[HN Gopher] What makes you senior
___________________________________________________________________
What makes you senior
Author : mooreds
Score : 174 points
Date : 2025-12-19 16:34 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (terriblesoftware.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (terriblesoftware.org)
| moralestapia wrote:
| This sounds cool but reality is much more boring than that. If
| your work title says "Senior" then you're Senior.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Until you get to a behavioral interview at your n+1 job...
| moralestapia wrote:
| What's that supposed to mean?
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| These are typical questions I ask when I'm interviewing a
| senior developer:
|
| "Tell me about a project you're most proud of?" Then I'm
| going to start asking questions about your decision making
| process, how you dealt with complexity and ambiguity, etc.
|
| If all you did was pull well defined tickets off the Jira
| board, you're not going to be able to answer that question
| well and you aren't the type of person I'm going to
| delegate a very ambiguous assignment where you have to make
| good architectural and organizational decisions and have to
| deal with "the business" to disambiguate.
|
| The next question would be "Looking at your resume, I see
| you have $x years of experience, if you could go back to
| one of your earlier projects, what choices would you have
| made differently knowing what you know now?"
|
| If you haven't led any major initiative, what are you going
| to say? "I would have pulled more tickets off the board?"
|
| I interviewed someone from AWS at my last job, he thought
| he was a shoo in especially after he looked on LinkedIn and
| saw that I was from AWS. I guess he thought he was going to
| be reversing a binary tree.
|
| No matter what I asked, he couldn't describe anything he
| had done of note except be on a team who did stuff. I asked
| him had he led any features, presented any "six pagers"
| internally, blog posts on the AWS site, presentations - he
| had done nothing.
|
| I passed over him for a guy at an unknown company who could
| talk about where he "took ownership". That's one of the
| Amazon BS Leadership Principals.
|
| Hell I had a public footprint at AWS after only 3.5 years I
| had been there as a mid level L5 employee.
| necovek wrote:
| I do all my interviewing in a very similar way, but I
| don't use that to "level" an employee: I want most of the
| engineers in my team to have this mindset, and the only
| difference between seniority levels should be in the
| size/scope of the initiative they led and took ownership
| of, and obviously, the level of exposure to wrong things
| they had a chance to do and learn from. I will sometimes
| take someone where I believe they were not put in a
| position to do this, and who I believe I can support to
| develop this mindset.
|
| I know I've done all of this since day 1 of my
| professional software engineer career (and well, before
| that too). I've also been "side-moted" to a Tech Lead
| after 2 years of starting my career in a strong tech
| company too.
| onion2k wrote:
| Based on a number of people I've worked with whose job title
| was Senior Engineer, it isn't that.
| wiseowise wrote:
| It is. You might pat yourself on a back that you're "not like
| them", and in fact might be better than them, but if they
| hold the same title and earn the same amount of money -
| they're senior just like you.
| ursAxZA wrote:
| Sometimes that's true. Sometimes it isn't. This seems to be a
| discussion about the latter.
| terrillw wrote:
| Great article. The key things often missing in meetings
| discussing a vague problem is do we really understand the problem
| and how do we make concrete progress. Its a hard skill and often
| just comes through experience - being able to put yourself in the
| user's shoes to understand their problem, and knowing based on
| past experience, how to execute. That is the value of seniority.
| andsbf wrote:
| Oh, so it isn't about know to solve any leetcode?
|
| Good to hear it
| onion2k wrote:
| A very important skill for Senior engineers not mentioned in the
| article is an ability to take the initiative on something. For
| example, when a dev sees a bug in an area of code they aren't
| responsible for and thinks "I'll raise an issue for that and
| mention it to the product manager so we can get it fixed" instead
| of "Oh, a bug", then they're starting to show that senior
| mindset. It's a desire to make the whole of the software good
| rather than just the little bit they work on good.
| bdangubic wrote:
| I have literally _never_ seen or thought of this as "senior"
| thing. if anyone on the team regardless of their seniority does
| not operate this way they will see a quick exit to some other
| place
| agumonkey wrote:
| beware, some cultures are territorial in nature and this kind
| of hard ownership will make people slap you if you ever try to
| improve things as they come.
|
| i'm in the camp of improving things regularly without
| hesitation but again this can devolve. another way it can turn
| sour is when the team is made of people too different from each
| other. one improvement from someone pov is a waste or even a
| regression for others .. then it's a 'who decides here'
| conversation.
|
| that said when you have a cohesive group all focusing on
| pushing in the same direction then it's bliss
| juancn wrote:
| If you're skilled enough, sometimes you can even force the
| culture to change. It can be painful and not all battles are
| worth it, but it's doable.
| agumonkey wrote:
| probably, that said i would love to hear stories on this
|
| ps: even beyond work, that kind of knowledge is very
| important, culture is a form of abstract layer over a
| group, and it can make or break your future
| adhamsalama wrote:
| I did this by constantly complaining about JavaScript and
| how TypeScript is so much better until some of my
| colleagues started writing new projects in TypeScript.
| zwnow wrote:
| I am literally not allowed to fix bugs at work. Nothing senior
| about going rogue and showing initiative.
| antonymoose wrote:
| In that case I would ticket the specific bug with as much
| detail as possible for scheduling. Is that also not possible?
| That would sound like hell...
| wiseowise wrote:
| This has nothing to do with seniority. This is a question of
| priorities.
| hoss1474489 wrote:
| I like this. I more generally look for _reduces chaos_.
|
| I've seen the pursuit of disambiguation employed to deadlock a
| project. Sometimes that's the right thing to do--the project
| sponsor doesn't know what they want. But many times the senior
| needs to document some assumptions and _ship something_ rather
| than frustrating the calendars of 15 people trying to nail down
| some exact spec. Knowing whether to step on the brake or the gas
| for the benefit of the team and company is a key senior trait.
|
| This is a _yes, and_ to the article; building without
| understanding the problem usually will increase chaos--though
| sometimes the least effort way through it is to build a
| prototype, and a senior would know when to do that and how to
| scope it.
| oh_my_goodness wrote:
| It's just a pay grade. Please folks stop trying to analyze
| "junior," "senior," and so forth. It's just something management
| told HR to write down.
| WhyOhWhyQ wrote:
| When did this "junior/senior" lingo get cool? I don't remember
| it being used when I was young. Maybe the leet code trend
| brought on a sort of gamification of the profession, with ranks
| etc..?
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| As a 51 year old, I hate when other old people think that
| "back in my day things were different"
|
| > Evans has held his present position with IBM since 1965.
| Previously, he had been a vice president of the Fed- eral
| Systems Division with the man- agement responsibility for
| developing large computing systems; the culmina- tion of this
| work was the IBM/System 360. He joined IBM in 1951 as a
| _junior engineer_ and has held a variety of engineering and
| management posi- tions within the corporation
|
| Dated 1969
|
| https://bitsavers.org/magazines/Computer_Design/Computer_Des.
| ..
|
| Next meme that needs to die: "back in my day, developers did
| it for the love and not the money"
| WhyOhWhyQ wrote:
| The title has always existed. I meant the obsession about
| being a "a junior" or "a senior", like gaining an
| achievement in a video game or something. I just thought
| every young person was a junior engineer and every old
| person was as senior engineer.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| You don't get to be a senior engineer just because of
| tenure. It's not gaming the system to expect a level to
| be based on the amount of responsibility and not just
| from getting 1 year of experience 10x.
|
| You want a promotion because you want more money. Even
| though I have found the difference to not be that great
| on the enterprise dev side. But in BigTech and adjacent,
| we are talking about multiple six figures differences as
| you move up.
|
| I work in consulting and our bill rate is based on our
| title/level of responsibility. It kills me that some non
| customer facing consultants want to have a "career track"
| that doesn't involve leading projects and strategy and
| want to stay completely "hands on".
|
| We can hire people cheaply from outside the country that
| can do that. There is an IC career track that is equal to
| a director (manager of managers). But you won't get there
| hands on keyboard.
| WhyOhWhyQ wrote:
| I'm deleting my hn account. Have a good day.
| moondev wrote:
| The bigger the company the less impressive "senior" is.
| There are probably three levels of staff above it and
| then distinguished super fellow territory.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| A senior software engineer can easily make $300-400K+ at
| BigTech that's "impressive" enough to me.
|
| On the other hand, a "senior" working at a bank or other
| large non tech company will probably be making less than
| $175K if you aren't working on the west coast.
|
| For instance Delta
|
| https://www.levels.fyi/companies/delta-air-lines/salaries
| nineteen999 wrote:
| It really only matters on an individual level once you
| become a manager, and have both juniors and seniors to
| manage.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| It matters to me as a senior+.
|
| When I talk to a senior: "hey we got this initiative, I
| know only little about it. Can you talk to $stake_holder
| figure out what they need and come back to me and let me
| know your design ideas, how long you think it will take,
| etc".
|
| I can do that with a few seniors and put Epics together
| and they can take ownership of it.
|
| For a junior I have to do a lot more handholding and make
| sure the requirements are well spelled out
| necovek wrote:
| When I was a junior engineer, I did not need almost any
| hand-holding, and could take ill-defined initiatives,
| figure out the desired goals and outcomes, and ship them.
|
| It's just that my code would be shit (hard to understand,
| hard to test...), but I learned quickly to improve that
| through code reviews (both getting them, but also doing
| them) and architecture discussions. I can't thank the
| team enough that put up with me in my first 6-12 months
| :)
|
| When I find a junior engineer like that, I give them as
| little as I can, and remain available to pair, review or
| discuss when they get stuck. And they... fly... But I
| also try to develop these qualities in everyone, but it's
| sometimes really hard to get people to recognize what is
| really important to get over the finish line.
|
| And I've seen plenty of "senior+" engineers who can't do
| it and go on to harp about a field in a data model here
| or a field in a data model there, adding weeks to
| shipping something. So really, it is only a paygrade.
|
| Any of those "competency matrices" are really just a way
| to reject anyone from that promotion they are hoping for:
| it won't be a blocker if that someone has this innate
| ability to help the team get things done.
| tayo42 wrote:
| How I became a staff engineer with 3 yoe making 140k/year
| oh_my_goodness wrote:
| By 1 weird trick?
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| And making $25K less than a new grad at BigTech...
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| It's way more than a "pay grade" for any company with real
| leveling guidelines.
|
| This jibes with both my personal experience at BigTech, knowing
| the industry and various publicly available leveling
| guidelines. Sone are more granular
|
| https://www.levels.fyi/blog/swe-level-framework.html
|
| https://dropbox.github.io/dbx-career-framework/
|
| The company I work for now has similar leveling guidelines,
| it's also more granular.
|
| But levels are defined by scope, impact, and dealing with
| ambiguity
| oh_my_goodness wrote:
| Is pay grade. You can look this up.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| So are you really arguing that tech companies that pay top
| of the industry don't require that you demonstrate that you
| can handle responsibility that requires you to be able to
| work at a larger scope, impact and dealing with ambiguity
| and go through a promotion process with a promo doc?
|
| Are you saying that when you interview for one of those
| tech companies that they don't level you according to your
| past experience?
|
| Yes I know the answers to all of these questions from both
| personal experience of interviewing and hiring at one
| BigTech company and ignoring outreach from another's hiring
| manager who I had worked with in the past.
|
| (At 51, I would rather get a daily anal probe with a cactus
| than ever work at a large company again and I am damn sure
| not going back into an office)
| oh_my_goodness wrote:
| If I'm being honest, I sense some ambivalence about how
| perfect and rational big companies really are.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| What do you suggest? They just promote people based on
| tenure?
| oh_my_goodness wrote:
| You've put a lot of words in my mouth, and I don't know
| why.
|
| What do I suggest? I suggest that big organizations have
| pockets of careful, competent folks. But in general a
| large company tends to be all fouled up. They do a lot of
| things pretty much randomly. _Some_ stuff happens the way
| a new graduate has a right to expect, and the way many HN
| commenters insist it has to go.
|
| But a lot of other shit just ... _happens._ People get
| promoted because they have another offer from another
| fouled-up company, or because the boss thinks they 're
| awesome (but sometimes the boss is dumb), or because they
| talk the talk exceptionally well, or because they happen
| to get the attention of someone 2 or 3 levels up, or
| whatever.
|
| Is any of that controversial? What am I missing here?
|
| Do people not still read Catch-22? Or has it been proved
| wrong or something? Or take that mysterious cactus that
| you mentioned in connection with large companies. What's
| that about? Because the cactus sounds bad.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| I have only worked for two large companies in my career -
| both Fortune 10 companies when I worked their - General
| Electric and Amazon.
|
| At GE? Sure things are random. But it was also just
| another random enterprise company where it really didn't
| make sense to work toward a promotion just to make
| $10-$20K more. You would be better off just getting
| another job (which I did after 2.5 years). There were no
| published leveling guidelines or procedures.
|
| But I can guarantee you that a random mid level developer
| is not going to walk up to their manager with a competing
| offer and be handed a promotion at any of the large
| _tech_ companies. The manager by themselves can't
| determine a promotion. There are promo docs, committees,
| recommendation requirements. Etc
|
| At 51, with just me and my wife, grown kids and already
| had the big house built in the burbs that sold for twice
| what we bought it for 8 years earlier and we downsized to
| a condo one third the size in state tax free Florida, the
| juice ain't worth the squeeze.
|
| But if I were 22 and had a choice between wallowing in
| enterprise dev making 90K doing CRUD apps or making $160K
| out of college and over $200K at 25, I would play the
| game with the best of them.
|
| My own anecdote is that outside of BigTech now, I'm a
| staff consultant working at a 3rd party AWS consulting
| company making the same as a 25 year old SA that I
| mentored when they were an intern at AWS and the first
| year they came back
| Razengan wrote:
| When someone calls you senpai
| paulcole wrote:
| Bro thinks this is unique to engineers.
| z3ratul163071 wrote:
| age
| ncr100 wrote:
| Nah
| random17 wrote:
| I think a lot of people in the comments are getting hung up on
| titles and missing the real point of the post. The headline
| probably didn't help with that.
|
| The post actually does a great job of highlighting a genuinely
| valuable skill that the best engineers practice regardless of
| their title. In particular, "reducing ambiguity" is something I
| believe would be really beneficial for many early-career
| engineers to intentionally develop.
| rippeltippel wrote:
| Junior deals with "if" statements.
|
| Senior deals with "what-if" statements.
|
| <EoF>
| jamietanna wrote:
| Related: Job Titles are Bullshit (2024)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39511732
| johndoh42 wrote:
| Meanwhile the industry standard definition since the 80s:
|
| - Junior - someone who can work under guidance.
|
| - Regular - someone who can work alone.
|
| - Senior - someone who can guide others.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I do wonder how seniors manage cultural / technical
| differences. If the junior is not responsive to guidance,
| advices, hints .. what else do you do
| dijit wrote:
| If juniors ignore guidance and advice, they stay in junior
| roles, handling simpler, less impactful tasks.
|
| Everyone seeks career growth, but pushing for it too quickly
| often just leads to inflated titles without real substance.
|
| It's perfectly fine to remain a mid-level engineer for your
| entire career if it makes you happy; it's solid, honest work
| that contributes meaningfully. Plenty of people in their 60s
| have held the same job for decades, and that's okay; it can
| be a path to genuine satisfaction.
| HPsquared wrote:
| I don't want career growth, rather homeostasis. That is,
| growth that matches the rate of decay.
|
| At most, maybe something like "tissue remodelling" to be
| lean, clean and flexible, so to speak, but not "big".
| luckylion wrote:
| > Everyone seeks career growth, but pushing for it too
| quickly often just leads to inflated titles without real
| substance.
|
| That's why I'm not a big fan of recommending people to
| often and quickly change jobs to increase titles and pay.
| Their skills don't level up the same way, and they end up
| with a title of senior/lead developer and can't actually
| build maintainable systems or solve problems that nobody
| tells them the solution to.
| ip26 wrote:
| And what if no junior under a certain senior ever makes it
| past junior?
|
| Any mentor type figure is going to be at least partially
| evaluated by progress of the mentees against some
| benchmark.
| dijit wrote:
| Hinging senior evaluations on junior promotions directly
| fuels the title inflation I'm decrying. Desperate to show
| "impact through development," seniors (or managers) push
| for premature title bumps; turning fresh juniors into
| "mids" or "seniors" without the skills to match, just to
| hit metrics.
|
| This is rampant in tech, where inflated titles compensate
| for everything from low pay to talent wars, eroding
| expertise and making hiring a nightmare.
|
| We end up with a system that prioritises optics over
| substance, where growth takes a backseat to checkbox
| promotions. It's frustrating and counterproductive.
|
| Mentorship should inspire organic development, not force-
| fed ladders that collapse under their own weight!
|
| Instead, let's measure seniors holistically, decoupling
| from junior title escalations to allow people to excel at
| their level indefinitely. Alternatives include:
|
| * Technical Proficiency and Individual Contributions: Use
| code reviews, technical assessments, or metrics like
| deployment frequency and bug resolution rates to gauge a
| senior's direct impact, without needing to "graduate"
| juniors.
|
| This focuses on their own output and problem-solving
| prowess.
|
| * Knowledge Sharing and Enablement: Track things like
| workshops led, documentation created, or peer feedback on
| guidance quality via 360 reviews--emphasising team uplift
| without mandatory promotions. * Project Outcomes and
| Efficiency: Evaluate based on team velocity improvements,
| innovation (e.g., patents or architectural wins), or
| overall delivery success, rewarding systemic
| contributions over individual mentee milestones. These
| methods honour diverse career paths, letting juniors stay
| put if it suits them while still valuing (and evaluating)
| senior leadership.
| nh23423fefe wrote:
| let them fail and see if they change affect
| HPsquared wrote:
| That's a good functional definition. Verbs beat nouns for this
| kind of thing.
| everfrustrated wrote:
| Yes but there is also a temporal component as well. A Senior
| should be able to do all their tasks and whatever else comes
| their way without needing guidance. To be able to do that
| requires a certain level of time in position.
| butlike wrote:
| nah, the tasks evolve as you get older. having a senior do
| all their tasks and whatever else without guidance sounds
| like free work. even the old people in the old folk's home
| get an assistant to help them take their pills!
| alexgotoi wrote:
| > this isn't talent, but practice
|
| This. Totally agree. Seniority level it's based on the volume of
| practice someone has. Period.
| Insanity wrote:
| Disagree, it's not _just_ practice. You can do something for
| 10,000 hours but never actively try to improve. Does that mean
| you're now more senior because you had more volume of practice?
|
| e.g, let's say someone spends 10k hours doing just 'addition
| and subtraction' problems on 2 digit numbers. Are they now
| better at maths than someone who spent 0.1k hours but doing a
| variety of problems?
|
| To grow as a software engineer, you need to have volume + have
| this be outside of your comfort zone + actively try to
| improve/challenge yourself.
|
| Apart from this, I do agree it's not 'innate talent' that
| drives someone to become a senior engineer, and I think anyone
| with the right attitude / mindset can do so.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| "Some people say they have 20 years experience, when in
| reality, they have 1 year's experience repeated 20 times."
|
| - Steven Covey
| necovek wrote:
| There is no denying practice is needed, but... I've been doing
| this (getting to reduce ambiguity and simplify complex
| problems) since before my first job in free software
| communities, yet really, I wasn't anywhere close to "senior"
| when I joined my first job at a demanding SW organization at 22
| years old.
|
| There was simply a lot I did not know, but I had the _talent_
| to do this part well (sure, one can argue that I had
| "practice" doing this with any problem since I was ~10 years
| old, but calling that "senior" would be... over the top: I
| think it rather qualifies as "talent").
|
| It took me a couple of years of learning good software
| engineering from my wonderful and smart senior colleagues and
| through my own failures and successes for me to become a Tech
| Lead too.
| anthonypasq wrote:
| being senior is clearly about having certain abilities or
| skills and absolutely nothing to do with how long it took you
| to acquire those skills
| bpev wrote:
| idk about titles, but my basic thought is that when you are less
| experienced, you're paid to do things, and when you are more
| experienced, you're paid to know things.
| cod1r wrote:
| I suffered with this problem quite often with my previous job.
| There would be something vague assigned to me and I didn't quite
| get what to do but I also felt like if I asked questions, it'd
| give off a vibe like I didn't know what I was doing so I would
| just start programming and making a bunch of assumptions.
|
| That wasted a lot of time which is a lesson to be learned from.
|
| I also struggled with self management.
| agumonkey wrote:
| usually what i did is to take an abstract spec, derive thick
| layers / modules to decompose the problem, and then look at the
| deadline to see what MVP i can draw in that space.
|
| whenever that mvp is not what was expected, if i'm lucky
| enough, the decomposition allows for easy adjustements to match
| the need
| dcminter wrote:
| My superpower as a staff engineer was having zero shame in
| asking questions. Anything from "what does that abbreviation
| stand for?" through to "what will the traffic look like when we
| go live?" - mostly people are worried about looking ignorant,
| so weirdly this makes you look both knowledgeable and
| confident! I wish I'd known that when I was younger...
| mooreds wrote:
| Yes, this is so powerful.
|
| One of my favorite moves is to ask a question that I feel has
| an obvious answer and then say "what am I missing?" Sometimes
| I am right, other times I am missing something.
|
| Either way I'm modelling:
|
| - that it's okay to ask questions to which the answer seems
| obvious
|
| - that it is totally fine not to know everything
| tintor wrote:
| Schools don't teach this to students.
| rented_mule wrote:
| It's subtle, but I think the use of "senior" rather than "Senior"
| in the article is an attempt to distinguish the concept of being
| a senior engineer from the title of Senior Engineer. The article
| is focused on actually being senior, not playing title games. I'd
| take it further and use the term "leader" instead of "senior
| engineer".
|
| Leaders reduce ambiguity, so others can operate with more
| clarity. The ambiguity involved can be in many different domains.
| It can be focused on product and tech, as in the article. Another
| example is ambiguity around people and organizational structure,
| which is more common in management roles, where some in
| management are more effective leaders than others. It can be
| around finding ways for people to understand why they might want
| a product, which is more common in sales and marketing roles. And
| so on.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Eh. Whenever someone posts something like this, you get a bunch
| of folks, stating how they meet that description, etc. Sometimes,
| they do it humbly, sometimes, not.
|
| In my case, I met that description on my first job, and I
| guarantee, I was _not_ senior.
|
| You see, my initial training was as an electronic technician
| (RF/microwave stuff).
|
| That thought process described, was _exactly_ what they trained
| us to do. Debugging a wonky RF board is about as ambiguous as you
| can get.
|
| So maybe there's a different definition of "senior."
| kittikitti wrote:
| One thing that I would like senior colleagues to avoid is the
| tendency to claim something can't be done or is impossible.
| Sometimes, a colleague would claim something can't be
| accomplished but when I do accomplish it, it can create tension
| and give the impression that I'm undermining them. I would prefer
| if senior leaders instead enumerate the reasons why it can't be
| done and avoid dealing with absolutes. Often, it requires
| research into unknowns that have real limitations such as costs
| or processing time. Thank you for considering it if this is
| useful to you.
| farcitizen wrote:
| When everyone in the room wants to go in a certain direction. And
| you tell the team "9/10 times i did it that way it blew up in my
| face.", and you don't fight them and let it play out as a lesson.
| And there is still a 10% chance it could work!
| butlike wrote:
| why would you lose your army to something as stupid as 'i told
| you so?' Don't let them do it.
| wiseowise wrote:
| Because it's not "your army" and there's no point in fighting
| meaningless wars. Just make a good effort to convey your
| point and if they still don't listen - let them learn their
| lesson.
| kcplate wrote:
| Likely these are not "lose your army level" lessons. I've let
| idiots touch a hot pan if they've insisted to do it. I would
| not let someone pour gasoline on themselves and strike a
| match
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| This is not a positive behavior, also you should ask yourself
| why everyone wants to go against your position so often that
| you have a strategy like this in the first place.
| butlike wrote:
| age
| wiseowise wrote:
| Can someone who worked in multiple industries clarify: is it only
| software that has constant identity crisis with "what makes you
| X" and "what is expected of Y"?
|
| The only thing that makes a senior are years of experience,
| that's all. You can be a shitty senior if you only do one thing
| for 10 years, but you're a senior nonetheless.
| Gagarin1917 wrote:
| What if your company has you doing the job of a senior without
| the pay (because all the actual seniors left)?
| hamasho wrote:
| > The moment you hand them something fuzzy, though, like ...
| > "we should probably think about scaling", > that's when
| you see the difference.
|
| Senior engineers should ask, "but do we need scaling? And if it
| does, how much needed now and future?" But I've seen a lot of
| seniors who jumped to implementing an unnecessarily complicated
| solution without questions, because they don't think about it too
| much, want to have fun, or just don't have energy to argue (I'm
| guilty myself).
| Aachen wrote:
| Isn't that just called "being put in charge"? The causality seems
| reversed to me here, as in, you're not senior because you're
| reducing ambiguity, but you've either explicitly been made senior
| or just have tenure and now others come to you with questions
| about what you think makes sense. Consequence rather than cause
|
| Or maybe that's just in egalitarian companies, like in tech where
| I'd ask a second opinion or technical input of just about anyone,
| whereas in other lines of business it's different? I imagine a
| water treatment facility has a lot more niche constraints to work
| with than we do and so expertise goes much deeper and you're not
| immediately prompted for advice
| ChicagoDave wrote:
| I like the post but I'd add senior is also the instinct to take
| risks. I was once at a client in NY with an ASP.NET code base
| that used the compile at runtime capability (like Java used to).
| The C# source was being pushed to the web server.
|
| I ran a compile and the code was riddled with errors. So I went
| to the PM and explained the code needed to compile and I needed a
| day to clean it up.
|
| I refactored the entire project to compile and deploy that way.
| After that the development went very fast.
|
| The hilarious part was the three devs who'd gone on vacation came
| back and thought what I'd done was "wrong".
|
| But the client said we (consultants) had done in two weeks what
| they couldn't do in six months.
|
| That's what a senior engineer does.
| lunixbochs wrote:
| I'm not familiar with C# compile at runtime. Are you saying
| your change was to do an AOT compile locally?
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-12-23 23:00 UTC)