On Being A Senior Engineer. I think that there’s a lot of institutional knowledge in our field, especially about what makes for a productive engineer.
But while there are a good deal of books in the management field about “expert” roles and responsibilities of non-technical individual contributors, I don’t see too many modern books or posts that might shed light directly on what makes for a good senior engineer. One notable exception is of course Kate Matsudaira, who has been posting quite a good deal recently about the cultural sides of engineering. Erik Hollnagel - To Err Is Human: The ETTO Principle.
Surprisingly, it is the investigation of "non-accidents" that inspires Erik Hollnagel most in his work: though, as he explained, accident investigation and risk assessment models universally focus on what goes wrong and the elimination of "error".
This principle, in an approach dating back to the Industrial Revolution, may work with machines: but it does not work with humans, who are a common element in all accidents. Variability in human performance is inevitable, even in tasks we repeat every day. The need to identify a cause for any accident has coloured all our thinking about risk assessment.
The trouble is that we don't just "find" causes; we tend to "create" them, and when none can be found, we use the "act of God" opt-out clause.