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Updated August 7, 2023When you’re first starting out in your programming career, you’ll be fixing bugs and extending existing features to add new functionality. Most of what you’ll be working on will be determined by a product manager, your engineering manager, or a senior engineer. It’ll be up to them to determine most of the functional and technical requirements, and it’ll be your job to implement a working solution.
As you grow into a senior role, you’ll be faced with more ambiguity in the problems that you need to solve. There won’t always be a straightforward answer, and oftentimes there will be a number of ways in which you could solve a problem. It’ll be up to you to weigh the trade-offs and determine the best path forward, which may not always be the ideal technical solution.
Senior engineers are often asked to solve difficult technical problems when there isn’t always a good understanding about how to get there, such as keeping a user’s shopping cart updated in real time across both web and mobile devices. It’s up to the senior engineer to break the problem down into smaller, more manageable pieces, determine dependencies between the pieces, and put together a plan for building a solution. Junior engineers, on the other hand, often have a known path set out in front of them and are tasked with working towards a goal, such as making sure orders are processed successfully and inventory numbers are updated accordingly.
Dealing with ambiguity is what sets a senior engineer apart from a junior engineer. This partly comes down to experience, but it also has to do with problem-solving skills, creativity, collaboration, and good communication. It takes all of these skills to keep projects moving forward and finishing on time, and senior engineers learn how to leverage them in order to reduce ambiguity.
In addition to being able to cut through ambiguity to deliver results, senior engineers are expected to be accountable to others and themselves. They are responsible for project timelines and ensuring that the features shipped to production meet all of the project’s requirements.
Junior engineers sometimes blame the quality assurance (QA) engineers or other devs who reviewed their pull requests for not finding a bug in their code, rather than accepting responsibility for it being there in the first place. Senior engineers, on the other hand, accept that responsibility and take full blame for letting bugs slip through, even the ones that aren’t caught by peer reviews and QA engineers.
When senior engineers make mistakes, they treat their peers as teammates, rather than adversaries. Being able to accept responsibility for your mistakes and work with your team to identify and fix the root cause is a sign of maturity, and it shows that you’re ready for a senior role.