What Actually Makes You Senior

"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 to improve performance", "users are complaining about the onboarding flow" or "we should probably think about scaling", that's when you see the difference. Not because mid-level engineers are bad at their jobs, but because ambiguous problems require something more. Senior engineers look at the big, messy, abstract thing and start digging: They ask questions nobody else thought to ask. They separate what matters from noise."

"It's one of the reasons why senior engineers are worth their salaries. Not just because they write good code (which they often do!), but because they derisk projects. They turn "I don't even know what this is" into "there are two small projects and one thing we should cut." And you know what's funny? When senior engineers do this well, it looks easy. Like nothing was even done."

Reducing ambiguity is the core skill that separates senior+ engineers from others. Mid-level engineers excel at well-defined problems with clear specs and constraints. Ambiguous problems like vague performance goals, onboarding complaints, or scaling concerns require deeper inquiry. Senior engineers probe unclear situations, ask overlooked questions, distinguish signal from noise, and prioritize immediate work versus deferred efforts. They derisk projects by converting vague goals into discrete, actionable tasks and cutting nonessential work. Their upfront invisible effort reduces surprises, production incidents, and emergency meetings and enables smoother, more predictable outcomes.

Read at Terrible Software