Not an engineer, but I find this translates well over to design.

Seniority in a lot of ways feels like the acknowledgement of being able to utilize people/soft skills in order to build things. I find at least 1/3 to 1/2 of my time, a roadblock in the project is caused by accidental miscommunication from top down, and the faster you can debug those, the happier everyone will be.

Personally I rather enjoy that hybrid of people and "hard" design, but it's definitely not for everyone.