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Soft Skills & Staff Topics

The non-code dimensions of the senior bar: code review as a force-multiplier, framing trade-offs in writing, mentoring and tech leadership.

Topics (canonical order)

  •   Code Review Checklist

    What seniors look for, the difference between blocking and nit comments, async vs sync review styles

  •   Trade-off Framing

    Writing decision docs (ADRs), framing options as comparable, the "good / fast / cheap" template

  •   Mentoring & Tech Leadership

    Mentoring patterns, "growing the next senior", influence without authority, picking battles

  •   Git Workflows & Branching

    Trunk-based vs GitFlow vs GitHub flow, advanced ops (rebase, bisect, reflog, worktree), commit conventions

  •   Stakeholder Communication

    BLUF, Pyramid Principle, RFCs, status updates, escalation paths, design-review facilitation

  •   ADRs at Scale

    Templates (Nygard, Y-Statements, MADR), supersede-don't-edit, ADRs as onboarding gold

  •   Tech-Debt Management

    TD ledger as a product artifact, Fowler quadrant, communicating debt to non-eng, sustainable budget

  •   Blameless Postmortems

    Five Whys / causal graphs / Cynefin, action item taxonomy (prevent/detect/mitigate), facilitation language

Why this section comes last

Technical depth must come first. These topics rely on having technical credibility to be useful — a code-review checklist read without first knowing what good code looks like is just bureaucracy.

Cross-references