What does a Senior+ engineer actually need in their toolkit?
There is a standard toolkit for engineers. Version control. An IDE. A task tracker. Maybe a note-taking app. These tools exist because they solve problems that are consistent across roles: write code, track work, record things. The senior+ engineer job has a different set of problems. And the standard toolkit doesn’t solve them. The senior+ job is mostly not about writing code This is the uncomfortable truth that Tanya Reilly’s The Staff Engineer’s Path articulates clearly: senior+ engineering is a fundamentally different discipline from senior engineering. The technical work doesn’t go away — but it becomes one input into a much larger job that’s about strategy, alignment, influence, and organizational navigation. ...