I had a conversation with one of our senior engineers recently. They were frustrated about the number of meetings on their calendar.
I’m a senior. I know what to do. Just let me work.
Out of curiosity, we ran the numbers. They were spending exactly 30 minutes more in meetings per sprint than at their last job.
The complaint wasn’t really about meetings. It stuck with me.
I know what to do.
Is that what makes someone a senior engineer?
I looked closer at how this engineer was working. I asked product managers and other developers for feedback.
The reality didn’t match the title. This engineer was taking every hard task themselves. Creating knowledge silos. Tickets assigned to them sat empty, no comments. No documentation on the how or the why of their decisions.
I sat down and reread our career ladders. I wanted a clear answer to: what does it actually mean to be a Senior Software Engineer here?
Here’s the baseline I want us to align on.
Table of contents
Open Table of contents
It’s about outcomes, not just code
Writing good code is the minimum. When you reach Senior or Tech Lead, the job changes.
You transition from executing tasks to owning solutions.
Our Senior ladder states that a senior developer:
reliably owns the end-to-end design, development and rollout for entire initiatives.
Thinking through risks before you write a line of code. There’s a phrase in our documentation: “mountains are small from far away”. A junior developer starts typing. A senior knows that big projects hide problems you haven’t seen yet. You plan for them.
You also work with product managers on trade-offs. If a feature is too complex for the value it brings, a senior engineer speaks up and proposes a simpler alternative.
The “coder in the corner” is a trap
Hoarding work is not senior behavior.
If you build a complex system but no one else on the team understands it, you haven’t helped. You’ve created a bottleneck.
A real senior engineer leaves a trail. You write documentation. You leave comments on your tickets so the rest of the squad knows the status. You communicate.
Our Senior ladder expects you to:
divide projects so that they are addressable by multiple developers.
Break down big tasks. Define interfaces so teammates can work in parallel. You don’t do it all yourself. You build the scaffolding so the team can build with you.
Communication is the work
Back to the meeting complaint. It’s easy to see meetings as a distraction from the “real” job.
At a senior level, aligning with your team is the job.
You collaborate with Product and Design early. You explain technical limits to non-technical people.
Our Tech Lead ladder notes that a Tech Lead must:
get cross-team buy-in for solutions.
You cannot build consensus or champion a new architecture if you refuse to talk to people.
Focused coding time matters. Hiding from the team to write code in a vacuum damages the product.
The multiplier effect
Your impact isn’t measured by your own commit history anymore. It’s measured by how much you elevate the people around you.
John Allspaw, former CTO of Etsy, wrote a defining article on this. True seniority is engineering maturity. A “generosity of spirit”. Seeking out constructive criticism. Actively lifting the skills of everyone around you.
If you’re a Senior or Tech Lead, you’re a mentor. Code reviews are teaching moments, not formatting nitpicks. You let junior developers struggle a bit with a problem so they can learn - providing a safety net, not the answer.
Final thoughts
Being a senior engineer means stepping up. You take ownership of the messy parts. You deal with ambiguity. You write the docs, you leave the comments, you talk to your team.
I want us to build a culture where we multiply each other’s efforts - where we act like seniors, not just wear the title.