How do you measure and evaluate the performance of your senior engineers? Can you even do it as a non-engineer? And what are diminishers and multipliers in your team? I’m an introvert, will I ever become a real senior engineer! And how do you even decide who get’s a raise and who not? Clean Coders to the rescue, I need your help.

Welcome to The Innovation Engineer Podcast, your favorite place for picking brains of your favorite engineers. This time Ard asked us how you actually evaluate and judge senior engineers. We already talked about what makes a good senior engineer in episode 2 of our podcast. Can this even be done by a manager who didn’t touch code for a decade? Or even a manager who never coded? The simple answer: Yes! Because code quality and pure technical skills are the least important thing you are looking for in senior engineers. 

Hosted by two former CTOs who decided to stay hands-on, both veterans of the industry with decades of experience as engineers. You can expect many stories from current and past ventures. Meet Innovation Engineer Tarek Madany Mamlouk and Principal Engineer Sebastian "Waschi" Waschnick.

Key Takeaways

• Soft Skills are everything. It’s not the number of programming languages or number of years you have been coding.
• It depends on your culture. What do you strive for? You need to write this down! Oriente yourself on the “Level-System” used in many US companies.
• Performance works inwards and outwards. This includes your mindset and which value you bring to the company, but also making sure that your team performs.
• Try to decouple the performance review and the salary negotiation. Salary is only a hygiene factor and should be orientated on the personal market situation of each developer..

Show Notes

• 0:00 Intro
• 1:33 What Tarek did to impress his superiors
• 2:58 The best metrics: Lines of Code or Story Points
• 4:19 What the git commit history tells you
• 9:33 The Dunning–Kruger effect 
• 13:03 There is no linear path to increase your skill level, you can add value in different ways
• 14:20 Multipliers and Diminishers
• 17:45 Fire your best engineer
• 21:13 Introverts also speak up and are productive communicators
• 22:33 I’m an introvert, I just trained my soft skills
• 27:57 The hard questions - how to do the actual evaluation
• 29:03 Salary - decouple it from the evaluation, it’s only a hygiene factor
• 31:56 Should your salary be independent from your performance?
• 34:24 Encourage your engineers to talk with headhunters
• 35:47 Something like employee terrorism
• 37:55 Where does the value from that person come from? Druid knowledge?
• 39:42 There are only bad leaders - Team performance depends on leadership 
• 42:07 The keeper test
• 43:45 The “We are a family trap” 
• 47:28 Summary and Key Takeaways
• 50:38 Next time: We talk about the book “Drive”

Stuff we mentioned

• 🎙 TIE POD Episode 2 → “What makes a senior engineer”
• 📄 Dunning–Kruger effect
• 📄 Gitlabs Engineer Career Development
• 📘 Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
• 📘 Netflix “No Rules Rules”
• 📘 Clean Coders

What should we talk about next?

• YouTube:  The Innovation Engineer
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