Shadowing Practice: The Skills You’ll Need to be a Senior Software Developer - Learn English Speaking with Video
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Welcome to today's video.
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In this video we're going to go over the skills that it takes to be a senior software developer.
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We will be covering what those skills are, how to present those skills in an interview,
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and also what steps to take to move into a senior role.
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Welcome to the Life at Miro channel.
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Let's get started.
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Hi, my name is Alyssa and I'm our technical sourcer for engineering.
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Hi, my name is Elliot Monofy and I am a senior engineering manager in Enterprise.
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So some of the things that I look for in an interview, basically we have about 30 minutes,
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so I have to get through kind of a lot of content really quickly.
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So some of the things that I'm checking for because I'm not so much deeply technical in the way that Elliot is,
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is communication skills and style.
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Are you clear?
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Are you structured?
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Do I understand kind of the journey that you're taking me on?
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I know that this is really important for you too.
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How do you assess like communication when you're when you're speaking with candidates?
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Yeah, for communication generally we do behavioral style interviews and so
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when you're doing a behavioral style interview you want the interviewee to be telling
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you taking you on a journey telling you a story about the time
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that they worked on a project or a time
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that they dealt with the situation right and
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so being able to coherently form that story
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so I understand what happened how they were part of
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that story where they fit into the puzzle is very important in understanding what their role is what skills they have.
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What their scope is.
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Exactly.
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And so if there's not a fully formed story there,
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it's very hard to really get what they're trying to tell you and where they were doing something, or their manager was doing it,
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or somebody else on the team because they're not being very clear.
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And so communication ends up being the number one thing that we're looking for in these calls.
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People will say, we did, whereas it helps to be more clear when you say, I drove or I led.
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I did this thing that way I have a very clear idea of what it is
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that you did rather than like kind of what the team did overall.
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And with that you can also mention which parts your manager did
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which parts other members of the team did because you can't do everything right?
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Exactly.
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Especially as a senior engineer many times you'll be taking the requirements from a you know PM
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or somebody else on the team and you'll be breaking those down so that other engineers, less senior engineers will pick up that work.
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And if you're not doing that work, that's okay to mention, right?
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You may be instead focused on things like designing the architecture of the system or some other aspects or communicating with stakeholders,
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working cross -functionally.
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There's so many other aspects to being a senior engineer that go way past what the other engineer's roles are.
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Are there any, because you're doing the recruiter screen, right?
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And I feel like in the recruiter screen you're obviously looking for clear signs
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that this person hasn't made it to that senior role just yet right
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so that we so that you know they they don't you know end up
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that we know that it's a fit from the start right what are the signs for you
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that are clear
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that this person is not ready yet for a senior role well we already kind of touched on communication style
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but I would say kind of the scope of the overall work
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so are you what I'm looking for for senior basically is
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have you implemented basically from the beginning the overall plan you need to execute the initiative
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so meeting with as you said meeting with stakeholders breaking down
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those requirements also after the the initiative is done are you still maintaining it
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and and if you don't have those things then
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that makes me think maybe not quite a senior right now
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but definitely we can get there
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and then generally after your call with them we go into those uh more technical interviews right
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and in these technical interviews we start assessing uh especially in the system design interview
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we start assessing more of the the technical skills
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that we see from the candidate right their ability to adapt
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to new technologies uh to do research on those technologies understand what is out there
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and how they can use them to build a system that has multiple services with lots of different communication between the services,
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know when which pieces of design best fit and where to make the greatest trade -offs to make resilient
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systems that can have millions of customers, which Miro does.
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Something I always talk about in my initial screening with candidates is just how important the system design is for Miro.
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Here you touched on it, it is kind of breaking down the requirements.
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How are you.. considering what some of the trade -offs are and maybe,
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for example, if one of the interviewers doesn't ask you or asks you something that you may not know the answer to,
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still making a decision and still sticking with it, even though right now it may not be the best thing.
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Yeah, I think the big thing there, right, is that even if you don't, if you've never, let's say,
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worked with every piece of technology, not everybody can.
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Yeah.
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But when you get that list of technical
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and non -technical requirements from the interviewers in
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that system design to be able to understand what it is
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that are the goals and that come from those requirements and understand that, hey, when I'm picking out a cache, when I'm picking out a database,
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I may not know all the options that are out there.
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I may default to one that I've used before.
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But if I know that the one I've used before doesn't meet the requirements, then to even say that in the interview,
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hey, I would go do research for on these things.
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I'm looking for a cash that is best for x y
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and z and it should i don't care about that other thing
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and so that you you show that you can go out there
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and investigate because nobody has all the answers all the time right
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and there's also some maturity there to not just throw out hey i'm gonna use this buzzword here exactly
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because we'll find it out and then you won't do
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so well that doesn't show the maturity of a senior engineer
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and then generally after that round right we get into the the um the behavioral rounds, right?
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We have two of those and that's where we start to get a little bit,
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it's a little bit more of a mix of soft skills and technical, right?
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And those will be a little bit more project focused interviews, though we do sprinkle in some other questions, right?
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And I think the biggest item for us here on the seniority, and I think you've heard
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this from us a lot feedback for the candidates is the ability to pull from a large resource of examples.
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Exactly.
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And having clear, personalized examples, that really, I mean, you said this in the beginning,
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it really helps to wrap your head around what it is that the person did.
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This also shows that this person is thinking and storytelling in a structured way.
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Because one of the problems
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we see is a lot of times people will use the same example multiple times in one interview or over separate interviews,
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even though the question is widely different.
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They just adapt an answer as much as they can.
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And this usually shows that they just don't have the experience that we're looking for from them.
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They have maybe one really good example and they're just trying to use that again, which is fine right and experience would come with time
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and it comes with with working and
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and getting to run into really challenging things
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and each one of those comes with learnings
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and i think learnings is the next thing i want to talk about here
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and i think is really key for a strong engineer is
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that strong engineers also they learn from both their successes
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and their failures yes um and so i feel that when you're doing the interviews,
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being able to call out areas in which you succeeded
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or failed and what you learned from those
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and how you have taken those learnings back into your work is really key to being a senior engineer.
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I think this is also like a clear marker of a senior.
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Of course you failed, but how do you kind of implement the failure
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and take it to like turn it into a positive basically.
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Another thing I am always looking for when I'm speaking with a senior
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and something that's like a clear indicator to me is feedback.
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How do you give, how do you receive feedback, how do you ingest it?
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When you're working on a team it's really important that you're like actively soliciting feedback.
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Okay how can I improve on this?
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What can I do?
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Does this work?
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Does this not work?
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And that is what a lot of our teams do at Miro, we find feedback really important.
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Feedback is kind of one part of a greater ability for people to not only learn themselves,
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but also help other people learn and grow, whether that's part of mentoring or part of even,
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I think this falls into the same place as feedback,
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but being able to, let's say two people are challenging each other on a single solution
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or path forward technically or even non -technically
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and sometimes you may find yourself convincing others
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but sometimes you also may find yourself being convinced right and
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and someone who's senior can cannot be stubborn
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and can be like hey look that person's right we should go with
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that one and or even you know the term that
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that we use all the time disagree and commit right yeah
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because someone who's truly senior doesn't always hold their ideas as part of themselves.
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A lot of what is the most important.
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in addition to the technical skills are the soft skills
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because you need to be able to like fit on the team
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and work in a way that basically you're not the blocker.
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I would actually say
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that soft skills are usually the biggest hurdle for an engineer to take to get from the normal
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software engineer role to a senior engineer because the technical chops are something they've been working on for years.
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But at that point, they haven't been thinking about leading other people, working across teams, working across functions, their communication skills.
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And usually that's the one that's lacking, right?
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And so it actually is quite challenging for them to learn those skills.
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But I do think it is possible.
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And I think that's the kind of the next area I wanted us to talk about
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which is kind of how do you what are the steps
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that an engineer can take to move into that
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that senior role at Miro we have a pretty well -defined rubric for doing
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that we call it the career matrix it has a set of eight individual competencies
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and one what we call a core competency
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and generally the the idea of this is it gives the
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engineers something to build their IDP off of their individual development plan.
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Generally what you would want to do as an engineer whether you're at Miro
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or outside of Miro is you speak with other more senior engineers on your team, you speak with your manager,
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you receive as much feedback into these development areas as to where you believe you're strong
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and where you happen to be weak, right?
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And we can't expect everyone to be perfected everything
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but generally you want to hit as many of these competencies as possible yeah and so
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when you find your your weaknesses you find
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you create a plan as to how you want to develop in those areas yeah
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and um the career matrix for us is a like a clear defined structure everyone has access to it
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and so you can kind of see like what level you are at now
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and what you can do to take yourself to the next level
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and as much as it is on your manager and business need and stuff like that,
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it's really on you and what are you going to do to get there?
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And I think the best part about it is that by clearly defining it,
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at least within Miro, we have a baseline of what it means to be senior, right?
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There's not as much of this, you know, everyone being at different levels,
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it's pretty calibrated across the organization is this is what we believe a senior is, these are the things that they contribute to the company,
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these are the skills that they have, which is really great and it also makes it very easy for non -engineers to go in
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and see what it is that you need.
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Exactly and I know
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that you recruiters have been using it quite a lot to understand what it is we're looking for in these roles.
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Yeah another thing I wanted to mention and this goes kind of hand -in -hand with the matrix is impact.
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As a senior basically the work that you're doing needs to be visible
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and it needs to have an impact on not only your team but on customer business metrics.
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Yeah, no, I agree with you.
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I would say that all of the little individual competencies that we talk about are just a way to hone your skills.
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But when someone truly becomes senior, generally here at Miro, we believe it's somebody who can take a pretty complex project,
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break it down for potentially up to five engineers within their team to pick it up and deliver successfully at Miro.
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And additionally, that project should have a pretty strong impact at the company, right?
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It should be moving some of our objectives and actually making a difference.
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And like you said, this generally brings visibility back at
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that senior engineer because most people will know that they're the one who helped drive this project to completion, right?
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Yeah.
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And something I touched on earlier is not only driving the project to completion
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but maintaining it afterwards because it's easy or I don't want to say easy
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but anyone can kind of get a project across the line
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but then what do you do with it after it's done how do you kind of keep it up
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and continue to make an impact in
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that area as you are getting more senior I did mention this a little bit at the top
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but how do you communicate with non -technical stakeholders and
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that is something that I'm also looking for I'm not the most technical person, but I need to be able to understand,
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okay, what did you do?
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How do you break it down so that someone like me can clearly understand
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and digest what your impact has been on the org?
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For you, what is one of the clear markers that somebody can communicate with someone non -technical?
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Generally, if their manager doesn't have to step in.
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No, I'm kidding around there a little bit.
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But generally, for some of the really complex projects that we have, especially within the enterprise stream, which is the stream that I'm working in,
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a lot of times
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you may have to get involved with other teams like even the legal team at the company
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or the security team or some of these other teams
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that may not be as as technical or you're speaking to the you know
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CPO or COO or some other role at the company and
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when you're speaking to people in these roles they don't understand the technical implications of the things
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that you're mentioning right yeah and And we would prefer for a senior engineer,
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and we expect for a senior engineer to not have to pull anyone else into that conversation, including their manager.
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They should be able to hold that conversation pretty easily on their own
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and break down those very technical challenges into something that's digestible and the other person can understand.
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So the final topic that we were hoping to speak with you today is picking between the individual contributor track,
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which is more like a senior software engineer, or the management track, which is an engineering manager.
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Once you reach this fork in the road, especially here at Miro, you have to start understanding which skills you're looking to hone.
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As a senior engineer, you need to continue focusing on those technical skills
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and start asking your manager for larger and more complex projects
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that are potentially going to have an even larger impact on the organization as a whole.
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If you instead try to speak to your manager about going into the management role,
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this is where you need to start honing your kind of project management skills, your people management skills, delivery,
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some of the other skills that maybe you haven't been focusing on over the previous years in your career.
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If you want to hear more about this, we actually have another video that we'll be posting, and this will dive deeper into this topic.
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We covered quite a lot of content today.
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Are there any skills that we missed?
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If so, please comment below.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This speaking lesson is built on the video “The Skills You’ll Need to be a Senior Software Developer”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: senior, engineer, skills, technical, interview. This video has 153 sentences and 2924 words to shadow. The speech runs for 17:18. The speaker talks at a natural 169 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. 89% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is easy to follow. 45 of its 153 sentences are questions, so it is good practice for question intonation and short answers.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| skill noun | /skɪl/ | A capacity to do something well; a technique, an ability, usually acquired or learned, as opposed to abilities that are regarded as innate. |
| feedback noun | /ˈfiːdˌbæk/ | Critical assessment of a process or activity or of their results. |
| requirement noun | /ɹɪˈkwaɪɹmənt/ | A necessity or prerequisite; something required or obligatory. Its adpositions are generally of in relation to who or what has given it, on in relation to whom… |
| define verb | /dɪˈfaɪn/ | To determine with precision; to mark out with distinctness; to ascertain or exhibit clearly. |
| communicate verb | /kəˈmjuːnɪkeɪt/ | To impart or transmit (information or knowledge) to someone; to make known, to tell. |
| assess verb | /əˈsɛs/ | To determine, estimate or judge the value of; to evaluate; to estimate. |
| matrix noun | /ˈmeɪ.tɹɪks/ | The cavity or mold in which anything is formed. |
| behavioral adjective | /bɪˈheɪvjəɹəl/ | Of or relating to behavior. |
| topic noun | /ˈtɑpɪk/ | A subject; a theme; a category or general area of interest. |
| aspect noun | /ˈæspɛkt/ | Any specific feature, part, or element of something. |
| potentially adverb | /pəˈtɛnʃ(ə)li/ | In a manner showing much potential; with the possibility of happening in a given way. |
| enterprise noun | /ˈɛntəˌpɹaɪz/ | A company, business, organization, or other purposeful endeavor. |
| initiative noun | /ɪˈnɪʃ.ə.tɪv/ | A beginning; a first move. |
| convince verb | /kənˈvɪns/ | To make someone believe, or feel sure about something, especially by using logic, argument or evidence. |
| scope noun | /skəʊp/ | The breadth, depth or reach of a subject; the extent of applicability or relevance; a domain, purview or remit. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| break down verb | To stop functioning. | |
| pick out verb | To remove by picking. | |
| call out verb | To specify, especially in detail. | |
| end up verb | To bring to a conclusion. | |
| get through verb | /ɡɛt ˈθɹu/ | To overcome; to endure. |
| go out verb | To leave, especially a building. | |
| go over verb | To look at carefully; to scrutinize; to analyze. | |
| pick up verb | To lift; to grasp and raise. |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- Do I understand the journey that you're taking me on?
- Because you're doing the recruiter screen, right?
- How do you receive feedback?
- How do you ingest it?
- Are there any skills that we missed?
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — an action that started earlier and is still going on | they've been working · haven't been thinking · have been using |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | again, which is · have, which is · somebody who can |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | hasn't made · have you implemented · you've heard |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 62 contractions and reduced forms, such as you're, I'm, doesn't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: potentially /pəˈtɛnʃ(ə)li/, initiative /ɪˈnɪʃ.ə.tɪv/, completion /kəmˈpliː.ʃən/, cache /kæʃ/, implication /ˌɪmpləˈkeɪʃən/
- Long words — get the stress right: communicate /kəˈmjuːnɪkeɪt/, behavioral /bɪˈheɪvjəɹəl/, potentially /pəˈtɛnʃ(ə)li/, initiative /ɪˈnɪʃ.ə.tɪv/, technically /ˈtɛk.nɪˌkəl.i/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like skill, feedback, requirement.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.