After staffing senior-only engagements for a year, here's the pattern we see: the senior engineers we trust the most spend roughly half their time writing code and half their time writing words.
The words are documents that compound: ADRs, runbooks, post-mortems, design docs, written status. They take effort up front and save the team weeks of misalignment later. The code without the writing is just future tech debt with someone's name on it.
We hire for the writing as much as the coding. The two skills are not separable in our work.
StudioEngineering