we're continuing our discussion today on what differentiates a senior engineer from a more junior engineer as we disclaimed in the last episode this is not a specific requirement that a given company would have right this these are not based on some kind of standard because our industry doesn't really have a specific standard that every company follows we don't have any kind of regulatory licensing or anything like that that's not to say that you can't go and get some kind of license or some kind of certification but ultimately you're leveling in in a specific standard that every company follows that's not to say that you can't go and get some the company that you're in is going to be based on whatever that company's policy is whatever they have adopted because this industry isn't really regulated by an external governing body at least in the united states that's that's the case i'm not sure if that's true everywhere but generally speaking uh titles are you know kind of fluid in the software development industry but that said for most of the more senior roles that i've ever encountered in my career most of the job descriptions that you'll see most leadership or tech lead roles that you'll find they're going to benefit from what we talk about in these episodes because this is not just a list of skills there's not a list of you know black and white qualifications these are behaviors that set you apart as a senior engineer right these are behaviors that set you apart in the last episode we talked about taking your your perception or your perspective of a situation from static which would be a more junior perspective to dynamic which is a more senior perspective and we talked about the three-axis model if you missed that go back and listen to it i encourage you if you're interested in growing as an engineer that's a good episode to start with if you're just coming to the show but in today's episode i want to discuss another trait another trait of a senior engineer and this is another simple perspective shift a simple perspective shift that you can make today all right so you probably know that your job your career is highly correlated on your ability to produce value your ability to use your skills use your talent use your uh your energy to produce something valuable but this is usually where junior engineers stop they spend a lot of time on the job and they're not going to be able to do that all of their energy and their existing skills to try to produce as much value as possible as much value as they can in a given window of time and there's nothing necessarily wrong with this approach but it leaves a lot on the table if you always do it this way specifically your career is not just directly correlated it's not a one-to-one correlation with the value that you produce it is arguably just as affected by your ability to translate that value to someone who cares in other words value doesn't exist in a vacuum you can't just produce something that you believe is valuable and close your eyes and wish that that's going to result in something good for you your ability to communicate that value to some audience that matters this is a critical part of your career we're going to talk about some basic communication theory here because your career is going to be moderated by your ability to effectively produce a message send that message to the right receiver in a way that the message is received as valuable in other words your potential in your career this is for most cases not every case right we don't live in a perfectly fair system that treats everybody exactly the same and rewards everybody exactly the same but your job and your career is heavily dependent on your ability to tell what your value is to the right people so the basic communication theory right this this is very important for you to understand both for this case and for many other situations that you'll encounter in your life and your career basic communication model consists of a sender and one or more receivers right this is the fundamental concept is you have a message you as the sender you formulate the message you use some medium to translate that message from you the sender to a receiver the receiver optionally will provide feedback to your message this is a response to a message and this is a response to a message and this is a response that is directly you know kind of triggered by whatever that original message is which acts as a kind of a message on its own it's a is a return message and it's through a medium as well finally in that medium whatever that medium is there will be some kind of noise and this model of interaction or messaging model is kind of a reciprocal or a cyclic model you send a message you get feedback that acts as a new message which then itself gets feedback and it continues on like that this isn't the first time we've talked about communication theory but it's critically important for this discussion because we're not just talking about you know a message that you might give your manager in a one-on-one really we're talking about a more systematic message how do you present your message to yourself so that your value is clearly demonstrated part of that messaging model which is likely the most underserved or forgotten part of the messaging model is the encoding and the decoding you as the sender you are encoding information now this information for you is somewhat raw you know what the information means you were present for you know the the actions that you were doing and you were doing it for the purpose of the message and you were doing it for the purpose of the message and you were doing it for the purpose of the message and you took as an engineer maybe the the thing that you created and so all of that experience you're trying to encode into some kind of compressed format for example a bullet point list of what you did in the last six months and this encoding doesn't just have one kind of output certainly it doesn't just result in words that you write for a performance review or something it may also be encoded into your behavior and your behavior and your behavior and your behavior and your behavior your behaviors uh as a part of kind of a overall messaging strategy that you have but let's keep it simple you're encoding a message about your performance over the last six months it may result in that bullet point list it gets sent across some kind of medium maybe it's the platform that you use for these kinds of reviews and then the uh the receiver of this match is they're going to decode it so they may look at this bullet point list and they're going to decode it and try to extrapolate out in their minds what exactly it means. How does this translate to value for the company? Or how does this translate to growth for you as an engineer? Or their belief that you may be able to step up a level in your career? So all of this encoding and decoding can change the message pretty significantly. And as it turns out, the majority of communication problems happen because of the encoding and the decoding. The other thing that may happen is the noise that may be introduced could be poorly attributed to you. That is, something about the way that the message gets translated to the receiver could change the message itself. Or it could change the way that the receiver decodes it because it's been kind of mutated by whatever environment it was in. A good example of this is, in fact, performance reviews. If your manager has read five or ten other summaries of people's work, they may start to see this bullet point list as just another one of the same. This means that the effectiveness of your communication may suffer from that noise, the environmental noise, the context in which your message was sent. So this episode is not a tutorial in how to send the correct message. So that your career will grow. That would be too much of a complicated topic to cover in this episode of the podcast. But the important thing to recognize here is that just by thinking about this model, just by recognizing that the value that you produce in your career doesn't stand on its own. You have some responsibility to communicate that value so that the value can be recognized properly. So it can be attributed properly. So that you can actually grow. In your career as a result of the value that you've generated. These are loosely correlated events. And your responsibility is to manage that messaging so that the value gets tied correctly. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea. Hopefully this was a valuable concept to you. Maybe you will think about your next performance review a little bit differently. Your next status update with your team, your next stand up, your next retro. All of these messages that you create. To your colleagues, to your manager, whatever the situation is. These are opportunities for you to generate that narrative of value for yourself. Thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed this discussion, please leave a review in iTunes. We don't ask you to do that very often. But if you haven't done it yet, and I know there are thousands of you who have not. Leaving a review in iTunes or in another platform, a podcast platform, is incredibly helpful. To help the show continue to reach new engineers who have never heard of us. That's one great way to help out. If you'd like to take the conversation one step further, you can do that in two ways. One, you can just talk about it with another engineering friend of yours. They don't really even have to be an engineer. Somebody that you think could benefit from the conversation. Having that discussion is going to help you kind of embed this knowledge a little bit deeper. And help you understand how you relate to it. Rather than just taking it wholesale and moving on. So I encourage you to have that conversation. Another way you can do that is to join the DeveloperTea Discord community. Head over to developertea.com slash discord to join totally free today. Thanks so much for listening. And until next time, enjoy your tea.