elegant, or superior their designs are, it won’t matter if no one wants to work alongside them because they are assholes.”  Oh, and this too: “Be the engineer that everyone wants to work with.”
• understand that not all of their projects are filled with rockstar-on-stage work – There’s a lot of work to get done.  Being willing to do the work that needs to get done, not just the high-profile work, is one of the ways that you become senior.  This is related to, but definitely not the same as, being the person who everyone who everyone wants to work with.
• lift the skills and expertise of those around them – One of the most important things that you can do in a senior role is to help your team be better. If you’re the rockstar on your team, but everyone else around you is floundering, you’re not senior.  You need to help those around you so that they can be rockstars too.  Create a team of rockstars, and that’s one of the ways that you become senior.
• make their trade-offs explicit when making judgements and decisions – Nothing is perfect.  Life is a balancing act.  When you’re making trade-offs, document them.  It will help others understand your thinking, which makes the team better and which helps with gathering constructive criticism.  It will also help yourself in the future so that you remember why it is that you decided on one thing over another.

Allspaw makes a lot of other awesome points, and I feel like I’ve lifted enough from his post as it is.  His blog post is one of the most insightful and thought-provoking that I’ve read in quite some time.  It’s long, but I recommend reading all of it and thinking about how it applies to your career and your life.