Episode 019: It’s Made of People!

Greater Than Code

This episode is in loving memory of Melia L. Moore Panelists: Astrid Countee | Sam Livingston-Gray | Jessica Kerr | Coraline Ada Ehmke Guest Panelists: Darin Wilson of Infinite Red and Keyboardist in @4Minus1Trio Cheryl Schaefer of Launch Code and CoderGirl Show Notes: 01:11 – What it means to be a Senior Engineer When You Don’t Want to Go Into Management 05:07 – Generativity: The difference between your team’s output with you on it and your team’s output without you. Gregor Hohpe: 37 Things One Architect Knows About IT Transformation 13:46 – The Job of An Architect 22:09 – What are the managers doing? “It is too much to ask for your manager to be your career mentor?” Sam Gerstenzang: The Happy Demise of the 10X Engineer Everything's an Argument by Andrea A. Lunsford, et al. Takeaways: Astrid: From Jessica’s perspective, what a software architect actually is supposed to be doing. Sam: Everything's an Argument by Andrea A. Lunsford, et al. Coraline: I’m going to read ^ book. Jessica: More surprise episodes! Support us via Patreon! Get instant access to our Slack Channel! Darin: Think less about me and more about the team around me. And I’m looking for a mentor! Cheryl: Greater Than Code > Mission Taco ASTRID: Hello, everybody. I'm Astrid Countee and welcome to... What are we talking about today? What is this today? Well, here today is one of our patrons, Darin. Say hello, Darin. DARIN: Hello. I'm very happy to be here with Sam Livingston-Gray. SAM: Hello. Welcome Darin and I would also like to welcome another surprise special guest, Cheryl Schaefer. CHERYL: Thanks, Sam. I'm happy to be here and introduce our friend here, Jessica Kerr. JESSICA: Thanks, Cheryl and this is a really fascinating episode today. Let me tell you the story of how this episode happened. See, Coraline was in Africa and she was coming back from Africa. Then people wanted a show with some origin story so we thought we'd have a show with just us but we moved it because Coraline was coming back from Africa but apparently Coraline is still in Africa time zone because she's not here so we popped up in the Slack and ask for some company and Cheryl joined us and Darin joined us and Darin has a question and we don't know what it is. Darin, what is the topic of today's show? DARIN: I've been thinking a lot about what it means to be a senior engineer when you don't want to go into management so I wondered what all of that meant to you. What is your career path look like now that you've sort of crossed over to senior developer when it's not as clear what the next steps are? JESSICA: Excellent question. SAM: That's a really interesting question. It's one that I've been pondering for like five or six years. I don't really have a good answer but I really love programming. I really love figuring out how to get better and better at expressing solutions and even just expressing problems and I love being able to teach people. But I have zero interest in going into management because I know that if my job involves going to meetings and remembering stuff, I would be absolutely horrible at it. I've been a senior developer, in title, for six years and I don't know where to go from there and that's probably going to be an issue at some point. But it's okay for now. ASTRID: Can I ask a question related to this because I don't have an answer, obviously but I do have a question, which is when I was working at HP and I'm wondering if this is just because they do a lot of hardware, they seem to have a path for this and it was different. It was like you became almost a senior fellow kind of thing where you were a person who within the company, you were considered to be an expert. Whenever different groups were working on certain types of solutions that maybe using your wheel house, they could consult with you. It was like you were an in-house advisor and you were also the first point of contact for whenever they were goi...