We're continuing our discussion on the traits of a senior engineer. And in today's episode, I want to talk about how you spend your time as a senior engineer. Your intuition as a young engineer, as a junior engineer, might lead you to seek out learning. And in the beginning, most of what you learn might feel difficult. Now you get a rush from this. Most people do at least. A rush of learning things quickly. If you think about it, you're learning at a rate. You're learning at a rapid pace when you begin your engineering career. This also happens if you start at a new company. You get the opportunity to learn a lot in a very short amount of time. We've talked about this in the past on this show as a source for imposter syndrome. The reality is that your pace of learning feels very different than your use of that learning. The analogy we've made in the past is acceleration versus speed. Acceleration is your rate of change in your learning. In other words, you're learning at a fast pace. You're gaining new skills quickly. Versus velocity being that you already have those skills and you're simply applying them. You're not necessarily learning nearly at the pace that you used to learn. And so your acceleration slows way down even though you're moving quickly. But in this early phase of your career, that learning is also tied to difficulty. In other words, you begin to succeed. You're given some kind of reward for doing difficult things. So let's think about this thoroughly here for a second. Early in our careers, we are given a reward for doing difficult things. And so we're trained, whether consciously or unconsciously, that doing difficult things is worthy. It's reward. And we replace reward-worthy in our minds. We do a quick substitution for valuable. This is also compounded by the fact that most of pop culture rewards things that are difficult to do. This is especially true in things like sports. People who are extraordinarily talented have to work very hard and that is very difficult. And so we attach some value to doing hard things. But there's a question. What is the value of doing difficult things? And this is one of the traits of a senior engineer. They learn what this error was. They learn that difficult does not directly equate to valuable. A more formal representation of this might sound like this. Just because valuable things sometimes are difficult to achieve does not mean that difficult things are valuable. Now, of course, we're not going to dive into, how to define value in this discussion. You can kind of substitute whatever your particular picture of value is. You could substitute what your company or your boss thinks is valuable. Or if you want to substitute the monetary value as what we're talking about when we say valuable, all of those things will still track for this definition. Things that are difficult are not necessarily inherently valuable. Now, the second part of this, the kind of response, that a good senior engineer will have, is to recognize that if this is true, if not all valuable things are difficult, and difficulty doesn't represent some direct tie to value, then a senior engineer is going to seek out the things that are not difficult and are also valuable. This is very important to capture, very important to understand. Senior engineers are going to look for things that are not difficult, but are also highly valuable. This is one action in a theme of actions that's really critical to understand. This is a theme that senior engineers absolutely understand, and that is high leverage activity. When you are a senior engineer, especially when you start getting into upper senior level, like staff or principal, depending on where you are, the way you spend your time needs to converge further and further towards high leverage. That means the value that you produce, with a given action, needs to outpace the value that you used to produce with a similar amount of energy. This will be a theme that comes up over and over in this series, but this is the first way that this is likely to show up. You may hear the old adage, work smarter, not harder. Interestingly, even embedded in that is a misunderstanding. Even being smarter does not necessarily mean that you're going to equate your work with action. Added value. The important thing here is to recognize that value does not care about your intentions. It doesn't care about your capabilities. It doesn't care about how intelligent you are. If you can achieve value through a simple set of actions, then you are focusing on high leverage, and that is a trait of senior software engineers. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea. If you enjoyed this episode, if you want to carry the discussion further, we've been having a great discussion, for example, on the merits of coding while in flow state. There is some good disagreement happening in the Discord community on whether or not that is actually a valuable state to be in while you're coding. If you want to go and learn more about what other people are saying, not just my word, but what other smart software engineers have to say about these subjects, join the Developer Tea Discord community. That's developertea.com slash Discord. Thanks so much for listening, and until next time, enjoy your tea.