In this episode of IseeQ’s TechTalk series, veteran agile coach Bálint Farkas and Gergely Orosz, engineering manager at Uber Amsterdam, sat down to talk seniority in software engineering and everything that comes – and should come – with it. Scroll down for our favourite takeaways and aha moments from the discussion.
1. Big tech’s secret of productivity is… (drumroll, please)
No secret at all. Steve Jobs once famously quipped: “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.” Gergely straight out says that the big secret is rather a small attitude adjustment: “When people are motivated, they’ll produce twice as much in the same time. That’s the ‘secret’ of all the top tech companies, starting from Google back in the day through Facebook to the latest group of unicorns that came after. Get people motivated, get out of their way, give them the support they need and see them do great things.” 
Companies who are unable or unwilling to move on from age-old hierarchical models have a good chance of going from leaders to laggards.
Gergely brings a sobering example: “One of my buddies is advising a major bank in the UK on a two- or three-year project to revamp the bank, its services and rewrite its apps. It is run as a big waterfall project and actually has six layers of project management. Engineers work at the bottom two layers and decisions can only be made from the third layer up. That means that if you worked there as a software engineer and had an idea, first you would have to take it to your boss, then your boss would take it to their boss, who would come back with a decision.” Sounds efficient.
2. Mentoring is a two-way street
And it leads to growth on both ends. No matter how far along you are in your career, you should always strive to do more or do better. Or do more, better. Whatever the case may be, you should never underestimate the power of together. “When I talk to people about how they can get better at something, my go-to advice is ‘Well, you could start by helping less experienced engineers become better’,” Gergely explains. Newly minted mentors might need some coaching on how to give feedback or how to have one-on-ones with juniors first, but these efforts will more than pay off in the long run – for mentors and mentees alike.
“Teaching something always gives you a new perspective, too. No matter what you teach, you have to understand it so well that in the end you’re bound to become better at it yourself. It’s about understanding things more profoundly, whether it’s a codebase or a business,” Bálint chimes in. The numbers certainly check out on this. A Deloitte survey has found that those millennials who intend to stay with their employer for more than five years are twice as likely to have a mentor. Mentors, says another, are promoted six times more often than those who don’t take part in mentoring programmes.
3. A little inefficiency goes a long way 
Your workplace isn’t exactly big on mentoring? It might be time you did something about it. “Managers exist for one reason: they’re hired to make sure that the team works better with them than without them,” Gergely points out. Nothing stops you as a manager from creating a mentoring environment in your team. And there’s not much to lose either, despite what others might think. “There are companies, typically outside the tech industry, who like to look at engineers’ time as a box of eight hours and want to know exactly what they’re doing every hour of every day. As a result, mentorship is often discouraged because it’s thought of as a bad use of people’s time.”
4. What fancy titles really (should) mean
The way Gergely sees it, the difference between junior and senior software engineers lies in the impact they have. “By impact, I mean when you get work done, what’s the kind of blast radius, if you will,” he explains. The bigger the company, the bigger the impact, of course. At Uber, for instance, there are staff engineers who’ve built the payment system that moves millions of dollars and, if there’s a glitch, can put the ride-hailing giant out of millions of dollars. But that’s only half the story. The impact of people at this level of seniority goes way beyond numbers. Most of them lead huge teams, often across multiple departments, and influence a lot of people in the process.
“What I expect from people with fancy titles is to be supportive, help others with their ideas and also teach them in a gentle way. And often just let them fail, if possible,” Gergely explains. They should be the people who say “yes, and” instead of “no, but”. Even if they’re pulled into a thousand different directions because of their immense organisational knowledge and technical expertise. “To me the biggest surprise is that the people I know at this level are just very nice people to talk to and they always make time for everyone. I often say to myself ‘How are you doing this when you’re so busy working on all these projects?’,” the engineering manager admits.
 

Ready for more wisdom? Grab a bean bag and watch the full(-sized) video or listen to the podcast!

Check out the IseeQ blog site for in-depth interviews and articles on the latest career and recruitment trends and best practices from the world of tech.

Looking for software engineering experts? As specialised headhunters, we’re here to help with all your IT recruitment needs in Budapest. Give us a shout.