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 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.
They identify what should be done now vs. what to punt.
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. The project just… goes smoothly. Fewer surprises, production fires, or emergency meetings. But what actually happened was that someone did a lot of invisible work upfront.
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