alt Hacker News> Influencing without authority
> Getting work prioritized
> Developing 1YP+ plans for their areas
I was a little surprised by your list. Aren't these normally the responsibilities of a team lead or a manager? If I were hired as a senior engineer, I'd expect to be involved in group decisions about cross-cutting technical concerns (architecture, choosing languages and frameworks, the code review process), but changing my team's priorities would fall well outside the job description.
If somebody has the power to tell me what to prioritise, it feels topsy-turvy for them to ask me to tell them what they should tell me to prioritise. At that point, why have a leader at all?
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Team lead manages the overall direction of the team (and is possibly the expert on some portions), but for an individual subsystem a senior engineer might be the expert.
For work coming from outside the team, it’s sort of upto your management chain and team lead to prioritise. But for internally driven work (tech debt reduction, reliability/efficiency improvements etc) often the senior engineer has a better idea of the priorities for their area of expertise.
Prioritisation between the two is often a bit more collaborative and as a senior engineer you have to justify why thing X is super critical (not just propose that thing X needs to be done).
I view the goal of managers + lead as more balancing the various things the team could be doing (especially externally) and the goal of a senior engineer is to be an input to the process for a specific system they know most about.
I work at a large software company, senior engineers here are essentially technical leads for a team or a subsystem. They are my equals when it comes to level, often getting paid a lot more than me for high performers.
I'm here to help the team make decisions, but I delegate as much of the opinion having to my senior engineers. To have an opinion they need a bunch of inputs, sometimes getting those inputs isn't as natural as the technical inputs, that's where I come in.
Senior engineers are still involved in cross cutting technical concerns but for any work that is bounded by our team I'd be working with them scope out the work as requirements or use cases we give to mid level or early career engineers on the team to disambiguate with the senior engineer as a consult/negotiate.