What Actually Makes You Senior – Terrible Software
The one skill that separates senior engineers from everyone else isn’t technical. It’s the ability to take ambiguous problems and make them concrete.Retry
People love to describe senior engineers with a big checklist: architecture, communication, ownership, leadership, etc. But if you strip away the title, the salary, and the years of experience, there’s one core skill that separates senior+ engineers from everyone else: reducing ambiguity. Everything else flows from that. Here’s what I mean. A mid-level engineer can absolutely crush a well-defined problem. Give them a clear spec, some reasonable constraints, and they’ll deliver solid work. Don’t get me wrong, that is valuable. The moment you hand them something fuzzy, though, like “we need…
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