Great engineers create value in all kinds of ways. There’s way more to the job of engineering than writing code.
Some of these will be more valuable than code, depending on your organization:
- Discovering requirements behind features
- Thinking through edge cases
- Consider UX and accessibility
- Architect deployment & adoption strategies
- Reduce friction in the engineering process
- Review other developers’ code
- Read, edit, & write documentation
- Interview candidates & help with recruitment
- Coach junior engineers & pair program
- Respond to incidents & conduct post-mortems
- Implement best practices in monitoring & observability
As you grow in your career, writing code may be a small part of your overall job. To get ahead, great engineers know it’s all about creating value, and often that's not through code.