Team-First Approach

There’s a lot that has been written about teamwork, and for good reason. When you have a group of people all working towards a common goal, you can achieve great things. Each individual member on the team brings with them a unique set of skills, and when a team is able to leverage the skills from one of their team members, everyone benefits.

Senior software engineers recognize that shipping software is a team sport. While programming may feel like an individual activity when you’re deep in the code, developers rely on one another to review their code, answer questions, share knowledge, and teach each other.

When software developers work together, they can achieve so much more than what each individual could accomplish on their own. When they build off each other’s work, fix each other’s bugs, and share their knowledge, a team becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

A senior engineer recognizes the importance of the team, and they identify and complete tasks that benefit the team, even if the work isn’t planned or assigned to them. They understand that sometimes being senior means taking on the mundane tasks that no one else wants to do, because it will help unblock others to complete more work. Their focus is always a team-first approach, and they strive to lift up all members of their team because they know that when it comes to software, we all share the same responsibility to keep the systems running and deliver as much value to our users as possible.

Senior engineers recognize that the team consists of more people than just other software engineers. Test engineers, product and project managers, product owners, scrum masters, designers, and technical writers can all be a part of the same team or business unit. Just because someone doesn’t write code doesn’t mean they’re not part of the team, and senior engineers work with everyone to achieve the team’s goals.

Senior engineers look for opportunities to mentor junior engineers, help them develop their coding skills, and teach them problem-solving techniques. We all start out as junior engineers when we begin our careers, and senior engineers are able to empathize with the younger members of the team and help them work through problems collaboratively when they notice someone is stuck or unsure of which direction to go.

And finally, senior engineers understand that in some cases, sacrificing their own productivity in order to unblock or enable other developers’ productivity is time well spent. They may spend a day without coding while they work through requirements for a project because they know it will enable the rest of their team to work quickly with clear instructions. They view productivity in terms of the whole team, rather than just themselves, and sometimes that means working through others or spending more time upfront in order to enable their team members to move faster in the future.