“Why not people?” you ask.

It’s that soft skill thing. It’s trick. I’ve found that it’s hard for Seniors to do a consistent job of people, mostly because they’re typically just above the ones they’re managing. It’ easier for Development Managers to evangelise, mostly because they’re less focused on the technology. But that’s just my <extreme-sarcasm>oh-so-humble</extreme-sarcasm> opinion.

If you can showcase a team on a project – no matter what size, it shows a great deal about the Senior Developer’s leadership, pride, passion and confidence NOT ONLY in his/her work but in the team they manage.

If you can’t help others up the ladder you don’t deserve to be on the rung you’re at.

Excellent points, and you’re right — the best ones are the ones who can park the ego. I’ve been very fortunate to work with several of those.

As for the ones who claim to write bug-free code, they’re just BEGGING for a butt-whumping.

That’s a shame we never got to get together at all! Especially since (I think) Schematic is just around the block from The Hangar? If you get a chance hit up Jason (he’s “Hale” further up) — he took over from me, and a great guy to get to know!

First of all let me tell you this is a great post. I enjoyed it a lot.

I work as Tech Director at Schematic in our Costa Rica office!! Yeah Costa Rica. Just found out you lived here last year. Too bad I didn’t knew your blog then. I would’ve loved to meet you in person.

I shared your post with my team.

I’ll read more of your posts. Nice blog

Cheers

I’m not a senior developer, never will be. But I have worked with and managed a bunch of them over the years. The best ones (from my perspective) take great pride in their work, but park their ego, or perhaps it’s better described as attitude at the door. The worst – well I’m sure many of us have seen one or two of those. Like one of the development team leads on a big project I worked on in Ottawa many years ago who claimed that he wrote bug free code. Talk about waving a red flag in front of someone who was at the time an intermediate QA person (I seem to recall not being terribly polite either). Needless to say, he wasn’t a happy camper a few weeks later when his code was integrated and sent to testing for the first time.

I’d like to think that I can still offer advice to friends, and hope that I can make some amends for things I didn’t get a chance to finish.

Doug, sometimes you do just have to hit people on the head.

Thanks for the insightful post!