Senior Engineers Need More Than Code
The skills that get you to senior engineer are almost entirely technical. The skills that make you effective at senior and beyond are almost entirely not.
"How to run a meeting, and no, being the person who talks the most in the meeting is not the same thing as running it." Camille Fournier
Camille Fournier's incomplete list of skills senior engineers need beyond coding reads like a curriculum in organizational influence: how to write a design doc and drive it to resolution, how to mentor people at different career stages, how to lead a project when you don't manage anyone on it, how to influence another team to use your solution, how to convince management to invest in a technical project, how to pick your battles, how to take negative feedback gracefully. Not one of these is about writing better code.
At Google, a principal engineer described the transition this way: promotions from L3 through L5 are about doing more individually getting faster, writing more code, learning tools. But L6 (Staff) is "more like a change in job ladder" where writing code matters far less than clear communication and strategic thinking. His superpower became working across teams to make connections that would otherwise be missed. "Google Docs is basically my IDE nowadays." At Amazon, Carlos Arguelles observed that the most senior engineers speak less and listen more. A favorite principal "perfected the art of asking questions instead of stating opinions," guiding people to conclusions through questions rather than directives.
The Old Hacker's advice on staying employed reinforces this from a survival perspective: you want to be so useful that losing you creates problems for your boss, your project, and your company. That usefulness increasingly comes not from the code you write but from the organizational glue you provide the relationships you maintain, the context you carry, the friction you reduce.
Takeaway: After a certain point, your technical ceiling matters far less than your ability to influence, communicate, and connect across organizational boundaries.
See also: Communication Usually Fails Except by Accident | Do Things Then Tell People | Trust Is Infrastructure