High- and low-level Intuition in Engineering

A junior engineer should have a great intuition for the low level: what components are there in the program, how data flows between them, whether one component outputs data in the same format another consumes, and so on.

An engineering manager who is only a people manager should have a great intuition for the high level: what the business goals are, how the tech adds up to those goals, when to intervene in a project and when not to, how to decouple things, how to keep people aligned, and so on.

A technical leader like a principal engineer or an architect should have both high- and low-level intuition. The low-level intuition ¹ is necessary to design an architecture that translates well to implementation. Otherwise, the architect will just draw some diagrams in the air and call it a day, but the resulting system will be bloated or otherwise not meet the requirements, for the same reason that designing a rocket without understanding the pros and cons of different types of fuels doesn’t work: you need to understand what you’re working with (low-level intuition). But a technical leader should also have the high-level intuition to keep the project on track, de-risk it, achieve the required business goals, challenge the goals as needed, and so on.

Many engineers who become leaders switch to managing people and getting the work done through them, devolving all technical decisions. They soon lose the low-level intuition, making them unfit to work as a technical leader. They can only work as a people manager from then on.

In summary, junior engineers need low-level intuition, people managers need high-level intuition, and technical leaders need both high- and low-level intuition. This makes hiring technical leaders hard.

1. Not low-level details like const vs let in Javascript — these can always be looked up.