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What Does It Take To Become a Senior Software Engineer?

Important skills to learn that nobody taught us in grad school

Manny de Souza
Better Programming
5 min readOct 4, 2021
Female sitting at desk coding
Photo by Nicole Wolf on Unsplash

More than a decade ago, it was a trend for companies to hire developers based on the programming language they had experience with, frameworks, tech stack, and such.

Even though it is desirable to hire engineers skilled with a particular stack, this turned out to be less important. After all, great software developers can learn and ramp up quickly with the massive knowledge available on the internet.

With that being the absolute baseline, companies started to value developers with great complementary soft skills, as their technical expertise is now baseline to work in the industry, setting the bar even higher to people starting a career right out of college.

The Three Fundamental Traits

After eleven years as an engineering manager, I observed the skills that tech companies generally value the most. I noticed a pattern that generally falls into three different categories:

1. Technical expertise and craftsmanship

Understanding the fundamental concepts of computer science is the baseline to become a software engineer. Even though this is common…

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Manny de Souza
Manny de Souza

Written by Manny de Souza

Engineering Manager at Netflix. Writes about leadership, career progression, culture and effective organizations.

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