Intro

I think some character traits of a senior engineer are

1. Organized
2. Methodical
3. Patient & Kind
4. Good communicator

They can:

1. Dive into unknown code
2. Handle oncall competently
3. Mentor junior engineers
4. Make decent technical choices

It has been difficult to make the transition. I’m still feel very much like a junior engineer even with almost three years on the job.

Pragmatic Details of Oncall

I feel more senior engineers also have speed. It’s very difficult for me to respond to a page in a timely manner. I think it’s important to not feel hopeless when paged.

1. Page received and acknowledged
2. Form a hypothesis
3. Searches for error strings?
4. Keeping DataDog dashboards in browser tabs
5. Reject/accept hypothesis based on data
6. Take action