Marketing Yourself as a Senior Engineer
Explore practical ways to present yourself as a senior engineer despite self-doubt or skill gaps. Understand the importance of sharing your accomplishments, securing credible mentors, and combating imposter syndrome. This lesson helps you build confidence to pursue senior roles by leveraging feedback, storytelling, and public engagement.
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It doesn’t hurt to try
You may feel like you’re not fully ready yet. You haven’t checked off all the boxes for the senior engineer job or promotion you’re applying for. It doesn’t hurt to try. You don’t know if it’s impostor syndrome talking, and even if you fail the first time, you get priceless feedback and practice for the next time!
Dunning-Kruger effect
Remember the
People crossing from junior to senior are particularly likely to be at or just coming out of the “Valley of Despair.” There’s no point on that curve where you magically become irrefutably senior. It’s all a spectrum, and perhaps, the only commonality among seniors is having recovered from both the heights and troughs of confidence vs. ability. You can ask other people how you’re doing or teach what you know to keep some perspective.
Sponsor with credibility
Devs from minority backgrounds can face systematic bias (conscious or unconscious) in their evaluation. This is both unfair and a fact of life. A sponsor with credibility can help you a long way. If you have trouble finding one, Mekka Okereke has a technique he calls “The Difficulty Anchor,” which is hard work but a great strategy to win a powerful ally.
Stories of accomplishments
As you start marketing yourself as a senior dev, you’ll want to have your accomplishments and stories in order. Just to give you an example, the AWS interview process involves asking you for examples of accomplishments and interactions that demonstrate one of their fourteen Leadership Principles. Most companies may not be this formal about it but will have some form of a “Tell me a time when you…” question.
Proof of work
Portfolios and proof of work still matter, but less so because you can choose to lean on a lot of the production work you contributed to as a junior. Pay particular attention to any quantitative results you can cite, including cost savings per year, Monthly Active User increases, Time to Interactive drops, or whatever other metrics make you look good.
Fight imposter syndrome
In particular, anything you do in public, like blogging, speaking, podcasting, making video tutorials, and open-source work, can help you grow your knowledge and your network at the same time, opening up the possibility for inbound opportunities to come to you. Remember to fight
📝 Note: You can find more ideas in the Marketing Yourself chapter of the Tactics section.