What Actually Makes You Senior

Date: Jan 20, 2026·Tags: #career, #good-reading, #insight

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.

Spot on. Love it. I couldn't agree more with this perspective!