Trying to wring some useful insights out of the roiling AI discourse: today I want to talk a little bit about Senior Engineer Essentialism.
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Trying to wring some useful insights out of the roiling AI discourse: today I want to talk a little bit about Senior Engineer Essentialism. As with many AI Coding things, this is not a *new* problem, but it is now a *worse* problem.
According to my hazy recollection, circa 2012 we started seeing a rash of forgettable blog posts about "what it really means to be a senior software engineer".
There is no such thing as a senior software engineer. 🧵
@glyph not to try and influence the direction of these thoughts, but something that occurred to me today:
around the same time, we saw an awful lot of fuss around the adjective "opinionated" as the world of programming embraced that programmers have Big Opinions and these inevitably make their way into our software, and navigating opinions (especially where there are conflicts) is in some sense one of the cores of the profession
and now there's a lot of fuss about something that definitionally cannot have opinions replacing that core…?
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Nowadays we are hearing constantly about "treating an AI like an enthusiastic junior". I've recently written at a bit more length about why that's not really a good metaphor specifically <https://blog.glyph.im/2026/03/what-is-code-review-for.html> but it also makes an incorrect categorical assumption about people: that there is a clear distinction between "junior" and "senior" people, which just isn't true. You might think it's a spectrum, and of course any cutoff will be arbitrary, but even that's wrong. It's multiple spectra.
People have skills, and skills come from training and experience. Recent graduates often have a clearer memory of specific aspects of their training. If I needed to have someone implement a customized hash table, chances are I'd seek out someone who had recently been to college or to a training program that focused on algorithms. That does not mean I would look for a "junior"; some "juniors" are self-taught. Some had education that focused less on fundamentals and more on a specific tech stack.
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People have skills, and skills come from training and experience. Recent graduates often have a clearer memory of specific aspects of their training. If I needed to have someone implement a customized hash table, chances are I'd seek out someone who had recently been to college or to a training program that focused on algorithms. That does not mean I would look for a "junior"; some "juniors" are self-taught. Some had education that focused less on fundamentals and more on a specific tech stack.
In addition to skills, people have *titles*. Titles come from promotions, which means that they come from self-advocacy and luck. In 2017 when engineers were a red-hot commodity and people could get raises by skipping from one company to the next every 6 months, we had a fair amount of title inflation. In 2026 when layoffs are happening every year in the tens of thousands and early-career folks are barely hanging on, title advancement is significantly slowed.
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In addition to skills, people have *titles*. Titles come from promotions, which means that they come from self-advocacy and luck. In 2017 when engineers were a red-hot commodity and people could get raises by skipping from one company to the next every 6 months, we had a fair amount of title inflation. In 2026 when layoffs are happening every year in the tens of thousands and early-career folks are barely hanging on, title advancement is significantly slowed.
As humans, we look at our environment and try to find patterns. So if we find ourselves in a place with some people called "senior" or "staff" who seem pretty skilled, and some people called "junior" (or "no adjective", that's always fun to try to talk about, just in terms of grammar) who seem less so, it's natural to begin to think, "hmm, it seems that senior-ness is a quality I should cultivate and try to achieve. how can I do that?" These correspondences are not *random*, after all.
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In addition to skills, people have *titles*. Titles come from promotions, which means that they come from self-advocacy and luck. In 2017 when engineers were a red-hot commodity and people could get raises by skipping from one company to the next every 6 months, we had a fair amount of title inflation. In 2026 when layoffs are happening every year in the tens of thousands and early-career folks are barely hanging on, title advancement is significantly slowed.
@glyph I'd add "privilege" to "self-advocacy and luck." E.g.: my experience is that "principal" means "senior and cis."
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As humans, we look at our environment and try to find patterns. So if we find ourselves in a place with some people called "senior" or "staff" who seem pretty skilled, and some people called "junior" (or "no adjective", that's always fun to try to talk about, just in terms of grammar) who seem less so, it's natural to begin to think, "hmm, it seems that senior-ness is a quality I should cultivate and try to achieve. how can I do that?" These correspondences are not *random*, after all.
This is where the parade of thinkpieces come from, people picking apart elements of experience they admire in others and in themselves, trying to chart a path.
But the reality is that there is no path. Many of these decisions are made arbitrarily. What your particular organization values may be different than what another one does. Not to mention tons of implicit biases at play. Different skills are evaluated and rewarded differently in different places and at different times.
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This is where the parade of thinkpieces come from, people picking apart elements of experience they admire in others and in themselves, trying to chart a path.
But the reality is that there is no path. Many of these decisions are made arbitrarily. What your particular organization values may be different than what another one does. Not to mention tons of implicit biases at play. Different skills are evaluated and rewarded differently in different places and at different times.
If you want to improve your professional standing, by all means, make a skills inventory and try to achieve those skills. Many of these skills might be in common with other "senior" people you know. Take some from your organization's leveling doc. But remain aware that there is nothing that "separates" juniors from seniors, that there is no threshold you cross, and that a good team is made up of a diversity of skills that complement each other, not just a bunch of people with maxed out 10X stats
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If you want to improve your professional standing, by all means, make a skills inventory and try to achieve those skills. Many of these skills might be in common with other "senior" people you know. Take some from your organization's leveling doc. But remain aware that there is nothing that "separates" juniors from seniors, that there is no threshold you cross, and that a good team is made up of a diversity of skills that complement each other, not just a bunch of people with maxed out 10X stats
The negative outcomes of a static senior/junior distinction mindset include:
- complacency once you've achieved an arbitrary title
- failure to identify specific skills needed to complete specific projects
- treating other engineers as homogenous and fungible based on level
- not listening to people lower-level than you are because you're now Senior-er than them
- failing to provided needed pushback on people higher-level than you are even when you have specific knowledge that they don't -
@glyph not to try and influence the direction of these thoughts, but something that occurred to me today:
around the same time, we saw an awful lot of fuss around the adjective "opinionated" as the world of programming embraced that programmers have Big Opinions and these inevitably make their way into our software, and navigating opinions (especially where there are conflicts) is in some sense one of the cores of the profession
and now there's a lot of fuss about something that definitionally cannot have opinions replacing that core…?
@SnoopJ @glyph One time I decided I was going to stop having opinions.
In reality I was going to stop saying things that sounded like strongly held beliefs even though I had only thought about them for like 30 seconds just now in this meeting.
Management generally became less interested in what I had to say if I said it with my actual levels of confidence.
LLMs can't have opinions, but they can make text that is incorrect and uses words that imply confidence.
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The negative outcomes of a static senior/junior distinction mindset include:
- complacency once you've achieved an arbitrary title
- failure to identify specific skills needed to complete specific projects
- treating other engineers as homogenous and fungible based on level
- not listening to people lower-level than you are because you're now Senior-er than them
- failing to provided needed pushback on people higher-level than you are even when you have specific knowledge that they don't"Juniors" can be more than you expect and "Seniors" can be less. A senior engineer who has been in an environment that provides psychological safety, good tools, constant clear feedback, a culture of mutual respect, and strong technical challenges will probably be amazing to work with. Someone who has worked just as long and just as hard in a backbiting constant corporate turf war will be bitter and jaded but will not have the technical chops to match that.
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"Juniors" can be more than you expect and "Seniors" can be less. A senior engineer who has been in an environment that provides psychological safety, good tools, constant clear feedback, a culture of mutual respect, and strong technical challenges will probably be amazing to work with. Someone who has worked just as long and just as hard in a backbiting constant corporate turf war will be bitter and jaded but will not have the technical chops to match that.
Ultimately in our culture we need to have ways to calculate what people are compensated, and I do not fault anyone for participating in the process of this type of ranking. Some number needs to be written on the offer letter and if you don't have a process for determining that as fairly as you can, then it will be entirely based on implicit biases. So people will have titles and titles will have pay bands. But that's the real, final difference between "junior" and "senior": about $100,000.
