Thread by @practicingdev

Here are a dozen ways that a senior software developer can be highly effective without training other developers or moving into management.

(Thread)

1. Build internal tools that help pretty much anyone in their company be more effective at their job.

2. Work on spikes and prototypes whenever a new big project is coming up to identify risks and/or opportunities.

3. Spend time exploring and evaluating various developer tools and libraries and/or vendor services with the goal in mind of curating a "standard stack" for their team to converge towards

4. Work with others within their company to find out what kinds of questions they have that can be answered through better reporting / monitoring / etc. and then look for quick and easy ways to build out those reporting tools.

5. Shadow employees within the company, or customers, or any other stakeholders and observe how their job to be done intersects with any software tooling that they may be able to make improvements to.

6. Sit in on business meetings, sales conversations, customer support interactions, etc. and provide technical insights into any problems and solutions that come up.

7. Look for opportunities to extract reusable parts or at least write up common patterns after seeing similar problems being solved over and over throughout the company's codebase.

8. Participate in open source projects that the company depends upon within their ordinary office hours to either fix bugs that create headaches for their team or add extension points that would make working with those tools easier.

9. Help other developers find relevant documentation, learning resources, etc. by curating a knowledge base around frequently asked questions / common topics themes shared across their team.

10. Little by little do the "hard work" on stabilizing and cleaning up the most probablematic and complex systems that their team needs to interact with, so that others who are less experienced on the team have fewer areas of the code that they are afraid to work with.

11. Lead efforts around automated testing and manual quality assurance by building support tooling around it to lower the cost of testing, building checklists that others can follow to drive up quality/safety/etc.

12. Find and build good relationships with people who *are* good at people leadership and/or teaching so that they can make sure that need is met for their team even if they aren't personally the ones doing the work.