There is no such thing called L6 task

“So John will join force with you next sprint to drive project X over the finish line. How do you like a L6 SDE working together with you?”, I was talking to a team lead about moving more resources to his project.

“John will be a great help for sure but ..”

“You have concerns?” I asked.

“Yeah. We have a lot of small tasks that need people but they are not really L6 level tasks, a L5 engineer or even an experienced L4 engineer can do them as well. I am not sure if John will like these tasks.”

“Ha! There is a logical error in your statement. Can you tell where is the problem?”

“I am not sure what you mean”. The team lead was confused.

“There is no such thing called L6 task! Let me explain. SDE levelings are based on skill set and behaviors manifested through delivering values to stakeholders. It is more about ‘how’ they do things, less about ‘the difficulty of the things’, that differentiate senior engineers from junior engineers. Of course when we have a project with significant scope, complexity and impact, we tend to ask the engineers who have demonstrated the required skills and leadership principles in the past to lead it. We want to set our engineers for success. Sometimes we do assign projects out of their comfort zones to a engineer, just enough to allow them to grow. If they are too far away out of their conform zone, they get scared. That is bad for them and for the projects.

When we teach people to get better at skiing, the first thing we do is to match their skills with the right terrains. In instructors’ circle we have a saying: ‘new skill, old terrain; old skill, new terrain’, which means when we teach new skills to students, we need to choose the terrains within students comfort zones and vice visa. There are no terrains that advanced skiers won’t go just because they are below their skill levels. In fact, you can easily tell an advanced skier on easy runs: they have total awareness of their ski-snow interactions and their body positions, they make perfect round turns, completely in control. It is a treat to watch them. It is NOT the terrains that define who are advanced skiers, it is how they handle the terrains.

Similarly a L6 SDE will differentiate themselves even in easy tasks. Their CRs will be examplatery to other engineers, their design decisions demonstrate long term thinking: modualization, maintainability and extensibility etc. Their communication to stakeholders will be timely, clear and right to the point.

The engineers who claim certain tasks are lower than their ranks are not mature enough to appreciate the true essence of engineering disciplines, just like the skiers who brag they will only ski double black diamond runs are just rookie skiers that still lack self awareness.

It is ‘how’ we handle tasks and the qualities we demonstrate from doing the tasks, that make us worthy of the senior title, not the size of the tasks!”