> "Senior Developer" is a heavily diluted term at this point. You can generally only count on it meaning 3 years experience. It's effectively code for "did not wash out".

Ha, I recall a link to a blog post on the subject here on HN very recently. It certainly struck a cord with me.

> The problem here seems to be that you are in fact a Lead Engineer, not a Senior Engineer, which does have some pretty hefty expectations associated with it. You feel like the blind leading the blind.

This is totally correct. It's been more pronounced since we hired an engineer who had a short tenure at a FAANG. While I believe there is rough parity in how we model and build software, there's a huge gap in our understanding of devops and systems architecture. I am a painful bottle neck in that area and I am sure the engineer in question feels the same.