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The idea that you can't be anonymous in such a situation is a "junior" attitude.

The "senior" attitude would be to find ways to achieve autonomy and improve the situation. They would either succeed or determine the company doesn't actually want a senior person in that role and move on.

In talking with senior people who have been in such situations, you hear stories about their valiant efforts with partial or full results. When I talk with junior people, you hear about complaints and wishes but little action beyond their own work.

2 comments

Sounds very "no true Scotsman" and people are taking this way too senior vs junior. If you are a junior wanting to become a senior or prove themselves as being more than junior, but find yourself in scenarios where management isn't actually asking for a senior but a rockstar, domain-expert medior going under the title of senior, what do you do? Continuously hop jobs until you get lucky? Wait until you finally rack in enough years so society deems you worthy of senior? Most situations I find myself in don't want to be fixed. Trying to take charge comes across as trying to tell the driver how to drive, or take the wheel myself, when its their car we're riding in. And using my own car is akin to starting my own company or going contracting.

>The "senior" attitude would be to find ways to achieve autonomy and improve the situation. How is this a "senior" attitude anyway? This should be the default attitude of any self-respecting employee, and I personally had this mindset from day 1 of my career. Who in their right mind wants to be either dependent or not make their life better? That's not junior, that's lazy.

The needs of a senior engineer vary by org and culture. It's only a "no true Scotsman" thing if we insist that there must be a single objective definition, but such a thing is a total myth. I've hired devs with the senior title that barely kept up with college interns. Similarly I've seen folks with 5+ years fail to meet expectations for baseline engineer with clear coaching and PIP over 6+ months, leave the company and land their first "senior engineer" a month after being fired. I've seen senior google engineers who failed to thrive in an open-source stack since they were used to being hand-held by Google's internal tooling and wealth of expertise they could turn to for any issue that was outside their immediate wheelhouse.

Within a company it's possible to have some standard, and a lot of companies work very hard to make their levels as objective as possible, but even then it's incredibly difficult to reduce a large set of diverse individuals working on diverse projects with diverse skillsets down to a single number.

All that said though, it doesn't matter how good your technical skills are, if you can't unblock yourself with cross-functional efforts, or figure out a way to optimize a bad situation, you will not be considered for the fast-track in most large engineering orgs. If the situation you find yourself in is truly intractable as you suggest, then the senior mentality would be to cut your losses and find a new situation.

“Either change your environment or change your environment”

If you are truly a senior developer in any major metropolitan area in the US and kept up with the market, it shouldn’t take that long to find another job.