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I feel like we are not in alignment on what a senior engineer should do so lets first agree on that. The primary responsibility of a senior engineer is to move

I feel like we are not in alignment on what a senior engineer should do so lets first agree on that. The primary responsibility of a senior engineer is to move the business objectives forward. Code quality can be a business objective but that needs to be decided together with the business team. If that is not a business objective then the senior engineer is wasting their time and everyone else's time on it. A solution is objectively better only if it moves the codebase forward towards the business objectives. More often that not this involves no refactoring but surgically adding features without changing or breaking any existing functionality.

JoeAltmaier 4y ago
That's a business person's view. At some point a Senior Engineer is about Engineering. Leave the marketing to that department. The idea that 'business objectives' can be meaningful in detail at the Engineering level is hopeful. Maybe in a startup with one product, and even then, everybody is guessing about what features will resonate and what the customer base is. No, a Senior Engineer is first about competent correct performant code. That's got to be their focus. Not attending business meetings.
- nodemaker 4y ago
  Haha I am as technical as it gets (Have a masters degree in engineering from a decent school, even have written my own compiler and database system) and this is the senior engineer I want to be and have in my team. The engineers you are describing are some of the biggest time wasters I have seen - spending months on making “engineering improvements”. One guy I met spent a year on making the perfect build system in rust lang that I could have written in cmake and bash in a week.
  - JoeAltmaier 4y ago
    Not any guy I am describing. This has reduced to cherry-picking bad examples. I think we both understand the issues by now.
    - nodemaker 4y ago
      Yeah okay cherry-picking an example wasnt the best idea i admit. But still the disagreement we have is between a senior engineer striving for business value vs a senior engineer striving for engineering value. I have been on both sides of this to be fair.

JoeAltmaier 4y ago

That's a business person's view. At some point a Senior Engineer is about Engineering. Leave the marketing to that department. The idea that 'business objectives' can be meaningful in detail at the Engineering level is hopeful. Maybe in a startup with one product, and even then, everybody is guessing about what features will resonate and what the customer base is. No, a Senior Engineer is first about competent correct performant code. That's got to be their focus. Not attending business meetings.

nodemaker 4y ago
Haha I am as technical as it gets (Have a masters degree in engineering from a decent school, even have written my own compiler and database system) and this is the senior engineer I want to be and have in my team. The engineers you are describing are some of the biggest time wasters I have seen - spending months on making “engineering improvements”. One guy I met spent a year on making the perfect build system in rust lang that I could have written in cmake and bash in a week.
- JoeAltmaier 4y ago
  Not any guy I am describing. This has reduced to cherry-picking bad examples. I think we both understand the issues by now.
  - nodemaker 4y ago
    Yeah okay cherry-picking an example wasnt the best idea i admit. But still the disagreement we have is between a senior engineer striving for business value vs a senior engineer striving for engineering value. I have been on both sides of this to be fair.