[projectazorian]

I used to prioritize communication and collaboration because I’m better at it than most engineers I work with. A problem emerged where I noticed that come review and promotion time, I was always coming up short due to concerns about lacking technical seriousness. My interview performance was also suffering due to not spending enough time in the codebase.

I deprioritized collaboration as a result and now I get much better results. It’s not an issue because I am happy to explain the trade off up-front to anyone who asks. My job title is “software engineer” and my job role is to ship code. If you want me to be a staff+ engineer, engineering manager, or PM, happy to chat about a role change, but until then collaboration needs to take up a minority of my time.

[The_Colonel]

That's an interesting experience. I agree that this advice is probably more valuable to people who are already quite senior technically. Before that, it might be better to simply focus on sharping your technical skills. Reflecting on my experiences, I remember junior-ish people who chose to focus on communication rather than technical skills - without being able to back their communication with hard skills, they seem to kind of drift toward scrum master / project manager role.

But once in a senior position, a person should start thinking "larger" than just their own code, especially if they want to further advance.

> but until then collaboration needs to take up a minority of my time.

For sure. I would say from Staff position upwards, the collaboration aspect might take a larger chunk than pure engineering.

All this is of course very organization specific.