2019 Essay on Senior Developers Still Rings True: It's About Judgment, Not Code
tlakomy · x · 2026-09-22
Developer Tomasz Łakomy revisits his 2019 essay on what makes a senior developer, arguing its core insight still applies today.
Key points:
- The goal is to solve problems with code — and deep system understanding enables decisions beyond pure tech.
- Seniors ask the upstream questions: Is this feature even necessary? What problem does it solve? Could it be solved another way? Do we even want to solve it?
- Seniority isn't about being a machine that solves any problem; it's about judgment and broader scope.
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